Chapter Text
Your hands shake with weariness and your eyes burn with exhaustion and lack of sleep. It is four thirty in the morning and you are about to fall asleep on your drafting table, pretty likely to drool all over brand new plans that will undoubtedly, at some point in the morning, be revealed to have some manner of critical flaw other than being smudged by your caffeine-laden drool.
So attractive.
You know this because that is what has happened with painful regularity for the past six months once your exploratory calculations into other realities (or dimensions, you weren't really sure what to call them yet) gave you an outline of how to proceed in your, let's face it, lunatic quest. The problem with outlines is that they need filling in. And in science, the filling in happens with experiments. As much as you're intellectually and professionally conditioned to view failures as stepping stones to success, they're still failures. When your lunatic quest involves trying to bring back the soul (consciousness?) of your comatose daughter, failures don't just sting. They crush.
Your name is Roxy Lalonde and it has been two years since you blasted your possessed daughter with a reality-gun that you drunkenly assembled, the workings of which you still weren't clear on. Two years since she reverted to normal, just without any brain activity and barely any life signs. Two years since you wept with sorrow and rage over your daughter's laptop and two years since you began to decode her journal.
Those two years have been... trying.
To say the least.
--
The script, or runes, or whatever that made up your daughter's journal entries was like nothing you'd ever had to learn before. You picked up texts on language and linguistics, learned the basic ideas behind the construction of communications and then threw it all away when it proved useless for deciphering the twisting, eye-aching scratchings that seemed seared onto (into?) the pages.
But you were determined not to fail this soon, so you took the methods that linguists applied to deciphering long-lost languages and deconstructed them. You looked at how people looked at languages, and through that disassembled lens, looked at how you were looking at the journal.
Nothing.
Which wasn't to say that this wasn't a failure, you realized, your heart speeding up in your chest those many months ago. This just told you your frame of reference wasn't up to snuff. Your frame of reference being the very methods by which humans construct language, this led you to the inevitable conclusion that this language was not human (lol no shit sherlock) and not meant to be able to be read by humans.
And humans weren't meant to build particle accelerators to smash atoms together like a speed skating accident gone horribly wrong to figure out what makes their universe tick. Tough shit alien beasties.
If this shit wasn't meant to be read by human minds, you'd run it through a non-human mind much, much faster than your own. You scanned the journal in, page by page, and had to laugh after the first scanner fried, its glass pane exploding inwards from something or other (in the book?). You had a lot of disposable income and many dozens of scanners later, you had a complete digital record of the journal. You backed it up to as many drive states as you could get your hands on. Sure enough, they started to corrupt.
In between incinerating the corrupted drives and pointedly ignoring the non-faces screaming silently in the smoke, you wrote code. You started with the ideas behind OCR and then expanded on it. The program would analyze every curve, every twist, every angle, until it found patterns. Correlation, equation and solution, rule and exception. The universe was built on these things and you could figure them out. You had to. And if there was no pattern, as a hyperaware portion of your brain suspected, it would look for something... else.
One night, you were dozing fitfully in the desk chair, bottle of vodka held limply in one hand, mostly empty. The terminal you sat at pinged to alert you and you shook awake, bottle dropping from your grasp. It cracked against the tile, but you were past paying heed. You'd gotten your else.
You scrolled through the data so fast, most people wouldn't have been able to read it. Though your vision was swimming, you still sucked it all in. Despite (or because of?) your swimming vision, your drunken haze, you began to understand and your stomach heaved with revelation. You tabbed away from the text-recognition screen and to the scanned originals. Your vision clouded, swam and you blinked to clear it, again and again, but it remaining blurring and the world seemed to drift further and further away.
You awoke some time later, staring up at the ceiling. Your head pounded with a vengeance born of alcohol and dementia. You vaguely recalled hysterical laughter, hurling the keyboard against the wall. You tried to reach through the screen, crawl in and then- whiteness?
When you tried to push yourself up, your hand came down in something sticky and wet. Looking down, your blood had pooled with the vodka. When you wondered where you were bleeding from, a thick dollop leaked from your nose anew. Unconsciously, you licked at it, tasting the cloying iron.
And with that taste came the memory of -
- Blessed be ye, O Seeker, that ye read these profane words, the gospel of the Noble Circle -
your daughter's writing.
--
It took you weeks to finish reading the journal. Weeks more of headaches, nose-bleeds, weeks filled with stabbing pain and flashes of eye-searing white. You stumbled about the house, drunk on some occasions, raving on others. Hell, sometimes both. It was a miracle you didn't hurt yourself. Well, much. Or unintentionally.
And the nightmares! They chased you from your sleep, and the lack of it probably helped drive you to the limits of your sanity. Sometimes you could almost see the ravenous maws of the Noble Circle, gaping beaks and tooth-ringed mouths, pseudopodia reaching, reaching for you. More horrifying were the ones that were almost human, or aped some aspect, like blunt white teeth in a fish’s mouth. Worse still were those dreams washed sterile white, and a dark spot approaching from a distance. You knew that spot represented something horrible, something that caused your animal hindbrain to shrink into itself, whimpering. The more you read, the closer it came, jerking and staggering sometimes, striding smoothly and familiarly others. By the end, you could tell it was a person.
But you kept reading. Page by page, a plodding, uncertain pace, like the drunken failure of a mother you were. You got there in the end, and when you sat down, weeping, to make sense of it, your scientific mind quailed. The ideas contained in your daughter's journal (and the fact that you could understand them) were a perversion of the physical world. What it boiled down to was that the beasts that possessed and took your daughter were a race born of a different reality, where the rules were different. They survived off slivers of energy from realities like yours, energy produced by merely thinking of them. But since not many knew of them, they were almost always ravenous. Ravenous and undying.
And they had your daughter.
--
At the end of your reading, the dark figure approaching you in the white resolved.
"Hello, Mother."
--
Once you recovered enough to make with the science again, you quickly figured out that you wouldn't be able to survive in their reality, nor they in yours. That's why they needed Rose and why you'd need something to keep you alive on the other side. And since you were pretty sure (but not entirely?) that you couldn't possess one of them, you'd need a different a way to get over. A vessel of a different sort.
The Journal (lol when did you start capitolizing that shit gurl) pointed to ways at weakening the walls between realities by, well, sacrifice. In the language you shouldn't understand, you got the impression that the energy released by someone dying before their time made little dents in reality. The Noble Circle liked this, because it allowed the energy that sustained them to leak through more easily and completely. With some very shaky and experimental equations, you figured it should be possible not just to make a dent, but kick the goddamn door down.
All it would take is a sacrifice of colossal proportions. Something like a genocide.
Sure.
No problem.
Lawl, no.
Why kill millions of people when you could just build a different reactor of some kind to generate enough of that energy to kick said door down? Of course, you'd need to get some readings on the energy, if in fact it existed. Carrying that line of reasoning to its logical conclusion gives you the shakes as you go cold all over.
...oh well. Omelette, eggs, casual murder for science.
Again, eyes like amethysts and hearts as hard. Terrifying women, really. We can't really be expected to let them live.
You told yourself it was okay, because it was for Rose. You still whispered pleas for her forgiveness at her hospital bed.
--
"You don't need to do this anymore," the dream of your daughter tells you.
"Come again?" This dream Rose doesn't look quite how you remember her. Washed out grey, instead of veiny, mutated black.
"You stopped them, shut the door."
"Pfft, whatevs. I just want my daughter back."
"And if I don't want to come back?"
--
You'd built a lab and an observatory from the money your patents earned you, but a reactor, a new kind of reactor, was on another scale all together. You took a little, fierce sort of pride that the royalties from Rose's novel, now sold internationally, helped in its financing. All the same, you had to sell some stuff off. The lab was too valuable to you still, but the house was stripped bare of most, well, everything. Priceless (tasteless?) art got sold off at a bargain, antique furniture as well. Your halls became bare, lonely white in a way that still haunts you, reminds you of Rose's body, barely breathing in the lab.
The reactor got built, channeling its power into an array that would hurl enough entropic energy at the walls between realities to break them down for an instant, enough to cross over. Getting back would be a problem, but you left that to another day. First, a probe.
You fired the array once, and the probe vanished with a scream like a million people dying, as if having heard three weren't enough. Then a second later and on a hunch, fired it again, bringing the probe back, if off by almost a meter. It worked. You hadn't really been expecting that. It came back warped, it's plastic casing turning black and wriggling, worm-like things birthing from that alien discolouration. They died even as they were born, melting in the reality of a world that denied them. Shortly after its return, the probe was only a warped, broken mass.
You checked the instruments all the same. Most were useless, except for some esoteric energy sensor that you downloaded the data from and the little Squiddle watch, which you checked against your own. Off by fifteen seconds.
Your eyes burned at the implication.
--
“Lolwhut.”
“What if where I am is preferable to a life on Earth, an evolutionary dead end? Preferable to living with a mother who is drunk more often than not? One who banished her only daughter to a nightmare reality than humanity was not meant to survive in. One who-”
“Stop it! Rosie, I only wanted to help like you asked!”
“And you managed to ruin that as well.”
--
One of Rose’s friends visited once. Actually, you think it was her ex. You were pretty sure it was the same dark-skinned girl that you caught necking with Rose one afternoon. Goddamn, but you screwed up that apology.
She showed up one afternoon, all black lace and flouncy skirts. She carried one of those small umbrellas and wore a veil, as if she was in mourning. Could have been, for all you knew. You just thought it was morbidly appropriate at the time. It was almost a year since Rose’s collapse (as the rest of the world knows it) and she wanted to see her. You invited her in.
“Sorry about the mess. Haven’t really given a shit about cleaning since Rosie...”
“I understand Mrs. Lalonde, please do not feel bad.”
“Ha! Mrs. Lalonde. It’s either Dr. Lalonde or Roxy, Kan- yeah sorry, forgot your name already, what was it?”
“Kanaya, um... Dr. Lalonde.”
“Kanaya! Right. I’d offer you a drink, but I don’t think you’re legal yet. Not that that ever stopped anyone...”
“I appreciate the offer, but no thank you.” Kanaya’s tone was polite, kind of strained, and her words oddly precise. She had a quality of speaking that reminded you of Rose and her writing. Speaking of, that was your way to avoid making the situation awkward as shit!
“Hey, so have you read the Complacency yet?”
Kanaya’s face finally gives way to a small smile. “Yes! It is very... Rose-like. I love it. I’m surprised that you published it.”
“Hey, Rosie obviously wanted to get it out there, I wasn’t gonna stand in the way. It was mostly done anyhow.”
“Oh no, don’t tell me we’re going to be waiting forever for a seque-” Kanaya stopped short, too caught up in the Complacency to remember herself. You had to give a bitter smile.
“Nah. Not forever. Rose’ll be back.”
The pair of you were quiet as you made your way to the lab were Rose rested. You didn’t let Kanaya into the sterile room, and she seemed fine with that, content to just stand and stare, hands folded before her, rested on the long skirt. A part of you noted their similarity in style and wondered who influenced who.
Eventually, Kanaya gave a single sniff and turned back to you. “Thank you for the opportunity. I will be leaving the country soon and couldn’t bear not saying good-bye.”
“Yeah no probs. Thanks for coming by, Rosie could use support other than me.”
You walked her to the end of the drive where she thanked you again. Before she got in the waiting car though, she hesitated and turned back.
“Was there anything else that Rose wrote? Other than the Complacency?”
“Nah,” you lied off-handedly. “Not that I found, at least.”
“Really? It seemed in her writing that...” She trailed off once she noticed your face go hard. “Well. I must have imagined it. Will you please let me know if she recovers?”
She handed you a small black card, and departed.
--
That was a year ago. You’re now half-asleep, still managing to cry with drunken regret, further moistening your drafting table. You’ve managed to put away the nice vanilla vodka before you get worse. And by “put away”, you clearly mean “huck at the growing pile of blueprints in rage and frustration.” You should probably throw this attempt at the pile as well, but that’d require moving your head and you don’t think you’re up to that yet. Maybe in an hour or two. Or three, four, five little sheep...
Sleep.
Dream.
“And you’ll ruin this pathetic attempt as well.”
You start up in your chair, nearly falling off, Rose’s voice clear as day behind you. “Wha-?”
Looking around, the room doesn’t look any different, but your dream Rose is before you, all grey and dim. You want to pinch yourself, make sure that you’re not hallucinating and this really is a dream.
“Oh, so now she’s worried about her mental health. Not when writing starts to writhe, not when she easily countenances the murder of innocents, not when the scars on her body tally up with those in her mind. When an apparition of her dead daughter appears outside an endless whitespace.”
“ROSE ISN’T DEAD!” you scream at the thing, all desperate denial.
“I may as well be,” the thing you once called your daughter gestures to herself. “And soon so will you, if you keep trying to use your limited mortal psyche in ways like this.”
Your voice still hoarse from the sudden scream, you whisper, “What do you mean?”
“None of these work, Mother.” It gestures now at the pile. “Keep this up and one day you will be desperate enough to build a faulty one, just to cross over for a final glimpse of your daughter.
Before you die, a tattered plaything in the foul grip of nightmares playing God.”
Your heart seizes, because for a moment you know that you’d do that. Calling the last dozen months anything other than self-destructive would be laughable. But...
“I need to save my Rosie,” you whisper, head downcast, heart twisted with your own failure.
“At this rate, you’ll only crush her further, watching her mother be warped and violated for the amusement of the Noble Circle.”
“But what can I do?!” you wail at your hallucination. Tears cloud your eyes and your nose runs.
“Nothing. There is nothing you can do alone.” You rub at your eyes, ready to deny it. “So accept our help.”
Your head comes up. The "our" really should tell you something. Hell, it does. You know whatever this hallucination is, it will probably have a goddamn reason for wanting to help you, and from reading Rose's journal, you're real fucking read up on shady paranormal entities offering deals. You're not getting anywhere with this, not anywhere fast enough. You sniff the snot back into your nasal cavities messily and ask,
"What's the catch."
The not-Rose entity seems to brighten, glowing from within, snapping and dimming like a phospor starting to fluoresce. A sardonic smirk that wouldn't look out of place on your Rosie crooks at its lips. "No 'catch.' Our price is our gift - allowing us a foothold in your world as your daughter did the horrorterrors. Except we come to defend it from their predations."
You are anything but an idiot, and you know that "defending" your world probably means staking claim to it, just like the ugly-ass fuckers who took your daughter. But these... things (the entity is now so bright it may as well be made of light) claim they can give you the means to rescue Rose.
It's hardly even a choice, is it?
"Done."
--
The pain is immense. From the moment the word leaves your lips, your world explodes into migraine-white light and your brain feels like it’s on fire. They say that the human brain cannot feel physical pain. Well that's all well and good, but it can fucking think it does and right now it's thinking up an excruciating conflagration. The words are apt, and you would be glad that you can't see yourself right now, head alight with a crackling halo of impossible energies. Would be, if you weren't busy shrieking yourself hoarse.
It's too much, and it doesn't take you long to beg it (them?) to stop; it's killing you.
"Foolish woman, we haven't the time for a slow corruption like what afflicted your daughter. Bear the pain and pay the price."
They (it?) stop speaking to you, the echoing voice(s?) fading under your continued screaming. You claw at your head, trying anything to make the pain stop, even as your body twists in pain. Your nails tear burning furrows in your flesh that you can barely feel over the excoriation of your brain. You should be blacking out by now, but apparently even that mercy is denied you.
Your twitching body flops over onto your stomach and smacks your head on the ground. That dull strike barely registers, but to your maddened state seems a brilliant idea. You haul back your head and pound it into the ground, once, twice, three times, building a sick, cracking rhythm. Anything to stop the pain. You don’t care if you renege on this, if you can’t save your daughter. Anything to-
"Oh for pity's sake, you pathetic meatsack."
And then darkness.
--
You wake in a pool of your own blood and other fluids. The drunk in you thinks I have got to stop doing this even as you wipe a thin trickle of vomit from your mouth. The mother hopes it was worth it. But those parts are drowned out by a part of your mind thinking at the speed of light, thinking thoughts and ideas in a terrible angelic choir. Your once-brown eyes are luminous, their twisted and popped vessels lending them hideous a pink glow. A twisted, mad grin splits your face, and through the giggling-turned-mad-cackling you babble something that might be,
"Let's get to work."
The part of you that's just Roxy notes the fluid coming out of your ears and nose isn't blood and that there are gobs of grey matter on the floor.