Beautiful Creature

Chapter 6

Clare's POV

          "Why do you want to know about my parents?" I asked angrily. Family was always a touchy subject for me. When I was back on my home planet or the planet I was born on, I lived with both my mom and dad. I was going to have a brother but he was a miscarriage. That was a sad week. I was only five at the time but it still hurt to have to be told your little brother who you had been waiting for was dead. 

          My mom and dad took it just as hard, if not worse then me. My mother refused to have any more children. Two years later my father was shipped off to war. He didn't come back. It was like my brother dying all over again except my mother never got over it. She started drinking and at first, it wasn't that bad. I thought she was going to get over it, but it only got worse. 

          Soon she started to bring random people home and act as if she didn't even know me. I was saddened by this and I had to do most stuff for myself. Learning to cook meals, do laundry, and other things ten-year-old kids didn't know. I wished every day that she would stop drinking and "see" me again. At least one of those wishes came true but not in the way I wanted. 

          Abuse. That's how she paid attention to me. I flinched my back away from the couch as if the scars were recent wounds. In a way, they were a constant reminder of what I went through. She always told me that I was the reason my father had died. Even if the truth was he was shot by an emery soldier. I never blamed my father for any of it, he was a good man and I looked up to him. 

          My mother continued my beatings till I was 13 years old when I started fighting back. The beatings turned into all-out fistfights. I would lose most of them but I got better and fighting became second nature to me. Learning self-defense was one of the few things I learned from my mother, if not intentional. A few months after the first fights, my mother was found out. A police officer caught her at one of her drug meeting places. 

          I was still too young to live on my own and the people gave me a choice. I could remain on that planet or move to a different planet to colonize. Despite the small part of me that still believed that my mother was a good person deep down and wanting to stay on the planet with my father's grave, I choose to leave. 

          I stayed in the orphanage for all seven years. It was bad, to say the least. When I first got there some of the older kids tried to bully me. Tried. Still fresh from my mother's abuse I fought back violently and broke a few of their limbs. I was forced to stay in a separate room from all the other kids and wasn't allowed outside. 

          When I was free from my punishment and allowed into the world again. Everyone was scared of me, I still remembered the time when a smaller kid screamed at me. I was in a dark place and not even the joy of being adopted could pull me out. When I was 16, 2 years from getting out of the orphanage, Stacy came. 

          Stacy's parents had died in a car crash and she didn't have any family relatives that they knew of at the time. Later we found that her uncle was a repairman and he's now semi-involved in her life. She got there and ended up sharing a room with me. Not yet hearing at me she and I became quick friends. That's one of the reasons we ended up sharing the apartment. 

Neither of us got adopted and we were kicked out at 18. The rest was history. 

          The creature didn't like my tone, "If you have no connection to SEAR then maybe your parents did. Maybe they experimented on you?" I shook my head," My parents gone," I said plainly. We sat in silence for a bit before he asked his next question. "What is your name?" his tail twitched like he didn't even want to ask. "Only if you tell me your's" I bargained my fear was starting to dissolve but I didn't let my guard down. 

          "I don't take orders from humans," he growled standing up on four legs. I put up my hands in defense, " Alright it's Clare." He seemed to be satisfied with the answer and sat down, closer to me this time. "My name is Abhipal," he said and he stared me down like he was daring me it make fun of his odd name. 

          I knew better than to anger him, so I held my tongue and said instead, "What are you?" I was genuinely curious, he wasn't any sort of animal I knew of. " I am a Xenomorph."  Another episode of silence and I yawned. Abhipal cocked his head. "What?" I asked, sleepiness starting to take over. 

          "What was that? What you just did?" He walked closer and I scrambled away. He continued to stalk towards me and pinned me up against the corner of the couch. This guy's seriously had a problem with pinning people. "If you continue to withhold information, then I might be forced to other methods," he said threateningly. 

          "I yawned, it means that I'm tired. So please get off me," I snapped, sleep making me angry by default. He growled leaning in closer before he jerked his head to the window. He snorted and looked back at me. A type of sneer crossed his face and he climbed off of me. He ran to my bedroom. One night down and countless more to go. I didn't want to get up from the couch so I grabbed the blanket that was draped over the back. 

The last thought that came to my mind before I shut my eyes was, What a jerk.

Sorry for not updating sooner. Finals and Christmases are coming up and I haven't had as much time as I usually do. I'll try to make the next chapter a bit longer and less of a thrown-together-at-the-last-minute like this chapter was.