Chapter Text
Your name is Dr. Roxanne Lalonde and there is something growing inside you.
It's a pretty sad statement of your life that the cold, clinical room feels comfortable, like a second home. For Roxy Lalonde, brilliant astrophysicist and xenobiologist, you guess it's ok to feel that way, since you've spent more than fifty percent of your time since you were sixteen in some kind of lab or another. It certainly helps ease you when you're on your back, stomach smeared with jelly and an ice-cold sonogram head pressed to your skin.
"Jesus Christ, don't you guys, like, warm those things up these days?"
"Well we would, except you're in here for free, behind the backs of the doctors and it's SIX O'CLOCK IN THE FUCKING MORNING."
"Haha yeah, fair 'nuff, I'll shut up now."
"Thank fucking Christ." Nurse Vantas adjusts some dials and presently the screen resolves in the blue and white static of a sonogram. "Right, gimme a second..."
With a delicate touch that belies his rough features, he shifts the head about gently, bringing into view something that writhes like grasping pseudopodia.
The two of you blink as a tiny humanoid shape slowly resolves. You're both silent a moment longer, either out of fading shock or uncertainty, before Vantas manages,
"Congratu-fucking-lations. Your impending shitmonster is a girl."
You crack a smile, "A girl? You're sure."
"Well I'm not a fucking doctor, but the lack of a dangly bit is pretty telling at this stage. Lemme try to get another angle."
The head, now quite warm from the heat of your body, moves and the sonogram image dissolves but not before some undulating thing teases your vision. A sense of unease spreads from the head, like butterflies in your stomach, but less overt, and more troublingly suppressed.
"Yeah, ok, more sure now. It's female." His choice of words sends shivers down your spine. "Great. Exactly what the world needs; another fucking Lalonde making unwanted passes at anything with an ass."
"But it's such a nice ass, KK." You bat your eyelashes at him and he throws a towel at you.
"Fuck off and wipe down. I wanna be outta here long before the first egghead gets in."
You do so and heave your increasing bulk off the examination table. For all his grouchiness, Vantas is there to lend an arm. You're grateful for it as you reconsider, not for the first time, the wisdom of keeping the kid.
--
You have to admit, it was a pretty stupid fling. Some visiting psychologist, here for some conference or another. He was charming enough, in a vaguely creepy, European way. But he rose to the occasion well enough when you cracked about his shiny cue ball head, even if he was surprised at your doctorate(s) and the fact that you were about to literally drink him under the table.
Hardly the most flattering of descriptions, but accurate enough. Still, nothing went awry.
But even that deep into his cups he was charming and attractive and so you took him home. And so, weeks later, you were heaving your guts out and wondering who to sue, the birth control company or the condom company.
Your colleagues, all older than you, thought that you were crazy for keeping it. All "Don't you have enough on your plate, Roxy?" "Just think about what it's going to do to your career!" And they were right, or close enough. You were hella busy, always looking for more to occupy you, to distract your racing mind. It's why there were more letters after your surname than in most others’ first names. It's why you sat on three different boards of directors. It's why you drank, and smoked and fucked. You were a brilliant hurricane bound up into the body of a twenty-six year old who didn't know what she was looking for.
Somewhere in there you got sick of calling the child "it" and called in a favour from Vantas.
You thought, maybe, you were looking for the family you never had.
--
You wonder if the kid kicking and shifting is supposed to feel like a barrel of eels.
--
The grump is on staff when you go into labour, and you make sure that he's on the team that attends you. You do this by literally twisting the doctor's arm around with a half-remembered bit of jiu-jitsu and screaming that if Vantas doesn't get his goddamn ass in here you are going to start breaking heads. Soon enough he's telling you to shut the fuck up and breathe like how you learned, goddammit.
It's an agonizing twelve hours of pushing a basketball down a garden hose and it's enough to distract you from worries of mutated babies with tentacles for arms. You have climbed the Alps, cracked theories about black holes, and gotten grants from the government and this is by far the hardest thing you've ever done.
But when the doctor wearily announces that she's out, you've got a beautiful baby girl your heart almost stops. There's no crying. Why isn't there any crying? The doctor smiles reassuringly and hands you a gurgling baby girl,
- limp and bloody tentacle burst from her stomach that's the umbilical cord, idiot testament to unnatural birth -
breathing fine and not making a peep. Your panicked face must have communicated something to him, because he shrugs and says exhaustedly,
"Happens sometimes. I've never seen it before, but I know a few colleagues who have delivered babies that don't cry. Don't worry, it probably doesn't mean anything. Let's have her here so we can do a quick run of tests."
For a small eternity, there's only you and your child, the world gone warm and fuzzy with the aftereffects of birth and more drugs than you've ever taken at once. Vantas takes her from you and wouldn't you know it, that's when she bursts out screaming and crying. He rolls his eyes and she opens hers. For a moment, you consider naming her Violet, but you doubt Rose would ever forgive you for it.
--
You take maternity leave to enjoy ten months with your newborn in the Catskills, housed in the mansion thousands of patents paid for. It was meant to be a home away from home, but now you are determined to turn it into a home proper, with some laboratories on the side.
You nurse and coo over Rose as contractors assemble an observatory, a biohazard facility and a testing facility the military had to be bribed to overlook. For once in your life, your brain isn't haring off on some wild algorithmic chase because there's your dear child, anchoring you with love and worry. That's not to say you don't take her with you into the labs, show her the infinite vastness of space or the complexities of life, all more than she could possibly understand.
But you like to think it had something to do with her precociousness.
--
The first time she burps black tar, rank with the smell of decay, on your shoulder and down your back, you stare at her in horror as her eyes film over with a milky white sclera like a washed up fish. You rush her to the hospital. Your heart is in your mouth and the only thing that keeps you from violating a thousand and one road laws is the knowledge that you could kill your Rose doing so.
But when you get there, she's giggling and healthy as can be and your labcoat is spotless, save for a mild brownish discoloration, the sticky stuff long since evaporated.
--
At nine months, she saysher first words, before she can even walk. From a playpen in Lab 6 she extends her arms toward you as you come out of decontamination and exclaims,
"Mama!"
The squeal out of your mouth is more girlish than you've been in years, but you don't care, sweeping her up in your arms and bouncing her happily. You nuzzle her face, tell her how proud you are of her and laugh lightly. She laughs and burbles with you, sharing in your happiness and pride. Then she extends her hands over your shoulder and says, with that same joy and familiarity,
"Dada!"
When you spin around, there's nothing there, and Rose is crying from how hard you're clutching her to you.
--
That's about when you pick up the bottle again. Just to settle your nerves, you know.
--
You suppose it's partially your fault when she finds the kitten. And partially the kitten's fault, considering the damn thing managed to haul it's mutated carcass up to the window and headbutt the pane repeatedly until someone came to investigate. That someone was Rose and when you'd finally gotten around to investigating the sounds yourself, you found her trying to push open the window herself.
Of course you do away with that silly idea and pick her up off the sill, placing her safely on the ground before opening the window to let the poor thing in. It looks badly mauled, eyes barely open and so thin you could see ribs, its stomach concave. You were already thinking of how to get it back up to weight before Rose started begging you if she could keep it, please oh please.
After a nutritional formula in a bowl of milk, the thing opens its eyes and you're looking at four of them. And well, that's certainly not a naturally occurring mutation and you guiltily think about the effects of some of the more exotic radiation you're working with.
It doesn't bother you that your daughter's best friend is a mutated cat until years later. Years later when you've conclusively proven that none of your machines could produce radiation to induce mutation in living creatures. And then it's quite inseparable from her, curled up on or about her, purring contentedly. So it's really no harm, is it?
--
Her teachers in kindergarten have concerns.
"How does she even know what abyssal means?"
You give her a look. "I have 4 PhDs that took me as long as it takes most people to get through their honours. I THINK my kid might be as smart as I am."
"She has imaginary friends."
"So does every other brat at this age! Lindsy is off playing with whassisname now!" You gesture at the girl pouring tea for an invisible guest over a table she built from blocks.
"Mister Flopsy isn't called Nehrubyegleth."
"Nrub'yiglith," you correct off-handedly. They stare at you. You try to stare back defiantly, to take your daughter's side, but you have to admit her choice of names is disturbing. You wondered once if you'd left Lovecraft lying around somehow, but you can't remember the last time you saw your copy of the Complete Works.
"She's scaring the other children!"
"Well the other children can learn to suck it up then!"
Three weeks later they ask you to collect Rose early. She's made the children cry. Your darling Rosie looks sullen and a little bit scared. She also looks like she's been crying. The teachers don't answer your questions and nearly push her out the door at you before shutting it behind her. Bastards. Turning out a three year old girl. You gather up your baby and try to soothe her, to say nothing of yourself.
"Honey, what happened?"
"Billy stole my book and wouldn't give it back."
"Oh. Why were the other kids crying then?"
Rose looks unhappy, a little bit guilty. "I hit him until he gave it back."
Despite yourself you feel flush of pride. Then you see strange red circles around her wrist and your temper flares. "Did he hit you, too?"
Rose sees you looking at her wrist and tries to hide it. "No, he just cried."
Now at the car, you buckle Rose in and try to think of what to say next. "You know you shouldn't fight with the other kids, Rose. Especially if you're so good at beating them up."
You flash her a little smile. She brightens a little.
"I'm not real good. " she admits. "Nrub'yiglith helped, and held my hand when I got scared."
--
It's like that, or close enough, at most kindergartens, so you end up homeschooling her. It's easy as hell, because she's as bright as you and even though you're a crappy enough teacher, she's a great reader. She makes a hash of the state curriculum, so you let her study what she wants most of the time. So long as she passes the tests with a good mark, she can read whatever she likes, you tell her firmly. And if she's a bit wobbly on her math the first time, she quickly improves as your math lessons eat into her reading time.
And if you, from time to time, dream of Rose's episodes of scaring the children, you don't remember them when you wake up. They should be nightmares, jolting you awake, but from your perspective, from Rose's perspective, you're just confused why the other kids don't want to play with the things in the shadows. Comfortable tangled masses that pet you like you were theirs and rumble with seething laughter when you pout. It’s just like having more mommies and daddies. But the kids cry and run away from you.
She's seven, going on eight, when you pick up the bottle for real.
--
She asked you for a journal ages ago, you can’t rightly remember when. Apparently the notebooks weren’t good enough so you supplied it happily. She got a bright pink leather-bound little tome of her own and she was soon filling it up when she wasn’t reading or writing or chatting on the internet.
You were getting back to writing of your own, academic journals long neglected. The past several years had been fruitful for research, but now it was time to put it all together and start wowing the community again. It’s a shame you still suck at the writing part, but long hours of grinding it out get you there.
The sun’s gone down when you stumble out of the lab, laptop under your arm. You don’t bother with the lights, you know the way to your room by heart. So it’s a shock when you nearly trip over Rose in the darkened living room, before your eyes have the chance to adjust.
“Jeez kiddo, think you could turn on the light?”
“I can see fine, Mom.”
You peer down at her. Now as the dark turns to something visible, you can see her scribbling away in the notebook. You look up at the huge french windows. Sure, there’s a moon out, but no kid should be straining their eyes in this light. Hell, you can’t even see what she’s writing and you’re leaning right over her.
Looking closer, your eyes grow wide as you take in the hideous, crawling scratching that
- mar the page like the lifeblood of abyssal creatures dripped from a quill made of the ovipositor of a deformed alavaraphidia -
mark the pages in the moonlight. Then Rose looks up at you, eyes huge, glossy, and insectile black and you leap away shrieking.
--
The vodka burns as it goes down, but the silky pain of it is nearly enough to blot out the memory of Rose crying, running to her room after you flipped on the lights. Three chugs in, you cough, the liquid running out over your lips and down your front. You get the vermouth and mix a martini that you drink out of the shaker and in inadvisable quantities. The world goes fuzzy and you realise it’s tears blurring your eyes, not the vodka.
The tears blurred her eyes, but not enough for you not to notice her lovely violet irises.
--
That was when the passive-aggressiveness started, when you tried to apologize the next morning with pancakes and fresh maple syrup. But even as she thanked you profusely, in flowery language kids twice her age didn’t use, you could see the betrayal in her eyes. That terrible knowledge of children who discover that their parents are flawed creatures, with real fears and problems.
And certainly, many mothers hid from their problems in the bottle, tragic as that may be. But most mothers didn’t fear what lurked inside their very own child. So Rose’s warm attitude towards you became a frosty veneer of eagerness to please and loving care, while yours became a drunken parody of a perfect mother and scientist. You wonder miserably, at your most sober, when you started giving half-realized fears more importance than love for your daughter.
You try to reach back out for her, but you still brace your attempts with drink and come out all the more stumbling and false for it.
--
Every mother fears her little girl going to high school, and you would have avoided it if you could. But you’d been re-hired at the university after you applied to get access to better equipment. You didn’t have enough time to teach Rose and look into the research that you were losing yourself in. So eventually you let your little girl, grown older and paler, out into the world. You didn’t worry for her education. You worried that she wouldn’t make friends with someone other than a black stray cat. In the days before her first day of school, it's curled about the shoulders of your daughter, four pairs of feline eyes staring at you while the promise of countless shifting black-lipped mouths seemed to lurk under the midnight-black fur.
You’re worried about what the other kids will think of her, but not for any reasons that could be called sane.
--
It goes on fine for years, Rose coming home telling you about her day in that chillingly pleasant tone that tells you everything she says is a lie, an exaggeration or just what you want to hear. Her teachers are impressed and none too worried at her anti-social behaviour (“it’s just a phase, she’ll get through it”). Their words make you doubt your own sanity even more. All kids go through crap like this, right? Your daughter’s still perfectly normal, just a bit smarter, more distant than others. Thoughts like these eat away at the back of your mind even as you allow their assurances to ease your most obvious worry as you dive deeper into your work, distancing yourself from Rose even as you begin drinking less and less. You're not sure if she even notices, as she doesn't interact with you unless you initiate. But so long as everything's fine with her, you're fine too, you tell yourself.
She even makes some friends and has them over a few times. And when catch her with a girlfriend on the couch, you think you might have overdone your approval with the “coming out” gift. And if she’s just a bit more, ok a lot more, tight-lipped, that’s fine too.
Years pass, and it’s all fine, you think, until one night something comes in from the darkness.