InsaneJournal

Pre-fic for this year's NaNo project, since the real thing is still too horrifyingly disorganized to post in any real quantity. Some salient bits and pieces of Lizzie's life before the story begins.

Lizzie had been eight years old when the Construct first appeared. Her parents had been missing for almost a full week, and she had long since exhausted all the food she could reach on her own; she was scared and hungry, aware even at that age that she would soon starve to death if they did not come back. Finally she had left the house, abandoned the comfort and security of its locks and burglar alarms, and wandered the streets in the vain hope of finding someone, anyone, who might know where her mommy was.

She still could not remember exactly what had happened that night. She knew what had happened, of course, but to her memories most of it was only a vague blur. She remembered an alleyway, and men in dark clothing; she remembered an unpleasant, earthy smell, and strong hands hoisting her over someone's shoulder. And then she remembered being dropped, shouts of surprise that quickly turned to screams, a variety of thumps and scrapes and unpleasantly wet noises that continued for a good while after the screams stopped.

And then it was standing in front of her, seeming impossibly tall in the gloom, its hands and its drab white clothing spattered with blood and gore and its face covered by a featureless white mask.

She had not been afraid of it, that she remembered clearly. The men had been very real, and very frightening, but this creature was too strange, too unreal to really scare her. Certainly, she wondered whether it might be about to kill her like it seemed to have killed those men, but moments passed and she continued to be alive, so it began to seem rather unlikely.

"Hullo," said Lizzie, finally. "What are you?"

The creature continued to stare at her. And then it crouched down, awkwardly, and extended one skinny, gore-stained hand towards her.

Lizzie looked at the hand doubtfully. She was a hardy child and not imaginative enough to be bothered by gore, but on the other hand she had heard many lectures about hygiene from her mother. "I'm not touching that," she said. "It isn't clean."

The creature looked at its hand with apparent surprise. It wiped the hand on a clean portion of its clothes and then held it out again.

"Well, all right then," said Lizzie, and took it.

And as soon as their hands came in contact she heard, not words, but simply a thought, a feeling, a little bit of knowledge transferred directly into her head. The creature was her friend, it told her. It had been sent by someone who cared about her very much, and it was there to protect her from things like the bad men that might come after her. There was no reason to be afraid while it was nearby.

Lizzie brightened. "Well, that's all right, then!" She got to her feet and started back down the alley, towing the creature behind her. "Come on, my house is this way."

It wasn't her parents, of course, but it would do, for now.

#

The Construct 'spoke' to her very rarely, only when there was some vital piece of information to convey that could not be expressed by pointing at something, but she liked when it did. An obviously supernatural servant, the numerous beasts and monsters that began to appear wherever she went, those she all took in stride, but having something talk to her inside her head made her feel like a fairytale princess.

#

The creature was completely clean by the time they reached the house, although Lizzie never managed to see quite how it happened. She was too distracted by her growling stomach, and by trying to re-trace her steps back through the gloomy streets, and once they had gotten inside she was too busy explaining things to bother asking about it.

"This is the foyer!" she said, gesturing expansively around the room. "There's the stairs over there, my dad's library goes through there, and my room's upstairs." Her stomach interrupted with another demanding rumble. "And there's a bunch of other places," she finished, and started towards the dining room. "But the kitchen's over here!"

The creature followed her sedately, arriving a few seconds after her. It hadn't seemed very interested in her description of the house, she noted, and wondered if it could actually understand her. If it couldn't, this might take more effort than she had thought.

Most of the food, she knew, was kept in the main pantry, which was kept shut with a simple latch lock, put there by her parents to keep her from stealing baking chocolate out of it. It was too high for her to reach, and the dining room chairs were too big for her to easily drag over and stand on.

"The food's in there," she said, pointing. "You know, food? Like you eat?"

The creature simply watched her.

"Anyway, I'm really hungry and I can't open the latch, but you are, so could you open it for me?"

The creature looked at the door, and back at her, with a general air of confusion. A lot more effort, Lizzie thought dismally.

"The door is locked," she said, patiently. "That latch is keeping it shut - see, right up there?"

She pointed. The creature looked up, still not seeming to understand.

"I need you to open the latch. Um, lift the little hook up so it's not in that little ring there? You see how it works?"

Cautiously, the creature lifted a hand and nudged the latch with a finger. It lifted slightly, and fell out of the hook with a little tinkle of metal.

Lizzie breathed a sigh of relief, and with a hurried "Thank you!" slipped past the creature and pulled the pantry door open. She grabbed the first thing she found that looked like a meal, which ended up being a can of beef ravioli, and returned to the kitchen to begin rifling through drawers for a can opener. The creature followed her, keeping just a few steps behind.

"I'm looking for a thing," Lizzie explained, "it's got, umm... two handles, and a little metal wheely thing, you use it to open cans..."

Following her example, the creature opened a few drawers and peered inside them, but it was Lizzie who finally found the device, triumphantly extracting it from a jumble of spatulas and garlic pressers. "There!" she said. "Got it."

This only presented her with a new problem, however, which was that she did not actually remember how her parents used the thing. She attempted various ways of latching it onto the can, twisting the knob, pushing at the handles, but the can remained stubbornly unopened. Finally she gave up, dropping the can opener and folding her arms over her chest.

"It's too hard," she said petulantly. "Do you know how to do it?"

The creature picked up the can opener, but dropped it almost immediately, as if its hands didn't know how to deal with such a foreign object.

"Don't you know how to do anything?" said Lizzie, although she felt bad as soon as she said it - the creature was her first new friend in a long while, she shouldn't be so demanding of it. Still, the possibility of getting a reasonable dinner seemed to be getting slimmer and slimmer.

The creature's shoulders slumped a bit, and it gave her what could only be described as a hurt look, despite the complete opacity of its mask. It wrapped one hand firmly around the can and extended the index finger of the other; the tip elongated into a wicked claw, which it sank into the tin lid and dragged in a ragged circle around the edge. The top clattered onto the counter, and the creature placed the opened can in front of Lizzie, seeming quite pleased with itself.

"Oh," said Lizzie. "Well, um. I guess you could do that too."

It took them another ten minutes to puzzle out the instructions on the side of the can, find an appropriate dish to put the pasta in, and decipher the controls to the microwave, the creature dealing with the harder-to-reach parts under Lizzie's careful instruction, and by the time they had finished Lizzie had decided she was really quite fond of the thing, strange though it might be. She was also ravenously hungry, and so quickly retrieved a fork and set about consuming her pasta as fast as she could manage.

The creature stood in the middle of the kitchen and watched her, motionlessly, with an air of fascination about it. It looked as if it had never seen anyone eat before, and was trying to figure out how it worked -- although, now that she thought of it, the creature had looked like that about most things so far. It was sort of... well, the only word she could think of for it was "adorable", but she had the idea that wasn't something you were supposed to say out loud to grown-ups.

"You can have some too," she said, graciously, once she had eaten enough to fill the worst of the emptiness in her stomach. "It's all right, I don't mind. You must be worn out from killing all those bad men before."

The creature did not move, which she supposed meant it didn't want any. Lizzie shrugged, only a little bit disappointed -- she had halfway hoped it would take the mask off to eat, she was curious about what might have been underneath -- and returned to her meal, telling the creature in an offhand way about her daring survival over the past week. And from that afternoon on, the creature was simply part of the family.

#

She couldn't remember exactly when she started calling the creature the Construct. She didn't think it had told her what it was, exactly, not in the same way it had told her why it was there; it was just that after a few days she simply realized she'd known what kind of thing it was all along.

Once she had looked the word up in the dictionary, and it said that a construct was something that had been constructed, which didn't help her very much. She supposed it must be one of those metaphors her teachers had been talking about, and didn't bother to pursue the matter any further.

#

It took the next couple of days to train the Construct enough to keep the house running as it was supposed to. At first it was confused by everything, the strange noises that the washing machine made and the particular way you had to turn doorknobs to make them work, but Lizzie found that with the right instruction it caught on very quickly, although it never did quite overcome that peculiar clumsiness of its hands. She dug up the dusty old instruction manuals for all the major appliances and taught the Construct to work all the ones she couldn't reach, which was most of them. She showed it where all the rooms were, where to find some things and where to put away others. It followed her orders unquestioningly, and seemed to commit everything she said to it perfectly to memory, to the point where at the end of the week it was anticipating daily patterns she didn't even realize she had fallen into.

Getting it to understand some of her personal needs was somewhat harder. It seemed totally baffled by the idea that she could possibly want to be alone in her room at night, and no matter how many times she chased it out it always came straight back in again, taking up a sentry position just in front of her closet. After a great deal of one-sided arguing she managed to convince it to accept a compromise, where she would keep the door open and it would sit just outside in the hallway, so that it could keep watch on her without bothering her with its looming presence.

Keeping it out of the bathroom was even harder, but Lizzie put her foot down about that one. "You may not really be a boy," she said -- real boys had faces, after all, and couldn't turn their hands into giant claws -- "but you still look like one, so it would be weird. And I'll get dirty and sick if I don't have my bath, and I won't have my bath if you're going to keep being a brat about it." She left the door open the tiniest bit just so the Construct wouldn't end up tearing it off its hinges if it suddenly decided she was about to drown, but she kept the shower curtain very tightly drawn.

The monsters began appeared in the middle of the first week, just when Lizzie thought she was getting used to life with the Construct. She had gone outside for some fresh air and a run around the backyard, and prowling about the edge of the property was what could only have been mistaken for a real wolf if you hadn't the faintest idea of what they were supposed to look like. It was large, and it slavered, and it seemed to be just as surprised to see her as she was to see it.

There was a moment of shocked silence, and then the wolf-thing growled, bunched its legs up, and charged at her. Lizzie did not even have time to consider running away before the Construct dashed past her -- she hadn't even known it had seen her go out, although as she would soon discover it seemed to have an instinctive knowledge of when she was being threatened. The wolf-thing skidded to a halt, apparently thrown off by running into something that did not instantly flee in terror at the sight of it, and then the Construct's hand shot forward and the wolf-thing was no longer a whole wolf-thing.

The Construct stared down at it as if to make sure it wasn't going to suddenly leap back into life, which seemed unlikely given the state it was in. Then it turned back towards Lizzie and, taking firm hold of her collar, dragged her back into the house.

"You're getting yuck on my shirt!" Lizzie complained, and the Construct pointed down the hall to the laundry room, indicating that this was a fixable situation and a bit of wolf-blood on her clothing was infinitely preferable to Lizzie's blood on her clothing. And it stalked off again, leaving Lizzie to change by herself.

It wasn't until Lizzie had fetched a new top and properly disposed of the soiled one that she wondered what they were going to do about the wolf-thing's corpse that was now lying in plain sight on their lawn. She hurried to the back door again to see if anyone had noticed it yet, but when she peered outside it had disappeared completely. There was not even a tell-tale bloodstain on the patch of grass where it had fallen. Lizzie pondered this for a moment, and then decided that the Construct must have taken care of things, promptly forgetting about the matter entirely. And so the monsters, too, were designated simply another one of the strange things that had been happening to her lately -- interesting, perhaps, but not worth worrying about.

With all of the major issues thus dealt with, her new life turned out to be surprisingly simple. She started going back to school again, after growing bored with puttering around the house all day; the Construct insisted on coming along, but it assured her in its wordless way that no one would be able to see it, and indeed no one ever commented on the way it lurked about in the back of the classroom, keeping a watch out for any monsters brave enough to attack them in public.

Whatever effect that kept the Construct invisible seemed to leak over onto Lizzie at times: her teachers seemed to call on her less, and her classmates did not pay as much attention to her as they once had. This was perfectly fine with Lizzie -- it meant no one would get upset with her for fidgeting or reading ahead. She quickly found out, when they went to replenish their food supplies, that the cashiers at the grocery store would not notice when she walked out laden with plastic bags full of their wares, which was a lucky thing because she was not entirely sure how to get her hands on some actual money. Similarly, the electricity and water back in the house kept on running without the need for any of those strange and terrifying things called Bills she had occasionally heard other people mutter about. It was all remarkably convenient, as if this whole situation had been planned out just for her convenience. She felt as if she had been handed all of the benefits of being an adult, without any of the annoying responsibilities that usually went with them.

#

She didn't even notice that she had forgotten about her parents, forgotten even to wonder what might have really happened to them. They had been nice people, of course, and she had been quite fond of them while they were there -- but she didn't need them anymore. She had the Construct, and it was the best friend a little girl could ever hope to have.