Work Text:
It’s almost midnight on April the twelfth. A secret lab lies still. It has everything a mad doctor needs. A spiraling staircase, leading down from a secret entrance hidden in your daughter’s pet cat’s mausoleum, though you hardly use it these days.
You prefer the Transportalizer as a quicker and more importantly, safer alternative more fitting with your unsteady gait that comes with your addiction.
A computer with a giant screen showing a map of the world, several smaller ones showing crucial data necessary for their mad doctor work. Not far from it a Ectobiological cloning machine joins the line-up of weird, sciency machines.
And settling neatly between the two is a cute little bed dressed out with wizardly drapes and paraphernalia, accompanied by a fitting dressing table.
The transportalizer comes to life and moments later you make a crackling entrance. ROXY LALONDE, Scientist, Black Belt, Marksman, Mother, erstwhile cat owner and alcoholic.
Though let’s not pass judgment on that last part, most people would turn to some sort of destructive addiction if they knew what you know.
And tonight you are tanked to the brink… Like every night actually. You’re used to this routine by now that you can walk down the way to your bed with a confident swagger even with a breath that’s 40 proof.
Time for your late night salvage operation, that make up won't remove itself. You take off your scarf and wave it around before, in one great arching movement of your arm, throw it vaguely in the direction of the bed.
It slowly floats downwards in a circling fashion before it comes to a rest, almost exactly half and half on the mattress and the floor. You chuckle to yourself.
“So dramatic” you muse before you set yourself in front of your dressing table. You lean backwards, hand raised to your forehead as you let out a wistful sigh,
“I am ready for my big scene”
As you say it your view passes over the big screen behind your bed and inadvertedly settles on the date. You wish you hadn’t, because the instant you did you did the dam breaks and a tearful deluge of diluvian proportions spills out of you.
You tried your best to hold it together, but all the Manhattans, Martinis, Screwdrivers, Dom Perrignons and Perriers weren't enough to make you forget…wait, that last one’s just some sparkly water.
Maybe that’s why you’re coming to your senses a bit sooner than usual.
As you are slumped over, ugly crying in your dainty little chair you catch a glimpse of your reflection in the mirror. An errant thought crosses your mind. “Like a sculpture of a third year art student, called The beauty of Woman.”
The sudden thought makes you burst out with a coarse laugh. You spend hours alternating between hysteria and sorrow. Tears and snot spill from your face like the waterfalls that run under your house.
Somewhere around thirteen minutes past 4 AM you’ve finally calmed down enough to let yourself think again. April the thirteenth, the day it all comes to an end and there is nothing you can do to change that.
You let out a balloon sized sigh and start to clean up the smeared mascara, after all… you do want to look good for your big scene.