Cloning Blues (31_days 04/06, femslash100 Tarot 18)
Title: Cloning Blues
Series: None; one-shot
Rating: G
Characters: Annette Gerritsen
Pairing: Annette Gerritsen/unspecified
Disclaimer: Fake as hell. I did not write Niemand houdt mij tegen; Evert Hartman did. I’m just borrowing his sandbox.
Word Count: 210
Notes: Unoriginal title is unoriginal, I know. Today’s 31_days prompt (there is little gossip among the stars) and femslash100’s Tarot Challenge 18, The Moon combined to give you this sort-of-crossover-definitely-future-fic. Let’s play an association game: there are two towers on the card, which reminded me of De zingende torens (a book taking place in teh globally warmed future, and there are these two magical towers which sing to women and drive dudes nuts or some crap like that), which in turn reminded me of Niemand houdt mij tegen (also a post-sea-level-rise tale but now with more anachronistic EU-defying isolationism *g*). The book takes place in the early-mid 22nd century, when humans have engineered a new minority to oppress. I took a bunch of liberties with the whole ‘clones’ thing, though.
Summary: She was a clone. Well, that explained everything, didn't it?
The thing about being the famous clone of a famous woman was that everyone knew. It was worse, because Marianne’s identity was public knowledge, and people knew what she was like. They knew all the little ways she differed from her donor, and they attributed them to an imperfect cloning process rather than to her own personality. A clone didn’t have personality quirks: their birthstatus explained everything.
She was attracted to her co-stars (well, there was just the one, which made for a pretty small reference pool) because Marianne before her had married one of hers and had dated another one (giving the massively larger sample size of all of two people). She’d met hers when they had briefly shared a mentor in their teens, and they’d even been given the parts over their rivals because they were a real-life couple. But that didn’t matter.
If she liked lemon ice cream because it reminded her of summers in the south as a little girl, that was merely coincidental, because Marianne had a public fondness for citrus-flavored ice creams, so that was where she’d really got it from.
It was public knowledge that clones couldn’t reproduce, so her terror of pregnancy meant her “creators” had gotten some of her wires crossed.