One of these mornings, you're gonna rise up singing
You're gonna spread your wings and take the sky
But till that morning, there is nothing can harm you
With your mother standing by.
—Summertime
VII
My mother was so much braver than I could have ever been.
The bounty hunter did not know why these words came unbidden into her mind.
Perhaps it was the juxtaposition in her mind between the mother she had barely known and the Mother she had been terrorized by for nearly half of her life.
Her real mother had died to save her.
The Mother who was rising up from the ruins of her Zebetite tank, rearranging herself into a mechanized monster that made even Samus shiver where she stood, was willing to kill her in order to save herself.
And I, Samus thought numbly. What kind of mother am I?
Mother Brain bent her head—now equipped with jaws that drooled gray machine lubricant all over the floor—on her flexible neck and let loose a knee-weakening roar. Her eggplant-shaped body was hunchbacked but still towered over Samus on clawed back legs. Her single eye, rimmed with orange and shot through with angry red lines, gazed upon Samus with a look of pure, unadulterated—
—triumph?
Samus could tell that she was no longer capable of cognitive speech or thought; that she hadn't been ever since she had gone defective. Hard to believe that this being saved her, once, and had built that suit that she was wearing now.
So she spoke with the words she could understand; with missiles, charge beams, wave shots, well-placed bombs. And Mother Brain answered her back with flamethrowers and sonic booms that nearly knocked Samus senseless.
They spoke of love and loss of each other, neither one bending a knee, neither one wanting to relent in the face of the other's wrath. But whether she wanted to or not, Samus was wearing down, and after she had spent two hundred missiles on Mother Brain's mechanical head, she started to wonder if there was something she had missed, some clue in Ridley's warning, some hidden secret that Mother Brain was not letting her in on.
She found out soon enough.
It felt like the air was being sucked out of the room as Mother Brain arched her neck backwards, hissing in though her mouth. Samus reflexively stepped backwards, presenting a quarter profile target to her enemy. She had an idea that something devastating was coming.
The broad beam of light from Mother's eye that cleaved through the air was a myriad of the most stunning and vibrant colors that Samus had ever seen.
And when it hit her she couldn't even draw breath to scream.
The force of the blast slammed her up against the far wall, pinning her against the metal, holding her there as it carved points of agony into her power suit. The weapons readout in her visor short circuited; she decided that was little matter, for she couldn't even close her eyes against such pain.
The attack ended what seemed like hours later, and Samus slid down the wall, her knees crumpling when her feet hit the floor. That single attack had drained three quarters of her energy tanks. She would not survive another hit of that magnitude.
Stand, Aran, she mentally ordered herself; her left wrist twitched convulsively at the order. You will die if you do not stand.
Mother stood over her, her weight making the floor groan. Opening her mouth, she let loose a purple ring of energy that hit Samus on the back, knocking her to the side. She was laughing at her prey. Gloating already, thinking that she had already won. Samus would not give her that satisfaction.
The bounty hunter grit her teeth. The pain was nearly making her lose the mental concentration needed to keep her suit functioning. With a grunt, she splayed her hand on the floor, pushing her body up, holding her right arm as she brought herself into a pitiful stand, her knees bent inwards and her back bowed. She had to think of something. Mother Brain could not be immortal. There was always a way. She just had to live long enough to figure it out.
She shuffled forward. One foot, then the other.
She raised her arm cannon again.
Almost haughtily, the robot overlord in front of her took a heavy step forwards; the shift in weight made the floor shudder and Samus went down heavily on one knee, visibly panting. She looked up, glaring behind her visor, blue eyes blazing.
That noise again. The gathering glow of energy flickering in quick luminous lines on Mother Brain's spiked head.
This is not good.
Her head was tucking back. She was aiming her final blow.
Oh, Mother.
"Skree!"
She could only watch, a helpless kneeling figure on the ground, as her deux ex machina came out of the shadows in a blur of red and rage, colliding with Mother Brain's head with all the force of a warrior with a soul to save.
Mother Brain reeled backwards, horrible shrieks falling from her drooling jaws, as the monster of a Metroid latched onto her head, spikes and all, and began feeding. She tried to shake it off, but the parasite held on tenaciously with its mandibles despite the jagged spikes from the Mother Brain cutting into its membrane.
What are you doing? Samus's lips formed the words, but her breath failed her. She watched from under sweat-sticky lashes as the Metroid—her mango-fed parasite, her thrumming baby hatchling—brought Mother Brain shrieking to her knees.
Get 'er, she mentally coaxed it, even as her vision began to blur. Oh, baby, you've got her where you want her. Just hold on and don't let go until she's down.
Slowly, Mother Brain's jaws ceased their Piranha-like snapping; her metal limbs folded into themselves, reminding Samus of a dead insect. The shrieks died down to mournful sighs, and then the room was quiet.
The Metroid detached with a short thrum and buzzed around the room, squealing with what sounded like laughter to Samus but what was probably a triumphant battle cry.
She did not mind it, then, when the Metroid once again loomed over her weakened state, mandibles flared, ready to drain her dry. Gratitude swelled in a wave and crashed over her, and, shamefully enough, tears sprang into her eyes. She would not have to kill it. It could live. Little matter that there were Metroids in the universe again. Little matter that she would not be around to stem their spread.
How soft everything felt, how warm, how safe. Little wonder she had never feared death, if this is what it was like.
"Skree!"
She opened her eyes and was surprised to find herself completely surrounded by raspberries.
The Metroid was spread over her in a gelatinous cloud, covering every inch of her power suit, smothering her into the ground as gently as it could, blocking out her senses to the surrounding room. Its buzzing body made hers hum in tandem all the way through to her heart, thrumming especially poignantly at the space where her neck met her shoulder, and she smiled and snorted with soft reflexive laughter because it tickled.
Seldom, if ever, had Samus Aran felt so safe. So loved. It was a feeling she had only shared with her parents and the Chozo.
I'm home, she thought woozily, looking blearily up at her hatchling's raspberry nuclei. Reaching out to see if she could touch them, she found that her body felt whole. She looked at her energy readout and found, to her surprise, that her power suit was recharging with remarkable speed.
"My little baby," she murmured. "You didn't forget your mother after all."
Her hatchling was breathing life back into her broken body. It had stolen energy directly from Mother Brain and was using to it nurse Samus back to health.
Who is the mother in this situation, exactly? Samus thought, pawing around at her hip for the apple that she had stored.
"Hey," she whispered hoarsely. "I've got a present for you." She held the apple in her palm, bringing the fruit close to the Metroid's inner mandibles.
The Metroid's happy skree nearly burst her eardrums and the apple was gone out of her hand like it had been sucked up into a vacuum. Samus laughed aloud.
"I was right. It was the fruit that made you grow so big, wasn't it?"
Her limbs were bursting with newness; her power suit hummed with power.
We will leave here together. Somehow we will make it, together.
But fate would not allow Samus Aran to stay loved for long.
The air around the Metroid changed; it turned sour as the vibrations emanating from the parasite turned from a soothing hum to an angry buzz. Samus felt the ground underneath her tremble with that same sickening shiver that happened when Mother Brain's body moved. She tilted her head back and almost screamed when she saw a bloodshot eyeball a mere arm's length from the Metroid's body.
Mother Brain had woken up and was staring at Samus, who was still smothered by the Metroid's furiously quivering body. Samus tried to move but her hatchling refused to lift off of her, and she felt cold horror grip her heart when she saw take a step back and align its head with her hatchling's fruit-laden form.
Oh, if I could put you in a jar once more. If only you could hide.
Her hatchling was—
Mother Brain was—
The mechanical brain opened its mouth and fire fell from its lips like a curse.
Instinctively flinching into the ground, Samus cried out in anger instead of pain as the Metroid took the full force of the blow. But for all the pain it was enduring, it pressed its body all the more firmly onto its imprinted mother.
Enraged that she could not get at her prey, Mother Brain launched into a relentless attack, vomiting destruction onto the bounty hunter's hatchling from point-blank range, making the creature cry out and squeal and squirm and yet it held steady, a bubble of steel over its mother, refusing to let her body suffer the same fate as its own, even as its own life began to bleed out from beneath it as it gave birth to its own mother's salvation.
Samus, in the meantime, horrified that the Metroid was willingly putting itself in harm's way, was trying to use her strength to push it away from her, all the while keeping her eyes locked on Mother Brain's grotesque face, made even more warped by the jelly-like membrane through which she saw it.
"Move!" she pleaded desperately, shoving roughly at the Metroid's jellyfish body, feeling the squishy membrane sink under her palms. "She'll kill you if you don't get out of here!"
Another blast from the Mother Brain's mouth made the dome of jelly shudder around her and finally, finally, her hatchling jerked away. Its body was lumpy and miscolored; two of its mandibles were cracked in multiple places, and one was missing completely. The nuclei in its clear dome flickered like smoldering embers.
And in the back of her mind, Samus knew.
But her heart had hope. And that hope gave her strength.
She rose up to her full height, charging her Power Beam, bracing her elbow with her left hand, and prepared to let fly. She felt an indescribable power in her arm, burning from her brain all the way down to the tips of her fingers, and knew she had to make it count.
"You are dead, Mother!" she belled in a terrible voice. "You have preyed upon the helpless and I will no longer tolerate your existence! Now I shall be your opponent!"
The Mother Brain's head jerked up as if pulled by an invisible string; the mouth opened and it belched out white-hot fury. Samus ran directly into the line of fire. She could take the pain now. Her hatchling had shown her what to do.
But strangely enough, even though she was standing in the path of Mother Brain's tyrant-born flame, Mother Brain aimed her attack at something above the bounty hunter's head.
If she had known what was going to happen, she wouldn't have looked.
But Samus Aran was used to seeing such sacrifice.
The cry pierced her ears and shattered her heart and for one wretched second, Samus Aran thought that she was seeing the death of her parents all over again.
Above her, its body illuminated in stark contrast to the dark hell of a room around it, the last Metroid, the once-infant now-huge survivor of a species, her hatchling, was lanced through with the fire of Mother Brain's rage.
How small it was. Her mind's eye saw the egg, cherry color swirled with white, and her mouth filled with the taste of mango.
Something terrible flooded in her chest and she realized it was sorrow, poignant and sharp and coming deathly close to piercing her heart.
She could only watch as the hatchling's body writhed and began to sink towards the floor, its membrane bubbling from the intense heat. It was crying; she could feel it in the air around its body, sick little vibrations of agony that wracked its jelly frame. It was hovering out of her reach but falling fast. She could have caught it, once, when it was small, and it would have burrowed into her neck, buzzing, tickling the soft spot of skin above her collar bone.
But it could no longer burrow and would never again make her laugh with its funny squashy vibrations. She reached up with both arms, grasping one of its mandibles with her left hand as gently as she could, before moving her palm up to rest against the now charred and rubbery texture of its once red round bubble body. The normally healthy-looking raspberries—nuclei, she corrected herself—were bruised purple.
Her thumb moved from side to side, little infinitesimal strokes of comfort come too late. Its resulting skree was weaker than a whisper.
"Oh. Oh, it's okay, it's okay," she told it numbly. "I've got you."
The light contact of her hand was too much for her hatchling to handle.
And the body that had once bounced off the walls of her ship, the little form that could jam between the control panel and the windshield and could fit into the warm thrumming space behind an icebox, the hatchling that had liked to smash itself into her cleavage while she slept, smelling of mangos and glowing the color of sherbet and sunset and love, fell to pieces like rain all around her.
raw. very raw.
