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She wipes the tears from his cheeks with a sad sigh because her Page always was a crier.
Scraped knees, banged foreheads, bruises up and down his legs.
He’d climb trees and fall out of them and climb cliffs and fall off of them and he never seemed to get that humans weren’t born with wings.
She hated the ugly red colour of his species but she hated cleaning it off his torn skin even more. Smeared on tissues and towels and the back of her hand. Ruined white shirts speckled with red that matched his pants and her spoon.
She’d soak in warm salt water to clean away the stain. Pretend she was home and not shackled to two wrigglers whose gap-toothed smiles made her blood-pusher stutter and whose blood made her stomach churn.
She’s always hated wiping away his tears the most though.
He was stronger with her, she thinks. Stronger in the thirteen years with her than in the eight years with an old woman and eight years completely alone. He is weak here. Weak like only Pages can be weak. Weak in spirit and self in a way so crippling that it would be amazing if anything could be made of him at this point.
But it’s alright, she thinks. Because she’s here now. She’s here, and she’s going to make him strong like she did before. Her darling son.
So she wipes his tears away and makes sure the lines that her claws leave across his face don’t draw blood. She gives him a new outfit of red and white, like the one he had when he was little. When he was hers only hers in that universe so long ago.
She kisses his wet eyelids and holds his trembling body and ignores the way his straining against the binds on his wrists and ankles is chafing his skin raw and red.
The pain will make him stronger. He needs to be stronger. Needs to be strong enough to defy her and leave home with the fucking dog. Needs to be strong enough to be powerful and cunning. Needs to be her son and not this boy who could have been her son but wasn’t.
When he’s worn himself out and is panting in her arms she pushes gently with her spider powers and sends him to sleep against her. It reminds her of leaning over the wooden wriggler cage and watching the two pink monkeys slumber and and marveling at how a species so fragile could have survived for so long.
Her Page and Maid had scars all over from her claws. When she held them, fed them, cared for them, she left her mark.
They were hers.
But this Page, weak and blubbering and too alone for too long- he will be hers too. In time. Her employment gives her all the time in the world.
And she will make him strong.
--
Somehow, her heiress is stronger here.
Not just from the tiaratop, but from the game, from the meddling of that infuriating Prince, and from growing without her adoptive brother to coddle her.
She is strong here in a way she was never strong with her. Unlike the boy, who needed a strong hand to guide him, the girl needed freedom to bloom. When she was hers she was scared. She was too scared for too long, and was ultimately a disappointment.
But here.
Here, the Maid was very much like the Page had been in the first universe. She was willing to defy the corporation she had been born into, to change and shape things to what she desired them to be. She was willing to take charge and be strong. Raise her hands, knead the batter, and bake a whole new slice a cake, traditional Crockercorp be damned.
But she was plagued with the same weakness that cripples the entire dismal species. She was weak. She was feeble and pliant under the weight of her heart. Weighed down by her affection for the one who had been her brother. Shackled to the ground and beaten over the head with it over and over and over again.
She could have been so strong here. She had the power of Life in her hand and she could have been a God among gods.
But humans are disorganized and try so hard to feel everything at once that they leave themselves entrapped and ensnared in a barbed-wire fishing net. No quadrants to straighten their shit out, no moirails to beat sense into them. A stupid, backwards species.
It’s up to her to pull her precious daughter away from that.
Her eyes glow and pulse black and red and her skin crackles with data. She’s pretty like this. Fierce. She pulled no punches and her grin was shark-like and predatory. The human softness is gone, and she pulls her precious girl to her and presses a razor-sharp kiss to her forehead.
Because this Maid is hers. This Maid is hers in a way the other one wasn’t. The pulsating band on her forehead has secured her loyalty and soon she will be hers even without the tiara.
Curling, cruel smile that mirrors her own. Dagger grin, remorseless eyes, and her favourite shade of red covering her from head to toe.
Darling daughter.
Hers at last.
--
She was always wild.
Wild, and angry.
A ferocious whirlwind even as a child. Irreparably disturbed with her lack of ability to understand everything. Green eyes that were always searching the skies for answers. Flailing fists that would turn on others viciously when they couldn’t provide the answers either.
She knows it’s because of the game. The meteors that never came for her. Because this green girl with the bared teeth and searching eyes is not where she is supposed to be. Her spirit is made for another time. For a title that should be hers, but isn’t.
That’s what she was like when she was her daughter.
But she was never really hers.
Not even for a second. For a moment. There was insubordination and revolution in her eyes the moment she was lifted from the smoking crater. The polished guns and the carefully crafted blueprints were a continuous countdown for the ticking timebomb that was the Witch.
The daughter that was never hers.
Until now.
Now the Witch is pliant under her hand. Ears twitching, a low, contented growl deep in her throat. Sparks of delicious green dance along her body and she stares at it hungrily. Because here is power. Here is strength.
Beautiful daughter, tamed at last.
Emerald fire dancing down her legs and arms and sides and face. Burning in her eyes. Like a wild inferno, blazing strong within her, but contained. Controlled. Ready to be unleashed at the wave of a hand.
She wanted a daughter, and she got an attack dog.
It’s amusing, in a way. She’s put the human to sleep, and left only the First Guardian beast in her place. Cast aside the emotion, the free thought, and kept only the power. But she is still wild and angry. Still all fury and fire.
The difference is that now the fury and fire is hers. And this all-powerful doggirl is hers.
She lets her daughter lie in her lap as she embroiders her black dress with red. Gives her a Crockercorp collar and tells her what a good girl she is. What a good daughter. Precious darling whose hair entangles in her fingers and claws as she runs her hand along the top of her head.
Because now, now.
The Witch belongs to her at last.
--
She’s gained an extra one.
Another girl, of bright pink and dark blue fire. A Rogue of indispensible talents who will make her plans come together perfectly.
But while the Rogue is what she needs, the Rogue isn’t what she wants.
She has gained one, but she is also missing one.
What she wants, who she wants, is her second son.
Her stupid blue boy. The cerulean Heir who made her so angry with his smiles and his laughter. Who she could never find a use for because he was so oblivious all the fucking time. A little boy made out of pranks and jokes and an unfettered optimism.
He was her favourite.
The Page was wild and always looking to the horizon. The Maid was scared and could never look her in the eye. The Witch was angry and looking for things that would never come.
But the Heir.
The Heir had blinders on the size of a hoofbeast’s ass.
The Heir didn’t see the corruption the way the girls had. He was as oblivious as her precious Page, without the wanderlust. The boy was happy with his practical jokes and his ivory keys and the red bowties that he loved so much.
He’d give her a kiss with every new bowtie she bought him, everytime she indulged him with a short bark of laughter at his ridiculous jokes. He gave her wide toothy smiles where his sister only gave her scowls.
The Heir was hers in a way that she didn’t want him to be.
The Heir was hers in a way that made her chest tighten. In a way that made the human concept of ‘motherhood’ seem marginally less ridiculous and nauseating.
When the Witch left and she sat stewing in a cloud of fury and anger, fuschia rage broiling in her chair, the Heir remained.
His eyes were like the Maid’s, blue and wide. But they were not full of fear, and they rose to meet hers easily.
When his sister left and she breathed fire and brimstone at having lost the only daughter this universe had to offer her, the Heir let the fire wash over him and blew his calming Breath over it until the flames died down.
He played his piano for her all through the night.
He was stupid, her Heir. Stupid because he never left her. Unlike the Maid, who stayed out of fear, this dumbass boy stayed out of actual, genuine, affection.
He used to roll himself in her hair and pretend it was eating him alive while laughing hysterically. Let it wind about his limbs and neck and flail about with playful shrieks.
She wanted to press her hands to his throat and show him what strangulation was really like. Let her claws dig into his skin and make him finally, finally taste fear. Knock some sense into him.
But she never did.
She left her son with his head in the clouds and he was never strong but was always the strongest.
He was the only one she never left scars on.
And here, in this universe where her blue boy was never hers, she holds her three other children close and imagines that the Rogue is replaced with the Heir. She wants his bubbling laughter, his skyblue eyes that never saw, mouth that never stopped smiling for her.
An unsettling thought occurs to her, as she sends out her Witch to fetch her last child. The thought that the Heir was never quite hers.
Rather, she was his.
--
A monarch is supposed to be a mother to her people.
Alternians don’t need mothers, nor do they need a parental figure beyond one that will chase off predators and feed them for the sweep or so they’re incapable of doing it themselves. Her role as Empress was that of a dictator, and only that. She had no motherly stirrings, and needed only unquestioning loyalty from her people. Having ‘motherhood’ thrust upon her when she took up her secret place on Earth was a large inconvenience, one that she hoped to bypass quickly.
She never expected to love the feel of their warm bodies against hers as much as she does now.
The Page was easy to break. All she had to do was take away his Hope. Isolate him. Slow down time so that weeks passed for him where seconds passed for the rest of the session. He’s slumped against her now, eyes closed, and none of that irritating need for adventure coursing through his veins. She's broken him down, and soon, she will begin building him up. Stronger.
She cards her fingers through his hair and whispers lullabies in his ears like she did for a different Page, in a different universe. It doesn’t matter now. This Page, the one here, and now, is hers.
Her darling daughters are curled against her. The Maid against her side, thrumming with electronic energy and eyes open. The Witch sprawled across her lap, calm so long as her mother’s insistent pressure continues pulsing within her mind.
And her last son, her darling Heir.
He is filled with a fury she has never seen in him before.
It hurt at first, to see her darling boy so angry with her. Wind whipping his hair and clothing and sending her own long locks into a frenzy. His eyes are filled with no warmth for her. Nothing but cold rage and grit teeth, angry accusations and demands to ‘LET THEM GO RIGHT NOW!’
He shouts and threatens but doesn’t make a move towards her. Because that bigass heart of his is still right where it always is, no matter the universe. His affection and loyalty may no longer be for her, but it’s for the girl whose throat her claw is hanging perilously close to. For the boy whose prone in her arms. For the girl sitting at her side and clutching a personalized trident with a sharklike grin of her own.
He is angry that his siblings have fallen and only he remains. He is angry because he cannot act without fear of hurting them.
Her hurt subsides quickly as she feels his wind whip around the room. Feels the curl of his anger, the blue fire of his eyes. Feels his strength, unlike any she’s felt before. Strength of body, of mind, of spirit.
And she wants him to be hers the way he wasn’t before. She wants him to be hers like the Witch, and the Page, and the Maid are hers.
So while he stands with indecision, unsure how to act without endangering his friends, she wraps her Gemini psiionics around him like a blanket, and pulls him across the throne room towards her.
She hears the Breath whoosh out of him and the winds fall as she tightens his hold around his chest and throat and hauls him forward until their face almost touch.
His skin is red and his mouth hangs open as he attempts to Breathe to become Air. His form wavers and starts to dissipate but the sharp-shock of her psiionics causes him to cry out and solidify.
The pain of having his matter forcibly brought back together has tears trickling down his cheeks and she leans forward to wipe them away.
Yes.
Just like this.
She wants to wipe his tears away like this, and bandage the Page’s knees like this, and braid the Witch’s hair like this, and bake with the Maid like this.
They were her children, and she wants them to be so again.
She pats his cheeks as he heaves for air and gently shoos the Witch onto the floor to make room for her brother.
He is not the Heir who was hers or the Heir who could lay claim to her. But he, unlike his predecessor, is a Heir that she can use. He is strong, stronger than all his siblings, and she wants him completely and totally.
He can barely breathe and his consciousness is fading. She makes a soft sound and guides his flopping head onto her shoulder to rest. She remembers when her Heir would tire himself out. The first few times she’d leave him to sleep on the floor, then she began covering him with a blanket, and eventually, she started carrying him up to his room.
He goes limp against her and she smiles and kisses his forehead as she thinks of how to make this Heir hers. He will not break easy, but she thinks she will be able to control him. Through that troublesome human heart of his and the siblings that are tied to it, or simply through the power she has. The power to render his Breath useless with a single thought.
He will be her son.
She sighs contently at the feel of her four children against her, and internally swears to never let them escape her again. She is the last of her Empire, and exposure to human culture has given her a fondness for the concept of kinship. When she has reestablished her kingdom, she will be glad to have her four children to work beneath her. They will be celebrated, and treated of the highest regard. The boys will be Generals, and the Girls will be her Special Agents.
They will be more powerful than they ever believed, and in time, even John will come to thank her.
After all, a Mother will always do what's best for her children.