Can I request a drabble on Khan's thoughts right after or right before the first hearing about Cold Station 12? :)
In his time, they would have called it a house of cards. A house of glass. A house of mirrors. Any number of structures or monuments dedicated to light or transparency which only required the slightest inclination to fall apart. While his memory was still convoluted and confused, he wondered how a man like Marcus could make such a fatal mistake. He seemed to be such a good man, Alexander. Yet it seemed that Alexander was but a facade - like every other thin veneer of his falsified identity, one which crumbled and spirited away at the first glimmering of the truth.
The file he uncovered was the catalyst, when he chose to remember it. Oft times he later chose to block the memory, for lack of the ability to comprehend its severity. Yet all the same, it was a moment he would never forget. Not in a thousand years would he be able to fully erase a single detail of the expansive file which lay in the bowels of Section 31's vagabond hoard of illicit knowledge.
Finding that specific file had been accidental, almost. Had something in him not still been skeptical of the laziness of the universe, he might have been more inclined to remain believing it was coincidence. Yet when he looked back to the sleepless night he'd been having when he found the Cold Station 12 report, he doubted very much that there was no force but himself in the wide cosmos acting upon that moment. Whether or not he knew the players, even later, was irrelevant. So long as the solipsistic belief that he'd come upon the horror on his own didn't remain, he was satisfied to leave some things a mystery.
It was good enough, he felt, to have hunted down what few crew-members remained from the incident. Their specific deaths were events he could not abjectly remember, much unlike the existence of the file's details. To him the people who had machinated the event were unimportant compared to the lives that had been lost; slabs of flesh that fell into the ground much the same as many had during the Wars.
Unborn infants, however. Those he would never forget. The hundreds, thousands of their children that lay innocently waiting for centuries. Those he would never forget.
An entire week passed between his reading of the file and his return to conscious memory. He knew the exact dates, the exact frames of time in which his catatonic state came and went, because it was Admiral Marcus' presence which bookend-ed the event. His was the last face Khan saw before that initial night closed, and his was the first he remembered seeing after what he could later document to be a vengeful spree the likes of which he hadn't succumbed to since the mass murder of the last band of children during the Wars.
Whether to his eventual benefit or not, it was Marcus' face which drew his focus. That face inspired a thousand plots, a thousand schemes, to see the damage repaid. A life for a life, they always said. An eye for an eye, and unlike most, he had no fear of going blind by the end, so long as he did not have to see the faces of those children that had slipped through his fingers in waiting.
