Work Text:
"You're such a handful."
The voice, and the statement, is one that Charlie has heard many times. There's a warmth in her voice that Charlie wishes that someone would direct toward him now, something that the Thasians could never give him.
What the people in Colony 5 would have given him. What the people on the Enterprise gave him before he had ruined it all and the Thasians ripped him away, back to a planet where he was nothing.
Where there was no one for him.
"Robert, isn't little Charlie quite the handful?" His mother hums and the little version of him giggles as his father joins the scene. Charlie holds the small screen close to himself as if he'll lose it too. It's all he has left.
"Our little Charles," His father speaks, and Charlie whispers those words along with the data file, having listened to it many times.
He's not a Thasian.
He doesn't belong here.
He wonders how Kirk and Spock are. Wonders if they're still playing chess- there's a data file tucked away of his father and another crewmember playing the game, one that he has watched a good many times. The exact set is broken, its glass pieces having been shattered in the crash. He wonders if Uhura still sings and if McCoy is still tending to patients in the gruff way that he had tended to Charlie. He wonders if Janice is still on the ship, attending to her duties, maybe even thinking about him.
As he watches his parents on the screen, he shuts down those thoughts. All he has now are these tapes, these flashes of memory of people he barely even knew.
His mother's words ring true in his mind- 'such a handful'. That's what the Antares and the Enterprise thought of him.
That's what the Thasians thought of him.
Too much power and not enough strength to hold it back.
"My darling," The tape of his mother coos, "My Charlie."