mod lore: i was thinking abt ybgfwtl marcanne while in cosmology class and this happened.
~1k words
“Did you know that the Milky Way is gonna collide with Andromeda in 4 billion years?” Marcy murmured, leaning on Anne’s left shoulder.
“Hm? No,” Anne said, sleepily blinking.
“Yeah, I read about it a while back actually. Y’know… before.” Her voice fell, briefly. “We’ll pass through each over over a few hundred million years, and all the constellations we know will tear themselves apart. Stars, scattered across the sky, chaos without the spiral structure. It’d be gorgeous, even if everything we know would be gone.” There was a faraway look in her eyes as she rambled on about stars.
“Oh, cool,” Anne said, distracted by the ever-present ache in her side. It was cool, if a little grim. She shifted, trying to get comfortable against Marcy’s side.
“And, in another billion years or so, those stars will form a new galaxy, and eventually the black holes will combine, which causes another cool thing called ‘gravitational waves,’ which is when spacetime actually ripples! And they know that’s real because they built these observatories called LIGO that have lasers in them to--”
A knock came on the door. In the few seconds before it opened, Marcy pulled herself away from Anne, going silent.
An axolotl stepped into the small, stark room that Marcy and Anne shared, his bloodstained labcoat sweeping just above the tiled floor. Between their beds, Anne squeezed Marcy’s hand. She squeezed back.
“Marcy,” Triturus drawled, tapping a pencil on a clipboard he held, “follow me to the prep room, if you would.”
“W-why? What’s going on?” Marcy said, stopping herself from getting out of bed.
“What are you gonna do to her?” Anne said before he could approach, raising her arm defensively in front of Marcy.
“Nothing much, just a little peek inside to see how you humans work. After all, Anne, you know that our technology isn’t well-suited to human bodies. Remember what happened with the tank?”
“Stay away from her,” Anne growled.
“Or what? Last I heard, you couldn’t even get out of bed.”
“Stay back,” Anne repeated, Marcy cowering behind her.
Triturus glanced back and forth before his gaze hardened. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. Marcy,” he said, and she looked at him, “If you tell Anne to back down, I’ll make sure you have a nice IV drip of painkillers waiting when you wake up. If you don’t… the bag could always get swapped out for one without any of that in it at all. You don’t want that, and neither do I..”
“Yeah, well too bad,” Anne said, clenching her fist.
“Oh, what a development,” he muttered excitedly, eyes fixed on Anne’s.
“Don’t HURT HER!”
Anne saw blue. She threw herself forward out of her bed, knocking over Triturus and pummeling him with her single fist.
“Anne!” she heard Marcy call, though she was in a blur of cerulean and cyan. She was scarcely aware of what she was doing, barely composed enough to accurately fight and simply trying to rake his skin with her nails despite his thick lab coat, her voice inhuman.
Anne screamed and panted as she was dragged away from the axolotl, though she could do little to struggle. Robotic, tentacle-like arms pulled her from the ground, and the blue faded from her hair and eyes and fist as she was left breathless and sobbing.
She was helpless as she was pinned to the wall, watching Triturus stand up and dust himself off before he stepped past her to grab Marcy’s wrist.
The other girl’s eyes were wide with terror, crying out for Anne but unable to find coherent words.
“MARCY!” Anne screamed as Triturus dragged Marcy away. The door at the far end of the room closed with a hiss. The lock clicked, and Anne was finally allowed to drop to the ground again.
Thick, salty tears caught in her throat. “Marcy…”
Her knees hit tile, harsh and cold. There, she sobbed on the floor, unable to crawl back into bed on her own.
She wasn’t sure how long she sat there. It must’ve been hours before the door at the opposite end of the room, leading to the vast laboratory that this was only a subunit of, gently opened.
“Anne?”
It was Laurel.
“Marcy’s gonna be okay,” she said, offering a hand to Anne. She drew it back when Anne didn’t take it. “I was there when they put her under. She’s not suffering.”
“W-what about when she wakes up? D-Dr. Triturus said that he’d--he’d not let her have painkillers if we resisted, and I… I--.” She clenched her fist, looking at the bloodied knuckles, trembling and pale.
Laurel knelt beside her. “He won’t do that. I promise. Triturus is not a cruel man. He does not want to cause undue suffering.”
Anne sniffed. “When will… he be done with her?”
“It’ll be another few hours at least. She’ll be okay. I’ll make sure they bring her to recover in your room so you can be there when she wakes up.”
A few minutes passed. Anne calmed enough to sit up a bit, looking up at Laurel quietly. She helped Anne back into her bed, where she sat by her side to keep her thoughts far from Marcy, two rooms away in that lab.
-
Hours later, Marcy lay in her bed back in her and Anne’s room, still asleep. Her torso was thickly padded with bandages under her thin hospital gown, an oxygen mask sat over her face, and several IV lines ran to her body from the medical equipment around her.
Marcy moved slightly in bed, causing Anne to instantly focus on her, hoping she’d finally wake up.
“By the time Andromeda reaches us, we’ll already be gone,” Marcy murmured dazily, eyes finally cracking open.
Anne jolted a bit at the broken sound of Marcy’s voice.
“The Earth’ll be gone, at least. And the sun.”
“Marcy?” Anne exclaimed, voice teary.
When she heard Anne speak, Marcy tried to sit up, but cried out in pain as soon as she made the attempt to move, clutching her stomach.
“Shit, shit, Marcy, d-don’t move, okay?” Anne’s eyes traced the IV line that ran from the metal stand beside Marcy’s bed to her hand, the skin still scarred from the rejuvenation tank’s tubes, as she gently pulled away Marcy’s hand. “Do you… uh, know what happened?”
A faraway look appeared in Marcy’s eyes. “He was… he was going to…”
The beeping of one of the monitors sped up as Marcy broke off, her breathing quick and shallow.
“Hey, hey, you’re okay, Marbles,” Anne said, leaning in close. She leaned back against the pillows of her bed when her side spasmed in pain, still looking softly at Marcy. “I--I’ll tell Laurel you woke up. You should probably get some rest. You’ve, uh, got a lot of healing to do.”
what does triturus wear when he's off the clock? since he's a femboy and all
he wears clothes what else would he wear
(in all seriousness i dont really have an actual answer, feel free to imagine him in whatever. visualize him in a maid dress for all i care you'd probably be right. i only ever draw him in his lab uniform and havent imagined much else)
Was triturus specifically created for mad science fun times?
okay that i don't know. he and dismal were an experiment focusing on newts' regenerative abilities so ig they were created As a mad science fun time and raised in the castle lab afterwards since . well . their parents signed a contract and officially disowned em as eggs. they logically had nowhere else to be put.
does tits r us like being called that? what are his feelings on the nickname
he isn't like. Actually called that by anyone in the au canon, but he'd probably think it's pretty funny. repetitive use would make it annoying, however, which isnt surprising
