The Moms at the Park Are Free

by BananaDucc

Summary:

Mouse Protector is kidnapped by her new wifey Siberian, because Riley really really wanted another mom.

 

Mouse Protector is not a normal person. Normal people don't fantasies about killing their perfectly nice coworkers, normal people can take care of their own bodies, normal people don't have their lives get drastically better when they get kidnapped by the Slaughterhouse Nine.

Notes:

"The elites don’t want you to know this but the moms at the park are free. You can take them home. I have four hundred moms." -Bonesaw, age 12

Chapter 1: Normal Human Hours

Mouse Protector

Day 0

 

When Amber gets home the first thing she does is rest her forehead on the cool wood of her apartment door. She stays that way until her feet begin to hurt from the strain of standing after enduring her eight hour warehouse shift.

Without even processing the moments in between, she finds herself laying on her couch as her microwave beeps loudly. The TV dinner is cold by the time she forces herself to shovel dinner down her throat. Amber sits on the floor of her shower until the hot water cuts off, she doesn't remember even entering the bathroom.

Amber lays in bed until the light from her window fades. She grabs the clothes she tossed aside on the chair the night before. She fights to put on the too tight bodysuit that makes up the first layer of her costume. Amber pulls something when trying to buckle the back of her trusty body armor because she forgot to stretch beforehand again. She clicks her tongue when she has to put on the off the shelf cargo pants and knee pads, having torn the old pair of custom made bottoms just last year and been unable to afford new ones. The pavlovian click of the warn-in utility belt makes Mouse Protector sigh in relief. 

No matter what was thrown at Amber, no matter how much she wanted to drive her forklift through the small warehouse office or how fucking much she wanted to break everbody’s legs with a wrench on the daily, she knows it’s not her real life.

Mouse Protector straps her sheath to her belt, pastes on her domino mask, settles her chipped helmet over her wet hair, and finally she dons her iconic burgundy cloak. 

The fabric mouse ears happily bob up and down as she bends over to tie her boots. The whole time her mind is elsewhere, instead focusing on the mark applied on the door handle of the building's stairwell. Mouse’s vision around her dims and is replaced by the fuzzy awareness of the stairs. Suitably satisfied with it being empty she lets herself drop. With the feeling of the world falling from under her, Mouse Protector teleports. She readjusts in the brief moment of unaccounted for time, that impossible second between the tick of the clock hand. 

Now standing, she pulls on her gloves as she makes her valiant trip up the stairs, a perilous journey leading to the roof. From the third pouch from the left Mouse retrieves an illegally cloned key. The door had long since been given a non off the shelf padlock after she accidentally left the old open one too many times. Mouse sits at the edge of the roof.

Mouse Protector is not suicidal. She would never step off the ledge she was currently sitting on, the one high enough to kill her despite the extra flexibility of her joins and elasticity of her bones. Nor would she fail to catch herself in the first five feet by teleporting away if she somehow stumbled off the roof. It’s just a thought that swirls around her head every blue moon. 

Intrusive thoughts are normal. Very normal in fact. Amber knows; she went to a therapist well over a decade ago so she could get a good grade in being normal.

So here she sits, just thinking about life. As one does.

Fights, friends, the inevitable fallout from her total inability to form normal human relationships. It's a story repeated time and time again, at some point it all starts to blur together. But on nights like these, her mind can't help agonizing over the little things. 

Shitty conversations where she should have kept her mouth shut. The villains she knows in her gut that she left worse off. The fights she should have known not to drag out, the people she never should have let gotten away. Heroes, friends, relationships ruined over shitty comments that come first nature to her. 

Mouse Protector wants relationships. Wants what other people have. Wants to be a hero, wants to leave people better off than she found them. But she's doesn't feel things at the level of everybody else, doesn't love as hard, doesn't empathize like people should. She was built wrong.

And as of being fired today, Amber officially has absolutely zero income. Oh, her mistake. Mouse forgot about the thirty-eight or so dollars a month she gets in the mail from old TV cameos and what little merchandising she owns the rights to.

Amber is thirty now, an age Mouse never thought she would reach. Planning a life around living fast and dying young turns out to be a bad plan when you only do one of those things. Fifty thousand dollars of debt would attest to that. She's had setback after setback, but this time it feels unrecoverable. Like being normal is finally a true impossibility.

She has no hobbies, no ambitions, no friends, no team, no prospects. Deep in her bones she knows her jokes have been stale for well over half a decade. Her life sucks. 

It sucks. All of it. Jobs suck, heroes suck. People suck. The world is a terrible place. It’s all pointless. No amount of action she can take would improve anything. 

Mouse is not a spiteful person. Her cursing of the world remains an internal phenomena. An intrusive thought. After a long life of holding everything in, it feels right for bitter words to do nothing but linger on her tongue.

In Bet the birth rate is being chased down by the death rate, Endbringers are heralds of the end times, society is doomed, blah blah blah blah. There's no point cursing it all. Life has sucked since the moment she aged out of the wards, maybe even years before that, maybe it was the moment Reed sparked the Inaugural’s falling out. Maybe it was when the power in her brain click into place.

At this point it’s nothing new. And right now, in this moment, she needs to do something. Mouse is twitching with anticipation, the nowadays rare drive to do something is back. She needs to beat up some mugger, or fight some villain, or- or- hurt someone. So she gets up off the ledge, just like every time something in her life goes sideways, and Mouse Protector gets back to work.

Mouse hesitates. She was not alone. On the other side of the roof is a little girl sitting on the opposite ledge with her back towards her and her head down. She couldn't possibly be older than twelve. Amber cringes at how terrible of a role model she must be. She left her apartment not thinking she would be interacting with anybody in a way that didn't involve lots of blood.

A Chibi-Mouse bonks her with the knowledge that ‘Naughty heroes get put in the ‘not allowed to be Mouse Protector’ box’.

Maybe not blood- but she still would have showered with soap or maybe washed her costume if she knew she would be talking to someone this week.

In her head Chibi-Mouse taps the sign labeled ‘Children dying is a bad thing’. Right, she forgot.

In a flash she does the mental math. She doesn't have her shield on her, and if she leaves behind her belt and armored cloak the kid would be under her weight limit. Worst case scenario everybody’s still getting home safe.

She treads carefully to mask the sound of her footsteps. Mouse lightly brushes the back of the kids back to place a mark just in case before plopping herself down next to her. 

“Heyyo!” After hundreds of hours of practice, the perfect tone of playful enthusiasm comes naturally.

The girl looks up from her book with wide eyes. She flushes and covers her face with an ancient Wards coloring book. One that has a full page spread just for Mouse Protector on page thirteen. 

“Great view, huh?” 

“Ummm…” The kid just curls further into herself in embarrassment. The act covers her shirt, an old worn out thing with the original Wards leaping into action, a young Mouse Protector is printed proudly right in front.

“Can I tell you a secret?” MP asks. 

The kid nods behind her book. 

Mouse leans in and whispers, “This is my favorite spot in the whole world. I come up here when I need to clear my head. Nice and tucked away so no peeping peepers see me, and with a view like none other. But the view’s waaay better on the other side. Want to see?”

Mouse stands back up on the roof behind the kid, she picks them up and sets them on her shoulder. It gets her off the ledge. In Mouse Protector’s opinion the view isn’t something to write home about, Mouse doesn't really like any view for that matter, but it is nice and tucked away from prying eyes. A good place to catch her breath before a patrol. 

Mouse Protector sets the little girl back down after a mathematically suitable amount of time of contact. “I’ve got some very important hero work to get to, so let's get you back to your parents.”

She kneels down, and flips through the book, “These are really…” All the Wards are covered in crayon diagrams that peel away their paper white flesh to see the cherry red insides, “Creative. Do you want me to sign my page?” Mouse is not one to judge. She made weirder tributes in her youth. 

The girl shakes her head fast enough that MP thinks that her hair clips could fly over the side of the roof. “I don't need that. I have you!” She seems a lot more personable now that she’s gotten used to Mouse’s presence.

‘The child is cute’. Mouse Protector thanks Chibi-Mouse for the help on that one.

Idly Mouse doodles her logo, a simplification of her old helmet. She finishes it by writing one of her dozen pre-written notes of encouragement in the borders between the diagram and the pink hearts that surround the page. 

Mouse Protector fights back a yawn as she tucks away the pen she stole from work. “Do your parents live in the building?”

The kid grins wide enough to show a missing molar. “No, but one of my moms is right behind you."

Mouse Protector turns around and-

Mouse desperately fumbles through her utility belt. It's empty, she opened the wrong pouch due to shaking hands, it's the one unusable do to being completely worn through. The action was stupid anyways, a mistake of adrenaline from staring down the yellow eyes of a predator. Mouse Protector hones in on the furthest mark she has, a faint imprint left behind at her work.

The smooth ceramic of a thick collar locks around her neck, tiny hands affixing it from behind. The awareness of her marks disappears like fog through open fingers.

The Siberian begins walking closer.

‘Oh, that's worst case scenar-’ Chibi-Mouse is set on fire and torn to shreds by a pack of starving dogs.

The girl, Bonesaw, jockeys Mouse with a piggybacks. Her words are playful, “My new mom’s also right... Here! That's you! That means you and Sibby have to hold hands. You're married now and that's what married people do.”

The words barely process as Amber’s rat brain chooses freeze for once in her life. Her mind can focus on only one thing in the world. The curl of the Siberians lips, the bearing of its teeth.

It's smiling at her.

Notes:

Chibi-Mouse is a jerboa wearing a helmet. Jiminy Cricket if Jiminy Cricket had to tell Pinocchio to not kill people for talking too loudly.

Chapter 2: Playing Doctor

Mouse Protector

Day 0

 

‘You are going to die.’

Mouse Protector roars back to awareness. She grabs the thin neck of the kid behind her, tearing their weak hold off her back. She whips her arm over the side of the building.

Bonesaw has to fight to keep her tippy-toes on the raised ledge. The Siberian slows its approach. It tilts its head in curiosity. 

Bonesaw bangs on Mouse’s arm with far too much strength for her tiny frame. She speaks clearly despite the iron grip crushing her windpipe, “Hey that's not nice! That's not nice at all!”

So. Mouse's worse case scenario: Eternal torture by the preteen in her grasp. Her best case: Dea- No, just from the little she knows of Bonesaw through osmosis, death is no escape.

God, what a truly pathetic end to the meaningless life of Mouse Protector.

“I really am out of my prime aren't I. I don't even have a pun for this. Throw yourself off the roof, or I drop her.” Mouse Protector’s words are as shaky as her hands. She hates that the beloved feeling of adrenaline pumping through her veins is being twisted against her. Fear is an uncommon state of her mind. 

The mass cannibal rolls its eyes. Ivory lips part and whisper, “She would live, and you would suffer.”

“Nope! You can't hurt each other! You’re married!” The child is ignored.

Mouse could nearly laugh at the predator across from her. It's still staring at her unblinkingly with those unnatural slitted eyes. “I'm dead anyways right? A little torture is nothing but a nice cherry on top of my shit-sunday.”

Bonesaw groans in frustration.

The Siberian raises a brow before chuckling like everything is all in good fun. It opens its arms invitingly towards Mouse Protector. “Come on. Let's go home.”

Only now is she made aware that the Siberian is wearing a satchel on her arm, the striped bag hidden by its perfect camouflage against the tiger print body. The notion of it wearing a purse would be amusing, insane even, if not due to how distressing it is for Mouse to be aware more than ever that she knows next to nothing about the modern Slaughterhouse Nine. She didn’t even know the thing could talk.

Mouse Protector opens her maw, ready to sling a string of insults and jabs that have been building with every moment they linger in the tense air of their standoff. But she stops herself. All of this is just delayal; an old habit from ages past rearing its head in the face of something she can’t run from. But there is no team at her back, no adults supervising an exercise. The device around her neck is not coming off without intervention she does not have access to. There is no way out of this except through.

“Fine. Let's make a deal. A- a bargain… A, um-” Mouse sways on her feet, “An under- understanding…”

She blinks and the Siberian is suddenly far closer than she remembered it to be. It takes considerable effort to lift her limbs, like she's moving through oil. Mouse looks down to see that her hands are empty. Where did the kid go?

Amber’s legs give out from under her. Strong arms catch her as the world lulls away.

 

---

Day 1

 

Awareness slams into her like a brick wall. Mouse Protector thrashes in her bindings. A tremor runs through the cramped dim room she finds herself in, like the entire world is moving. Desperately Mouse Protector tries to get away, but her struggle only highlights the straps holding her down. 

She feels like she can't breathe; her neck is still choked with that abominable device. Lightning strikes down her spine as little hands adjust something in her open abdomen.

“Oops, you're not supposed to be up yet. Sorry.” In the haze of pain it's nearly impossible to notice the needle pinch on her upper arm, “I like your bones by the way.”

Amber's vision fades back into the void of unconsciousness.

 

 

---

Day 2

 

Time- she’s losing time. Something is in her brain- Tools digging and scraping and- She need to say awake, Amber needs to-

 

Notes:

Riley dropping a live rat in MP's exposed diaphragm: "The patient needs mouse bites to live."

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 3 of Mouse/Siberian