full_of_wrath | captivity

Without rage, Kirk doesn't hit as hard, but his stamina is incredible when he's focused on controlling himself. This is the most bizarre way of letting off steam he's found, and he's tried a few.

It's like last time. The way he'd buckled and slid down the wall, this time he's suddenly gone from standing, unflinching, to sitting at his feet, with one last blow to the face. Words, he finds, are just as far away, and his vision is white.

Kirk will go on like he had last time: until he physically can't. Now that he knows Khan can heal so quickly he's even less concerned about how he hits, but thankfully he isn't angry and so doesn't resort to heavy blows like kneeing or elbowing.

Instead he grabs Khan by the throat, just holding him steady while he punches him a few last, frantic times in the face.

The corner of his fist catches him badly in the eye, and suddenly there are tears on his face, swelling where there wasn't before. He rattles in his grip like a ragdoll, shaken by the throat.

As before, when Kirk is shaking and out of breath he lowers himself onto the bed and shakes out his bruised hands.

"Damn. You've got a really hard head, what did they feed you back then?"

"Standard rations. I don't imagine bone density has actually altered that much."

He whispers, sliding back to put himself against the wall, knees to his chest, lowering his head onto them.

The adrenaline begins to recede, replaced by a pleasant sense of release...until he sees Khan. Then, there's guilt.

"Sorry. Won't happen again."

He mutters, because this is so far out of acceptable officer behavior he imagines Pike spinning in his grave.

"Since this is now the third time around, you'll forgive me if I don't share your optimism."

He says, rubbing gingerly at his eye. It's already back to normal, the only sign of what happened is the hair in his face.

"It doesn't matter. I've been hurt far worse, for much more trivial reasons."

"It's not optimism. It's a decision."

Kirk retorts, every inch of him stubborn and determined. You can't call him professional but he is, right now, a Starfleet Captain and not just the captain of the Enterprise, which he tends to treat as if it's its own world.

"Do you need a medic?"

"Not as badly as you do. Come here."

Nodding at Kirk's hands, as he lifts his thumb to his mouth. He bites the edge of it quickly, right down to bleeding.

Kirk has had much, much worse before but he doesn't really want to go to the med bay for this. He has to be forced into going when he's half-dead. He moves carefully over to Khan and sits in front of him.

"That's generous of you."

"Their lives depend on your working well, Kirk. I'll heal you, I'll submit to you, whatever you need to make that happen. You have me completely, Joaquim is unthawed and flying them away to settle safely, I'll do anything."

Including dart his thumb into Kirk's mouth now, to take care of those hands of his. His voice is pitched deliberately even, taking most of the implication out of what he's saying, but he wants the statement just on the edge of being uncomfortable.

Kirk isn't unthawing anybody right now, and he looks sharply at Khan. And then he sucks blood from him until Khan's wound heals a few seconds later.

"You aren't required to put up with this. You never were. If the only reason you were was because you thought it was part of some bargain, that wasn't my intention."

"Then please don't hit me in the head again."

He offers, hand dropping down into his lap.

"I can survive it but it isn't enjoyable."

"I already told you I wouldn't."

Kirk gets up, annoyed at himself.

"Tell me something, if you weren't going to be locked up for what you did, and if your crew was given back to you...what would you do here? You're three hundred years from everything you knew."

"Create a settlement."

He says, instantly.

"Find an M-class planet and touch down. All that we had ever intended to do, when we set the ship adrift, was awaken far enough away from and long enough removed from the past that we might have a chance to begin afresh, away from the Federation. We had set a course into deep space."

He considers that seriously in silence for a moment.

"What changed? I mean you had a job. You had plenty of work to do, back then. When did you decide to just pack it in?"

"Has history been so extensively rewritten? What do you actually know about the Eugenics Wars?"

Eyebrows lifting.

Kirk tells him bland, history book facts: dates and places, explosions and a few names. He is thoroughly unimpressed with his own knowledge.

"Let's just say I've always been skeptical of history's honesty. You were there; why don't you tell me what it was like."

"Eugenics is an ugly business."

He answers, quietly.

"No one seemed to understand that. There was initially tremendous popular support for the program; eradicated disease. Eradicate mental illness, infirmity- not through the murder of the existing population, but through the selective creation of men and women with stable, perfect DNA. They created us gladly, and asked us to rule the Earth, to lead her to a brighter future. Most countries, in the end, were under the rule of one of my kind. There were thousands of us."

Kirk nods slightly. He doesn't recall the names of those leaders, but he does know they were 'supermen'.

"People changed their minds."

"We weren't murdering them. They did get that wrong. But in order to replace the faulty genome with the correct one, certain standards of breeding had to be upheld. It was part of an ongoing drive to tackle overpopulation of the planet as well. Simultaneously, many of my... more optimistic counterparts were instituting firmer rule in their cities, radically cracking down on certain kinds of crime, on environmental negligence, dramatically restructuring work forces, and in fact, religions to purge attitudes of racism, sexism, to finally destroy the vestiges of capitalism. Too much changed, and too fast. A war began... and perhaps we were too good at winning it, but it seemed as though everything, the fate of mankind itself was at stake."

Kirk listens quietly, but there's such intensity in his gaze, like he can see right through Khan and into the past.

"And what was the punishment for those who continued to believe? You all had to know that had been tried before. All it does is make people more convinced their faith is right."

"Nothing dramatic, just a little financial restructuring. You're too young to remember this, but there was a time the Catholic church was one of the richest organizations in the entire world. You have eradicated this kind of corruption- largely on the back of our planning, you know. But this religion had hundreds of billions of dollars in assets, and used them to preach that homosexuality was a sin and that gay parents should not be allowed to adopt. It permitted no women to take any roles of leadership in its' ranks. It campaigned actively to prevent sexual education and singlehandedly crippled efforts to promote the distribution of barrier protection at the time when fatal sexually transmitted diseases were ravaging the poorest countries in the world, killing the men and disproportionately high numbers of women in these countries. Whether their faith is right or wrong, they were a relic of a time long past, who had rested on the laurels of an institutionally protected lack of accountability for far too long. So, we simply... severed their purse strings, when we restructured economies. It added fuel to the fire."

Kirk has learned some of this, too, but long ago. For him, the nineteen nineties were as obscure historically as the middle ages likely were for Khan. Hearing about it from someone with the knowledge Khan has is...disturbing.

"Look, I don't disagree that religions back then were corrupted by their own momentum, but you had to have known how deeply people held onto it." But Kirk can't' honestly say that he would have done something different. Not if he'd been living in an era where religious superstitions were more important than men and women's lives.

"So what happened when you took away their clout?"

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