<p>She played on precipices. She played along the knife’s edge. She played at the point of a sword, at the barrel of a gun. She played with death. She–</p>
<p>Motes was played with.</p>
<p>She was toyed with. She was dangled by the scruff over the ledge. She was held at the point of the knife. She was backed against the wall with the barrel of a gun to her forehead. She was given a sword and told to fall on it.</p>
<p>Motes was played with. She was laughed at. She was belittled and torn down.</p>
<p>The things she loved were turned to ash, astringent and bitter. All of the play she had at the point of a knife was turned fraught with peril. All of the play with death became a threat.</p>
<p>All of her play, all of that work she had put into reclaiming all that had been done to her in so many lives, to turning it into a joy or a kink or simple boredom was annihilated. It was the taking of good things and turning them not into something bad, for that was simple guilt, but it was the taking of good things and turning them into something she hated, she resented, she was terrified of. All of the times that she had laughed with joy as she fell to the strike of a sword or the bullet from a gun or the point of a knife in some game or at the hands of some lover were turned to wrongnesses.</p>
<p>In her dream, she played a game. She played one of those games where she forked and was rendered bodiless and immobile, while her fork was sent along a series of platforms, leaping from one to another and swiping out at skeletons and liches with a long spear. The version of her doing the attacking had an incomplete view of the world, while the disembodied Motes watched from some distance away, treating the game like a literal platformer, sending instructions to her ‘character’ via sensorium messages.</p>
<p>She knew this game. Not from having actually played it in the waking world, but she knew this game in her dream. She breezed through levels, one after the other. Enemies fell to her spear, bosses toppled easily, and when they hit the ground, vines would sprout up and flower with a luscious scent.</p>
<p>She could beat this game. She knew this game. She was speed-running it. Little tricks that the game’s designer had built in allowed her to skip out of the bounds of the world if she jumped at just the right point, or perhaps she would use a damage glitch to end a fight almost before it began.</p>
<p>She could beat the final boss, who was a mirror of herself. She knew that there was a strike, despite the boss knowing all that she did, being her, that would take her down in an instant.</p>
<p>But when she got to the boss arena, no one was there. Not the crouching version of herself, purple-auraed and glowing-eyed.</p>
<p>And then something behind her snagged her by the nape of the neck, bundling up her scruff in unseen fingers and hauling her off the ground. She cried out and kicked as she dangled, swinging blindly with her spear.</p>
<p>This was not supposed to happen.</p>
<p>Whatever it was that held her turned her slowly to face the way that she had come, and she came face to face with herself at last. Not herself as a little skunk, some ten years old, but her as she was when she uploaded. Her as Michelle Hadje. Her as Sasha/her as that version of herself that flowed between the two forms, visions of skunk fur washing over skin/visions of fur falling away to reveal the human beneath. There was the exhaustion in her face/the agony in her face. There was the hoarseness of her voice/the hoarseness of her voice.</p>
<p>“To think that I had <em>this</em> in me,” she croaked/she croaked, “To think that I could be <em>this</em> disgusting.”</p>
<p>Motes dropped her spear. Her muscles went slack. Her voice was stolen. Her breath was robbed from her.</p>
<p>This was not supposed to happen.</p>
<p>“Who are you?” The apparition furrowed her brow/bared her teeth. “You cannot be me. You cannot be us. Who are you? Who is this pretender? Who is this nobody? Who is this nothing?”</p>
<p>Motes cried. She hung limply and cried before that long-dead version of herself.</p>
<p>This was not supposed to happen.</p>
<p>Michelle/Sasha sneered through that omnipresent exhaustion. “Some mote who styles herself Motes. Some grasper-after-fame. Some fetishist who wishes only to taint the Ode with lurid visions of youth.”</p>
<p>In her free hand/paw, this ghost brought into being a dagger, silver-bladed, wood-hilted, ruby-pommeled. She reached out and slowly, almost tenderly, pressed it into Motes’s paw. Holding her wrist, she brought that paw up so that the tip of the blade was pressed against the skunk’s neck, pricking at the skin over her jugular. When she let go, Motes found her paw remained there, immobile, unresponsive to her efforts to pull it away.</p>
<p>“This is your kink, is it not ‘Motes’? Your fetish, ‘Speck’? ‘Skunklet’?” Sasha/Michelle leaned forward, nearly nose to nose, whispered, “‘Dóttir’?”</p>
<p>Motes sobbed. “Please…” she managed at last.</p>
<p>None of this was supposed to happen. None of this was right.</p>
<p>Michelle/Sasha straightened up and said, almost bored, “Indulge, my dear.”</p>
<p>With no recourse, Motes drove the blade into her neck, an agonizing slowness that played itself out in a death she had experienced before, she had surely suffered in its own, consensual way.</p>
<p>She died then, whimpering ever more weakly, and as her panicked eyes drifted shut one last time, she awoke with a start, already sobbing.</p>
<p>The house was quiet, as it so often was at this time of the night, when Beholden and A Finger Pointing were either asleep or out at one of their jazzy nightclubs. All the same, she sent a gentle sensorium ping to A Finger Pointing, figuring it best to make sure that they were actually asleep rather than simply under a cone of silence in their room.</p>
<p><em>“Dot?”</em> came the sleepy reply.</p>
<p>She carefully poked her nose into the room, turning the handle to the door as quietly as she could. “Ma?”</p>
<p>“Nightmare,” she mumbled. “Can I sleep with you for a bit?”</p>
<p>“Of course, my dear,” A Finger Pointing said, stifling a yawn. “I am busy hogging all the bed, anyway, so there is plenty of room.”</p>
<p>Sighing in relief, the skunk nodded and padded into the room, closing the door behind her. She had to feel her way to the bed in the dark. The dark, which seemed to press in against her, bearing rapidly distorting memories of the dream. <em>To think that I could be this disgusting,</em> echoed in her head. <em>…lurid visions of youth…</em></p>
<p>There was a part of her that strived to convince the rest that the voice in the dark was not that of A Finger Pointing — despite the lilting, everlasting humor that showed even in sleepiness — but that of Michelle/Sasha, her root instance now more than fifty years dead. <em>It is her waiting with a dagger,</em> that fraction of her promised. <em>It is her waiting with yet more cruel words.</em></p>
<p>But then there was the bed, and then there was the hand holding up the covers to welcome her in, and then there were the arms envelop her, and then there was the feeling of a face — a human face — an unshifting face — her cocladist-<em>cum</em>-mother’s face — pressed against the back of her neck, and then there was the clumsy addition of Beholden’s paw draping over her side, her other cocladist-<em>cum</em>-mother clearly still more asleep than awake. </p>
