Obligatory (and thus Sardonic) Disclaimer: This is first and foremost an exercise. It heavily borrows from Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book and Kipling's The Jungle Book and unabashedly so, thus I do not claim any sort of ownership. So if you are at all connected with Harper's publishing -firstly, let me beg you to introduce me to Gaiman (trap him somewhere, leave me riddled clues to his whereabouts, something!)-let me remind you that he tends to look the other way when it comes to his works on the interwebs and their subsequent and bounteous admiration aka fanwork. As far as Kipling goes, the public owns that shit now.
Image cred: "ME: I belong to you (Preview)" by Tripower on deviantART
A/N to Past Readers: I have been fairly MIA regarding other stories on my page for a myriad of personal reasons. If you read Aftereffects, do not lose hope. The last chapter is written and will eventually be published. It's the final chapter-the final nail on the coffin of my baby on ffnet -so I am taking my sweet time with it. I'm sorry you have to wait. As far as LiaraFemshep One Shots and my other stuff, I continue to write those as well; I simply haven't written one that I merit ready. Thank you so much for your continued support! This starts out darker (much less fluffy) than my other pieces, but it will all in all be a playful piece.
A/N to All Readers: Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think ^^
Chapter One: Mother's Raid
It was seven o'clock, dusk, of a very warm evening on the human colony located in the Attican Traverse on a planet newly called Mindoir. In the near darkness, there was a hand outstretched, a finger playing at the trigger of a gun. The once stolen, now properly cared for claymore shotgun had a grip of melted down, but still lovingly polished salarian medallion platinum, and a blade at the end that was sharper than any omni's. If you were shot or cut by the gun, you would never know it.
The gun had done everything it was meant to do on the Mindoir colony, and both the blade and the grip were wet and rusty red from its work.
The door to the farmhouse was still open, just enough, where the gun and the woman who held it had strode in without hesitation, and the faint scent of metal wisped into the air from pools of blood turned to mist when the wind from the open door blew through the home. The woman, Mother, paused at the stairs. On her left pant leg, she cleaned the blade. She tore a section of cloth that hung over the couch so that she could clean the grip too. It might seem pointless to do so before the job was done, but she knew there was only one human left in the small farmhouse and it didn't have enough blood in it to truly dirty her gun. She had left the man in his bed, the woman on the hallway floor, surrounded by pictures of the new family in different outfits and posing in different positions. That only left the infant, a girl barely two Mindoir years of age. One more human and she was finished with this planet.
She tightened her hold on the grip. Mother was, if she were to pin herself to adjectives, industrious, professional, and thorough. She would not let herself leave until the job was done, the encroaching Human Alliance forces be damned. Her four eyes blinked up the stairs, each step enveloped in more darkness than the last.
The infant's room was at the top of the staircase. Mother hefted her legs up the stairs, her feet remarkably silent on the wooden steps considering the weight of her armor. She opened the freshly painted door, and stood at the entry. The darkness of her iris-less eyes reflected Mindoir's moon and the sheer curtains wafting in the planet's breeze above the window it shone through. Beneath the curtains, a wooden box of sorts with a miniature holo projection of the Sol system twirling and hovering above the box, held the child. There were slated sides to the box, making it appear more like a cage than a resting place. Mother leaned over the railing and saw the lumpy shape that she took to be the infant—too young to join the other survivors of her raid, now slaves, aboard her ship. She holstered her gun on her back and spied down at the thing.
The child had a scraggly patch on her head of red fur, and when she raised it from its bed, two big eyes with piercingly green irises stared back at her. She set it down on the floor, more curious than anything, about what it would do.
Little did Mother know that since it had learned the art of walking on its two feet, the child had become its mother and father's despair. Cabinets and drawers were means to explore—stepladders with which kitchen counters that held sharp cutting knives became a jungle gym, and electric outlets could be tested with the poke of a tiny, fat finger.
When the thing began to climb up Mother as if she were an arboreal plant, the batarian couldn't help a chuckle in the silent night. It struggled, fell, landing softly though gracelessly on its padded rear. It did this a few times until at last it reached Mother's gun. There, on the salarian medallion grip, it sunk its rear end and was apparently content to stay there playing with the grooves of Mother's armor. Mother's brow arched that the child had managed to completely bypass the blade and any number of other obstacles that should have ended the little beast for her.
As if drawing her gun, she reached back for the human over her shoulder and held her at an arm's length, examining her bit by bit. She sniffed it with her eight nostrils and hummed. It had been many raids, after all, since she had chosen a prize for herself—something to groom into one of her children, her slaving crew. Holding the girl like a sack of flour, apparently to the infant's delight—high-pitched, clipped sounds signaled laughter in humans, she knew—Mother left the farmhouse and Mindoir for her ship.