“You spent yesterday afternoon lounging in the auditorium trying every kind of kettle corn you could find on the exchange.”
She sat up straight, staring at her partner like she was some alien creature, something too dense to understand the importance of kettle corn. “Yes. Busy.”
As A Finger Pointing and Beholden finally got around to whipping up lunch for themselves, the conversation once more fell into comfortable chatter, the sort of banter that so often filed the house, and while, by the time her appointment arrived, Motes had not yet felt comfortable enough to refer to them as ‘ma’ and ‘Bee’, that welcoming sense of family had returned in force, and she felt once more in her comforting role as their Dot, their dóttir.
-((meeting with Sarah))
+As the afternoon started to threaten to slide right into evening, Motes took her leave and left A Finger Pointing and Beholden on the couch, canoodling. Clearly that had taken precedent over whatever they had had planned at the auditorium for the rest of the day. That they had come home for her, for Motes, was the base of that warmth that had begun to grow within her.
+She made her way out of the house and wandered to the center of the neighborhood. She left the automatic chalk lines going, letting them be the fuel that propelled her forward, left their flowering shapes fit into this perception of herself as a flower child rather than simply a child, a gentle reframing that allowed her to have this thing, this gentle goodness.
+The neighborhood formed a lazy semicircle, a ‘U’ that butted up against an avenue that petered out into the nature of the sim in either direction. Across the street — in accessible to anyone who was unwelcome — sat the back entrance of the theatre Au Lieu Du Rêve most commonly performed at. Just homes and beloved workplace dropped into an endless landscape like sugar into so much tea.
+In the bowl of the ‘U’ sat all of the common areas. A pool — one with seats and jets, one that could be a hot tub seeing a hundred as easily as an Olympic pool — a few tennis courts for the few — who? — who actually enjoyed the game, a liberal dotting of grills — everyone had a favorite — for cook outs, a “community center” which had long ago turned into a movie theatre-cum-cuddlepit…
+And there, right at the very lowest point of the bowl of the ‘U’ sat a playground. What was initially intended to be Motes’s haunt, hers and her friends, had long ago turned into a place for late-night musings. Thousands and thousands of times over the years, couples or small groups or lone individuals would converge on the swings or the slide and sit in the dark, staring up on the star-speckled sky, the Milky Way glowing bright enough to light one’s face beyond even the gold-and-black of the rest of the neighborhood with its sodium vapor lamps and countless darknesses. It was a place for play, yes, and it was often used for such, but it was also a place for couples to work out their problems or groups to chat about everything and nothing or for one to sit alone, drunk, beneath the stars, looking up and feeling good or bad or simply introspective.
+It was not dark now.
+There, on the swings, sat a child, a girl, looking to be perhaps twelve or thirteen with brown hair cut into an unruly bob, pale skin shining in the sun, swaying lazily back and forth as they faced away from her. She looked mostly down, skidding the heels of her shoes through the gravel beneath the swings, scooping the pebbles out of the way and then smoothing them back into place with her toes.
+Motes moved quietly through the grass — quietly enough that the girl did not notice her — and sat down on the free swing within that segment.
+“Hi, Sarah,” she said.
+“Motes! Hi!” the girl said, then hesitated. “You’re Big Motes today. Do you want me to Big Sarah?”
+Motes held onto the chains of the swing and gave herself a push with her feet, testing the way she glided through the air for a few feet back, then a few feet forward.
+“Motes?”
+“Yeah, actually, I think I would like Big Sarah today.”
+Nodding, Sarah Genet stepped off the swing and summarily disappeared, leaving behind a fork still sitting down. This new instance was far older, looking to be sixty or so years old with silvery-gray hair in a similar bob, her skin just as pale and yet fraught with wrinkles, her smile kind and gaze always attentive.
+“Is this better?” she asked.
+Motes smiled, nodded and gave herself another gentle kick, keeping the same back-and-forth going, the same few feet of earth wafting beneath her feet. “Thanks.”
+“Of course, Motes. Would you like me to prompt or wait?”
+She caught herself in the act of shrugging again, then shook her head to clear it. “Thanks for asking,” she said. After a long moment’s thought, she sighed. “I think I would like for you to prompt me today. I do not yet know where to start.”
+“That’s fine,” Sarah said gently. “You said in your message that you’ve just come up from overflowing. Can you tell me about that?”
+“Mmhm. Just a few hours ago, actually. Beholden and Pointillist are still back at home after coming to check on me.” She smiled down to the ground as it swung beneath her. “They set up alerts around the house so they would know when I was up.”
+“That’s sweet of them.”
+“It is. I…uh,” she trailed off. “The overflow started when I got a letter from within the stanza. It really fucked me up. Like, really bad.”
+“And that’s why you’re Big Motes? Why you didn’t say ‘ma’?”
+She smirked. “You read me like the Sunday comics,” she said, laughing. “Yes.”
+Sarah smiled in turn, far more gently. “Tell me about this letter, then. Tell me what’d be enough for you to get knocked out of commission.”
+And so she did. She summarized portions of it, then pulled it up to read the most impactful bits. She talked about the feelings of the week and change leading up to this, the conversations and the dream. She talked about how she had stopped playing, how it hurt to think of reengaging, how she knew she would but there was work to be done first.
+And then, on Sarah’s gentle urging, she worked her way backwards. She worked her way back through the months and years before, the feelings that lingered, the various comings-to-terms that she had had over the years. She talked through and made her own connections, letting Sarah suggest when her voice stumbled to a halt.
+“Motes,” Sarah said gently. “Tell me why Hammered Silver’s opinion matters to you.”
+Motes snorted. “It should not.”
+“But it does, doesn’t it? A Finger Pointing has addressed it and you’re all but guaranteed to not have to deal with this again unless Hammered Silver’s gone off the deep end, which it doesn’t sound like she has.”
+She nodded slowly, mulling the question over in her head, brow furrowed.
+“Let me split it into two, maybe. First, what about it hurt? Why are you still hurting? And second, who is Hammered Silver to you?”
+Motes put her feet down, letting the drag of shoe against gravel slow her to a stop. “Who is she to me? You mean, other than a weirdly invasive aunt who thinks she knows better?” The bitterness in her voice rose, and she was helpless to stop it. “Some old bat who is more concerned about the image of the clade that any — literally any — of us living earnestly?”
+Sarah raised a brow. “That is absolutely an answer, yes. You still see her as part of the clade?” she asked. “You still see her as an aunt?”
+Stymied, she ground her heels down against the gravel beneath the swing.
+“I think it’s worth digging into, but if you need–”
+“No, that is a good point.” Motes groaned. That hollow feeling within her chest once more grew, and she squinted her eyes shut. “I guess I do, yeah.”
+“To which? A part of the clade or aunt?”
+“Both.”
+“Why do you feel she’s still a part of the clade to you? That feels like it might be the easier one to answer.”
+Motes nodded. “Yeah. (cont)”