Chapter Text
The Cardassian labor camp at Lazon II had been abandoned, but the prisoners were still there.
Medical professionals bustled past Kyle Riker as he leaned over a biobed, trying to identify the patient lying there. Whoever he was, he was a Romulan, but his face was so disfigured that Kyle’s PADD couldn’t match him to any records. He grunted and tried again, this time clasping the patient’s hand in his own. He used his thumbnail to scrape the dried blood from the Romulan’s fingerprints and then held his hand to the screen.
A chirp. A positive identification. Kyle read the report with dark eyes. The last prisoner he’d identified had been a dead woman – and her only crime was that her son had been tenuously involved with a Bajoran refugee camp, as a doctor. But this patient, alive and well, had been convicted of killing eleven Cardassian children in a terrorist attack. With a sigh, Kyle let the Romulan’s hand go and pressed a subdural laser marker to his forehead, leaving behind a lurid pink seal that would identify him as someone the legal team needed to speak to.
He rubbed the back of his neck and moved on to the next patient. He’d barely had time to register the lack of a pulse when someone called for him.
“Dad?”
Kyle Riker bolted upright, his eyebrows raised. He recognized the voice instantly — although it had been a good eight years since he last heard it in person, and right now it was creaky and low. He turned to scan the Starfleet officers all around him, searching for Will’s tall form. "Will?" he said, earning a few blank looks.
The boy was nowhere to be seen. Kyle adjusted his search parameters, glancing over the shorter officers he’d skipped before — then checking the array of yellow and blue shirts — then, eyebrows furrowed, the handful of medical personnel kneeling on the floor to unpack crates of supplies. The voice intruded again:
“Kyle?”
And this time Kyle could pinpoint it better, even as the voice hitched and broke, turning into a barely-lucid cry of pain. He turned slowly to face a medical cot he’d passed by on his way in. The patient there was bone-thin and barely-conscious, back arching in agony, one eye swollen shut from a recent beating. A medic sat at his bedside, hard at work cleaning the blood and filth from his skin with a bare cloth.
“Just an after-shock,” she said firmly. The patient collapsed back onto the bed, his chest rising and falling in shallow gasps. “If they used electricity on you, sir, you need to tell me where.”
The patient’s lips moved in a whisper. Unable to hear him, the medic just stuck a hypospray against his neck and went back to cleaning his face. When he reached blindly for her hand, she batted him away, businesslike and undeterred – and he was so frail-looking, so heavily injured, so filthy that Kyle almost didn’t recognize him.
But the single blue eye that swiveled his way was unmistakable.
“Will, ” said Kyle, his heart dropping. He took a disbelieving step toward the cot. They’d shaved his hair and beard already to clear out the lice that infested this labor camp, and beneath the bruises and burns, Kyle could almost recognize his son as he’d seen him years ago. He drew up short, his voice coming out all wrong, brisk and emotionless. “Nurse, has this patient been identified?”
“Aren’t you with Clerical?” the medic asked, eyeing Kyle’s PADD. She scooted back, making room for Kyle to do his work.
“Will Riker?” Kyle asked, still disbelieving, and the patient only stared at him, one eye swollen shut and the other hooded and flat. Kyle forced himself to move forward, his features steeled.
The sharp sting of body odor was so strong Kyle almost covered his nose. Will had his feet propped up on a towel at the end of the bed, where the fabric could catch any pus dripping from the open wound on his soles. The flesh there was thick and split open, as if he’d been whipped across the bottom of his feet often enough to keep him from walking for months on end. Kyle spared a quick reluctant glance for Will’s left foot, where the big toe had been bisected and hung there, half amputated and totally unhealed, the open flesh turning black. The bones of that foot had been crushed so thoroughly that Kyle couldn’t bear to look for more than a second. All over Will’s body, sneaking out from under his ragged prison uniform, there were signs of torture: scars and burn marks, evidence of electroshock, the heavy reek of confinement and fear.
Kyle swallowed his bile and held his hand out by instinct. With a weak grip, Will grabbed hold, his palm cold and slick.
“You called for me,” Kyle said, not sure if Will remembered, if he was even lucid. That pale blue eye assessed him without emotion.
“I thought that was you,” Will said finally, groggily. “Can’t hardly see across the room. Two meters is about my limit. But you looked familiar.”
“How…?” Kyle started, and by reflex, Will squeezed his hand. “I thought you were on the Titan. With Deanna. When did you…?”
Will was too gaunt to be a recent prisoner. He had to have been here at least six months, to lose all this weight. Probably longer. But Kyle had heard from Will just two months ago, about Deanna’s pregnancy. He nudged the medic, silently offering to take over, and she handed him her supplies and hurried off to the next patient.
“Tell me what happened,” Kyle ordered, settling down into the medic’s seat. He rinsed the cloth she’d been using and pressed it against Will’s face, trying to soften up the layer of filth caked to his skin. Will grunted and turned his head away. “How badly are you injured?”
This time, the only answer was a rough laugh. Kyle left the wet cloth on Will’s forehead, covering his swollen eye, and dug through the medkit for a scanner.
“I thought you were with your ship,” he said, aiming the cheap handheld device at Will’s body. He dragged the beam from Will’s forehead down to his toes. “Has anyone contacted your wife yet? Sure as hell nobody contacted me…”
His voice died. The scanner’s most urgent diagnoses were malnutrition, exhaustion, two broken ribs from a recent beating. But the evidence of torture went back years . There were old fractures in Will’s bones that hadn’t been treated by any modern facility; long-term starvation that had dropped Will’s blood pressure and carved out his muscles; scars from electric shocks and whips, knife blades and wooden rods. Kyle’s mouth went dry as the scanner listed internal injuries consistent with sexual assault, all of them stretching back for years. When he forced himself to look away from the scanner, Will was staring back at him with one weary, hooded eye.
“This doesn’t make sense. I just talked to you two months ago,” said Kyle helplessly.
Will shook his head without expression.
“What do you mean, no? Some kind of imposter? A changeling? Will—”
“Not Will,” he said flatly. He reached up with a clumsy hand and pulled the wet cloth over his eyes, hiding them from Kyle’s sight. “Thomas,” he said.
Thomas. For a single heartbeat, that name was gibberish. Then it clicked into place. Kyle sat back in his seat, his heart slowing down until every thunderous beat hurt his chest. The clone. The transporter accident. The terrorism on behalf of Maquis — he’d heard, of course, that Thomas had been sentenced to a Cardassian labor camp, but he didn’t realize it was Lazon II. He’d never reached out to this version of his son, never really stopped to think about…
“Thomas,” he breathed.
“Pleased to meet you,” Thomas grunted, his eyes still hidden by the cloth.
Kyle snapped out of his thoughts. “Meet you?” he repeated, dazed. He forced the confusion away and squeezed Thomas’ hand. His voice came out brisk, no-nonsense. “I raised you. How long have you been in this camp?”
Beneath the cloth, Thomas’ jaw tightened, his lips becoming a thin line. Kyle watched his chest and found it unmoving, no breaths taken in the space between his question and Thomas’ answer.
“Don’t know,” said Thomas eventually, his voice an odd mix of light and tense. “What year is it?”
Kyle kept his tone calm. “2375.”
Another long pause. Gently, Kyle removed the cloth from Thomas’ eyes and pressed it against his cheek again, working on the dirt ground into his skin. Thomas kept his good eye closed.
“Four years, then,” he said finally. “And what are you doing here?”
“I was called in as a political consultant,” Kyle said. “Due to my work on Cardassia–” Ah, but of course, he’d never talked to Thomas about that. He searched helplessly for the right way to explain. “They needed experts on rehabilitation. Lawyers, politicians, doctors. Anyone with experience, who wasn’t afraid to get their hands dirty.”
Thomas let out his breath that almost sounded like a laugh and turned his head back, leaning into Kyle’s touch with a sleepy bonelessness that implied he didn’t really know what he was doing. His breathing evened out, the lines in his face smoothing over as exhaustion claimed him, inch by inch. Kyle swallowed hard and scrubbed gently at the dirt on Thomas’ face.
“Thought maybe you came for me,” Thomas murmured.
Kyle’s heart pounded in his chest. He kept his focus on the task at hand, trying to beat back the wash of guilt that came over him.
“We can discuss it later,” he decided. He rinsed the rag out and smoothed it over Thomas’ cheeks, relieved to see some of the dried blood softening up. It stained the cloth a pale orange as it flaked away.
“Dad?” Thomas said, his eyes still closed.
“Yes?”
Thomas’ voice slurred. What he said was nearly inaudible:
“Stay.”