A/N: This is follow up to my drabble "Tango" in "Kiss & Other Khanolly Ficlets". I wrote it in one sitting and posted it in three parts on tumblr, then today when I looked at it I thought, ugh! This needs massive editing. So this is the first part of the massively edited version. :) Rated M for eventual sexy times, but right now it's just a tad angsty. Enjoy!

They shared a dance. A single, sensuous dance. Then they shared a night together, a single, incredible night.

He gave her a rose…and then a son, although he wasn't to know that for more than two years.

Khan stared out over the water, wishing (not for the first time) that cigarettes weren't almost entirely unknown on 24th century Earth. Oh, they weren't illegal and they weren't impossible to obtain, but they weren't easily purchased in a corner shop these days, either. So although he wished for one, he made no effort to get one. Not tonight, when he was thinking about the life he'd so carelessly created with a woman he barely knew, a woman who no doubt thought of him as a traitor and a monster, the murderer who'd blown up the 'Kelvin Memorial Archive' and was responsible for the death of Admiral Christopher Pike and so many other. The man who'd crashed a starship into San Francisco in an attempt to destroy Starfleet Headquarters.

And she'd be right; he was all of those things and so much more. Things she couldn't possibly have imagined, in her wildest dreams. One-time ruler of a third of the world, former leader of a powerful group of genetically altered superhumans who'd been created to bring peace but had, instead, only served to further destabilize an already precarious political situation and nearly led to a third world war. Thankfully he and his surviving Augments – a pitiful seventy-three out of nearly a thousand – had long fled Earth when the third world war did break out, so even history couldn't lay those deaths on his shoulders, bowed as they were with the weight of so many others.

Yes, he'd been all that. But the one thing he'd never been, not truly, was Commander John Harrison.

The man she'd willingly given herself to, the man she'd danced with and allowed to bring her home when the dancing was over. The man whose clothing she'd stripped off, the man who had removed her yellow, form-fitting sheathe with an impatience he hadn't felt in literal centuries.

The father of her child was never John Harrison, but always Khan. Khan Noonian Singh.

How, he wondered as he gazed out into the darkness, would she feel about him now that he was back?

oOo

Molly sighed as she watched her son toddle off to meet up with his friends, the small group of children still allowed to remain with their parents, deemed too young to be traumatized by their life in a penal colony. The last one remaining on Earth itself, where those whose crimes weren't harsh enough for them to be exiled to an alien world were forced to live out their lives. She didn't want to think about what would happen in the next two years, when her son was considered too old to remain under her questionable influence, when he would be shipped off to live with – well, she had no idea. Considering his parentage, simply fostering him off to a civilian family seemed out of the question, not when he was still under scrutiny, while Starfleet suspiciously watched him for any signs of incipient megalomania.

It didn't help that his mother was considered no better than his father. She twisted her lips in a bitter smile at the thought. Molly hadn't committed treason, but had been doubly tainted by her close association with Admiral Marcus, and by her personal relationship with the man she'd known only as John Harrison.

The father of her child. Who, as it turned out, hadn't been John Harrison but rather a warlord from another century, from an Earth so barbaric it hardly seemed real to her.

Khan Noonian Singh.

Even now, nearly three years after the fact, she found it hard to believe. Yes, John had been an enigma in spite of what she'd read about him in his official files, but an Augment from one of Earth's darkest periods? A man who'd been in cryosleep, drifting in space with his crew of seventy-two fellow Augments, and awakened by the Admiral to help him create weapons of war? The truth of his origins had been such a closely guarded secret that it turned out only Marcus knew the truth – or rather, he was the only one to survive who knew the truth. Molly shuddered at the memory of how his crimes had come to light, how he'd had the Section 31 elite assassins take out the scientists who'd helped awaken Khan, and even arranged the deaths of the crew of the starship that had found the Botany Bay drifting in space. The original explosion had been deemed a tragic accident, but was now known to be deliberate sabotage, on Marcus' orders.

Madness. There were times when she thought that of herself, that surely she must have had a complete break with reality due to the immeasurable stress of her job with Section 31. And then Jamie would clamber into her lap or demand her attention, and she was snapped back to reality with an almost painful feeling of joy. He was her jewel, the one good thing that had come out of the tragedy her life had devolved into.

In looks, he was a tiny mirror of his father: same dark hair, although his was curly where John's (Khan's) had been sleek and straight; the same blue-green eyes with flecks of amber, cat-shaped and dark lashed. The same sharp cheekbones, as his baby fat was gradually outgrown; the same fair skin and long, tapered fingers.

The only thing about him that she could claim entirely as her own was his temperament, placid and even, so difficult to ruffle. Here he was, her Jamie, technically in the middle of his Terrible Twos, and still the most cheerful, even-tempered child she'd ever seen. Whether his obvious intelligence was natural or some diluted product of his father's genes remained in dispute as far as the Starfleet geneticists who'd examined him were concerned. For right now he was a normal, healthy, well-adjusted little boy whose mother loved him more than anything else, even herself.

She wondered if his father would be proud of him. If he would see the similarities between them or only the differences. If he would care, or if he would be indifferent. Augments were bred to be superior; would Khan feel that a half-Augment child was a disappointment, inferior, a mistake?

She discarded that line of thought with difficulty; it had been cropping up more and more, no thanks in part to the therapist who'd been recently assigned to her 'rehabilitation' and had been trying to get Molly to discuss her relationship with Jamie's father.

Molly snorted. Rehabilitation; hah! She wasn't a criminal and never had been; she'd been railroaded, to use a quaint term her grandfather had been fond of. She'd worked for Admiral Marcus in Section 31, worked closely with him for several years. How could she not have known of his clandestine activities, his desire to create what he'd termed a preventive war against the Klingons? And how could she have not known who it was she'd taken to her bed? Hadn't she done so on the Admiral's orders?

No matter how many times she said no, she hadn't known and no, she certainly hadn't had sex with John Harrison because she'd been ordered to, no one believed her. Nor did they believe her when she insisted that the single night they'd spent together had been the extent of their relationship.

As she watched Jamie embrace one of his friends – Kirstie, she thought the little girl's name was – Molly wondered bitterly if he'd even have been allowed to be born if she'd revealed the name of his father as soon as she'd discovered what it truly was.

Once again she wondered what had happened to Khan, after he'd crashed a starship into San Francisco and brought the number of his 24th century victims into the thousands. What sort of a madman had she allowed between her legs, what kind of a woman did it make her that even now she still ached for him?

"Molly Hooper."

She sucked in a shocked breath at the sound of her name, spoken in a voice she'd never expected to hear again. She turned, eyes wide with disbelief and anticipation, to see Khan standing behind her in the uniform of a prison guard.

"Collect your son, Dr. Hooper," he said softly, but with an unmistakable hint of steel. His eyes were hidden behind a pair of tinted lenses, making his expression hard to read, but Molly thought she detected a bit of softening as he tilted his head downward. "We're leaving."