ladyjanelly | Fic: Narada's Child --Star Trek-- Rated:R

Title: Narada's Child
Author/: LadyJanelly
Pairing: None
Rating: R for violence and disturbing imagery
Summary: Spock will arrive at any moment and Nero will use the child Kirk to cause him pain.
Notes/Warnings: Non-traditional Mpreg, non-sexual consent issues, violence, AU, violence against children
Thanks to civilbloodshed and twelve_pastels for reading it over for me. And then I went and changed stuff. So anything that ended up wrong is probably all me.

Feedback and concrit are always welcome.

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The first officer of the Kelvin dies his fiery death and Nero can at least acknowledge the tragic waste of it. The wayward shuttles have scattered but the Narada collects them like a child at play collects fluttering insects.

His men search through the escapees, the refugees, for the child, the son George Kirk spoke of in his dying transmissions to his mate. James Tiberius Kirk, a name as famous as ambassador Spock’s in its own way.

The medical crew fight to protect the mother, the infant. The male’s white uniform is awash with blood and his body broken before Nero arrives in the shuttle bay. The mother and the other caretaker have barricaded themselves in the transport.

“I have no patience for games. Come out and all of you will live through the day. Stay and I’ll have your ship melted to slag with you inside.”

He waits and within minutes there is motion in the shuttle’s shadows. A hatch slides open and the two women come out, one helping the other down the awkward step. The pale-haired one, the mother, has no shoes and a drop of blood curls down the inside of her leg to her ankle. Dark and heavy and the reddest thing Nero has ever seen. The infant is cradled in the shaking woman’s arms. Protesting the cold and noise in its wavering little voice.

When Spock appears (soon, it can’t be much longer, any minute, any day) Nero will make Spock watch as he crushes the infant’s skull, as he destroys the potential of a life so bright and glorious.

The day was not a complete waste.

---------
Within days it is clear the mother and child will live and the caretaker has no use to them. No value to Spock and there is no reason for her continued existence. A pirate might give her to his crew but Nero is no pirate and his crew are good men. Miners and widowers and men fighting to save their home world. He breaks her neck himself and the ship’s recycler unit breaks her down to reusable molecules.

The child Kirk is four years old and his mother stops fighting. Stops trying to fashion weapons from eating utensils and the supports from her bed and the lacings of her clothing. She begins to care for her grooming. Washes and combs her hair. She smiles at Nero now. Soft secret smiles as she glances at him from under her lashes and some things are universal across the galaxy.

If he allows her to seduce him he knows he’ll wake up with a knife in his heart one day. If he rejects her she will find another and there will be a mutiny.

It’s been four years since his love has died. Four years of being alone. Of waiting for Spock. He is calm as he drags her down the corridors by her hair. As he throws her to her knees in the airlock. The child struggles to get to her but Nero holds him with one hand as he engages the system and flushes the wife of George Kirk out into the nothing.

There is a moment of quiet then. Except for the cries of the child. Four years of conflict with the woman ended with the push of a button and the future waiting for Spock stretches out before him again, empty and without progress.

How will it be, Nero wonders, if he comes to this time to find his Kirk is as Nero’s child, his Kirk bestowing upon Nero all the love a father deserves.

So he tries. For a year and more. With little gifts and companionship and singing of songs.

But the stubborn creature refuses to accept the deepest kindnesses Nero can bring himself to give. Refuses to yield to a father’s discipline, refuses to be tamed or cowed. The child bites and fights and claws like an animal. The third time Nero breaks one of his fragile human bones he sends the boy away for fear of ending his life too soon.

Spock will arrive, must arrive, and the boy must live long enough for his death to hurt the Vulcan.

----------

None of Nero’s crew knows where the boy Kirk sleeps, but he is seen often enough that there is no worry that he has perished. He moves through the Narada like the lingering spirit of a departed miner, silent and restless.

Sometimes Nero sees him. Watching from the shadowed edges of the command center, the transporter room, the drill control. He is seen in the engine room and heard up in the ductwork that brings cool damp air throughout the ship.

He must know the Narada more intimately than even those who built her. Nero feels uneasy at that thought but can’t spare the manpower to track Kirk down and keep him.

Everything has to be ready.
Everything has to be right.

Spock will arrive soon.

----------

The years wear hard on his crew. They fall to arguing over petty things--misplaced tools, a lost data-PADD, stolen pornography. They need goals, plans they can touch and hold. “When Spock comes” has become a time too distant for them. They cannot feel the imminent potential of it.

Nero shows them the files he collected of Spock’s life in their time. Tidbits of information he has gathered from the Narada’s library over their years of waiting. There was a child, a quarter Vulcan, carried by a surrogate and later the custody of both Kirk and Spock.

He sends raiders out, broadcasting medical distress calls until they capture a Bone-smith, a doctor to make this dark goal a reality.

“Madness has taken you,” the Andorian tells him, its silver eyes glazed with horror.

“You will do this or I will kill you and find someone who will,” Nero warns.

The Narada is a mining vessel and mining is dangerous work. Their med-bay was advanced even by the standards of their native time. Still, it takes the physician hundreds of hours before he has successfully grown a working womb and built an egg, strand by strand of DNA. Nero suspects the Bone-smith of stalling but chooses to allow it.

It takes time, but Spock will arrive soon and successful or not, watching this will occupy the men until then.

-----------

It takes long days of hunting for the Narada’s crew to bring the Kirk whelp in for the procedure. Nero is surprised to see how tall he’s grown and how thin--barely to Nero’s collarbone and less than a third of his mass.

The data he has on human physiology says that a later age would be ideal for reproduction, but that few life-threatening complications occur in human females this young. Nero deems the risk acceptable.

Kirk struggles against his captors and makes it difficult for them to obey the order not to harm him. He screams at them, at Nero, at the Andorian who will perform the operation, words in standard and Romulan and when those fail to express his outrage, fierce howls with no words at all.

------------

The last half of the pregnancy is even harder on the youth than Nero had expected. He goes from thin to skeletal as the half-Romulan inside of him saps his vitality.

The doctor exists in a state of drugged panic, awake all hours to monitor Kirk and the fetus. Every day the pregnancy continues is another day he lives, even as he shivers in fear of Nero’s wrath should they die from his hesitance.

In the end, it is the boy who takes the decision from them all. Though he should be too weak to walk, he takes himself from sick-bay and into the bowels of the ship. The search party follows the infant’s cries and the trail of blood to where he has wedged himself into a corner between two pieces of equipment.

He holds the babe in one arm and a scalpel in the other hand. The skin of his abdomen hangs loose and open like torn cloth.

He should be unconscious from blood loss.

He should be dead.

“No,” the boy growls as four of Nero’s men move forward. Nero wonders if he means to kill the baby they have forced onto his body. It is what Nero would do in his place.

The theory is short-lived.

“Mine,” Kirk says as they try to take it from him, and he cuts Ayel’s hand to the bone with the scalpel. “Mine,” in standard and Romulan. “Mine!” as they press him down, sliding in his blood. “Mine!” over the child’s infant howls and the Bone-smith shouting to hold him and silent only, finally, when he is hit with a hypospray of sedatives and goes still.

----------

For a year, maybe more, the prisoner Kirk remains in sick-bay. Nero has the doctor implant a tracking device beneath the skin of his arm so that when Spock comes (soon, it will be, must be, soon) Nero will be able to find him.

The infant grows, jealously guarded by her human parent. Her hair is dark and her ears pointed but her eyes are Kirk’s blue and the one time Nero comes to see her she watches him like she has seen the end of his world. He wonders if the child his dear wife had been carrying would have been so beautiful or so serious had Romulus been saved. If Spock had saved them.

He realizes he has hurt himself by making this child more than her existence could possibly hurt Spock. He leaves then and doesn’t return until Kirk has resumed his fugitive wandering feral ways and takes the child with him.

------

Kirk lives, though he is rarely sighted. Nero watches the tracker sometimes, follows on the screen as Kirk moves through the Narada. He wonders at the speed Kirk can get from one level to the next in a place where only a ladder and hatch bridge the two, wonders if Kirk is burdened by the weight of a child or if she walks beside him. He wonders if she has died.

He orders his men to watch for her but if Kirk is a ghost, the child is a myth--all agree she exists but none have seen her in a long time.

The first time she’s sighted, the man who saw her ends up in sick-bay with his left eyeball crushed to jelly.

“I saw the half-breed,” he says as Ayel does what he can to clean up the mauled socket. He has a stunned look of horror on his face that reminds Nero that these men are miners and not warrior-caste. “The Kirk. He didn’t have to hurt me. I just wanted to see her better. Just wanted to touch her. So pretty.”

And any pity Nero may have felt for his injured crew member burns away in the unexpected surge of rage that rushes through him like a wave of molten ore. His hand is around the man’s neck before he realizes, crushing in even as the man struggles against him, trying to claw open his grip.

“That half-breed girl is half my blood,” he growls. Every word is punctuated by slamming the defiler’s head back against the countertop. “Am I pretty? Do you want to touch me?” but the question will never be answered and the miner will never again walk the Narada’s passageways.

----------

Nero’s men keep dying. An environmental system imbalance and two go to rest and die in their sleep. One is crushed under a piece of falling machinery. One props a disruptor rifle between his knees and blows his own head off at the neck.

Ayel. The most loyal of his lieutenants--Ayel falls from a platform with no signs of a struggle, no indication of a slip. Nero can only conclude that Ayel intended to leave him, and death was the one way it could be done.

There is an assassination attempt and Nero kills another two men in self-defense. He is calculating positions now, what must be done, and who he can trust to do it. He rearranges the plan some and has just enough to accomplish his goals without a man to spare.

All the deaths Nero blames on Spock and he hungers for his arrival. It has to be soon--his men are dying, his ship slipping into disrepair.

And then Spock’s ship slips through the vortex.

It is time.

-----------

“Nero. I grieve with thee.”

His plan had always been to greet Spock as a grieving husband and father. To let his sorrow prove the justness of his actions--prove that he is preventing a tragedy, not enacting pure revenge. The moment is not as he had pictured it. The Vulcan is not cold and logical. His eyes ache with sympathy and pity despite the weapons pointed at him. And in return Nero feels fury swell up in his chest. How dare Spock share this pain? How dare he claim even some small part of it for himself?

His fist connects with Spock’s face, three, four times and then the Vulcan is on the ground and Nero kicks him. Spock lies still and Nero gasps for breath before he stops. The sharp green of Spock’s blood spatters the deck and his chest rises and falls with struggling, gasping breaths.

This is not how Nero pictured his plan’s fruition but it will do.

It will certainly do.

----------
The Narada cuts the quickest path to Vulcan. Through Klingons with the poor luck to be in their way and the Federation armada that rises to protect the planet. The other Spock, young Spock, arrives in the Enterprise and Nero slides one plan into action after another. He has the Enterprise’s captain surrender himself and taken to their make-shift interrogation room.

The planet Vulcan fills Nero’s viewscreen--a beautiful spinning ball of red rock and sand and life with the Narada’s drill stabbed deep through its skin. Ambassador Spock sprawls out on the deck below, helpless and watching. With luck he will live long enough to suffer Earth’s destruction as well as his home planet’s. Nero savors the moment, savors the horror and pain on Spock’s face as Nero orders “Release the red matter.” Savors and then--and then--nothing.

He frowns as too much time passes. “Cargo bay, report.”

Silence.

“Engineering, report.”

“Drill crew! Transporter room! Security!”

He sits in silence for slow moments. His men--none of his men would do this to him. Not with the end so close. Not with their loved ones so near to salvation. His plan crumbles to dust, leaving only a wisp of revenge to grasp at, one sweet moment that he will have before crashing the Narada into the planet.

He turns to his helmsman. “Find Kirk. Bring him to me.”

“Sir,” the man agrees, then pauses. “Sir, he’s--there are three locks on his signal, all on the move.

Nero looks to the last of his men. “Then you three go find him!”

------

Nero mans the controls, waiting for the bridge crew to return with Kirk. He keeps the weapons systems locked onto the Enterprise, the Narada in a steady orbit.

It is Spock’s voice calling a raspy “Jim? Jim, what have they done to you?” that causes Nero to turn. There stands Kirk by the emergency escape hatch. He looks like a devil. Green blood and red mix to black on his skin. Great dark smears like careless tattoo work across the corded muscle of the human’s chest.

Kirk bares his teeth and pulls his blade. Nero is glad to see the cool steel. Even if the room wasn’t too sensitive to risk on disrupter fire, it is right that they should meet like this. Simpler. More primal.

Kirk’s steps are silent as the vacuum of space and Nero draws his own weapon and moves to meet the charge. Nero swings and Kirk slides under the blow. Fire burns along Nero’s hip as Kirk’s knife slices hard through the layers of his coat and into his skin. Kirk is not as strong as Nero but he’s quick and he cuts Nero twice more before Nero catches him in the face with the haft of his weapon.

And then the battle is all in Nero’s favor. Kirk rolls, trying to put space between them, trying to regain his footing but Nero follows up on his advantage, kicking until Kirk lands up against the command chair with nowhere else to go to. Nero bends then and lifts him by the throat, bowing his spine over the back of the chair as he crushes the life from the human who has taken so much from him.

He can hear motion behind him over the sound of Kirk choking and dying. Small feet running towards them on the decking and he braces himself as the girl’s small body impacts into his back. He doesn’t think her a threat until a blade jabs in at the junction of his neck and shoulder. She doesn’t have the strength to kill him with a single strike, doesn’t have the skill to hit vital flesh. That she would try, that she would cut him, it infuriates him. He turns and catches sight of dark hair and blue eyes as he grabs the half-breed child and throws her off of him.

“No!” Kirk screams, the first word he has given up throughout the entire fight. Regret twists in Nero’s gut even as he watches the child hit the control console and lie still. Watches and can’t look away, waiting to see her breathe or move or something. Anything.

Kirk’s knife feels cold as it parts the skin and muscle and veins of Nero’s throat. Bright like a star, like a sun and then he’s falling into darkness and Kirk is pushing past him, leaving him and he is nothing and he has failed in every thing. In every way.

------------
The bridge of the Enterprise is a maelstrom of activity. The crew performs at a peak of efficiency that Spock could not have predicted but is please to see. Uhura codes and sends transmission after transmission to Starfleet, information about Nero and the drill and the Narada. Chekov at his station tries to crack the Narada’s shifting shield frequency for long enough to send over a boarding party. Sulu, still in his high-atmosphere jump suit, waits with his hands hovering over the controls that will sent them to warp-speed at the slightest provocation.

And at the center: Spock. Waiting for more input, for plans to fail or succeed. For the Romulan ship to attack anew or turn its firepower on the unprotected planet.

“Captain Spock, sir,” Uhura calls and he turns to her. “Incoming transmission from the Narada. Shall I put it up on the main screen?”

He gives her a crisp “Yes, Lieutenant” and turns back to watch.

In the low resolution display of the shadowed interior of the Romulan ship it takes a moment for him to realize what he is seeing. Nero on his throne-like command chair. His head is tipped back and his throat is slit from ear to ear, almost to his spine, the wound gaping and glistening in the darkness.

Silence stretches for long seconds.

“This is Acting-Captain Spock of the Enterprise,” he announces. “Are you receiving our signal?”

Silence again and then a voice speaks, rough and raw and out of the camera’s view. “I am Kirk. Nero is dead. You will negotiate with me now.”