Work Text:
==> Be Ms. Lalonde.
You slip into your daughter's room to watch her sleep. It's intrusive, but you do it anyway; for the past two years any lingering look from you has been met with adolescent suspicion. She won't let you see in, any more than she can really see you.
She's so young.
Once, you were this young, but you never had a mother. You had a strange little cat and a laboratory filled with wonders that could sate your every curiosity except for one. You had a series of nannies and tutors and the occasional visit from that strange old man. You had a clever, devious mind and a way with picking locks so that the nannies' liquor stashes were never safe from you and your quest to dull the constant ache in your chest.
She's just a child.
You never were really a child. Those nannies and tutors and the strange old man guided you on a path to becoming stunningly brilliant from the time they found you. You were thirteen before Mr. Harley began telling you why, but deep down, you knew it all along. Destiny counted out by timer measured in years had long since taught you how to dread.
You never really grew up, either. Your room, your real room deep inside the laboratory, still has its princess bed and soft toys. No one has seen it since you were old enough to clean up after yourself, but you still sleep there, when you sleep, curled around one of those old friends. One of those only friends.
It's not fair! She's not old enough for this kind of responsibility,
Even before you found Rose in that crater (when Mr. Harley had told you to look out for it, you'd nearly slammed the phone in his ear, convinced once and for all he was full of shit), you couldn't make friends. How do you get close to anyone when you know they and all of their friends and families will be dead for certain in twenty-five, twenty, fifteen years? How do you even know how to get close to anyone when you never had a mother, father, sister, or brother?
this kind of trauma.
Then you had your little Rose, your perfect little Rose, someone to love and get close to who wouldn't leave, couldn't... and you had no idea how to do it. You got too close and went too far by turns, you confided things that she wasn't old enough to understand or got annoyed when she confided things you were too impatient to find interesting.
When you showed emotion or tried to bond, you tried too hard. When Rose came to you with bad dreams or childish worries or screamed at you, you didn't try hard enough. You've been a fake as a mother, a scared girl under the fashion and alcohol trying to raise a child when what you want is a sister, a friend.
She should have a chance to grow up in her own time.
You look down at Rose's sweet face, still round with puppy fat, and you wish you could kiss her cheek. You wish you could give her a hug without her shrugging away. You wish you could fight through adolescence with her, make rules for her to break, ground her from things she would sneak, catch glimpses of love between the adolescent storms. You wish you could meet her future boyfriends, girlfriends, husband or wife. You wish you could watch her grow into a smart, beautiful, loved young woman.
You wish you could tell Rose everything would be okay, and that you will always be there for her.
However, the clock that counts down in the laboratory is now as familiar to you as your own heartbeat. You haven't apologized for everything you've done wrong, said everything you want to say, and there isn't enough time for her to grow up enough to be able to listen. Once upon a time you could fantasize and pretend you lived in a better world, but now there are only snatched moments in which you wish for a what-if that never could have been.
In a few weeks your daughter will be on her own much too soon. You pray you haven't failed her too much.
Carefully, you bend and ghost your lips against her soft, pale cheek. "I love you, my little Rosebud," you murmur, and before she can stir then you slip out of the room, gone as if you were never there.