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it starts like this: there is a child.
in one world, a starling falls from her mother’s nest too young to fly and too soft to survive. she twists her fragile neck as she falls and is dead before she hits the ground.
the mother has no other children in her nest, and cries her name long into the night. she cries and does not notice it when the hawk soars above her, disguised against a blanket of stars.
the worms eat the starling’s corpse below as her mothers’ bones crunch far above.
in one world, there is a fox kit born with silver fur and wide eyes that reflect the sun. she is the last and smallest of her litter, and the rest quickly grow cold despite her mothers’ attentive licking. and yet she lives, surrounded by death.
she grows, enters the wide world on tiny paws and seeing it through wide eyes. she follows her mother, learns to hunt, learns to live, despite her strangeness.
one night the kit wakes to the sound of roaring thunder, of smashing water. she’s barely opened her eyes when the first wave rushes in, icy cold, spearing her lungs and shocking her to the bone. her mother similarly chokes.
the rainwater washes the kit out of her den, exposing her to the open sky. she is helpless as the currents drag her dying body along rocks and against branches, tearing her skin, exposing her muscles to the moonlight.
she is dead long before she washes up on the bank of a river, torn and mangled next to the bodies of twin snakes. they are twisted together in death’s cold embrace, and it is impossible to tell which killed the other first.
in one world, the only daughter of a lab rat watches as the humans outside destroy each other. she is a small thing, too small, her mother taken from her and caged away. they reach for each other through the bars, but can never quite touch.
the rat watches with too-wide eyes as the genius screams, the genius who owns her. he is a madman. he is a murderer and madman and he has accepted destruction and pain into his own home. all of this is beyond the rat.
she watches him swear out his son, his wife, his daughter. she watches him tear down the photographs from the walls, the medals he did not earn. he is a coward. he always has been.
he picks up her cage and flings it against the wall. she is dead as soon as the bars make an impact.
in one world, olga screams as she gives birth. the child screams too.
she is too small, too fragile, too floppy. she screams because she knows to do nothing else. olga keeps bleeding.
she dies minutes later. the child follows.
in one world, there is olga.
she claws at her throat as a snake watches her die, windpipe slowly snapping. spots blossom in her vision, the world turning blurry under them.
she has to tell him. she has to tell raiden, or snake, look for my child, please, find her, save her—
the claws snap closed. her breathing stops. she was too slow.
somewhere far away, there is a child in a pod. several years later, someone will break into the warehouse, brush a layer of dust off machinery, and find a tiny corpse.
in one world, there is raiden, and there is the baby.
he covers her with his cloak, sprinting as fast as his legs will allow. he is bleeding, underneath his suit. he doesn’t even know if the blood is real, or his. it doesn’t matter. it never mattered.
turn it off, jack. keep running, jack. get a high score, jack.
the baby gasps with broken lungs and paws at him. she needs air, needs a way to breathe after spending so long synced with numbers and code. she thinks in binary now, dreams of electric sheep, but she does not know how to live.
her skin is turning blue.
there is a point where raiden will stop running. he will look down, and realize that what he is protecting is already dead.
in one world, she is lucky.
there is a man called snake and he is in love with a man who is not, and the baby does not dream as deeply of permutations in an eternal server and takes her first breath as raiden runs. when raiden runs to their door, they let him in. they take the baby from his trembling arms and they warm her and dress her and feed her.
no one told her that love existed before. it did not exist in any of the databanks she was fed. it was unnecessary information.
but hal holds her close at night so she’s not scared of the shadows, and david is warm and laughs so deeply she can feel it in her bones. raiden is pale and fragile, just like her, and always curls around her with his whole body, so she can play in the safety of his embrace.
she grows up surrounded by love, in this world. she eventually goes to the sky.
in this world the baby is called sunny, and in this one she knows love. she knows that her fathers love her and each other, and she knows what it is like to be in a family. even at the end, where the world crumbles around david and rips him from their grasp, they are still a family.
in this world, things are good.
sunny sits and watches the birds play on the porch. the sunlight catches her hair through the window, reflecting off the early-season snow.
her father is outside, feeding the dogs. he will let them in later, after they’ve run most of their energy off, after they’ve been fed. she can see him past the birds on the porch, in the dog kennel, although sometimes she sees the tracks of arctic foxes nearby.
behind her, a roaring fire, cheerfully crackling in the grate. it is warm and cozy inside, and she nestles further in her sweater.
her other father enters, brushing off his hands. he’s been placing traps all day, claiming they must have rats, but david always laughs it off. how would rats get out here, to this tiny cabin in alaska?
“what are you thinking about, sunny?” he asks as he pulls a book off the nearby shelf. “you look lost in thought.”
“i wa-was just thinking,” sunny says, not looking away. “would you still li-like me if i was something else, daddy? wou-would we still be here?”
hal smiles, and sits down. outside, david waves. his daughter waves back.
“well,” he replies, “i like to think that i would get to be your dad no matter what.”
david is coming inside now. sunny slips off the window perch and tucks herself up against her father’s side. soon they will all be in, and david will make dinner, and hal will read her a story until she falls asleep. they will wrap her up in the softest blanket they can find and when she wakes up in the morning, it will be snowing.
in this world, things are right.