Motes — 2362

Motes played.

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–

No.

Motes was played with.

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.

Motes was played with. She was laughed at. She was belittled and torn down.

The things she loved were turned astringent and bitter. All of the play she had at the point of a knife was turned fraught with peril. All of the play with death became a threat.

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.

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.

In her dream, she played a game.

She played one of those games where she forked and was rendered bodiless and immobile, while her up-tree 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.

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.

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.

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.

But when she got to the boss arena, no one was there. Not the crouching version of herself, purple-auraed and glowing-eyed. Just her, suddenly in one, suddenly unified instead of spread across two forks.

And then something behind her snagged her by the nape of the neck, bundling up her scruff in unseen fingers and hauling her off the ground. She cried out and kicked as she dangled, swinging blindly with her spear.

This was not supposed to happen.

Whatever it was that held her turned her slowly to face the way that she had come, and she came face to face with herself at last. Not herself as a little skunk, some ten years old, but her as she was when she uploaded. Her as Michelle Hadje/her as Sasha/her as that version of herself that flowed between the two forms, visions of skunk fur washing over skin/visions of fur falling away to reveal the human beneath. There was the exhaustion in her face/the agony in her face. There was the hoarseness of her voice/the hoarseness of her voice.

“To think that I had this in me,” she croaked/she croaked, “To think that I could be this disgusting.”

Motes dropped her spear. Her muscles went slack. Her voice was stolen. Her breath was robbed from her.

This was not supposed to happen.

“Who are you?” The apparition furrowed her brow/bared her teeth. “You cannot be me. You cannot be us. Who are you? Who is this pretender? Who is this nobody? Who is this nothing?”

Motes cried. She hung limply and cried before that long-dead version of herself.

This was not supposed to happen.

Michelle/Sasha sneered through that omnipresent exhaustion. “Some mote who styles herself Motes. Some grasper-after-fame. Some fetishist who wishes only to taint the Ode with lurid visions of youth.”

Motes cried. She could do nothing but hang from Sasha’s paw/Michelle’s hand and cry, could do nothing but dangle in the grasp of this person who had always been so, so fond of her and cry.

In her free hand/paw, this ghost brought into being a dagger, silver-bladed, wood-hilted, ruby-pommeled. She reached out and slowly, almost tenderly, pressed it into Motes’s paw. Holding her wrist, she brought that paw up so that the tip of the blade was pressed against the skunk’s neck, pricking at the skin over her carotid. When she let go, Motes found her paw remained there, immobile, unresponsive to her efforts to pull it away.

“This is your kink, is it not ‘Motes’? Your fetish, ‘Speck’? ‘Skunklet’?” Sasha/Michelle leaned forward, nearly nose to nose, whispered, “‘Dóttir’?”

Motes sobbed. “Please…” she managed at last.

None of this was supposed to happen. None of this was right.

Michelle/Sasha straightened up and said, almost bored, “Well? Indulge, my dear.”

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.

She died then, whimpering ever more weakly, blood staining her paw and arm and front in an outsized torrent, and as her panicked eyes drifted shut one last time, she awoke with a start, already sobbing.

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.

“Dot?” came the sleepy reply.

She carefully poked her nose into the room, turning the handle to the door as quietly as she could. “Ma?”

“Is everything alright, Motes?”

“Nightmare,” she mumbled, still sniffling. “Can I sleep with you for a bit?”

“Of course, my dear,” A Finger Pointing said, stifling a yawn. “I am busy hogging all the bed, anyway, so there is plenty of room.”

Sighing in relief, the skunk nodded and padded into the room, closing the door behind her. She had to feel her way to the bed in the dark. The dark, which seemed to press in against her, bearing rapidly distorting memories of the dream. To think that I could be this disgusting, echoed in her head. …lurid visions of youth…

There was a part of her that strove to convince the rest that the voice in the dark was not that of A Finger Pointing — despite the lilting, everlasting humor that showed even in sleepiness — but that of Michelle/Sasha, her root instance who had ever loved her, now more than fifty years dead. It is her waiting with a dagger, that fraction of her promised. It is her waiting with yet more cruel words.

But then there was the bed, and then there was the hand holding up the covers to welcome her in, and then there were the arms envelop her, and then there was the feeling of a face — a human face — an unshifting face — her cocladist-cum-mother’s face — pressed against the back of her neck, and then there was the clumsy addition of Beholden’s paw draping over her side, her other cocladist-cum-mother clearly still more asleep than awake.

And then she finally was able to relax.

None of them spoke, once she was settled. Both A Finger Pointing and Beholden quickly drifted back to sleep, and although there were the occasional flashes of skunk/human face, exhausted and sneering, behind her closed eyelids, Motes soon followed.

It was not until morning came, when Beholden had slipped away for a few minutes and returned with three mugs of coffee on a tray, when all three of them sat up in bed, leaning against the headrest, tray set before them, that she told them of the dream.

“I do not remember it all that well, now,” she said holding the oversized mug carefully in comparatively small paws. “But Michelle was there, and she was really upset with me. She kept saying that I was gross and a fetishist and stuff, and that she could not believe that she had this in her, and then she made me kill myself.”

“Jesus, Dot,” Beholden said, frowning over the rim of her mug. She reached her free arm around the skunk’s shoulders and tugged her close against her side in a hug. “I am sorry to hear that. That sounds awful.”

“It really does, my dear.” A Finger Pointing leaned over to kiss at the tips of her ears. “And I think that it is demonstrably untrue that she did not have this in her. You exist, Motes. You are absolutely my up-tree, and I know where you got it from.” She smiled. “And I am absolutely her up-tree, am I not?”

Doing her best to hold still despite the ticklishness of the kisses, Motes nodded. “I know. It was just a dream. Dreams are not real.”

“Not unless you are Slow Hours,” A Finger Pointing said, nodding. “And even then, there is no guarantee. But come, the details of the dream aside, how are you feeling now?”

“I guess I am feeling okay. It feels like any old nightmare.” She furrowed her brow, picking words carefully. “It feels like it is something sticky that has gotten stuck in my fur and I have to carefully remove it. It sucks, and it is a lot of work, but it is just a silly thing that happens sometimes, right? Every time I remember driving the knife home, I just remind myself it was fake.”

“Good,” Beholden said, letting the smaller skunk slouch against her. “That is a good way to think of it.”

A Finger Pointing leaned against Motes in turn — over her, in fact, to the point of resting her head on Beholden’s shoulder. “I know that you will not be able to forget about it, not completely, but processing it for what it is — a dream — may well help it be less of a burden,” she said. “I have gained comfort in that at times for my own dreams, waking and sleeping.”

Motes huddled comfortably between the two. “But what does processing even mean? I feel like even my brain is yelling at me about all of this now,” she asked, doing her best to keep a whine out of her voice. “I do not even know why it is all coming up so much lately.”

Beholden laughed. “It is all your fault, my dear. The dream probably showed up because you have been thinking about it. Others have been talking with you about it because you keep bringing it up. Probably best to ask yourself what got you thinking about it in the first place, right?”

“I guess,” she grumbled. “I will try and remember. It felt like it just kind of floated up into my mind a few weeks ago from out of nowhere.”

“Remember, yes,” A Finger Pointing said, yawning dramatically and leaning harder until she was able to push both of the skunks over onto their sides. She held up a hand as though inviting them to picture a tableau. “I remember the maps of the Holy Land,” she lamented, quoting from some old production, some old classic. “Colored, they were. Very pretty! The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty.”

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.”

“We will swim! We will be happy!” Motes chimed in.

Sighing fondly, A Finger Pointing nodded. “We should have been poets.”

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.

She saw their gentle manipulation and loved them all the harder for it.

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.

The fifth stanza had begun its life in an apartment building in a cozy, artsy town. 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.

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.

For each of those who lived there, the neighborhood was theirs in some specific way, and for Motes, it was hers to paint.

Motes had painted it all hundreds of times, of course.

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 flowered 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.

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.

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 the set of steps to a 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.

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.

Why am I so nervous? one part of her wondered, and then another answered, Perhaps because you are worried she will tell you the truth. Another chimed in, Is that not the goal? Perhaps–

She was startled out of her anxious spiral by a gentle ping in return. “Speck? What is up? I am at the ALDR library. Would you like me to cycle the door?”

Motes nodded. “Hi Slow Hours. Yes please.”

There was a quiet chime from the door and the letters on the nameplate faded from ‘Slow Hours’ to ‘Au Lieu Du Rêve Library’. This done, there was a quiet click and the door swung lazily open.

Beyond, rather than the comfortable and comfortably her home that Slow Hours kept, there was a well-lit reading room, a solarium of sorts with glass that looked out over some far distant part of the selfsame prairie that the neighborhood abutted. A table, several chairs, and a small collection of far more comfortable recliners huddled in the middle, while beyond, a room of shelving stretched into dimness.

And there, already levering herself out of her chair, was Where It Watches The Slow Hours Progress. Sis Hours, her big sister. Slowers. Slow, if she was feeling particularly cheeky. Had Beholden been human or Slow Hours a skunk, they could easily have been mistaken for twins, so similar were their builds — short, soft, round of face with curly black hair framing that pale skin versus short, soft, round of face with thick white mane framing that black fur — and yet as soon as they spoke, the differences were immediately evident. Where Beholden was brash and snarky, Slow Hours was quiet and thoughtful. Where Beholden leaned into music as the lead sound tech, Slow Hours leaned into books as the lead script manager. Where Beholden was fun — really, truly, earnestly fun and a joy to be around — Slow Hours was nice. She was the one with which one spoke about feelings. She was the one who cried with you.

Behind her, scattered among the shelves, several more instances of her cocladist were at work, peeking over whenever they thought she was not looking as though ready to do just that.

“Hi Speck,” she said, smiling. “If you are calling me ‘Slow Hours’ then something must be up.”

Motes huffed.

“You are transparent, my dear. It is a strength of yours.” Slow Hours rested her hand atop the skunk’s head. “Now, come. Do you want to go sit outside?”

“Yes please,” she said, feeling suddenly smaller still.

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 moved. Skunk and woman observed this magic carpet in gingham hovering inches above the ground, bending blades and heads of stiff-stalked grass.

When Motes lingered on the trail, pensive, Slow Hours stepped onto the blanket and tramped dutifully around the rim of it, tamping down the grass so that they would not sink so deep. That done, she lowered herself to sit cross-legged near the center and patted her lap.

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.

“Now,” Slow Hours began. “Tell me what is on your mind. Tell me your second greatest joy and your third greatest fear.”

Unable to hide a smile, she replied, “You cannot just steal my weirdo questions like that, Slowers.”

“Can and will.”

She giggled faintly. “Well, okay. My second greatest joy is that you brought a fricking picnic blanket out here because you knew I would just get all frumpy in one of those stupid chairs, and my third greatest fear iiiis…” She trailed off for a moment, thinking. “I am afraid you are going to just tell me this is nothing.”

“When have I ever been able to stop myself at “it is nothing”, Speck?” Slow Hours tweaked one of the skunk’s ears gently. “And if I do say that it is nothing, would that be so bad? You may have spent some time worrying, but is that not also time spent thinking through your emotions? We will still have spoken about why it is nothing.”

Motes pawed up at her cocladist’s hand on her ear. “Well, okay. That is fair. None of us ever seem to be able to shut up.”

“You see? You do understand. Now. Tell me what is on your little skunk mind.”

“I had a dream last night,” she said, beginning slowly. “And I already talked about it with Ma and Bee, and I think I sort of understand the ways in which it is wrong. Like, we talked about the fact that it was just a dream, and that it was probably spurred by how much I have been thinking about that sort of thing anyway, and that, since I cannot tell why I started thinking about all of this stuff, what I need to do is to start thinking back and remembering what might have happened that started the thoughts before.”

Slow Hours nodded quietly. “Start at the dream, then, and we will talk from there. I am sure that I will infer what you mean by ’this stuff’.”

And so she did.

She delved deep into her memories and pulled out as many details as she could. The System would help her remember anything that would pass before her sensorium, that which she heard or saw, touched or tasted or said aloud, but not any of her thoughts or feelings.

Dreams, however, sat in some liminal space. They were built up of images, yes, and sounds, perhaps even pleasurable or painful touches, but the System did not quite know what to do with this onslaught of imagined input. It allowed her to remember distorted flashes of images with startling perfection, to remember the garbled words overheard without fault, and yet the distortion and garbled nature of each remained.

So vivid had her nightmare been, though, that Motes had no trouble recalling the emotions and thoughts that had pinned themselves so firmly to the dream.

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.

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.

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.

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 tears, her cocladist simply sat with her in silence, stroking through her fur and sharing in those tears. It was a comforting silence. Thoughtful. Patient, with no need of filling.

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?”

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. The death was just the punishment.”

“And you are not sure where these anxieties came from?”

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.”

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.”

“She did? Why?”

“Because she loves you and because I love you. Because we want to see you happy and we notice when you are not.”

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 and Warmth. Everyone talked about how some people in the clade got all upset about it.”

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 never really engaged with it specifically.”

“Yeah. Dry Grass said that Hammered Silver was all sorts of upset about it, and I know In Dreams was pretty unhappy early on.”

“Have you heard from any of them lately?”

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.”

“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.”

“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 over just about everything.”

“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.”

“Right,” Motes said, pushing that miserable sensation in her chest down once more. “I feel…I do not know. Usually, it feels like I am just living like myself, if it feels like anything at all. Sometimes it feels transgressive in a fun way, like when I get booted from a sim for being weird or I get strange looks on the street or whatever.”

“And sometimes it feels transgressive in a bad way?” Slow Hours asked when Motes drifted to silence.

“Yeah. It feels like I am doing something wrong. That is what I got out of the dream. It was not just that I was doing a bad thing, but a wrong thing. A bad thing might be naughty, but a wrong thing is me fuc– messing up. It is me making a mistake. Being a mistake.”

Her cocladist smiled sadly and reached out to take her paws in her hands. “I could tell you a million, billion, trillion times that you are doing as you say and just living like yourself, that you are not doing a wrong thing, that you are not a wrong person, but I do not think that is what you need to hear, is it, Speck?”

After a moment’s hesitation, she shook her head. “That is something I know intellectually already.”

“Do you want to hear my thoughts on the clade, then?”

Motes shrugged. “I guess.”

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.”

“Why? Do you have a prophecy for me?” Motes asked, smiling faintly. “The last time you gave me a prophecy, it was about whether I should stay friends with Alexei.”

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.”

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?”

Slow Hours smirked, tapped at her temple with two fingers. “I have the outline of the world, do I not?”

Motes stuck out her tongue. “That is not an answer.”

“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 lot 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 constantly. The stories wherein ’no contact’ holds without further enmity are vanishingly few.”

She wilted, shoulders slumping. “So I might be hearing more of this, then? From Hammered Silver and so on?”

“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.”

“Yes, but what am I supposed to do?”

“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. Live fiercely and let it inform your growth, just do not let it define you.”

Motes nodded sullenly.

“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 being safe. You are leaning on support and protection. You are holding in your mind both the truth that this is you and that an expression of identity like this coming from an adult is fraught.”

“I know,” she mumbled, burying her face against her cocladist’s shoulder. “Thank you, Slowers.”

“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.”