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Title: Witch Hunt
Author: Looneyluna
E-Mail: looneyluna2000@yahoo.com
Rating: R
Category: AU, Angst, Romance, Humor, Horror
Code: R/S, Tu/O, All
Summary: Everybody is the same except Hoshi, who was orphaned at the age of six. Enterprise comes across wild Hoshi… well just read it!
Author's Notes: Thanks to Kathy Rose for the final beta. Thanks to Jessica and Chrysa for letting me borrow Em
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The season was cooling and she would need to hunt for skins soon. For now, she would collect whatever she could scavenge from the lake in front of her. Luckily, her father had taught her how to move through the water and collect the food. She shielded her eyes, looking up at the streaks of pink dotting the horizon, noting that she didn't have much light left.

Jumping into the cold lake, she reached down to the knife at her ankle. Soon she was at the bottom of the lake, trimming away at the long strings of kelp and scraping away the few mollusks on the bottom. She would eat tonight. Her lungs screamed for air, overriding the grumble of her stomach, and she kicked at the bare bottom of the lake and ascended for air, one of the other necessities of existing.

She broke the surface of the placid water and gulped for air, easing the ache of her lungs. Climbing onto shore, the cool air hit her cold skin and she shivered. She had no reserves as, during the warmer months, she had become ill and was unable to protect her reserve food stocks. She rushed to the fireside to warm herself, her teeth chattering. She rubbed her arms.

Dumping the bag of weeds and mollusks onto a stone close to the fire, she wrapped some of the protein in the weed and impaled them on a long stick. Other mollusks she ate raw because her stomach was cramping with the hunger she had been unable to satisfy for three days.

After she gorged herself on her meal, she laid on the pile of leaves and let sleep claim her. She was alone, which was a good thing, because nobody heard her scream as the nightmares claimed her soul.

***

The monsters came in the middle of the night, quickly silencing her father as the blood poured from his neck. They ripped her from her mother's arms and tore at her mother, laughing maliciously as she cried.

The little girl whimpered in the corner, unnoticed, silently pleading with her father to do something. His dark eyes were fixed on her as a single tear escaped from the corner of his eye.

Her mother struggled as her torturers inflicted more pain on her. "Mercy. Please have mercy and leave her alone. She's only a little girl. She doesn't understand. She isn't manifesting. They don't need her."

"We're here for her, witch! Fucking you up is just an added bonus," the monster sneered.

Hoshi could see fear seize her mother. She heard the familiar voice in her head, "Run! Don't look back. Your father is dead and I am too. Run and hide. Always hide whenever they come!"

The little girl with pigtails cried, not wanting to leave her mother.

"Now!" screamed inside her head as she felt herself flung out of the hut.

Frightened, she ran, only looking back as the hut was engulfed in a fireball.

The heat from the fireball warmed her as she watched everything she held dear burn before her eyes.

Shivering in the cool night air, she stood there with her nite-nite, a pink and white-checkered blanket, clutched to her small chest. No more tears trailed down her pudgy cheeks, as she stood still, unwilling to move. The monsters were dead. So were her parents. Every lesson they had ever taught their six-year-old daughter ran through her head as she set out to secure a new shelter and a new food source.

Her first season alone, she procured a rotted out trunk as shelter, and dove into the nearby lake for sustenance. Unable to start a fire, she consumed the morsels raw, listening to her mother in the back of her head about eating things she did not like the taste of.

She would look at her reflection in the lake and ponder it, the shape of her eyes, nose, and mouth so much like her mother's. The face that peered back at her throughout the years was a solemn face, always surviving, rarely thriving.

Feeling the breeze of the coming season pass through her, her teeth chattered, and she grasped the large rubber-like leaf around her shoulders.

***

Hoshi shivered and turned over in her sleep, mumbling her distress to the night air. She opened her eyes and saw the fire was out. Heat. There would be no more heat, unless she stoked the embers. The thought repeated over and over in her head, but she couldn't move. Trembling, she closed her eyes and let another nightmare overtake her.

***

"Hoshi-chan, it's time for dinner," her mother shouted at her across the courtyard.

Hoshi waved in frustrated acknowledgement and threw the pebble onto the eighth square, giggling. "I'll be right there, Momma," sounded the child's voice over the other children in the courtyard.

"Now," the stern yet soft voice of her mother projected into her head.

Hoshi knew better than to argue when her mother talked without moving her lips. Some people called it her mother's gift or talent. Her mother called it her curse.

Hoshi and her parents lived in a guarded camp with others like them. The houses were identical and varied in size according to how many were in the family unit. There were streets, schools, which Hoshi just started and loved, and lots of trouble to get into.

Hoshi's father had been gone for three days and she could tell that her mother was growing more frustrated as the clock over their mantle kept the time. For the past two nights, Hoshi had crawled into bed with her mother to wipe away her mother's tears as she silently wept.

"Why are you crying, Mama?" the inquisitive five-year-old asked, as she stroked her mother's raven hair.

Hugging her daughter tight, her mother whispered, "I miss Daddy. I love him."

Hearing the word "love," Hoshi started whispering a poem of love in French, knowing her mother knew the intonations of the language but not the meaning of the words. She was a prodigy, knowing all the earthen languages. She still didn't understand why her mother discouraged her display of this knowledge.

Smoke swirled around the scene in her mind, switching scenes as though she were watching a video screen.

Her mother screamed as the overseers tossed her unconscious father onto their front stoop. He was covered in blood and mumbling.

That night Hoshi lay in bed as her parents whispered back and forth hoping she wouldn't hear.

"It was a blood bath, Mina. I don't know if I can go through another one," a disembodied male voice sounded. "They provide us with no justifications for the attacks. We have to do as they say; otherwise…" he choked on the thought that harm would come to his wife or daughter.

"I've had it, Matthew. Once you are recovered, we are leaving. I don't care who or what I have to destroy for us to get out of here. We deserve better and so does our daughter." Her mother's voice carried a menace in it that Hoshi had never heard before. "She's manifesting an ability, one I've never seen before. We've got to get her out of here before they try to harvest her."

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