"Jane."
"Yep?"
"I want to talk to Aether."
"I'll let her know!"
"Went home," says Amariah in clipped tones. "Saw Kas napping on the floor. Curled up, napped a bit too, woke up, there was hugging and crying, I've been gone sixty-six years, he wrote me a lot of postcards, I started reading them - and then who should appear - but his thirteen year old daughter who looks just like Yseult or Damaris."
Path fluffs up on her shoulder and huddles close to her neck under some of her hair. "I need to figure out how to solve the approximately twelve problems I have now," she says. "And I don't want to put Path down while I'm upset." (She lets her aura out. Path is Not To Be Touched.)
"I don't want a kid. I wasn't ready. I'm not even old enough to have a kid her age, I'm subjectively twenty. We never talked about having kids. Witches don't - can't - conceive accidentally, not the first time at least, we're sterile till we first want to get pregnant and I still am. Hell, Golden was older than I am when her half-vampire child looked thirteen. I have no idea how he's been bringing her up or what she thinks of me or anything. And maybe this shouldn't even be my business, maybe I should go back and ignore her, but one, I can't ignore her, because she's Kas's kid and she'd be relevant even if she weren't mine - and two I can't because she is mine, even if I wasn't there, even if I didn't decide to have her, because she's the firstborn Bell-and-Joker-kid template, she is the kid I would've had if I had ever wanted one, if we ever have one together now she'll be a - a Griffin, they call themselves - instead - my firstborn child has been stolen from me by the person I love most of anyone -"
"I can tell you're there, which means I should be able to do some things, although you could hedge me out in ways I'm not familiar with that don't affect my ability to detect that you're a mind at all. I can't tell that some of the others are minds, but yours must be lighter-duty or operate on a different wavelength."
"Okay, so - putting on my completely unqualified therapist hat - it sounds like there are separate problem-bundles here - there's the girl, what's her name? - and there's what Kas did - and there's the fact that you've been gone a long time and there will be fallout in your relationship. And you can have feelings about any one that don't translate in obvious ways to the others."
"- I don't know. He called her 'button'. He probably did not literally name her Button. Fuck if I know, maybe he just let her go without a name altogether, didn't the Joker persistently call his kids 'munchkin' and 'pumpkin' and let Nathan pick their names, maybe single parent Jokers will literally refer to their children by nicknames forever if no one gets in the way." She starts fishing around in the postcards, looking for one with the kid's name.
"So," says Aether slowly, "if things had gone as they should've - if, um, Materia hadn't broken Jane - then there's a meaningful sense in which you'd still have the chance to have this particular child one day, but a lot of things about her situation would be different. And all of those things are reminding you about how things didn't go as they should've."
"Nnnot really, except that I am considering staying in school and I can log this as extracurricular practice. All the details zipped up in patient confidentiality," she adds. "So I might be more willing to listen than somebell else, but I really haven't taken any therapy classes at all, Juliet might have more specific expertise or you could take her Tony-related advice."
"Sixty-six. He didn't have her immediately. I mean, I understand he'd be lonely, I just wish he'd addressed that by - talking to the harpies or hanging out with that bear he was friends with or meeting new people - I could even get it if he'd met someone and fell in love with them and wanted to have kids with them - but this is so much worse."
"We never talked about having kids. Not even the perfunctory conversation about prophylactics - witches can't get pregnant until the first time we want to, it's supposed to be literally impossible for me to have a surprise kid even more than it would be for anyone else - and - Now if I ever want to, the one we would've had is already grown, she's probably already settled and separated, at thirteen - if she's even going to settle, if she's even separating, she was wearing mortal clothes when I saw her. I don't know anything about how he's bringing her up - culturally, personally, induction into the mysteries of the multiverse; she didn't look surprised when she saw me but who knows why that would be. I don't know what possessed him to spontaneously reproduce at all, let alone anything about what he opted to do once he'd managed it. I wouldn't have wanted to name her Helen. I wouldn't have left her alone for thirteen years. Even if I hadn't meant to have her. If I'd gone home and he'd presented me with a newborn I could - I'd be mad, I'd be bewildered, but I'd step in. It's not like I'd decided to be eternally childless, you know? And now the - possibility I was supposed to have is gone. I'm not even old enough to have a thirteen-year-old daughter. I am only seven years older than her."
"Also kind of relevant to spontaneously having children, I guess," he says. "Except that wasn't really what I was after, I just - I was a bored, lonely genius and I thought I probably could clone myself if I tried, and I'm not even sure I was expecting it to work, and then suddenly there was this baby and he had needs and I kind of freaked out and by the time I'd almost started to figure out what to do with him, he was practically my age and I had a whole different set of problems. Which I will totally talk about at length if you want, but I don't really know where it stops being relevant for you, you'll have to tell me."
"So, there I was," he says, "thirteen years old, with this one-and-a-half-year-old clone most of the way caught up to me - it seemed like every time I turned around he was a year older. And, uh, it was kind of freaky and I did a lot of stuff I ended up regretting. Mostly I didn't talk to him enough. Because it was new and weird and I didn't know what to do and I was vaguely afraid of fucking it up, so I didn't do anything, which definitely fucked it up. Wow, that is a super depressing story with a super depressing moral, I'm sorry."
"- Yeah, quite apart from whether Kas thought through the effect on me I don't know if he fully thought through the effects on Helen. Even if it'd turned out how he wanted to and she was just some random kid, I was always going to come home eventually and then she'd have a - we aren't married, so not a stepmother, but the same general idea - who was there first and simultaneously had no idea she existed. And instead she's mine and she's been growing up without a mom except insofar as Kas counts, so even if I'd talked to Yseult and Damaris more I wouldn't know that much about her, I don't know how that will have affected her, I don't know what if anything she wants from me now, and I don't feel like I can ask her till I'm more calmed down and have read these - postcards. He wrote me a lot of postcards while I was gone." She brandishes her postcard bag.
"And Sherlock turned out all Sherlocky, which is, as the multiversal observational study proves, not strongly related to anything you did - so I guess I should expect Helen to turn out templatey, too, unless that's just a way the templates in question differ. I suppose I could see if Yseult or Damaris wants to talk to me."
"Well, I grew up knowing that my mother was... you," she says. "They call you the Shade-Dreamer now, there's a million movies and things, I guess you wouldn't know that if you haven't been back. But it was all a big secret - Granatee, I mean Ranata Ekamma, just told the queen whose daughter I was and let the rest of the clan think I was Random Witch Baby. And then after I separated, Kas told me about worlds and Bells and minting and stuff."
"I'm not really sure where to start," she says. "Kalavar used to love being dragons when I was younger... I'm really good at magic... I was kidnapped very briefly once, we never really found out why - oh, I have an ingot power, I can throw my voice arbitrary places. And listen arbitrary places, too."
"You have some - themes to you, nothing that unusual to have in common as templates go - daemons, coin colors, obviously appearance. None of you are standing out as the template instance at all. I think you might be - almost a subtype? You are a kind of person, the specific kind of that kind of person that appears for Bell/Joker pairings' firstborns. There might be a theme to the ingot powers but I can't tell until I see more of them, I think. I think you're going to continue to usually be female as more of you appear but it's not a guarantee the way it is with - Matildas, say, I don't think we'll ever see a boy Matilda."
"Yeah. I'm - not in a position to be really comforting, just yet. I think I need to finish reading the postcards first, minimum. If only I'll do - then nothing doing. If he wants somejoker to show up and be soothing, Jane's up, she can fetch him anybody who'll come. Although I guess the ones who have daemons already are busy so they'd need the star."
After a spate of doodled owls - it looks like he went through an entire pad of hotel stationery - the next thing she pulls out of the bag is a crumpled movie poster with her name misspelled in the subtitle and HA FUCKING HA scrawled across it in red Sharpie.
After a while, a letter, looking somewhat the worse for wear - some of these things bear hints of how they were destroyed, and this one was apparently cried on profusely and then burned.
There are still a lot of them.
And as the years of one-sided correspondence wear by, the 'I miss you's start creeping back in.
One postcard, from Quebec City, says: Augustine died. I didn't even know. Talked to her last night and she says she's not coming back. Fuck.
Subsequent postcards take on a darker tone. He's not happy; he misses her. There are moments of joy, and he tells her about most of them, but there's a melancholy edge to it even when he's talking about the amazing waffles he had this morning or how gorgeous the Aurora is from the air.
Eventually, there is a postcard that says, Talked to your mom today. She's still adorable. I miss you so much.
And another one after a week that says, I can't do this anymore.
And the next postcard - after almost two years, the longest stretch of silence yet - says, in smallish writing:
Shit fucking hell, sweetie. I don't even know how to say this.
You have a daughter. Her name is Helen. Her daemon's Kalavar. Likes being ducklings.
I meant to have a kid - I didn't mean her to be yours. She wasn't supposed to be anyone's. I don't even know if that makes it better or worse. I don't know what happened. Fuck.
And they are almost all about Helen, now. Helen's daemon branched out from ducklings to snakes. Helen's birth blessing is gonna make Kalavar stronger than she looks and give them an easier time separating. Helen met Charlie. Helen likes strawberries. Helen's birthday is August third - well, August something, but third is what he told Charlie so that's what'll stick. Helen is playing with some other witch babies and it's cute. Helen, Helen, Helen.
Shura (the friend) wished she didn't have to sleep so much. A drawing of a pentagon, with a line slashed off the edge of the card like he was interrupted while drawing it - and then, Helen wished too. She said it would be more fun if you got to pick your birth blessing. She wanted grace. (The card is extremely crumpled, and the second message was obviously written after the crumpling, much more shakily.)
The 'become amazing at magic' project went well, apparently. For her seventh birthday, she baked a cake and gave some to everybody.
The next thing after the postcard about cake is a letter.
Helen got kidnapped. She's fine, don't worry. Some asshole witches got her lost and said they'd take her back to me, and then they did a spell to kill me instead, right under her nose. Sent Petaal after her as soon as I torched. They killed me again on the way back.
And then they wised up and put me under some kind of freezing curse. I went to sleep and the next thing I knew your mom was standing over me with a knife. Really freaked Helen out - the freezing, not the stabbing, Ranata wouldn't let her watch the stabbing, she's pissed about that but she'll get over it.
The queen found the kidnappers, got their queen to hand them over, killed them both. Still don't know what they were after. I can guess, though. Nobody's supposed to know whose daughter Helen is, but shit gets out.
She wanted to try on some clothes she saw in a store today. I let her keep 'em. She looks cute in pink.
A few days later, Turns out one of the other kids can be a real asshole about the clothes thing. Shura's not happy either, but she's trying. Also, Sue visited today and Ranata saw him, so I told her a bunch of stuff. I don't even know why you never did.
Not very long after that: FUCKING PROPHETS
After that, it's a lot of incoherent helpless scattered phrases with occasional perfectly lucid reports about Helen's life. He can hold it together talking about Helen, but talking about his feelings leads to things like the page full of I can't and the postcard with a heart-shaped bloodstain blurred by tears.
As time goes on, the proportion of incoherent messages about his feelings decreases.
All of Helen's friends settle before she does; when she gets around to it at last, it's just before her thirteenth birthday and she separates on the first try.
Postcards get sparse after that.
The very last one says, Maybe I'll clean your house again.
"I couldn't—if I'd known from the start I would've been fine," he says. "And if you'd just shown up one day I at least wouldn't have spent six years getting good and wrecked about it first. The finding out too late to do me any good, but in plenty of time to worry about it for years - that was bad."
"So - so I read some postcards. And Juliet recommended talking to a Tony so I did that, after trying to talk to Aether and that not working all that well. And then I talked to Helen's alts. And then Helen. And then I finished the postcards. And - now I am back."
"I don't know... what happens now," says Kas. "I don't know what - you know, when I first met Stella, I told her something like this was going to happen? Because... I don't know you perfectly, and I'm not perfect, and forever is too long a time not to make any mistakes in. But I didn't think it was going to be so soon." He sighs. "I guess you never do. If I'd known it was going to turn out like this, I wouldn't have done it."
"I thought you might mind, you might think it was inconvenient or something that I'd gone off and had a kid by myself, I didn't think you'd - hurt," he says helplessly. "And then she came out yours, and I didn't know what the hell you were going to think, but I still didn't really know it would be this bad. This is - I don't know what this is. I don't know what's going on. You said we're going to be okay but I don't know how."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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."
"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.