choice strains #2
4/5/14 00:38![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
helpfulpandemicsBackstory for Mama Palmer. Spoilers from "Cassette" through "Cookies"; may need some kind of unreality content warning?
the thing about alice’s parents is that although they were outsiders they adjusted to night vale as though they had lived there all their lives. they had been soldiers for so long that not living in a war zone left them feeling adrift, purposeless, and so living in night vale, with everything that entailed, allowed them to go on living the way they had for ages. they kept their heads down and obeyed city-wide ordinances no matter how bizarre and got through it all because they had each other, they had the radio and the emergency nuclear bunker in their basement and the gun rack next to the bed and the stories they told each other when they lay awake at night, to pass the interminable hours before the next cacophonous sunrise, and the knowledge that their neighbours in the houses on either side of them were doing the same thing. alice didn’t want to live that way.
it wasn’t ingratitude, which they might have come to understand if things hadn’t unfolded the way they had. what alice wanted was the better world the adults around her had failed to give her, and the only way she saw of doing that was to rebuild it from the ground up. she wasn’t alone in her desire, and the fact that she wasn’t was what led her, at seventeen, to follow the long-haired youth pastor out of town, as well as a host of other dissatisfied and disenfranchised young people, in search of a certainty - a hope - that had been denied them all their lives
in the end, of course, one angry young man claiming to be the messiah is very much like another. the truth of the matter is that a god wants a believer first and an avatar second, if at all. you certainly don’t get to declare yourself a godhead on the strength of a terrible childhood and whatever you saw whenever you last took peyote. what a god wants is total selflessness, devotion above all else, singular and unshakeable
(when they raised their voices in song around a bonfire her voice was always the loudest and the sweetest, and her eyes were glued to the horizon, waiting for the others to come across the scrublands and join them, and they always did, and she would smile at the man she thought was a god, and the thing being incubated in the bowels of the earth and in the spaces between the stars felt her pleasure.)
he was the prophet and she was the priestess, everyone took that for granted. even when the cactus blossoms opened at her hand, when her visions led them to water in the middle of the desert, it was still assumed that he was the one who made it possible. she was his handmaiden, his favourite, and her place was by his side, defending him against all dissenters by day and going to his bed at night. it continued on like this for months - too many months to count - until alice palmer woke one morning to find him on his back in the caravan, with black blood leaking from the corner of his mouth. the most obvious conclusion, to his disgruntled followers, was that she had killed him. they found her there, leaning over him, with his head in her hands, and converged on her. she couldn’t tell you what happened after that.
it would follow, of course, that something had happened between the first hand coming in contact with her shoulder and waking up again to darkness, to the end of a storm and the layer of sand it had deposited over the stinking, charred inside of the caravan, the roof either torn away or actually burnt through. there had been a fire inside, somehow, some way, and everything had been touched - destroyed - except for her. in the middle of the blackness, where she had been lying, there was a patch of carpet that was perfectly untouched. she didn’t know what had happened. she didn’t want to. alice took what supplies she could salvage and made her way back to civilization.
(her memory of the months leading up to the birth is spotty. the days all run into each other, one endless procession of cracked earth, dry grass, passing cars. the things she remembers most vividly are as likely to have been hallucinations as dreams. she remembers - fairly late along - being in a truck stop near red mesa, and staring up at the waitress, and knowing, instinctively, that the woman was three years away from being in a car crash, could hear the screeching tires and breaking glass, feel the heat on her face - and she must have screamed, must have made some kind of a scene, because first she was in her chair and then she was on the ground, tears on her cheeks and no recollection of how they got there, surrounded by a dozen curious faces. a pair of arms hauled her up, passed off some kind of bill to cover her tab, led her - slowly, steadily - out. she doesn’t remember the colour or make of the car, only that she fell asleep in its back seat, and was handed off to the staff of night vale general by the driver, who turned away before she could see his face. it’s very possible that he was wearing a tan jacket, and carrying a deerskin suitcase. she isn’t certain. she doesn’t want to be. the things alice knows for certain are generally better left unknown.)
whatever their differences might have been when she had disappeared, the palmers were grateful to have their daughter back. they didn’t ask questions, probably aware that she wouldn’t have been able to answer them; instead they sat by her bedside, at least one of them at all times, as if they were expecting a death instead of a birth. they never questioned the things she would say in her sleep, or the oil-black tracks her tears would leave on her cheeks, her pillowcase, her hospital gown. she gave birth with those tears streaming down her face, and slept like the dead afterwards, as her parents watched the twins in their nursery alcove with a quiet concern - a perfectly ordinary boy on one side of the cradle, and on the other side his - brother, if it could even be called that, a bad carbon copy, grey where the other child was golden, watching the ceiling with empty sockets. like most unexplainable phenomena, they took it as a bad omen. the brown-eyed baby came home with his mother, while the void-eyed baby stayed with the hospital. her parents told her that only one had survived, and alice didn’t question them.
three days later, alice’s mother found her leaning over the crib they had hauled out of the basement, offering her finger to the baby they had left behind, who seemed to enjoy grabbing at it. his brother was beside him, fast asleep. they didn’t question that either.
alice had her good days, stretches of lucidity that would last for weeks or even, occasionally, months. she could help her mother around the house, interact with her son without seeing him pursued by a shadowy doppelganger with pulsing white eyes. during one of these periods, she was even able to move out, and the boys followed her, never questioning why they shared the same bedroom, or why they both answered to “cecil” even though cecil’s hollow-eyed brother was “cyrus” on every class roster. they would never last, of course. no matter how minor, gods will not relinquish their hold on their chosen people. her children lived not so much with her as alongside her - an unhappy ghost, as likely to be found vomiting black bile into the sink in the middle of the night as to be locked in her bedroom for days at a time. her parents took to coming over to the house with casseroles, making sure the boys ate and gently, hesitantly, enquiring after her welfare. sometimes she could speak to them, the words running into and tumbling over each other, so much to say and yet having no way to communicate exactly what she knew; sometimes she was silent, listless, hardly acknowledging their presence at all. never, ever, was she spared from seeing, the background hum of it ever present, like white noise, like dead air on the radio
(okay, breaking format, partly because i’m still fine-tuning this, partly because i’m really not sure how to convey it in overwrought nonfic format - alice’s…possession by? enthrallment to? whatever the cult created/summoned, solidified by her bearing of its demigod babies, has left her with not-infrequent glimpses into whatever plane of reality the deities inhabit. depending on what plane she’s seeing she can only perceive one child at a time - cyrus is considerably less human than his brother, so she’ll see him during the periods when she’s largely incapable of perceiving humanity - but given that they’re both kind of nonhuman she’ll have occasional glimpses of both of them together, which given her visions of her son’s eventual death-by-doppelganger understandably freaks her out. when cecil starts interning at the radio station, whatever…imprint? claim? whatever station management has on him alters him sufficiently that she, at the time in not-our-reality, can perceive cecil and cyrus at the same time. she assumes cecil is the doppelganger, grabs cyrus-who-she-assumes-is-cecil and deserts the house, leaving the real cecil vulnerable to…whatever happens in “cassette”. ETA: my longstanding theory is that kevin is cecil's twin brother, which would mean that alice ended up in desert bluffs at some point, though whether she's okay or not is a kind of troubling loose end. i have no idea how cecil's sister/mrs carlsberg fits into the picture here, unfortunately. i may have more to add when i actually listen to "cookies", as opposed to just being spoiled for it.)
the thing about alice’s parents is that although they were outsiders they adjusted to night vale as though they had lived there all their lives. they had been soldiers for so long that not living in a war zone left them feeling adrift, purposeless, and so living in night vale, with everything that entailed, allowed them to go on living the way they had for ages. they kept their heads down and obeyed city-wide ordinances no matter how bizarre and got through it all because they had each other, they had the radio and the emergency nuclear bunker in their basement and the gun rack next to the bed and the stories they told each other when they lay awake at night, to pass the interminable hours before the next cacophonous sunrise, and the knowledge that their neighbours in the houses on either side of them were doing the same thing. alice didn’t want to live that way.
it wasn’t ingratitude, which they might have come to understand if things hadn’t unfolded the way they had. what alice wanted was the better world the adults around her had failed to give her, and the only way she saw of doing that was to rebuild it from the ground up. she wasn’t alone in her desire, and the fact that she wasn’t was what led her, at seventeen, to follow the long-haired youth pastor out of town, as well as a host of other dissatisfied and disenfranchised young people, in search of a certainty - a hope - that had been denied them all their lives
in the end, of course, one angry young man claiming to be the messiah is very much like another. the truth of the matter is that a god wants a believer first and an avatar second, if at all. you certainly don’t get to declare yourself a godhead on the strength of a terrible childhood and whatever you saw whenever you last took peyote. what a god wants is total selflessness, devotion above all else, singular and unshakeable
(when they raised their voices in song around a bonfire her voice was always the loudest and the sweetest, and her eyes were glued to the horizon, waiting for the others to come across the scrublands and join them, and they always did, and she would smile at the man she thought was a god, and the thing being incubated in the bowels of the earth and in the spaces between the stars felt her pleasure.)
he was the prophet and she was the priestess, everyone took that for granted. even when the cactus blossoms opened at her hand, when her visions led them to water in the middle of the desert, it was still assumed that he was the one who made it possible. she was his handmaiden, his favourite, and her place was by his side, defending him against all dissenters by day and going to his bed at night. it continued on like this for months - too many months to count - until alice palmer woke one morning to find him on his back in the caravan, with black blood leaking from the corner of his mouth. the most obvious conclusion, to his disgruntled followers, was that she had killed him. they found her there, leaning over him, with his head in her hands, and converged on her. she couldn’t tell you what happened after that.
it would follow, of course, that something had happened between the first hand coming in contact with her shoulder and waking up again to darkness, to the end of a storm and the layer of sand it had deposited over the stinking, charred inside of the caravan, the roof either torn away or actually burnt through. there had been a fire inside, somehow, some way, and everything had been touched - destroyed - except for her. in the middle of the blackness, where she had been lying, there was a patch of carpet that was perfectly untouched. she didn’t know what had happened. she didn’t want to. alice took what supplies she could salvage and made her way back to civilization.
(her memory of the months leading up to the birth is spotty. the days all run into each other, one endless procession of cracked earth, dry grass, passing cars. the things she remembers most vividly are as likely to have been hallucinations as dreams. she remembers - fairly late along - being in a truck stop near red mesa, and staring up at the waitress, and knowing, instinctively, that the woman was three years away from being in a car crash, could hear the screeching tires and breaking glass, feel the heat on her face - and she must have screamed, must have made some kind of a scene, because first she was in her chair and then she was on the ground, tears on her cheeks and no recollection of how they got there, surrounded by a dozen curious faces. a pair of arms hauled her up, passed off some kind of bill to cover her tab, led her - slowly, steadily - out. she doesn’t remember the colour or make of the car, only that she fell asleep in its back seat, and was handed off to the staff of night vale general by the driver, who turned away before she could see his face. it’s very possible that he was wearing a tan jacket, and carrying a deerskin suitcase. she isn’t certain. she doesn’t want to be. the things alice knows for certain are generally better left unknown.)
whatever their differences might have been when she had disappeared, the palmers were grateful to have their daughter back. they didn’t ask questions, probably aware that she wouldn’t have been able to answer them; instead they sat by her bedside, at least one of them at all times, as if they were expecting a death instead of a birth. they never questioned the things she would say in her sleep, or the oil-black tracks her tears would leave on her cheeks, her pillowcase, her hospital gown. she gave birth with those tears streaming down her face, and slept like the dead afterwards, as her parents watched the twins in their nursery alcove with a quiet concern - a perfectly ordinary boy on one side of the cradle, and on the other side his - brother, if it could even be called that, a bad carbon copy, grey where the other child was golden, watching the ceiling with empty sockets. like most unexplainable phenomena, they took it as a bad omen. the brown-eyed baby came home with his mother, while the void-eyed baby stayed with the hospital. her parents told her that only one had survived, and alice didn’t question them.
three days later, alice’s mother found her leaning over the crib they had hauled out of the basement, offering her finger to the baby they had left behind, who seemed to enjoy grabbing at it. his brother was beside him, fast asleep. they didn’t question that either.
alice had her good days, stretches of lucidity that would last for weeks or even, occasionally, months. she could help her mother around the house, interact with her son without seeing him pursued by a shadowy doppelganger with pulsing white eyes. during one of these periods, she was even able to move out, and the boys followed her, never questioning why they shared the same bedroom, or why they both answered to “cecil” even though cecil’s hollow-eyed brother was “cyrus” on every class roster. they would never last, of course. no matter how minor, gods will not relinquish their hold on their chosen people. her children lived not so much with her as alongside her - an unhappy ghost, as likely to be found vomiting black bile into the sink in the middle of the night as to be locked in her bedroom for days at a time. her parents took to coming over to the house with casseroles, making sure the boys ate and gently, hesitantly, enquiring after her welfare. sometimes she could speak to them, the words running into and tumbling over each other, so much to say and yet having no way to communicate exactly what she knew; sometimes she was silent, listless, hardly acknowledging their presence at all. never, ever, was she spared from seeing, the background hum of it ever present, like white noise, like dead air on the radio
(okay, breaking format, partly because i’m still fine-tuning this, partly because i’m really not sure how to convey it in overwrought nonfic format - alice’s…possession by? enthrallment to? whatever the cult created/summoned, solidified by her bearing of its demigod babies, has left her with not-infrequent glimpses into whatever plane of reality the deities inhabit. depending on what plane she’s seeing she can only perceive one child at a time - cyrus is considerably less human than his brother, so she’ll see him during the periods when she’s largely incapable of perceiving humanity - but given that they’re both kind of nonhuman she’ll have occasional glimpses of both of them together, which given her visions of her son’s eventual death-by-doppelganger understandably freaks her out. when cecil starts interning at the radio station, whatever…imprint? claim? whatever station management has on him alters him sufficiently that she, at the time in not-our-reality, can perceive cecil and cyrus at the same time. she assumes cecil is the doppelganger, grabs cyrus-who-she-assumes-is-cecil and deserts the house, leaving the real cecil vulnerable to…whatever happens in “cassette”. ETA: my longstanding theory is that kevin is cecil's twin brother, which would mean that alice ended up in desert bluffs at some point, though whether she's okay or not is a kind of troubling loose end. i have no idea how cecil's sister/mrs carlsberg fits into the picture here, unfortunately. i may have more to add when i actually listen to "cookies", as opposed to just being spoiled for it.)
(no subject)
10/5/14 03:27 (UTC)discussion of medical abuse? not explicit
15/5/14 01:02 (UTC)