Brother Bear 2

*********since it's been awhile, I should mention that I don't own Captain Carrot and the Amazing Zoo Crew. Although, obviously, I am trying to make them my own in other ways. *********

It used to be that "Starry-Eyed" was an almost positive phrase. It meant hopeful, optimistic, that you were looking up. And, as those things could become too easily too much as a good thing, sometimes "having stars in your eyes" was a bad thing. Unrealistic. Set up for disappointment.

But no, the phrase has darkened in the last five years because of a very specific type of PTS response. After being a puppet of a weird and alien hive mind, it was expected.

In hindsight.

Bobby had this condition. He'd been mind-raped for several hours, watching countless tortures through his own eyes and the eyes of others, aware the whole time that the Starfish was slowly digesting his mind. It hadn't seemed important enough to fight it. He was driven to get the rest of Zoomanity to surrender. It would be so much easier on everyone if they just surrendered. Himself included. The Starfish included. When, finally, the alien monster was disposed of, Bobby had gotten his mind back, the strange fleshy thing falling from his muzzle as if he'd never been alive.

But what he'd gotten back was pretty chewed up.

He'd been pretty good at covering up the cracks in the facade of normalcy he dragged around with him as he went around what was left of his life. His bothers and father dead? A week off, more to heal than to mourn, there was too much work to do. His mother died. Three days off and back to work. There was a city to get back on its feet. He kept it together.

He kept it together for Cecilia, He kept it together for Roosevelt. He kept it together for his partner, for his twin, Jackson. He kept it together for himself, because he was afraid of what would happen if he let it all come apart.

He kept it together until Pete's wife broke apart into a million blood splattered pieces.

And he might have been able to hold it together a little longer, too, if only she had the decency to wait until he was gone.

Oh, but Hanna was always a pretty, sexy bear with unusually long legs that gave her hips an wonderfully sensual roll when she walked. And she sure knew how to move her tail. Bobby had noticed that right off when he first met her. Of course, she was already dating Pete then, or had her sights set on him, which he supposed was much the same thing for a girl like Hanna. Pete and Hannah were seniors together. He and his twin were just Freshman and a young bear like Hanna was beyond his reach by that enormous gap of three years age difference.

He always liked older women. Experienced women. Women who knew what they wanted. Women who would tell him what they wanted.

Cecilia had wanted him first. She had told him so and it just blew his mind. She whispered it in his ears. She might as wee have cuffed him and thrown him in the back of his own police car. He surrendered with an abandon. He was barely 18, taking criminology at CUNY. She was thirty with a seven year hybrid male. At twenty, being thirty was like being from a foreign land. Everything she did seemed exotic and cultured. And the boy, Roosevelt, was so polite and sweetly oblivious to his uniqueness.

He had to find his own way everywhere else in the world. On the force. In his family. He even felt disconnected from his own twin.

But with them, the path was already there, clearly marked and comfortable. A perfect little Zoo family. He proposed within a year of meeting her and he never understood why he had waited so long. He was in the Police Academy right after their honeymoon.

And then the Starfish walked out of Hudson River on an otherwise beautiful fall day.

His brothers, except for Jack, all died that day defending the city. His father died driving into the city, as if one more hand gun would have been enough to turn the tide. His partner, Powell was dead, defending the city with his dying breath.

Bobby, knowing it was a mortal sin, wished he'd been as lucky.

(Eyes looking at his soul over a pair of silver rimmed glasses)

Don't think about that. It's not safe.

(Tentacles burning the fur from his face. A thing humping his muzzle. Suction cups kissing his eye balls, secretions pouring into his brain)

Don't think about that.

It's not safe.

(Eyes looking at his soul over a pair of silver rimmed glasses)

There was blood on his claws.

They cut-away all his nails and put them in evidence bags.

Maybe a three thousand people were captured by those little drone things, Starlets, as some in the press like to call them. Most simply stopped running, stopped fighting. They just stood around waiting for buildings to fall on them. Most simply gave voice to the Starfish's demand of a peaceful surrender.

But a few took more active roles defending the alien. The alien hive mind understood that the people of Earth took understood many languages. And one of those languages were Violence.

There was many questions, debriefings, and dispositions but no trials, not for anyone. He recalled only snapshots of violence and... he thinks it might have been a Rabbit. That rabbit pulled the little monster from his face and... he just passed out. He liked to think he passed out.

Some nights, he had nightmares. Nightmares of blood and mayhem and when a rabbit pulls the thing from his face, his nightmare self screams and fights... to get the... thing back...

But he doesn't think about that.

It's not safe.

(Eyes looking at his soul over a pair of silver rimmed glasses, kind, trusting eyes that darken as they squint, smiling without lips. "Just let it go," the eyes say, "Don't think about it. It's not safe.")

He tried to be there for Little Peter, too. It was what Pete would have wanted. A good strong bear role-model of masculinity.

And Hanna. Hanna wanted that too. And she wanted more than that.

Bobby had started with visiting with Roosevelt, who was a little older than Little Peter, but after a few months became mostly just Bobby. So his nephew could get a little one on one time with a grown-up male bear.

Hanna also insisted that she get a little one on one with a grown-up male bear. And she got it, because Hanna had never stopped being the female he measured all woman against. Because, biology drove them together. Because, in the face of all that death and destruction they shared, they had to do something life affirming. Because three years made no difference now. Hanna offered all these excuses to him and he scooped them up and crushed them against himself with a drowning man's desperation.

He was weak. He knew that. And his particular weakness was a strong woman whispering her wants and demands into his ears.

Pete, being a practical bear, and knowing that his job was dangerous, had set aside blood in a blood bank, just in case. He also set aside sperm, because he and Hanna wanted three or four cubs, three or four years apart. One of the many ironies from that day, was that the building that crushed Pete housed the lab where his blood and semen were stored.

Bobby hadn't known that. He'd known about the blood, of course. Almost every cop did it. Furs alone had over thirty types of blood and one gun shot wound could clear a hospital's supply of a specific type in minutes. The sperm thing happened, too. Just less often. Most cops could barely keep their kids healthy and well-fed while they were alive; they doubted they could afford it when they were dead.

Hanna hadn't realized the sperm was gone until she went to collect some. She told all her girlfriends, of course, that she'd be going. She needed to make sure she'd have support. She'd even told Cecilia. It devastated her that Pete's legacy would be denied her. It also embarrassed her. Hanna was not the type to handle embarrassment well.

She admitted, easily to him, that she told her friends she was trying to get pregnant. That she told them all that her apartment would be filled with little baby Hewitt's. She didn't tell any of them that she'd be withdrawing from the the sperm bank of Bobby. They kept it their little secret.

It wasn't uncommon for males in mixed species marriages to have children outside the marriage, in order to "propagate the species." As barriers fell between species, it was even downright acceptable in many circles.

Cecilia was not in any of those circles.

Neither was Hanna. But she wanted what she wanted and she got what she wanted.

Hanna got pregnant, and everyone assumed that she'd gotten that way from from the sperm bank.

That was the plan and that was it. She wanted it to be over. So, it was.

It hurt his ego, but it was also a relief. He kept visiting, of course. Little Peter still needed an older male bear. Roosevelt was dragged along more often as an unsuspecting chaperone. He thought about her musk and the feel of her hip between his hands and between his legs. He brought those erotic images with him to bed with Cecilia, re-igniting their sex life that had grown stale since that first monster attack. He became a bit more aggressive, and she did not complain. They began sharing secret smiles.

He had fathered a new life. The darkness inside of him was tipped back.

But there were things, Bobby did not know about Hanna. And the things he did know, he didn't understand the full import of. Until too late.

When Hanna was pregnant with Little Peter, she had seen her OB-GYN once a week after a certain point. Bobby assumed, because that part of a woman's life was mysterious quagmire of emotion, intrigue, and hygiene that no mortal man should attempt to navigate, that was a little overdoing it. He only knew about it because Pete had to fight with the insurance company to get those visits paid for. Pete explained it away as it was her first child she had to be careful.

Later, Bobby would learn that Pete hadn't been completely honest. It was her first child to make it to the middle of her second trimester. The first six pregnancies all ended early; results that Pete first believed were accidents. Hanna's mother had taken Pete aside and explained that when She was pregnant, her hormones were all over the place. She suggested that Hannah had the same thing, perhaps even worse.

So when Hanna began telling him that she was having nightmares towards the end of her first trimester, he didn't think much of it. Choosing to have a second child was probably very scaring when you were a single mother. The neediness was an absolute turn-off. Plus, there was probably guilt. Guilt on both sides.

He actually thought to have Cecilia spend some time with her, talk to her, comfort her. But then he realized that he was being incredibly stupid.

Hanna started having some vivid dreams. The bulk of these dreams were of Pete visiting her from beyond the grave. Mostly, he stayed in shadows, but when she could see his face, there was a Starlet covering his eyes and muzzle. His fur stood on end to hear this and he reacted badly. Pete was spared that, because he died so quickly. Because if he had been brought into the collective Bobby would have known.

He would have just known. It was a thing he couldn't explain.

She seemed to understand. To accept. To agree.

But by the middle of her second trimester, she still hadn't seen her OB-GYN. She went to a few clinics of course, here and there, never the same one twice. Hanna seemed to believe that she knew what to do having had one child already, but her actions told a story of avoidance and denial. But she did see a lawyer repeatedly during this time.

With hormones out of control, Hanna became convinced that Pete had died tied into the network of the Starfish. She wanted the lawyers to open records that weren't closed, to find the autopsy reports they were so obviously hiding when there was nothing to hide, to get her husband's body exhumed. To prove the truth of the things her husband's ghost was telling her.

Bobby, who was familiar with obsessions, had never really seen it from the outside before. Yes, as a police officer, of course, he'd seen hundreds - maybe a thousand - of the final end games of an obsession that had reached its ultimate conclusion. When things had already gone on for far too long, and far beyond that in many cases. But he'd never seen the slide in madness so clearly, step by step and he hadn't realized he'd let it go too far until, of course, it was far too late.

She'd hinted, in the early stages, that she felt that the spirit of Pete had possessed Bobby when he was watering the seeds inside of her. He thought that she was being romantic, in the fairy tale sense. Or that maybe this was another way of dealing with the guilt she might have felt about the whole deception and sneaking around.

It wasn't until he stood in her apartment, 15 feet away from here as she stood with Pete's .45 held in her hands, barrel pointed straight up her neck, poised to blow off the top of her own end, that he understood that the nightmares and the lawyers were warning signs that he should not have ignored.

No wonder he'd never made detective.

All he could think was, "Where's Little Peter?" A better cop would have formulated some plan. Some way to leap across two body lengths and disarm her. Words that would loosen her fingers and make the gun fall to the floor. He could have screamed, He could have cried. All he could do was think where his nephew was; the idea that she'd had already "taken care of" her child, his nephew, his brother's only living legacy on Earth. The image of the dead boy possibly behind a closed door allowed now other thought in his head.

Little Peter was in the laundry room, in the basement, when his mother blew her head off four stories up.

He liked watching the clothes rise and fall as the dryer worked its magic and spun colors across its little round window.

Bobby took three weeks off to deal with this. His fragile, pre-chewed mind said, that's it... final straw. And while he'd kept it together on the outside, claiming the three weeks was to help Little Peter to adjust to his mother's death, to adjust to a new house, to heal... on the inside, Bobby was so very afraid that he'd caught the crazies from Hanna.

His nightmares were so much more vivid. And, he could see that he had conflicting memories. A rabbit pulling the Starlet from his face and the Starlet simply falling dead from his muzzle when the battle was over. He tried so very hard not to think about it and he tried so very hard to make sense of it all.

They said he was Starry-Eyed. But the truth was, the cop in him was just used up. The young man he started out as just had too many miles on him. He didn't last six months back on the force when he returned. He let them call it PTSS, and maybe it was; but mostly it was the core deep realization was that he was just a man, a flawed man that liked guns and order and being told what to do.

And when he stared off into space it wasn't always about the blood under his claws or the horrible things he might have done or seen with the Starfish controlling him. Sometimes, he did see those things. When he did see those horrible, soul-crushing things, there was a always comforting voice telling him to not to look, to let it go.

Most of the time now, the nothing he stared at was a little black bear with a fist full of quarters watching the clothes go round, happily fascinated by the flashing colors inside the dryer, oblivious to the soft thumping of his miscarried brother's body as it went round and round inside the steel barrel.

The world was so dark and red was the darkest color of them all.