AN - Also posted on AO3 under the same name, Potterology.
At two, she can read; at four she is mastering arithmetic even her father cannot quite wrap his tiny mind around; at six, she grows tired of adults and their condescending wonder, asking her to quote paragraphs from her mother's books or recite her father's poetry; and at the ripe old age of seven, she feels the boiling rage which will go on to define the majority of her childhood for the first time. It is the Morgan bi-annual family picnic and in the kitchen her 'aunt' Peggy, really a cousin on her mothers side, laments Mother Nature promoting Alice's brain rather than her looks. No one's saying she's not a bright spark, but come on. Beauty pageants are clearly not in her future.
Alice, standing out in the hall, clenches her hands into fists until they turn white and the muscles start to cramp; the sound of her small knuckles cracking gives her away and the door swings open. Her eyes are damp but not for the reasons her mother mistakes as she kneels in front of her daughter, hushing and hugging and being everything Alice despises.
Cretin. Peggy's comments on her physical appearance do not bother her. What bothers her is the sheer audacity of the woman to believe she had a right to comment in the first place. By what right does the plankton judge the shark? In what universe does the opinion of someone who barely registers a rung above well-organised pond life on the evolutionary ladder matter to someone like her? In the circle of her mothers arms, she can do little more than seethe quietly, already devising a plan of bloody, bloody murder and understanding exactly what it meant to truly taste hatred.
It becomes a slippery slope for there on in.
At nine, she proves tangent minus 1x. It is the beginning of the end for Douglas and Laura Morgan. It is also around the time Alice decides the laws of mathematics and humanity are boring; up tilts her head and she decides crushing forces of unnatural nature, combined with the open eternity as promised by the stars is so much more worthy of her time.
Ten, eleven and twelve are comparatively unimpressive once she hits thirteen and travels off to Oxford, but they are the years in which her parents rack up a decidedly impressive set of transgressions against her dignity and patience. Embarrassing interviews with Richard and Judy are followed by lunches with parents of gifted, but sadly ordinary, plebeians of her own age. They masquerade family gatherings and smug parents nights as socialisation for their unsocial daughter, fooling precisely nobody, and from then onwards Alice considers the entire concept of brazen bragging simply pedestrian, preferring a more subtle approach of dropped hints and cutting remarks.
Brilliance is recognised and remembered, not blurted out and nodded at.
Oxford is blissfully welcome, a breath of well-educated, encouraging air. With the crippling presence of her parents gone, she can finally be free to stretch her metaphorical mental legs and it takes barely a month for her to catch up to even the brightest of students, weeks more to outstrip them completely. Nothing trips her up but everything challenges, she absorbs, processes and catalogues faster than her professors can provide material. Only one man is the exception. Professor Jacob Kent.
Ah, Jacob. His mind is a canvas full of painted wonder; his intelligence, while not quite enough to topple her own intellect, is striking and unlike anyone she has encountered; they do not speak of classic literature or great works of art, as is the cliche, rather the mysteries and unfathomable consequences of black holes; of the uncertainty principle and phase space; of fermions and bosons and Einstein. At this point she has only read about orgasms, but from what she feels discussing Newton's third law, she imagines she must be close.
After a year of heated debate, she decides enough is enough - close is not cutting it anymore, she wants to really feel it and science is all about experimentation. And so, at fourteen, her v-card is clocked out by a slightly predatory, thirty-eight year old physics professor. The pain lasts for days but the exhaustive glory feels as if it possesses more power than the combined force of every star in the galaxy.
She wants to strip the skin from his body and wear it. She wants to crack open his skull and dig her hands into the brain underneath, really push her nails in and feel the very essence of him run through her fingers. She wants to absorb him from the inside out. Lectures are spent in the front row, staring so solidly at the back of his head she goes cross-eyed on more than one occasion.
Without warning, however, it all stops. A few days after their encounter, she approaches him after one such lecture, tentatively fingering the spine of a textbook. But he doesn't look up. There are no more late-night after lecture discussions. No more books loaned from his personal library. No more handwritten notes on the Pauli exclusion principle. He makes it painfully clear she no longer holds any more significance in his life than any one of her random, fellow scholars.
Violence for violence sake has never impressed her, but as a warning it is decidedly effective. She breaks into his home one night and nails his pure-bred, oversized pitbull to the wall. Curiously, he resigns his position two days later. His replacement is an equally enthralling woman, Melissa, but it is just not the same.
At sixteen, she dyes her hair red with the help of a girl who dresses like a cathouse whore named Cassie. It is from her Alice learns a lifelong lesson: red lipstick makes everything seem dangerous. At eighteen, she earns her PhD. Her parents throw a barbeque and an impromptu get together of all their friends and neighbours, none of whom Alice recognises or likes. By now she is starting to realise her parents have no concept of subtlety. And that she would very much like to murder them.
Nineteen and twenty are spent oversexed and under appreciated. Leaps and bounds are made: she is published in every physics journal in Britain at one point or another in the following year and she discovers the Anthropic Principle, deciding all life is simply matter. At twenty-one she meets Natalie, who hangs herself in their apartment. For an hour, Alice stares up at the blue, eye-bulging body wondering if she should cut her down or leave her up there and study the effects of decay. She calls the police eventually, her unwillingness to clean Natalie's rotting bowel off the carpet winning out against her scientific interest.
At twenty-four, Jacob Kent is arrested for possessing child-pornography. The police receive an anonymous tip about a website set up by him full of troubling forum messages. She sends him a postcard with the imprint of her lips, a short note underneath: No one likes a kiddie fiddler, Jake. He is stabbed in prison three months later.
At twenty-seven, she starts a research fellowship at a local university and planning her parents murder at the same time. One is vastly more interesting than the other.
Strangulation is her first thought. (Slow and symbolic, retribution for the years of being steadily choked to death by her parents' inability to accept her superiority, coupled with the endlessly humiliating parade of dresses and functions and newspapers and people.) There was also drowning to consider. (Thoughts of standing over her mother, holding her tiny, empty head under the water and watching the light leave her eyes, body seizing and flailing, filled her with a blistering euphoria that almost won her over.) Fire, perhaps? (Dousing her father's unconscious body - and damned office - in petrol and setting it alight brought a gleeful smile to her face whenever she pictured it.) Eventually, however, she settles on a gun.
Clean, efficient and, best of all, quick. Then they buy the dog and her plan falls to shit. Her time, she must bide. Twenty-eight is a year of very careful planning.
And at twenty-nine, she meets John and finally does away with the pesky parental annoyance that are the dark blips on her radar of shining excellence. It is nothing short of spectacular.