exulting somewhat, with my will intact to go
Dani likes museums. It's easy enough to get in; she just has to invisibly grab an admission sticker off some kids' shirt as they leave. She flickers back into visibility in a bathroom and finds a school group to tag along with, close enough to snow security but not so close that the kids and their chaperones will start wondering she is. No one ever looks twice at her.
There are water fountains in the lobby, some low enough for her to reach, and free air conditioning. This one is big enough to have an imagination-center-whatever, like a big fancy playroom, and she can go on the Internet. Only to certain educational kid-friendly sites affiliated with the museum, but it's still more information than she'd ever expected to have available without begging.
(She hadn't been given any information that wasn't useful to her mission, ever. Begging just got her Danny trivia, hours of exposition on what music he liked and what shows he thought were stupid. And most of it wasn't even interesting because she had no idea what all those things were. Data is useless without the contextual knowledge necessary to interpret it.
Still, it was better than silence. Worlds better than listening to her brainless brothers slowly dissolve in their holding tanks, calling for Daddy.)
She walks casually and confidently, but not too confidently – she doesn't want to stand out – slipping from place to place like an eel going from one rocky hiding place to another.
(If she ever gets stable enough to risk leaving dry land, she'll learn to swim and go see a coral reef. All the bright beautiful colors, tiny fish darting here and there, poison spines sticking out at random intervals to weed the stupid and unwary out of the gene pool – it all looks so interesting.)
She runs down the hall, careful not to go too fast, breathe too deep lest her breath catch and choke her. She finds the mineral exhibit and reads a wall plaque on the formation of crystals. The gleam deep within a corundum specimen reminds her of her father's eyes, brilliant and cold. She moves on.
There is an exhibit about farming techniques Egypt, Persia, Mesopotamia – the nurseries and cradle of western civilization. The roads and aqueducts of Rome, and the old tale of a mad emperor playing his fiddle as his city burned. Fine silks preserved and shipped overseas from China long ago. A worn ragdoll from the Great Depression. Massive axes and pikes from medieval Europe. Brightly woven peasant skirts and tiny potatoes from Central and South America, preserved under glass. So many things to see and hear and read about, and she'll never have enough time to learn all she wants to know.
She stands outside the museum's cafe for ten minutes, watching people go up to the cash register and pay for their food. Bottled water. She wonders if there's anything in it that makes it better than tap water. Maybe some people like the taste of plastic? They could just drink it from a plastic cup, then. It'd be cheaper. They'd have more money for food.
It would be simple enough to walk in and pull a sandwich out of the display case, but the security cameras might catch her and she's too tired to hold invisibility long enough to get out of the museum and off the grounds. Overshadowing one of the customers and just walking out with food sounds good in theory, but in practice she can never tell which minds will have enough intelligence and willpower to fight back, and she doesn't have enough willpower to spare any from holding herself together.
Dani silently wishes her stomach would shut the heck up already.
(She was special, like her brothers. She didn't need food. The nutrient fluid in the tanks was more than enough for her, but it tasted like pennies and tap water. She was always hungry.
Daddy kept a bowl of fruit on the kitchen table even though he never had guests, and if he did have guests he wouldn't have made them eat in the kitchen, and the maid was just going to throw it out when it rotted, and it smelled so good.
The pear's skin split and peeled. The fruit-flesh was firm then soft and so sweet it hurt, and the little stones in the skin ground between her teeth. She swallowed out of reflex, some human instinct she hadn't been consciously aware of until that moment, and felt it slide back and down her throat. She couldn't feel it hit her stomach, but she knew now what had happened, her body's reaction to almost pure carbohydrates and natural sugar when she'd never been fed anything but pills and nutrient mush, just the bare minimum necessary for a semblance of life.
She had gorged herself, more than once nearly choking on bruised-soft fruit, the sour-sweet wetness of oranges and the crisp crumpling of apples. She ate two whole bunches of grapes, stupidly tiny yellow ones that were even sweeter than the pear and big purple ones she could stretch out to four bites if she wanted to. She kept going until her stomach felt like it would burst, but there was still one left and she wanted it. Then her teeth couldn't get through the skin and she couldn't use knives without supervision, so she had to stop.)
She was literally drooling, just thinking about it. Definitely time to move on. Come to think of it, there might be another way to get food...
She wanders through the museum gardens, inhaling the fragrance of a million dead things rotting. The prospect of new life coming from old is a wonder to her, a vindication – even when things die, they can still be useful.
She wonders if her not-cousin (the only one now, first and foremost) will be able to find enough pieces of her for a funeral. Ectoplasm sublimates pretty quickly once it starts degrading, and she's always rotting from the inside out.
(She got sick and threw up in the sink later. Daddy had been kind and told her that she had to face the consequences of disobedience. She got two hours in the time-out tank, sitting in the dark and trying not to breathe too deeply. It smelled like ectoplasm, and she never managed to get the green glow out of her shirt.
It might have been hers.)
Dani wonders what it's like for healthy people, not hurting. Sure, it can be overwhelming and scary when it gets too strong and her hindbrain starts shooting off neurochemical panic messages everywhere, but a little pain is comforting. It's a good sign, it means her nerves are still working.
Dani thinks maybe this is one of those thoughts that make people stare at her and ask if she needs a doctor. She's glad she's tiny and harmless-looking enough not to scare humans. They're mean when they get cornered.
(She hadn't believed him at first. It was just one of Daddy's tests, just another "oops I got you, now go time-out" trick to see through. She couldn't really say no to Daddy. No one disobeyed Daddy. Daddy owned her, like he owned all of his experiments and all of his employees.
Human blood was red in the light, not at all like the blue veins she could sometimes see under her skin.)
None of the trees have fruit on them. Television lied to her.
She takes one of the fruits from the display case and slips a plastic knife in her pocket, fades out of visibility and leaves by the most direct route she could find on the map. By the time she's sure none of the security guards or random passers-by are going to stop her, she can feel her feet melting up to the ankle, bones just barely solid enough not to bend and tendons just barely tight enough not to crumble. It only really hurts at the join, where the mostly-intact flesh starts. It isn't that bad.
(She was bad, she was such a bad girl, she was going to be in so much trouble.
She was just a broken worthless tool anyway, so she might as well malfunction.
He smiled so wide when he got out of the draining machine, so easy to read like all of them were in the beginning. He really was a terrible liar.
Her not-cousin not-brother thanked her for setting him free, for letting him live. His eyes, his nose, his face and his everything was just like hers except not; he had that spark that her brothers had not, that need for more than just what was needed but what was wanted too, for new bright things that were interesting, and she didn't know if she was afraid or hungry.
She wanted to know how to say no without being afraid.)
Dani leaned against a wall and cut the fruit open, scooping out a few seeds and licking them off her fingers. She chewed the pinkish-red pulp off and spit the pomegranate seeds into the dirt.
Maybe they'd be a tree someday.
Notes: Isn't she just the sweetest little broken thing?
Set between Kindred Spirits and D-Stabilized. Title quoted from "The Layers" by Stanley Kunitz.