A/N: This is one of those fics that wrote itself. I'm still unsure if I want to continue this. If you have an opinion about this and leave it in a review, I'd be much obliged.
Warning: Dark imagery ahead. Trigger warning for abuse, self harm, violence, and enclosed spaces.
When Cecilia Carter tells her husband (three small boxes in the trash, a gallon's worth of orange juice, and a tiny unassuming pink plus every damn time), he smiles wide but doesn't say anything at all. She cries happily into the crook of his neck, and he pats her back, and wonders, idly, in the back of his mind, whether there is still another cold beer in the refrigerator.
It will be like this for the rest of their daughter's life.
0000
"There are so many ways to die," she says, one quiet afternoon in the backyard while her husband is at work. Her daughter gazes at her, uncomprehending. "Love is just one of them. Remember that," she says, but the little girl doesn't need to be told twice.
She always remembers what her mother tells her.
0000
They decide on the name 'Penny' just because it sounds nice, and ordinary. Penny Carter - the most beautiful name of the world, Cecilia says to her husband. He smiles, and nods, and smiles again when Cecilia catches his gaze.
Do you like it? she asks, voice cracking like it does when she cries.
He nods, once, and she places her right hand to belly, traces the rise and fall of firm flesh below the thin blue cloth of her t-shirt, and swallows. She clenches her hand, lets her nails dig into the fabric, pierce through the fibers and leave marks on her abdomen, tiny half-circles of pink in a wide curve.
It doesn't hurt - the sting too weak to even be bothersome. She wishes she bled, wishes for anything but this deafening silence.
When she lifts her head back up, he isn't looking at her (anywhere but her, anywhere but here).
0000
"Penny is such a boring name, mommy," says Penny, three, having reached the peak of her self-confidence for the rest of her lifetime. Penny isn't afraid of anything, not even her daddy, and it won't ever be like this ever again. She stuffs a red lollipop into the cavity of her mouth, swirls it once with her tongue, and fixes her mother with a expectant glare. "Why'd ya pick it if it was so boring?"
"Penny is a beautiful name," says Cecilia. "The most beautiful name in the world." She takes her daughter's hand. "Your daddy thinks so, too."
"No he doesn't," says the little girl. Her young eyes flash, her expression shifts, and it says: you're lying.
Cecilia swallows, and clenches her hand into a fist, wishes her nails to pierce, to cut, to do anything but produce the only slightly unpleasant pressure against the skin of her palm.
"You're right, sweetie. He doesn't. But remember this, and never forget it: there is always someone who will tell you that you're beautiful, and they're probably lying."
0000
The first time he holds his daughter, Penny Carter, she's asleep and looks remarkably like a baby. She hasn't really got hair, just a wisp of what may be brown, or perhaps red, and her eyes are closed so he doesn't know what color her eyes are. He supposes she looks like a him a bit (the contours of her nose, his snow-white hand on her pinkishly pale forehead) but he's not one to notices these things.
Cecilia shifts in her slumber in the hospital bed next to him, and he looks at his wife for a moment - the worried set of her jaw, the way her thumb twitches restlessly, the unnatural point of her elbows and hollows of her cheeks. She never did gain much weight during the pregnancy, and she looks as fragile a particularly bitter china doll. He imagines breaking her arm in two, the thin bones snapping and fracturing and crumbling until they stick out at all ends, puncturing her skin and leaving purple bruises. (She'd scream, he thinks, or maybe she'd just stare in that way she does - like she's saying I knew the whole fucking time before she'd gasp and die.)
He looks away, back to the smallish bundle in his arms. Penny Carter sleeps unaware.
I could kill her right now, he thinks, but doesn't. Something about this tiny person in his arms grounds him in a way Cecilia never did, a presence like gravity, binding him not to the earth but something else entirely, something somehow more important than bones or blood or bruises.
He's grateful, but he's never tell her that.
0000
When she is fifteen, Penny understands.
"You said...when I was younger, that everyone dies." She confronts her mother on the sun-porch, not cowering but no more the little girl with wide eyes and no fears. Her hair is reddish brown and droopy and she's wearing a ugly t-shirt with a jean skirt but her eyes are dark and determined and her mother almost doesn't recognize her.
Cecilia sits in her wheelchair, and smiles vacantly; thin, red, chapped lips spreading unnaturally over her teeth. "Everyone does," she whispers. "Even you, sweetie." Cecilia tilts her head, considering. "Soon, very soon, you'll fall in love - real, burning love," she says, and stares into the air in front of her, remembering, "and you'll love it in a sort of quiet, beautiful way. And it'll sneak into you, through your mouth, until the flame slips into your stomach. And it'll scorch everything, blacken every part of you until you're all hollowed out and very, very dead." She raises her hand to her mouth, a frail finger tracing the the slope of her dark red upper-lip. She raises her eyes to meet Penny's gaze, and her eyes are grey, like ash - the hollow shell after the fire.
Penny swallows, and clenches her hand, allowing her nails to bite into the palm of her hand; tiny half-moon scars stinging red and then fading quickly into the the pale grey of her skin. "You're depressed, aren't you? You never told me...but you are." Her voice quivers. "Don't lie."
"Very. I'm as fucked up as they come. And soon you'll be just like me, sweetie. Dead."
"I'm nothing like you," Penny says, quietly, coldly.
Her mother chuckles.
0000
She awakes with the distinct sensation of six feet of compressed dirt laying on top of her. She loses count of how many time she suffocates before she reaches the surface, dirty-nailed and bleeding, but definitely, painfully alive.