Final pass on motes, Marsh anthology

motes-played/content/008.tex

@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@ Beholden never quite understood play.
 
 She \emph{played,} that was for sure. She played with her music, her sound design. She played with people's voices, recording them for later and slicing them up into bits and bites, rebuilding them into some work of eerie or jittery or calming beauty. She played with the sounds around her house, her studio, the whole of the world. She played with acoustics. She played with spaces. She played with echoes and reverberations and dead-zones and cones of silence. She played with soundscapes and world-soundtracks.
 
-She hummed and sang. She played the piano, the drums, the guitar. She played the clarinet badly and the flute worse. She played with A Finger Pointing, their own little jazz trio, their own little big band. She played with her friends, jam session after jam session after jam session. She played her own sets, forking countless times over to play at however many clubs or venues. She played at The Party—several instances thereof!—running now for the last century and a half, a party that never ceased, attendees sleeping wherever, in beds or where they had fallen, with each other, alone. Beholden To The Flow Of The Crowds existed for a reason, yes?
+She hummed and sang. She played the piano, the drums, the guitar. She played the clarinet badly and the flute worse. She played with A Finger Pointing, their own little jazz trio, their own little big band. She played with her friends, jam session after jam session after jam session. She played her own sets, forking countless times over to play at however many clubs or venues. She played at The Party—several instances thereof!—running now for the last century and a half, a party that never ceased, attendees sleeping wherever: in beds or where they had fallen, with each other, alone. Beholden To The Flow Of The Crowds existed for a reason, yes?
 
 She played as she danced. She played with others, dragging them home for a one-night stand, a few-nights' fling, a relationship that lasted a month or two, but so rarely any longer.
 
@@ -14,15 +14,15 @@ Beholden was not stupid. She was not an idiot. She could conceptualize things ar
 
 She did not really know why she played, because she did not really \emph{care} to know why.
 
-She did not know why she loved, why she loved A Finger Pointing or Motes. She did not know why she loved so few others. She did not know why she felt such devotion to her boss—``not your boss'' the common refrain—and her Dot in a way that she could not muster for anyone else. She never bothered to question why.
+She did not know why she loved or Motes. She did not know why she loved so few others. She did not know why she felt such devotion to her boss—``not your boss'' the common refrain—and her Dot in a way that she could not muster for anyone else. She never bothered to question why.
 
 She did not know why she rose so quickly to anger. She did not know why she and Motes fought at times. She did not know why she got so mad when she saw Motes die on stage. She did not know why, when she and Slow Hours fought—usually about Motes's various deaths—it hurt so much. She shied away from ever trying to figure out why.
 
-She just knew that she played, that she loved, she got stuck in her big feelings.
+She just knew that she played, that she loved, and that she got stuck in her big feelings.
 
 And so when she found Motes huddled in the middle of her studio, all but curled into a ball as she crouched on the floor, when she found her bloodied, beat up, Beholden panicked. She kept it together long enough to help the little skunk to her room, to fork, to bed. She held herself in one piece as she told Motes time and again that she loved her. She held the panic at bay until she made her way to her studio, locked the completely soundproof door, and crumpled to the ground, screaming and wailing and sobbing. She tore holes in the couch cushions with her claws. She ripped acoustic foam from the walls. She threw the table hard enough to shatter it.
 
-And then, when sobs settled into simple tears and not great, heaving things, she waved her paw to unwind the tantrum. She brought into being a glass of water to set on the once more intact table, sat down on the un-torn couch, and moaned through her tears, letting the replaced acoustic foam absorb the sounds.
+And then, when sobs settled into simple tears and not great, heaving things, she waved her paw to unwind the tantrum. She brought into being a glass of water to set on the once more intact table, sat down on the un-torn couch, and moaned through her tears, letting the replaced acoustic foam absorb her despair.
 
 When she was next able to speak, she began a sensorium message to A Finger Pointing. \emph{``Dot is overflowing, love. She--''}
 
@@ -104,7 +104,7 @@ The skunk nodded. ``Yeah, like that. I just have way less of that in me than eit
 
 Dry Grass winced. ``Me too. I will not show up to a performance if I know that will happen.''
 
-``Really? Shit. I am sorry. At least I am not alone in that,'' Beholden mumbled, nudging herself to start swinging as well. ``It is moments like those when I feel most like she is my kid, though. I feel that family dynamic most when she is at risk, you know? When Slow Hours and I argue about that sort of thing, that is when I feel most protective of her, like my sister is doing something bad to her.''
+``Really? Shit. I am sorry. At least I am not alone in that,'' Beholden mumbled, nudging herself to start swinging as well. ``It is moments like those when I feel most like she is my kid, though. I feel that family dynamic most when she is at risk, you know? When Slow Hours and I argue about that sort of thing, that is when I feel most protective of her, like my sister is doing something bad to my kid.''
 
 ``Was it always like that?'' Dry Grass asked. ``Did you always feel that?
 
@@ -156,7 +156,7 @@ She had to, at least for now, at least for the time being. She would someday nee
 
 It was her fragility, and the only way she knew to reinforce herself was through setting such emotions aside. She would need to confront that—that and so many other things—but not just yet, not with so much before her.
 
-And so, when A Finger Pointing stood, wobbled, and requested that she take her home, Beholden had been immediately ready to stand up and gently guide her from the library and back to the neighborhood. She let her partner hold onto her to the extent that she was comfortable, rather than the other way around, trusting that she would take only what touch she needed lest she get yet more overwhelmed.
+And so, when A Finger Pointing stood, wobbled, and requested that she take her home, Beholden immediately stood with her and gently guided her from the library and back to the neighborhood. She let her partner hold onto her to the extent that she was comfortable, rather than the other way around, trusting that she would take only what touch she needed lest she get yet more overwhelmed.
 
 She knew well by now the ways in which A Finger Pointing had changed over the years, about how the crash had affected her.
 
@@ -166,7 +166,7 @@ She knew well because she had heard A Finger Pointing fall as the world ceased t
 
 So she set her mind to caring for her love. It was as she had always done. It was as she must do. If the crash had shaped the way that A Finger Pointing moved through the world, the way she danced with those around her, so too had it shaped Beholden and her path forward. Even if she did not know it at first, even if her partner had only explained it after the fall, it had shaped the both of their lives and the life of their \emph{dóttir,} brought them insensibly closer together over the years to where they were now: a family true.
 
-She pressed those emotions down and instead lingered on love. She lingered on her devotion to A Finger Pointing, on her protectiveness of her charge, her Dot. She lingered on those good memories as best she could to keep the very air from tasting astringent, to push away the feeling of desiccating sand gritting between her teeth.
+She pressed those emotions down and instead lingered on love. She lingered on her devotion to A Finger Pointing. She lingered on her protectiveness of her charge, her Dot, the child she so often insisted was not her own and yet so often referred to as her kid. She lingered on those good memories as best she could to keep the very air from tasting astringent, to push away the feeling of desiccating sand gritting between her teeth.
 
 Once A Finger Pointing was settled at home and Motes had been checked on, once the message had been sent to Hammered Silver and they had eaten and settled down on the couch for the night to rest, to at least pretend to work, only then, did Beholden very carefully open the jarred emotions from earlier, delicately withdrawing them one by one and laying them out before herself in her mind. She did not touch them, hot as they were. She used tweezers or tongs or perhaps chopsticks to lift them free, nudge them to lay flat that she might read deeper into them.