"But anyway, he might not be reincarnated. It can't be common. I've never found anyone else - we're not exactly publicizing it, but it doesn't even come up in fiction except with religious figures and in fantasy, and the rules are different from what I'm working with in those stories."

"I sort of want to say something like 'I'm sure you'll find him,' but honestly that's not based on any kind of real evidence," Helen admits.

"Yeah. I mean. I'd live. My dire threats to him on his deathbed that if he didn't want me to be miserable alone he'd better come check on me, aside. But - we were really good together."

"If Marie hadn't come back I would have had a lot of regrets about the time we didn't spend together in my first life for stupid reasons. I mean, I regret that anyway, but moreso." More hugs. Marie is not objecting.

"Well - that problem I mostly won't have. Except for the period of time when Kib had moved into the house with Aydanci - that was my, their, our, whatever, the husband's name, Aydanci - but they weren't dating because Kib hadn't yet remembered that Aydanci wasn't technically straight. That was a little embarrassing."

"That does sound a little embarrassing, but much less your fault than our mess was," Helen says. "We literally only reconciled while I was dying, too. So there's that, at least you don't have that to deal with."

"Yeah. ...I guess you don't refer to all your lives by their names because you keep all your memories and don't get used to new names without remembering the old ones each time, but it still makes it really confusing."

"It would be a little weird to refer to myself in the third person," Helen says. Marie nods. "I can start referring to my second life as Beatrice no problem, but saying 'Helen' in the third person would be awkward. It's...more my name than the others are."

"I don't even turn my head when I hear words that sound like 'Kib' or 'Aly'. Kib didn't mention feeling like his name was Aly even after he'd dreamed her entire life."

"You have a lot less continuity than we do, it sounds like. If Beatrice had only had dreams of being Helen, I almost certainly wouldn't have gone back to Marie."

"Kib eventually ran out of Aly to dream. And once we've dreamed a thing it slots into place like a proper memory, just as old as it really is. But I'll probably never run out. It took him more than forty years to dream through her twenty-four, and he lived to be seventy-six."

"It's not that I wouldn't have dreamed about her much or believed the dreams, it's that my first life was pretty unhappy, and even though Marie was the best part of it, Beatrice Carter wouldn't have wanted anything at all to do with the catastrophe that was Helen Fitzroy's life."

"Ah. I don't have that problem. I'm proud of myselves. ...Aly invented storks before she died."

"...Definitely something to be proud of. But it's not that I'm ashamed of Helen Fitzroy's life. I accomplished--nothing as good as that, to be sure. But not nothing either. It was my personal life that was a disaster, that's all."

"Oh. Yeah, if you worked like me you'd have had the option to pretend nothing happened except while you were asleep, if that seemed preferable."

"I, for one, am glad it works the way it does for us," Marie contributes.

"Sounds like it worked out for you. I do wonder what it would have been like being a baby remembering everything from the first. ...Kib might not have gone back to Aydanci right away just because that would have been awkward if one of us were five and the other thirty. But he would've written a letter so Aydanci didn't worry about me continuing to be dead. Aydanci was a very bitter unhappy sort of widower. Although it did motivate him to accelerate his existing public health project to the point where the pox that killed me, among other diseases, is now totally eradicated."

"I showed up on her doorstep at the age of eighteen after managing to convince myself I wasn't crazy like my biological family thought I was. I...won't go into the details of why they were able to convince me of that, like, at all, but that was most of why I didn't contact her sooner. I of all people will admit that the parenting system has its flaws," Helen says.

"...I hadn't pictured the parenting system in enough detail to have considered that it would have special flaws like that."

"If your parents suck but not so obviously that strangers notice then your well-being is at the mercy of sucky people, yes. Most parents aren't like that, but they exist," Helen sighs.

"...There are bad creche workers, bad teachers..."

"Mm. Probably not that different, then," Helen says quietly.

"...but if you don't like your teacher you can go back to the creche, and most creches have some monitoring between the staff members and would require collusion to get out of hand."

"There's systems in place to make sure kids in bad households get out. But they don't always work, and when you've got the kid half convinced you're right..." Helen sighs.

"Mmhm."