Tag: materxnatura

It’s Koschei’s birthday!          

************* 

 HIS BIRTHDAY PRESENT is one big box filled with all kinds of accessories and goodies; essentially an oversized care packaged, wrapped up neatly in gold wrapping paper (gabriel insisted, as he is the self-proclaimed “king of wrapping”). it has all of his favorite snacks, which may or may not be a subtle way of encouraging him to eat more. some very expensive jo malone cologne is also nestled in there, as well as a new laptop case because she can’t stand looking at the one he’s used so much he’s worn a hole in it. all this, and a velvet box, which contains a very tasteful watch, with an elegantly simple style that matches her own. rolex, of course. more significantly however, the watch is engraved with his initials: K.L.P. the same initials as her father. because all that time ago, she gave him her father’s middle name of “lucien”, in some small effort to start some kind of family tradition after her mother died. they are the initials on his adoption papers, and they are the initials that mark him as hers forever. a note in her familiar script reads sweetly.

          happy birthday, pup. i’m so grateful to have finally gotten the chance to see you grow. you make me so proud with each passing year, and even though you’re away at college putting everyone else to shame, you’re still, and always will be, my baby boy. love, mum.

The prodigy who’s finished his undergraduate theoretical astrophysics and engineering degrees in two years, and is now well into graduate school at the age of (as of today) 20, can be felled immediately by goodies from mum. Because mum is his hero. Mum is his model of greatness: merciless, ambitious CEO of the largest scientific corporation in the world.  And mum is just, well, the coolest.  

The years they spent separated by the circumstances of war were the worst of his life: survival in and out of psych wards and foster care homes that found his manifold mental health woes too great a challenge, on the streets becoming alarmingly proficient at major felonies, and constantly high.  Being rescued just after his seventeenth birthday those three Christmases ago, and reconciled to Dr. Pichiner … . he may never be able to articulate his gratitude.  He did try, just a few weeks ago, on her birthday.

Still, with eagerness, and a bit of greed, he opens the gold foil he recognizes as his adoptive father’s work.  He rolls his eyes good-naturedly.  Gabe’s grown on him.  Slowly.  Mostly because he’s so good to mum.  Even though he’s decidedly uncool.

He’s munching on some sweet and sour gummies while he opens the watch.  Dark clever eyes dart over the data provided: a Rolex like mum’s, with his initials.  He squints, and then his eyes widen with epiphany: has he ever learned his middle name?  Curiosity overcomes him and he hops up while distractedly reading the note. 

He dials Seraphina on his mobile. 

     “MUUUUUUUM!” he cajoles, when she answers, with the endearing entitlement of a child who has finally found a home in which asking for something, needing something, needing someone, is not a crime.  “What IS me middle name, ey?! Oh, and THANKS, it’s brilliant!  This cologne is WAY better than Dad’s!” 

materxnatura:

MASTERFULXRHYTHM:

      “ … . Dr. Pitchiner, you’re … probably going to never speak to me
      again after we have this conversation.  So I’d … I’d ask you to just
      let me finish.” 

The prodigal young geneticist doesn’t welcome himself to a seat at the Californian ranch home of his former mentor and her husband: both of them ex-employees of InGen.  

He knows he won’t be welcome long enough.

So he fidgets with the amino acid lapel pin she gave him years ago, when he first came to the company’s employment as a teenager who’d already obtained a PhD.  He wore it today as a good luck charm. As a gesture of goodwill.  As a farewell. 

That’s obvious in the way tears gather in the corners of his eyes, as he inhales to speak, exhales, collects more useless words, and continues to quietly implode, a vein pressing against his temple. Finally he blurts it.

      “The Indoraptor was my fault. I bred it.  I bred it without Blue’s DNA to
        help it be more loyal and emotionally connectible.  I didn’t do it for 
        money, I did it because I wanted to be famous.  I did it because I
        was stupid and vain.  Then I realized too late I cared for the animal.
        By then they’d taken it from me and begun to train it to be a weapon.
        And it’s dead now … ! Grady told me Blue killed it.” 

He laughs feebly. 

       “So you see, you foretold the future.  I’m the Frankenstein’s ass
        that took your masterpiece and made a new animal.  And I already
        lost him.  Like you lost her.”  

         SERAPHINA FEELS AS though she’s been plunged underwater. her skin pricks with ice cold goosebumps, and the words he speaks become vague, unintelligible noises. another life, precious and monstrous all at once, but doomed to die from the very start. she’s angry. she’s so angry, but she doesn’t even have the words to articulate it. not yet, anyway. for now, all there is is sickness and grief and god damn reruns of an insane, desperate creature who wanted to love and be loved, but treated with violence and clinical apathy. and it’s happened all over again.

           ‘ that’s the problem with people like us, ’ she begins, her voice distant with the effort to keep her nausea at bay. her hands begin to rifle through drawers and through her pockets, until they find a cigarette and a lighter. and just as she’s flicking the lighter, just as her body is just aching for the dirty, temporary release of nicotine, she remembers. a hushed, but sharpened ‘shit’ hisses under her breath, before she tosses both cigarette and lighter roughly onto the kitchen counter with a clatter. she takes another cleansing breath, and leans both hands up onto the edge of smooth granite as she closes her eyes. ‘ people like us… learn the hard way. ’

            the anger returns, and true to form, tears sting and burn at her eyes like acid as she continues more sharply. even yelling at some points. ‘ i gave up everything run from that place. the money, the fame, the reputation, because don’t you think i wanted that in the first place, too? ey? i get it! but i gave all of that up just so i could set an example to impressionable young scientists, do you know why? because when i thought of  ‘impressionable young scientist,’ i thought of you. you know i couldn’t give a fuck about anyone else in that fucking lab besides you, so i said enough. that’s it. i’m done with this work, because i can’t let you go through the same thing i did! ’

            she sniffles loudly. her voice becomes brittle, and the true grief, the sadness, the worry, the fear, all of it begins to bleed through despite her best efforts to hiss and to bite. ‘ and now here you are…learning the hard way because all of that wasn’t enough!… ’ a hand clamps over her mouth now, as she turns away in shame and humiliation at her own pathetic reaction. ‘ god what am i doing? ’ the other hand then presses against her womb, still flat as a washboard, as she asks to no one in vain. ‘ what am i doing? ’ she can’t even protect one grown ass kid, what the hell does she think she’s doing anywhere near smaller ones.

“ …”

By nature irascible and fierce, every bit the ingenious predator his own creation had been, Koschei now takes his mentor’s tongue-lashing without a word of protest.  In all honesty, he’d expected far worse.  

He scrubs a hand from nose to chin, compulsively, several times in a row.  

“You don’t … have to tell me it was foolish, and … self-destructive, I … I know. I know now.  I watched them in the process of his … his attenuated murder.  I think I got to hold him, interact with him, out of egg for … a matter of weeks.  Then he was gone.  I’ve been punished already.” 

The Manc dialect of his birth and rearing grows prominent with emotion, but he forces it down under King’s English again, as he forces down his feelings and, sometimes, his conscience.  He trains his hands into the pockets of his slacks, and keeps his vision trained on the portraits on her walls, the notes of warmth he’d not have expected, clearly the mark of her new, better life, after she left him behind at InGen floundering to be noticed, seen, acknowledged, loved.  Portraits of her kids … two, it looks like. Of course she has kids.  Of course. She’s a mum by nature.  A vicious pit viper who strikes anything that draws near her eggs.  

Which brings him to the matter of his visit.  

“ … It was enough, Dr. Pitchiner.  You were enough, I …was the one who failed Red–that’s what I called him–and you.  But it, ah.  It’s not too late for you, actually.  I found something, some… one.  Red might be gone, but.”

He pulls his mobile from his pocket, and swipes it open.  And he hands it over to Seraphina, with a picture of none other than the immense, ghostly hued, red eyed Indominus Rex, asleep on the floor of a massive iron cage, heavily sedated.  

“I had high clearance in the lab at Lockwood Manor and. Well.  One afternoon I walked too far down a particular hallway.  They didn’t extrapolate DNA from her remains, to give me the materials to make Red, like they’d claimed.  They took it from a living body.  That’s her. Your Indie. She’s alive.”  

materxnatura:

        ‘ koschei, i stopped working there for a reason. and for me,
                   me, to stop working there, that’s – you’re going to get hurt. ’

@masterfulxrhythm​ liked for a starter.

      “ … . Dr. Pitchiner, you’re … probably going to never speak to me
      again after we have this conversation.  So I’d … I’d ask you to just
      let me finish.” 

The prodigal young geneticist doesn’t welcome himself to a seat at the Californian ranch home of his former mentor and her husband: both of them ex-employees of InGen.  

He knows he won’t be welcome long enough.

So he fidgets with the amino acid lapel pin she gave him years ago, when he first came to the company’s employment as a teenager who’d already obtained a PhD.  He wore it today as a good luck charm. As a gesture of goodwill.  As a farewell. 

That’s obvious in the way tears gather in the corners of his eyes, as he inhales to speak, exhales, collects more useless words, and continues to quietly implode, a vein pressing against his temple. Finally he blurts it.

      “The Indoraptor was my fault. I bred it.  I bred it without Blue’s DNA to
        help it be more loyal and emotionally connectible.  I didn’t do it for 
        money, I did it because I wanted to be famous.  I did it because I
        was stupid and vain.  Then I realized too late I cared for the animal.
        By then they’d taken it from me and begun to train it to be a weapon.
        And it’s dead now … ! Grady told me Blue killed it.” 

He laughs feebly. 

       “So you see, you foretold the future.  I’m the Frankenstein’s ass
        that took your masterpiece and made a new animal.  And I already
        lost him.  Like you lost her.”  

materxnatura:

             WHEN HER ELDEST son doesn’t put up a loving fight, that’s when she knows something is wrong. her chest tightens in the familiar despair that all mothers like seraphina feel when their baby is somehow in pain, but of course she is a veteran parent who knows how to keep that from manifesting on her face. but she does let down her hands from his face and furrows her brow as her once jubilant smiles falls in immediate worry.

                                                            ‘ pup, what’s wrong? ’

@masterfulxrhythm continued from here.

Koschei’s round cheeks flush violently; having spent the majority of his life in mental institutions, drug dens, and on the street, he’s built a reputation for callousness, for manipulation and for sadism.  It’s hard to break that habit, and show his adoptive mother that he can sometimes be plagued with ordinary adolescent insecurities.

        “ … . it’s  the new baby. Not …! Not that I don’t wanna have another
        little sister, I joost.” 

He tosses his hair, ridding restless dark eyes of dishwater blond bangs.

       “I feel like I ought to make myself small so you don’t … you know,
        get preoccupied. With me. When.  Well.” 

He nods at the swell of her belly and shrugs fiercely. 

since this is the theme for the night, she spit finger cleans his cheek and generally squishes his very round elastic face. she did it when he was four and she’s doing it again and clearly, she is going to be doing this until the day she dies. ‘lookit these cheekies! lookit these lil cheekies!’

image

Ordinarily Koschei puts up a fuss, but lately, he’s been missing his mother.  It’s not as if she’s been absent when he’s asked for her, but rather, her preoccupation with yet another new baby leaves him feeling it’s necessary he withdraw and step aside.  

      “Glad to be a source of unending amusement, mum,” comes his 
        indulgent remark.  

“Hi mum.” Koschei comes to sit beside Sera, without preamble, and work on a project on his laptop, fingers clacking over the keyboard at dizzying speed. They are nearly shoulder to shoulder, the way he’s always liked it, and not another word falls. <3

materxnatura:

           SHE DOESN’T FEEL well, but of course she’s still working. lack of sleep and other factors are contributing to it as she sits hunched over a file at the kitchen table, but when her son comes to sit beside her casually, she reaches over to muss his hair in her familiar, handsy manner. his cheeks escape her clutches this time.

            ‘ hi pup, ’ she greets, seamlessly and happily integrating his presence into her work. she underlines something in black ink. ‘ what are you doing? ’

       “ … am I allowed to say you’re worrying me a bit?” 

He may be nineteen, but the boy is more world wise than most–put through the meat grinder of disownment, homelessness, crime, adolescent sex and drug addiction–but what’s more, he understands his mother inside and out. 

      “If you’re unwell, I know it drives you mad to be idle, but you can lie down 
       for a bit maybe, and help me with my homework.”

Koschei doesn’t need help with his homework; he could probably write most of the math and science courses he takes, already at the graduate school level.  But he wields the power of one of Sera’s children whom she cannot deny when they ask for any sort of aid.