Chapter Text
"Oh, glub."
Its wails swirled through her chambers, each unbearably loud whimper punctuating itself with a choked, infinitesimal sob.
It was scarily small, able to fit in the palm of her hand like little more than a bug.
She could close her first right now, and that would be it.
It would be over.
Yet she found herself unable to keep her magenta eyes from lingering on its candy red ones, squeezed and squinted with garnet-shaded tears that stained her palms in filth.
'Kill it,' They had said.
The last mutant.
Everything about the grub was twisted and wrong, the exact thing she had been told time and time again to exterminate.
Her other hand, which grasped her trident so rigidly her knuckles had began bruising coral, raised above her head, readying the killing blow.
Do it, she urged herself. Kill the grub.
The terrible surge its howls gave her stomach swelled up to her chest like the spread of a disease, and before she could stop herself she heard the jewl-rimmed weapon clatter to the ground.
No.
She wouldn't.
Slowly, her hand lowered, sliding underneath the grub to hold him securely to her chest.
Steadily, his cries abated to whimpers, then soft huffs of satisfaction at the cool envelope of her around him.
Glub, she cursed.
She wasn't a lusus. She wasn't even a jade!
To pardon a mutant at all would inspire hatred, but to raise one? It could start a revolution!
Her mind drowned in the irrationality of it all. Then he squirmed, and she cradled him with her other arm as well as he waned into slumber, knowing full well he wasn't going to die.
Not with her around.
She is Feferi Pexies, empress of the Alternian empire, and she can do it.
Shes conquered seas, wrestled beasts, and killed the woman that came before her-
She can raise a grub.
How hard could it be?