#daniel&stella.

Dona nobis pacem Miserere nobis God have mercy on them God have mercy on me.

//

I'm an aging wolf who lost the taste for blood Even anxious pups need the Moon I howl for you, I sing to you

@ruinaa asked me "is spirit particularly maternal or does she want to be" in reference to her relationship with her daughter stella, and basically i got into how spirit thought she was infertile for most of her life bc of what was done to her in the lab and daniel getting her pregnant was a HUGE shock but also such a happy surprise. she was so excited to create life and have the opportunity to nurture something in the way that she was never nurtured due to being tortured by erik eriksson as a human experiment.

however, in reality, spirit could not compete with how much love daniel had for stella and how he was able to express that love. spirit is really fucked up from the lab, from harris's abuse, from her relationship with daniel (which started out as just kinda toxic and power imbalance-y and quickly became outright abusive, the violence intensifying as spirit gave daniel access to the drug Mutant Growth Hormone, but nonetheless leading to their marriage).

she just doesnt have the building blocks to be a good mom. so she comes to resent herself for not being able to nurture stella. she takes that out on stella because it's easier and because she resents how much positive attention stella gets from daniel. spirit is so unhealthy; it's easier for her to resort to childlike and vindictive behavior than to be the bigger person and break the cycles of abuse and toxicity that have defined her own upbringing.

worth noting that spirit has never physically abused stella (or vincent, for that matter, her step son) because she is too afraid of retaliation from daniel. but she has definitely considered it as an appropriate course of action.

stella sees her mother as a deeply sad and troubled woman. by the time at which im writing stella, she's of an age where she no longer needs or expects maternal nurturing and comfort from spirit. she is also aware that the relationship between her mother and father is deeply troubled, though she does not process the extent to which her father is to blame for that and how abusive he truly is.