AN: It's been forever since I've posted to my old stomping grounds. This is a sort of sequel I suppose to a work of mine on AO3, though this is less focused on my SI and more on the people she meets. It's called "The Insanity of Ann McKay." I'm too scatterbrained and impatient to wait until I got to that point in that, so for now I'm making this a mini-series. Enjoy.
Divide
Her eyes have not left you from the moment you asked, "Can I hold the baby?"
Ben and his wife agreed to let you hold the small boy in your arms. Well, hands, technically speaking. The little human is so small, so frail, that it only takes two of your massive hands to hold him.
The unofficial auntie's expression is hard to decipher. She isn't smiling, or scowling, or wrinkling that protruding nose as humans do when they're disgusted. She isn't doing anything, just… staring.
It grates on your nerves. On Khoros, people don't just stare for no reason, and you doubt humans would be much different. You were never one to beat around the bush,
"What's your problem?"
She blinked, but her expression didn't change. The child's parents looked between you and Ann nervously; did she have some sort of reputation they didn't inform you about? Her words were bland, but you could barely pick up an edge to them,
"Nothing."
"You haven't taken your eyes off of me since I asked to hold Kenny."
"He's delicate, somebody needs to keep an eye on him."
She speaks very matter-of-factly, as if she knows better than you do. She's now taken her eyes off of your face and focused on the baby, and you suddenly realize why: she thinks you're going to break him.
Naturally, you're offended, "Oh my gods, you think I would hurt him?!"
It is a capital sin and felony to hurt such a young child, and it's a personal insult to a woman's honor to imply that she would commit such an act. To rub even more salt in the wound, to think that a woman would betray the trust instilled in her by some of her closest allies, including an ex-fiancé. You are beyond shocked.
She, on the other hand, seems a little bit surprised. Those fuzzy light eyebrows twitch up, and her mouth quirks in – I shit you not – relief. Her expression of pleasant surprise lasts for barely a second, but it's enough to get your blood boiling. What she says next is arguably even worse,
"Ah, good. I was worried there for a moment."
"You're serious!"
Her brow furrowed, and her face scrunched up in confusion, "Why wouldn't I be? This is a human child we're talking about."
"You would think I would hurt a baby?! What's wrong with you?"
"Want a list?" she huffs a brief laugh, but once again it's back in the shell. You bear your teeth and scowl at her, carefully handing the wiggling bundle to the waiting arms of his mother. Ben's hand is nervously twitching for the Omnitrix, and the tan woman backs away a tad.
"Why the hell would you think such a thing?"
"You have been briefed on me before, yes?" she asks, quirking her head a little but not giving you any room to answer, "If so, you should know that I have seen everything from Ben's childhood leading up to his teen years from an almost bird's eye point of view. And that includes when you arrived."
You didn't see how this was relevant. The humans you've fought were no older than you at the time.
"Your point is?"
"When your father found this planet, do you remember what he threatened to do if your then-fiancé was not found?"
"He said he would destroy the planet."
"Along with every man, woman, and child that lived there," she ended on a sour note, her emotions finally showing on her face. You could tell she was angry, maybe even a little disgusted, and Dare-I-say even frightened. Not a hint of trust for you.
"This is ridiculous," you scoffed, "it's just a tradition to threaten people if your daughter's husband doesn't show for the wedding."
"But if the people on your planet comply with such a threat, does that not mean that you never go through with it?" She's probably gone through this in her head a million times, "You people have a certain fondness for forcing your problems out; you even use it in your justice system."
"Oh, so you just have a problem with Tetramands, huh?!"
"To be fair, I don't trust most people, period. I tend to trust aliens even less so, but it isn't without it's reasons."
Your left eyes twitch angrily at her flat tone. How could someone be so tactless and blunt about this? How could someone be so blindly discriminate? The human divergent continued,
"Look at it this way, the human element tends to screw up experiments all the time. You can't predict how precisely a person's thought process goes. There's a similar thing with animals, trained and wild alike. Now imagine mixing those two into what I call the 'alien element.'
"A horrible combination of unpredictable sentient thought processes and incredibly foreign instincts, with the added confusion of extremely differing cultures and capabilities."
"What," Ben muttered, having gotten lost in his arguable friend's lecture. Ann rolled her eyes, and put it out simpler, at least in her mind,
"There's way too many unknowns to not be at least a little careful, and what little data I have of her is not exactly in Looma's favor. I know nothing of how she thinks, acts, or feels, and I don't want to figure out the hard way what happens when you stick a young delicate human child in the hands of a warrior princess who was nearly responsible for xenocide against that child's species."
Ann spoke like a Gatling gun, and her tone was just the same. You have no idea what to say, but Ben tried to diffuse the palpable tension, "Looma, you might want to close your mouth before you catch a bug in it."
His shaky laugh broke you out of your stupor. You sigh heavily, "You're a bitch, you know that?"
Ann shrugged, "Meh. I'm not doing this for fun."
"And what do you suppose I do about that? Hm?"
"I dunno," Ann said flippantly, "But you may want to lower your voice."
"Or what?!"
The tiny whining sound from behind her grated on both yours and her heartstrings. The human female, Kenny's mother, was trying to calm the little thing down, patting his back and shooshing him. Ann frowned for real this time, speaking lowly,
"If I must justify my caution, so be it, but it doesn't mean I will be lenient. I don't care about how xenophobic I look or how much it may hurt me or others; as long as things are secure, I don't care. I'm sure you would be the same if you were as close to the bottom of the galactic hierarchy as humans are."
"Oh my God, Looma, I'm so sorry for what happened back there!"
You don't understand why he's apologizing on Ann's behalf, "It's not your fault, it's hers."
Ben looks like he's run across the planet a hundred times while simultaneously punching criminals the whole way through. His hairs sticking to his head and disheveled, he hasn't shaven in probably days, and he's got the kinds of dark circles under his eyes that your father mentioned to be "a mark of a new father." The poor man just looks beat to you. He sighs, running a hand over his face,
"You don't understand. She's... different. Even more so than normal.
"Ann's got serious issues. Ones that make her come off as even more hostile than she probably intends to. Uh... How's the mental healthcare system on your planet?"
You blink in confusion, "It exists."
"Then you should know that there are sicknesses and wounds outside of the physical kind," he ran a hand through his hair, "Not anything that's been diagnosed, but it's been there even before she arrived to this world. She does care, she really does, but she's absolute shit at expressing it. She gets bossy when she's worried, and takes things into her own hands when she doesn't trust that anyone else will, which is a lot..."
"Did something happen?" You ask, curious as to what could damage a human so deeply as to inflict upon the mind. Most mental conditions on your planet often came from particularly gruesome battles or hardships; anything else was more a personality thing. Ben shrugged,
"Uh, it's more everything happened. She's told me on multiple occasions that her family was 'cursed to fuck up their own kids in such a way that they can't be prosecuted for it.' Add in the fact that she was ripped from her home dimension before she could get help and... Her mental state isn't the greatest. Whatever went on back there gave her a really warped sense of right and wrong, and you just faced the ass-end of it. I've gotta warn you, she isn't going to apologize unless she's forced, and even then she's going to tell you point blank that she doesn't mean it."
You whistle lowly, if only because it was all you could come up with. So it's one of those deals. Can't say you didn't kind of expect it; humans rarely report that sort of thing. For whatever reason, they tended to lean towards "look good" rather than "do good." Ben smiles wearily, "She'll cool down if she sees that you're not a threat. Then she'll be apathetic to you, but it's better than Aunt Big Brother."
You lower one of your upper eyes in a mimicry of how humans would quirk an eyebrow, and Ben chuckles, "Ah, it's a reference. It means someone or something that's insanely vigilant to the point of invading privacy." You nod, and ask, "So, I have to put up with your sick friend?"
"Friend is one way to put it. And don't call her 'sick,' she gets really fussy over details like that. She will concede to words like 'deranged,' 'twisted,' and 'disturbed,' though. She's not that bad once she starts trusting you, I promise."