Twenty-five years before the Klingon raid on Celos-D42
Katbujo watched from an upstairs window as her husband returned from the latest raid. She knew their eldest son, T'udrok, wouldn't be returning with him but it didn't stop the ache she felt inside.
She gazed as her husband emptied the shuttle he'd filled with personal loot from the raid and when a small biobed floated out, her eyes widened. She rushed down the stairs and into the courtyard.
"What is this?" she demanded as she stood by the biobed with the unconscious child on it.
"Our revenge," Hus answered simply. "And thank you for the warm welcome."
"Don't you joke around with me right now," Katbujo hissed as she came around and stood before her husband. "Tell me why there's a living human on my property."
Hus gestured to the child. "Her mother killed our son, so I took her child. And, as I killed her, I told her I would raise her child as my own – raise it to hate humans, to hate Starfleet, to hate the Federation." He stopped unpacking the shuttle and gave his wife a tired look.
"I'm a man of my word and I intend to keep this child. She cannot replace T'udrok, but turning her against her own will go a long way to making up for his noble death."
"Did you stop to consider whether I'd be willing to bring a human – and the child of the person who murdered my son, no less – into my home?" Katbujo asked, enraged at her husband's spontaneous and thoughtless actions.
Hus sighed. "I did indeed realize you would not be happy with my decision. Which is why Korgihl is on his way here."
"Why is the family doctor coming?" Katbujo asked tightly, half out of curiosity and the other half still seething anger.
"I want him to replace her memories," he gestured to the child.
Katbujo made a noise akin to a snort.
"You want him to use a sifter or a thought maker on her? She will not survive the process," she replied.
"Perhaps not. In which case, you have nothing to worry about," Hus said mildly, turning back to the work of unloading the shuttle. "But if she lives…"
"She will have no memory of her life to this point?" Katbujo asked, knowing the answer already.
"Indeed," Hus confirmed. "She will be ours to mold into whatever we desire her to be." Seeing his wife peer down at the girl in the biobed, he continued. "You would like her, my dear. She has the same feistiness in her that I have always admired in you."
He came up behind his wife and put his arms around her waist, only hesitating for a moment. If she wanted to hit him, he'd let her. But she yielded and allowed him to hold her.
"I know how much the miscarriages after Drel'ak have haunted you. I know you wanted another girl. And since we cannot have one on our own, I have found another way to give you what you want."
Katbujo took a shuddering deep breath. "This is not what I wanted," she murmured. "I did not wish to trade our eldest for a human child."
Her words hurt Hus which had been her intention. He pulled away from her. Hus knew she blamed him for their son's death and no amount of commendation on their son's heroic death would make her feel better. He'd been there and watched his son bleed out from the knife wounds inflicted by the young girl's mother. He could never admit it to his wife, but the death hadn't felt heroic to him either. Still, he didn't regret taking the child alive. He hadn't been lying – this child was a fighter. After he had first stabbed her mother, the child had come out of her hiding place, yelling. He'd been impressed by the tiny girl's spirit. If she could live through the procedure to alter her memories, she would make a fine addition to their home, even if she could never fully be Klingon.
Katbujo stalked back into the house, leaving her husband to finish his tasks. She wanted nothing to do with the child and nothing to do with her husband for the moment.
"I don't know if she'll survive," Korgihl said to Hus with some nervousness. They both stared down at the child on the biobed, wrestling with unknown demons in her induced state of unconsciousness.
"How long before we know if the procedure was successful?" Hus asked, his face placid. Either she'd live or she'd die and there was nothing he could do so why allow himself to feel emotions at this point?
"It's hard to say. I've never used a thought maker on someone so young. I'd guess she'll be out for the next couple of days," Korgihl responded, packing his bag to leave.
Hus stared at the child. She hadn't been awake since he'd given her a hypo of sedatives on Meestos. Before that, she'd fought him violently – violent for one so small and human. She'd kicked and bit, looking for purchase wherever she could find it, resisting him as he picked her up and held her in front of her dying mother. It had only been at the sound of the incomprehensible babble of her mother that the child had quieted and stopped squirming against him. And then the mother, with her dying breaths, had started singing to the child. As she sang to her daughter, Hus lowered himself to the slouched woman, making eye contact with her. When she had lost the ability to sing, but was still alive, still able to comprehend what was happening around her – that was when he'd told her what he would do to her daughter. He ran his bat'leth through her one final time, to ensure her death and the child's shrieks as he did it would haunt his dreams for the rest of his life. He turned away from the woman who had killed his son while her child kicked and struggled in his arms, her cries unabated. Hus knew he needed to keep her quiet, lest she draw too much attention and wind up dead, a prize for a successful raid.
After Korgihl left, the unconscious child was moved into the house. Hus had not asked Katbujo's permission as the two had not spoken since their stand-off by the shuttle. He was too tired to fight her anyway. If she wanted to smother the child in its sleep, so be it.
He went to his study and sat down at his desk with a thud. There were many things he needed to attend to from his absence but the first thing he wanted to do was look up exactly who the girl's parents had been.
Katbujo awoke to the sound of a child crying in the middle of the night. It was instinctual to get out of bed and find the child to sooth them and she was halfway down the hallway before she remembered that none of her own children had awakened her in the night with their cries for years. Drel'ak, her youngest, was seven and though she knew he occasionally had nightmares, she never heard a peep from him. Like his brothers before him, he'd been taught at a tender age that Klingon men did not cry. Though the muffled sobs Katbujo had heard coming from Hus's study after he returned from this latest raid were proof enough that Klingon men did cry on occasion. They had begun to warm up to one another in the days since his return and he had finally returned to their marital bed.
Katbujo realized the cry was coming from the source of so much of the tension between herself and her husband – the room where the little human girl had been left, four days ago after Korgihl had used the thought maker on her. So the human was awake now. Katbujo debated returning to her bed but the plaintive cries of the child were too similar to those of her own children. Without wanting to, she continued to the child's room and opened the door.
The girl was sitting in the bed they had moved her to, her fists in balls and large tears spilling out of her eyes. Her cry stopped when she saw Katbujo's outline in the doorway.
"Mama?" she cried. "I had a bad dream."
Had it really worked? Here was a tiny human speaking to her in perfect Klingon. Katbujo approached the bed more out of perverse curiosity than any feeling of maternal affection.
"What did you dream, child?"
"I can't remember – I just know it scared me."
Katbujo sat gingerly on the edge of the bed and the child took that as invitation to scramble into her lap.
"Hold me? Till I fall asleep?" the little girl begged and in that moment, with the child's arms clasped around her neck, Katbujo knew they would never turn the child away. She was theirs now and Katbujo would do what she could to help the human girl navigate life as a Klingon.
In the morning, Hus found his wife in the child's room, asleep next to the little girl. Katbujo would never tell him he had been right to take her but she did ask him what they should name their youngest child and, together, they chose Jokusho.
"Everything looks to be fine with her brain patterns. It's hard to say with humans – they only have one brain. As such, it's a bit bigger than a single Klingon brain would be. But they seem to otherwise operate similarly and based on the patterns I see in my scans, the memory erasure and replacement was a success."
Korgihl spoke quietly, aware that the subject of his words was liable to come running into Hus's office at any moment.
"Is there anything we should be wary of?" Hus asked, pleased at the doctor's diagnosis. Somewhere in the house, he could hear Jokusho laughing with Astori and Drel'ak.
"Sometimes, memories are triggered by actions or places the child was exposed to before the thought maker was used. Seeing as you've brought her to a new environment, with a different species, I doubt that will be an issue."
"But I should make sure she doesn't receive exposure to anything regarding Meestos or her parents?"
"That would be wise." The doctor regarded Hus shrewdly. "You have quite an uphill battle, you know."
Hus fixed his gaze on Korgihl. "How so? You think she'll reject the replacement memories?"
The doctor shook his head and took a sip of the bloodwine Hus had poured him at the start of their meeting.
"No, I think she's settling in quite well," he paused and they both heard children's laughter floating in. "She seems happy with her new life. I'm not worried about her. I'm worried about how everyone will receive her."
Hus scoffed. "She's my daughter. As head of the most powerful house on Boreth, I think I have something to say about any mistreatment of my children."
Korgihl clucked his tongue at the other Klingon. "No one will outright harm her – they're too smart for that. But they will treat her differently, Hus. You need to be ready for that – and you need to prepare her for it as well."
Hus considered the doctor's words as Korgihl finished his bloodwine. He stood and Hus stood as well.
"I have to be going. Kor has requested my presence at a medical conference on Qo'noS," Korgihl said as he gathered his things.
"Qo'noS? That's quite a distance to go for a meeting with other doctors," Hus mused.
"I know. But Kor heard about this idea of adapting human augmentation to Klingons and he's become obsessed with it. I keep telling him it'll never work but he's determined that I listen to the theories and, at the end of the day, it's not like I can refuse the man."
Hus nodded his head, knowing how impossible it was to turn Kor down when he was set on a particular course of action. The men parted ways and Hus sat down to continue his work but instead, he listened to the voices of his children, shouting and laughing with one another. Jokusho's voice blended in so perfectly. It was almost as though she'd always been there, just another member of the family.