"Understanding"
By Viridian5
7/12/02

RATING: PG
ARCHIVAL/DISTRIBUTION: Anywhere, as long as you ask me first.
FEEDBACK: can be sent to Viridian5@aol.com.

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"Understanding"
By Viridian5
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So many of the others had died when the changes came, when new monsters came down from the stars to take over. They hadn’t understood how the stars could betray them, as if understanding meant anything. They couldn’t just be, like she could.

She found out that the bogiemen tasted too foul but the big, bone men just had a funny tang that she didn’t mind at all. The first prey people still lived here but they hid in holes like skinny, scared little mice with their whiskers all a’twitch and hardly any life in them at all. She liked how rough and tough and bad the bone men thought themselves, how hard they fought when she sunk her fangs into their thick, brawny necks. It was funny to murmur the names of their ancestors against their skins, loud enough for them to hear, as she ended their lines.

Time passed as time did. She ate what and where she pleased, but the whole world had become a dim sewer. Maybe she should take a ride on one of the star chariots, where she would never have to worry about the hurting sun again. Someday.

Right now, she had prey in her grip. He smelled of fear, anger, dirt, and machines, and his heart pounded against her so fast. "Mouse," she murmured into his ear. "Little mouse who makes all the hurtful noises. The hurtful noises that stab into my ears like knives." His hands scrabbled at her arm around his neck, and his fingernails were as black as hers but a slick black, with a green-pink iridescence. She had to see how he did that.

"I don’t--" he protested in a little mouse squeak.

"Shrill," she growled. "Shrillers."

"You’re not an Uber," he gasped.

"I am sensitive." She rapped her knuckles against his forehead.

There would be metal on the warm, tasty skin of his neck someday but not yet. Her tongue almost tasted the metal to come as she licked it. She saw the stars again when she looked at him. This boy would slip the bonds of earth and fly. Or she could end his days now, cut his cord too soon, and he would never know that she’d snatched his shiny future from him. His eyes would turn to dead glass and the stars and all the other possibilities she saw in him would die with him. Death. He had death waiting in him, the death of so many bone men in a wave of glowing fire, but it would happen before now, in their past but also in his future.

Understanding was worthless. Things were.

She felt a shadow at her back, a shadow of light. "You are not here," she said to it.

"You are not sane," the mouse muttered as he kicked, but he didn’t feel the brush of the meddler’s attention, the flick of a tail that wasn’t there.

The meddler in fate. Meddler who had marked this mouse as property already. She could kill him, but the meddler would only become more hateful.

This little mouse boy who kicked and struggled against her would make barely a mouthful. There were two other mice who wielded this one’s noise with him, but one would die soon, and the noise would end, giving her some peace.

When she let him go, he ran fast, hit the tunnel wall, and turned with a crescent of sharp metal in his hand. Drusilla smiled and said, "Your mummy and daddy miss you from their bed of worms, Seamus, but they’ll have to wait to get you back."

He paled, and his eyes widened, but she walked away before he could decide whether to run from her or fight.

She’d named the stars once but forgotten. They hadn’t always meddled so much. Maybe it was time now to visit them.

**********************THE END***********************

SPOILERS: "Bunker Hill."
SUMMARY: Some predators predate the Fall.
DISCLAIMERS: All things Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda belong to Gene Roddenberry’s estate, Tribune Entertainment Company, and Fireworks. Drusilla is a Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy Inc., Kuzui/Sandollar Television, and 20th Century Fox Television creation. No infringement intended. Suing me would be a waste of time.
NOTES: I’ve had my inner Dru bubbling up for years. It figures that she’d finally show up in something weird....