Fan Fiction
TITLE: Chakotay's Holidays: Luck of the Klingons
AUTHOR: Brenda Shaffer-Shiring
RATING: PG
CODES: C, T. Future chapters will be C/T.
PART: 5/?
DISCLAIMER: Paramount will little note, nor long remember, what I do here. But
they still own the VOY copyrights, so they get a shout-out anyway.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Kathy Speck gets the blame for this one! Chakotay and
B'Elanna not being Irish, I wasn't even going to do a St. Patrick's Day story
until Kathy came up with the plotbunny that led to this. Thanks to Diane
Bellomo for betaing, and to Will Speck and Dan Warman for naming my Klingon
characters.
SUMMARY: B'Elanna teaches Chakotay about a Klingon holiday.
Chakotay smiled as he watched B'Elanna attack her hamburger with the ferocity of a predator bringing down its prey. He hadn't been a meat-eater himself since before his Academy days, but whether or not he cared for B'Elanna's choice in food, it would have been hard not to appreciate the zeal with which she consumed it.
Reminded of how hungry he was himself, he set upon his cobb salad with matching fervor. One thing he had noticed, in the years since returning to Earth, was how much more flavor the familiar Terran vegetables seemed to have now that he usually ate them fresh instead of replicated. Chakotay knew plenty of people who would have insisted there was no difference between fresh and replicated foods, and indeed that was the theory. His tastebuds argued differently.
Hunger assuaged, he leaned back in his seat and took a swallow of his cider. "Thanks for dinner, B'Elanna."
She looked up and smiled back at him, for a moment relenting in her assault on the fries. "Hey, sure thing. Next time we both end up working late, it's your turn, okay?"
"Sure." He tilted his mug back, draining it dry. He would have been willing to do the honors this time, if B'Elanna hadn't said she needed to get Miral home and into bed.
"Dessert?" B'Elanna offered around a mouthful of fries.
"No thanks, I'm good."
He thought about a cup of coffee, but rejected the notion; he had lost his Starfleet-bred caffeine tolerance and it was a bit late in the day. Instead he poured himself a second helping of cider, savoring the taste. According to the label the beverage was fresh-pressed, not replicated; he would have guessed that much from the genuine earthy tang.
As B'Elanna pursued the last of her fries, he regarded her silently. She had been more sober and serious than usual these last few months. Not that she didn't have reason, he conceded, but he knew that when someone had suffered from depression in the past, she or he was more likely to suffer it in the future. He had missed the signs before, back on Voyager, but he was determined not to let her down in that way now. If she ended up clinically depressed again as a result of her separation with Tom, Chakotay would give her all the help he could. If what he could give wasn't enough, he would make sure she got any other help she needed.
Still, he thought, that zesty appetite argued well.
B'Elanna chased her vanquished meal with her own mug of cider. "Ahh. That was good." A frown crossed her face, as if at a sudden thought. "Oh, hell."
"What is it?"
"I forgot to see if Miral's purple shirt still fits her. She'll need it for tomorrow."
"She will?"
B'Elanna gave him a look. "Don't tell me you forgot tomorrow is ChuQun Jaw Day."
"ChuQun Jaw Day?" Chakotay struggled with the unfamiliar Klingon syllables. "What's that?"
"You don't know?" She snorted. "And you call yourself an anthropologist."
"Are you going to laugh at me, or are you going to tell me?" Well, that was just great. He'd forgotten some special Klingon holiday. Good thing she had said something, or DaChut, his Klingon colleague, would probably never have let him live it down.
She started with the former, but at his affronted look, she curbed her burst of laughter. "Okay, I can do both. You really never heard of ChuQun Jaw?"
"No, I really never did. Who was he?"
"Only one of the greatest Klingon heroes. I can't believe a hotshot cultural expert like you never heard of him. My mother used to tell me about him when I was Miral's age."
"B'Elanna." He was getting impatient.
"Okay, okay."
She held up her hands in a pacifistic gesture.
"Most people in the Federation don't know it, but the K-7 Incident wasn't the first time Klingons had ever run into tribbles."
Chakotay knew what the K-7 Incident was, of course. Back in the 23rd Century, Federation Space Station K-7 had been the site of a legendary clash between a Federation Starship, a Klingon cruiser, and what eventually became thousands of small, voracious -- but to humans, incredibly cute -- creatures known as tribbles. The furry little animals hadn't been seen anywhere in the Federation for almost a century after that. Not too long ago, though, another Federation space station -- Deep Space Seven or Eight, he thought -- had suddenly become infested with them, no one knew how. (Chakotay suspected a Customs screw-up.)
But she was right, he had never heard of any Klingon encounters with them before K-7.
"Go on."
"Way back in our history -- long enough ago that nobody's really sure when -- there were tribbles on the Klingon homeworld itself."
Chakotay blinked. Tribbles were a non-sentient species that originated from an entirely different planet than did Klingons. Prior to Klingon space flight, how could tribbles have come to QuonoS? But she was going on, "Brave warriors vanquished some with torches and flaming arrows, but the tribbles bred quickly, like the vermin they are. Soon the whole planet was crawling with them. Fields and forests were covered with pulsing, shrieking balls of fur."
B'Elanna's eyes were only partly focused, as if she were summoning the words out of memory. "Finally the emperor cried, 'Will no one rid me of these troublesome pests?' And brave ChuQun Jaw stepped forward. 'On the honor of my House,' he said, "'I will.' He summoned up his war band, and they went forth, driving their foes off of the land with clubs and with fire, until not one tribble remained.
"So the emperor and the people honored him and his House, and let his fame be spread. Even now, Klingons celebrate his memory by wearing purple on his holiday." She blinked, shook her head, and visibly came back to the present.
"Sound familiar now?"
"Uh, yeah."
It sure did; in fact, it sounded just like a bastardized version of the Terran legend of Saint Patrick driving the snakes from Ireland. But Chakotay looked at her earnest eyes and decided not to point out the resemblance. It would, he thought, also be a bad idea to mention a certain Klingon cultural propensity for adopting legends or literary works they admired, and then passing them off as their own. Outside of scholarly circles, few Klingons even now believed that Shakespeare had actually been a denizen of Earth and written his famous works in English; any historical evidence to that effect was dismissed as partisan fabrication. ChuQun Jaw was probably about on the same level.
"Yeah, that sounds familiar," he said finally, the words truthful if incomplete. The conversation passed to other topics.
On his way home, Chakotay made a mental note to do some research on the legend of ChuQun Jaw. But the hour was late, and he could certainly postpone that until tomorrow.
The next day, as he was entering his office at the university, Chakotay saw his Klingon colleague, Professor DaChut, walking down the corridor. "Happy ChuQun Jaw Day, DaChut," he called cheerfully (thinking, 'I know *my* Klingon holidays!').
DaChut looked at him, clearly baffled. "What are you talking about, Chakotay?"
Some minutes later Chakotay finally made it into his office, grateful that flaming cheeks were hard to detect against his complexion. His first act was to activate his computer and text a short message to his supper companion of the night before.
It read, "Three words, Torres: APRIL FOOL'S DAY."
