Chapter Text
Chapter 1: Prologue
When you think “sisters”, what comes to mind? Perhaps petty squabbles over a stuffed bear or television remote, or braiding each other’s hair while talking about boys, depending on your own personal experiences.
Neither was the case for Roxy Lalonde. Her experience of sisterhood was that of such separation that it fit more into most people’s perception of distant cousins. You know the ones: you see them at holidays and maybe send them a nice text message on their birthdays, and you love them as family but you don’t really know them, do you? Their hobbies and livelihoods and romantic endeavors are relayed to you through intermediary family members, so you say “good for them” and move on with your life. Rose Lalonde, her sister, existed in such a space for her.
Throughout their childhood, Rose was, for lack of a better phrase, “in and out”. She and Roxy were close until Roxy was six years old and Rose was shipped off to a boarding school in western New York. She returned for holidays, like the aforementioned “cousins", and sent birthday letters for Roxy, her twin Dirk, and their youngest brother Dave. After that boarding school there was another, and the divide only grew between the eldest Lalonde sister and her three siblings until they barely heard from her at all. During all this time, things got worse back at home.
Roxy’s parents split when she was 12, the same age Rose was when she first left, and their father took the boys with him back to his hometown in Texas. Her mother…didn’t take it well, to put it lightly. She hit the bottle hard, renounced the surname “Strider” for her maiden “Lalonde”, and Roxy was forbidden to reach out to either of her brothers for no reason other than grief and spite. Middle school came and went as a blur of avoiding her mother while simultaneously doing everything she could to please her, to maybe convince her that they would be okay by themselves, or that maybe Rose could come home to fill the glaring void left by the other half of their family. Needless to say, her mother was deaf to all of it.
It was a dark time for Roxy, who coped with the neglect of her home life by throwing herself into education as much as she possibly could once high school began. She worked hard to avoid dealing with anything relating even remotely to matters of the heart and soul, substituting them for the strict logic of the STEM world. The programming club was a great reason to leave the house early, before her hungover mother awoke with a stale tirade to go on, and the engineering club kept her at school into the evening. For lunch, she avoided the popularity contest that is the lunchroom by eating in the classrooms of whichever teachers would have her. It was here that she found a mentor to push her to greater heights, to imbue her with the ambition (and the letter of recommendation) for college, and the academic guidance to pad her application to the absolute brim. It is through this string of events that we wrap back around to the original question. When you think “sisters”, what do you think of? Two people who unconditionally have each other’s back? Two people that can call on the other for a place to stay? Roxy didn’t.
She looked at the letter in her hand, and then the letter in her other hand. The two were vastly different aesthetically, but the contents were inextricably linked.
On the left was a letter of admission. It was fairly standard, written on plain white printer paper, arriving in a plain white envelope with the SburbTech logo on it, and reading as blandly as something that dictates your entire future could possibly read.
On the right was a letter that could only have been sent forward in space and time from an alternate fantasy universe by a witch. It was in a (homemade ?) parchment envelope sealed with purple wax, the letter was weathered and neigh impossible to read due to the diction and the ornate calligraphy, and it was signed "Rose Lalonde, PhD"
Honestly, Roxy wasn’t sure which letter was more baffling.