full_of_wrath | captivity

"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?"

"Do you know, they systematically hid the sexual abuse of children? There were hundred- I'm not exaggerating, hundreds- of cases of religious leaders who were known to be pedophiles, who had committed violent assaults and were simply tucked away, transferred from one community to another before there could be any outcry. The youngest recorded case was of a child of three years old. The priest in question offended for decades, selecting targets in that age range, with the knowledge of his superiors. Frankly, I don't much care what public support they had. They were an enemy of the new world. But that was only one, small piece of the puzzle."

He unfurls his legs, stretching them out in front of him.

"While the religious portion of the world rebelled, the rest balked at what the idea of the new population control requirements meant for them. People had initially consented wholeheartedly to these measures, but many were simply unwilling to give up the chance to have children, or unwilling to consider fetal genetic enhancement. There were incentive programs, but the shift in the population never really came. Humanity remained short-sighted and brutish, and the next generation of us, my generation, was born. We were asked to carry out global changes that had been planned premised on a population that was mostly patient, wise, and brilliant. Needless to say, from that point on almost every policy was met with violent resistance. The democratic process had been intentionally eroded early on, to provide consistency in policy and to let us make changes that would be necessary but would not garner popular public support. You don't actually know about democracy as it was practiced at the time, do you? I'm sure without context this sounds like madness."

"It wasn't democracy then. In most places it was a loose federation of nations, and each nation was usually run through a republic."

That's about the extent of what he knows; that and that it hadn't worked. But truth be told, the world didn't find real peace until after first contact with the Vulcans anyway.

"They're acknowledging that, in retrospect? The masses called it a democracy, and we were despots, tyrants. They were howling for our blood. Most of us were killed, some by mobs, some by seizure, with a trial and execution."

It's far enough in the past that there's some objectivity, but the republics of the past are still held to an odd sort of admiration.

"They still did executions? No--that's right."

He looks at Khan curiously. "What nation were you running?"

"The United Kingdom. I lived in London, even then. The building I destroyed was actually there in my time."

A source of private amusement.

"Not a sentimental man, are you."

He leans back, arms crossed over his chest.

"What do you think of the world now?"

"I like it. It turned out the way we wanted... if not quite as quickly as we had hoped. There's still significant room for improvement on a genetic level, but that isn't actually crucial in the grand scheme of things."

Shrugging, a little bit.

"I do think control of Starfleet needs to be put back in altruistic hands, rather than militaristic."

And something shuts in Kirk's expression.

"You haven't been around enough to know what Starfleet's like. And you killed the best man in it."

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