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So, I saw District 9 the other day, and I really liked it, and I was on the comm, and it was late and I kinda wrote weird introspective Daddy!Wikus fic DON'T HURT ME OK I AM SORRY.
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Title: Strange Paths
Fandom: District 9
Summary: Where you think life will take you and where you actually end up are completely different things.
Notes: Contains implied xeno (yeah I went there, help me) and swearing. It's Wikus, come on. Also mpreg (I think it counts?)
The problem with the egg is not that it’s alien, nor that it came from him and Christopher, (except it is; he honestly doesn’t know how it could be about anything else sometimes) but more that it exists at all, and what it implies about his life, and all this is so far from anything Wikus ever imagined for himself that he’s afraid a little.
He’d always imagined Tania and him would have children. They’d have a boy and a girl and they’d get a better house with the money from his next promotion, and move out to the countryside to get away from District 9, and they’d be happy. Living in a slum with a fokking prawn and his brat while his DNA rewrites itself and he fokking gives birth was not in the picture.
Clearly that’s not the egg’s fault though, so he tries to do his best for it. He strokes it and feeds it and cares for it, and tries not to think of golden hair and tiny pink toes and big blue eyes, tries not to think of Tania looking exhausted and proud in a hospital bed. Instead he’s got Christopher, clicking happily whenever he goes by the weird chemistry kit they rigged to feed it, and looking at him strangely (like he’s fokking worried about him) whenever he thinks Wikus isn’t looking.
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Days go by and CJ is ecstatic to discover he’s going to be a big brother (sister, sibling, whatever) and Wikus finds it a bit easier not to think about the ones he could have had, running about the yard and messing up the house, playing tricks on the youngest and generally being nuisances. CJ follows him about like a puppy and talks to the egg at night and loves anything technological, and generally makes a nuisance of himself. Wikus is astonished to find he’s actually getting fond of the little bugger.
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The hatching date gets closer and somewhere along the line he realises he’s stopped thinking of the egg as an it, and started thinking of it as sondaughterbaby, and it’s worryingly easy to start thinking of all this as his life and not some waking nightmare. To forget about Tania, and the children they would have together, and just accept never being human again. (Somewhere in the back of his mind a voice is screaming “Not that you could go back, not really, even if your body was human you’ve changed. More importantly, how would you explain it to the child?”)
But the hatch date dawns, and he feels worried and excited and like shit already, because he’s bringing a child into a fokking hellhole with no chance of getting out anytime soon and that makes him a fokking shitty parent, no two ways about it.
Then the egg cracks and big eyes in a tiny alien face look bewildered, and his heart stops. This might not be what he wanted, but it’s what he’s got and as he holds out a shaking claw to his baby, he doesn’t feel too bad about it.