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xp_logs2020-11-12 02:16 pm
xp_cuckoos) wrote in xp_logs2020-11-12 02:16 pm
Entry tags:
Time Stands Still || Open Secrets
Ruby & Garnet force a confrontation and 14's deepest secret out, both largely just by existing. 14 is angry, Emma is apologetic, and the rest of the mansion is blissfully unaware of the ongoing drama. Because that's just how Frosts roll.
Ruby and Garnet were feeling a bit at loose ends wandering around the mansion. Waiting patiently wasn't really their strong suit, they preferred to be doing something. Antagonizing someone, hitting on people, -hitting- people, they weren't picky so long as it was active. But until they determined where the Topaz they were looking for was, waiting was the only option. Which made them bored.
And they tended to make poor life decisions when bored.
14 was... intrigued. Rumor had it there were a group of time travelers visiting the mansion, and at least one of them was standing out to her second sight like a beacon. She couldn't quite put her fingers on what was happening, beyond the idea that someone was scraping their nails along a chalkboard in her mind. There was a subtle sense of wrongness that was a wholly alien experience to her. She didn't like it. She only had the faintest clue what it could mean.
There was no chance in hell she wasn't going to investigate. Hence why Sophie was lingering on the vaguely same side of the mansion as the point of interest. Phoebe was nearby for support, should it be needed. It was unlikely, but 14 didn't get where she was by being careless.
Emma stopped abruptly from where she was just about to walk into the hallway, the presence of one… two, possibly… Cuckoos coming to her attention, as their psychic presence always did, an unmistakable sensation in her head. She didn’t… okay, she did. She had to confess it to herself, if no-one else, but she had spent the last few years successfully avoiding the Cuckoos as much as she could. At first it had been because of the staggeringly visceral reaction they brought out in her, the proof that once again some man had committed an unforgiveable crime against her. But that heated anger had slowly cooled and left behind it only an awkward inability to deal with five daughters she had neither wanted nor carried but didn’t know how to tell that she… cared for them. So she didn’t take that final step into the hallway.
Ruby and Garnet cocked their heads to one side at precisely the same angle. They were used to feeling the ebb and flow of others around them psychically. Even well-shielded individuals (other psi and the like) had a distinct sort of...presence, even if their thoughts were obscured. And the presence approaching was...very distinct. There was a second one off to the side that...might have been familiar as well, but the first one was the one they keyed on.
They smirked and waited for the arrival. This was certain to be a poor life decision. But at least it wouldn't be boring.
To say 14 wasn't at least a little bit nervous was not only wrong, it was just dumb. Of course she was. Emotions like fear were the ultimate survival instinct, and every fiber of Sophie's link with the rest of the hive felt more and more like a tensioned wire with every step she took on approach.
14 knew, academically, that she wasn't exactly what people would consider a 'good person'. She was cold and often kept people at a distance, either by choice or just by not being able to form an actual connection with others. So while others cultivated relationships, 14 replaced them with secrets, and substituted knowledge for geniality.
And now, there was a visitor from the future. A realm of information the likes of which 14 could not even begin to grasp. There was no telling what any one of their guests knew, either about the world or about the residents of the mansion, that could potentially upend people's lives. There wasn't a contact she could reach out to for a briefing. No book she could consult on the matter. Best she had was guesses, against the certainty of experience.
They were after their time's version of Topaz. 14 had been able to lift that from the mansion gossip easily enough. She'd have preferred to get it directly from their guests, but they were all shielded up tight, and all of 14's finesse and trickery hadn't managed to find her a way in yet.
A part of her refused to discount the idea that she hadn't done something awful in the future. She knew she was capable of it, after all. And while she was usually one of the mansion's weakest telepaths, she absolutely had the potential to be one of the strongest. And if she ever reached that point, she'd have very little left to lose.
A part of her wanted to know. The rest absolutely did not. And as such, she warred amongst herself in a hallway, just round the corner from the answers she craved and couldn't stand.
She composed herself, and Sophie strode into the room.
Emma tilted her head to one side, feeling the Cuckoo (she thought it was Sophie) walk into the same room as some of the visitors from the future. Emma still felt a certain scepticism about the future part of that, but not enough to make her actively suspicious. The visitors were quite strongly shielded, obvious psis that Emma didn’t remember meeting earlier, but Emma felt there was an odd familiarity to their shields, reminding her of her own diamond-faceted shields. Emma felt a moment of sudden hope and possibly pride that perhaps it was her training in psi-shielding that continued to be taught as the standard. She caught her foot tapping, her body impatiently trying to remind her that she had a board meeting she had to attend shortly, but Emma ignored herself. She wanted to know what was going to happen in that room.
A pair of artfully arched blonde eyebrows met Sophie's entrance. This hesitant shuffling around was taking too long for their taste. But to be fair, they were the only one who knew exactly why this dance was happening in the first place, and neither of the others had survived as long as they had without being cautious. They opened their shields, just enough for 14 (and Emma) to feel the shimmer of amusement and familiarity in their thoughts. No sense in giving it all away at once, after all.
Though the impulse to just cut across things and reveal who they were to each other was tugging at them.
There was a certain amount of delightfully mirrored irony in 14 being on the approach in a situation in which one side is holding most of the cards and knows it. She'd certainly have appreciated it all more if it hadn't been her that usually entered from the position of power in these types of exchanges. As such, she mostly just didn't like it.
'So this is what it's like from this side.... no wonder people call me a bitch.' There was a sardonic kind of amusement in the thought. This entire thing was honestly extremely familiar, although she was used to seeing it from the other side. The visitors were also infuriatingly familiar. 14 had her suspicions.
Still, if at least a token effort was going to be made to reach out to her, she could if nothing else do the same.
"Hello."
It was actually a rarity for Ruby and Garnet to be holding the cards. After all, they were used to the other two people in this mess being the older, more experienced members of their dysfunctional little...
"Family," they blurted out in an uncharacteristic burst. "That's why you're feeling this weirdness. We've had years to get used to it from our perspective, but it was a lot to take in at first."
That... that was not what she wanted to hear, thought Emma. Other people apparently had pleasant associations with the concept. Emma did not. Her relationship with Adrienne had blossomed as adults, but everything from her childhood was tainted and stained. To have a further, future family thrust upon her, on top of the Cuckoos... Emma took a shudderingly deep breath, let it out in a soft sigh. The board meeting was going to have to wait.
Up in the privacy of her room, Celeste closed her eyes and let out a deep sigh. Yeah. That was about what she had figured. Very, very rarely, she hated being right.
"...the next few minutes are about to get very complicated, aren't they?" Sophie asked, rhetorically. Because of course they were. She could already feel her walls, both the actual psionic ones and the more metaphorical ones, slamming into place. "I'm going to guess... Emma and Scott, maybe?" she asked with a raised eyebrow.
One of the two bodies flashed into a blood-red quartz facsimilie of Emma and Fourteen's diamond forms, then back just as quickly. "We're not exactly certain of the details of our...father. Given your complicatedness, and genetic experimentation being involved, it's entirely possible that there's more than one. But I'm reasonably sure there's a Summers in the tree somewhere, yes." Which was the source of endless needling of their timeline's Scott. To a lesser extent Alex as well, but he had always been the cool uncle figure to Scott's more reserved fatherliness.
"But the maternal genetics didn't come from Emma. It was actually specifically from you."
Emma’s control over her telepathy was normally exquisite. But the combination of the sheer force of the emotions that ran through her and, she suspected, the family connection meant everything spilled out of her for a moment, a surge of relief that this was not something that had been done to her (again was a private scream in her own head) followed by a blinding moment of rage that someone may have done to the Cuckoos what was done to her. It lasted only a few seconds, washing out and over the people in the room near her, and then Emma closed it down with, locking it behind diamond walls inside her mind.
There was no longer any point lurking in hallways then. Emma strode quickly into the room, everyone turning towards her, three generations of her DNA in one room, mixed and matched by… others.
~Perhaps we should take this out of the public realm,~ she sent into the minds in front of her. ~Are you telling me that someone did genetic experiments on my… on the Cuckoos?~ Her mental voice was icy rage, held on the tightest leash.
Ruby and Garnet caught the almost-slip, they wondered if Fourteen (and wasn't it weird to refer to your parent as a number) had as well. ~They did. We know less about what was done to us, because we were rescued and brought to the mansion at a much earlier age.~ They had memories of girlhood among this strange house, with no shortage of people to be parent, sibling, or weird aunts and uncles.
Sophie hadn't moved since the initial revelation that the girls in front of her were 14's. There were a lot of thoughts that could--should come from that, and 14 was quite frankly uncertain where to even begin.
She could smell the antiseptic, hear the beeping and echoes of conversation from her time in the Weapon XIV facility. Whispers of scientists and the lies of everyone she ever knew. She was suddenly back there, experiencing her own nightmare again.
Behind her, a lightbulb in the lamp in the corner exploded in a shower of broken glass. Her eyes glowed a vibrant and brilliant pink. There were a thousand things she wanted to know, but she was angry, at a level she couldn't quite remember being at before. Her hair fluttered as the force of a single word psionically ripped through the room, the only way she could channel that anger.
~WHEN~
~And can we…~ Emma stopped herself short. ~No,~ she said. ~It’s not fair to ask that of you.~ She took a shuddering breath. ~I’m sorry,~ she sent out and it wasn’t clear who she was aiming it at, or if she was just aiming it at the world in general. ~I keep failing my… the children.~
If it had been any other moment, 14 might have been able to maintain her composure. She could have swallowed her anger, schooled her expression, and kept her business to herself. She could have taken in the anger through Sophie, and vented it out through Irma or Celeste or any of the others in the privacy of her room. She could have held her composure, not given away her emotions to the others in the room.
Give them power.
But it wasn't any other moment. It wasn't any other person. And it was like poking an old wound, one that had never been given the chance to properly heal. And 14 lost her self control.
~You can't even say the word, can you? Can you?! It's 'Daughter'. DAUGH. TER. You can't even pretend that you care, can you?~
Emma flinched at the accusation flung at her, at the justified anger that roiled underneath it. She closed her eyes, unable to look at Sophie for a moment. ~I don't have the right,~ she said softly. ~I haven't earned the right to call you... to call any of you my daughter. My daughters.~
~You didn't have to earn it! You just have to be there!~ There was a deep thrum over the psychic line, the mental equivalent of a deep and shakey breath. ~Do you have any idea how hard it is to give up on family? How much it hurts?~ A flower of grief bloomed through her mind.
~Do you even remember that I sent you a Christmas gift for the first three years after you found me? Or was it just another box you tossed in your closet at the end of the day?~
~Every time I tried, I failed. Effort wasted for nothing. I give up. And eventually, I'd try again. Every time, nothing. And it hurt every time.~
~I kept them,~ replied Emma, softly. ~All of them. I couldn’t… I didn’t open them. I didn’t dare. I was so angry. At first. Not at you, at any of you. At what you were proof of. At what someone had done to me to make you. I couldn’t… And then it was too long. Too late. I was… ashamed of what I had done to you. How could you want anything to do with me after what I had done to you? At how badly I had failed you.~ For a moment, Emma’s face distorted with pain and then it smoothed out again. ~I didn’t think you could ever forgive me for that.~
~So you ran,~ 14 sneered, letting her feelings flood through the link. There was a bit of disdain there, but mostly there was an overwhelming sense of hurt and loneliness. ~You didn't know me. You didn't try to know me, but you decided you knew how I felt.~
14 hated how her hands were shaking, across all bodies. Hated how she could tell her anger was being drowned out by her sadness and hurt and all the other emotions that said 'I care. you can hurt me with this.'
~I needed you to at least try. I needed you to be my mother.
Emma gasped suddenly, as if she had taken a blow to the heart, and then clamped her mouth closed around the sound. She had never asked for that, never needed that, but to hear herself called “mother” - for a moment it felt as if the entire world drew away from her and then came back, rearranged, made different.
But what she sent across the link to Sophie wasn’t that feeling - the strange, terrified, elated feeling - but images. Images of Hazel Frost, of a mother in name only, cold and distant, tranquillised and broken, images of Winston and his delight in cruelty.
~I didn’t know how,~ she sent, simply, no self-pity in her tone. ~I thought... I didn’t want to risk... When I was so angry, I didn’t want to be to you what my mother was to me. What my father was to me. I was afraid of what I may turn into, then. And then you had - you had your teachers and everyone in the Mansion. You had each other. You were doing so well. I didn’t think you needed me.~
~I did need you!~ 14 felt sick. The words she was trying to find wouldn't come, and the ones she was finding were all wrong. ~Even before you found me, I was always alone. I thought you might have been the one person who maybe, maybe could have understood!~
She hadn't had a childhood. Surrounded by scientists, her life had been a carefully planned out experiment overcast by the dark shadow of the Weapons Plus facility. She'd never been allowed to forget that she was unique, that there wasn't any one single person like her in the whole world.
She hadn't had friends. She hadn't been taught to make friends. She'd kept everyone she'd ever known at arms distance, because she didn't know how to not. Because she had to protect herself. Because that's how she'd been trained. And now, even when she wanted to have someone finally understand, because she was so tired of being alone, she couldn't do it.
Emma wasn't getting it, and 14 didn't know how to explain in a way that would get through to her. So 14 did the only thing she could. She did the psionic equivalent of grabbing Emma's arm, and made her understand. Her hurt. Her loneliness. Her hope, and her crushing disappointment.
~Instead you left us alone! But there is no us! There's just me! And you left me alone!~
It came through the psychic link with all the force Emma had expected from Sophie’s words, but she didn’t try to buffer it or shunt it aside. Instead she let herself take the brunt of it, try to understand what Sophie was trying to tell her so desperately.
To be a telepath was to learn to be alone. Trying to live with everyone else’s voice in your head meant building careful shields and spaces between you and everyone else, drawing the edges of your own mind over and over again to ensure that you knew what was your thought and what was not. It taught you a certain… apartness from everyone else. Emma was used to being alone like that.
But what Sophie showed her was not that kind of loneliness. What Sophie showed her was a young girl… a girl, a single girl growing up alone, unloved, told over and over that she was alone, singular, unique, unlike anyone or anything on the planet. And then Emma had come, and the girl had thought that she would finally be understood and instead had had to continue to pretend, to hide her secret, to make people think she wasn’t… what she was. That she would never be safe to tell anyone her secret, because the one who should understand had cut her off completely.
She was so alone. So desperately, terribly alone. She was five-in-one and she wanted her mother.
~Oh,~ said Emma and she raised a hand that trembled towards Sophie. ~My girl,~ she whispered. ~My little girl. Oh, what they did to you, my daughter, my darling, my love. My poor darling girl. I’m so sorry.~
14 came completely undone. Over five years of self-imposed isolationism collapsed in an instant and with only a few words, and for all her vaunted self-control and icy aloofness, she stood absolutely no chance at dealing with the massive swell that overtook her.
It crashed over Celeste first. It burbled up in her chest, a pressure that left her feeling like she could just explode in an instant, and before she even knew what was happening she was crying and laughing, and then just crying. She placed a pillow over her face to muffle the noise. Eventually it was too much for the one body to hold, and it spilled over into the rest of the hive.
In the side room, Phoebe slumped against a wall and sank to the floor. She tucked her knees under her chin, wrapped one arm around her legs, put her other hand over her face, and took deep, shuddering breaths that just wouldn't calm themselves.
And finally, when there was nowhere left to hide and no body left to take the excess, it hit Sophie. Like a cresting wave, raw emotion slammed into her with enough force to literally take her off her feet. She stumbled a step forward, towards Emma's outstretched hand, even as her legs gave out.
Openly and for the first time since arriving at the mansion all those years ago, 14 wept.
They had been standing there, frozen in place as the conversation that had been briefly spoken moved to the speed of thought, and then the intensity of emotion blazed like wildfire even the most mindblind could have felt were they standing in that space. Ruby and Garnet remembered being amused what seemed like forever ago, now they were almost horrified as Sophie crumpled against Emma, her shoulders heaving with completely silent sobs. Still trying to maintain that icy composure, that was their mother in spades.
This young woman, who would grow to be their mother through a twist of genetic tinkering, had made sure they never felt as alone as she clearly felt right now. Was she maternal? Not all that much. But she had always been there for them growing up. Her -and- Emma.
~oh god oh fuck did I break them both~
The pair of bodies almost vibrated with the need to do -something-, but they hesitated, not wanting to invade the tableau or somehow make it worse.
Emma held on to Sophie, stopped her from crumpling to the floor completely. Despite the admixture of love and compassion and sorrow that was radiating from her into the shared mental space, her mental voice was dry as she said, ~We’re Frosts. Family drama is what we do, darling.~
Ruby and Garnet's hands flexed, their own emotions pouring into the shared space. ~Can I-?~ they asked hesitantly, almost girlishly.
Emma sent the question on a gossamer-thin private thought to Sophie, felt the slightest hint of a nod against her shoulder. ~On one condition,~ she sent back to Ruby and Garnet. ~That you never ever ever – and believe me, I will know if you do – that you never even think about calling me Grandma,~ and then there was a sudden burst of joy and agreement against her mind and two more pairs of arms wrapped around Emma and Sophie, holding them all close.
Ruby and Garnet were feeling a bit at loose ends wandering around the mansion. Waiting patiently wasn't really their strong suit, they preferred to be doing something. Antagonizing someone, hitting on people, -hitting- people, they weren't picky so long as it was active. But until they determined where the Topaz they were looking for was, waiting was the only option. Which made them bored.
And they tended to make poor life decisions when bored.
14 was... intrigued. Rumor had it there were a group of time travelers visiting the mansion, and at least one of them was standing out to her second sight like a beacon. She couldn't quite put her fingers on what was happening, beyond the idea that someone was scraping their nails along a chalkboard in her mind. There was a subtle sense of wrongness that was a wholly alien experience to her. She didn't like it. She only had the faintest clue what it could mean.
There was no chance in hell she wasn't going to investigate. Hence why Sophie was lingering on the vaguely same side of the mansion as the point of interest. Phoebe was nearby for support, should it be needed. It was unlikely, but 14 didn't get where she was by being careless.
Emma stopped abruptly from where she was just about to walk into the hallway, the presence of one… two, possibly… Cuckoos coming to her attention, as their psychic presence always did, an unmistakable sensation in her head. She didn’t… okay, she did. She had to confess it to herself, if no-one else, but she had spent the last few years successfully avoiding the Cuckoos as much as she could. At first it had been because of the staggeringly visceral reaction they brought out in her, the proof that once again some man had committed an unforgiveable crime against her. But that heated anger had slowly cooled and left behind it only an awkward inability to deal with five daughters she had neither wanted nor carried but didn’t know how to tell that she… cared for them. So she didn’t take that final step into the hallway.
Ruby and Garnet cocked their heads to one side at precisely the same angle. They were used to feeling the ebb and flow of others around them psychically. Even well-shielded individuals (other psi and the like) had a distinct sort of...presence, even if their thoughts were obscured. And the presence approaching was...very distinct. There was a second one off to the side that...might have been familiar as well, but the first one was the one they keyed on.
They smirked and waited for the arrival. This was certain to be a poor life decision. But at least it wouldn't be boring.
To say 14 wasn't at least a little bit nervous was not only wrong, it was just dumb. Of course she was. Emotions like fear were the ultimate survival instinct, and every fiber of Sophie's link with the rest of the hive felt more and more like a tensioned wire with every step she took on approach.
14 knew, academically, that she wasn't exactly what people would consider a 'good person'. She was cold and often kept people at a distance, either by choice or just by not being able to form an actual connection with others. So while others cultivated relationships, 14 replaced them with secrets, and substituted knowledge for geniality.
And now, there was a visitor from the future. A realm of information the likes of which 14 could not even begin to grasp. There was no telling what any one of their guests knew, either about the world or about the residents of the mansion, that could potentially upend people's lives. There wasn't a contact she could reach out to for a briefing. No book she could consult on the matter. Best she had was guesses, against the certainty of experience.
They were after their time's version of Topaz. 14 had been able to lift that from the mansion gossip easily enough. She'd have preferred to get it directly from their guests, but they were all shielded up tight, and all of 14's finesse and trickery hadn't managed to find her a way in yet.
A part of her refused to discount the idea that she hadn't done something awful in the future. She knew she was capable of it, after all. And while she was usually one of the mansion's weakest telepaths, she absolutely had the potential to be one of the strongest. And if she ever reached that point, she'd have very little left to lose.
A part of her wanted to know. The rest absolutely did not. And as such, she warred amongst herself in a hallway, just round the corner from the answers she craved and couldn't stand.
She composed herself, and Sophie strode into the room.
Emma tilted her head to one side, feeling the Cuckoo (she thought it was Sophie) walk into the same room as some of the visitors from the future. Emma still felt a certain scepticism about the future part of that, but not enough to make her actively suspicious. The visitors were quite strongly shielded, obvious psis that Emma didn’t remember meeting earlier, but Emma felt there was an odd familiarity to their shields, reminding her of her own diamond-faceted shields. Emma felt a moment of sudden hope and possibly pride that perhaps it was her training in psi-shielding that continued to be taught as the standard. She caught her foot tapping, her body impatiently trying to remind her that she had a board meeting she had to attend shortly, but Emma ignored herself. She wanted to know what was going to happen in that room.
A pair of artfully arched blonde eyebrows met Sophie's entrance. This hesitant shuffling around was taking too long for their taste. But to be fair, they were the only one who knew exactly why this dance was happening in the first place, and neither of the others had survived as long as they had without being cautious. They opened their shields, just enough for 14 (and Emma) to feel the shimmer of amusement and familiarity in their thoughts. No sense in giving it all away at once, after all.
Though the impulse to just cut across things and reveal who they were to each other was tugging at them.
There was a certain amount of delightfully mirrored irony in 14 being on the approach in a situation in which one side is holding most of the cards and knows it. She'd certainly have appreciated it all more if it hadn't been her that usually entered from the position of power in these types of exchanges. As such, she mostly just didn't like it.
'So this is what it's like from this side.... no wonder people call me a bitch.' There was a sardonic kind of amusement in the thought. This entire thing was honestly extremely familiar, although she was used to seeing it from the other side. The visitors were also infuriatingly familiar. 14 had her suspicions.
Still, if at least a token effort was going to be made to reach out to her, she could if nothing else do the same.
"Hello."
It was actually a rarity for Ruby and Garnet to be holding the cards. After all, they were used to the other two people in this mess being the older, more experienced members of their dysfunctional little...
"Family," they blurted out in an uncharacteristic burst. "That's why you're feeling this weirdness. We've had years to get used to it from our perspective, but it was a lot to take in at first."
That... that was not what she wanted to hear, thought Emma. Other people apparently had pleasant associations with the concept. Emma did not. Her relationship with Adrienne had blossomed as adults, but everything from her childhood was tainted and stained. To have a further, future family thrust upon her, on top of the Cuckoos... Emma took a shudderingly deep breath, let it out in a soft sigh. The board meeting was going to have to wait.
Up in the privacy of her room, Celeste closed her eyes and let out a deep sigh. Yeah. That was about what she had figured. Very, very rarely, she hated being right.
"...the next few minutes are about to get very complicated, aren't they?" Sophie asked, rhetorically. Because of course they were. She could already feel her walls, both the actual psionic ones and the more metaphorical ones, slamming into place. "I'm going to guess... Emma and Scott, maybe?" she asked with a raised eyebrow.
One of the two bodies flashed into a blood-red quartz facsimilie of Emma and Fourteen's diamond forms, then back just as quickly. "We're not exactly certain of the details of our...father. Given your complicatedness, and genetic experimentation being involved, it's entirely possible that there's more than one. But I'm reasonably sure there's a Summers in the tree somewhere, yes." Which was the source of endless needling of their timeline's Scott. To a lesser extent Alex as well, but he had always been the cool uncle figure to Scott's more reserved fatherliness.
"But the maternal genetics didn't come from Emma. It was actually specifically from you."
Emma’s control over her telepathy was normally exquisite. But the combination of the sheer force of the emotions that ran through her and, she suspected, the family connection meant everything spilled out of her for a moment, a surge of relief that this was not something that had been done to her (again was a private scream in her own head) followed by a blinding moment of rage that someone may have done to the Cuckoos what was done to her. It lasted only a few seconds, washing out and over the people in the room near her, and then Emma closed it down with, locking it behind diamond walls inside her mind.
There was no longer any point lurking in hallways then. Emma strode quickly into the room, everyone turning towards her, three generations of her DNA in one room, mixed and matched by… others.
~Perhaps we should take this out of the public realm,~ she sent into the minds in front of her. ~Are you telling me that someone did genetic experiments on my… on the Cuckoos?~ Her mental voice was icy rage, held on the tightest leash.
Ruby and Garnet caught the almost-slip, they wondered if Fourteen (and wasn't it weird to refer to your parent as a number) had as well. ~They did. We know less about what was done to us, because we were rescued and brought to the mansion at a much earlier age.~ They had memories of girlhood among this strange house, with no shortage of people to be parent, sibling, or weird aunts and uncles.
Sophie hadn't moved since the initial revelation that the girls in front of her were 14's. There were a lot of thoughts that could--should come from that, and 14 was quite frankly uncertain where to even begin.
She could smell the antiseptic, hear the beeping and echoes of conversation from her time in the Weapon XIV facility. Whispers of scientists and the lies of everyone she ever knew. She was suddenly back there, experiencing her own nightmare again.
Behind her, a lightbulb in the lamp in the corner exploded in a shower of broken glass. Her eyes glowed a vibrant and brilliant pink. There were a thousand things she wanted to know, but she was angry, at a level she couldn't quite remember being at before. Her hair fluttered as the force of a single word psionically ripped through the room, the only way she could channel that anger.
~WHEN~
~And can we…~ Emma stopped herself short. ~No,~ she said. ~It’s not fair to ask that of you.~ She took a shuddering breath. ~I’m sorry,~ she sent out and it wasn’t clear who she was aiming it at, or if she was just aiming it at the world in general. ~I keep failing my… the children.~
If it had been any other moment, 14 might have been able to maintain her composure. She could have swallowed her anger, schooled her expression, and kept her business to herself. She could have taken in the anger through Sophie, and vented it out through Irma or Celeste or any of the others in the privacy of her room. She could have held her composure, not given away her emotions to the others in the room.
Give them power.
But it wasn't any other moment. It wasn't any other person. And it was like poking an old wound, one that had never been given the chance to properly heal. And 14 lost her self control.
~You can't even say the word, can you? Can you?! It's 'Daughter'. DAUGH. TER. You can't even pretend that you care, can you?~
Emma flinched at the accusation flung at her, at the justified anger that roiled underneath it. She closed her eyes, unable to look at Sophie for a moment. ~I don't have the right,~ she said softly. ~I haven't earned the right to call you... to call any of you my daughter. My daughters.~
~You didn't have to earn it! You just have to be there!~ There was a deep thrum over the psychic line, the mental equivalent of a deep and shakey breath. ~Do you have any idea how hard it is to give up on family? How much it hurts?~ A flower of grief bloomed through her mind.
~Do you even remember that I sent you a Christmas gift for the first three years after you found me? Or was it just another box you tossed in your closet at the end of the day?~
~Every time I tried, I failed. Effort wasted for nothing. I give up. And eventually, I'd try again. Every time, nothing. And it hurt every time.~
~I kept them,~ replied Emma, softly. ~All of them. I couldn’t… I didn’t open them. I didn’t dare. I was so angry. At first. Not at you, at any of you. At what you were proof of. At what someone had done to me to make you. I couldn’t… And then it was too long. Too late. I was… ashamed of what I had done to you. How could you want anything to do with me after what I had done to you? At how badly I had failed you.~ For a moment, Emma’s face distorted with pain and then it smoothed out again. ~I didn’t think you could ever forgive me for that.~
~So you ran,~ 14 sneered, letting her feelings flood through the link. There was a bit of disdain there, but mostly there was an overwhelming sense of hurt and loneliness. ~You didn't know me. You didn't try to know me, but you decided you knew how I felt.~
14 hated how her hands were shaking, across all bodies. Hated how she could tell her anger was being drowned out by her sadness and hurt and all the other emotions that said 'I care. you can hurt me with this.'
~I needed you to at least try. I needed you to be my mother.
Emma gasped suddenly, as if she had taken a blow to the heart, and then clamped her mouth closed around the sound. She had never asked for that, never needed that, but to hear herself called “mother” - for a moment it felt as if the entire world drew away from her and then came back, rearranged, made different.
But what she sent across the link to Sophie wasn’t that feeling - the strange, terrified, elated feeling - but images. Images of Hazel Frost, of a mother in name only, cold and distant, tranquillised and broken, images of Winston and his delight in cruelty.
~I didn’t know how,~ she sent, simply, no self-pity in her tone. ~I thought... I didn’t want to risk... When I was so angry, I didn’t want to be to you what my mother was to me. What my father was to me. I was afraid of what I may turn into, then. And then you had - you had your teachers and everyone in the Mansion. You had each other. You were doing so well. I didn’t think you needed me.~
~I did need you!~ 14 felt sick. The words she was trying to find wouldn't come, and the ones she was finding were all wrong. ~Even before you found me, I was always alone. I thought you might have been the one person who maybe, maybe could have understood!~
She hadn't had a childhood. Surrounded by scientists, her life had been a carefully planned out experiment overcast by the dark shadow of the Weapons Plus facility. She'd never been allowed to forget that she was unique, that there wasn't any one single person like her in the whole world.
She hadn't had friends. She hadn't been taught to make friends. She'd kept everyone she'd ever known at arms distance, because she didn't know how to not. Because she had to protect herself. Because that's how she'd been trained. And now, even when she wanted to have someone finally understand, because she was so tired of being alone, she couldn't do it.
Emma wasn't getting it, and 14 didn't know how to explain in a way that would get through to her. So 14 did the only thing she could. She did the psionic equivalent of grabbing Emma's arm, and made her understand. Her hurt. Her loneliness. Her hope, and her crushing disappointment.
~Instead you left us alone! But there is no us! There's just me! And you left me alone!~
It came through the psychic link with all the force Emma had expected from Sophie’s words, but she didn’t try to buffer it or shunt it aside. Instead she let herself take the brunt of it, try to understand what Sophie was trying to tell her so desperately.
To be a telepath was to learn to be alone. Trying to live with everyone else’s voice in your head meant building careful shields and spaces between you and everyone else, drawing the edges of your own mind over and over again to ensure that you knew what was your thought and what was not. It taught you a certain… apartness from everyone else. Emma was used to being alone like that.
But what Sophie showed her was not that kind of loneliness. What Sophie showed her was a young girl… a girl, a single girl growing up alone, unloved, told over and over that she was alone, singular, unique, unlike anyone or anything on the planet. And then Emma had come, and the girl had thought that she would finally be understood and instead had had to continue to pretend, to hide her secret, to make people think she wasn’t… what she was. That she would never be safe to tell anyone her secret, because the one who should understand had cut her off completely.
She was so alone. So desperately, terribly alone. She was five-in-one and she wanted her mother.
~Oh,~ said Emma and she raised a hand that trembled towards Sophie. ~My girl,~ she whispered. ~My little girl. Oh, what they did to you, my daughter, my darling, my love. My poor darling girl. I’m so sorry.~
14 came completely undone. Over five years of self-imposed isolationism collapsed in an instant and with only a few words, and for all her vaunted self-control and icy aloofness, she stood absolutely no chance at dealing with the massive swell that overtook her.
It crashed over Celeste first. It burbled up in her chest, a pressure that left her feeling like she could just explode in an instant, and before she even knew what was happening she was crying and laughing, and then just crying. She placed a pillow over her face to muffle the noise. Eventually it was too much for the one body to hold, and it spilled over into the rest of the hive.
In the side room, Phoebe slumped against a wall and sank to the floor. She tucked her knees under her chin, wrapped one arm around her legs, put her other hand over her face, and took deep, shuddering breaths that just wouldn't calm themselves.
And finally, when there was nowhere left to hide and no body left to take the excess, it hit Sophie. Like a cresting wave, raw emotion slammed into her with enough force to literally take her off her feet. She stumbled a step forward, towards Emma's outstretched hand, even as her legs gave out.
Openly and for the first time since arriving at the mansion all those years ago, 14 wept.
They had been standing there, frozen in place as the conversation that had been briefly spoken moved to the speed of thought, and then the intensity of emotion blazed like wildfire even the most mindblind could have felt were they standing in that space. Ruby and Garnet remembered being amused what seemed like forever ago, now they were almost horrified as Sophie crumpled against Emma, her shoulders heaving with completely silent sobs. Still trying to maintain that icy composure, that was their mother in spades.
This young woman, who would grow to be their mother through a twist of genetic tinkering, had made sure they never felt as alone as she clearly felt right now. Was she maternal? Not all that much. But she had always been there for them growing up. Her -and- Emma.
~oh god oh fuck did I break them both~
The pair of bodies almost vibrated with the need to do -something-, but they hesitated, not wanting to invade the tableau or somehow make it worse.
Emma held on to Sophie, stopped her from crumpling to the floor completely. Despite the admixture of love and compassion and sorrow that was radiating from her into the shared mental space, her mental voice was dry as she said, ~We’re Frosts. Family drama is what we do, darling.~
Ruby and Garnet's hands flexed, their own emotions pouring into the shared space. ~Can I-?~ they asked hesitantly, almost girlishly.
Emma sent the question on a gossamer-thin private thought to Sophie, felt the slightest hint of a nod against her shoulder. ~On one condition,~ she sent back to Ruby and Garnet. ~That you never ever ever – and believe me, I will know if you do – that you never even think about calling me Grandma,~ and then there was a sudden burst of joy and agreement against her mind and two more pairs of arms wrapped around Emma and Sophie, holding them all close.