For the second time across three universes, you find yourself looking into the unafraid blue eyes of an alien child.
The girl-child with the green eyes stands in the doorway, as vexed by her brother's actions as you should be.
"John, get away from her," the girl hisses, and throws you a glare. The boy waves her off without even breaking eye contact with you, and shuffles closer to your armchair.
He is small, perhaps two and a half sweeps old, and his glasses too large for his face.
"Why are you sad?" he asks you, and the question surprises you so much, that you don't even cull him for his nerve.
"I ain't sad," you reply, but it doesn't look like he believes you.
There was a night when you went from having everything to having nothing at all, and you never would have thought that there would be a time when you'd think having nothing was not the absolute worst thing that could happen to you.
Because now you have something; you have a purpose, and a mission, and powers innumerable, and a demon who thinks you his best agent, and having all of that is your most dreadful burden.
So yes, sometimes you wish you had nothing, because it's an improvement over having things you do not want.
You had a husband.
One universe earlier, you would not have even known what a husband was, much less what use he could have.
But yes, you had a husband, not because you wanted one, but because a green-skulled demon whispered in your ear, and you had to obey.
And you became a baroness, and married a kindly old colonel with washed-out blue eyes. He was soft and alien and strange in ways you couldn't quite define, but he made you laugh. You remember that; even after the jokes and japes have faded from memory, you remember that he made you laugh.
You remember that he bowed and kissed your hand with a tenderness you found bewildering at times, and you remember that his barkbeast would growl at you whenever you'd cross paths, and that your master would leer at you and ask if you enjoyed being "human married" and kissing. You can't recall who exactly you had to blame for the fact that you had to learn how human reproduction worked, except that you were angry at both your husband and your demonic employer once you found out the salient details.
You recall baking, and baking, and baking, avoiding eye contact with your human husband out of sheer disgust. He only expressed one regret, that he would never have children, and for the next three nights you had odd nightmares about grubs clawing their way out of your body like you were a human mother. Your disgust would only grow over time.
But you knew why you were there, even if he didn't, and you told Hass thatof course he'd have children one day. And he asked, "Not we?"
You had a lusus.
You had a lusus as terrifying as the vast emptiness between stars, and just as incomprehensible, and she loved you. But she still took everything away from you with her dying song. She took everything she'd given you.
Later, you would be given her again. And this new Gl'bgolyb would not love you, and would only take away from you the things you sought to create by yourself. But she was still your lusus.
The first meteor came. Your husband brought a young girl to you, the girl with brightest blue eyes, and he told you that from that day on, she would be your child—his and yours; "ours", he said.
And then the second meteor came. And he died. Behind was left only a green-eyed boy, and you took the boy, to be yours and the colonel's.
It was important, that they be yours and the colonel's. It was how you justified it, every day you let them live.
"Come here, little buoy," you say.
His eyes dart in his sister's direction, just for a fraction of a second, but you see it. The girl clutches the doorknob hard enough for her fingers to turn white and shake with tension. She is haloed in the soft glow of the hallway lamps, and a strip of yellow light intrudes into your dark room and paints a path from the door to your armchair.
The boy follows the yellow path towards you, as he will (as he did) in a different lifetime.
When he is near enough, you grab his chin, clawtips resting against his cheeks, just a gentle squeeze away from tearing through his delicate human hide.
The boy grew up to leave, and the girl grew up to hate you.
You baked, and baked, and so did Jane, standing across from you, hand clenched on the whisk and cold glare set on you. You recall how younger, she would try to make you laugh, and you never did. You wonder why; why she tried, and why you never laughed.
You allowed Jane her hate; it's fitting, and it gnawed at her, wore her down over time, even if she didn't realize it.
You were always meant to destroy her life, in order to prevent those other children from being born, though at the time you didn't know about ectobiology and the game and timelines and frogs. What you knew was that for your master to win, you had only to prevent this one thing from happening.
But it was not that simple; in a laboratory on a meteor in a place that didn't exist yet, the children were born nonetheless.
Your master would tell you that even doomed to fail, the attempt was required by the whims of time.
And that was the first time a kindly colonel's memory wore thin for you.
"Get away from her, John, get away," the girl hisses.
You know what she calls you behind your back, the way she whispersbatterwitch, like another human girl used to, like a curse or a secret. She wants to yell it at you now, yell batterwitch because she doesn't know any worse names, and the boy just stares and waits.
"Aren't you afraid a' me, buoy?" you ask him.
"No."
You had a husband again.
The same one.
And sometimes, he could still make you laugh, but you'd learned your lesson by that point, you'd learned that all your master's gifts are poisonous, and that anything you had in every new lifetime would be turned against you.
He died again, and you only just realized by the shape of the hole he left behind that you'd pitied him from the start. You know your master will never let you meet him again, because from that point on, meeting him a third time would not hurt as much as it would soothe, and you are not allowed solace.
"No?" you repeat. "No?"
He must realize that was the wrong answer, because panic flashes across his face.
Your hand clenches and your claws sink into his cheeks; blood trickles down your fingers, not blue like his eyes, but red, red, red.
Red and blue, like two universes ago, another thing you had and lost, in the time before having anything at all was a curse.
The girl will grow up to hate you more viciously than anyone ever did.
The boy will grow up trying to make you laugh.
And you will not know which one of them you want to kill more.
But they will never stop being yours.