Star Trek: Starbase 777 - ketha︱q’reth-family-home

Home sweet home, or something. It had been nearly a year since Alin's life was irreversibly upended and his prior existence reduced entirely to rubble. He wondered what the people he used to work with thought of him now, a counsellor entirely unable to reach any of his therapy milestones that would allow him to go back to working. He had been a dead weight, moving between the holodecks and his quarters and the medical levels, never going elsewhere, never moving otherwise. He wondered if Lhi was tired of him yet, quiet now where before he'd been talkative, a shadow behind his eyes that betrayed a tiredness he'd never felt before. One he was unable to get rid of no matter what techniques he'd applied. And he'd tried to apply many of them. He knew so much, about so many different ways of putting a mind back together after severe trauma, and yet nothing he knew had helped him. It didn't help that he knew he'd made improvements from the near catatonic state he'd spent several months in. Great improvements, actually: he'd made strides that would have allowed many other officers to return to their work in some capacity. But he was in charge of the mental wellbeing of others, and with how... fragile he'd proven to be, they weren't keen on clearing him for even light duty. Fragile. If there was ever a word Alin hadn't thought would someday apply to him, it was fragile. 6'5 and built like a barn, well over 250 pounds, shaped out of dense muscle and ample fat and sturdy bone keeping his body together for as long as he had had it. But his eight-chambered heart had clearly been fragile, and not even Klingons had a redundant brain to take over when the first one decided it was too damaged to continue functioning. (edited)

21:32

So now that shore leave had come upon them once more, he'd gone home. Not to Earth. He didn't know how he would look Mathias or Zingi in the eye, their gentleness forever his model. Their pain and grief he felt would break him. But Kronos, with all its rough edges and blunt words, he could take. His father had been in the Federation enough to not begrudge him his silence and his pain, but they were Klingon enough to not take note of his... Well, it wasn't a sin. Even if Alin had believed in some kind of God, he didn't believe he'd committed some grave act of personal failure. But what he had done was possibly worse, and weighed on him heavier than any sin he might have committed otherwise. The taking of a life was normal, to Klingons. Perhaps not expected, but certainly not so noteworthy as to be bereaved over it. But Alin was not just Klingon. The sum of his parts was gentle despite his strength, and kind despite his genetic makeup and cultural background. Despite knowing his Klingon family would hardly look at him differently, he'd found he hadn't yet acquired the ability to create a sentence, or two or maybe three at most, that would explain to them where his mind had left for. So instead, he spent the quiet hours between meals sitting in his father's villa's courtyard, staring at the ornamental fish jumping around in the pond. His eyes tracked their instinctive movements, which might have been the only evidence that he was conscious and aware. (edited)

Eventually, Alin noticed his father sitting next to him. q'Reth wasn't or hadn't ever before been a quiet man. He was boisterous by nature, loud and attention-grabbing and confident in a way that made you want to look at him. He was going on seventy, but aside from wrinkles around the eyes and smile lines around his mouth he did not betray his age in the slightest: his hair was still jet black, and he still walked with the gravitas and fluidity of a man in his prime. In all of Alin's life there had hardly been a moment where q'Reth had sat quietly. Perhaps he saved it for conference rooms and formal dinners, or the quiet hours of the night that were only shared with his wife. But now, he sat calmly beside Alin, only moving when he noticed Alin looking at him. "You are worrying your mother," was the first thing he said when Alin finally paid active attention to him. It wasn't said in an unkind way; q'Reth was, for all his faults, not capable of true cruelty. It was merely a statement of fact, an assessment of the situation. He did not say anything about his own feelings or thoughts. Simply that Digos, his beloved wife, was worried about Alin's strange, un-Alin-like behaviour.

Alin's hand found its way to his collarbone, which had rarely seen daylight before due to his natural preference for heat, but was now always kept covered with the careful intentionality of a surgeon suturing a wound closed. Alin had asked to keep that burn scar, as the only one. They had had to graft new skin to his palms, and the melted skin of his thigh he had also asked to be replaced and healed. But his collarbone would not impede his movement, and he needed some kind of reminder that it was all real. That he hadn't simply let a terrible dream ruin his life. He let his father's words hang in the air for a little while, unsure of how best to respond. When he did finally open his mouth, whatever he had been planning to say was forgotten entirely for the impulsive, careless words that tumbled out of his mouth instead. "I killed a man." The distinction that it had been a woman, someone Alin had never met but who he had technically served with, even if she'd betrayed them, someone who had taken delight in exploring the limits of his pain tolerance, someone who had taken delight in the threatening of a child, who Alin had then felt the instinct to protect, that all seemingly didn't matter: at the core of it, the thing that had destroyed him was the life he had taken. Not even the accidental nature of it could encourage the brittle shards of his soul to come together in some sort of shape again. He had simply... killed a man.

q'Reth, for his part, did not speak immediately once Alin had revealed the thing weighing on his mind so heavily. He was a diplomat, son of a diplomat, he had grown up and grown old with the weight of words a constant and familiar responsibility to him. Ma'at, his father, had been a man so great they had lifted him from inconsequentiality and given him a House and a Name, and q'Reth had surpassed his father by a Bird-of-Prey's length and done everything to honour their House's name and the principles it had been founded on. So he waited. And when it became clear that Alin, shocked by his own callous confession, was not going to speak again, he took a deep breath and spoke in that familiar, gravelly timbre he had used many a time over the past four decades to calm and comfort his distressed sons. "I think if you had asked me what I thought had been weighing on you so, I would have exhausted every possibility in the universe before landing on that." Because despite living so far away, and Alin often seeking to visit Earth especially after spending so much time on Qo'noS taking care of a sick Martok who had been stubborn beyond reason about seeking care until Alin showed up, he knew his son. They kept up, wrote letters, did calls on occasion. Theirs was not a relationship that needed constant maintenance, because q'Reth's love for his son was as solid and immovable as the mountains. But they knew each other well, all the same.

11:45

And q'Reth knew of Alin's unflinching gentility, of hands that could hold like a iron shackles but would never squeeze like vices. Not even in the face of Martok, insensate with pain and fever, larger than Alin and trained in combat besides, had his eldest son lost his temper or his patience. Not even the stubbornness of a foolish, honour-drunk Klingon could get a rise out of him. Or perhaps it was simply that Alin had been more stubborn, in the end, because for all that his own insistent mulishness had been passed on to all of his sons, he knew Brina, had gotten to know her quite well in raising their son together, and he knew she had imparted on Alin a bullheadedness not even he nor Digos could match to give their sons. "Tell me what happened." Not so much a command as a request, but q'Reth had been a father long enough now to know that if he phrased it like a question his sons would take the opportunity to deny him. He was not the type to enforce the command with any force, especially now that his sons were grown, but he hoped the phrasing would make Alin talk regardless. (edited)

Alin knew his father well enough to know that he wouldn't follow up if Alin chose to stay silent now. But he knew himself well enough too, and if he didn't start now, he might never speak of it at all. "You remember when the Romulan Senate was eradicated," he started, his word choice as Klingon as it could get. It had been a long time since he'd spoken purely in Klingon, usually defaulting to a complex personal creole that the UT had learned to facilitate. But with his family, he spoke more Klingon, and he usually felt more Klingon, too, never having them look down on him for his scales. "Nearly a year ago. The refugees came to the Starbase where I was stationed. The Tal Shiar-" He could barely get the words out. He'd discussed this ad infinitum in therapy, why was it suddenly so difficult? "They came to look for the survivors. When that didn't work, they kidnapped hostages. I-"

When Alin faltered, q'Reth could fill in the blanks. Throughout a long career as a diplomat, he had experienced a great many dangerous situations. But he had never been kidnapped. He had never been at the mercy of a merciless enemy. "You were one of them." A statement of fact. And then, because a lump in Alin's throat prevented him from speaking more, q'Reth continued, extrapolation making way for assumption. "They took you, and however many others, and they treated you roughly. There may have been some people with actual information they wanted, but the rest of you were collateral, to do with as they pleased so long as you didn't die; that way you could be sent back to the Federation in exchange for the surviving senators." In truth, q'Reth had heard something about this, in a passing fashion. His own work was far less focussed on the fractured remains of the Romulan Star Empire; beyond work with the United Federation of Planets, he tended to be sent on internal missions. He did not have the details ready of the incident Alin was referring to. But from how his son was acting, he had learned enough.

"There was a child," Alin supplemented, speaking slowly as if his tongue was weighed down with lead. It was one of the many things he had struggled with a lot. It had been one thing to have committed such violence and have had it affect him. It had been a second thing entirely to have a child be witness to it. In such a place, Alin could never be sure that it was the first violent thing the boy had experienced, though surely, after they had all been rescued it would hopefully be the last. "He was- she was accosting him. The electricity, I could take it, but he was- she was going to kill him." Where had the eloquent man gone that q'Reth had raised? The accomplished speaker whose mind was gathered and his ducks in a row, who had spent his entire professional life making his words ones that mattered. His sentences now were stilted, his thoughts scattered. A tear rolled down his face, and then a second. Over the past year he had cried so many of them he had to wonder, even with all of his medical knowledge, how his lacrimal glands had not completely been depleted yet.

q'Reth did not have the words to say that would make it better. He sat there, beside his son, until eventually, he was kicked brutally from his spot, and made to leave. He sputtered out protests, wanting to be there for his son, but there was no sympathy to be found here: move, old man.

The youngest of q'Reth's sons took his place by Alin's side, the only one who still lived at home. A civil engineer by trade, and somewhat of an outsider to a lot of Klingon culture, he and Alin had always gotten along easily, even if they differed greatly in the ways they missed the cultural mark. Moras understood Alin, and Alin had always understood him in turn. "When dad first had this pond built, he wanted fish, so mom gave him fish," Moras started, and Alin had to wonder where this story was going. "Father was overjoyed, but then, within six months, the fish had all died. Some of them had been fished out by the massive herons that stay in this area year-round, but a lot of them simply turned up dead day after day." Alin's brother retrieved a pack of disgusting smelling Klingon cigarettes, offering Alin one and only shrugging when the doctor refused. "At first, mom simply bought new fish. Every time one died, she would simply replace it, often before dad could even find out more fish had died. But the fish kept dying." The cigarette truly smelled foul, the scent only permeating more now that it was lit up. "Eventually, mom asked me to take a look at the pond, and I found there were rocks leeching toxic metals into the water. That, and there weren't enough plants filtering the water, so the nitrogen levels were way too high. The fish were choking on their own shit."

The turn of phrase was so crude that it almost shocked Alin out of his mood. For some reason, everyone had been so careful with their words around him so far. His therapists, his family, his colleagues... Moras' directness was stunning him, but in an entirely different way from before. "So what did you do?"

"I got rid of the metals. Couldn't very well get rid of all the rocks, they're very prevalent in the soil here. But there's great filtration systems for that kind of stuff, and a few of the plants I planted love eating a few heavy metals, so that helped, too." Moras took a looooong drag of his cigarette. "Point is, they were solving a problem the only way they knew how." He blew out the smoke directly in Alin's direction, the rudeness and terrible smell serving to wake Alin up some more. "Didn't work, though, did it? In the end, they had to get someone else to take a look, dig up the pond some, and put a system in place to solve the problem finally."

Alin finally looked away from the pond, looking his brother in the face, his own eyes and cheeks still wet with tears. "So what do you think I should do?"

Moras shrugged. "Mom's cooking dinner." Entirely unhelpful, but in its own way it enforced a sort of normalcy about the situation. Welcome back to the real world, buddy, let's go eat something. "But after that?" He got the sort of grin on his face that told Alin with certainty he was about to say something he wouldn't like. "I'm gonna teach you how to throw a punch."