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<h1 id="motes-2362">Motes — 2362</h1>
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<p>Motes played.</p>
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<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>
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<p>No.</p>
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<p>Motes was played with.</p>
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<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>
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<p>Motes was played with. She was laughed at. She was belittled and torn down.</p>
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<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 destroyed. 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>
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<p>It was annihilation. It was the opposite of play — of Motes’s kind of play, this reclamation of childhood. It was a negating of that play. It was a turning of joy into shame, a turning of fun into fear, a turning of laughter to ash before it leaves the mouth. </p>
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<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>
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<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>
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<p>She knew this game. Not from having actually played it in the waking world — who knew how real it was? — 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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<p>“This is your kink, is it not ‘Motes’? Your fetish, ‘Speck’? ‘Skunklet’?” Sasha/Michelle leaned forward, nearly nose to nose, whispered, “<em>‘Dóttir’?</em>“</p>
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<p>Motes sobbed. “Please…” she managed at last.</p>
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<p>None of this was supposed to happen. None of this was right.</p>
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<p>Michelle/Sasha straightened up and said, almost bored, “Indulge, my dear.”</p>
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<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>
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<p>Michelle/Sasha straightened up and said, almost bored, “Well? Indulge, my dear.”</p>
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<p>With no recourse, Motes drove the blade into her own 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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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 in their room rather than simply under a cone of silence in their room.</p>
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<p><em>“Dot?”</em> came the sleepy reply.</p>
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<p>She carefully poked her nose into the room, turning the handle to the door as quietly as she could. “Ma?”</p>
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<p>“Is everything alright, Motes?”</p>
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<p>Both of the skunks fell into laughter, sprawled awkwardly beneath their down-tree instance on the bed. “That is where we will go, you used to say!” Beholden said, keeping up the act. “That is where we will go for our honeymoon.”</p>
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<p>“We will swim! We will be happy!” Motes chimed in.</p>
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<p>Sighing dreamily, A Finger Pointing nodded. “We should have been poets.”</p>
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<p>Motes could tell what they were doing: she was as adept as they were. The job of an actor is to trick the audience — just for a moment! — that the story playing out before them is more real than the rest of the world, that it is the rest of their lives that is merely a play. A Finger Pointing and Beholden, ma and Bee, were nudging her to set aside for now this dream-rotted headspace, this mopery.</p>
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<p>Motes could tell what they were doing. She was as adept at this as they were. The job of an actor is to trick the audience — just for a moment! — that the story playing out before them is more real than the rest of the world, that it is the rest of their lives that is merely a play. A Finger Pointing and Beholden, ma and Bee, were nudging her to set aside for now this dream-rotted headspace, this mopery.</p>
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<p>She saw their manipulation and loved them all the harder for it.</p>
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<p>The rest of the morning passed in comfort and lazy chatter, but throughout, some portion of Motes was dedicated to thinking back, to remembering. Comfort and lazy chatter and remembering, then, before the three decided to split off to their own tasks — Beholden into two instances, one to work on music, one to the theatre; A Finger Pointing to some planned brunch; Motes to go for a walk, to go and talk.</p>
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<p>The fifth stanza had begun its life in an apartment building. As many studios and penthouses as were required for one mind split ten ways. Life on Lagrange had progressed as ever, though, and soon the sense and sensation of being a part of the fifth had changed. It began to encompass relationships fleeting and lasting. It housed devotion, invited in friendship. It grew beyond the bounds of just this tenth of a clade to include all of Au Lieu Du Rêve, and some few decades on, the whole of the project decamped from their city-block sized apartment building.</p>
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<p>Now, the fifth stanza — along with however many other lovers and friends, coworkers and groupies, up-trees and tracking instances — occupied a sprawling neighborhood of houses and townhomes, yards and copses of trees, and yes, even a playground. The whole neighborhood crowded against an untamed field, a prairie, a meadow laced up with deer trails and footpaths, dotted with yet more copses of trees lining a creek.</p>
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<p>For each of those who lived there, the neighborhood was theirs in some specific way, and for Motes, it was hers to color.</p>
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<p>Motes had painted it all hundreds of times.</p>
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<p>She had painted the prairie, painted the neighborhood, painted those who lived there. She had chosen the colors of many of the houses — had even helped paint some by hand until it had gotten too boring. She had chalked up all of the sidewalks — the sim’s designer had made it so that colored chalk lines flower behind her automatically as she walked when she so desired — and she so desired — only to fade some hours later. One could always tell where Motes had come and gone.</p>
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<p>Motes had painted it all hundreds of times, of course.</p>
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<p>She had painted the prairie, painted the neighborhood, painted those who lived there. She had chosen the colors of many of the houses — had even helped paint some by hand until it had gotten too boring. She had chalked up all of the sidewalks — Warmth had conspired with A Finger Pointing and Serene, the sim’s designers, so that colored chalk lines flower behind her automatically as she walked when she so desired — and she so desired — only to fade some hours later. One could always tell where Motes had come and gone.</p>
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<p>Thus, when, still sleepy, she trudged out of the ranch-style home she shared with A Finger Pointing and Beholden, colored lines of flowering vines trailed after her bare paws. She guided those vines with her steps or, relishing in a secret pleasure, pretended like they were propelling her forward, pretending that she was a being of growth — that she was a seed, a being of potential — that she was a giant at the head of some toppled beanstalk.</p>
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<p>The vines or her feet carried her down through the neighborhood at a contemplative pace, giving her time to think of the conversation she wanted to have before she actually had it. She spoke so often without thinking, letting that be a part of her nature rather than some simple flaw, that to approach something so deliberately as this set her mood from the beginning, and by the time she drifted up one set of steps to the duplex near the far end of the neighborhood, many of her doubts had been set atop well-lit pedestals, and placards beneath each labeled their names, their creators, their provenance.</p>
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<p>No one answered the door when she knocked, so she hesitantly pressed the doorbell. This, she knew — for it was the same throughout the neighborhood — was created to send a sensorium ping to the inhabitant.</p>
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<p>“Hi Speck,” she said, smiling. “If you are calling me ‘Slow Hours’ then something must be up.”</p>
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<p>Motes huffed.</p>
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<p>“Come, my dear.” Slow Hours rested her hand atop the skunk’s head. “Do you want to go sit outside?”</p>
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<p>“Yes please,” she said, feeling suddenly smaller than usual.</p>
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<p>She was a long time in opening up, which seemed to suit her cocladist just fine. She summoned up a blanket and, disregarding the patio furniture that littered the concrete that ringed the solarium as well as the hard-packed dirt trail, picked her way out into the prairie. Holding two of the corners, she threw the blanket out to spread it over the shin-high grass. It seemed to float there for a moment, and for a long moment, neither of them move. Skunk and woman observed this magic carpet in gingham, bending blades and heads of stiff-stalked grass.</p>
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<p>When Motes did not move, Slow Hours instead stepped onto the blanket and tramped dutifully around the rim of it, tamping down the grass so that they would not sink so deep into the blanket. That done, she lowered herself to sit cross-legged near the center and patted her lap.</p>
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<p>“Yes please,” she said, feeling suddenly smaller still.</p>
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<p>She was a long time in opening up, which seemed to suit her cocladist just fine. Slow Hours summoned up a blanket and, disregarding the patio furniture that littered the concrete that ringed the solarium as well as the hard-packed dirt trail, picked her way out into the prairie. Holding two of the corners, she threw the blanket out to spread it over the shin-high grass. It seemed to float there, and for a long moment, neither of them move. Skunk and woman observed this magic carpet in gingham, bending blades and heads of stiff-stalked grass.</p>
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<p>When Motes remained in place, Slow Hours instead stepped onto the blanket and tramped dutifully around the rim of it, tamping down the grass so that they would not sink so deep into the blanket. That done, she lowered herself to sit cross-legged near the center and patted her lap.</p>
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<p>At last, the skunk sighed and stepped onto the blanket, lowering herself to all fours and crawling forward to flop down beside her cocladist, resting her head on her thigh.</p>
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<p>“Now,” Slow Hours began. “Tell me what is on your mind. Tell me your second greatest joy and your third greatest fear.”</p>
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<p>Unable to hide a smile, she replied, “You cannot just steal my weirdo questions like that, Slowers.”</p>
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<p>She had often wondered if dreams took any time at all, if perhaps there was nothing while she slept and it was instead the act of waking up when the chaotic firings of her non-neurons from all that time she slept crashed and tumbled into some sense made by her newly-waking mind. Perhaps nothing happened while she slept but crude and natural processes, and it was hypnopompia where a cloud became a duck or a bunny.</p>
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<p>She was not so sure now. The immediacy of the dream felt too bound to time. Sure, the time spent playing the game was a haze of knowing how games work, of knowing what a speed-run was. That was non-time. That was all bunched up in impressions built from however many hundreds of such games she had played in her long, long life. She could not express whether or not the combat was good because it was neither good combat nor bad, it was just Combat™. It was just an idea.</p>
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<p>She was not so sure that dreams were meaningless firings of neurons composed into some semblance of order in the process of waking as she recalled tearfully the way that Michelle had caught her up by the scruff and told her horrible things — such horrible, horrible things — and then bade her drive home the blade to end her own life.</p>
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<p>All throughout, Slow Hours listened in silence, letting her talk while brushing her fingers slowly through the thick fur of her mane. Even after she finished speaking, while she lingered a while in those tears, her cocladist simply sat with her in silence, stroking through her fur. It was a comfortable silence. Thoughtful. Patient, with no need of filling.</p>
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<p>All throughout, Slow Hours listened in silence, letting her talk while brushing her fingers slowly through the thick fur of her mane. Even after she finished speaking, while she lingered a while in those tears, her cocladist simply sat with her in silence, stroking through her fur. It was a comforting silence. Thoughtful. Patient, with no need of filling.</p>
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<p>Once her tears began to slow and she wiped at her nose with a tissue, Slow Hours leaned down to kiss her cheek. “I am sorry, Motes. You deserve better than what your sleeping mind has told you,” she said gently. “It sounds as though this false vision of your past self was upset with two things: your explorations around age and your explorations around death, yes?”</p>
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<p>Stifling some sniffles, aftershocks of the cry just ended, Motes nodded. “Yeah, though I think more the first,” she said, wincing at the muffled sound of her voice through her congestion. It sounded round, somehow, wrong. “That is what I have been thinking about most, anyway, that would have led to a dream like that.”</p>
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<p>“And you are not sure where these anxieties came from?”</p>
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<p>She shook her head. “Nothing has really changed. I have been seeing friends the same amount, I have not heard from anyone who got upset at me, nothing like that. It feels like it just popped into my head and now I have to live with it.”</p>
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<p>Slow Hours smiled down to her. “You know, A Finger Pointing mentioned to me that you brought it up, actually. She says that you have been talking about it lately. Far more than usual.”</p>
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<p>She shook her head. “Nothing has really changed. I have been seeing friends the same amount, I had therapy with Miss Genet, I have not heard from anyone who got upset at me, nothing like that. It feels like it just popped into my head and now I have to live with it.”</p>
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<p>Slow Hours smiled down to her. “You know, A Finger Pointing mentioned to me that you had brought this up, actually. She says that you have been talking about it lately. Far more than usual.”</p>
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<p>“She did? Why?”</p>
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<p>“Because she loves you and because I love you. Because we want to see you happy and we notice when you are not.”</p>
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<p>Motes pushed herself halfway up to sitting so that she could hug around Slow Hours’s middle. “Love you too, Slowers,” she said, then sat up the rest of the way, wiping her face off more. “I have been talking about it a lot, though, yeah. I talked about it with ma and Bee, and I talked about it with Dry Grass, and also with Sasha. Everyone talked about how some people in the clade got all upset about it.”</p>
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<p>Motes pushed herself halfway up to sitting so that she could hug around Slow Hours’s middle. “Love you too, Slowers,” she said, then sat up the rest of the way, wiping yet more tears away. “I have been talking about it a lot, though, yeah. I talked about it with ma and Bee, and I talked about it with Dry Grass, and also with Sasha. Everyone talked about how some people in the clade got all upset about it.”</p>
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<p>She nodded. “I have heard mention of the sixth and seventh stanzas, yes, and I thought for some time that the eighth was also quite unhappy, but I believe Sasha when she says that they had not ever really engaged with it specifically.”</p>
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<p>“Yeah. Dry Grass said that Hammered Silver was all sorts of upset about it, and In Dreams was pretty unhappy early on.”</p>
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<p>“Yeah. Dry Grass said that Hammered Silver was all sorts of upset about it, and I know In Dreams was pretty unhappy early on.”</p>
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<p>“Have you heard from any of them lately?”</p>
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<p>Motes shook her head. “I never really talked to them, even going way back. I did not really need to, and they never talked to me either.”</p>
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<p>Motes shook her head. “I never really talked to them, even going way back — I did not really need to — and they never talked to me either.”</p>
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<p>“Much of that was because A Finger Pointing fielded most of their interactions,” Slow Hours said. “She is quite protective of you — of all of us — and if she can do something to protect us, she will.”</p>
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<p>“Sasha said something like that,” she said, brow furrowed. “She said that ma had been working behind the scenes to deal with Hammered Silver getting angry about just about everything.”</p>
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<p>“A Finger Pointing worked behind the scenes to deal with most things, Speck,” Slow Hours said, voice fond. “Still works. Au Lieu Du Rêve is self-sustaining, so she is doing what she does best: caring for her stanza and for the clade as a whole, even the parts of it that dislike her. But come, this is not a conversation about her. This is about your dream. This is about how you feel.”</p>
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<p>“Do you want to hear my thoughts on the clade, then?”</p>
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<p>Motes shrugged. “I guess.”</p>
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<p>Slow Hours nodded, letting her paws go. “I will not say “fuck ‘em”, much as either of us might want. You must not hyperfixate on them, but neither must you disregard them.”</p>
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<p>“Why? Do you have a prophecy for me?” Motes asked, grinning faintly. “The last time you gave me a prophecy, it was about whether I should stay friends with one of my one-night stands.”</p>
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<p>“Why? Do you have a prophecy for me?” Motes asked, grinning faintly. “The last time you gave me a prophecy, it was about whether I should stay friends with someone I met at a club.”</p>
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<p>She laughed. “I remember that, yes. You were bound to run into someone who was also into kidcore stuff as Big Motes, and we were stifling you.” The mirth faded to something more thoughtful. “But, yes, I have a prediction for you: the clade is not done with you, And We Are The Motes In The Stage-Lights. Even those who have cut you off have not forgotten you, and it is best that you not forget them.”</p>
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<p>The skunk frowned, rubbing her paws over her knees and toying with a rip in the denim of her overalls. “Okay,” she mumbled. “Where do you get all of this, anyway?”</p>
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<p>Slow Hours smiled, tapped at her temple with two fingers. “I have the outline of the world, do I not?”</p>
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<p>Slow Hours smirked, tapped at her temple with two fingers. “I have the outline of the world, do I not?”</p>
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<p>Motes stuck out her tongue. “That is not an answer!”</p>
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<p>“Yes, my dear, it is,” her cocladist said haughtily, then the smile returned. “But in reality, most of these prophecies or omens or forecasts that I am apparently known for are simply reads on the situation based on the stories that I have read — and I have read a <em>lot</em> of stories. The clade is not done with you because that is not how people work. They do not cut contact with an erstwhile friend and then never think of them again. They think of them <em>constantly.</em> The stories wherein ‘no contact’ holds without further enmity are vanishingly few.”</p>
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<p>She wilted, shoulders slumping. “So I might be hearing more of this, then? From Hammered Silver and so on?”</p>
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<p>“You might. You might not.” Smiling at the exasperated look on the skunk’s face, Slow Hours leaned forward to brush some of her longer headfur from her face. “The key takeaway here, Speck, is not that you need fret about this constantly, but that you should not ignore these feelings. You should not simply dismiss those within the clade that cut contact as irrelevant. Even if they forever live only in some dusty closet in your mind, they will still live there.”</p>
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<p>“You might. You might not.” chuckling at the exasperated look on the skunk’s face, Slow Hours leaned forward to brush some of her longer headfur from her face. “The key takeaway here, Speck, is not that you need fret about this constantly, but that you should not ignore these feelings. You should not simply dismiss those within the clade that cut contact as irrelevant. Even if they forever live only in some dusty closet in your mind, they will still live there.”</p>
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<p>“Yes, but what am I supposed to <em>do?</em>“</p>
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<p>“Live, my dear. Grow.” She smirked, adding quickly, “Not up, not if you do not want, but take that knowledge, take strength in the fact that you are living intentionally as you are in spite of them, and make yourself better for it.”</p>
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<p>“Live, my dear. Grow.” She laughed, adding quickly, “Not up, not if you do not want, but take that knowledge, take strength in the fact that you are living intentionally as you are in spite of them, and make yourself better for it.”</p>
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<p>Motes nodded sullenly.</p>
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<p>“I know that you said that you do not need to hear that you are not wrong or doing wrong things,” Slow Hours said, drawing the skunk up into her lap. “But I will tell you all the same: you are not in any way a mistake. You are approaching this cognizant of the implications. You are holding in your mind both the truth that this <em>is</em> you and that an expression of identity like this coming from an adult is fraught.”</p>
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<p>“I know,” she mumbled, burying her face against her cocladist’s shoulder. “Thank you, Slowers.”</p>
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<p>“Of course, my dear. I am afraid that I did not do quite the job of comforting you that I might, but I do hope that you take that to heart. Live intentionally, and remember that we love you.”</p>
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<p>Page generated on 2024-01-15</p>
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<p>Page generated on 2024-01-18</p>
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