Work Text:
=> Be the MILF.
Okay, yeah.
You’re the milf now. Congrats.
Your name is ROXY LALONDE. You are, in fact, ROXY LALONDE. You are permanently- terminally, almost- ROXY LALONDE. You cannot be anything other than ROXY LALONDE, and frankly, you don’t want to know what happens if you try and break out of that particular mold. Something bad, probably. You don’t like to think about it -you’ve had a set destiny from the moment you crash-landed on this planet. You think maybe you’ve stepped into it perfectly, even if you can’t remember the last time you thought of yourself as something other than “Mom”. The thought of that- of complying perfectly with your destiny- sets your fucking teeth on edge.
=> Fuck thinking.
Alright, yeah, you can do this. You pour yourself another shot of whiskey, set it aside, and take a long swig, directly from the bottle. It’s raining today- you’re already in the lab, you’ve been in the lab since yesterday evening. You have so much work to do, and suddenly so little time. If only the old man was still around. Even when he had no fucking clue what to do either, you could at least work with him yammering incomprehensibly on a voice call. God, the old bastard talked weird.
Instead, you’ve got a niche porn livestream going on your laptop beside the appearifier. Some sort of puppetry bullshit. You don’t care. It’s mostly ASMR at this point, really, something soothing and familiar in a way that scratches at the corners of your mind like a cat on its way to the vet.
You take another long drink from the bottle and try to block it out. You know that by the end of this drinking session, you’re going to be so drunk you can’t feel your body. You, as always, look forward to it. It feels good to leave the rest of yourself behind, just your head and hands on a mad scientific journey. Braving the unknown voids of knowledge that stretch out before you incomprehensibly.
What you look forward to less is knowing that, yet again, you’ll be leaving Rose alone. You don’t particularly like knowing that she has to fend for herself, but knowing that she can is a small comfort that you allow yourself. You know she’ll have to, at some point. You’re not sure when, but you know it's soon.
=> So why are you down here?
You’re- you have to-
You have work to do.
You only have so much time before the countdown finishes and Rosie has to go. She’s only thirteen, around the same age as Joey was when she vanished to god knows fucking where. You still don’t know what happened to her, but you do know it was your fault. You should have been there, instead of sitting in class like a fucking moron. Another long drink from the bottle, but this time you don’t bother to wipe away a stray droplet that misses your mouth. Fuck it. Fuck everything.
The puppet porn is still playing in the background and you don’t have the heart to turn it off, even as you appearify pumpkin after pumpkin. God, you don’t even know what you’re doing anymore. You don’t know what or who you’re trying to reach. You know something has to happen here, something big and important and powerful- you just don’t know what it is.
Another drink from the bottle, and you find it empty. Huh.
=> Toss it.
It doesn’t matter. You always have more. It’s like this shit just keeps materializing. You drink the first shot as you appearify a fresh bottle from your stash in the kitchen. Cheap sherry. It tastes like garbage and it’ll only get you drunker faster, but you don’t give a shit. You haven’t given a shit for a long time, and you probably should have died of alcohol poisoning a long goddamn time ago, but some ungodly force keeps you going. Maybe it’s fate, maybe it’s destiny, maybe it’s bullshit. You just know you’re going to persist until the job is done.
Idly, you and the sherry bottle slip down the side of one of the terminals, and you turn her upside down, taking a long gulp of the liquid. God, it’s shitty. As casually as you slid, you let your mind wander, reaching out to pet the little mutated cat who’s just wandered up to you. You’ve just been calling them “Baby”, because they were a tiny neonatal thing when you first appearified them, and also because they’re a sweet little baby. You're lucky your Rosie came with a name attached, otherwise she too might have had such a literal name. You pause briefly and imagine having a daughter named "Baby" instead of "Rose", but it's impossible. She's always been Rose.
=> Roxy: Wander.
You’re too sauced to get up, but your mind goes for you. There are hundreds of thousands of Roxies. Some are old like you, some are young- god, some are so young. Younger than Rose, and the thought makes tears bead in your eyes. Even if they're you, they're still children. Practically babies.
There is water around some of them, a moat, an ocean. Some are lost in it. Some are found, surrounded by friends you don’t recognize, friends you do. Some are men, and that makes your breath catch in your chest every time you imagine it. Men. You haven't had many interactions with them, but that's mostly because you haven't had many interactions with other people. The weight of destiny can do that to a person.
You think about your own face, the set of your shoulders (too narrow) and your hips (too wide). You think about these men-Roxies, and you can’t stop yourself from pressing the bottle back to your lips to dull the feeling of correctness that you’ve never felt. There’s no time. No time to chase that rightness, no time to become anything other than what you already are. It aches, knowing that, and the alcohol can’t fill the hole burning away inside you, no matter how much of it there is. You feel sick. You always feel sick.
=> There are consequences to drinking like this.
And boy do you fuckin know it. You drag yourself, tired and far too drunk for any of this bullshit, to the sendificator plate. Something about the design feels familiar to you, in an old, aching way.
One of the advantages to getting sick inside of a mad science lab is that you always have a good way to get rid of the puke. You heave up your stomach contents onto the platform, and slam down on a button, banishing the returned booze and stomach acid to a random set of coordinates over the Atlantic ocean. You give yourself a moment. Only a moment to rest, to breathe out and bite back the tears that always threaten to appear when you get like this. Weakly, you haul yourself to your feet.
You have so much work to do.