Scene #7824: Girls Like Us

Owner	Pose
Persephone Kore	Sapient Heuristics feels like a different place the second time around. It isn't, in a literal sense: Persephone had moved it back to her original world, the one with Zubrin Station and the long-unified cassette futurism, after the Paladins threat had passed. The messy, utilitarian hangar with its warpgate, and the curving crimson halls beyond, haven't changed in the slightest either. Yet the atmosphere is vastly different. Part of that is likely Lilian's mindset; she's in a far better place now than she was back then. Another part of it is her purpose in being here: the world simply looks different when one can relax and appreciate the beauty of things, instead of regarding objects as cover to dodge vision cones behind. And part of it is my warmth and love, for you and everybody! Haha, but maybe especially you. Persephone's feelings overflow her heart, cascade outwards, and suffuse every person here; formerly a tempest of frustration and sadness, they're now a softly radiant glow of serene wellbeing and nurturing affection. That love is the color that was missing from its palette, the note that was missing from its harmonies. Sapient Heuristics without Persephone was simply incomplete. It deepens the reds and brightens the greens; it fills the hallways and the rooms with a resonating, welcoming warmth; it connects everyone in a bright-soft constellation of hearts. This is home. Or, at least, some deep part of your brain insists so.
Lilian Rook	It's true that, even were Persephone not here, everything about this station would feel different to Lilian today. Without the other Paladins on her back. Without the 'objective' in front. Without scouring for menace in every soft curve and warm nook in every corridor, inventing it where she couldn't find it. More than anything, before ever laying eyes on it the first time, she had been determined to be suspicious; to find something wrong, because if there wasn't, then that'd make everything . . . Lilian arrives through the warpgate this time, rather than a tactical inertial jump into the hangar. With company of just one, and a special case. Rather than being dressed and equipped for stealth, she's agonized for an hour and a half over her appearance, letting her hair down long, matching small earrings to her hairpin, dressing in a somewhat familiar white blouse, red blazer, black bow, pleated skirt, leggings, and heeled shoes, and, after a while of fussing, eventually deciding to leave the red laceration marks over her nose and below her eye alone. She's carrying a black messenger bag over one shoulder, a few cloth-wrapped items strapped to its slightly bulging girth. She could leave it to her plus one, and though that would technically be proper (and has been asked to do so a million times), for some reason she hasn't been able to that. Because her plus one is Cecilia. Out of a maid dress for the first time anyone involved but Lilian herself has seen, and given an opportunity to wear a surprisingly cute, if technically 'old-fashioned', dated to the 2000s, autumn dress, jacket, bag and boots. Just that, plus unbraiding her hair, is somehow enough to make that unusual purple-tinted colour actually look kind of punky rather than 'dye covering up grey'. Actually, it'd be hard to imagine grey either way; she looks thirty five at most, and being a couple of inches taller, trailing Lilian like this almost seems like she could be her mother, instead of Well, arguable. "Oh my, it's all so futuristic! But at the same time, doesn't it feel like an old home?" "How do you mean?" "You get a sense for these things with experience. I can tell" "Hm?" "These walls tell me that a great many people put their pride into taking good care of them. This is the feeling one only gets from a precious place that everyone is proud of." ". . . Yeah. It's . . . A little overengineered, but I can see how you'd be right." "Well, of course I wouldn't know anything about the engineering aspect. But . . ." "No. No, thank you Cecilia. You're completely right." "Are you still certain you wouldn't rather I carry the luggage, Miss?" "Please, we're not . . . Can't you call me Lilian off the clock? Like you used to?" ". . . Yes, Lilian. I'd be glad to!" Lilian really isn't sure what the actual procedures are for entry here, so she goes as straight through the hangar as she can after notifying of her arrival, and starts looking around for the closest place to 'arrivals' or 'reception' she remembers.
Persephone Kore	There isn't, really, anything like "arrivals" or "reception", for the simple reason that arrivals are extraordinarily rare. Slightly recessed, winding paths in the hangar floor subtly steer one to where one needs to go, but they're mostly for the unloading of heavy cargo; like a butterfly with an atrophied digestive tract, any further intake faculties would be superfluous to its specialized purpose. The hangar itself, accordingly, is totally devoid of "people doing their jobs". Short, early-teen triplets leap floatily between cargo containers and the tops of parked ships, two of them trying to catch and tag the third in three dimensions; they move at normal speed, but fall in slow motion, hair and jackets fluttering out behind them as if underwater. One of them spots the pair. All three come to a halt near-simultaneously. They glance at each other in a silent conference; Lilian can tell that their immediate response to an unfamiliar visitor is "telepathically ask Phony if it's okay", and of course I'm happy to have you, little star! They're reassured by what they hear, and one of them hops the fifteen feet to the ground to approach while the other two watch from on high. The chosen representative of the triplets (not that the others are much different) has dark hair, pale skin, and an almost sparkle-eyed curiosity about her- if not for her eyes being brown instead of green, she'd have a notable resemblance to a younger Lilian. "I don't know you," she says to both of them, in that blithe way kids do. A slow blink follows. "Why can't I feel you? Are you fake?" is directed specifically at Lilian, followed a moment later by "Are you one of the people who was here Before?" The other two, after a moment, drop down nearer Cecilia and gravitate towards her, probably drawn in by what they can sense of her maternal nature and instinctively seeking affection. "Are you her mom?" is in fact the first question they ask, followed by "Do you need directions? We can help!", and then immediately after "How did you get your hair to do that?" They're really about as un-creepy as identical psychic children can possibly be. The hangar opens up into those now-familiar curving crimson halls. Lilian might recall that the Arboretum dome is off to her left, even without the triplets' assistance. The station is still roomy for its population, but with nobody sleeping at this hour, it's a little more thickly-inhabited; staff and subjects alike (at a ratio of twelve to one) congregate in little reading nooks, coffee"shops", and social tables. The bearded man that I4 tased looks up from his book at Lilian and Cecilia with surprise bordering on alarm, but he's reassured by one of the triplets giving a cheery thumbs-up.
Lilian Rook	"This feels very strange." "How so, Lilian?" "It . . . Well, normally someone welcomes you at the door, don't they? There's someone there to tell you how things are and where to go." "Hmm, but haven't we already been invited in? I'm sure that happened at some point." ". . . Yeah. Hah. You're right. As usual." And so, the triplets are Lilian's first test. The sight of them brings her reluctant pace to a stop. That unidentified queasy feeling knots in her gut. Her fingers squeeze the strap of her bag nervously. Their questioning stare makes her even more glad than usual that they can't know what's involuntarily running though her head. A slight wince follows at 'are you fake', but a bigger one at 'the people who were here Before'. A multitude of white lies assemble themselves in triple time on the back of Lilian's tongue in a moment, begging her careful inspection and selection of the most palatable half-truth. §No. I thought dishonesty would make people feel safer around me before, all this time, and look how that turned out. I just . . . have to trust this time.§ Lilian takes a deep breath. Centering herself, she digs deep into her feelings, and synthesizes her 'ambient glow' from them. Normally, what she would radiate would be a compulsion, demanding fascination, respect, adoration, hanging on every word. Instead, she simply does her best to interpret and faithfully convey how it feels to be herself at this moment. Delicate uneasiness mingles with the warm embers of 'feeling better than before', the soothing influence of the station reflected on her feelings and come away with a note of wistful longing and isolation, like wet from water. She thinks the triplets are adorable. That their game is incredibly pretty. She wants to know more about them. And she feels a little sick. They might recognize the emotion that she doesn't: guilt. "I'm sorry. The people who were here before were . . . my fault. You know Persephone, don't you? Back then, she and I had a big fight. And thought that maybe . . . the rest of you were in danger. And there were other people who meant well, who followed me, looking for something bad that wasn't here. Even back then, when I was fighting with Persephone, I can say for sure that nobody wanted to hurt any of you, and I'm sad, and sorry, that it scared you all so much, and it took so long to clear up that misunderstanding. I told Persephone, but . . . I want to tell you as well, that this place is very special, and nothing bad would ever happen here. So, now that Persephone and I are friends again, I wanted to come back and . . . say so." Lilian crouches down, simultaneously to prop the bottom of her bag against the floor to be searched, and also to be closer to eye level with the triplets. It takes no fumbling for her to find what she brought for these three. She unwraps a trio of what appear to be iridescent, colour-shifting 'superballs', each soft-textured and translucent enough to show little runes inside that become visible when the light catches them. Though they look identical, teeny tiny alchemical fluctuations are triggered when they bounce, designed so that one ball randomly changes its angle of incidence, one randomly speeds up or slows down for a little while, and one randomly gains bits of momentum. They aren't randomly chosen presents: they've been carefully hand-crafted with these three in mind. Ostensibly, the bag is completely full of them.
Lilian Rook	"The reason you can't feel me . . . Hah, well, it turns out that I'm sort of like the children on this station too. But, I didn't know, because I wasn't lucky enough to have someone like Carpathia tell me, or help me. What's inside my head is different from most people, and gets in the way sometimes. That's the reason we had a fight. It was too hard to understand. But, it's over now, and I'm hoping I can get to know you all better, instead of not feeling you either." Cecilia, of course, has no special qualities about being read. Her reaction is immediate and intense maternal adoration for the triplets at play, and an intuitive gut-comparison of their behaviour to a memory of a Lilian their age. The most she seems to be fussed about is the fact that Lilian is lugging around all that stuff instead of her; she'd much rather carry it herself. "A-ah, that's flattering, but I'm actually merely her--" "She's like my Carpathia. But we didn't get to see each other for a long time, so it was very tough." "Lilian . . ." "And the hair is her special charm point~" "I'd love your help, dear~" Going into the halls, Lilian keeps up her 'mirror emission' on an effortless, subconscious burn. It's tinged with a kind of contrite self-mockery at having been so determined to be 'scared' of this place. Second-glancing everything from the door panels to the reading nooks fills her with new what-should-have-been-obvious intuition for the care that went into micromanaging it, that reflects her chatter with Cecilia about 'a home is a team'. Cecilia herself insists on thoroughly and formally greeting absolutely everybody. Where Lilian runs into staff, she mostly just sticks to quickly introducing herself, saying she's here to see Persephone, maybe exchanging a card or number, and otherwise making herself small and polite. Where she runs into kids, more and more presents are delivered. Ones she'd spent hours hassling the censors about (she insists on calling them that, if psychometrically read), but ultimately decided on herself. Each of them has been chosen with great forethought and literal precognition with the 'selfish' desire of 'what will provoke the most immediate joy when given'. The server room dude gets a little more time, having a brief sitdown chat, a signed card, a rather fat compensation cheque, and a photo of I4 with Persephone after she'd corrupted him into a good little sweater-wearing human boy. For once, she seems to be in absolutely no rush whatsoever. Her resolve is firmly 'do it right this time'. The whole process is . . . measurably soothing. Measurable from the outside, even. Lilian's 'aura' grows gradually less uneasy and more restful as she goes, that sense of anticipating herself being an unwelcome outsider wearing off flake by flake like old paint, though a lesser worry starts to bubble up as she closes inexorably in on the arboretum.
Persephone Kore	The triplet tasked with speaking to Lilian responds with sparkly-eyed amazement when the older girl 'opens up', her mouth hanging slightly open. Lilian knows what she sees- after all, it is all conveyed purposefully- but how she sees it, the way those projected elements assemble themselves in her eyes and in her mind, must be as something mysteriously beautiful. It's replaced a moment later by a warm and lightly sympathetic smile. "I forgive you," she says simply. "We were scared for a little while that those people would come back and hurt us. It took a while for us to feel safe. But if you're here, and you're sorry... then there's nothing to be scared of anymore, and it really is okay." She's easily distracted, as most children are, from heavy talk of emotions by the promise of toys. Her two mirror images crowd around her the instant they're revealed, simultaneously marveling and making grabbyhands to share two balls between three people. It takes them just a moment to figure out the gimmick, and then they start excitedly chattering between each other with so much crosstalk it's almost impossible to decode anything beyond the ecstatic, enthralled tone they all share. Lilian's prediction was firmly correct. It concludes with a resounding chorus of "Thank you!!" Two of them break off back into the hangar to play new games with their fantastical toys; the third sticks with Lilian and Cecilia, and even takes Cecilia's hand. Even though the remaining one (probably) isn't the one Lilian was talking to before, she picks up the conversational thread as effortlessly as if she were. "It must have been really scary," she says as they leave her mirror images' laughter and play behind, "being that special, without people teaching you how to handle it and grow. But I'm really glad that you had at least one grown-up who understood." Cecilia's hand gets a little squeeze. She responds to Cecilia's unspoken curiosity once they get a bit of breathing room. "I'm Charity! My sisters are Faith and Hope. We're turning thirteen in a month! I'm learning to sing but Hope is a lot better at it, and we still haven't found a bass. Marc says he can't go any lower than tenor. We have a special big room with three beds and lots of stuffed animals. I wanna show you sometime!" That seems, to her, to be an adequate summary of her entire life. "You feel guilty, don't you," Charity says to Lilian a little later on. With all the precocious confidence of a child repeating a grown-up's words: "Guilt is a feeling that teaches you not to do bad things. But you've already learned not to do this bad thing again, right? The guilt has done its job. It's okay to give yourself permission to let it go." The bearded man- "Doctor Temeraire," he introduces himself, "but you can call me John-" seems remarkably relaxed about the fact that he got stealthgame takedown'd a couple weeks ago. But then, that makes sense; only terminally good-natured people could pass Carpathia's bar. He tries to refuse the check a couple of times before finally caving, and gives a beautifully earnest guffaw at the picture of I4 in a sweater. Their conversation concludes with him insisting that Lilian email it to him so he can print it out and put it in his office. The other adults mostly treat Cecilia and Lilian with polite confusion, or cautious acceptance if they're more up-to-date on the news. The kids are more knowing, and more enthusiastic; word reaches them through their psychic grapevine, and they crowd around with bright-eyed expectation and Christmasish greediness. They are, in fact, all utterly delighted, and a surprising number stick around to make small talk or pester the pair with childish questions even after getting their gifts. It's easy to feel beloved when you're playing Santa, but this extends deeper than that. The younger subjects regard Cecilia and Lilian like a long-lost aunt and cousin, respectively; something precious buried and then rediscovered.
Persephone Kore	Charity finally lets go of Cecilia's hand to point into the beautiful, lush Arboretum. "There! That's what you were looking for, right? I did my job!" She hesitates for just a moment, seeing if Cecilia and Lilian will ask anything else of her, but her waning curiosity is struggling with her waxing desire to go play bouncyball. On being released from her duty, she sprints off down the hall, barely touching the ground with her moon-bouncy strides. Even for someone accustomed to a far grander garden, the Arboretum has a cozy charm. In place of grass it has moss and fern and clover and vetch, sprouting from translucent blue gel-soil that can only intermittently be glimpsed. The wizened, drooping tree that nearly scrapes the glass dome with its branches is the natural centerpiece. It's mostly the children that run and play here, with adults sticking to the perimeter walkway en route to other places. Somewhere, someone is quietly practicing the mandolin. The starry void yawns through the glass dome overhead; the sun is an eighth of its usual size, and dim enough to look straight at without discomfort. Outside, close enough to look nearly as big as your palm, are the white-and-brown un-spheres Pluto and Charon; the former has a strange green patch on it. The breathtaking disc of the Milky Way is clearly visible slicing the sky in half. "Hey, fuckface." ("Language," Charity chides, glancing back over her shoulder.) Dylan approaches with a determined gait, a dangerously firm look in her eyes. Any injuries she'd picked up in that fight would be long gone, but she's picked up new ones; new skinned knees showing through her distressed jeans, new band-aids color-matched to the lining of her flight jacket, new bruises giving exciting new undertones to her skin in total void of makeup. She doesn't slow her pace when she enters Lilian's bubble of personal space. For a moment, danger instincts might flare- then she throws her arms around the other girl, squeezing her tight and giving her a few Very Het And Manly pats on the back. "If you hadn't come back, I never would've forgiven you for making Phony cry. Glad you sacked up enough to say sorry in person." She pulls away, glances at Cecilia, and raises her eyebrows. "Who's your girlfriend? She fall for those new scars? They look real good," she admits grudgingly.
Lilian Rook	'I forgive you' Lilian's face remains exactly the same, but now that she's committed to projecting her own feelings, the sharp hiccup cannot be denied. Those specific, simple words of childish acceptance --words so clear and simple that adults seldom ever use them-- make Lilian's heart skip a beat. It's too late for her to try and start actively filtering herself. §Nobody ever said that to me, except Cecilia, and Persephone.§ "I wouldn't let them." Lilian blurts out verbally, clearing her throat of a little hoarseness on the second try. "Even if they wanted to, I wouldn't allow it. If if neither Persephone nor I would allow it, then it's really not allowed." she laughs, still a little less smoothly than she intended. Cecilia, once the third toy is handed out, absolutely gushes with 'I want to hug this child' adoration, starkly at odds with the well-trained professionalism of her polite smile. Honestly, the pair of them are so very disconnected in the way they act for seeing eyes and the way they think for hearing hearts. "Aha . . . I should say something of the reverse. To think, even to imagine, that there could be a place for such special children where they might be surrounded by all the care that they deserve-- it's almost too much to believe . . ." ". . ." "I used to dream that I might find a place like this for you one day, when you were very young, did you know? A special school, or something like that. I spent quite a bit of time looking, but . . ." "Yeah . . . I remember now. You never told me back then, but I remember. I'm really happy too." "Oh those are lovely names! I wasn't sure parents still named their children like that any more! It's so refreshing! Ah, and though it isn't commonly, I think they're very suitable~ You must be so proud~!" While Cecilia is now gushing over the small child, Lilian really takes a minute to process the hard read. "I . . . maybe? I don't really . . . know. The . . . grown ups that I knew, taught me . . . not to feel bad about a lot of things, but only to feel bad about doing what they didn't want. But the . . . the feeling bad about that, and the feeling scared, sort of mixed up, so . . ." She delicately lays a hand on her middle for a moment. §I wonder if everyone else thought the same thing when I was whingeing about feeling ill?§ "Haha, sorry, I'm still not very good at talking about these kinds of things. You know so much more than me." Cecilia's fingers find Lilian's own. "She certainly knows quite a lot. Things I wish I'd been able to teach you when you were her age, certaintly." Reading it off Cecilia is always simpler. Old fantasies tugging at her heartstrings, of little Lilian playing with other girls her age like this. Talking about feelings, instead of just all the right answers at school. But what's inside her heart goes well beyond merely projecting Lilian onto the other children. Her reaction to each and every one of them is that each is a heaven-sent treasure that could save her soul. Splitting present duty, each gift, each introduction, each sharing of names, each hug she is permitted to give, feels like the equivalent of wiping layers of tarnish off of a gorgeous silver antique, and opening long-shut windows to air out a dusty room. Each of them, to her, is genuinely a little dream come true, and their sparkling hearts are contagious. Enough that it begins to weigh on Lilian by proxy. Something that Cecilia can't feel, or Tremeraire, whom she eagerly swaps emails with, but maybe the others can. Something that makes her stomach turn, just a little. §Couldn't I have made her this happy? This is nice . . . Really, really nice, but . . . I'll never be able to be like these children. Too much went wrong. I can't be perfect like them.§
Lilian Rook	It's not quite the best space to hear 'hey fuckface', but then there isn't one for her anyways. Dylan entering her zone detects the sudden, cautious alarm of a scarred, wild wolf seeing a rifle raised in its direction. Before she even enters Lilian's personal space, a smoothly oiled gear train of fight-or-flight choices ticks and tocks all the way through its flowchart. Assessing fine balances of negative emotions in the callout, predicting how she's about to be attacked, analyzing her relative social standing and what there is to lose, skimming her memory for things someone might be about to scream at her for and checking alibis for those she can't immediately rule out, and putting together an escalating gradient of ready-made jabs to hit back with, sorted by level of viciousness. One hand even reflexively pops upwards, loosely curled near to her face, and the other drops low and forward near her waist, her body turning subtly and automatically sidelong to the noise. Then Dylan just walks up slowly and down-hugs and Lilian's brain kind of shorts out for a moment. Cecilia presses her hands over her mouth, her eyes going wide and face going a little pink at the perceived compliment to her age. "Oh my! No no, I'm Lilian's-- Ah, her 'primary caretaker'. It's a pleasure to meet you, Young Miss Cruise! Lilian has told me about you! My, but you seem a little old for me to bother like the other children, so . . ." For lack of any better idea, Cecilia clasps her bag to her lap and bows thirty degrees. "It's a pleasure to meet you!" Lilian escapes with a flinch of self-consciousness. The waver in her aura from 'cool scars' is the same as if she'd been called hideous, before it self-corrects back into the region of sanity. Her fingers rise up and touch the bridge of her nose reflexively, then lower manually. "Persephone? I thought you were the one who cried all night." A flinch. "Sorry . . . That was . . . shitty. Let me try again please." "Persephone and I have already . . . discussed things. I came here for the rest of you. I'm sure you've probably already heard bits and pieces from the younger children by now, but . . . you especially didn't deserve what happened. It wasn't ever my intent to involve anyone like that. Even when I was being . . . wrong, about everything. It wasn't fair what happened to you. And it's not fair of me to expect you to handle everything in the way I would have. My own allies certainly didn't." Something struggles inside Lilian's throat for several seconds before she finds the way to express it. "I was worried like Marc was. That . . . I found this precious and fragile and perfect thing, and I damaged it . . . tainted it, forever. That, because I touched it, I ruined something wonderful, that had every right to exist, and that it was all my fault. Because I h-- . . . I hated that it was so perfect. And I hated the thought that . . . there was no way I could ever touch it without tainting it. I convinced myself that-- . . . that I was being realistic. As in, the children here should know what being scared and losing things is like, or they wouldn't be 'real people'. But I was probably just making up excuses to . . . to smear everything in the ugly colours I know are painted on me. So I wouldn't feel so awful looking at it. If there's any way at all I can undo that, then . . ."
Lilian Rook	Throat tight, eyes burning, Lilian runs out of words to say, and instead just grabs one of her cloth-wrapped bundles. Handing it over, Dylan should recognize the shape immediately. Unwrapping it is a slightly unexpected answer even then. It's not just 'the same bat', but 'her bat'. The mangled and charred thing she'd left behind in the hangar has been meticulously restored, down to the individual stickers, by recruiting a third party to help. Strangely, this seems to have the side effect of the psychometric events of Zubrin Station having no bearing on it, replaced instead only with that additional person's sense of tired dedication, proud of someone else. It is slightly heavier, as the inner shaft walls appear to have been replaced with something far sturdier (and sparklier) than aluminium. A pair of red paint slashes make a dramatic 'II' north of the grip, though whether to dictate this is 'bat v2' or splash marks for conking the shit out of two Paladins Elites is unclear. "This is yours. Please don't go losing it again. It was very difficult to fix." says Lilian, taking refuge in how much easier it is to be backhandedly genuine behind a veneer of faux-exasperation.
Persephone Kore	(Charity, before she departs, does in fact give Cecilia a long and heartfelt face-buried-against-body hug.) Dylan is as unreserved as she is oblivious. Cecilia attempts to bow, and finds her head resting on the bastard girl's shoulder instead, strong arms wrapped gently around her back. Instead of the firm boyish pats, she gets a short, affectionate squeeze. "Dylan," she corrects gently as she pulls away. "Good to meet you too. Primary caretaker, huh? You must be real proud of her." The words ought to sound ironic or insulting, but there's nothing but true sincerity in her tone and in her heart. It seems to take Dylan a moment to register that Lilian's heart is open, even if artificially; when she finally registers that embarrassment, that discomfort, that guilt, Dylan looks away a little sheepishly and rubs the back of her neck. "Not that night. After you, uh, made up. Mostly relief. A little guilt, I think." "You especially didn't deserve what happened" makes her jolt with surprise, fading into awkward shame. She can't stand to make eye contact. Guiltily: "Hey, no, shut up. I tried to hit you with a fucking bat just over some dumb plates, didn't I? Don't say I didn't deserve it. I know how much of an asshole I am." Dylan's big, doe-like eyes start to glimmer with moisture as Lilian continues talking. She tries looking down again, but that makes the welling tears come dangerously close to spilling over her lashes, so instead she looks up at the stars and tries not to blink. "Lilian... please. Please, no." There's no hiding the fact that she's choking up. "It's supposed to be, 'happiness for everyone, and no-one left behind'." That motto Persephone half-said when they were sitting on the bench together. Her hands ball up petulantly. She looks back down at Lilian, those glittering tears now streaming openly down her cheeks; she makes a token effort to wipe them away with the back of her sleeve. "She said 'Nothing is broken. Nothing is ruined.' Did you think she wasn't including you?!" There's an ugly sniffle, followed by a little laugh. "God, you're stupid. Being good is hard when you're hurt, and easy when you're happy. If you want to make things right, then just let people love you, idiot." "If you're covered in ugly colors, I wanna hose 'em off. You belonged here all along. It sucks that..." She trails off as Lilian pulls out that bat. She's been keeping it to something that could vaguely pass for Manly Tears until now, but at the sight of that, her face trembles with intense emotion. Anxiously, she holds out both hands to take it. "Oh." Dylan unwraps it, then emits a choked sob and holds it to her chest like she's hugging a childhood teddy bear. "It's not... no, this is the same one. All the memories, they're there. How..." Still holding the bat in one hand, Dylan wraps her arms around Lilian and fucking sobs until tears drip down onto the back of her blazer. It must be ten or fifteen seconds. At the very end, she only barely manages to croak "Fuck you. Doing this to me in front of everyone," and pull away to clumsily wipe her face on her sleeve again. This time it's enough to visibly wet the fabric.
Persephone Kore	The bandages on Dylan's face are starting to come loose from the deluge of tears and face-smudging. "I'm gonna go put this in my room," she says hoarsely, turning her back on the group. Before she leaves, though, her back droops; she almost, but not quite, looks back over her shoulder for some parting words. "Thanks, I guess. ... I'm sorry. I hope you get back what you lost, too." At the far end of the Arboretum, Persephone and Carpathia round a corner and come into view, holding hands. Seeing them side by side like this, it's almost impossible to imagine they could be like family, even beyond a shallow surface level. Carpathia is bowed by stress and guilt, crinkled by worry, fretful and sharp. Persephone is soft and serene, gracefully upright, unworried and unhurried even when I really should be! Ahaha. Phony waves from a hundred feet away, tracing a broad arc with those orange arm-warmers like she's signaling an airplane for takeoff. She and Carpathia trade a few words, too far away to hear, before approaching closer. At the midway point, she has a brief exchange with the retreating Dylan too, which ends in her giggling. "I know you're really here for everyone else," Phony says to Lilian once she's close enough, "but I just couldn't stay away. You deserve to feel nice when you do the good, hard things, don't you? So please, let me." "I want you to know that she was extremely persuasive," Carpathia says to Lilian, "but now that I have you here under better circumstances, I understand why. I hope you find, here, the things you're missing." "I feel bad about how our last conversation went," Phony says to Cecilia with a bittersweet smile. "I didn't realize I was lying to you until we were already too deep. But it all worked out, didn't it? ... Thank you, so much. For helping Lilian be the person she is now. I think you're the only one who really understood how much more she always deserved." "It took me this whole station, five hundred staff, and who knows how much money to raise these special children right," Carpathia says to Cecilia, shaking her head. "Doing it alone would have been impossible for me. You really are a strong person, aren't you?"
Lilian Rook	Cecilia smiles warmly in return. "Miss Dylan, then." She tried her best. "And I've never been anything but." She means it. She really, really does. Cecilia is far too girly to know how to give bropats, so she just holds Dylan for a little while and rocks slightly from heel to heel. "Maybe you did, but I had the power to make things different from how they were, and I didn't use it. I got so . . . so mad, instead, that you were making it harder than it had to be. It felt like I didn't deserve for it to be that hard. And it was just because . . . You were all too good for me. Like I shouldn't have even dared get involved. And . . . It wasn't okay." Lilian fumbles through in reply midway. But by the end, she's doing her Trained Meangirl best not to cry. Which means she evinces awkward patience at Dylan crying on her, outwardly, despite projecting emotional turmoil. A disconnect between heart and face that is so perfectly natural on her and so outrageously severe even were it not a place like this. "Persephone is a little too optimistic for her own good. I'm never going to be as perfect as you are. I can't make all those old things go away, but . . . Someone I love very much told me it's like rings on a tree. If you grow enough healthy rings, the bad rings make up less and less of the trunk by comparison, and over time, it gets stronger as a whole. At least I'd like that." She chokes a laugh just a little at Dylan's bafflement over the bat. "Katrina helped me with this one. She was glad . . . She was really happy to fix up something like this for a change." There's another twinge of guilt there, remembering all the things she made Katrina 'fix' in past, but mostly just a warm, if distant and somewhat confused, feeling of sisterly connection. "You'll have to teach me what that is." she says, as Dylan departs. Lilian is not ready for Persephone to appear just yet, but she is especially not ready for Carpathia. Even with Cool Scars, being in the director's presence again, Lilian feels as if she's somehow shrunk by four inches, and would shrink even further if she could. "I'm sure she was." Lilian replies, with more than a little awkward stiffness. "I'm sure you probably heard most of that, so . . ." The mental bracing Lilian has to do here is like putting a gun to her head. Now she even ramps up the intensity of her emotional broadcast so that even Carpathia can feel it. "I don't know how to make it up to you. Your office, all the stress since then, the damage I've probably still done to the project. It's not as easy as just saying sorry when it's between adults. I was . . . shitty, about your dream, because the idea that someone could just make 'people like me, but good', 'not just good, but perfect', was . . . I couldn't accept it. But the point it became I started being completely unacceptable was when I was refusing to even accept reality. When these children weren't just better, but . . . so much happier being this way. The idea that it was . . . a military thing. Factional. Was keeping me together at that point, and . . ."
Lilian Rook	She's thinking of the crayon drawings. Even now, just remembering them is like a knife to the gut. An ice cold stab of sober realization, agonizingly twisted with boiling hot envy. The white hot feeling of 'where were you when I needed you?' immediately grappled and held underwater by wild rationalization until it stops moving, remembered in post. Expecting a Concord hardliner lunatic, and instead just facing 'Persephone's mom', and realizing she'd never be able to look her in the eye again; how guilty and lonely that felt. The clenching desperation of 'needing to have something to show for it', gripping on the fraying rope of 'the mission', trying to assert control like fumbling for a flashlight terrified in the dark. The weight on her shoulders, rapidly escalating out of control, expectations slipping out of reach, having all that power and sinking faster and faster anyways. "I don't really know what to say. I didn't expect to meet like this at all. Explaining my feelings and apologizing doesn't really mean anything. The damage I did to your research, your dream --that dream only you were ever brave enough to follow, is real, and it matters, and 'why I caused it' isn't, and doesn't. So, at least if you'll have me . . . I'd like to try helping with it. If that's even possible." Cecilia, meanwhile, is busy with Phony, and all of her thoughts, feelings, and expressions are in perfect alignment, as she reaches out to take Persephone's hands into her own with earnest and worried seriousness. "I wouldn't have blamed you if you lied on purpose dear. What I thought of you was . . . Well, perhaps it was unavoidable for a mere maid with no true knowledge, but what I thought of you was certainly wrong, and at the time, I'd most certainly blamed you for all sorts of terrible things that weren't true. I treated you like the devil himself, because I was so afraid of the way that things had suddenly fallen apart, and nothing could have been further from the truth. I insist that you forgive me first, if you still think you somehow need my forgiveness, for heaven's sake!" Cecilia holds out her hands to Carpathia right away next. Without any gift for mind-reading, she has immediately sensed something regardless. "Tough women are a dime a dozen from my generation. If it were just you, wouldn't you have tried to do the same for Miss Kore? I can't take anything close to sole credit --for the most part, I only wish I could have done more-- but when there's a child right before your eyes who needs you, and it seems you're the only one fit for the job, isn't it natural to want to stop at nothing? No one should . . . No one should . . ." Cecilia swallows, then looks doubly determined. "Nobody should be afraid of a child. No one should ever treat a child as something to fear."
Persephone Kore	Carpathia squints at Lilian as her mental broadcast intensifies, then scoff-laughs in a single barking syllable and glances down at her shoes. Though she's only in her fifties the doctor's skin is lambent-thin, covering practically just skin and bones; it's no wonder she has to dress so warm. Stress has made her fragile before age could make her frail. "I'm used to the children being able to play my heartstrings like a harp. But it is different when you do it, isn't it? ... No, this isn't the time for technical details." Carpathia straightens up, uncharacteristically; breathes in, holds it five seconds, then exhales in a defeated-sounding sigh. She does, at least, manage to hold Lilian's gaze unflinchingly. "I thought I'd be able to be angry at you. And I was, for a while- very angry. Now, there's... I reach deep down inside, and there's nothing but a little guilt." She glances at Persephone for a moment, wondering briefly- Lilian can tell- how much Phony's mental influence was causative in that, before deciding with a practiced zen that it's pointless to even wonder; something startlingly similar to the zen with which Cecilia views the holes in her own memory. Then Carpathia reaches out with both hands to hold one of Lilian's. Her mouth opens in something between a bittersweet smile and a grimace, an expression normally peculiar to the very old indeed. "I won't lie and say that you haven't been inconvenient for me." Memories bubble to the surface: sleepless nights spent comforting equally sleepless children; the long minutes of heartstopping panic after being thrown through that warpgate and not knowing what was happening back on the station; comforting Persephone for the first time in a decade, instead of being comforted by her. "But all that seems so far away, now. I wish we had been there when you needed us the most. I really, truly do. But it's better late than never, isn't it? And if you can help us in the process- which I'm positive you can, existing deep into what was previously speculative territory- then it seems we have a beautiful arrangement. Let's start giving you those good rings." "Phrasing." "What?"
Persephone Kore	Persephone's fingers interlace with Cecilia's as she looks down into the maid's eyes, listening with a warmly patient little smile. Up close like this, without Flamel's suppressor tiara, she feels] oppressively Real: the mind instinctively assigns everything about her a deep, almost spiritual gravitas and weight. "A 'mere maid'. Ahaha, you've said twice now. But I don't get it at all! Your heart is really beautiful; I could hold it in my orbit and bask in it for hours. Your kindness, your determination, your empathy are all so amazing! And even if you weren't 'supposed' to be important..." She glances over at Lilian, currently talking to Carpathia, and her smile blossoms wider. "You ended up being so crucial anyway. Because nobody who was ahead of you in line had in their hearts what you do. Isn't that true?" Her hand relinquishes the hold to come up and cup Cecilia's cheek in mildly inappropriate adoration. "For that, you really especially deserve to be happy too. I know you have duties at home, but... whenever you can come here, I know everyone would love to have you. The children did you some good already, didn't they?" She smiles a smile so irrepressible that her eyes simply must close. "But if you insist, I forgive you for being so wonderful! Please never stop."
Persephone Kore	Carpathia's expression towards Cecilia is a rueful, deep, knowing sympathy. She shrugs her shoulders helplessly. "I'd like to think that I would have tried my best," she says with a little shake of her head, "but I rather doubt that my best could have sufficed. Look at me, Cecilia: careworn, wilted- what did Beaufort call me?- shrunken. That's what a desk job has gotten me. I quite doubt I have the fortitude, or the patience, or the enduring bonhomie to survive a vocation such as yours. Please stop selling yourself short- really, are you allergic to compliments?" "Nobody should be afraid of a child." Carpathia's eyes slide over to Persephone, who's still entrenched in her own conversation. That rueful smile becomes a little less bitter and a little more sweet. "You understand perfectly," she says in a softer tone. "No-one can be both feared and loved. And children, of course, need love the most. Even the really frightening ones. Especially those." Her eyes drift back to the maid's face, but her look is faraway, nostalgic. "I had the privilege of understanding, before I'd even heard the name 'Kore', that if our project succeeded we would be like playthings to these children. There would be, definitionally, nothing anyone could do to stop them from getting anything they want. Punishing someone like that is idiotic; they'll simply learn to avoid getting punished. The only sensible approach is to make sure they only want to do good things." "We built everything around that from the start. But you figured it out as you went along. And in what I hear was a hostile environment, no less. For that, I must regard you as my better."
Persephone Kore	Persephone steps forward, loops an arm gently around Lilian's shoulders, and squeezes her hand in the process too. "Hey," she says gently. "Can we go sit under the tree together? Stare up at the stars, and just relax. It's been months since we did that. Your bag's mostly empty already; the other kids can come to us." She guides her friend over to a specially-chosen spot where the trunk's subtly indented and the moss is soft, eases herself down gracefully, laughs a little, and then pats the ground next to her. "Come on," she says warmly. "You absolutely deserve it. Don't tell me you don't. No matter what bad things happened, you've done some really good things lately too. You're supposed to train special children through reward, not punishment, right?" Persephone's clothes are almost as soft and warm as her body, which is almost as soft and warm as her aura, sweetly intoxicating up too close. Even if one won't- or can't- let it inside, that warmth still permeates the air, still clings to one's skin. Above, the stars are twinkling. There's distant, sweet mandolin music, and the laughter and shouting of children a hundred feet away. Everything is okay, even if the road to get here was hard. There's nothing at all to be scared of. There's nothing to worry about. You're with people who understand how hard it is; how much more you deserve than what you got. Who understand how important it is to make it easy to be good. Who want to help you create the future where Lilian Rook is happy and whole. You've never opened your heart to me like this before. Even when we were on that bench together, it was different. Even if it's on purpose, even if it's effortful, I love it so much. You really are pretty inside. ... Can I have another kiss?
Lilian Rook	"I'm sorry, but I never learned the harp. I skipped straight to picking up the machhine and shaking it." Lilian replies ruefully. "There's just no way that . . . someone like me could express everything in words. Even now there's . . . there's a limit to how much I can bear to say it. So I have to say the rest like this. I thought that . . . that's what you'd be used to, so . . ." Now Lilian gets to have her own uneasy, choked-off laugh. "You don't get to feel guilty. I won't permit it. You did everything right. Everything. You feel like you're going crazy because nobody who matters will tell you that you're wrong. And they won't, because you're not. Taking responsibility for my problems as well is too outrageous. We didn't even share the same universe when the time for that still existed." The fact that she involuntarily chokes on a sharp, shuddery breath when Carpathia thinks of the crying children cannot be hidden without hiding everything now. It terminates with a little sputter at Persephone's interjection. Cecilia, meanwhile, is smiling with Persephone on the verge of tearing up. "Ahaha . . . My apologies dear, it's a habit of the career, I suppose. I do wonder if your own adults think the same way sometimes? To be a 'mere scientist', next to you wonderful children. To be a part of the home that raises them, not an authority on their lives. It feels familiar, in that way." Her smile falters just a little bit. "There were warm hearts before me; I really, truly wish she had the opportunity to touch them as well. Who knows how things would have turned out then. All I did was my best to carry forward what should have permeated every corner of the house to start with, in a just world." Now she actually does wipe away a bead of moisture from her eyelashes. "I would . . . I would love that. They're wonderful. So, I forgive you too! Aha!" She tries to laugh a little for Carpathia, and it's more geniune than Lilian's attempt. "Now now, don't say that! I can put you in touch with the most wonderful little helpers, if you'd like! They still owe me quite a few favours!" A return back to a warm and positive resting state. "Even I have young people I can rely on to take care of things, so that I can put in my elbow grease where it matters most. I admit I can't help but feel a little envy, that you could shoulder 'making everyone happy', instead of just one household, one child. Sometimes the flesh is a little too frail for the heart, I think." And then about the strangest sense of the familiar-strange creeps into the smile Cecilia wears for just Carpathia, and Carpathia alone. "It's the god-given prerogative of children to play, isn't it? People like us tend to forget how, as we get older. Better to be a well-loved doll than a worn out factory machine at our age; that's what I think! It takes . . . a certain kind of adult, to believe they shouldn't be played with, for any number of reasons. But, well, what you bar a child from young, they'll become especially obsessed with all grown up, now won't they?" "I wish that . . . I'd been able to keep it up for longer. That the world wouldn't have had to steal my Lilian away as it did, as she grew up. I wished her another ten years to do it, for more of us, and less of it. I wish I could have been the world, like you are to these children. If I must accept such an outlandish compliment, at least accept my praise in return."
Lilian Rook	But Carpathia has said yes. Persephone has said yes. Lilian takes the part that should be courteous professional acknowledgement, and fails to materialize her own part. A grave misstep in the dance between offer and counter, acceptance and gratitude, of adult professionals. A few short seconds after being told 'yes', she's still silent. Her first attempt to speak is just a burbled choke. Then a deep sniffle. And then she loses her composure altogether, becoming the exact, unimaginable opposite of what had menaced Carpathia's office before. Fat, glistening tears quietly roll down her cheeks two at a time, dripping from her chin with the shaking of her shoulders. She has to breathe in like a gasp for air before she can even talk, and the first time is a false positive, only expelled again in a helpless sob before she gathers up and tries again, every few breaths punctuated by a wet, shuddering stutter. "A-are you sure? Is that really o-okay? I can't-- . . . I-I can't be like the o-others. I'm too o-old now. S-so much is wrong with me. Th-there's s-so much broken. I can't be-- . . . I c-can't be what you need p-people like me to b-be. I m-missed . . . e-everything. I can't just g-grow up like a n-normal girl anymore. E-everyone here is so . . . so . . . p-perfect, and I feel s-so . . . damaged. I'm s-so scared s-someone is going to see r-right through m-me, and when they d-do, a-all that's left is just p-pity for an old c-crippled s-stray, l-like the only reason people want me ar-round is because they feel s-sorry for me and . . . You d-don't . . . you don't h-have to take in a . . . a rescue l-like me. I sh-shouldn't be here I . . . I d-don't know how to behave at all, a-and I'm just going to, just going to, m-mess everything up and . . . a-and-- there's no way I could ever be-- . . ." Cecilia's hands gently placed on Lilian's back cause her to cut off her choked rambling, and quickly duck her gaze down at the floor. A tense, shuddering wheeze escapes her all at once. One more pair of droplets fall from the tip of her nose and soak into the ground, and then Lilian wipes the rest away on the back of her sleeve. Inhaling, exhaling, in and out, with Cecilia just gently touching her, Lilian takes a few more moments to get it together, then brushes her hair away from her face and looks up again. The agonized quietness to her voice makes it sound like she barely dares ask. "Can I really be pretty like them? Can I really . . . is it not too late to be something other than ruined?" Of course she's in no state whatsoever to refuse Persephone now. A sniffling gasp brings an uneasy end to the theatrics for a moment. As second nature, Lilian taps her mounted smart device and brings up a window that nakedly shows her obscene fifty-two hour schedule for today for the whole group. "Y-yeah I can . . . I can spare ten minutes, I think." she replies, and excuses herself from the two older women to wander off to the tree and sit where Persephone shows her. Though her eyes are a little red now, Lilian leans into her soft sweater easily, and just 'thinks at her' in company.
Lilian Rook	§I really am scared though, Persephone. The people here signed up to raise perfect children, and the children deserve children who are as good as they are; neither of them should have to deal with me. I'm scared that it's too late to fix anything. I'm scared of being a disappointment. A burden. A worse version. I'm really scared that people who know everything about powers and goodness are going to look at me and shake their heads and think 'poor girl, if only we'd been there sooner, now it's just kindest if she goes to sleep'. I can't help but trust them a lot now, and what they'll think of me scares me so much, because now if they say it, it'll be real.§ §But I'm still really glad I came. On top of everything else, I'm really happy to be here like this. Thank you for believing in me when you really shouldn't have.§ Lilian wordlessly tilts her head up, and kisses Persephone. Just a little.
Persephone Kore	"That's very considerate of you, dear. I suppose I am used to it, as strange as it feels to say out loud. Carpathia's face crinkles up. She's very used to being told she's not allowed to worry about things, and has never listened once. A hot rush of guilt clouds her mind when she realizes what made Lilian recoil; Phony's interjection saves them from a feedback loop of mutual misery. Then what gushes out of Lilian next completely guts the doctor all over again. She reaches out as if to try and put a reassuring hand on the girl, hesitates, looks to Cecilia (who's already doing the same) for guidance, and finally places her hands gently on Lilian's shoulders to help ground her. She opens her mouth with a desperate look in her eyes, and gropes for something adequate to say. Carpathia feels utterly inadequate to the situation. The debt of love that 'the world' owes to Lilian is too vast, too incalculable for a near-stranger to ever fill. What can she say? What could she ever say? "Every one of these children was unwanted once," she says, her own voice quavering but desperately held to some standard of composure. "All of them were 'ruined'. Even Persephone. Especially Persephone. Marc, for sixteen years. All of them felt like, once, this was too good for them. That they'd never fit in. What's a few more years on top of that?" In her agitation, her grip wrinkles Lilian's blouse; she notices, lets some of that desperate tension (and a few tears) out with a little sigh, and fussily smooths the fabric back down with her hand. Still desperately: "Lilian, please. You're... you are not ruined. You..." Carpathia fumbles over her words. In a fit of frustration with herself, she impulsively steps forward and gives Lilian the kind of small, heartfelt, slightly feeble hug that only grandmothers can normally manage. She steps back a moment later looking slightly embarrassed, hands still resting on Lilian's arms. "A flower starved of sun its whole life. No-one could blame it if it never bloomed at all. But you're beautiful already, Lilian. How could you not become even more beautiful when properly allowed to grow?"
Persephone Kore	Carpathia re-composes herself a little as Phony pulls Lilian away. Rather than wiping her face on her sleeve like Dylan did, she has a plain linen handkerchief for the purpose in her pocket. "Lilian needs you, of course," she says. "That's the most important duty to you, isn't it? Not to 'the house', but to her. ... I understand it." "Those 'little helpers' could be wonderful. Finding suitable staff is terribly difficult. But... if ever your duties permit, you are always welcome back here as well, Cecilia. I strongly doubt anyone else is so rigorously qualified to be beloved by our wonderful children." As if on cue, the triplets return. Hope and Faith are still clutching the bouncy balls, and look absolutely tuckered out; Charity is in somewhat better shape. It's Charity who tugs on Carpathia's dress with gentle insistence to get her attention, then holds up a paper fortune-teller that's been elaborately manuscripted to the limit of their collective skill in pencil and crayon. She holds it out at Cecilia. "We made something for you! It's to tell the future. Red, green, yellow, blue: you have to pick. And then a number too!" The game is totally psychically rigged. Three of the fortune-facets read "X", "NO", "BAD THINGS". The one she inevitably ends up choosing instead says "YOU'RE GOING TO HELP US BRAID OUR HAIR", and is decorated with crude hearts and flowers. All three of them make terribly irresistible pleading eyes.
Persephone Kore	Persephone drapes an arm around Lilian's shoulders and leans in against her, resting her cheek against the top of the shorter girl's head. Her other hand reaches across to offer itself up for holding. Of course she responds in kind. Lilian... please don't say such terrible things about my friend. I told you back then, didn't I? That you're really more of a hero than I am. You've been trying so, so hard to be good, even when it was desperately hard. I want to make it easy for you, and see how beautiful you'll become then. When you don't have to struggle or be scared anymore. That's the future I want. The only way it can ever be too late to fix things is if you're too far gone to want to fix them. For a while, I was a little scared that was true; that you'd shut your heart to ever having a happier future. But you were stronger than that! You're here, and you're more open than I've ever seen you. That tells me it's not too late. That tells me you're already getting better. Nobody is here to raise perfect children. Perfect children aren't just dug up out of the ground. I wasn't a perfect child; not when I was sad and angry, defiant, still hadn't even figured out who I was. You get perfect children by making damaged people more whole. They want to help you become more whole, too. Persephone leans down to reciprocate the kiss, then slides an arm behind Lilian's knees, pulls her up into her lap effortlessly, and wraps her friend up into a tight, heartfelt, almost desperate hug. "Ahaha. Sorry for doing things I shouldn't have. I guess I'm still an idiot. But it worked out okay, didn't it? ..." "... Just please, don't leave me like that again. Haha, I don't know if I could stand it."
Lilian Rook	Carpathia, bravely, reaches out and touches Lilian herself. Nothing special happens; regardless of how impossibly intensely charged that moment is, the static cannot crackle and bite her. All she feels is Lilian's sharp, reflexive flinch at the touch of her hands, and then the quiet, invisible shaking that has risen from her chest and into her shoulders. It may be simple to assume the former, at least, a deeply engrained adverse reaction to being touched by an authoritative stranger, and one wouldn't be entirely wrong, but what now-involuntarily rolls off of Lilian is the deep, gnawing worry that she has somehow made Jocelyne Carpathia unclean for touching her. As if she were radioactive. That the next beautiful child she wants to embrace will somehow, plausibly, be tainted by the dusty fallout of deviance and misery. The way she'd talked to Persephone, even deliriously, about everyone being 'delicate' and 'fragile', and the 'fragility' she interprets here, feel so very different. Because right now, Lilian can't possibly imagine any circumstance under which she would act out and cause harm to any one of these people or any part of this place, and yet is quietly terrified that she is stretching fraying and wearing it out just by being here. Carpathia's valiant attempt at remaining composed, brittle as it is, is enough to rally Lilian into making the same effort. It's less convincing while Carpathia and Cecilia both can feel her trembling, but it is at least a better face than before, even with all the high-pitched tension of recent sobbing still charged in her breathing. "I don't know." she says, and her voice cracks. "I don't know what a few more years is. And you don't either. And . . . a-and the idea that . . . j-just imagining finding out that th-that was the cutoff is . . . being the first, the only one who can't get better, is even more horrible than never knowing. It's . . . terrifying." she admits, and strangely, in the doing so, her trembling lessens by degrees. "I really want to believe you . . . I really really do . . . And I should believe you. You know . . . everything about this, and I don't know anything about it. I just . . . I-I just--! . . . I won't be able to k-keep it together ever again if you're wrong--!" Lilian has never received a hug from a grandmother. She had never been given the opportunity to meet either one. But the unbearable preciousness and frailty of that abrupt squeeze from Carpathia, after a moment's more severe flinch, helps sooth Lilian's nerves in a way even she feels palpably confused about, dazedly searching for the leak in her head as the cold and clammy chest-high tide of anxiety starts to drain out. She receives Carpathia's next words a little numbly, simply lacking the installed mental machinery needed to fully process and absorb them, but it is unmissable even to the non-psychic that the dense and unpleasant aura of self-imagined filth, of poisonous contamination and black grime, borrowed and twisted straight from the mind of an obsessive germaphobe, ebbs away one slow heartbeat at a time, bit by bit resembling something more like 'feeling guilty about skipping a shower' rather than 'terrified Carpathia is ruined forever'. "I don't . . . I don't feel like I deserve that at all . . . but I guess I should have known, since . . . you're a little obsessed with girls like me, huh?" She only dares the shortest and gentlest of squeezes to the old woman's hands.
Lilian Rook	Cecilia, speaking to Carpathia as the halves of the group separate, says quietly enough so that she thinks Lilian won't hear her, "That was very kind of you. Grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts and uncles, cousins and nieces and nephews; I'd have liked so very much for her to have grown up with those things. It's been a treat for the soul to see it just like I imagined, even if only for a minute." She then reacts by being quietly and politely stunned for a moment. "Well of course? What good is a house for if not the people in it? What use would there be to keeping up a lovely building that everyone is miserable inside of? Who'd want to live in a place like that? Keeping a clean space allows everyone to feel relaxed. Maintenance allows everyone to feel safe. Careful arrangements allow everyone to feel included. Proper displays allow everyone to have fond memories. It's hardly as if it was going to be sold!" Her own age is rather revealed by her hands-laced-over-collar-and-gasp gesture at the offer, her eyes even glimmering a little. "I'd . . . A-ah, well, if I can find the time, I'd love to." Cecilia almost sniffles. And then the triplets come back. Cecilia crouches down a little to be closer to the level they can offer the paper fortune teller at. "Oh, I remember these! They were all the rage when I was a little girl!" she says, and then eventually laughs when it ends up at the inevitable result. "Well, if that's my fortune, then it must be true, yes? I know just the braid to show you girls!" Cecilia makes sure that she doesn't actually go anywhere that would put her out of line of sight of Lilian, but sits the girls down a little further away in the arboretum, and eagerly absorbs herself in trefoil and quatrefoil celtic knot braids, similar to Lilian's seifoil that she seems to favour for keeping it up. It's been a very long time since Lilian let her do it, and so the activity itself causes her to radiate nostalgia and subtle joy. Under the tree: §I'm sorry. It feels like I might crack and explode if I don't say at least some of them out loud. Keeping them completely inside is too hard. At least it feels like it is while I'm here. And . . . even if I don't think I could ever be like you, or the other children, I think it'd . . . still be nice, if I could be more like them than I am now. 'It has to be perfect or I won't even try' is . . . that's not the way I've ever thought before, right? I feel a little silly for suddenly being like that now. But it's still . . . even if you know you have to, that it'd be worse if you didn't, it's still scary beyond belief while you're waiting for the doctor to tell you that you don't have cancer, right? So please forgive me if I lose my composure just a little.§ §And 'leave you'? Really? I'd think if I started wandering away, I'd be going in the opposite direction I mean to. I'm not very good at . . . I don't have anyone who . . . I'd . . . Well, if there'd be anyone who should set an example of what I want, it'd have to be you, wouldn't it?§ With that thought completed, the rest of Lilian's mental chatter rapidly trails off into tired nonsense, and then a couple of minutes later, her projected mental aura winks out. It is replaced by the deep and gentle breathing of someone fast asleep in Persephone's lap, head lolled back against her shoulder. Cecilia looks up from braiding the triplets hair, and whispers to Carpathia "My . . . Look at that . . . ! I haven't seen her fall asleep like that since she was ten years old . . ."
Persephone Kore	The triplets crowd around Cecilia with the greedy, restless kind of contact that only children can really muster: while one of them is braided and the other two watch, they lean into her lap, or rest their heads against her side, or marvelingly run a hand along her clothes in a way that's innocently thieving. It is never to reassure or comfort or warm her, but solely obliviously for their own indulgence. And yet there's a comfort in being subjected to it. The comfort comes from their marveling eyes, and their radiantly smiling faces, and their soft gasps of awe. They really are happy, in such an overflowing way that it's hard for her not to be happy too. As much as the seating will allow, Persephone and Lilian are entwined: the arms over her shoulders; the natural headrest in the crook of her arm and chest; her left leg crossed over Lilian's right. It is messy, but comfortable, like waking up tangled in each other and the bedsheets. The gravitational center of Pluto and Charon is within neither of their bodies. As much as Lilian will (can?) allow, their hearts are entwined too. Phony is warm and bottomless, a gentle lightless sea into which one could sink forever. Don't take after me too hard, she 'says' lightly, and the soundless giggle that follows seems to come from everywhere at once. There are so many ways I'm messed up. And so many ways you're better than me. Don't forget those. Still, she blushes. It can't be seen, but Lilian can feel it with Persephone's cheek resting atop her head. Nobody here is perfect. I'm not perfect! Only Carpathia could think something that silly. If you're the changeling child, the misfit, the girl who could never be good- what do you think we are? Nobody is strong enough to leave a world that loves them. Only the ones who never belonged can make the new one. This is like a limb that's fallen asleep, right? As long as you don't try to fix it, it's just a dull ache. You can ignore it. But as soon as it wakes back up, and blood rushes in, it burns so much. It remembers what it's been starved of for so long. Thank you so much for being brave enough to let me love you. That's the hard part. Everything from now on will be easy. I really, really promise. Dr. Carpathia walks over to Cecilia and the triplets, leans against a rock, and eases herself down into sitting on the grass next to them with an achy careful slowness. "Since she was ten," she repeats softly, staring at the two girls under the tree. "I hope it won't be thirteen more years until the next time she gets to relax." It doesn't take long until Persephone is sleeping too.