Power and Corruption

OOC: Crossposted from muse_academy today.

Week 10: 1.A - Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Lord Acton

This, of course, is absolutely true... but depends entirely on your definition of power. And corruption.

( What is power? Or corruption, for that matter? )

Quid pro quo

OOC: Contains spoilers for Star Trek XI, the new movie, beneath the cut. Third person ficlet, set in an AU based on the movie.

Prompt 2009.18.B.1: You need something from someone that you really can't stand. How do you approach that?

She was standing in her garden, obsessing over the care of her silly plants. Honestly, how a sentient being could possibly lavish so much attention on something so mindless was incomprehensible to him. For all the intellectual and emotional capacity of a plant, she could be keeping a rock garden. Just as attractive and a lot less work.

Her head came up, her face tight and her eyes searching. So she knew he was here. He came very, very close to simply turning around and going home. Surely there was nothing he really needed from her. He could figure this out on his own. He didn't need the help of a mortal, and certainly not help from her. And what were the odds that she would help him anyway?

But the shard of his own future corpse burned in his mind with the recorded memory of a conflagration, explosion, death. 129 years. He'd expected to be around for billions more. 129 years was nothing. He had to know everything he could, to make sure that what had become of him in one timeline would never happen here.

So he materialized in front of her, in his default male humanoid form. "Hi, Teyande," he said, with a cheer he didn't feel in his voice. "Miss me?"

( ...he didn't want to die. He'd do favors for whoever he had to if it meant he wasn't going to die in an explosion in a mere 129 years. )