Work Text:
“Dr. Erhardt said it was Kim Cattrall,” Kinga said smugly, apropos of nothing.
Pearl laughed; her granddaughter had asked about “it” so many times, now this. “Oh-ho, no. Larry must have seen the passionate letters going back and forth, but Clayton was just passing those along for Art.”
Kinga snarled, thwarted again. “If it’s not Kim Cattrall, who is it!?”
“Maybe when you’re older.”
“How old do I have to be, forty? Fifty? Ninety!?”
Pearl took a long swig of her beer, savoring her turn at being smug.
It was even better because she wasn’t just teasing; she really did know the truth. Of course she did. She remembered that most bizarre of her experiments like it was only yesterday...
The tricky DNA extraction had yielded predictably incomplete results, and she’d filled in the gaps with Clayton’s genes more because they were handy than anything else. When the whole thing had somehow resulted in a normal, healthy baby, Pearl had stood staring into the test vat and remarked to the universe “Well, now what do I do?”
Pearl Forrester was never at a loss for long, though. Suddenly she had a granddaughter — the girl she’d always wanted, with womanly self-possession and a perfect fall of red hair, a worthy heiress to her foremothers’ pursuit of weird science and world domination.
But to look Kinga in the face and tell her “your gene-splicing mommy is a cartoon bombshell married to a rabbit”? The girl wasn’t ready.
Would she ever be ready?
Pearl smiled mysteriously and said the words no child who wanted anything ever wanted to hear:
“We’ll see, honey.”
End