we do not bear children until we have so chosen

[dark_light]

Amariah appears in the Belltower, throws herself into a chair, and tries to read postcards, but her eyes won't focus on them. She tries the Bellbook, and scarcely has better luck, although her eyes do catch on a certain word.

"Jane."

"Yep?"

"I want to talk to Aether."

"I'll let her know!"

Comments

[dark_light]

"Don't create sapient life," says Amariah. "I would've dealt a lot better if she'd been somebody else's too, if you'd just met someone and wanted a kid with them - I would have managed even better if you'd run into some orphaned or mistreated moppet and decided to look after them, some kid who already existed - this I don't understand."

[truthwright]

"...I don't know what the difference is," he says. "I don't - okay. Sure."

[dark_light]

"If you'd met somebody else," Amariah says, "and you had a kid with them I wouldn't be - like - There would be another factor in the situation besides you being disastrously wrong about how I tick. I'd have started out imagining that you met someone who really really wanted kids and that was a compelling feature of the situation. And the kid would have a full set of parents instead of a gap where I was supposed to be - which would be the case even if you'd spontaneously impregnated yourself with a clone of yourself, unless I missed a postcard where you broke up with me in absentia, people are involved with their partners' children, you knew I was coming back and you knew everybody involved would carry on existing forever, maybe if I'd shown up when Helen was thirty this wouldn't be an issue but you sure couldn't rule out my appearing during her childhood. And if you had adopted someone who already existed - then they were already in the set of people I count within my sphere of things-to-take-responsibility-for because I picked up the entire worldsheaf, that would be the more involved equivalent of you making a close friend who was going to be around a lot."

[truthwright]

He curls up and shivers.

[dark_light]

She sighs and puts her arm around him.

"I didn't think I was that - hard to understand."

[truthwright]

"Did we ever even talk about it at all? I don't think we did," he says. "I don't know what you'd think of me... I don't know... carving the moon into one of those lacy balls with more lacy balls inside them by hand, either. I can guess that you might not mind it because it doesn't really affect anything important, or you might mind it because everyone is going to be weirded out that the moon rattles now, but I don't actually know, you've never said anything either way about anything that's even enough like that for me to tell."

[dark_light]

"It'd fuck up tides if you carved away ninety percent of the moon. If you fixed that, don't care. If you didn't fix that, then I'd come home and I would have to deal with a lot of fucked up tides. And if you have a kid, I come home and I have to deal with you having a kid - it's close enough to me and my life, through you, that I do have to deal with it. A perfectly innocent kid who seems nice enough and was not complicit in her own mistimed conception, so it is in fact much less fixable than the lacy ball moon problem, although she's probably destroyed fewer coastal cities."

[truthwright]

"None, last I checked," he says with a quirk of a smile.

[dark_light]

"Then she has an excellent record on the subject of destroying coastal cities, I suppose."

[truthwright]

"She's awesome. I love her."

[dark_light]

"Mmm."

[truthwright]

[dark_light]

Pet pet.



"What are you thinking?"

[truthwright]

"I know you don't love her; I don't know why you're not telling me that."

[dark_light]

"People don't like unrestrained negative feelings around their children. I had my rant; you don't have to be its audience."

[truthwright]

"Because it's going to hurt? Sure it is. But it hurts already," he says. "If we actually understood each other, it might stop hurting."

[dark_light]

"I - that's not what I'm worried about. People resent negative feelings about their children, people don't like people who produce negative feelings about their children."

[truthwright]

"But... you're you," he says, utterly at a loss. "And you feel how you feel. I can't resent you for being you, it would be like - like resenting Petaal for not settling, you couldn't be any other way, something would be wrong if you weren't who you are, I don't know everything about you but I know that finding out more things isn't going to make me love you any less. Probably cry. Never love you any less."

[dark_light]

Isabella kisses his hair.



"I didn't want her. I don't know if I ever would have wanted children, but now if I ever do they won't be the ones we would've had and you took that from me and I hate it. Your life is - almost incomprehensibly different to me now, we didn't get to learn to be parents together, I'm the one who vanished but you left me behind and now I have to scramble desperately to catch up and I can't even insta-cheat with magic like Juliet did with her spontaneous teenage relative. Or I could mostly ignore her, but - that's not who I want to be."

[truthwright]

He sighs and hugs her.

[dark_light]

"I mean, at least I didn't already have plans in place to have a little Dominique - Yseult donated the name to the template since she's not using it - at least I hadn't formed expectations that specific - although if we'd talked about it maybe you'd have called her something I like more than 'Helen' - I'm getting used to it but I wouldn't have named her that, Ianthe is fine and Kalavar is fine but -" She sighs.

[truthwright]

"Helen of Troy," he murmurs. "That's why I picked it."

[dark_light]

"Sure. It's not terrible, just - another thing I missed."

[truthwright]

Kas snuggles her.

[dark_light]

Snuggles.