And so we stayed in silence.
Dry Grass was the first to break the silence, mumbling. “In The Wind.”
“What was that, love?” Tule asked, brushing fingers through her hair.
-“That was my up-tree instance. In The Wind.” She laughed, choked and hoarse. “I remember the rattle of dry grass in the wind. I picked that up from Louie. Eir clade did much the same. I thought I was so clever.“
+“That was my up-tree instance. In The Wind.” She laughed, choked and hoarse. “I remember the rattle of dry grass in the wind. I picked that up from Louie. Eir clade, os Riãos, did much the same. I thought I was so clever.“
Tule, more flexible than I, bent down and kissed her on the cheek. Cress gave her own kiss after. Both of them glanced briefly at me, looking a little sheepish. I couldn’t quite piece together the reason for their looks until I pieced together their confusion — our confusion, since I shared in it — of how I must feel about her.
The compulsion to echo that gesture was certainly there, too. I knew from countless memories the softness of her skin against my lips, I knew what even the briefest touch would mean to her as she worked to process her own loss.
I also knew her only as a friend, only as Dry Grass of the Ode clade, only Cress and Tule’s partner, with whom I had shared only a few dinners.
Thinking rapidly, I opted for a middle ground of squeezing gently on her shoulder. This gained me a rather relaxed-sounding sigh from Dry Grass, and a pleased smile from both Cress and Tule. Dry Grass shrugged my hand off of her shoulder to instead take it in her own, holding gently.
“Can you tell us about her?” I asked.
-After a long moment’s pause, she nodded. “She was the part of me who remained a systech. After I burnt out
+After a long moment’s pause, she nodded. “She was the part of me who remained a systech. After I burnt out, I mean. I had grown weary of the mediation and moderation side of the job. I loved the tech, instead. I loved the feeling of being a caretaker for this vast and wonderful world we live in. I did not want to deal with adults bickering at each other over stupid shit. We are the moms of the clade, yes? My stanza? Not the judges and jurors.”
+Both Cress and Tule nodded, though the statement largely went over my head.
+Perhaps guessing at such, Dry Grass continued, “Each of our stanzas focused on something different. I am sure that much is in the stories you have doubtless read, if Lily’s reaction is anything to go by. She fusses at the eighth and their politics, perhaps the first with their habit of spying, but mine, the sixth, wound up with all of Michelle’s — our root instance — all of her dreams of and desire for motherhood. Motherliness. Caring and cherishing. That is why I have all of that art on the walls: it is all cherished, all lovely creations from Warmth and Motes, the clade’s little ones.”
+“So In The Wind was the one who stuck with that moderation?” I asked.
+She nodded. “To an extent. She often explained how she would push the moderation duties off onto other systechs. She really was just as focused as I was on the tech side.” She rolled over onto her back so that she could look up to us, transferring my hand in hers from one to the other. “All I wanted to do was take a vacation. I should have known it would wind up far longer than the two weeks I had intended Michelle had already tried that, and she got an entire clade out of it, after all.
+“She usually got what she want, too. She worked the tech side, disentangling crashes and hunting for problematic objects. She is the one who generally kept me up to date on changes in the tech, whether over lunch or via merges.”
+Cress nodded. “It must be hard to lose that.”
+“It is more than that,” Dry Grass said, sniffling. “I loved her, my dear. She was my sister, my twin. Fuck what my down-tree says, I lost family.”
+“I’m sorry,” the three of us mumbled.
+She rubbed the back of her free hand against her eyes. “I will mourn the loss of a sister and friend. It will take time, and I can only just touch it briefly now. It is too hot.”
+Familiar sensation, I thought, and from their expressions, I surmised that my cocladists were feeling much the same.
+“Need some space from it, love?” Tule asked.
+“Please.”
+He nodded, working on a careful extraction from his role as pillow, replacing his lap with another pillow from the bed as he slid from beneath her. He stretched his arms up over his head, winced at a quiet pop from his neck, and then shifted to lay down beside her instead, arm draped over her front. Cress followed suit, laying down beside Tule and hugging around them both.
+I chose to remain sitting for a while, idle gaze settling on the triad beside me, while I thought of the ways in which Dry Grass talked about In The Wind. I tried mapping that onto my own clade. Thinking of Lily like a sister, of Cress like a sibling, felt right in a way that I didn’t expect. While it was difficult to think of Tule as in any way younger than me, despite being my second degree up-tree instance, but perhaps that was due to his lingering similarities to me. After all, Sedge had forked him off shortly after I had forked into her. It was part of the package deal: Sedge went back to exploring femininity while Tule returned to cis-masculinity. Both of them remained siblings, perhaps because I was their progenitor.
+But Marsh? Were they a parent? Were they also a sibling? Some great-grandparent, perhaps? Or were they simply my root instance? All fit to greater or lesser extent.