Chapter Text
“The longer one lives, the more mysterious life seems.”
― Francis Brett Young, Cold Harbour
It had been two hours since Commander Spock had restrained him, one hour and fifty five minutes since Doctor McCoy had withdrawn a vial of his blood, and it would be three hours and ten minutes before it would be too late for their captain. Three hours and ten minutes until they would be the last of his family awake.
When Khan first awoke, he feared. He feared that it would happen all over again – after all, this Admiral Marcus chose to wake him up, not one of the others. However, time was mysterious and beautiful mistress and no matter how deeply into the research archives he went, he couldn’t find a single mention to the truth – the terrible, terrible truth about the Eugenics program.
Contrary to modern belief, the augments weren’t all genetically engineered. No, only Khan had the auspicious ‘honor’ of being genetically engineered from conception. The only real ‘test tube’ baby of his kind. They mixed a little of this and a little of that – the human genome having been mapped out and completely known by the time of his creation. Only, they didn’t stop at human, they combined the best of everything they could find, and much of which they didn’t know. In the end, there was a squalling baby boy – him.
As the first successful, viable result, they tried to recreate him to no avail – every child… every brother they tried to create died before they could open their eyes. Khan was 26 months old when they decided to go a different route – virology.
They used his DNA and programmed a virus, a virus that would change the host’s DNA to his. And then they made it a blood bourne pathogen and infected him. They turned him into a carrier for his own DNA. But they didn’t stop there. Shortly after they figured everything out, they added an orphanage to the facility where they took those who had nobody else in the world to speak for them and experimented on them – with his blood.
The only problem with this method is that those who were infected gifted only received a portion of his abilities. Victoria never received super strength, but she was the fastest of his sisters; Avinash had superior healing, but required glasses for reading; and McPhearson was brilliant, but lacked a lot of the instincts natural to most of his siblings.
No, what little the history books knew of his time thought all augments were created, were born augments. But really, Khan was the only true born augment and everybody else, his family, were his.
When his thoughts turned to revenge, he knew he could use his blood to manipulate Lt. Harewood into blowing up the facility; he was the only man desperate enough to do anything in order to save his daughter. But Khan didn’t want to leave this girl, a new potential sister behind, and so he modified his own blood, made sure it could only heal before eliminating itself. It was a suicide mission with little chance for survival and it was only fitting that as the first, he would be the last.
Khan checked his mental clock again and smiled. Yes, in two hours and forty-nine minutes his family would grow and then there would be two of them awake and seventy-two of them asleep. In three hours he would escape from this cell, and in three hours and twelve minutes, he would be on a shuttle to the neutral zone with his Jim.