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Capt. Kirk: What's your name?

Khan Noonien Singh: Khan.

Kirk: Just Khan? Nothing else?

Khan Noonien Singh: Khan.

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He remembers before he was.

He remembers feeling his cells multiply from one to millions. He remembers birth and his first breath, his first moment of being.

He remembers being held by his mother for the first time. She was warm and soft, with unfathomably deep brown eyes that seem to melt you from the inside. Small and human, she was fragile physically, but stubborn. And, despite being only a babe, he loved her.

Most of the other children don't have a mother who takes care of them. Most of the other women were prostitutes taken from Sonagachi or Kamathipura by the scientists and impregnated. The money was good, enough to buy food and shelter for a year, so most took it and left after the child was born. But his mother was different. She was Mongolian, born and raised on the plains with horses and a real family. She had volunteered to be his mother and raise him in the facility that he called home. She did not care that he looked like a different mother's child with his pale skin and blue eyes. The others would mock him, tell him that she was weak and he was weak too, like a tiny human. He never fought them physically, despite the ache in his bones to crush their throats between his fingers. She wouldn't be proud of him if he did that

He remembers the history books that she would read to him on rainy days or when the others were especially cruel. He would sit on her lap contently, letting her stroke his hair as she described the rise and fall of different Chinese dynasties, the fearsome Mongols, and the Silk Road. He longed to jump through time and join them, to fight and become remembered by so many.

He remembers the day his mother disappeared.

The scientists lied, told him she was gone and would soon be back. The verisimilitude had not lasted long. He kept asking when she return and where had she gone until one doctor, annoyed, snapped, "Don't you get it? She's dead, you stupid brat."

He doesn't remember what happened between that moment and the next, because when he looks again the man is on the floor, flopping and gurgling like a fish out of water, with a syringe shoved in his jugular.

The doctors feared him. The others admired him.

He had finally killed.

The others followed, raised him on a pedestal and cheered. The idolatry should have annoyed him, but he was happy. His mother would have been disappointed.

And when the head psychiatrist asks for his name, he remembered his mother and her books about Mongol leaders, and he told her, "Khan."

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Khan: Go.

[pushes her away]

Khan: Or stay, but do it because it is what you WISH to do!

[awkward pause]

Khan: Well?

Marla McGivers: I'll stay a little longer.

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He remembers her.

He met the girl fifteen years later, in the lab. He still lived there, working on his military career on the side. Soldiers knew him as "Khan the Terrible", famous for having ripped out a subordinate's eyes with his bare hand.

He was stronger and smarter than he was when he was eight. Escape would have been easy, but he had nowhere else to go. He did not know where his mother's family lived, and who would have believed a Caucasian, blue eyed killer was the son of a Mongolian Sikh?

He stayed, creating weapons and commanding his men to greatness. He was the greatest technical mind in the world.

A friend- no, a colleague- asked him for help on an experiment, the first ever attempt to make a natural born human like them. He had been sitting around for an hour before they finally brought in the test subject: a young woman, nineteen years of age.

He found her annoying.

She was loud for a start. And clumsy. The girl had not taken two steps before her toes caught on an invisible wire that made her stumble into him. He drew himself to his full height and politely pushed her away. Humans were disgusting with their dull senses and soft minds, and this girl- child- was the perfect example of their repulsiveness.

But, she was not repulsive at all.

She was beautiful.

Clear green eyes scanned every surface as her entire medical record was read aloud. Pale arms flexed as she was poked and prodded. Long fingers dug into her chair as the first injection is given. He saw it all, every movement, with great detail. Something inside him awoke, a primal thing that screamed to take her and own her entirely.

She kept trying to make conversation, sprinkling large vocabulary in awkwardly. And she grinned at him like his mother used to, big and wide with her lips closed, cheeks threatening to cover her eyes.

He was not lustful man, but he wanted her.

He supervised the entire thing; no one else was allowed. They began to talk during the experiments and he contributed more words to her repertoire. She became better, faster, and less visibly emotional. The others were cold, calling her "it" or "human" with sneers and acerbic voices. She came to him once, tears streaming down her face, and told him how she never felt more like an Augment when she was with humans and more like a human when she was with Augments. He held her for the first time, and she called him her only friend. The only person she needed.

His mother told him that once upon a time.

She was his from that moment onward. Not romantically or sexually. She was his in a way that made the primal animal in him satisfied.

The others noticed his change in behavior, how he brought her with him to meetings and other projects. How he ate with her, talked to her, shifted his body to shield her from their gazes. Some of the women would glare at her from across the room. Understandably, he once explained to her. He was considered the alpha of his people, the strongest and smartest male in the pack, and many thought they had mated. She had laughed and pretended to swoon at his masculinity. The others quickly learned to leave them alone. The humans, however, were not as quick.

One on the scientists, a young man, kept touching her when he did not need to. He stroked her hand and arm and once, without thinking, the smooth skin of her thigh. The animal in him roared and he found himself holding the boor's neck and squeezing as he explained that the man would never feel something that was his again. Because she was his, she just didn't know.

She had approached him in the halls after dark, whispering angrily that he should not have done that, it did not matter. He had drawn her into his arms and kissed her hard. Their teeth hit each other, their mouths opened wider, and they found themselves in a hidden corner. She was promptly pressed against the wall, legs up, skirt down. He pressed into her, gripping her thighs so tightly that he left bruises. Her nails dug into his shoulders and he whispered to her she was his and his only. His lover, his woman, his mate. She gripped him harder as she whispered her approval. And everything was wonderfully warm and good in that moment.

He remembers her stroking his hair afterward, and him holding her so tightly it felt like they would meld together and turn into one. Like some tenacious bond had taken hold of them.

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Khan: Improve a mechanical device and you may double productivity, but improve man and you gain a thousandfold.

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He remembers power.

Conflict, famine, hate. They were all human ideas. Humans- weak, sniveling things- were destroying Earth. The plutocrats ate and drank and purchased while the proletariats scrambled to catch up. He and his brethren could see it clearly, more clearly than those things. Augments were the apotheosis of the species, the apex of human life, and measures needed to be taken to stop the disease of normality from spreading any further.

He could do it. He could stop the pandemic.

He rallied most of the others with him, but some refused. They called him amoral, infected with the desire to control.

They did not live long after that.

She screamed at him when he tells her of his plans, asked him why he would destroy her species, and he reminded her that she was no longer a normal human. And then she was silent. Two days later, he took over Bombay and burned his way to the sea. There was a lovely villa in Bhavnagar owned by a millionaire who was more than willing to give it to him. She did not speak to him during the move, nor does she talk when she signed the papers that made her his wife.

She did not speak for three months. But when she finally did, he wished she had stayed mute.

It had been a quiet night, like so many others. She had approached him in his office and laid a folder down on the table. After flipping it open, she began to explain how the formula in the injections she had been receiving were destroying her nervous system and had been for over six months. Soon she wouldn't be able to move or talk or function. She would become brain dead and then die, and no amount of Augment blood could stop it.

He had gathered her into his arms, asked what he could do. And his heart broke as she told him there was nothing to be done.

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David Marcus: Lieutenant Saavik was right: You never have faced death.

Kirk: No. Not like this. I haven't faced death. I've cheated death. I've tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing.

David: You knew enough to tell Saavik that how we face death is at least as important as how we face life.

Kirk: Just words.

David: But good words. That's where ideas begin. Maybe you should listen to them.

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He remembers fire.

The humans had revolted against him and the others. Many had been overthrown, but he had held onto his land. The rebels had snuck into the villa during the night and set his home ablaze with his wife still in it.

He remembers his last day with her. They had journeyed in the gardens together, him pushing her along slowly in her wheelchair. Her delicate hands had reached out to brush the Spotted Calla Lilies and the Jewels of Opar as she passed them. He had kissed those hands and read from the book his mother had read to him as a child. She had smiled like she had when they first met.

He had arrived back home to find his house engulfed in flames. The air was acrid with the smell of burning wood and flesh. He found her in the rubble, sizzling and blackened, her wheelchair a molten slab. The rebels had found him there and tried to cuff him. He felt the same darkness from his childhood come over him, and he awakened to find the humans looking at him with horrified expressions. The taste of metal filled his mouth and he dropped the young man he had been holding whose throat had been bitten out.

He killed them all, tasted death, and was glad.

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Kirk: You fled. Why? Were you afraid?

Khan: I've never been afraid.

Kirk: But you left at the very time mankind needed courage.

Khan: [angrily] We offered the world ORDER!

Kirk: We?

Khan: [smiles admiringly, realizing he's revealed more than he would wish] Excellent. Excellent.

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The preparation for the freeze is long, but the process itself is short. He is temporarily paralyzed and laid out in the tube, waiting. A chemical cocktail is pumping through his veins and working its way into his cells. The liquid replaced the water in his cells so when they froze they would not expand and break. A pretty attendant took his vitals and smiled at him as she did. It was a thin one, not unpretty, but not the same as the ones he has seen before it. Not the ones that counted.

His empire has been overthrown, his people slaughtered, his wife murdered. His world, the one that was better than the one he had started with, was destroyed. The humans would keep rebelling, that much was clear, so he and the others were fleeing like cowards. Like humans.

He sees the scientists come in and feels the tube close around him. And as it does, he remembers.

He remembers his mother, the woman who always loved him, and her, the woman he always loved.

He remembers. Because it is all he can do.

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Kirk: Khan!

Khan: You still remember, Admiral. I cannot help but be touched. I, of course, remember you.

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Fin