Kael loved his sister with a mixture of devotion and bewilderment.
“Mama, she doesn’t follow the rules.” He was building towers, his favorite evening activity, the mark of a future architect, according to his father. Khash would get down on the ground with him, and they’d spend half the evening constructing towering little towns of blocks. Kora was their kaiju, stomping in with a singular aim — destruction.
“I think she’s only trying to play with you, bub. If you’re the builder, what’s her job? Remember, the rules are only fair if they’re for everyone.”
Kael thought about it. He shifted to building fewer towers, taller, more fun to knock over. When Kora wreaked her havoc, they both shrieked in laughter and did it again.
Maybe there was no such thing as aneasybaby and ahardbaby, she thought. Maybe there was only a difference in communication. Kael had taught her the basics of motherhood, a foreign language at the time. Kora was teaching her submission. Once she stopped fighting her daughter’s determination, her hard baby didn’t seem that hard to figure out at all.
“My fierce little warrior,” Khash cooed at her. “No one ever gets to dim your light, wildflower.”
Lurielle stepped out the back door that night, missing the rest of the ‘your great-grandaddy’ platitude, staring up at the moon with tears running down her face.
There was more than the potential for damage and harm in these fraught mother-daughter relationships. There was something dangerous and electric about having a daughter.
Her son was a pure ray of sunshine, but Kora was an entire storm system unto herself.And no one gets to dim her. The world would try. She already knew that. Classrooms valued compliance; the workplace valued communication tempered with exclamation marks. There was little room for women who took up more space than they were allotted. As a female elf in engineering, she knew that better than most. Lurielle already knew she was competitive to a fault, and didn’t mind talking right over her male peers when they interrupted her.
This is why you had her. Becauseyou’rethe best person for this job.
Her job wasn’t to prepare her daughter for the ways the world would try to make her small. That was whathermother had done, making Lurielle small first, before the world even had its chance. Her job wasn’t to corral her strong-willed little girl’s spirit — it was to help it grow. Help her learn to carve space for herself before someone inevitably tried to take it, teach her to be brave enough to claim it entirely. Help her become something formidable, a force to be reckoned with, a storm too big to be trapped in the teacup of polite Elvish society.Fucking crush it together.Keep that furious little fire burning bright.And no one gets to dim her.
Tate
When his eyes fluttered open, Tate was aware he was somewhere unfamiliar. Someplace unfamiliar, his entire body aching, and unable to breathe.
He choked against the tube down his throat as his fight or flight reflex kicked into high gear, but instantly, there was a soft hand on his arm, a high voice urging him not to fight, that he was safe.
Silva.
He went limp, melting back against the strange bedding. There was a steady beeping overhead, a continuous metronome that did not care whether he was conscious, only that his heart continued thumping. A pressure at his side, his ribs throbbing with a deep, grinding ache that made each breath feel like a negotiation he was losing, and a telltale antiseptic smell.Hospital. You’re in the fucking hospital. He could only see out of one eye, and blearily at that.With a fucking eyepatch. Perfect. But she was here.
She had been there, in his apartment. Her mouth had opened in shock at the sight of him, coming to him across the kitchenlike the goddess of starlight herself, making him squint to take in her glow. It was a struggle now to even turn his head minutely, casting his one good eye to the side where she sat, trying to make out the hazy shape of her before him, coming together slowly.
It was Cymbeline.
Cym, sitting beside his bed, a crumpled tissue clenched in her velutinous hand.
“Oh my fuckingstars, Tate. I thought we’d never see you again! We thought you were dead! We literally had a funeral for you! And now you’re back, and-and you almost diedagain?! My nerves can’t take this!”
He turned his head back, sinking into the unsupportive pillow.
It was Cymbeline. Not his Silva.
“Don’t try to move. You’re still intubated, but they said they would take the tube out today if you woke up. And you still have your chest tube. You have so many broken ribs . . . I’ve been stopping by every day on my way home from work; you know we’re just around the corner . . . I didn’t want you to wake up alone.”
Alone.
Then he remembered. His Silva. His no longer. A ring on her index finger, her hand bartered for. A tiny voice calling out for her.
It was better that she wasn’t here. He didn’t think he could survive seeing the inevitable exhaustion on her face, the stress ofobligationin her eyes instead of . . . whatever he’d been hoping for. What that was, he wasn’t sure.
It was better that she wasn’t here.
His eyes fluttered shut once more, allowing the darkness to swallow him.
He should’ve died on the forest floor. It had been a mistake getting up, a mistake climbing his way out. This was the part in Faerie stories that never made it to the page. He’d crossedworlds for her, killed to fight his way out, and it was still too late. Endurance entitled him to nothing. Survival was the only thing he was actually good at, but he should have fought the instinct a bit harder, gotten it over with while he lay there in the dirt. Ending the bastard’s bloodline while he had the opportunity.No time like the present, boyo.
When he woke again, there was someone new sitting beside his bed. The tube was out of his throat, and evidently, whatever steady drip of morphine they’d provided had been cut back. He winced, turning his head, attempting to make out the shape beside him.
