Chapter Text
You don't land in a lake. Your meteor crashes a little closer to civilization, on a brisk December afternoon, and your existence is met with the bafflement of local authorities. There is no enterprising young scientist to find you among the wreckage, and you are eventually whisked away to the hospital. You are adopted a few months later by a well-meaning, but bland, young couple, and soon find yourself living in the nameless suburbs of New York. The year is 1972, and the name they give you is not Rose Lalonde.
--
Your parents are good people. They are warm and attentive, and they dote on you, but in the way parents do when they don't understand their children. You are, for the most part, a good child. You're somewhat prone to over-analyzing the actions of others while being rather private about your own matters, which people find off-putting. This isn't so unusual though, and you form some tenuous friendships at your school.
Still, there's something distant about you, something almost dark, that your parents and your friends can't comprehend. You carry yourself like a girl too ancient for her own skin. You walk like a girl who has embraced death. You smile - well, you don't really smile at anyone. On a good day, someone might provoke a smirk, or even better, startle the ghost of a smile out of you.
But that's exactly it: you are a ghost floating aimlessly through a world that's just different in all the wrong ways. You don't know if you're alive. If this is what living feels like, then what was it that you experienced before this? What are those fleeting glimpses of something, those sudden heart-wrenching bursts of emotion that grip you without warning? Logically, you know that you can't have lived through the nebulous, half-formed memories that haunt you; you're barely a teenager. You've lived your whole life in Rainbow Falls, right above the river, surrounded by the forest and stuck in a house alone with no one but your cat and your mo
You've lived your whole life in some tiny town in New York, and the most exciting thing that's ever happened to you was finding a book on cosmological horrors in your local library.
--
When you were four years old, you asked your parents for a cat. You told them he had to be black and preferably good at listening. Your parents had frowned at each other, before your mother turned to you. It appeared that she was terribly allergic to cats, but maybe when you were a little older, they could consider buying you some fish. They took you out for ice cream as an apology, and you tried to forget about why this had been so important to you.
--
You try out several hobbies as you grow older. The violin soon becomes your instrument of choice, and you occasionally lay down some sick beats perform in a recital or two, sometimes to the accompaniment of a piano, which makes you inexplicably wistful.
Writing creative fiction is your true calling, you think. You're especially taken with magic and wizards, so you start a journal to try and capture this one story that's been percolating in your head for a while. It seems to be going well, though your prose might be a bit too...purple.
Baking does not stick; there's something vaguely unsettling about the activity, especially when you aren't making things from scratch. Your father brings you boxes of Betty Crocker cake mix, but you can't bring yourself to open the garishly red packages. They find their way into the trash can. In any case, you aren't even interested in cakes, or other assorted baked sundries. Your culinary endeavors began one hot summer day, when you woke up to the sound of frogs in your yard, and the only thing you could think about was pumpkins. Pumpkins, pumpkins, pumpkins. It was all a bit nonsensical; pumpkins weren't even in season at the time. But you weren't up for writing about Zazzerpan that day, so you decided to indulge your newfound obsession with this fruit that you had honestly never even seen before in real life. You couldn't simply just jump right into making pumpkin pie though, so you began with the basics. After staring down Betty Crocker a few too many times over the next couple of weeks, you give up. You forget about the pumpkin pie and the green eyed dream girl who had started the whole affair.
--
You do, however, take quite well to knitting, to your surprise. You make enough scarves for your whole family, and a neat rectangular cozy that you're not quite sure what to do with. More impressively, you manage to knit some new limbs for an old plush bunny you used to love. Not only is it ragged, it's also kind of oily and disgusting. But this is the one thing you crashlanded onto this world with, and you steadfastly refused to let it go when the police, the doctors, and your parents tried to remove it. No one knows where it could have come from (for that matter, no one knows where you could have come from), but it looks to you like a trite gift a father might give his daughter, if you ignore the oil stains. You knit new life into it, and place it on a shelf above your bed. Maybe someday you'll pass it on to your own precocious meteor baby. Ha.
--
Dreams are maddeningly elusive to you. Everything is jumbled and disorganized, reduced to a melancholy haze of color and nostalgia. You always wake with no clear recollection of your dreams, just snippets of distressingly life-like sensory information. The gentle whisper of wind in your hair. A thick, heavy heat and the endless click of gears. The smell of blood splattered against a lightly perfumed scarf.
--
"You will be resigned to absolute oblivion."
You hear this not-lie in your dreams with alarming frequency. It is infuriating.