((this is a reaction to the events described here. with a bit of backstory, for good measure.))

He did not think you could ever forget the first time you killed a man.

At the least, he couldn't. It was burned on his brain. Set so firmly into his memory it may as well have been etched into a sheet of titanium for all it would ever fade. It used to haunt his dreams. No longer. That, he thinks, should worry him.

It had been an accident. That's what the official report said. That's what he said. He didn't know. Didn't know. Was possible it was accident. How could a twelve year-old honestly kill a grown man and mean to' It was just a class. Knife techniques. They'd gone over the vulnerable areas. Practiced with fake blades. Were given real blades. Set against dummies to learn the weight of a blade, the force needed to pierce skin and muscle.

Was the other student's fault, they said. Shouldn't sneak up on someone practicing with real weapons. Should have known better than to mess around during weapons training.

Pavel never said that he should have found someone else to mock. Never said that the student he killed had been tormenting him for the past semester. Twenty and thought picking on a little boy made him tough. Not knife-proof, though. Should've thought of that before mocking him for not being able to reach all the kill points on the dummy. Could reach carotid artery easily enough with him leaning over like that. A surprised spin and a slash of the knife.

Twelve year old could not possibly murder. Pavel had been so frightened, eyes wide, face pale enough that he may as well have been the one to bleed out in minutes. By the time the instructor got over there, the other student was gone.

Blood was sticky when it started to dry, congealing onto his skin. He dropped the blade. Backed away. Didn't even have the voice to cry out. Never intended to. If he had, they might have saved the man.

He didn't even know his tormentor's name.

It didn't matter.

The second time was a phaser. Overloaded circuit. Went, taking the woman wielding it when it did. It had seemed fine. Of course it did. He knew how long it took the instructor to hand out phasers, set them up on the phaser range. Knew that the lanes were far enough apart that, in the event of a phaser exploding, the explosion wouldn't harm anyone in the next lane. Simple enough to set a time delay on her assigned phaser. Wouldn't have worked if phasers were passed out at random.

Third" Third was another young tough, a man who'd just got his masters in psychology. He should have known better. Known the risks of angering someone being trained the way they were.

Really tragic. Killed himself by accident; cyanide from the chemistry lab. Ingested some. They weren't sure how. Probably got on his hands. Ate something later without washing up first.

Somehow, he never got in trouble for it. The deaths. Always accidents. Students seemed smarter than the administrators. Figured out quickly that accidents happened when you crossed Pavel Andreievich. They left him alone by the second semester of his second year there. Didn't like being all alone, but better than the torment, better than being pushed around because he was small.

He got extra attention from the instructors, though. Lessons the others didn't get. They said he had potential. Pavel Andreievich liked the sound of that.

And yet, despite the extra training, he became a navigator. Because, you see, he wanted to be among the stars, and Starfleet generally put Konservatorja graduates into Intelligence if they opted for Operations Division.

There had been more deaths at his hands than the first three. Away missions, where it was kill or be killed. The Romulan ship, he felt that was blood on his hands as well; he'd fired the torpedoes and phasers. Mr Spock's mother was the only one that he had never intended to cause, all official reports aside.

Yet, all that blood on his hands, blood enough to drown him a hundred times over, he felt, and none of it ever felt like it stuck. None of it ever really bothered him. Not even that first one, despite giving his twelve year old self nightmares. Those passed, and it had just been a quick shower to get the blood off.

Now, though, there is just a tiny bit of Montgomery's blood on his hand, blood that splased when the knife pulled away, blood that dripped off his knife as well, and he finds himself at the sink all night, scrubbing his hands raw, trying to get it off, get the feeling to fade. He doesn't stop until his own blood wells up, and then, it is only with a desperate sort of sob as he shuts the water off. It won't come off. He doesn't think it will ever come off.

He bandages the raw, abraded skin carefully before collapsing into bed, staring at the Operations Badge he so proudly wore. A gift, from his brother. His brother, who he made bleed. Maybe even killed. He thinks his aim was enough to just wound, but he lashed out blindly, like a solar flare, no direction to the destruction. It could have been a killing strike.

He sobs himself to a fitful sleep, a sleep filled with nightmares about Montgomery bleeding to death in a dark alley, alone. Montgomery haunting him, hating him, always with a gaping slash down his neck. The others haunt him too, the students, a man with his throat cut open, a woman who bursts into bright vapor, a man who reeks of almond-sweet cyanide. Aliens, dead by phaser fire. A ship exploding into a black hole.

A man, a good man, tall and strong and kind. Who spoke almost perfect English and could sing Russian lullabies the best of any man. The only death in his life that wasn't his fault. The one that hurt him the most.

In his dreams, Montgomery was there too, Chief Engineer of the USS Yuri A. Gagarin, trying to fix the shields, trying to get them away, too much for him to do, too late for it to be any use. The nacelle went to a torpedo, an explosion that rocked the ship and vented her entire starboard side to space.

And in his dreams, he was the one who fired the torpedoes.