hi @ZeroIV4 i’m your secret santa this year! you asked for Q team as a family so i drew Sean opening a gift from Mira and Eric :D hope you have a wonderful holiday!
Happy holidays! I couldn’t help but write about Phi’s drinking shenanigans, the prompt was perfect and it was begging me to pick it. Phi’s such a joy to write honestly, so I hope you enjoy your gift as much as I enjoyed writing it!
Ao3
“This is all your fault, you know.”
Phi was getting tired of the constant sighs from Sigma’s direction as she added another entree to his tab. It was easy enough to ignore the first many that he had let out, but as the night wore on and her buzz increased, her already low tolerance went down the drain. Down the drain like the many wasted drinks in Rhizome 9’s lounge.
“What, pray tell, did I do to deserve footing the bill on all this? You do know that I have college debt to pay off.”
Phi rolled her eyes. “Oh please, as if Crash Keys wouldn’t pay that off at the drop of a dime if you whined enough about your ‘noble sacrifice’. Besides, there is a reason: crimes against humanity, for one.” Phi shoved a handful of fries into her mouth as Sigma sputtered out his response.
“Wha- Humanity?! And that didn’t even happen in this timeline!”
“Still counts, no take backs Sigma,” she replied, mouth still half full. If any of the others had been around, she was sure they would glower at her horrible table manners, but that was one of the perks to old man Sigma: he didn’t give two shits about correcting her if he didn’t have to. All he did was sigh endlessly.
“Where do you even put all that?”
It was a rhetorical question, but Phi gave him an appropriate answer: “It gets funneled off to the billions of me’s across the multiverse, obviously.” She raised her glass in mock cheer. “To me, me, and me.”
“Someone’s egotistical.”
She ignored his snark and took a large drink, satisfied with the burn the alcohol provided. It almost made up for the wasted drinks. Almost. She figured his debt would be repaid in… 45 years. That sounded appropriate.
“We should be heading back soon, you know Diana will worry,” Sigma said, squinting at the time on his phone. Phi was hard pressed to feel any sort of irritation towards her, but she couldn’t help the disappointment of her night out being cut short.
“She’ll be fine for a little while longer; at least let me get a to go box and another drink.” It came out as more of a plead than Phi would’ve liked, but the buzz was starting to hit her and she found she didn’t really care.
“You’re beginning to sound like an alcoholic, if I didn’t know you any better. Fine, but no more fries. If I have to see you eat another one…” He shook his head, some sort of disapproval on his face.
Phi looked him dead in the eye and ate another one just to spite him.
It took longer than she had expected for him to get fed up and drag her out of the restaurant. By then, it was approaching the hour where everything was dead silent, once they got away from the hustle and bustle of Drunkard Central. She couldn’t say she necessarily trusted Sigma behind the wheel of his car just yet, but she had to admit there was something soothing about his overly slow old person driving. It certainly didn’t upset her stuffed stomach that was finally acknowledging her overeating, so that was a plus. She could do with less grumbling though.
“Who even taught these people how to drive?” Sigma glared at the car that cut him off. “And you guys think I need to go back to driver’s ed.”
“Because you do, old man.” Phi covered her eyes with her arm, tired of the blinding car lights in her face. “If you drove like a normal person we’d be home already.”
She couldn’t see his face, but given his track record she imagined he wasn’t looking at the road. “Would you rather be late or dead? There’s nothing wrong with going slightly under the speed limit. It’s called a limit for a reason.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She waved her free hand dismissively. He mumbled something she couldn’t make out under his breath but shut up for once. Though she complained, she was glad that being overly verbose and feeling the need to comment on everything was something that he shared with his younger self. She sort of missed him, even if he was kind of a dick and flirted with anything vaguely female shaped. She could cut him a little slack; flirting aside, he wasn’t awful.
The car suddenly stopping was the only sign Phi got that she had dozed off momentarily. She blinked wearily, squinting to make out her surroundings. She was relieved to see that the sudden stop was due to them arriving home rather than his poor driving.
“Hey, grab my stuff,” Phi ordered, biting back a yawn as she opened the car door. When he began to protest, she pulled out the big guns. “You said Diana would worry, right? Shouldn’t I go tell her we made it back safely?”
Hook, line, and sinker. Phi knew how to play him like a fiddle. At least she used her powers for good, well, non-harmful demands. She wasn’t an Akane-level manipulator hosting Nonary Games and masterminding complex plans to alter timelines and that was a fact she would easily hold over their heads if confronted.
True to her word though, she swiftly made her way inside, fumbling with the keys aside. To her surprise, Diana didn’t immediately greet her; in fact, she wasn’t even downstairs. Phi frowned.
“Hey, did Diana get called out tonight?” Phi called back at Sigma, who responded with a “no, why?” She ignored him, going farther into the house and glancing at the couch where she expected her to be sitting. She hadn’t accidentally fallen asleep on it, so where was she?
Just as she was about to worry, a door upstairs opened and Diana’s voice floated down. “Welcome home, did you have a good time?” She sounded calm, which made Phi relax.
“Yeah, old man grumbling aside,” she called up, looking over to the entrance where Sigma stood with her leftovers. He rolled his eyes at her remark. Diana softly made her way downstairs as he went to put her food away. Phi allowed her a hug as she passed.
“Sorry we’re back so late, I hope you weren’t too worried,” Sigma apologized, forehead creased with worry himself. Out of the two, he was clearly the one more distressed by their late night out.
“It’s alright, Sigma. You told me you were going to be late.” She gave his arm a loving rub, and as Sigma moved to give her a hug and kiss, Phi noped it out of there. They were family to her in more than simply their shared blood, but that didn’t mean she was comfortable with their PDA.
Besides, she had more important things to do. Like sleeping. And digesting her food so she could eat her leftovers in peace, and thus giving her the power to make Sigma go out and buy her stuff. With her extremely important to-do list created, she dragged herself off to her bedroom, satisfied with her day and herself. Life was good.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you, @kurohawt! Have some Phi angst, as per your request :3 (Ditto to the mods of @zecretsanta–thanks for all your hard work, and for holding the event again this year!)
AO3 LINK
Reproductions
Before all this, before Carlos had shot her elderly twin brother in the head, and before she’d unwittingly played a game to ensure her own existence, before she’d discovered her biological parents and her origins and the fate of humanity in this timeline that Delta had claimed he was trying to avert, Phi had phoned her parents.
It hadn’t been anything major, really. She’d just forgotten that she’d been supposed to travel home for Christmas until she got her phone back and saw all the worried messages on it. It was fair enough that she’d forgotten, she thought, considering all the kidnapping and SHIFTing and time travel she’d gone through the day before—though, really, it was up in the air whether anything she had ever done could be measured in a linear fashion.
Anyway. Even though her thoughts had been elsewhere the entire time, phoning them had felt like the right thing to do. Perhaps it was filial duty that drove her, those future timeline splits where she would fail and they’d never see their daughter again driving her to make their last encounter a happy one. (Failure was something she loathed to consider, but she was too practical to not consider that it was inevitable for at least some versions of herself.) Or maybe it had been more about making sure they wouldn’t cotton on that something was amiss, and if that had been it, she’d been wildly successful. They’d not said anything out loud, but they’d not bothered concealing the delight in their voices at the prospect of her following in their scientific footsteps either.
They’d been an afterthought then, before everything that had happened, a check off a checklist of affairs to put in order. Now, though, as she lay sleepless in the dark early hours of the morning after the nine of them had left Delta bleeding out under the desert sun, her thoughts kept returning to them. What must they have thought of her? Even if they’d believed they knew what to expect, surely they couldn’t have been prepared to crack open a machine beyond human understanding to find a baby from nowhere? Her mother—not Diana, but the researcher that she’d called mother all her life—had read such stories to her when she was little, tales of Tom and Thumbelina and Kaguya, and now Phi couldn’t help but wonder whether she’d picked them out specifically, like any other adoptive parent of a child with a background and qualities so different from their own experience that they needed to find the stories that would speak to them in the way they couldn’t with their own voices. Surely she’d have noticed the correlation, her little Phi a dead ringer for one of the tiny children from the stories, though found within a machine instead of a flower, a miracle bestowed by time rather than magic and due to an experiment rather than a wish.
One who would rather die than abandon humanity and ascend to the moon.
Here, in the dark, early hours of the morning, where all thoughts are deeper and pettier and more disturbing for the lack of any distractions from them, her determination to save the world and the human race from devastation seemed less significant than the fact she was an experiment. (There was a Phi who hadn’t been one, and a Phi who had been a refugee from a doomed timeline, but she, herself, the Phi sent back into the future—there was no reason for her to have been sent forward aside from idle curiosity.) She couldn’t even tell what the emotion she was feeling was, or what emotions she even should be experiencing at the revelation.
She knew one thing, however, and that was even though her parents had insisted she come home for a few days after the test was over, since they wouldn’t see her over Christmas, she couldn’t imagine making small conversation and laughing around the table at in-jokes formed over years. Not right now. Perhaps it would have been possible if they’d just kept the truth from her: she’d always been their little Kaguya, just as they’d always been her old wood-cutters, and that would have remained a fact even if she’d never discovered it for herself. No, it was that there was no time for left for banal family gatherings and half-truths when the three of them were living in a timeline Delta had insisted led to death, and the deaths of every single human on the planet.
(She would not abandon humanity for a life on the moon, but that didn’t mean she didn’t feel just as set apart from other human concerns now, mixed up in such grand conspiracies and realised metaphysical theories as she was.)
She was still lying there, awake and motionless, when someone softly knocked on her door. Phi hadn’t bothered retrieving her glasses and so when she got up and opened the door, Diana was more an impressionist painting than anything else, a sweep of red hair and sensation without solid line.
“Sorry,” said the woman who she’d just found out was her biological mother. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“Yeah,” said Phi, “I couldn’t sleep either.”
She stepped aside and let her mother come past to perch on the edge of Phi’s bed, bringing with her a waft of something fragrant. Phi went back and sat atop the duvet, legs curled in a basket, before putting on her glasses. Diana’s expression was pensive, there were dark circles under her eyes, and there was a crease between her eyebrows. She’d not bothered changing out of the clothes she’d worn that day. She must have noticed Phi looking over at her, because she smiled, but it just made her look more tired.
There was a moment of silence between newly-found mother and daughter. It was Diana who spoke first.
“So, you really did keep that brooch all this time.”
Phi nodded.
“So then, that means I got it from you and gave it to you.”
“A bootstrap paradox,” said Phi. She had always presumed that the phrase on her brooch must have meant something to her biological mother, and a stab of disappointment had hit her when she’d learnt that it hadn’t even really belonged to her in the first place. “It’s the same with my name. Sigma told me.”
Fucking Delta had a reason behind his name, while she, named for herself, had nothing but a time loop behind hers. How unfair.
“Yes,” said Diana, “It’s strange. I suppose that means they’re all your own, though.”
“All my own, huh.”
Diana smiled at her. There was something nervous about it. Her eyes never stayed in one place.
“You know, we don’t really know all that much about each other, do we?” she said, eventually. “You were just a baby when we had to say goodbye, that first time.”
Phi considered this. Had they even truly said goodbye? She was, after all, a copy of a copy of Diana’s original child. The great, welling emotion in Diana’s tired eyes shut up that nagging little thought and any thought of voicing it, however: what kind of monster would remind her mother that the child she’d sacrificed her own chance of escape to save had also starved to death alongside her? After all, it wasn’t as though Diana didn’t know it already.
She also resolved to not mention the fact that the other child for whom she’d done the same thing was lying dead in the cold, unburied, brains splattered across the Nevada desert.
“I suppose that’s true,” she said instead.
“If you want, we can talk a bit, about ourselves? To get to know each other a bit better?”
“That… sounds nice,” said Phi.
Diana relaxed.
“Should I start off? Um… well, I’m a nurse, but you already know that. What else… well, I always wanted to go to the moon. It’s been my dream ever since I was a kid.”
How very ironic. A faint memory of a woman created for the express purpose of living on the moon, red-haired and with a caged bluebird hanging from her thin neck, flashed through her mind. She found herself judging Sigma a little less.
“I’m a student,” said Phi. “Classics and philosophy. I was raised by two researchers. Probably the same ones who got me at the other end of the transporter, but they never told me anything about it, so I can’t be sure.”
Diana’s face was intent, making sure to not miss a single piece of information. Unfortunately, being asked to immediately reveal one’s entire life-story came less easily than one might think, and so she decided to bat the ball back into Diana’s court.
“Why did you join the test?” Phi asked.
Diana went horribly silent at that, and Phi instantly wanted to take back the question.
“You don’t have to answer if—”
“It was because of my ex-husband,” said Diana. “He was stalking me and his behaviour was getting more and more erratic. The head nurse recommended I become one of the test subjects to… escape him, for a little while. It was dangerous for the rest of the patients to be around me since he’d usually be around, waiting, or even coming by the hospital to—”
She cut herself off. Her gaze had dropped as she talked, but when she peeked back up at Phi, her face made it clear that she regretted answering so honestly.
“You don’t need to worry about me. I’m an adult, it’s fine.”
Phi had intended it to be a reassuring statement, but Diana shrank. Crap. So, it was true, and here was the proof: even after the game, all that shared time and timelines and biology, she still didn’t have much of a clue as to what made Diana tick.
That she knew her better now was obvious, of course. Her delicate air had, on first impression, reminded Phi of a doll, and not even the hard china dolls people had often compared Phi to when she was younger and more likely to put up with it, but a felt one, soft and pliable (Luna had seemed doll-like too, and though Phi had presumed, after her little secret had come out, that it was just an unavoidable part of technically being a particularly highly-advanced one, she wondered now if it was something Sigma had seen in Diana too and had taken it into consideration while designing her moon-bound facsimile.) During the game, though, she’d come to know Diana more and more: she’d been the one to step up and direct the rest of the team, taking each decision into her own hands during the game, and a decisiveness had emerged from behind all the kindness and empathy. (Luna had been ever sweet and compliant, Asimov’s angel, but Phi preferred Diana’s bitterness and bloody hands.)
And still, even after they’d discovered more about one another, here she was stepping on buttons and stumbling into minefields.
“You are an adult, aren’t you?” Diana said. Her voice was quiet. “I should be able to tell you these things. Still…”
“We don’t have to talk about it,” said Phi. “Not if it makes you uncomfortable.”
A thought occurred to Phi then: while they’d experienced a far longer period of time, only a week had passed in reality. Even if Diana had gone into seclusion, not enough time had passed to make this ex-husband of hers any less a threat.
A burst of protectiveness filled her chest and she wondered, for a moment, if Mira would deign to take a commission.
“No, it’s all right,” said Diana. “It’s funny, it seems so mundane in comparison to the world ending, or even all those times you”—she cut off the last word— “But if he managed to hurt you because I’d kept him a secret, I’d never forgive myself.”
She smiled, gentle and bitter all at once. The urge to ask Mira about those commission rates increased exponentially.
“Even so, I would like to have you in my life,” Diana said then. “Maybe that’s selfish, but it’s not as though we’re not all in a dangerous situation. It’s a little strange since we’re the same age and all, but I really would like it if we could get to do all the things we missed out on together.”
Maybe she wasn’t the only one who didn’t know how to handle this screwed-up new family situation, after all. Phi leant forward and hugged her mother. It was an awkward position, the two of them too far apart and straining to stretch their arms out long enough, but it was fine.
“Of course,” she said, voice muffled by Diana’s red jumper.
Diana laughed, low and comforting, and patted her head like she was one of her kid patients. Phi let her. There’d be time to figure out proper boundaries and how to deal with a new set of parents her own age later.
“You know, I’m supposed to go home for a couple of days,” said Phi, hoping she wasn’t about to hit another sore spot, but getting the urge to mention it anyway. “Don’t think I’ll be able to, what with everything going on.”
“Home?” said Diana. “Oh, with those researchers you were telling me about?”
“Yeah, those are the ones.”
“You’ve not told me much about them. Are they nice?”
“Yeah, they’re nice.”
“I’m grateful they took care of you when we couldn’t,” said Diana. “I’d like to meet them and thank them—but I know that’s probably not possible.”
True. It would be quite the exercise to try and create a cover explaining away everything that had happened, was happening and was going to happen (and was currently happening in parallel timelines) just to explain to them how she’d met with Diana and Sigma. If they were to pick up on any more—and they were crazy smart after all, so it was likely—it could be a disaster.
“Considering where they picked me up—and, uh, their personalities—I think they’d be pretty interested in meeting you, if they knew you were still around.”
It was true; they were nothing if not science freaks. They’d gladly pay for the plane tickets for the opportunity to talk with her about her experiences, though it would probably be less about Phi’s childhood, like Diana presumably wanted, and more about SHIFTing in general.
“I hope we do get to just be together one day, all of us, even if it’s just for a little while.”
Phi wondered—it was something in her tone that led her to suspect it—if she was including that goddamn old man in that definition of us all. She decided not to ask. She’d already determined not to mention the bastard in front of their mother.
Instead, she just gave a bland “me too” as a response, hoping she was wrong, and buried her face back into Diana’s jumper like she really was a kid. For now, there was only that familiar scent and, in the morning, a world to be saved.
26. You just got a free plane ticket to anywhere in the world, but you have to leave immediately. Where are you going to go?: JAPAN! I want to go so bad!! Specifically to Tokyo, and even more specific than that Tokyo Disneyland. I want to practice my Japanese and learn more about the culture.
39. What type of music do you like?: Jpop/some pop songs coughs Love Live and vocaloid songs and what my friends refer to as dad music??? its like. rock I guess but softer than most rock songs? I’m not really sure how to explain it.
49. If you could breed two animals together to defy the laws of nature, what new animal would you create?: A golden retriever and a lion! They are my two favs.
60. Do you believe in aliens?: The universe is so big like idk how people can’t with all this advanced technology now.
This is my Secret Santa gift for Mischa @kurohawt.
It’s a short story called “Christmas Eve”, set at some point during the original series, probably early on. Anemone and Dominic are stuck at a remote base due to bad weather and a breakdown, and end up finding an unlikely shared interest. It’s entirely worksafe, and I tried to make it funny and heartwarming.
