Apocryphal Family Tree: The Rough Draft

Body Mods and Undercover Goodbyes

Lenny knew that not telling everyone that these were final goodbyes, that she was now definitely marching to her death, she was robbing them of what she was able to do: write out in her best hand all her thoughts both positive and negative about the other person and put them all together and have letters that she hoped someone would find and hand out to the necessary people. But she didn't want their pity and it would be harder to go if everyone knew she was headed to her death. That Winnie thought death was a better idea than whatever could be magicked up and attached to Lenny because she's too powerful for someone so naive.
Lenny laid in bed thinking about her favorite movie. Emma Thompson explaining that it's a book about a man who doesn't know he's going to die and then dies, but if it's a man who knows he's going to die, and goes anyway, goes willing, isn't that a person worth saving? Played on a loop and she was getting less and less worked up over Winnie saying, "Yes, but we don't know the exact circumstances of your death, it's slightly less preventable. There's no kid riding a bike and a woman who finally got a job as a bus driver who's story is the real tragedy and the fact that she's in that movie for a total of a hot second while Dustin "soft boiled clit" Hoffman is a major player is an injustice."
Winnie said that in a way that I think she's written a fic or two about the woman whose name we don't know but who Thompson totally screwed over. Somethings I think all Black people who aren't ashy will agree on.
Lenny relaxed her shoulders again. They had a way of creeping up to her ears with tension. She released her tongue from the roof of her mouth. She took a deep breath. Everything might not be fine, but she was going to die at some point and join her ancestors, why not do it sooner rather than later? Die young and be a pretty corpse. Lenny remembered the things she'd talked about with her friends about in college. She thought about the people she'd known that had died before her. Since Lenny was definitely related to Janus maybe she could even hop realms like Hopper once she'd transitioned to the afterlife. She could go talk to all the dead people. Trace the family lineage back better. Why hadn't Winnie just done that? Was that a thing that was always on her list but never high enough up to get done so then it continually got half assembly delegated to an apprentice until Nor the non-apprentice took over. And now there's two of them on the task and they've further than they've ever been but also they're all fractured and less communicative. Lenny caught that errant thought and used to to drag herself back to what she needed to do. Text Hopper. Schedule surgeries. Hopper might be the only person she could tell the whole story.
Lenny: Guess who's in Boston‽
Hopper: !!!
Hopper: how long you here?
Lenny: as long as needed for some fun implant surgeries.
Hopper: Winnie's bringing you on a mission.
Lenny: this is true
Hopper: you said that'd be what kills you
Lenny: I did in fact say that yes
Hopper: are you okay with this?
Lenny: can I explain this in person
Lenny: writing all of this is making me upset
Hopper: yes
Hopper: if it makes you cry or angry or cry angrily then you aren't okay with it
Lenny: sometimes you have to do things you aren't okay because you aren't okay with any of the options
Lenny: fun fact: Winnie knows this will kill me
Hopper: oh. I can see if the surgeon can take you tomorrow.
5 minutes
Hopper: tonight at 8pm?
Lenny: no time to prepare is probably best
Hopper: one surgery is the complexity of a fine arm sleeve tattoo
Hopper: the other is equivalent to a neck piercing and hip piercing
Hopper: also I need to apologize for Winnie putting it into you head that not only will you die but possibly get hacked to pieces.
Lenny: thanks. The mental images aren't great
Lenny: where should I go?
Hopper: how familiar are you with MIT?
Lenny: I used to be able to navigate the tunnels.
Hopper: my lab is in 42-45. Top floor.
Lenny: Okay. Be there in two hours.

Lenny didn't know exactly where that was and she wasn't sure if the key would work if the only clear thought she had is "where Hopper is," so she gave herself a ton of extra time. Lenny went downstairs, told her mom she was going out for the night to visit friends. It was cute that her mom believed that she had friends in the area when Lenny didn't. Although Hopper is a friend and in the area so maybe never mind I do have friends in the area. I used the door to the garage as the portal. I imagined Hopper and the words MIT and lab. I opened the door and Hopper was getting it on in her lab. Because I was two hours early. I closed the door as quietly as I could and then I was little stuck. Which was weird because I could go anywhere and yet there was nowhere I wanted to go. But I also didn't want to parade back through to my room. So I tried portaling from garage door to bedroom door. That worked. It made me feel like I was in that Escher painting with the stairs, but it worked. Once the dizzy vertigo feeling passed, she knew what she wanted to spend her time.
She opened a door and took a stroll through the Museum of Science. She loved this place. The new T-Rex, the lightning theatre, the musical stairs. Loved sitting in the Mugar Omni and the Hayden planetarium. She remembered the Museum of Science in Fringe and huffed. That museum didn't look like this museum at all. Like the rest of Fringe, it was set in Boston but not filmed in Boston or near or Boston or by anyone who knew what Boston looked like at all. Watertown doesn't look ritzy like that, you're thinking of Newton or Wellesley, the Chestnut Hill area. Lenny spent over an hour in the museum and for the most part she just sat and wrote in her journal. The time had flown by and Lenny ended up having to run to a door to not be late for her, which is anything less than 10 minutes early.
Lenny walked through the door and into Hopper's lab. It was a good lab. Lenny liked it, even though this was her first time in the lab, she felt comfortable. Another woman stood next to Hopper, a tall, beautiful woman with one of the most intricately designed braids crowning her head.
"It's the tracking beacon implants are easy surgeries. I figured we could do those now. The neural implant is a little more difficult, we're going to port to a pocket universe so that it becomes a minor surgery. I haven't gotten all of my tools to work in this universe yet.
It was such an informal but intimate experience. It was a small needle with anesthetic and then a slightly larger needle that pushed a small metal ball in between the muscles on my hip and the muscles off my spine. It felt like I'd gotten punched very hard by my sister in the hip and shoulder. I believe I've heard a friend call it a dead arm. It's my hip and neck, so waking and turning my head around is difficult. The doctor says that I should start feeling better in a few hours and back to normal after a full rest. A full rest is eight to nine hours, not however much sleep you are or aren't getting."
Lenny nodded. She'd see how she feels after six hours.
"You don't get all your spell slots back without a certain number of hours." Hopper said.
Lenny snorted. She didn't realize that Hopper was such a nerd.
"We'll see what I roll for initiative."
"It'll take a few days to get you bracers. I'll shoot you a text when they're ready."
"Okay. I'm just hanging out with my family and such. Soaking it all in."
"You telling them this is your swan song?"
"No. Is it true that swans sing before they die?"
"Ah! I've actually met a few swan people and have been told that in fact they don't sing. Silly Greek I ran legend."
"You've met swan people‽ I want to meet swan people. Or selkies. Or manatee people."
"The stories I could tell you about the duomorphs that frequently show up in "animal wives" tales. I've seen a few rehashed on Tumblr and Twitter. Ugh, they make me happy. So much righteous anger that led to reparations and restorative justice with help from the Wild Hunt."
"All of you know each other, huh?"
"This world is very six degrees of a deity, it's wide and vast but we could easily trace each other to within six degrees of a close friend. And not all of us, just the ones who either were human at some point or who are in the struggle to make living equitable among all humans. Some of us hard agree that instead of banding together, humans fractured apart and are so cliche-y it's tearing the fabric of human civilization and the environment on the planet that makes it possible down. We'd like to fix that. We'd like to make it better for the people behind us and such. That's how I got hooked up with Glenny Mae."
"Through the Wild Hunt?"
"A woman who goes around caring for the dead from mass state or state sanctioned violence is hooked up with an abolitionist org that aims to bring restorative justice to the masses, you're surprised by this?"
"Ah yes well when you put it like that I shouldn't be."