Benedict Cumberbatch

This was the scent he would forever associate with the last time in his life he was truly free of care–before he was forced to fulfill the destiny designed for him by scores of others.  None of whom had ever grasped the simple fact that inside his superhuman body—and despite his formidable brilliance and cunning—dwelled the very human doubts, vulnerabilities, and confusing jumble of hormones and adolescent emotions, of an average fifteen year old boy. 

Khan had been schooled in the act of pleasure and procreation, as befitted his station, first by grown women of his own kind, and then by lesser females—all sterilized, to prevent conception of a hybrid—to slake the tidal force, the powerful hunger, of his burgeoning adolescent lusts.  His mistake—his crime—was to feel a tenderness for a creature as far below him as a street mongrel was to a Himalayan wolf.  That tenderness had burned like a flame in his chest, shocking him and rivaling that biological imperative that all teenage boys experience.  No one had been wise enough to warn him that such feelings only led to pain.  

He’d been fifteen the first time he fell in love with a seventeen year old girl, who was well outside of the strictures laid down upon his kind.  His seed was not to be wasted in breeding with inferior stock.  But that one—his dear little Inaaya—had spirit and beauty worthy of a prince.  Had love in her heart enough to fill an ocean.  Love enough to see past the monster which many believed the genetically engineered to be. His little Inaaya, gentle as a lamb in service of his household, but fierce as his own flame in the lovemaking they had shared. Unashamed she had been, unabashed, to moan confessions of her love for him, each time he had taken her. That was a secret he had buried deep; deeper each year he had moved away from those callow days, onto the destiny he’d been taught awaited him. She had loved him unselfishly, and ever seemed a well of giving, always aiming to please him, guilelessly believing their trysts were part of some ridiculous, romantic fairy tale.  

When she had eventually ripened, Khan had felt an irrepressible, youthful pride in that physical manifestation of his virility. Inayaa’s abiding love for him was enough to make her bravely bear the child that inevitably took her life.  He’d been forced to watch the labor, to learn the lesson well; to strengthen him, toughen him; to teach him not to make that same mistake again.  The doctors could have taken the child by Cesarean, but had not, allowing instead for his dear, sweet flower to be torn fatally inside—howling in pain as she brought the boy forth—and then falling silent as her lifeblood gushed from her shredded womb in the poor baby’s wake.  He had wanted to hold the mewling thing in the aftermath, to feel its strong, steady heartbeat, a living remnant of their passionate affair, but they had whisked the child away even before Inaaya’s body had grown cool. Not as punishment, but simply as another lesson.  When he finally set his eyes upon the boy again, Joachim was an adolescent himself, a total stranger to his sire—and Khan himself the leader he’d been groomed to be, with no time for such attachments, as he fought the wars that mankind razed against his people.

Even in his youth, Khan had never believed in the old religion which many of his contemporaries had chosen to embrace.  Of symmetry and the circle of life; of death and return and rebirth.  Losing Inaaya in so cruel a manner had cured him of even the faintest belief that there was any sense or order to the universe, especially that which might have been set in place by a benevolent power beyond the visible world.  And he was a man of science and reason after all--leaving no place in his life for the comfort of such a philosophy and faith that dominated the culture he came from.

But Khan eventually encounters a woman so like his Inaaya in such vital ways (see A Khan By Any Other Name), that he finds himself reconsidering those ancient myths. That Inaaya had been lost to him hundreds of years ago--it was madness to believe that a woman born centuries after him could be Inaaya returned. And yet he wished with all his heart that it could be so.