muse(s) : anita mccann , 32 , bisexual
plot(s) : we’ve been sleeping together for years, but neither of us want to actually be with each other but that doesn’t stop me from getting jealous
possible connections : m / f / nb .
' don't tell me you're jealous , ' can't help the smirk that tugs at edges as she attempts to feign innocence . ' he's literally nobody . ' / closed starter for @dcymcres!
TIMING: Current
LOCATION: Mansión Mexicana & surroundings
PARTIES: Anita @gossipsnake and Inge @nightmaretist
SUMMARY: Debbie is nowhere to be found.
CONTENT: Mentions of child death (past).
The pair of mothers stepped over the threshold of Anita’s home, their hands carrying shopping bags of all supplies needed for their infant daughter. In this case, this didn’t include nappies and formula, but rather some separated body parts and an organ or two, freshly and locally acquired. Inge wasted little time moving deeper into the house, towards where Debbie was resting — she had gotten so big over the past few months and she was thrilled to see her again and show her what they’d gotten her.
But when she and her co parent reached the room assigned to their darling child, they found nothing. There was no hungry clicking sound. No wide eyes observing them, no wriggling body covered in quills. Inge dropped her bags and let out a sound of dismay, “Where is she?” She looked at Anita, wondering if she had moved her. A trail of bristles and goo lay in the room however, leading towards the window the pair had left open. She rushed towards it, letting out a screech into Seven Peaks.
_
Anita had grown used to having Inge and Deborah around over the past few months. More than just used to it, in fact, she had grown to truly cherish them as the two most important women in her life. So many of the things Anita used to do on her own she now had a partner for, including killing strange humans for food. She wasn’t sure there was any sight more beautiful than watching Inge clean up organs to feed to their sweet child. It was the closest thing to domestic bliss that felt attainable to the lamia.
But she should have known better than to think that bliss could last. Chills started at her spine and spread throughout Anita’s entire body when she heard the noise Inge made, followed by the question about where Debbie was. She saw Inge go to the window but refused to let her mind consider that reality. Instead, Anita began to tear the room apart. Throwing the pillows, blankets, toys, baskets of clothes about, “She’s in here. She’s in here.”
Her efforts were useless. The trail of goo was obvious - the goo went up over the window, down the pane on the other end. “Deborah just went out for some fresh air, no? Just like her mami, can’t get enough of nature.” There was a panic in Antia’s eyes as she looked towards Inge, though, her face revealing what she knew to be true but could not stand to say aloud.
_
The increase of murder and the handling of body parts did not bother her. Whatever thoughts about Rhett and his toes, feet and leg might rise to the surface to ruin it for her were suppressed by the blissful baby haze Debbie had put her in and Inge enjoyed supplying her baby her food. Besides, it was not much different than plucking a chicken or preparing a turkey, now was it?
It was a labor of love, one she intended to do for many years. Eighteen, at least, if not more … perhaps Debbie would always need their help with food, the way a dog did. Not that she was a dog and to compare her as one would be immeasurably cruel as dogs were the worst type of animal. Regardless, this was something she was committed to. She and Anita, co parenting for years, dedicating their precious time to their darling child.
But she was gone. The window was open, there was a trail leading towards it and Anita was panicking the way she was. She pulled herself back from the window, looking at the lamia. Inge noted that there were tears in her eyes. “Were we too late? Too late to feed her? She must — of course she likes nature. We have to go.” She picked up one of the bags and walked promptly out of the room, back out of the house and into the surrounding woods. The tears were on her cheeks now.
She distantly remembered losing Vera in crowds. At town festivals or at the local market. Worse, in Amsterdam. There was no panic quite like it. It was back, now. She walked into the woods, certain that Anita was with her, and screamed: “Debbie!”
_
Where Anita felt hesitation, Inge seemed to spring into action - rushing out towards the back door to follow the trail of breadcrumbs that Deborah had left leading away from the house. Trusting that Inge had more experience, that she knew what she was doing, Anita followed not too far behind. There was a terror in the other woman’s eyes that Anita knew, even without being able to see her own, wasn’t reflected in hers.
Maybe it was the animalistic side of her. Deborah was their child, undoubtedly, but like the two of them she was not human. Unlike Anita, unlike Debbie - Inge had been, once upon a time. “I’ve taken her out in the woods plenty of times. She knows the area out here.” In attempting to calm her partner down, Anita also opted to let her eyes shift so she could scan the area for the heat signature of their daughter. “I can’t see her.” She paused, trying to keep everything calm, “Yet. I can’t see her yet.”
They pushed forward in through where Anita’s yard ended and the tree cover began, the path left by Deborah beginning to get more unpredictable. If Anita hadn’t known better she might have thought that the winding tracks were an intentional attempt to throw them off her scent. But she knew better. Debbie wasn’t just some creature she studied - this was her family. “She’s quite fast. Have you noticed? We should find some activities to sign her up for once we get back home - keep her active. Find a way to channel this into something she can excel at.”
—
Anita was trying to be rational and Inge could not really grasp it. She’d raised Vera in a small town where kids stayed out until late and usually nothing happened, but Debbie was still an infant, wasn’t she? Besides, sometimes things did happen. Sometimes there were bad men out there, or cruel children. In these woods, there were hunters, who would probably want to strike down Debbie for her strong appetite.
“But she has never gone out alone!” There was something really desperate to her voice, a want to believe Anita’s optimism but a mother’s biggest fear was overtaking her. It wasn’t often that she was this easily put in distress, but it was different when it came to Debbie. Her head was spinning.
It was hard to keep track indeed and she looked into the woods, longing for nighttime so she could be more mobile and faster at this search. Such was what she called it now, a search. “She is very fast. Why would she — she should not be fast leaving her bedroom, though. We should have closed the window. She’s —” She shook her head and opened her mouth wider, “Debbie!!!”
_
It was clear that the words she had been offering in the form of comfort were not doing their job, so Anita elected to be quiet for the time being, focused on listening for subtle coos or the delicate gnawing on limbs that might point them in the direction of Debbie. The forest was large, undoubtedly, but they had not been gone for that long and she was still rather small - it didn’t make sense why Anita couldn’t sense her yet.
They were following the seemingly unintentional trail of bristles and goo left in Deb’s wake, the two of them calling out her name at varying octaves and decibels, but there was no response. There was no sign of her other than the trail they were blindly following. As the pair traveled deeper into the woods, desperate thoughts that had never crossed Anita’s mind before began to consume her. The pit in her stomach made her think of her own mother; did she ever feel this way, not knowing where her daughter was or if she was safe?
“What if we’ve gone the wrong way? What if this path isn’t even her path?” Saying those words aloud led to another horrid thought, one that rushed out of her brain to her lips with urgency. “Do you think that her real -” Anita stopped herself, both from finishing her sentence and in her tracks, as she turned towards Inge, her eyes desperate despite their dryness.
_
The further they walked into the woods, the more desperate Inge was starting to feel. How could Debbie have gotten out and gotten this far? She had not been very mobile before, which was explainable due to her small size. Besides, she always expected her mothers to come and bring her food — if they didn’t, she tended to get literally snippy. And yet there was no trace of her.
Tears had burst into her eyes and then started streaming, making her throat constrict as she kept shouting that name. She had lost a child before, she could not go through it again — it was against all laws of nature (even if she herself was against the laws of nature too, according to some). “I … I don’t know, the woods are so large and she … what if she’s back at the house, Anita?”
At the suggestion that the creature who had laid the egg that had held their darling Debbie had found her, she looked at Anita with a blazing gaze. “No. She has two real mothers, right here. Don’t –” Inge shook her head, trudging on further into the woods. “She would not leave us for whatever put her on this earth. We took care of her when no one else did. We took her in. She would not — How could she just leave?”
_
Inge was right and Anita was already mad at herself for thinking the thought. Had she not learned by now that real family had nothing to do with biology? “Fuck. Yeah. I didn’t mean …” she sighed as her sentence trailed off, unsure of what exactly she did mean. “Maybe she left to try and find us? Maybe we were taking too long. She knows we go out into the woods together, so she just - she went searching for us.” The longer it took to find her, the longer Anita tried to rationalize everything, the more helpless she began to feel.
But then, as if it were a literal glimmer of hope on the horizon, she spotted a familiar heat signature in a familiar size. “Deborah!” She yelled out, and began sprinting towards what she could only imagine had to be their daughter. She had studied that heat signature diligently, never imagining she would need to identify it across a field in this context. But instead of turning and heading towards Anita as she called out her name, it seemed that Deborah picked up her pace in the opposite direction.
Anita didn’t let that deter her as she kept running as fast as her stupid human legs would allow. “I think I can see her! She’s not too far over that hill!” She called out behind her, sure that Inge would be following - sure that their little family would be reunited in mere moments.
–
That beautiful silhouette was finally in her line of sight again and Inge felt something inside her release, like a balloon being burst. She wanted to fall down and weep, but instead there was still some distance to cross between herself and Deborah, so along with Anita she picked up her pace, running as fast as she could. (This was admittedly not very fast.)
Her voice was starting to feel hoarse from the shouting but that didn’t stop her from shouting again and again, Deborah’s name and all its nicknames seemingly the only words she knew. It made no sense, that she was not heading towards them — she had to be starving by now, right? Inge and Anita ran up to the hill, looking down the slope at Debbie’s grown body, worming away from them.
“Where is she going? Debbie!” The caterpillar-esque creature looked at them over her … well, she didn’t exactly have shoulders, but she turned her head and looked ahead. “Come back!” She stomped her foot, crossing her arms. “Young lady, we will count to three and if you’re not here by then — one, two —” Usually this worked, usually it was between the dead space between two and three that a child would come skittering back. But Debbie kept on moving. Inge did not dare say three.
_
As she reached the peak of the hill, the closest Anita had been to Deborah since she had left, she was met with the harsh reality that she had feared. Their daughter hadn’t been lost. She did not come running back to them once they all came into view. As Inge began to count with the seasoned tone of a mother who had done this countless times before, Anita simply dropped down and let her knees hit the grass below her.
“She’s too much like me,” Anita muttered to herself, now overcome with thoughts wondering if that meant that she was too much like her own mother. Maybe that is the true cycle of life: girls rebel against their mothers only to turn into women that are just like their mothers. The ache in the pit of her stomach began to radiate out through the rest of her body until it became unbearable. But the good thing about snakes is that their stomachs are much larger than human stomachs are, so their stomachs can contain much more ache within them.
And with that thought Anita knew she needed to transform - she could not handle these weak emotions in this weak shell of a body. Before she ran away from what she was feeling, she stood back up and turned to Inge. Before she transformed into who she really was she needed to prove to herself who she wasn’t - she wasn’t her mother. Placing a hand on Inge’s shoulder before deciding to pull her co-parent, her partner, into an embrace, she said softly, “One day she will want to come home… and the door will always be open for her.”
_
Debbie was proving to be a stubborn and disobedient child. She was like Vera, in that way, who had moved out the second she turned eighteen and wanted independence from her parents more than anything. But Debbie hadn't been that way before today, she'd been a little forceful and definitely demanding, but always glad to see her mothers (as long as they delivered fresh meat). Inge never said three, because she knew that Debbie would not come even if she did.
It seemed they were both busy comparing, Anita seeing herself in their daughter — which Inge understood more than she'd like to admit. Though she had not yet seen a mirror image of herself in Debbie, she had felt that way about Vera. Whether her mother had felt that way about her she'd never known, but maybe it was an inevitability of being a mother or a daughter. She did not know what to say in response to Anita's assessment and so she was glad for the embrace rooting her into place in stead.
Debbie kept hobbling on and Inge felt her eyes burn, tears slipping from them when she squeezed them shut. Anita's hair tickled her face. She thought of the hospital, the funeral, the goodbye between herself and her first daughter. Was this her curse, then? To be a mother who lost her children? “I hope she does,” she said, but what even was home to a nomad like her? To a woman who refused to be rooted in place? Vera had hated how flighty she was and yet for her she had not changed, so whether she would for Debbie was hard to know. Eventually, in a small voice, she added as a final note, “But for now, we have to let her go.”
To say Leo was in a foul mood was an understatement, and judging by her appearance -- a grossly oversized sweatshirt that once belonged to her brother, old basketball shorts, and her glasses -- it was safe to say she didn’t expect to run into anyone either. She was on her way to Flo’s room to pick up a copy of a book she had asked to borrow a while back in an attempt to distract herself from the day’s events. Eventually reaching his room and rapping on the door curtly, Leo only waited for a second or two before turning the knob. To her pleasant surprise, the entrance was unlocked, and she’d hopefully be able to get in and retrieve the novel and get out. So, when she found Anita perched on Flo’s bed, a startled gasp left her. “Jesus, fuck, do you just live here now?” Taking a moment and feeling immediate guilt for the unwarranted outburst, Leo realized that, in hindsight, Anita was likely way more freaked out to see Leo than Leo was to see her, and she took off her glasses, rubbing her eyes before apologizing. “I -- that was rude, sorry. Just came by to steal a book is all.” @anitangel
' you're being so obvious . ' the femme bluntly states as she fixes herself in the nearest mirror . ' you know for a fact he'd kill you if you ever lay a finger on me ... you know that right ? do you have a death wish or somethin' ? ' / closed starter for @springbreezc , based .
stands in the door way just staring at him , a whole course of thoughts running through her head before she slowly approaches . ' should i see the other guy ? ' the femme tries to make a half - assed joke , unable to wipe the concerned look off her face no matter how hard she tries . ' is there a bag free ? i feel like punching somethin' too . '
