Title: The Snowglobe
Fandom(s): The Rugrats, All Grown Up
Characters/Pairings: Lil, Phil, Incestuous undertones
Rating: R
Genre: Angst, tragedy
Warnings: Major character death, suicide attempt, adult themes
Summary: She would always be a twin; time could do nothing to change that.
A/N: I don't own the rights to The Rugrats or All Grown Up. I am simply borrowing some characters and concepts for non-profit creative purposes.
"So why did this happen?"
It was her social worker's favourite phrase. No accusations, just an innocent plea for enlightenment. It was condescending and unnecessary, but that wasn't to say that sometimes Lil didn't wonder where she stood. If there was no God, it was only her who stood outside of time and watched the world go by.
There was no time on those white hills, blue valleys and red rivers. There was no time on the surface of the water where the razor blade lilted in her unfurling fingers and the bubbles glistened like large irregular crystals. Her heartbeat rammed against her chest like a shark, but the landscape above was still and timeless.
Why did it happen? Because the lights went out.
That was how they had taken Phil.
Nobody believed her when she said she remembered the first year of her life. The earliest moment she remembered, preceded only by a haze of smiles and bright plastic, was bath-time, albeit a pastiche of many bath-times. But the sensation marked the zenith of her experience of twinhood. The bath was bigger back then, a smiley white, and spawning chunky, sleeve-rolled arms that tipped the water and kneaded them clean. Them. The extension of her own limbs to those of another snowy-skinned creature; the absolute reflection of everything she felt. And feelings leapt and flowed between them. Feelings didn't pool stagnantly inside her back then.
The one difference between them - the one her brother probed absent-mindedly - was, to Lil, a happy gimmick. Blue and Pink. A and B. Boy and girl. It was like heaven to have such celebrated individuality in the safe hub of unity that was twinhood.
And there was the other thing. Her mind was a little different. Unbeknown to anyone, a seed of psychosis lingered in the pleasant dome of her batch-baby head.
On a winter's evening, mommy had planted a kiss on each head and told her squirts g'night. That light switch had snapped off, and the landing light receded into a sliver of gold. And mommy's door thumped closed, cutting her absent natter at Daddy clean off.
Silence fell, and gathered character. It dripped on each of the stairs. It began as a whisper and peaked into a high-pitched wail. This intense entity was almost always turning the door handle and crawling up to Lil. It steamed a spot with its alien consciousness, and when Lil closed her eyes and huddled closer to Phil it was there watching.
"Philip, I-I-I think..." Dare she say it? Saying it made it real. But this was her brother next to her, and telling him was the same as thinking. She brought her dry mouth close to his ear. "There's - something - here."
Phil grunted and murmured, "whaddyaatalkinboutLillian..."
Paradoxically, his failure to sense this unequivocal threat had the effect of making her more sure.
"We're not alone in here, Phil..."
"You'recrazy. Gosleep."
Her stomach dropped as she comprehended. Every time he doubted her, that thing moved closer. It was feeding off the space between them.
And she then grabbed him, ploughing through her terror in a moment of passion as though she were jumping a void. To which he responded with a sharp yelp, and shoved her off of him, sending her rolling on her other side, back into barren enemy territory.
From that point on, her nights were spent in fear. In the darkness, the furniture and toys of their beloved room were reduced to a skeleton of outlines, like the fine silk thread of an immense black web in which she found herself paralysed. She endured the endless approach of her predator with her eyes screwed shut, a mile apart from Phil. One night she had cried and tugged at Mommy's sweater, wailing when the light was out. Mommy understood and kept the light on, only coming to turn it off when she was sure the twins were asleep. But then Lil would wake up, roused gently by the sinking weight of her solitude, and that presence was back. It was made of nothing; no sounds, no sightings - simply the inability to switch off that one niggling thought, try as she might, that they were not alone in the bedroom.
She paddled in a half-sleep in which fear almost became normal, her fluttering heart and crippling loneliness following her to lighter places. She began to have dreams of Phil sinking into the mattress, becoming a snoring, grunting hill that stretched on for miles. In those dreams, she shivered beneath the shallow shelter he afforded her, and as she felt herself emerging from her sleep and once again hitting the darkness, her terror was paramount, and she found herself frantically begging to whatever was breathing on her back.
She only begged for herself.
"Take him!" She thought as she felt that presence heaving over her, hating Phil for ever doubting her, hating him for allowing this thing to grow, for turning into a stone at night while it was all she could do not to be snatched away.
And then one morning, as she lay in a cold sweat, the light of dawn landed on the infant next to her, striped grey with the bars of the cot. One little fist was clutched futilely, as if something had occurred to him in his dreams. Lil just stared, too tired to question the motionless doll anymore than she would question her shadow. Then Mommy came in, and she watched the collection of soft parts prodded and knocked gently from side to side, and heard her mother's strangled cry of Phil! and she wondered momentarily why she didn't see her brother before her, until she realised it was because he'd been taken long before, and she had watched him go, and willed it.