Tumblr prompt from bademorte: Okay really bizarre prompt. Blame exhaustion on this. Molly is Captain Kirk's cousin, but it doesn't become well known, until she starts talking with him in front of the Bones, Spock, and the holding cell with You know Who in It. Whatever rating you think you can work with this mental goo that entered my head.

A/N: Here is part 1. Part 2 and possibly Part 3 to follow. This will be my very first T rated Khanolly story because to me the idea of soulmates is rather fluffy.

Earth – Early 24th Century (London, England)

As happened with every person born on Earth, Molly Hooper's forearm bore the name of her soulmate in elegant black script.

Unlike everyone else, she refused to share that name, kept it hidden away from public view. A soul name could be disguised with makeup or covered by a tattoo, as people sometimes did when they left Earth or fell in love with someone from another world. Molly had an elaborate swirl of roses banded in ivy covering hers as soon as she was old enough to do so legally. There was no government requirement to register a soul name, as there had been during less enlightened times, and anyone catching a glimpse of her forearm had the decency to comment only that the tattoo was striking, in spite of the very prominent thorns she insisted the tattoo artist include.

The tattoo only covered the name, of course; it didn't obliterate it, and eventually, if the ink were not renewed, the name would gradually bleed through, darker than before. Molly resolved never to allow that to happen. She was sixteen when she got the tattoo, four years after the soul name had appeared.

That day, her twelfth birthday, she'd been so excited, could hardly sleep the night before for pondering the moment the name would appear. She'd been alone in her room, per family tradition and her own choice, when the curling black script revealed itself – a name, then another, and finally, oddly, a third. She read the name aloud, puzzled and intrigued; generally it was only a single name, sometimes two in tandem, but rarely three – and never a last name as she knew 'Singh' to be. So she'd rushed over to her computer and entered the name into the voluntary soulmate database, only to come up with nothing.

Thinking that perhaps he'd simply not registered (not everyone did, of course, although she certainly intended to!), she'd widened her search.

The only hit she got couldn't possibly be right; frowning, she'd entered the name manually this time rather than reading it aloud for the voice interface to possibly misinterpret, careful to make sure the spelling was correct, the spacing, everything.

The same name came back to her. The same, impossible name.

She read the biography attached to the name with a sense of increasing horror, then called up a visual representation. The man was fascinating, compellingly handsome…and an adult.

No, that was wrong. Her soulmate shouldn't already be a grown man, certainly not on with cold, blue-green eyes and snarl of rage that sent a shiver down her spine and put ice in her heart.

As she read on, that ice grew until it seemed to engulf her entire form. With a small cry, Molly backed away from the computer screen and huddled on her bed, curled around herself and shaking.

That was how her parents discovered her, when they decided she was taking far too long; their bright, friendly daughter wasn't the kind to keep anything from them, certainly not on so momentous an occasion. When they saw her, their eager smiles vanished. Concerned, Henry and Karen Hooper had hurried to her side, and Molly had shown them her arm, then pointed to the computer monitor.

She hadn't known who Khan Noonian Singh was before that day, but she certainly knew who he was afterwards.

Her soulmate, it would appear, was a three-hundred-years dead mass murderer who'd helped precipitate the Third World War that had nearly destroyed Earth.

From that day forward, Molly Hooper failed to regard fate as anything other than a cruel prankster. She never again wore short sleeves, pursued very few romantic relationships, and eventually determined to leave Earth altogether and seek her future – and perhaps an alien or at least non-Earthborn lover.

With that goal in mind, she contacted her cousin Jimmy in America, who had recently joined Starfleet. Upon his recommendation, she applied to and was accepted by the Academy. Six years later, at the age of twenty-four, she'd graduated from their biochemistry program and – oh, disappointment! – been assigned to a position not only on Earth, but in London. The very city where she'd been born and raised. So much for exploring the galaxy and possibly meeting a not-dead man to give her heart to.

At least the assignment was an exciting one, involving research into cryogenics, a long-disused science but one that apparently had been discovered to have some useful applications when stasis wasn't feasible. So the girl who wished desperately to leave her home planet behind found herself staying right where she was, shaking her head at the way things worked out but determined to make the best of it.

She might have turned her back on the concept of fate, but fate, as it turned out, had not yet finished with Ensign Molly Hooper.

Earth – Late 21st Century (North Asian Protectorate)

He'd searched for her, of course, the woman named 'Molly' whose name had appeared on his arm on his twelfth birthday. None of his fellow Augments bore that name; nor did any of the daughters of the geneticists who were the closest things to parents any of them had.

Those same geneticists had been puzzled and disturbed to find that their supposedly superior breed of human still displayed the inexplicable Soul Name that ordinary humans did; they'd sought to breed such unscientific nonsense out of the improved version of humanity, rejecting the concept of a conscious Fate in spite of thousands of years of evidence to the contrary. Still, there they were; one hundred twelve-year-olds who'd been 'born' on the same day, each now with the name of another person emblazoned in unremovable black pigment on their right forearms.

Including the one they considered – rightly so – their masterpiece, Khan Noonian Singh.

Who search in vain for a woman with his own name on her arm. And then the wars had started, wars blamed on the Augments who had seized control of so many portions of the world in an ultimately fruitless quest to bring order to the seething, hate-filled masses with their petty tyrannies and numerous, ridiculous grievances against one another. The irony, of course, was that the Augments rise to power had given those same uncooperative, stubborn groups a common foe to hate.

And so they'd fled Earth, the seventy-three who survived the purges and assassination attempts, Khan as their leader vowing to find them a world where they could live far from the prejudice, hatred and foolishness of ordinary humans. They'd slept for three hundred years in their frozen cryotubes, their sleeper ship carrying them into uncharted space, only to be plucked from their journey by the desperate visions of yet another madman who viewed war as the only path to peace.

oOo

'John Harrison' scowled as he examined the latest test results from the pulsar cannon he was designing for Marcus' new dreadnaught-class starship. Although there was little variation between this set of results and the previous sets, it still wasn't nearly good enough to satisfy him.

"Run them again," he ordered the Starfleet lackeys assigned to him, lip curling contemptuously as they scurried to obey him. He was used to ruling an entire continent; how had he been reduced to this, little more than a lackey himself, held firmly under the thumb of a man he despised and whose head he would gladly crush?

Then he thought of his crew, his family, kept from him by that same man, hidden away, and his anger and contempt threatened once again to turn to despair. He reined in his emotions with practiced ease, although not without feeling some bitterness at how good he'd become at hiding how he felt. Concealing everything real about himself except for his unwavering belief in his own superiority, which he felt no need to hide and couldn't if he attempted to do so for another three hundred years.

One of his aides, a young woman whose name he hadn't bothered to learn, hurried up to him with a staff update from Marcus. Scowling, Khan took the data PADD from the nervous young blonde and glanced over it, barely even registering the names of the four new personnel that had been added to his current project. "Fine," he said curtly, using his thumbprint to indicate his acceptance, then promptly forgot about them as yet another technological crisis demanded his attention.

Six months later he was on the run as a wanted terrorist; he beamed himself to the Klingon homeworld in order to escape the net that was closing around him, and finally began the journey that would end with him finding his soulmate.