Story [RPF, OC Challenge] You Are Not A Pet, Sweetie

Of Course You Are Not A Pet, Sweetie​

Intention: One-Shot roleplay post recovery
Sources: Backstrom, Torchwood, Necroscope, in all my dreams I DROWN RP
Agent Mary Formal - Arcan female shapeshifter (human form), 242 years, E-Branch agent, seconded to SHIELD, pretends to be with the U.N.C.L.E.
Detective Sergeant Nicole Gravely Human female. 24 years, Special Crimes squad, Portland Police Bureau.


8:40am. On a short connecting Alaska Airlines' flight from Portland International in Oregon, up to the Seattle-Tacoma airport, Agent Mary Formal was struggling with several matters as she sat in the centre pair of seats, to the left of the young redheaded woman that, for the last eighteen months, she had regarded as her child, her little girl.

Back then, both women had been in the city of Los Angeles on different objectives, and drawn into a multi-agency police taskforce to hunt down the prolific Sidney serial killer.

Partnering up, Mary had quickly taken the shorter human under her wing,

The blonde-bobbed Arcan was wondering how well she had handled that morning's discovery of Nikki watching the local tv news in the living room, where a night-time hunter trying reach his deer stand (she didn't know what one was either), had stepped into an unused shallow grave in the woods, fractured his ankle, and fortunately had a distress beacon on him - as he wouldn't have been able to hike out to his truck - leading rescuers to him, three shallow grave plots and a stolen wood chipper.

As body disposal options, that was overkill, however she had insisted on them, clearly not confident that the trick-or-treating they had gone on, last night, would go as smoothly as it had.

Startled at finding her little girl exposed to Mummy's machinations, Mary had had to compose herself really fast in order to take up the remote with a steady hand and switch the tv over to Dora the Explorer.

Her own Resident Evil cosplay had grown on her, so the aqua boob tube and black miniskirt had been through the washer-dryer, and was being worn now, although Mary also had a thick black coat to cope with the cold of the region, up in one of the overhead compartments.

Worries about how well she had handled the morning incident, coupled with the feeling that they were being stalked by suspicious-looking men in removal vans, when they had emerged from the house to get into the taxi that had turned up to take them to the airport.

She remembered spying the furniture removal trucks sitting at the ends of their road, one to her left and one to her right, with the latter slowly retreating backwards out of sight, not suspiciously at all.

She had urgently flapped her hand at Nikki standing in the doorway, pink backpack on, and clutching her heart-themed Care Bear, Jennifer; to come join her, so that she could bundle her into the back of the taxi.

Without having to make the concessions supposedly necessary to accommodate her daughter's work as a policewoman, Mary had indulged herself when dressing Nikki that morning.

If you hadn't known that the titular Alice wasn't meant to be a redhead, her little girl could easily have gone undercover into Wonderland - twee little frock with short puffy sleeves, several layers of petticoating.

Getting her belted into her seat had been a two person job.

On a bright note, the E-Branch agent was quite glad that Nikki had insisted on continuing with Clifford, King of the Monsters, for story time, since thoughts about the morning kept intruding on and derailing her attempts to put meat onto the bones of her own preferred option, Clifford and the Crash of the Byzantium, based on the Doctor Who episode where the Doctor, Amy, River Song, a platoon of camouflaged troops (including one she remembered from the werewolf movie, Dog Soldiers), had searched the wreckage of the starship Byzantium, through a cavern filled with statues that had turned out to be Weeping Angels. Age old creatures that were statues when you looked at them, but superfast, homicidal time-energy guzzlers if you so much as blinked.

Her central conceit of having the Big Red Dog having peed on several of the statues, then having the lead soldier warn over the radio, "The statues are active, I repeat, the statues are active," just wasn't translating into a longer tale.

"So, you are with SHIELD, are you?" Nikki's statement intruded onto her thoughts.

Mary glanced at her, noting her little girl's cautious tone.

Her pretence of only being an UNCLE agent had come to an abrupt halt back at the airport, when her laminated black-and-yellow card had not been accepted as sufficient proof to back up Nikki's announcement that they should be able to keep and wear their guns in the cabin on thigh drop-holsters, as they were both LEOs, law enforcement officers; and Mary had been forced to break out her SHIELD identification.

"That warden from the Mexican prison who contacted us about Jimmy McNamara's drug trafficking sentence, said that he had been dropped off by a gringa SHIELD officer."

Mary frowned. "And who is this Jimmy character when he's at home?"

Nicole had sniffled and stuttered through a bare bones explanation, but Mary was already well aware of who Jimmy was. He had been Gravely's twenty-first bust when she had been an undercover with Vice. However, the man had been politically connected, and arresting him had stalled Nikki's career, gotten her previous twenty Vice arrests purged from her record, and almost gotten her fired. Also, for some reason, a rumour had been started, that she had been sleeping with her clients.

This was at least two years before the girls had met, and though the young woman put on a brave face, it was clear that it still upset her, and it may have been established by now, that when it came to her daughter's happiness, Mary wasn't ******* playing around.

She had gotten the idea from watching a quality show called Person of Interest, where the ex-CIA assassin anti-hero had used this on a US Marshal using his badge and contacts to stalk his ex-wife.

The British woman leaned over, putting her mouth close to Nikki's ear.
"Sweetie, we are on an aeroplane. I will not discuss this in public. Am I understood?"

Nikki nodded silently.

Mary reached down into her hand luggage to retrieve a plastic bottle with ridged measurement numbers up the side, and a rubber teat, leaned back in her seat, and thumbed the button on the inside of her armrest to call the stewardess, the responding person wearing a short-sleeved navy blue knee-length uniform dress with a lighter blue kerchief around her neck.

"How can I help you?"

"That milk that I pre-ordered. Please can you heat it up, and bring it along? Thank you.

Mary's tray, along with the armrest between them, was up by time the stewardess returned, the woman waiting patiently in the aisle as Formal stood Nikki up from her seat, and turned her to face away from them. Nikki had the glossy magazine from the seat pocket in front of her knees, folded open in her hands, and kept hold of it as Mary lifted her and pulled her backwards across her lap, tried to keep her own chin above Nikki's ruffles, and took the bottle. "Thank you."

"Mom!" Nikki whispered in protest.

"Shush, don't be precocious, Darling. This'll help Mummy to relax; and help you when your ears start to pop as we come in to land."

"I can swallow, Mom; I don't need the milk."

Mary held her kid securely around the waist, and used her right hand to glide the heated bottle closer to currently firmly sealed lips, doing an impression of a harried Colonial space pilot to facilitate the meal.
"Galactica, Kat! I got Cylons all over me, clear the landing bay!"

Nikki refused to play ball, so Mary diverted the bottle at the last moment, and took a sip herself.

"Actually, good call. That is still a bit hot."

After a few moments, during which Mary wrapped the still hot bottle in a couple of serviettes, Nikki piped up. "Were you like this before?"

"Before what?"

"Before having a pet."

Agent Formal frowned at the side of her daughter's head. "We don't have any pets, Sweetie."

"Well, I don't."

"Neither do....oh you mean you!" The Arcan felt her head getting hotter as her temper flared! Finding herself trembling enough to shake her child of her lap, she forced herself to calm down, taking a deep breath, and releasing it slowly through her nostrils.

When she felt a bit better, she craned up to peer over the seat ahead, and looked towards the left-side seating, where the nearest stewardess had been seated.

She lifted Nikki off her lap, and stood her in front of her seat. "Come on, that stewardess area ahead is empty, and there is an empty seat. I ought to have plenty of room to pull your knickers down."

Nikki jammed herself back into her seat, forearms pressing onto her armrests like she was an astronaut experiencing g-forces. "I'm sorry! I'm sorry, alright! I take it back. Please, let me just sit here. How about pretending that I never said anything?"

Formal's head brushed the overhead lights and airblower as she stood in the tight footspace in front of her own chair. "How about you pretend that you are not sleeping on your tummy tonight, when we get to Auntie Liz's?"

"Mom, can you just sit down please?" Nicole pleaded, leaning forwards in her chair and looking up from under her own eyebrows, a move that to Mary, seemed counter-intuitive.

She conceded though, sitting down, and swinging her knees a few degrees towards her daughter so that she could address her with a bit more comfort, whilst Nicole looked down to her lap, where her fingers were nervously ruining the magazine's pages for the next occupant of her seat. "Whoa, that escalated quickly."

"That's because, having you has turned me into a drokking supervillain."

"Super Vi-?"

"It means I'm super good at playing violins, Darling."

"Well, I have never heard you playing one." Nikki challenged with a momentary glare that instantly softened, but not so fast that the Arcan missed it.

"A testament to how much Mummy loves you. Look, you are my baby girl, that is true; but you are absolutely not my pet. No pet has a suicide gene as pronounced as you do!"

"Lemmings?"

"I literally have never heard of one of those being kept as a pet, Sweetie." And that is with the benefit of 242 years on this planet, she continued silently. On the other hand, she hadn't learned that Sweden had an island during those two-and-a-half centuries, either. Make of that what you will. "Probably don't live long enough to get domesticated." She audibly exhaled through her nostrils. "Jimmy is doing five to twelve in federalee prison because he ruined your career, and upset you, Sweetie; who would do that for a pet?"

"Neighbours have harmed and killed each other over how a dog has been treated, so there is an equivalence."

"Alright then, we went trick-or-treating last night. Who does that with a pet?"

"I might not know them personally, however, someone, somewhere, will have done it. I can show you videos where dogs are wearing little shark costumes. I would bet money that a pet has been taken trick-or-treating."

"Wait, hold up." Mary brought up her right hand, showing as much of that hand as she could without dropping the wrapped milk bottle. "Is all this because I won't let you bury your poop in the back garden?"

Nicole blushed deeply and shot her mother a scandalised expression: "I have never asked to do that!"

"Oh, so there is a difference between you and a pet. Chalk one for my side."

The young redhead pouted and sat back again, crossing her arms. "How about when you tried to flea me the other day?"

"I tried to flee you? What were you doing, cupping a spider in your hands?"

"Would that work?"

"Haha, nope."

"I'm a detective, Mom. There is logic to some of the things I come up with. One, you took extreme interest whenever that 'Itch' commercial came on the telly, where that tabby cat's eyes widen upon the narrator suggesting that its owner might forget to apply anti-flea medication every month. Two, a week later, one of those packages was on the doormat. Three, a day later, I was pulled over your lap without explanation, and instead of what usually happens, you put drops of liquid on the back of my neck, and made me sit with my arms crossed for an hour."

"I wouldn't call it extreme interest."

"Also, whilst I cannot prove that this was related, we went shopping for lamp shades, with you showing absolutely no interest in replacing any of our current ones."

"It sounds to me that whatever I do to keep you safe, can be twisted to sound like your the equivalent of a dog or cat. Or in your universe, lemming."

"Alright then, when I'm sick and have a temperature, where do you always put the thermometer?"

"You are my baby girl. If we fired up Excel and attempted to graph my trust that you wouldn't bite down on the thing, and accidentally poison yourself with toxic mercury, it would be so far into the negative z-axis, and beyond the Earth's crust, that we would be encountering magma. I would actually be interested to know how other parents know when to make that changeover." She glared hard at her daughter. "Everything that I do, Sweetheart, is to keep you safe and happy."

"Well, not everything." Nicole pointed past Mary towards the aisle. "How would taking me over there, make me happy?"

"When you are being naughty, rude, or insolent, obviously those moments are exempted."

"All I'm hearing out of this, is that you trust me less than say, a cat. A lot of owners would trust that animal to be out of their sight for days at a time."

"If you hadn't wrestled Nana to the ground, to stop her taking pictures of your room, you would still be at home, away from me for a week." The woman being referred to, was an associate of Gravely's, an Amy Gazanian, head of Civilian Oversight. Nikki hadn't wanted pics of her Princess Castle bunk bed online, for other cops to see. "That's on you, Honey. Plus, I don't know any animal, domesticated or wild, that is so self-conscious about their sleeping arrangements, that they'll break somebody's phone!"

"Try walking into a mother bear's den."

"It won't target your phone!" Mary put both hands up in placation. "Enough. We'll end this philosophically. There is a famous question: if a tree falls over in a forest, and there is no-one there to hear it, does it make a sound."

"Obviously, yes."

"I agree. The same applies to how I think about you. If you need to cross the road, and I'm not there to hold your hand, do I trust that you will make it across? Absolutely not!"

"Backstrom says that when someone says 'absolutely not', they mean 'absolutely yes'." Nicole asserted, referring to her lieutenant, and head of her Special Crimes' unit.

"Perhaps when someone else says that. I don't even trust you to stand on the curb and wait for me to catch up! Till I'm there to take your hand, 'far as I'm concerned, you can look at a road from behind a locked door that I, or another responsible adult, has the key to. That's the level that we are at."

A ping sounded above them, and both women looked up to see the Seat Belt signs illuminated.

Mary switched the bottle to her left hand, and reached over to pinch the un-protesting Nikki's nose from above, which of course opened Galactica's hangar, and the bottle's teat / Kat's raptor, immediately docked. "Hold that, and if it comes out of your mouth without permission, you'll wish you had an inflatable ring to sit on. Got it?"

Her hands freed up, Formal set about digging through the layers of lace and ruffles to find the edges of Nikki's seat, and in turn, the ends of her seat belt.

"What pet gets to hold their own bottle?"

"Trimpnzee?" Nikki mumbled around it.

"If it can rip your face off, doesn't count at a pet in my opinion. Which would invalidate a lot of dogs, tigers, and octopi, I suppose."

Snapping together her child's belt, Mary took the magazine, closed it and slipped it back into its seat pocket, then secured her own belt, settling back as the plane shuddered into it's descent to the airport at Seattle, Washington.

The End

 

Great job! As a quick disclaimer, I'm not familiar with the source material so I might have missed some nuances.

Heh, Nicole must have a lot of patience, or just know the best way to work with a 242-year-old Arcan. I imagine a lot of long-lived species could view species with shorter life spans (such as humans) as a type of pet since they would see so many generations come and go within their lifetime, like we do with dogs and cats. No matter how deep the connection is, the longer-lived species knows on some level that it's temporary for them.

Mary and Nicole have an interesting dynamic together, and it looks like they work together pretty well. I'm sure they're a formidable pair when they're doing their detective work.

Great work!

 

How did I miss this one, filled with the customary jollity? I dunno. *smiley chosen because of the fic's content)