Chapter Text
“Why don’t you go upstairs and play your game while your mum and I talk about some things, huh?”
Daisy knew exactly what that meant, and she had scampered back upstairs to her de-facto bedroom in her grandparents’ house right away. Her grandpa had been coming down the stairs as she dashed past him, nearly knocking the elderly stag over on the way up but getting a bemused laugh from him instead of the snarls and shouting she’d expect from her parents if she did the same to them. “Hey there, Dais, wh-” he began, catching a glimpse of the troubled look on the girl’s face and letting her run past him and across the landing to the spare room. She knew that they were about to start fighting about what had happened earlier, but doing it in front of her stepdad’s parents must have meant it had made things really bad.
The marten kit darted into the tiny bedroom, threw herself on to the bed, dug her muzzle into the first pillow she could grab, and screeched. It wasn’t supposed to be happening here too. This was her safe space away from how tense and angry and miserable her actual home was, and now the grown-ups had ruined things for her here too. Daisy’s home-life was...bad, to put it bluntly. She barely remembered her dad aside from a couple of memories from when she was super small and barely out of nappies; he had been there and been kind and sweet with her but her last memory of him was a blur, all she knew was that him and her mum were no longer together after that and that before long she had ended up with him instead. She had made an effort with her step-dad, a deer who seemed to love making fun of her and mocking her despite being several decades older than her, but that had given way to a deep and pronounced resentment instead. About the only thing she did like about him was his parents, who were a sweet elderly couple that lived far down south in a town resting on a massive, mountain-like hill.
Their house felt more like a home than her actual home did. It was huge, cosy, smelt nice, covered in thick deep carpets everywhere, and every room felt like a mini adventure to explore in because of how much furniture and how many knick-knacks were scattered around everywhere. She always loved the infrequent visits to their house, especially since it caused the fighting between her parents (which was a common feature in her own house) to grind to a halt so that they could put on a united front. Another thing that always made it worth it for her, along with how nice both her grandparents were, was their old game console. There were a few games that came with it and all of them were way older than Daisy herself was, all of them with graphics that felt equally dated or clunky gameplay, but there was one in particular that stood out to her more than all the others and had quickly became her favourite.
It was far too mature for her, and far too difficult, but Daisy had still picked the game up when she had first spotted during one of her family’s visits and she had been hooked right away. The main game had been hard and confusing to try and work out, and especially given that the very first level set her up against a long slide down a hill covered in spikes that made her yelp in fright like she herself had been impaled when she misjudged a jump and landed the adventurer in them, but what she loved most of all was the tutorial level. A big, open-plan trek around the sprawling country manor of the posh rich treasure hunter lady she played as along with her dutiful butler, with no enemies to attack her, guidance from the main character, and a ton of secrets and hidden nooks and crannies to explore.
Rolling over on to her side on the bed, the marten got back up into a sitting position and reached over to the desk to put the PlayStation on. The disc was already in it, where she had left it the last time that she had visited, and so she was able to leap straight into playing her favourite game. There were others in the series as well that she had tried, and they were all good, but none of them felt quite like this one. Skipping over the opening cutscene of a meteor hitting Antarctica and some scientists drilling and blowing things up in the present day where it landed, the strains of the theme music filled the room and caused Daisy to smile as the menu came into view; a shot of the meteor approaching Earth with the main character, a busty fox woman in a green vest holding a pistol, on the side of the screen next to the title of the game – Tomb Raider III: Adventures of Lara Croft.
She couldn’t tell if she wanted to be Lara Croft, to be her friend, or to be her daughter. Any of those three sounded good to her as it meant an escape from her life as it was. Lingering on the screen for a moment, getting herself comfortable on the bed and letting it show a preview of a level late in the game where the vixen was running through an abandoned underground train station in London while fighting gang members with flaming spiked bats, Daisy navigated to the tutorial level – Lara’s Home – and pressed on it to play it once again. The menu gave way to a shot of the explorer from behind in a lavish bedroom with a lit fireplace to one side and a bed to the other.
Welcome back to my humble abode. Feel free to take a look around.
She had dreamed about this game and this house on a few occasions. On nights when things had been particularly bad, especially the time when her mum had woken her up and told her that they had to get dressed and they had slept at a friend’s house that night instead, she had escaped in her sleep to somewhere nicer instead. The one that stuck in her mind the most was the one where she had woken up in Lara’s manor and been treated like she was being fostered by her, and she had treated the kit to breakfast despite it being way bigger than it was in the game and filled with surreal dream-logic aspects. Deep down, in spite of everything, she had wished that she had her as her mother instead. The marten did love her mum deep down but at the same time she couldn’t shake how she stuck with him despite how miserable he made her.
~
As their car had pulled up outside yesterday afternoon after a long, long drive down south, Daisy had felt herself buzzing with excitement. Her Nana was waiting at the front door already for them and came down the garden path to greet them at the car, to which the kit had waved happily to her from the other side of the window. With a quiet grunt of discontent her step-dad unbuckled his seatbelt and stepped out of the car, going over to his mother with a look on his face that said ‘I’d rather be anywhere else’ as she hugged him. Daisy’s mother got out of the car as well and went over to greet the doe in a much more welcoming way. The two of them had gotten along exceptionally well ever since they had met; while Nana could be kind of overbearing sometimes the two of them had very similar personalities and they were always happy to see each other.
“There you are, Dais!” She said, coming over to the back seat of the car and opening the door for the kit to climb out. Daisy unbuckled her seatbelt and leapt out into a tight hug, wrapping her arms around her grandmother and letting her tail curl around the side of her calves too. “Not even a full year and already you’ve grown!” “He really has,” smirked her step-dad from off to the side. Nana snorted quietly and hugged the girl slightly tighter. “Don’t listen to him. He’ll get there eventually.” Daisy doubted that very much, given some of the things that he called her behind closed doors, but she didn’t dare say that.
“Need any help unpacking the car?” came a deep, deliberate voice from the direction of the house. Daisy looked around her Nana’s side towards the front door and saw her Grandpa standing there, at which point she took off up the path over to him and barrelled into him with a tight hug. “Hey there, kid!” he said with a laugh, patting her head gently. “_____, get over here and come get your bag out the car!” said her step-dad at enough volume for the whole street to hear her old – and unmistakeably masculine – name loud and clear. The marten grit her teeth. He always, always referred to her by that instead of Daisy, and made it a point to call her ‘he’ and ‘him’ as well.
“Don’t be so loud,” said her mother, frowning slightly and shooting her daughter an apologetic look. She had accepted Daisy for what she was quickly, and was responsible for all her girl-clothing as well despite the protests from her step-dad, and her grandparents had also caught on quickly despite the occasionally wrong name or wrong pronoun. At the very least none of them had done it with malice behind it like her step-dad did, and even though he had little to no respect for her back when she was a boy he seemed to have even less now. The kit scampered back towards the car and pulled out her rucksack without a word, pausing briefly to glare hatefully at the stag standing by it before quickly walking past her family and into the house to drop it off upstairs.
~
The vixen took off running through her bedroom and out on to a grand staircase overlooking an equally huge hall. “If you want to take a look around, press and hold the look button,” Daisy repeated in time with the game as Lara began heading downstairs. She had played through this tutorial level so many times that she had memorised just about all of the dialogue and when it was said, and repeating it was beginning to flatten her native Yorkshire accent somewhat too. That had quickly been reset once she went back home again and was surrounded by others who sounded like her, but every time she had spent time with her grandparents she had come back with a strange hybrid dialect.
Electing to save some time and leap straight over the banisters and down to the ground floor, Lara gracefully pounced on to the tiled floor below before pausing to pick herself back up from the heavy landing. A rattling of glass and silverware nearby along with weird, eerie groans alerted her to the presence of Winston, the elderly bloodhound butler who shuffled around following Lara wherever she went. Daisy found him more than a little creepy with how persistent he was and the odd noises he made. He may have looked older than both her grandparents, maybe even combined, but they were kinda old too and they didn’t stumble about sounding like ghosts wherever they walked. She made a mental note to lure him into the walk-in freezer in the kitchen and shut him in there so that she could explore uninterrupted. He’d just let himself out once she got her pistols later on, so it wasn’t like he was in any danger in there.
Sprinting past Winston and into a grand dining hall, Lara leapt up on to the long table at the centre of it and ran along it towards the stereo system at the other end. Daisy hit the button to make her switch it on, and an atmospheric track lead by strings and quiet, hollow percussion rang out through the mansion. She loved this piece of music and went out of her way to make sure it was playing whenever she explored the mansion, or at least for the start of her adventures in the grand house anyway. Curving around the side of the table and running back down its length as the butler shuffled along on the other side of it, the marten did a wide U-turn out from the corridor and into another open room.
“Let’s go into the gym,” Daisy and Lara both said at once. The gym was an entirely different room; massive, tall, and filled with a great deal of athletic equipment to teach the player how to run, jump, and climb through the game’s levels. Normally the kit would have stopped to run through each of them, but this time felt different. She wanted to just skip all of the usual faff and go straight to the prize at the end of the gauntlet; the swimming pool area, a lavishly tiled and vaguely Greek-themed indoor pool with lit torches around the edges and a diving board. The girl smoothly dodged landing in the water as well, though, running along the edge until she found herself standing behind the diving board.
Placed in the middle of it was a button not unlike the one she had pressed to switch the music on. Daisy held down the look button to see how close Winston was to her, and how likely it’d be for him to block her path with what was about to come next. This was one of a couple of secret timed runs in the tutorial, and it lead to a well-hidden room near the front door of the mansion. Listening carefully for any rattling cutlery or bizarre butler noises, the marten pressed the button and immediately began sprinting along the closest edge of the pool and back into the gym. As she noticed the bloodhound slowly moving out from behind one of the pieces of exercise equipment she ran up one of them and sprang off the end of it in a running jump, hitting the ground hard but barely slowing down.
Lara picked up speed into a full sprint as she was directed towards an opening in the bookcases some distance from the bottom of the stairs, which had opened as a secret door and lead to another button. Daisy leaned in a little and grit her teeth as she watched the vixen’s stamina bar deplete with how long the sprint button was being held down and gradually got slower, going from an Olympic-level run into a brisk jog instead. Just in the nick of time she managed to make it to the opening and skidded to a halt against the wall, throwing her paws up to prevent herself from smacking into it at force. Daisy let out the breath she had been holding. That was the first part of the run down, now it was time for the second and hardest part of it.
~
The marten kit looked up at the steep cliff of mud, long grass, and assorted detritus in front of her. Every time she had come here, she had looked at her grandparents' unfinished back garden and swore to herself that she would explore it. Due to their house being built on a hillside the terrain was nothing if not forbidding, even for adults; it had been a work in progress for months and even though part of it was flattened enough to make somewhat of a patio the back fence was still roughly twelve feet off of the ground. Daisy walked up to a reasonably flat portion of it and sprung up, jumping directly upwards like Lara and unsheathing her claws to dig into the dirt and gain a hold on the wet, grassy ledge above her.
It was unstable and she could feel it shifting under her fingers, but she did it. Shimmying along the edge of the turf, having kicked off her socks before stepping outside so that she could dig all of her claws into the cliff, the kit carefully moved along until it began sloping downward and left her hindpaws touching the ground again. Daisy hoisted herself up on to the now-lower ledge, letting out a grunt of exertion like the adventurer but without meaning to as her belly was squished against the soil. "Egh," she puffed. "Lara made this look easy…" She had always been, as her mum had euphemistically described it, 'full-bodied'. Her step-dad had used far more hurtful terms to describe her weight despite not exactly being the picture of physical fitness himself. Despite this, though, she had spent her childhood running and climbing everything she could and in turn she had ended up with a startling amount of strength for a five-year-old girl.
Crawling forward with her paws stretched out in front of her, tugging herself up roughly using clumps of grass as handholds, the marten eventually managed to get to her feet again. It was a good four, maybe five feet of height or so walking along the edge. She looked down at her clothes, which were now entirely streaked through with dark, clay-heavy mud and grass stains. “I’ll give these over to Winston,” she said in an attempt at Lara’s voice, and stuck her paws under her shirt to wipe them clean on her belly fur. She didn’t care all too much about how she looked or how mad her parents would likely be. She had brought a couple of changes of clothes just in case, and her fur was dark enough for the rest to not be too noticeable.
Scrambling up the grassy bank as she ascended the hill, making sure to occasionally pretend to stumble and fall back so that she could dramatically grab some grass and pull herself up again, Daisy reached the peak of her climb. At the back of the garden was a raised flowerbed with a wall made of heavy grey planks. A variety of tall, bushy shrubs lined it along with what appeared to be a plastic pipe sticking out from the ground nearby. The kit went over to it carefully, setting her paws down with exaggerated gentleness on the way to ensure she didn’t stand in a hole or on something sharp she couldn’t see for the grass, and stuck her muzzle directly into it. “Hellooooo?” she called, giggling a little at how it distorted her voice. There was no reply from the tube.
The girl’s lips pulled back into a toothy, excited grin. “I’ve finally found it,” she said, slipping into a dialect very much unlike her own again. “The Lost Tube of...of...Tubimonga!” Wrapping her paws around it, the marten began tugging at it to try and dislodge it from the ground. She had assumed that since it was muddy and wet it shouldn’t be too hard to pull something up, but as she tried pulling it out she quickly realised it was either buried deeper than she thought or the ground was tougher than expected. Daisy snarled with frustration as she leaned back and pulled harder, letting out a strained groan as she sunk her claws into it for better grip and tried as hard as she could. “Just get outta the ground already, y’stupid piece of rubbish!”
Something gave way underneath her and the ground split and parted beneath around the base of the pipe, not dislodging it fully but causing it to shift upward somewhat. The marten squeaked in surprise and fell backwards as her paws slipped off the wet plastic, falling backwards and landing heavily on her backside before rolling back down the hill. With a gasp she began flailing about for something to grab hold of, finally managing to land her paw on the handle of an upturned metal wheelbarrow that was halfway up the grassy bank as she slid down. By luck, there was a big rock underneath it that was managing to hold it in place. Daisy panted and put her free paw over her beating heart as she came to a stop, using the handle for leverage and getting back up into a standing position.
She had nearly slid down straight over the edge at the base of the hill. The mental image of Lara helplessly sliding straight into a spike pit that fatally impaled her halfway down the hill in the first level ran through her mind and the girl shook her head to make it go away, letting out a distressed whimper. It wasn’t like that. She’d fallen from heights before and come out of it fine, other than being bruised and occasionally with scraped knees or elbows. Big pits of spikes didn’t exist in real life, at least not in her grandparents’ back garden. Still, as scary as playing Lara could be sometimes, it felt almost a little bit like preparation for when she finally did tackle that first level again.
“Daisy Laverick, get down from there now!” cried her mother in a muffled voice from high above her. The kit looked around in a panic to figure out where her voice was coming from and then looked up at the windows on the top floor. Her mum was looking out from the bedroom she and her step-dad had been staying in during the visit and looking outraged at the state of her daughter’s clothes. Daisy gave her a sheepish smile. “Sorryyyyyy…?” The older marten shook her head in disbelief and rolled her eyes. “You are-” she said from behind the glass, gesturing with a finger down at her. “-going in-” A running motion with two fingers, followed by lifting them and jumping into something. “-the bath!” A rapid sequence of miming turning on a tap, pouring bubble bath formula into an invisible bath, and then scrubbing herself.
Daisy giggled and put her paws up to her muzzle. It was good to see her mum in a light mood like this. It wasn’t often that she got to see her being her normal self instead of toning it down or being irritable and snappy because of her step-dad being nearby, and she assumed that he must have been downstairs and planted in front of the TV instead of anywhere he could see the events taking place. “O-” A thumbs up aimed at the window. “-kay!” A second thumbs up on the other side. Her mother smiled back at her and turned away from the window, disappearing as her kit eased herself down off the ‘cliff’ at the edge of the hill and went back inside to get clean.
~
Daisy huffed quietly. She knew this part was tricky, and every time she’d done it before it had taken several tries until she nailed the timing and gotten inside the hidden room. Hitting the action button to pull the lever and then immediately rolling on the spot to face in the other direction, she ran and jumped towards the section of wall that had slid upwards to reveal and doorway and then broke into a sprint as her feet touched the ground again. With a diving roll the treasure hunter launched under the gap just in time before it closed and shut her out, leaving her in a room with a lit fireplace and a multitude of artifacts and trophies from previous adventures. On the wall was a massive mounted dinosaur head, a T.rex roaring silently and looking every bit as menacing as it must have done when it was alive.
Daisy stared at the T.rex for a long while. She was lost in one of her fantasies again upon seeing it, that of discovering it locked in the basement or maybe outside on the racetrack and then turning it loose on all the enemies later in the game, snatching them up and swallowing them down in one bite and being invincible the whole time she was riding on it. She often thought of ways to improve the game or the things she could do while playing it, since she had discovered nearly every nook and cranny of the manor she could. She had even found a way of teleporting on to the roof by jumping against a corner until she no-clipped into it, and being able to run across the tops of hedge and walls and roofs made her feel even more untouchable. Nobody could get her up there, no adults and no butlers and no enemies.
She wished that she had the vixen’s strength, and coolness, and unflappable attitude. Facing her parents arguing and fighting and turning violent towards each other like they did made her sad and scared instead, and feel little as well. They at least calmed down and acted better towards her when she stepped in or came to them afterwards – or at least her mother did, given that her step-father mocked her and belittled her at every turn despite how young she was – but the sounds of screaming and crying and things being thrown still cut through to her core. Despite having not long turned five years old and being bigger than a good deal of the other cubs at school her age, she still felt like an overgrown toddler sometimes and it made her feel more than a little embarrassed about it. She still wet the bed sometimes, watched ‘baby shows’ as her step-dad had put it, and when no-one was present she would have conversations to herself between her favourite characters.
Daisy snorted out loud at the thoughts going through her head and tried to brush them away. Turning around to face where she came in again she went over to the button on the wall, pressed it twice to let herself out of the trophy room, and then left back into the lobby. She opened the front door and stepped outside, looking up at the mansion to work out where to go next. There was the obstacle course, and she’d be able to pick up the pistols and start chasing Lara’s butler around with them after that, but at the same time she didn’t want to do that this time. She looked over at the archway above the front door; there were two flat tiles on either side at the top of columns, and she knew a way of getting on to the roof of the house from there.
In the game, Lara ran up to the edge of the column and began jumping against it until she shifted further and further to the right, phasing into it and then teleporting on top. The marten angled herself against the next column and did it again, getting her to a ledge high above the ground and a short climb away from the top of the roof. Turning around to vault on top of it, and dangling from the edge as she shimmied across and above a lethally high drop just to show off a little, Daisy pulled up and walked the adventurer across the roof of her house slowly. The sounds of the butler below her began to fade as she moved further away from him, reaching the centre of the roof and letting her stand there.
She kind of wished that she was able to do this with her own house. From her bedroom window back up north she could have easily climbed out and on to the extension roof to sit on there, but she was aware of how decrepit the house was to begin with as well. It was, appropriately enough, slowly coming apart at the foundations. To Daisy it almost kind of felt like even the building itself was being poisoned by her step-dad’s presence in it, being that he had bought it and it had gone from old but functional to things breaking or getting worse with time. At the very least she still had her grandparents’ house and Lara’s home, though, and those felt like a safe space for her away from it.
The marten kit set the controller down for a moment and looked out of the bedroom window at the massive hill off in the distance. To her it looked like a mountain and she had called it as much, which had made her mum smile and the other one roll his eyes at her. She loved having it as the first thing she saw each morning whenever she got up, whether it was shrouded in fog or glowing from the sunlight beaming down on it. One day, she had decided, she was going to go up it and claim it in the Laverick name – the one her and her mother both shared. Daisy rest her elbows on the windowsill and gazed out at it, lost in thought. She couldn’t hear anything from downstairs, and it was beginning to make her think back on how this day in particular had started.