It was like a bolt of lightning had crashed into the deceptively serene family Christmas living room and split apart the delicate shell of stunted social graces that had been keeping everything barely in check for the past several minutes.
Lois rose like a shot from her chair and marched swiftly past the petrified Lauren before she had a chance to react.
“Mom, what’s going on? What was Britney DOING?” Lauren cried as she built to a terrified crescendo, her cheeks drained of color.
“Ross!” Lois barked as she made her way toward the stairs, as though this whole thing had been coordinated in the silent interim, and before the mortified daughter could give desperate chase, the well-built Myers patriarch begrudgingly grabbed Lauren by the shoulders and steered her toward a chair, forcing her to sit down as kindly as he could, even while she kicked at his shins.
“Dad, what the hell are you doing? LET ME GO!” Lauren screamed, now throwing her limbs every which way and thrashing against her father’s powerful grip with every fiber of her being. She flung herself backward in the chair, only to find it was too close to the wall to provide any momentum, so she tried lunging for the carpet to snake around Ross’s legs, but this too was blocked. Her father hunkered down on the floor, putting himself slightly below her eye level in hopes of soothing her. There was an agonized glint in his eye.
“Millie, please… help your sister calm down,” he requested softly to his other daughter, and Lauren’s younger sibling was at last snapped out of her frozen state.
“Lauren? Don’t w-worry. Mom and Britney won’t do anything to him. They probably just want to… go meet him,” Millie said, crouching by the chair and placing a hand on her sister’s knee in an attempt to calm her. Her tone suggested she wasn’t entirely convinced by her own words.
“Then why won’t they let me go up too?” Lauren growled, thrusting in every which way, but finding each attempt blocked by her parent. “Dad, I swear to God, if they do anything to him…”
“Lauren, I promise you,” her father said sincerely. “Nothing will happen to your… your, um…”
“My fiancé, Dad. The man I’m going to marry,” Lauren spat, finishing the sentence for him. Wrenching an arm loose, she slugged Ross in the shoulder, who took hold of her again, unfazed. “Do you get that yet? And I swear, if a single thing happens to him, I will never set foot in this house again. I will never speak to Mom or you again.”
“You’re just upset, honey. You need to just breathe. You’re getting overexcited,” Ross insisted in a hushed voice. “Come on, just try breathing slowly with me. In, out. In, out.”
Her eyes welling, Lauren gazed pleadingly through the lenses of her father’s spectacles. She could see the love she’d always recognized behind them, but intermixed as well she saw something that made her heart sink. Not compassion, but a regretful, almost shameful pity.
“Lauren, they’re not going to hurt him, okay? You know they won’t hurt him.”
Lauren swallowed what felt like a ball of cement in her quivering throat.
Did she know it? Did she really?
Despite the aggressive classism toward Betas she knew had been ingrained in her family for generations, Lauren knew they at least didn’t have a genocidally-inclined heritage like certain particularly vengeful Alpha bloodlines.
The closest thing to a hate crime in her family’s history was on the part of Britney, who’d suffered a social slaughter her senior year of high school when it was discovered that a defensive lineman on the Alpha football team she’d reportedly been on the verge of becoming involved with had started messing around with a girl on the Beta cheer squad of a nearby school. Britney answered the affront by slapping her suitor in the face, followed by tracking down the offending Beta at her cheer practice, spitting on her, and flicking her onto the football field. It had earned Britney a few months in an Aegis anger management course, and singular though the event was, Lauren had never felt more distanced from the sibling she’d thought she knew so well, and it had created a divide that had existed ever since.
And now she had come home to her parents and had to face them as, in their eyes, their daughter was literally snatched away by a piece of living scum. Her father, and especially her mother, had always done whatever they felt was necessary to ensure the best for their daughters.
Could she truly trust they wouldn’t do the same in this case, even if it meant…
“Let GO of me!” screeched Lauren, struggling with renewed zeal, forcing her father to shift to a less awkward position as he continued holding her down in her chair. Turning her head toward the ceiling, Lauren made a last-ditch effort to halt the unfolding madness with a blood-curdling shout: “DON’T TOUCH HIM!”
Ian Berry had spent the past five minutes of solitude waiting on the enormous purple platform that served as his fiancé’s bedside table in her childhood. He was more nervous than he’d been in a long time, but it was relaxing to be able to take stock of the massive space where the love of his life had spent her formative years. After all, he’d only seen her home in pictures before, and now that he was here, ensconced in the bookshelves of fantasy novels, rock band posters, and sunflower-yellow wallpaper, it made him feel a particular closeness with her he hadn’t yet experienced
Taking a seat on the base of a lamp once Lauren had lovingly deposited him down, he’d whipped out a book from his miniature suitcase and buried his nose in it. Just in case she decided to bring her family up to her room to meet him instead, he decided it would pay for their first image of him to be an intellectual one. It wasn’t that he didn’t actually enjoy reading, but given how much was riding on this meeting today, he knew only a stellar impression would have a prayer of selling them all on this.
In truth, Ian had been prepared for this moment for the better part of four years, and the challenges it was sure to yield. Lauren had always been upfront about her family’s intensely conservative political and social views, particularly when it came to the integration of the classes, and he’d come to accept that this was just the way of the world for some, as he had been doing for the previous two decades of his life. His feelings for this girl made it well-worth swallowing the fact that her family wanted absolutely nothing to do with him or his kind. Still, he’d yearned for the chance not just to try to make peace with the situation, but to allow Lauren the chance to reconcile these two halves of her life. Over the months, he had seen it beginning to eat her up inside, even though she wouldn’t admit it openly. No matter the outcome, they couldn’t continue to live a lie any longer.
Hearing the pounding of footsteps up the staircase out in the hallway, followed by the twisting of the doorknob, Ian quickly brought the book back in front of his face, though he couldn’t help but peer over the rim of the cover.
This was it.
His heart fluttered immediately when he realized the figure entering the room wasn’t Lauren, but her older sister Britney, who he’d seen in numerous pictures over his partner’s social media but not yet in person. Her bright red sweater caught his eye first with its loud hue, but the look on her tanned face quickly usurped this note. The breath caught in his chest when he realized she was the only one entering the room, her gaze landing heavily on him. Her upper lip was curled as though a large deceased animal was festering in the corner.
“Oh my fucking God,” Britney coughed in disbelief as she slipped inside the room and slammed the door shut behind her. She dug her fingers with distress into her short, silky locks. “She didn’t.”
“H-Hello there,” Ian said as pleasantly as he could, rising to his feet and tucking his book under his arm. “You must be…”
“Don’t even talk to me,” Britney scowled as she darted across the room and took a seat on the bed to more closely examine the specimen on the table.
“I’m… sorry,” Ian mumbled under his breath. He gripped the book harder in his now-trembling knuckles. Though he wasn’t just yet letting himself get scared, he did find himself wistfully desiring Lauren to be standing in this room right now.
“Ugh. What a fucking disaster,” Britney said through grinding teeth. She reached forward, simultaneously determined to touch the Beta but also afraid to confirm he was real. Ian took a nervous step back, but it wasn’t enough to avoid the woman’s French-tipped fingers from flicking outward in a claw and striking him roughly in the torso.
“Hey - hey, this… this isn’t-” he gasped as he found himself pinned down to the table by Britney’s firm thumb and index fingers poised decisively against his shoulders.
By this point, Ian was fully prepared to let loose a string of expletives. Ultimately, though, he decided this wouldn’t be in his best interest in such a vulnerable position, particularly as the thick pad of Britney’s thumb shifted from his shoulder to his chest, poised directly above his sternum.
“Why couldn’t it be fake? Why couldn’t it just be another one of her sick jokes?”
“I… think we’re maybe getting off on the wrong foot here,” Ian mumbled under his breath, squirming uselessly beneath the weight of the woman’s hand. He pressed his fists against the flesh of her thumb, instantly reminded by the shape of it of the safety and serenity of sitting in Lauren’s palm, and this act finally yielded the reaction he wanted when Britney pulled away in disgust.
Of course, it was the shape and precisely nothing else that reminded him of her.
“Jesus Christ… I just can’t believe… it’s just insane,” Britney muttered to herself as she withdrew her arm to her sweater and wiped her hand rigorously against the wooly fabric, hoping to rid herself of an imagined Beta pathogen. She shook her head. Placing her hands over her mouth, the brunette plopped onto her back on the bed, now speaking rhetorically to the ceiling. “God, does she ever think about anyone else except her own goddamned self?”
“All the time,” Ian whispered reverently under his breath as he pulled himself back to his feet, too quietly for Britney to hear, and took a step back further on the table.
His pulse quickened at the sound of a cry from downstairs. Lauren’s cry.
Instinctively, he searched the edge of the table. Of course, the odds of him being of any help to her if she was actually in trouble were little to none, but he had to try. There was no other consideration.
Hopping off onto the bed would already be risky with Britney spread out, particularly since her hands had settled into a pattern of punching against the bed sheets that would easily send Ian flying if he got within two feet of them. Climbing down the side was an impossibility as well, given the carved pattern in the legs of the table that were too fine to be used as handholds, even for someone of three-inch stature like Ian.
What the hell was going on down there?
The door swung open again and in came a woman in an equally extreme red sweater, her brunette hair tied back in a tight bun, and her skin now appearing to be pulled even tighter. Save for the grave look of taught woe on the woman’s countenance, Lauren was the spitting image of who Ian instantly recognized as Lois Myers.
“Oh, Lauren,” she sighed wearily, as she too caught sight of the Beta on the bedside table and seemed to shrivel up just as quickly as her eldest daughter, albeit far more dejectedly. “Lauren, Lauren, Lauren.”
“Mom, what if this… what if this comes back on us somehow? You know how some of those legacy things work at Millie’s school. What if she’s going for an internship and they get wind of this? And me? I’m already trying for the next department up, and thanks to Miss Free Love down there, I might be smacked right back down again,” Britney droned miserably, now with a hand clasped dramatically over her eyes.
“Honey, you won’t need to worry about that. You know how… liberal a lot of the people making those decisions are. It will be all right, I promise.”
“How can you promise something like that, Mom, when she’s about to marry her freaking pet.”
“I’m not a pet,” Ian spoke up at last, closing his eyes with resolve. He was prepared to put up with a certain amount, but there was, eventually, a line.
“What did you just say to me?” the twenty-seven-year old Alpha groused, lifting her head from the bed to chance a glance at the source of her ire.
“I said I’m not a pet. Lauren isn’t marrying her pet. She’s marrying a person.”
“Wow. Look, Mom. She taught him tricks. Perfect!” Britney huffed as she laid her head back on the bed again.
“Oh, God, this is just a mess. A vile, vile mess,” Lois said as she lowered herself onto the edge of the bed, and the quavering in her voice revealed she was about to cry. “I just can’t believe… after all we’ve done for you kids…”
“Mom, she’s the one SCREWING the Beta, not me!” cried Britney indignantly as she pulled herself back to her feet. “I stayed normal.”
“That’s enough,” Lois snapped to her daughter, though it was evidently much more a defense of her feelings than Ian’s honor. “I just… I just need to think this over. Think about how to say what needs to be said to her.”
“I know you don’t approve of this. Or me. Or anyone like me,” Ian called out louder than before, having taken a deep breath and steeled himself for this. “But I also know that you love your daughter enough to at least hear what she has to say.”
“Don’t you dare…” Lois shrieked, rising from the bed like a startled bat and shooting straight for Ian with a pointer finger extended, until she was close enough to jab him in the chest. “…talk to me about my daughter.”
With this, Lois pinched her fingers together on the back collar of Ian’s shirt and plucked him from the table. Her hand paused at chest level, her arm fully extended, and she dangled him above the plummet, only using the requisite amount of physical contact on his puny clothing to prevent him from dropping.
“Denying everything isn’t going to make things go away,” Ian announced boldly, keeping his voice at a lowered volume as he anxiously forced himself not to look down, and instead remained locked on the intimidating billboard-sized visage of the middle-aged woman’s glowering countenance. “You owe it to her, and to yourself, to talk about it.”
“Oh, we’re going to talk about it, all right. Very thoroughly,” Lois hissed with fire in her throat. The young man’s attempts at peace had evidently allowed her to transition smoothly from forlorn anguish to seething fury. Cupping her other palm a matter of inches below Ian’s swinging feet, Lois released the grip on his shirt and allowed him to plop haphazardly into her other hand. Instantly her fingers wrapped him up in a fist that was only prevented from squeezing the air from the Beta’s lungs by the conflicted emotional weakness the woman felt as her tears finally began pouring down her cheeks.
“Britney. Come on. We’re going back downstairs,” the matriarch ordered as she observed the quivering life form between her powerful fingers with barely quelled abhorrence. For a moment, Ian’s lips parted, but no response escaped them as he gained a respectful timidity of the titaness who now held his entire being in her warm and vengeful fist. “We have a lot to discuss.”