This was written for DesertVixen for the Trick-or-Treat exchange over on AO3. This is an idea I've had ever since watching the episode, one where James didn't die but got close enough that he looked like he was dead.

"Say hi to Sam for me," James said before his eyes slipped closed. La'an shook him once, twice, before Sera spoke.

James was gone. There was nothing that La'an could do for him. But for his killer? For the timeline? There was plenty.

La'an rushed at Sera.

Khan was exactly where and when he needed to be, no matter what horrors he would work upon Earth when he grew up. La'an wasn't.

But neither was James. Going back for him was risky. Who knew what the Noonien-Singh Institute for Cultural Advancement would do to La'an if she was captured. Would they realize that she was a distant relative of Khan's? His descendant? What lengths would they go to for time travel?

But what would information they gather from James's corpse? Not as much, but perhaps they could still find some knowledge of the future that shouldn't be. A corpse with antibodies for alien diseases, but did he have antibodies from Earth? La'an hadn't asked him if he'd ever been sick with normal Earth diseases.

La'an had gotten sick as a child. The fever had been a relief to her, proof that she was normal. The other children hadn't seen it that way. It didn't matter what she and Manu did. They always carried the burden of their family name, of their ancestor, of the child who had begged La'an to take him away.

She hadn't asked James what the United Earth Fleet did with their dead, what James had done with Sam's body. She wasn't supposed to have needed to know. James was supposed to have come back with her.

She should have asked. If she had prepared more for the possibility of him dying, maybe he wouldn't have been killed.

Theoretically, the Noonien-Singh family was to be afforded the same rights as any other corpse. La'an had never witnessed this in practice. The Gorn had no concept of respect for a corpse. La'an's more distant ancestors had been dissected.

James would be dissected if she left him here. And so La'an ran back to him. He was still warm. La'an's pulse beat loudly enough in her ears and chest and her hand that was touching his body. If she hadn't watched the light leave his eyes before he closed them for the last time, she would think she was feeling his pulse.

Perhaps he was on some sort of blood thinner, and that was why she could still feel his blood spilling out from the bullet wound. She was making the right choice. She kept telling herself as she cradled James in her arms. As she fumbled with the device that the man in grey had given her yesterday. As the bullet from one of the guards pierced through her shoulder.

Everything went white.

When La'an's vision cleared, she was on the bridge of the Enterprise. Her Enterprise, not James's Enterprise. She saw Spock and Sam. She felt herself call out to them, but her ears were ringing too loudly to hear herself.

Sam fainted.

Soon after, so did La'an.

The first thing La'an noticed was the smell of antiseptic. A part of her hoped that she had tripped or failed to block a blow while sparring with Joseph, and that the past two days had been a strange and terrible dream inspired by the concussion. She must have fell oddly on her shoulder.

Another part of her hoped it had been real. That someone had seen her for herself instead of Khan's legacy. That she had proof for why there was a metaphorical hole in her chest the size of a photon torpedo. That maybe she had been loved and lost it instead of her relationship with James never happening, like that 19th century poet that her roommate from her cadet days loved to quote.

La'an opened her eyes to find Captain Pike gazing down at her. "So it turns out there's a temporal prime directive. I can't believe 'prime directive' catches on in the future," he said. "I'm just glad I caught you before they do."

"James?" she asked around the painful lump that was forming in her throat.

"I think they're finishing up surgery right now. The bullet that hit him was different from the one that hit you. I think it had some sort of Romulan poison that made it harder for us to handle." La'an's confusion must have shown on her face – why was a dead man in surgery – because Captain Pike continued speaking. "He's not dead, despite Sam's and I guess your first thought. He was pretty close to it when you brought him in – would've died from a bullet to the heart if the shot had been just a little higher. But no, he's alive, and so is his counterpart who's native to this timeline. Sam also broke the temporal prime directive when he woke up by calling his brother and asking about the doppelganger."

La'an blinked a few times as unshod tears of grief turned into tears of joy. She still couldn't believe what was going to happen There was no use crying right now. "What will they do to him? The…" She still didn't know the name of the man in the gray suit, nor who he had worked for. "The ones who enforce the temporal prime directive?"

"I think they're going to make it seem like a transporter glitch, that it accidentally cloned him or something. We'll get this timeline's version of James on the Enterprise in the next couple of days, and then the James you brought with you will be recorded in the system. He might need to change his name, though."

An unbidden giddy thought wanted to suggest that he could take the name James Noonien-Singh. La'an did not voice this. They barely knew each other, and there was no reason to saddle him with the burden of her family name. She still hadn't told him what her family had done.

(She had always wondered why her family hadn't changed their last name, why her mother had taken her father's name instead of the other way around. Maybe they thought it better to announce themselves than to be found out.)

(La'an hoped that James would react well when he found out.)

"Can I see him?"

"I'll go see if Joseph and Christine are done."

Tennyson is credited with having been the one to coin, "Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." Thus, I decided to quote his poem "Morte d'Arthur" for the title. The fact that Christine's last name is Chapel, and La'an got James to medical care and thus Christine, is a happy coincidence.