MOTHERS

◙twenty◙

"You don't want them to ask questions."

But Lorelai had questions, so many of them floating inside her mind, taking up too much space. Pangs of pain shot through her stomach. Pain so similar to when she was pregnant that she wondered, for an instant too long, if somehow she'd gotten pregnant again. If the simple act of entering this building and all the secretive experiences it represented had filled her belly with another non-human creature.

Non-human creature.

Or had they knocked her out and impregnated her again? She knew how drugs worked, how they could alter one's perception; she'd preferred her drugs that way. So had something happened between when Cole had showed up at her house, and when they'd arrived inside the lab? Something she couldn't remember, because she'd been drugged?

She gulped, and the acrid taste traveling down her throat sent a wave of nausea up to her head, making her dizzy, swaying on the spot. Tegan had lugged her forward, and was staring at her in a new light now that she knew, that they all knew who Lorelai was.

Cole's mother. This tail-holding, three-month-old foreign entity residing in the body of a fully formed adult, was her son. As a streak of purple light slashed over his features, she thought for a second that she'd looked into a mirror, that she was seeing herself in him. She recoiled away from the image, away from Cole's straight-lined lips. Away from the eyes that mirrored hers, though his were blaring red, a menacing beacon of what she'd produced without meaning to—a monster.

Did that make her a monster? If she'd given birth to him, if he'd come from inside her, from parts of her DNA, did that mean she wasn't human, either? That there was something within her that wasn't normal, that wasn't from this earth?

"I won't believe it until we get proof," whispered Tegan, quietly enough that only Lorelai could hear her. She gripped Lorelai's shoulders, then steered her towards Cole, who was waiting for them to follow him down to what could only be perceived as their doom.

He had a tail. A tail. He had red eyes that reminded Lorelai of blood, and she pictured the substance oozing down his cheeks, drip-dripping to the floor. She pictured him whipping out a forked tongue to lap up that blood, any of it that flowed near his mouth, and slurping up the flavor of his own bleeding eyes.

A vomit-like taste began to spiral up her throat, and she shook the disturbing images from her mind before they took over and made her faint—again.

She'd been having a good day, a normal day, and regretted ever opening her door and letting Jacob—no, Cole—inside. She should have pretended to not be home, to be asleep, to be too busy to answer. He'd have gone away, right? Gotten back in his dirty van—which, now that Lorelai thought of it, was likely stained with blood, and not dirt, as she'd initially assumed—and driven off to recruit the other mothers. And they'd have refused him. It was her fault they were there, her vote that had tipped the scale in favor of them getting in his stolen vehicle and coming down to the lab that had produced him and his siblings.

Siblings? So the lab used the same DNA to implant into all of us?

They were mothers to a group of aliens. All four of them, without knowing, without quite consenting, had brought into this world babies that grew to adulthood within minutes, and who then conspired to escape and take over the world. Or so, that was what Lorelai assumed they wanted. She'd watched enough science-fiction movies to know that aliens usually didn't visit earth for benevolent reasons. They wanted the planet, they wanted the people, or they wanted to destroy both.

Lorelai reluctantly went with the others, led by Cole and his red eyes acting as a flashlight. But she wasn't sure what she was descending into, nor if she'd come out alive.