Motes thought of play.

She thought of all of the play that she had taken part in over the years, all of the games and make believe, all of the jungle-gyms and slides, all of the tag and red-light-green-light and duck-duck-goose, everything going back 276 years, as much as she could remember. She thought of all her toys, from the mound of stuffed animals occupying her bed beside her right now to the awful and cheap RC car she had received on her fifth birthday that worked for that day and that day alone, then never again turned on. She thought of all her friends, from Alexei on the playground the other day—three days ago? Four? calling out to her as she fell under the spike of panic—all the way back to Frida Couch who she had met in kindergarten, who she had told her parents she was dating in third grade, who had died some years after Michelle had uploaded.

She thought of the way that play defined the Motes that she had become, the way it had shaped the way she interacted with the world, the way it shaped her very form. She thought of how Au Lieu Du Rêve had accepted readily just how well it fit her self-definition. She thought of the family that she had built up around her.

She thought of play as she levered herself out of her bed, looked wearily around her room, the toys and art, the stuffed animals and silly prints on clothing, and then she forked into Big Motes.

She forked into Big Motes and straightened her hair and blouse, set a well-remembered dandelion flower crown atop her head, and made her way out to the rest of the house.

There was silence there, and emptiness. There was the place to herself in the warm sunlight of a late morning, some three days after first she fell on the playground. There was the comfort of familiarity set beside a hollow feeling in her chest.

Adjusting to a view of the world a few feet higher than it had been moments before, a view without a snout, movement without a tail, she made her way to the kitchen and poked around. It did not feel like a day for some sugary cereal, nor the cinnamon-sugar toast that she had always loved. It was a day for coffee and something savory and filling and hot. Perhaps a day for a mimosa.

\emph{An adult breakfast,} a part of her whispered. \emph{Setting aside childish things\ldots{}}

She shook her head to dispel the lingering thought, one based in overflow rather than her current mood.

And so she pulled out a couple of eggs, a few links of chicken sausage, and a dish of frozen hash browns. On a whim, she also pulled out a few large tortillas and some green chili salsa that she—that much of the clade—remembered fondly from her time back phys-side, back when she lived in the central corridor. She may as well go all out, yes?

The hash browns were the first to go in the pan, laid out in an even layer so that they could crisp up. Two more pans were dreamed up so that she could cook the sausage and eggs meanwhile.

Definitely a morning for a mimosa.

The eggs were fried over easy and the sausage cooked to just this side of burnt so that they offered a pleasant mix of textures, crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside with an indulgent oiliness throughout. These were layered on top of a pile of even crispier hash browns—the kind that shatter beneath a fork when you try to stab them—before the eggs were laid on top and the yolks punctured so that they oozed out over the mess to add a sauce of their own.

A plate laden with two burritos in one hand and mimosa in the other, she made her way to the couch rather than the dining table and settled down with a long, worn-out sigh.

What was missing\ldots? Ah! Coffee.

While there was joy in making her own, she was already down, she was already comfortable, she was already finished with her time in the kitchen, and so she deemed it easier to just wave a steaming mug into being on the low table before her, already dosed with cream and sugar.

She downed half of her mimosa in one go before setting that aside and focusing on her first burrito, each bite topped with a generous spoonful of the salsa until she was left nearly in tears. The rest of the mimosa and a few sips of her coffee, and then the second burrito, similarly doctored.

It was some time later—she did not know how long nor care to check, though her coffee mug was empty—before Beholden and A Finger Pointing returned, talking quietly about lunch. On seeing her awake and alert, the empty dishes on the table, they both smiled and changed course to settle down on either side of her.

``Glad to see you up and about, Dot,'' Beholden said, briefly touching her nosetip to Motes's cheek in an affectionate skunk-kiss. ``We got the ping that you were, thus lunch here rather than out, but it is nice to see you all the same.''

Bookending her with a similar—though far more human—kiss to her other cheek, A Finger Pointing said, ``It really is. Are you feeling better, my dear? Please say yes.''

Motes laughed and waited until each was finished before returning the cheek kisses to her cocladists. ``I am, mostly. I still have a lot on my mind, but I am no longer buried beneath it.'' She nodded towards the plates, adding, ``I already ate before you got here. I am not sorry.''

``Nor should you be,'' A Finger Pointing scoffed. ``I would be disappointed if you had not.''

``Of course you would be.'' Her grin softened to a smile. ``You really set up the sim to ping you when I woke?''

``Just a few things—your door opening, something being done in the kitchen or at the bar, that sort of thing—so that we would know while we were out.''

``She was worried,'' Beholden stage-whispered. ``You should have seen her brighten when she got the notification you were in the kitchen.''

``Beholden was \emph{so} worried,'' A Finger Pointing said, voice bearing all the drama of some overwrought Shakespearean performer. She spoke loudly, pretending as though she had not heard Beholden, that the skunk was not even there. ``I do not know if you noticed while you were down and out, my dear, but I swear, that skunk checked on you at \emph{least} once an hour.''

``She about started crying,'' Beholden continued, smirk on her muzzle.

````Beholden, you \emph{know} that she will pull through,'' I kept saying. ``She \emph{always} does.'' You are stronger than your silly cocladist, Dot, are you not?''

``She was so rude, cutting off a conversation with Sasha mid-sentence and begging to rush us back here, then putting on her most nonchalant act.''

Motes laughed as they both scoffed at each other, looping her arms through each of theirs and slouching down, settling into the comfort of touch and family. ``You are both nerds,'' she murmured. ``Thank you for keeping an eye on me.''

``Of course, my dear,'' they said in unison. A Finger Pointing continued, ``Motes, did you leave any champagne for the rest of us? I would not say no to a Bellini.''

``Another mimosa for me, Beholden,'' Motes added.

Laughing, the skunk gave her one more of those nose-dot kisses before disentangling herself to see to drinks.

``How are you really, Motes?'' A Finger Pointing asked, voice lowered less, it seemed, to keep her words from Beholden than to soften the mood. ``We need not talk in detail now, but I do wish to know.''

``Okay,'' she said. ``Tender, I guess. Sore, maybe? I am not feeling bad, but I am not yet feeling good. I am feeling like the slightest bump with leave me with a bruise.''

A Finger Pointing nodded. ``I imagine so. Are you up to speaking about what happened?''

She nodded. ``A little bit. I will let you know if I need to bow out.''

``Of course.'' A Finger Pointing took a deep breath, composing herself. ``Hammered Silver sent me a letter. She mentioned in it that she had sent you one as well.''

Motes wilted.

``Yes, I imagine that is much of why you were left overflowing.'' When Motes nodded, she continued, ``I am sorry, my dear. Is that also why you are Big Motes now?''

The answer was a long time coming, the silence filled with the gentle tink of glasses as Beholden mixed their late lunch cocktails, carrying them carefully back to the couch and handing them out so that she could rejoin.

``Yeah,'' Motes said at last. ``At least, I think so. It was something that I did almost on instinct. I knew I wanted to be Big Motes, or at least that I was not ready to be Little Motes yet. Been thinking about that all morning.''

Beholden tasted her drink, nodded appreciatively, then asked, ``Have you come to any conclusions?''

``I think so,'' she said, looking down at her mimosa. Beholden had topped it with a maraschino cherry poked through with a cocktail umbrella. There was a warmth of adoration starting to fill that hollow space in her chest. ``I am not going to stop playing, not going to stop being Little Motes, but\ldots but that really fucking hurt, and I need to know what to do with that pain before I reengage with that, you know?''

Letting her free arm dangle over the arm of the couch, glass held by the rim, A Finger Pointing tucked her own cocktail umbrella into Motes's hair behind her ear, adding a wheel of bright pink to the yellow of the dandelions before draping her arm around her shoulder. ``That does make sense, yes. That was one of my worries, even: that this would leave you too wounded to reengage with that part of you that has been so important over the years.''

Motes shook her head gently so as not to dislodge crown or umbrella.

``Good. You are allowed to be Big Motes for a bit while you process this. You are allowed to hold back on all sorts of interactions. I have noticed a lack of `Ma' or `Bee'-- no, no. No need to explain, just an observation. These are things that we will miss and then rejoice when they return.''

She slouched against A Finger Pointing and hugged around her middle, careful not to spill her drink. ``Thank you. I really do appreciate it. I will get there, too, for all of that. Just\ldots not yet. Not quite yet.''

Beholden smiled, reached out to brush some of her curls away from her face, added, ``Yeah. And if you need us to lay off calling you `Dot', I am sure--''

``Absolutely not,'' Motes said, laughing. ``I would not have you change your ways just because I am feeling icky for a bit.''

``It is an offer, Motes,'' the skunk chided gently. ``Not some weird obligation for us.''

Her shoulders slumped and she nodded. ``Alright. I think my answer still stands, though. I like it when you call me that, even when I am Big Motes. I do not imagine\ldots well, no. I am \emph{sure} this will not last longer than two weeks. That is the deadline I have given myself to process this.''

``Of course, Dot,'' A Finger Pointing said, tightening her grip in a squeeze before gently nudging her to sit back upright. ``With this of all things, I am sure there will be more than enough processing to fill that time. The situation has\ldots resolved itself while you were sleeping, but even that resolution is complicated.''

``Oh?''

She nodded. ``Are you alright to talk about it? I do not know that even Beholden knows the full extent of what happened.''

The skunk shook her head.

Despite the already warm feeling in her belly from the first mimosa, Motes quickly finished her second in a few gulps. ``Then sure,'' she said, laughing at the burp that followed. ``Hit me.''

Beholden punched her gently on the shoulder before taking her empty glass and setting it on the table in front of them.

The full story of what had happened over the last few days between A Finger Pointing and Hammered Silver was laid bare over the next hour. Not just that, but much of their story going back into the past as well; she even, at one point, dreamed up a stack of all 98 letters she had received over the years, totaling nearly 300 pages.

Both Beholden and Motes were left with more than a few questions. Over the last few years, their down-tree instance had opened up more and more about how much she had shielded the stanza from the political machinations of the rest of the clade around them, all of the ways in which she had strove to protect them, for better or for worse, and yet more of this became clear as she spoke about all of the fuss that Hammered Silver had made over the years.

When she finished and all questions had been answered or\pagebreak\ deferred, they fell into silence for a long few minutes, the three of them just digesting the last few days each in their own way.

Finally, Motes huffed and flopped back against the couch. ``What a fucking bitch.''

``Dot, language,'' Beholden scolded.

``Fuck fuck fuck,'' she said, grinning wildly. ``Bitch bitch bitch! You can yell at Little Motes\textasciitilde{}''

``No, she is right, my muse,'' A Finger Pointing said. ``Fucking bitch.''

``Well, okay, no disputes there,'' Beholden said, waving away the three glasses. ``What is on your plate next, Motes?''

She shrugged. ``Well, I pinged Miss Genet, so we are going to meet later.''

``Therapy!'' A Finger Pointing exclaimed, waving a hand at nothing in particular. ``What a lovely idea.''

``After all that?'' Beholden said, smirking. ``I am surprised that you have not already scheduled something.''

``I am so dreadfully busy, Beholden. You know that.''

``You spent yesterday afternoon lounging in the auditorium trying every kind of kettle corn you could find on the exchange.''

She sat up straight, staring at her partner like she was some alien creature, some queer thing too dense to understand the importance of kettle corn. ``Yes. Busy.''

As A Finger Pointing and Beholden finally got around to whipping up lunch for themselves, the conversation once more fell into comfortable chatter, the sort of banter that so often filed the house, and while, by the time her appointment arrived, Motes had not yet felt comfortable enough to refer to them as\pagebreak\ `Ma' and `Bee', that welcoming sense of family had returned in force, and she felt once more in her comfortable role as their Dot, their \emph{dóttir}.

When the afternoon threatened to slide right into evening, Motes slipped away and left A Finger Pointing and Beholden on the couch, canoodling. Clearly that had taken precedence over whatever they had had planned at the auditorium for the rest of the day. That they had come home for her, for Motes, was the base of that warmth that had grown within her.

She made her way out of the house and wandered to the center of the neighborhood. She left the automatic chalk lines going, letting them be the fuel that propelled her forward, let their flowering shapes fit into this perception of herself as a flower child rather than simply a child, a careful reframing that allowed her to have this thing, this gentle goodness.

The neighborhood formed a lazy semicircle, a `U' that butted up against an avenue that petered out into the nature of the sim in either direction. Across the street sat the back entrance of the theatre Au Lieu Du Rêve kept for its own community. Just homes and a beloved workplace dropped together into an endless landscape like sugar into so much tea.

In the bowl of the `U' sat all of the common areas. A pool—one with seats and jets, one that could be a hot tub seating a hundred as easily as it could be an Olympic pool—a few tennis courts for the few—who?—who actually enjoyed the game, a liberal dotting of grills—everyone had a favorite—for cook outs, a lake with a paddle boat, a ``community center'' which had long ago turned into a movie-theater-\emph{cum}-cuddlepit\ldots{}

And there, right at the very lowest point of the bowl of the `U' sat the playground. What was initially intended to be Motes's haunt, hers and her friends', had long ago turned into a place for late-night musings. Thousands and thousands of times over the years, couples or small groups or lone individuals would converge on the swings or the slide and sit in the dark, staring up on the star-speckled sky, the Milky Way glowing bright enough to light one's face beyond even the Moon, even the gold-and-black of the rest of the neighborhood with its sodium vapor lamps and countless darknesses. It was a place for play, yes, and it was often used for such, but it was also a place for couples to work out their problems or groups to chat about everything and nothing or for one to sit alone, drunk, beneath the stars, looking up and feeling good or bad or simply introspective.

It was not dark now.

There, on the swings, sat a child, a girl, looking to be perhaps twelve or thirteen with black hair tied in an unruly ponytail, coppery skin shining in the sun, swaying lazily back and forth as she faced away from Motes. She looked mostly down, skidding the heels of her shoes through the gravel beneath the swings, scooping the pebbles out of the way and then smoothing them back into place with her toes.

Motes moved quietly through the grass—quietly enough that the girl did not notice her—and sat down on the free swing within that segment.

``Hi, Sarah,'' she said.

``Motes! Hi!'' the girl said, then hesitated. ``You're Big Motes today. Do you want me to Big Sarah?''

Motes held onto the chains of the swing and gave herself a push with her feet, testing the way she glided through the air for a few feet back, then a few feet forward.

``Motes?''

``Yeah, actually. I think I would like Big Sarah today.''

Nodding, Sarah Genet stepped off the swing and summarily disappeared, leaving behind a fork still sitting down. This new instance was far older, looking to be sixty or so years old with salt-and-pepper hair in a much neater ponytail, her skin just as brown and yet fraught with wrinkles, her smile kind and gaze always attentive.

``Is this better?'' she asked.

Motes smiled, nodded and gave herself another gentle kick, keeping the same back-and-forth going, the same few feet of earth wafting beneath her feet. ``Thanks.''

``Of course, Motes. Would you like me to prompt or wait?''

She caught herself in the act of merely shrugging, then shook her head to clear it. ``Thanks for asking,'' she said. After a long moment's thought, she sighed. ``I think I would like for you to prompt me today. I do not yet know where to start.''

``That's fine,'' Sarah said gently. ``You said in your message that you've just come up from overflowing. Can you tell me about that?''

``Mmhm. Just a few hours ago, actually. Beholden and Pointillist are still back at home after coming to check on me.'' She smiled down to the ground as it swung beneath her. ``They set up alerts around the house so they would know when I was up.''

``That's sweet of them.''

``It is. I\ldots uh,'' she trailed off. ``The overflow started when I got\pagebreak\ a letter from within the clade. It really fucked me up. Like, \emph{really} bad.''

``And that's why you're Big Motes? Why you didn't say `Ma'?''

She smirked. ``You read me like the Sunday comics,'' she said, laughing. ``Yes.''

Sarah smiled in turn, far more gently. ``Tell me about this letter, then. Tell me what'd be enough for you to get knocked out of commission.''

And so she did. She summarized portions of it, then pulled it up to read the most impactful bits. She talked about the feelings of the month leading up to this, the conversations and the dream. She talked about how she had stopped playing, how it hurt to think of reengaging, how she knew she would but there was work to be done first.

And then, on Sarah's gentle urging, she worked her way backwards. She worked her way back through the months and years before, the feelings that lingered, the various comings-to-terms that she had had over the decades. She talked through and made her own connections, letting Sarah suggest when her voice stumbled to a halt.

``Motes,'' Sarah said gently. ``Tell me why Hammered Silver's opinion matters to you.''

Motes snorted. ``It should not.''

``But it does, doesn't it? A Finger Pointing has addressed it and you're all but guaranteed to not have to deal with this again unless Hammered Silver's gone off the deep end, which it doesn't sound like she has.''

She nodded slowly, mulling the question over in her head, brow furrowed.

``Let me split it into two, maybe. First, what about it hurt? Why are you still hurting? And second, who is Hammered Silver to you?''

Motes put her feet down, letting the drag of shoe against gravel slow her to a stop. ``Who is she to me? You mean, other than a weirdly invasive aunt who thinks she knows better?'' The bitterness in her voice rose, and she was helpless to stop it. ``Some old bat who is more concerned about the image of the clade that any—literally \emph{any}—of us living earnestly?''

Sarah raised a brow. ``That is absolutely an answer, yes. You still see her as part of the clade?'' she asked. ``You still see her as an aunt?''

Stymied, she ground her heels down against the gravel beneath the swing.

``I think it's worth digging into, but if you need--''

``No, that is a good point.'' Motes groaned. That hollow feeling within her chest once more grew, and she squinted her eyes shut. ``I guess I do, yeah.''

``To which? A part of the clade or aunt?''

``Both.''

``Why do you feel she's still a part of the clade to you? That feels like it might be the easier one to answer.''

Motes nodded. ``Yeah. I guess it just feels like that is something that only the cladist can decide, right? I cannot just say that she is \emph{not} an Odist.''

``Hasn't she done that to you and yours, though?''

She furrowed her brow, using her shoe to flatten out the gravel beneath her as she thought. ``I do not know that she has, though. She still calls me And We Are The Motes In The Stage-Lights—she was such a bitch about names, actually, `the one who has named herself Sasha' \emph{every} time—and even if she did not need to, she did write `of the Ode clade' after my name.''

``That's your name, though. Tell me about how that doesn't \emph{feel} like cutting you out of the clade.'' Sarah smiled gently, adding, ``Not that I don't believe you, I just want to understand where you're coming from on this.''

``I guess it is that she has not told anyone but her stanza not to talk to me. To us, I mean. Her and In Dreams's stanzas talk to each other. They still talk to the second, third, and fourth. They still talk to What Lives and so on in the ninth. We talk to all of those people, too.'' She smiled sidelong at Sarah. ``So I guess I see where you are going. I do still see her as an aunt because she has not actually said that we are not family—or like a family—she has just cut off contact. She has implied that we \emph{are} still family, but that I did something wrong by\ldots I do not know. Tempting Dry Grass?''

Sarah laughed. ``I really was just trying to figure things out, not lead you along, but that's an important connection to make, there. Family members cutting off others in the family is common enough to be a whole area of study. How does it feel to treat the rest of the clade as an extended family, though?''

``That is, like\ldots my whole bit, is it not? I am play-acting the kid. I am method-acting, and Pointillist and Beholden and Slow Hours and everyone is in on it.''

``Even Hammered Silver? Even those who \emph{aren't} in on it?''

Motes frowned.

``It's okay if you act as though they are,'' Sarah said. ``Or if they become a part of your internal conception of the play. They don't need to be actively in on it if it's an internal representation of your world.''

``Right,'' she mumbled, looking out into the neighborhood and swaying gently from side to side in her swing. ``I guess it makes more sense when you talk about family members cutting each other off. If that is a thing that families do with any frequency, then there is no reason for me to not incorporate that.''

``\,`No reason'?'' Sarah asked, picking up on the rhythm of Motes's swaying.

``Well, obviously I hate it,'' she said, laughing. ``But if I am going to get shit on like this, then I guess all I can do--''

``\,`All'?''

Motes snorted. ``\emph{One} thing I can do is reclaim it and turn it into a family spat, right?''

Sarah pushed herself to start swinging. ``That's what I was getting at, yeah. But tell me more about being Big Motes. You've talked about the family aspect of it, but it sounds like you were thinking about this even before Hammered Silver sent you her letter.''

Before she realized what she was doing, Motes was already starting to swing along with Sarah. Back to that movement, back to that little twinge of play. \emph{This} was why she appreciated her therapist, all of these little nudges, all of this meeting her on her terms. After all, had she not appeared at first as a girl a few years older than Little Motes, as she had so many times before? One of those girls who seems infinitely wise to someone younger?

Motes smiled faintly out to the world as it swung beneath and around her. ``I do not know that there was anything that spurred on all of the discussions or the dream—though I imagine the dream was a result of all of the thinking that I had been doing leading up to it. It was just on my mind. Maybe I have been doubting myself more of late.''

``Doubting how? The last time we talked, you didn't sound like you were doubting yourself. You talked about how everyone had a different nickname for you.''

She laughed, feeling earnest joy at the memory. ``Dot! Speck! Mote! Kiddo and skunklet and little one,'' she called out to sky and grass. ``Yes, you are right. But I also talked about how I had fallen again into that feeling that maybe my name had played a role in who I had become. Motes, yes? Small, little things that drift across your vision. Microscopic things. I talked about whether the name came first, or the nature, yes?''

``Mmhm. You used Beholden as a counter example.''

``I said she should have been in charge of lights,'' Motes said, still grinning. ``\,`Beholden to the heat of the lamps'? That has nothing to do with music or sound.''

Sarah countered, ``And then I pointed out Loss For Images and That It Might Give. `That it might give the world orders' being primarily a director is pretty on the nose.''

``Yeah,'' she said, sighing as the grin started to fade. ``Yeah. There is a mix of both. It does not matter whether or not the name or the nature came first, not in this case. What matters is that it got stuck in my craw, right? I got stuck thinking about it, and then Hammered Silver sent me her stupid letter and it all came to a head.''

``Some things are just coincidences.''

Motes nodded.

``Hammered Silver sent you the letter because she learned about Dry Grass visiting the fifth stanza. That's not something you had any say over—at least not beyond liking when she visits—and certainly not anything to do with how you were feeling, right?''

She remained silent. She remained silent for a long time, and when the arc of her swing started to slow, she began pumping her legs, working vigorously to get herself swinging as high as she could, swinging to the point where she looked now straight down to the center of the Earth, and now directly up to the heavens.

``Motes?'' Sarah's voice came from a distance, from all the way down there with her feet planted on the ground, from where she was anchored.

``Maybe it did,'' she hollered. She imagined the way her voice must have Dopplered past her therapist with each arc of the swing and started to giggle. ``Maybe me talking about this with Dry Grass did lead to the letter. Maybe it is my fault.''

``You mean you think she went and told Hammered Silver to let her visit you after you talked about your worries?'' Sarah called out to her.

``Yeah!''

``What does that change?''

``Nothing!'' Motes said, laughing joyously. ``It changes nothing. In fact, I hope that \emph{is} the case! At that point, Hammered Silver really \emph{is} just a bitch.''

Sarah laughed, and Motes felt the sound in the air as she breezed past, felt her flower crown flutter away in the wind of her passage and fall to the ground in a lazy shower of dandelions, felt the little pink cocktail umbrella A Finger Pointing had tucked behind her ear, by her ma, tug this way and that on her hair.

\emph{I respect her as a person, but I do not like her,} Dry Grass had said. \emph{And I certainly do not respect her authority.}

\emph{Do not worry, my dear,} Dry Grass had said. \emph{You are stuck with me for a good while yet.}

\emph{I would rather tell Hammered Silver to go fuck herself,} Dry Grass had said in the end.

Perhaps Dry Grass had excused herself from the sixth stanza. Perhaps she had taken an opportunity to make her opinions known. Perhaps she had spoken up, talked back, shot down a little bit of Hammered Silver's authority by standing up for Motes.

Perhaps she ought to hug Dry Grass extra-tight next time she saw her.
