This is horrifically sad, for the most part. I'm sorry. Blame bazwillendinflames and cyarra97 on Tumblr for giving me the idea about the soup.
The walk back to Tanya's house is silent.
Tanya is sort of glad for that, if only because she's not sure how much more of Quill's kindness she would be able to withstand, but she also doesn't want to deal with Quill's usual way of treating teenagers, either.
The adrenaline of the battle has faded. In its place is a numbness, a numbness that is almost familiar from the last time that Tanya lost a parent.
They reach the house and go inside. Quill lingers by the door as Jarvis and Damon appear and run to Tanya.
Jarvis and Damon don't know yet, not everything. There's no way they could, but they have clearly worked out enough to know that something terrible has happened, to know that they are so lucky to be together and alive.
They wrap Tanya in a tight embrace, and she feels her legs give out as she hugs them back, a fresh set of tears escaping her as she sobs in their arms.
"What happened?" Damon asks eventually. "Tanya, your bedroom door, there's blood-"
Tanya immediately pushes away from them, walks on shaky legs towards her room as if in a trance, and finds herself staring at the splatter pattern. The image is burned into her mind, playing over and over, the moment when her fragile world had shattered, the moment Corakinus' blade had driven through her mother's body like it was nothing.
"She's gone," she manages to choke out, "he killed her. The thing that tried to attack you, in the library, he killed Mum. She's gone."
"What?" Jarvis looks at her with disbelief.
Damon is more silent, more somber. Like he'd suspected, somehow.
Tanya can't even look at them. Her chest aches, burns, which shouldn't be possible because it also feels like there's nothing there at all. Nothing keeping her body going, because why should it, without the person that gave it life in the first place?
Her eyes fall on the bowl of soup, still sitting on the desk by her homework, abandoned. The last meal her mother had ever made her. Tanya hadn't even touched it. Tanya approaches it, and lifts the bowl with shaking hands. She thinks about lifting it higher, to her lips, to taste her mother's final labours.
Except it wasn't really her mother's final labour at all. That had been her words, her kind words as she'd tried to understand even though Tanya had told her nothing.
Words Tanya had ignored. Worse than ignored: she'd snapped at Vivian, so consumed with the idea that her mother didn't understand, that her words meant nothing. Her mother had been trying to help her, touching her shoulders and hair, doing everything she could to gently reassure her that things would be okay. Tanya had shrugged her hands off.
Now, Tanya feels guilt and self-hatred rise in her throat.
She stares at the bowl of soup in her hands, and it feels like a sick joke. She doesn't deserve it, she doesn't deserve anything from the mother she has failed so horrifically.
She doesn't realise she's thrown the bowl against the wall, doesn't realise she's screaming and reaching for something else to smash, until Quill's arms are around her from behind, pinning her arms to her sides.
"Let go of me, Quill!" Tanya yells.
"No," Quill replies, voice firm.
Tanya stares at the broken bowl of soup, at the mess it's made of her carpet. What has she done? How could she do this? Destroy the last thing her mother ever made for her?
"Why did I do that?" Tanya asks, feeling tears stream down her face. "Let me go, there's still some in that unbroken half, I don't even know what flavour it is, it's the last thing she made for me, I need to eat it-"
Damon moves to pick up the unbroken half of the bowl, leaves the room with it, and Tanya can't rest until he returns with the small remainder of the soup in a new bowl, identical to the other one. The soup is steaming.
"No, it has to be cold, I'm the one that let it go cold," Tanya says, shaking her head.
"Okay, we'll let it go cold again," Damon replies, gently, putting the bowl on the desk.
Tanya can still feel her body shaking. She still wants to rage, to break things, which is probably why Quill hasn't let go of her yet.
"Take a deep breath, and let it out," Quill tells her, and Tanya stops struggling against her, and does as she's told.
She turns and sees Jarvis still in the doorway. It nearly breaks her all over again, seeing the look on his face as he realises, much later than his twin, that what Tanya said is the truth. He looks at the blood and flinches away from it, before disappearing off towards the kitchen.
"Look, it's not that I don't completely understand the desire to smash everything around you in a fit of rage, because believe me, I do," Quill says to Tanya, "but I get the idea that a lot of the things around you are high in personal value and difficult to replace in that regard. So are you calm? Can I let go of you? Will your personal possessions be safe?"
"Yeah," Tanya mutters, all at once feeling exhausted down to the very bone.
Quill releases her, and Tanya moves to sit on the edge of her bed. Quill sits with her, eyeing her with a scrutiny that makes Tanya think that Quill doesn't trust her to not start going on a rampage again.
Tanya doesn't feel like screaming anymore. She just buries her face in Quill's shoulder, and sobs quietly.
Quill, after a solid ten seconds of being completely frozen, defrosts some and sighs, and makes no other noise or movement of protest. On the contrary, her hand strokes over Tanya's braids, making Tanya shiver, because it's an affirmation she needs so badly.
Jarvis returns from the kitchen not long after, with a bucket and a sponge in hand, and stares at the door with a hesitant, stricken expression.
"No," Quill says, getting up (and looking relieved for an excuse to get away from Tanya and her emotions, or rather, the physical touch they had incited). She takes the bucket and sponge from his hands. "Make some food for yourselves. That, or call someone. Your families are usually fairly large, correct? Who should you be calling?"
"Grandmother," Damon says, voice quiet. "Mum's mother."
"Yeah," Tanya agrees. "She's… in charge. Of everything."
"Good, well, you, sensible one, you do that," Quill says to Damon, before turning to Jarvis. "You, other one. You make some food."
With that, she starts cleaning the blood off the door, scrubbing vigorously.
"But what do I tell her?" Damon asks. "I don't even know what happened."
"It was an alien king called Corakinus, the leader of a race called the Shadowkin," Quill says without looking at him, thoroughly focused on her task. "They were a brute-ish species who believed they were an evolutionary mistake despised by all creation, and essentially wanted to make the universe pay for that. They slaughtered whole worlds. They tried to take this one too. Your sister, myself, and a few others, stopped them. The Shadowkin are all dead, and the souls of my people can finally rest in peace."
"Your people?" Jarvis looks at her curiously.
"Yeah, um… she's an alien too," Tanya says sheepishly. "But a nice one."
"I'm not nice," Quill mutters, but it's rather half-hearted. "But I don't have any wish to conquer this planet or, presently, murder anyone who isn't your disgusting prime minister, so I suppose the point stands."
"Okay," Damon says, staring between them and looking hopelessly lost. "But I can't tell grandmother that."
"And there's no body, what are we going to tell her about why there's no body," Tanya asks, nausea seizing her gut.
"There must be some kind of excuse we can come up with, one that would explain there not being one," Jarvis says, voice hollow.
"Explosion," Quill says.
Tanya blinks at her. "But there wasn't an explosion. Not anywhere near here."
Quill throws the sponge into the bucket. "Give me fifteen minutes and there will have been," she says flatly, before heading for the front door.
"Wait, Quill," Tanya says, alarmed.
"Be back in half an hour-"
"Quill, no!"
"Wait, is she serious?" Jarvis asks, frowning and looking between both of his siblings. Damon shrugs, but Tanya is already on her feet and chasing after the alien madwoman.
"Quill," Tanya says, catching Quill's arm when she's halfway out of the door. "You don't need to blow up anything for me."
"It's not just for you, Ram needs an excuse for this father too, and I haven't had an excuse to blow anything up in ages," Quill says, her seriousness shifting to let in a little grin. "This is multipurpose."
Tanya stares at her, exasperated more than anything else. "Are you sure this is a good idea?"
"It's a brilliant idea. Blowing things up always worked for me."
"Until you got arrested and enslaved."
"Well, yeah, alright, but before that."
Tanya is sure that she can think of other reasons this is a bad idea. However, it could be the trauma talking, but Quill's starting to sound like she's making a lot of sense.
"Please just… be sensible about it, and make sure the only injuries are the two fake deaths, okay?" Tanya asks.
"Of course."
"Promise."
Quill rolls her eyes and yanks her arm out of Tanya's grip. "I promise," she says, voice mocking. "I'll be back in half an hour."
Tanya is left with no choice but to let her go, and so she returns to her bed and gives her brothers a kind of helpless shrug.
"So, she's kinda hardcore, huh," Damon says.
Jarvis, returning from the kitchen, scoffs. "Try, actually insane."
"Hey, at least she's on our side," Damon argues, "and I don't see anyone else lining up to help us with the fact that our mum just got killed by an alien, and we've got to deal with that and keep it a secret! How the hell are we meant to deal with this? Any of this? We're orphans now, man! Do you even realise that? Both of our parents are dead-"
"Yeah, I do realise that, but I don't necessarily think blowing something up is the best way to deal with this!"
"Shut up, both of you!" Tanya shouts, tears pricking her eyes. "Just shut up. We're dealing with this. Me and Quill, because we're the ones that know how. We sort everything out first. We deal with the rest of it later; the emotions, the grieving, all of that shit, we do it later. We have to get through this first. We have to get our stories straight, we have to be able to make this normal."
They both stare at her.
"When did you get so grown up?" Damon asks. It's not malicious. It's awed.
"Probably when I watched an evil alien warlord king drive a deadly shadow sword through our mum's chest, killing her mid-sentence," Tanya replies darkly.
Jarvis turns a bit green, and runs in the direction of the bathroom. Damon just stares at Tanya with shock and moves to sit by her.
"I'm sorry," he says. "I've never been any good at this stuff. You know me. I rush into solutions before I even really know the problem. It took me even longer to talk about Dad than it took you. Jarvis is the one who actually knows how to deal with his emotions, you know?"
Tanya almost laughs, and instead sniffs as she nods. Damon puts his arm around her, and she leans into his warm, comforting form.
Jarvis eventually wanders back in, with a plate full of pizza that could probably have used at least another five minutes in the oven.
"It was in the freezer, seemed easy," he says, and he sits on Tanya's other side, and with the plate on Tanya's lap, the three of them quickly demolish the slightly undercooked food.
Tanya doesn't feel like she ever wants to eat again, but the pizza still mostly tastes good, even if she can't get the usual joy out of it. It still helps, a little. That's what all of this is. It's about each little step to being a little more okay than you were a minute ago. She knows this. She's done it before.
They don't talk. The Adeola siblings are good at not talking. It's the strangest sense of deja vu, sitting together on a bed - though it had been Damon's, last time - and trying to get their heads around something as huge as a parent being gone.
It's both better and worse. Better, because at least they've been through it before, and theoretically know they can make it out the other side. Worse, however, so much worse, because it had been disorientating the first time, but now they truly are lost - three lost siblings, three orphans now alone in a house that seems too big and too small all at once.
After a while, Damon goes to the door, picks up the sponge from the bucket, and takes up the job of cleaning away the blood splatters where Quill had left off. Jarvis stares resolutely at the floor.
Tanya finds that she can't watch Damon cleaning. It only makes the memory flash through her mind again on repeat. She curls up on the bed, not crying, not speaking, not doing anything. She wishes she were doing something - the emptiness is the worst part, it always was, and she'd been rid of it, she'd finally escaped it after the Lankin, mostly, but now here she is again.
The only time she's felt anything other than rage or grief or emptiness, since her mother died, is when she had been fighting alongside Quill.
Tanya realises, oddly, that she expects to feel better when Quill has returned. Which makes no sense, because it's Quill, and the concept of expecting comfort of any kind from a prickly alien - possibly in more ways than one, now that Tanya recalls something Charlie had once said about her people having quills - is ridiculous, surely.
And yet, when she hears the door open, Tanya's heart leaps in her chest, just a little.
"You know, it's a shame, that old community centre was starting to grow on me, with all that ugly pink paint, too bad about that gas leak," Quill says as she comes to stand in the doorway and lean against the frame opposite Damon. She grins. "It made a very satisfying, if small, boom. I'd missed that."
"It all went okay?"
"You'll need to think of some halfway decent idea for why Varun Singh and your mother were the only two people there, but otherwise, yes."
Tanya nods. "We'll work something out. It's enough for now, for telling Grandmother. Damon, can you-"
"Yeah, I'm almost done with this," Damon replies.
Quill frowns at him. "I can take that back now, if you-"
"No, I've got it," he says, firmly enough that Quill doesn't push it. She lingers in the doorway instead, visibly uncomfortable. Tanya considers inviting her to sit on the bed like before, but that seems weird, somehow.
Jarvis has finally looked up from the floor, and is regarding Quill curiously. "You're… pregnant."
"Yes."
"You weren't pregnant last week."
"No."
"... okay," Jarvis says, with a furrowed brow, apparently wisely deciding that it's just easier to not worry about that particular detail right now.
Damon glances behind him, at Quill's rounded stomach, says fuck in an emphatic whisper, then visibly shoves his bemusement aside to return to his task of cleaning the door.
Tanya can always fill them in later, if it comes up, but for the moment, knowing about how Quill had sex with an alien shapeshifter in a weird alien weapon of mass destruction that's bigger on the inside, would just be too much for both of them, probably.
Words from earlier replay in Tanya's mind, the ones that had informed Tanya as to who the parent of Quill's baby is.
Turns out fucking a shapeshifter, in a place that has the mystical power to give your body a temporal kick forward, can have consequences.
She'd been too busy worrying about her brothers at the time to really take it in, having just arrived at the school, but now the true weirdness of Quill's situation starts to set in.
Not that Quill seems particularly bothered, for someone who has woken up from a six day nap to a strange, accelerated pregnancy. Her hand rests easily on her stomach as she leans against the doorway and surveys the room and its occupants.
Yeah, Tanya is going to have to file Quill's pregnancy as something to find super weird and possibly disturbing later.
Damon finishes cleaning the door, and leaves to call their grandmother now that they've gotten their fake story straight. (Gas leak at the community centre, a tragic explosion.) Jarvis, apparently unable to just sit still while Damon does something so horrible, gets up and heads to the kitchen, mumbling something about needing more food.
Quill lets out a tiny breath, once she and Tanya are left alone. Tanya supposes that she doesn't have a lot of reason to be comfortable around strangers. Or most people, really.
"Why are you still here?" Tanya asks Quill, who has stepped into her room and started examining Damon's handiwork on the door.
Quill doesn't turn around to look at her. "You asked me to be."
"So are you walking me home, then?"
"If that's what you need from me."
"Yes, please."
"Very well. Come on then."
"Well, yeah, but I didn't ask you to stay. I didn't ask you to do any of… any of this," Tanya says, more confused the more she thinks about it. "You're still being kind. But I still don't understand why."
Quill finally looks around. Her face is solemn. "My loyalty is difficult to win. But once you have it, it would take a great betrayal for you to lose it. We stood together. Fought together."
"But you were being kind before that. So, how did I win it? When?"
"I don't know," Quill says, some of her hard mask falling away to reveal something softer, just for a brief while. "It's like… it's like that book you're all so obsessed with. The one about pride and all those fancy parties and so many fucking social rules I nearly tore my hair out."
Tanya stares at her blankly. "What?"
Quill sighs, before speaking with a strange tone to her voice that made Tanya realise she was quoting something. "I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun."
It should be strange, or wrong, hearing a romantic quote applied to their completely different situation. But it actually takes up in Tanya's chest and feels right. It's impossible to work out when Tanya had started thinking of Quill as someone sympathetic, as someone she looks up to. She just does, and knows she didn't before Prom, and that it had to have happened somewhere along the way.
"Yeah," Tanya says. "Yeah, I know what you mean."
"You saw me as a person when very few people did," Quill continues, and a strange little chuckle escapes her. "You went up against Charles to defend me! I couldn't believe it when you told me that."
"Don't really think I should get an award for basic human decency," Tanya replies, making a face.
"Do you see me shoving one of those ugly little gold things into your hands?" Quill retorts, and Tanya laughs, just for a moment. "It's not so much a commendation for your actions as a commentary on the failings of so many others. And most of those others weren't human, regardless."
Tanya sobers again at the thought of the life Quill has endured, the life she knows so little about, but that seems awful even just from what she can put together with the scraps of information she does have.
And at the centre of all of that… Charlie.
"Are you going to kill him?" Tanya asks.
"Kill who?" Quill asks, blinking at her.
"Charlie. I kind of… always got the idea you wanted to. Except you needed him for the Cabinet. But then you saved his life back there. I guess I… don't really know why you did that."
Quill's jaw clenches. Tanya realises that it's very possible that Quill herself doesn't know why she saved him, either.
"I have a front row seat for watching him suffer, why would I kill him?" Quill says in the end, shrugging. "I'd lose more than I would gain."
Tanya doesn't quite know how to reply, doesn't even know if she believes Quill, so she just remains silent. Quill isn't forthcoming either, and so the silence stretches out between them until Tanya isn't sure if she can bear it much longer.
"I should probably get back to the others," Quill says eventually. She sounds at least a little reluctant.
Tanya thinks about who is waiting for her back at the house. "Yeah, I guess you've got… a lot to talk about."
Quill nods. "We'll see each other again soon."
"Okay. Yeah."
"Are the three of you going to be alright?"
"Yeah, we will," Tanya says. "I'll get in touch if we aren't, for some reason, but even if Grandmother can't get here straight away, we're not kids, we can look after ourselves."
"Good," Quill replies. "Alright. Goodbye. You fought well today."
With that, she leaves, before Tanya can even say goodbye. And just like that, Tanya is alone. Alone in her bedroom, like she'd been right after it happened, when her mother's blood had still shone on the door, only seconds old.
Tanya gets up and crosses to the desk, and dips a finger in the bowl there.
The soup is cold.
She lifts the bowl to her lips, smiling a little at the thought of how her mother would scold her for the lack of proper table manners, and drinks from the bowl. The flavour is rich and unique - a family recipe that Tanya recognises, not Tanya's favourite but still one of the good ones.
She finishes the soup all too quickly because there isn't much of it, thanks to her little fit. She licks the sides of the bowl, getting every last drop left, but it still isn't enough. She suspects not even the whole bowl would have been.
That's how Damon and Jarvis find her, standing there, crying into the now empty bowl. They pull her into another hug, and she cries for the soup and for their mother and for them and for Ram and for Quill and maybe even for Charlie.
That night, with their grandmother scheduled to arrive in the early morning, the Adeola siblings do not sleep in their individual beds.
Tanya sleeps between Damon and Jarvis, the three of them crammed into her bed like when they were little kids, none of them even for a moment able to entertain the idea of being apart tonight.
Damon snores, and Jarvis sleep mumbles. That's okay. The three of them are what is left in this household, and silence will not claim it.
Thanks for reading, and I'm sorry! Let me know what you thought!