Plague doctor approved!

“All those preservatives are bad for the body, yeah?” Price will say, bouncing your daughter in his arms just to hear her squeal. She’s four, she barely understands what food actually is other than something to fill her belly.

But there’s just…..one thing. Your little girl loves boxed mac. She doesn’t get it often, maybe once every month or two. And sure it looks like wet cardboard but she eats it and is happy, and every parent knows that no matter how much you want to feed your child only the best, sometimes you just need that one thing to feed them that is utter junk because you’re sore or tired or just completely at your wit’s end on what to cook.

And Price hates it. Hates it with the same passion that he hates loud bangs and people driving like idiots on the road. He gives the boxes to neighbors, to food banks, anywhere but in your cabinets and you actually have to resort to hiding them in a shoebox in your closet like you’re a child with a stolen toy.

You find a way to sneak it in, your daughter loves it, your husband hates it.

Until one day he takes baby to his mom’s and comes back looking entirely too pleased with himself while she’s all wide eyed with smears of cheese on the corners of her mouth. Your heart sinks into your stomach and then all the way down to your feet before she even speaks. And when she does she goes on for what feels like forever about how Nana had made her fresh mac and cheese and it was so yummy!

You’re staring at Price, he’s smiling back. You both know you’re fucked now because you have the one child in the world who prefers actual food over cheap garbage and there is no way to undo what he just did. She’s never going to eat boxed mac anymore now that’s she had the homemade alternative.

He doesn’t know her, doesn’t know of her either. But she knows about him. Saw a picture of him and Tommy tucked into an old jacket of their father’s long ago. Cradled it in her too small hands and smiled as she imagined a protective big brother, a kind big brother. Someone to hold her and love her and take her far far away from the misery of her own life. Like a knight in shining armor, sent to rescue the princess. She pictured piggy back rides and hugs and trips to the park where he played the dragon and she played the damsel and Tommy would play the gallant prince/knight who would save his sister. She pictured contentment, bedtime stories, coming home from school to a home cooked dinner.

But of course she never got that, and of course she never met him. Got the letter about Tommy’s death first, and Simon’s not too long after that. And oh how she wept for that vision, that dream that would never come to pass, and then guilt that she was mourning herself more than them. But she was well and truly alone now, with a dying father and a dead mother and the looming responsibility of being an adult when she was still just a kid. Bills and mortgages and jobs when she’s only 15.

So of course she’s overwhelmed, and of course she’s scared, and of course she turns to what her father and mother and brother have all turned to. That poison, that burning painful thing that eases everything else. And of course she gets addicted, because that’s what runs in the family, isn’t it? Bad decisions and addiction and pain.

And her, without a family, without a brother like Simon to knock some sense into her and keep her steady, falls and falls hard. Who keeps falling and falling past her teen years and well into her twenties.

Yes, I am so obsessed with one fanfic that i’m making actual memes for it now