fic: family portrait
Film: Alien 3
Characters: Ellen Ripley, xenomorphs
Title: family portrait
Word Count: 463
'give me Christ, or give me Hiroshima
destroy another fetus now
we don't like children anyhow
I've seen the future, baby:
it is murder.'
- Leonard Cohen
family portrait
A queen. She can feel it squirming, tugging at her insides like a suckling pig. Her sacrament, so it seems, her grace - she was the mommy of her own parasitic fetus.
The inmates found her physically attractive, sexually. Even with her sunken face, her shaved head. A natural human response, despite the fact that she was covered in engorged scar tissue. (But, then again, she was the only one who could see those.) It didn't matter, they followed her with their eyes across the room. The persistence was almost funny. Nearly comforting.
.
'I can feel you breathing,'
.
It finds her body to be so familiar. Every curve, each of her tender muscles clenching against it. Her soft folds were unsafe and awkward, without exoskeleton. 'Without protection,' her xenomorphs; her children, hum.
Parasitoid, internecivus reptus, they are. As a race, they blur the lines of sexual dichotomy, but she is distinctly female. A child carrier.
If she were to expire - everything, everything would fail. She would become an inanimate carcass, the electrochemical activity of her brain would cease to function. If Ellen Ripley - their host, their mother - was a failure, nothing would be safe from their offense.
And nothing could stop them from uniting with her - nothing from fauna, flora, machina or human species.
The fetus can feel her heart, warm and wet. It clatters louder when the infant moves, curling deeper inside the security of her womb. When she thinks of her offspring, it makes her blood go hot and cold by turns, she feels it bubble under the film of her flesh. The queen making her first declarations.
.
'mothermothermother,'
.
The embryonic queen spouts bile, and Ripley expels it when it rises highest. She wants to be rid of it all, but she can't seem to force up the fetus. Even if she could - it would mean the end of the world.
'and what is her opposition to that?' they wonder. It is a world that, for some reasoning they cannot pattern, she loves. Even for all it put her through, she loves it.
They cannot understand why she loves a place like that - that dispels toxins; that lets things like parasites, like them, exist in their eco-system; that creates artificial intelligence with the purpose of imitating human life (though they cannot feel love, they imitate it). In the process of living in this universe, she lost a adult male and small girl child that she felt some sort of kinship and compatability to. They've found that only the moral die, as a general rule.
The children; the xenomorphs, are thinking, "If she can love a place like that, she must love us..."
.
'Mother' is the name for God on the lips and ears of all children.
Characters: Ellen Ripley, xenomorphs
Title: family portrait
Word Count: 463
'give me Christ, or give me Hiroshima
destroy another fetus now
we don't like children anyhow
I've seen the future, baby:
it is murder.'
- Leonard Cohen
family portrait
A queen. She can feel it squirming, tugging at her insides like a suckling pig. Her sacrament, so it seems, her grace - she was the mommy of her own parasitic fetus.
The inmates found her physically attractive, sexually. Even with her sunken face, her shaved head. A natural human response, despite the fact that she was covered in engorged scar tissue. (But, then again, she was the only one who could see those.) It didn't matter, they followed her with their eyes across the room. The persistence was almost funny. Nearly comforting.
.
'I can feel you breathing,'
.
It finds her body to be so familiar. Every curve, each of her tender muscles clenching against it. Her soft folds were unsafe and awkward, without exoskeleton. 'Without protection,' her xenomorphs; her children, hum.
Parasitoid, internecivus reptus, they are. As a race, they blur the lines of sexual dichotomy, but she is distinctly female. A child carrier.
If she were to expire - everything, everything would fail. She would become an inanimate carcass, the electrochemical activity of her brain would cease to function. If Ellen Ripley - their host, their mother - was a failure, nothing would be safe from their offense.
And nothing could stop them from uniting with her - nothing from fauna, flora, machina or human species.
The fetus can feel her heart, warm and wet. It clatters louder when the infant moves, curling deeper inside the security of her womb. When she thinks of her offspring, it makes her blood go hot and cold by turns, she feels it bubble under the film of her flesh. The queen making her first declarations.
.
'mothermothermother,'
.
The embryonic queen spouts bile, and Ripley expels it when it rises highest. She wants to be rid of it all, but she can't seem to force up the fetus. Even if she could - it would mean the end of the world.
'and what is her opposition to that?' they wonder. It is a world that, for some reasoning they cannot pattern, she loves. Even for all it put her through, she loves it.
They cannot understand why she loves a place like that - that dispels toxins; that lets things like parasites, like them, exist in their eco-system; that creates artificial intelligence with the purpose of imitating human life (though they cannot feel love, they imitate it). In the process of living in this universe, she lost a adult male and small girl child that she felt some sort of kinship and compatability to. They've found that only the moral die, as a general rule.
The children; the xenomorphs, are thinking, "If she can love a place like that, she must love us..."
.
'Mother' is the name for God on the lips and ears of all children.