Work Text:
Sophia was a beautiful woman and a mother of two, and she looked at her children with an expression usually reserved for the weak and the ugly. Occasionally, she took a step back and remembered when she still had Niko's affections, when he was too young to know that his mother was a cheap whore who drank too much booze. Before the monster put its baby in her belly for a couple hundred bucks. It didn't take long for Niko to wise up, and if she wanted to be perfectly honest, she'd half expected him to wise up sooner. Too smart for his own good, too good for his own good. And the monster came along, and they were one big happy family until she started throwing plates because what was the use of cursing the thing if it didn't even understand what she was saying?
And then it got older, and it got wiser, and Caliban was everything his brother was not and more and he owed everything to Niko. She took them out with her and promptly lost track of them, but when she stumbled upon them an hour, two hours later, they didn't seem very bothered that their mother had left them alone to their own devices. In fact, they seemed fine. And yes, maybe – maybe she took a bit of pride in the fact that they didn't need to be taken care of. Because if Niko was too wise, too good, he was also too strong. The monster would probably follow in his footsteps. And it did, and sometimes – maybe, just maybe she looked at Caliban with a little something more than just disgust or fear or hatred, like she used to look at Niko before the monster, because despite everything he still looked like her. Shared her eyes and her hair, shared the same shape and curve of the jaw line – though his was soft with baby fat while her own was narrow and skin taunt.
She called him beautiful because he was, in a horrifying way, and he was smart enough to understand the insults and jabs and bitter remarks she threw at him. It wasn't that hard to figure out how she felt about him in the first place. It was best to watch him from a distance, throw plates in drunken annoyance, rage, frustration, weariness. Better to watch them both from a distance as they obviously didn't need her anymore, and if that's the way it was going to be, she might as well enjoy herself while just making sure they didn't kill themselves doing something stupid. But her oldest was too wise, too good, too strong and too protective to let anything happen to the monster, and that endeared Caliban to Niko until his dying breath. That's what turned them away from her. Made them despise her until her dying breath and even beyond, when she was turned to dust far too soon by a fire set by her own mistakes.