## Reed — 2401

I followed Cress, Tule, and Dry Grass back home.

The three of them lived in a narrow brownstone of sorts, full of the dark wood and plush carpets that I knew well from Marsh's house, though the walls were lined — in some places all but completely covered — with paintings. The vast majority were of landscapes skillfully done in watercolor or acrylics, but each of which was interrupted with a shape of black so deep that it seemed to eat any and all light around it. Beyond just reflecting zero light, it pulled greedily at light that even got close.

Also spaced out through the house were various *objets d'art* I recognized from Hanne's work. Dry Grass explained that both paintings and art were from her cocladists Motes and Warmth In Fire. "My little ones," she called them, which fit well, given what I knew of Warmth In Fire.

She sounded proud of them, as a mother would of her children, which took me a minute to piece together. There were no shortage of family dynamics within the System — after all, old and young alike upload, and upload dates can be decades or centuries apart — though it was relatively rare that they were so strong within a clade where everyone was by necessity the same age. What guardianship we Marshans felt over Cress, the smallest among us, only barely seemed to scratch the surface of the depth of Dry Grass's feelings over And We Are The Motes In The Stage-Lights and Which Offers Heat And Warmth In Fire. We were protective of Cress; she was hanging artwork on her fridge door and walls.

Proud, yes, but the overriding exhaustion — physical and emotional — kept her expression muted and heavy, and she soon requested that we lay down as we had planned.

The bed up in the second-storey bedroom was already wide, but Cress and Tule pulled on either edge to stretch it out by another half meter or so while Dry Grass all put faceplanted onto the mattress. She elbow-crawled her way up until her head was at least resting on a pillow before letting out a muffled groan.

Cress and Tule followed after, moving as though they knew the parts they were to play. Dry Grass's pillow was quickly shifted up into Tule's lap while Cress settled beside her, rubbing on her shoulders. I knew from Tule's memories, still slotting their way in along with my own, that this was a somewhat regular occurrence.

I stood awkwardly by until Cress chuckled and gestured at the open space beside Tule up near the head of the bed. "Just relax, Reed."

"Yes," Dry Grass mumbled. "You do not need to do anything, there is no pressure. I want to be around those who enjoy my presence rather than resent it. We are all just here to unwind, yes? Among friends, yes? After these last few days, after so many tears and meals and meetings, I would like to think that this includes you, my dear."

"Right," I said, forcing a chuckle of my own as I awkwardly clambered up onto the bed, leaning against the headboard and hugging my knees against my chest.

We sat — or lay — in silence for a while other than the occasional small noise of contentment from Dry Grass.

Even as we stayed in silence, and Cress and Tule doted on their partner, this woman I had such strong feelings about foisted upon me out of nowhere only a few days prior, I struggled to disentangle my thoughts on the events of the day.

The longer I thought about it, the more surreal the act of having a funeral in the midst of such a disaster felt. Our gathering of nine people standing around an all-but-featureless black orb somewhere in a grid of yet more featureless black orbs was small. Nine people had stood around that core dump: six cocladists, two partners, and a systech who also happened to be a partner of two of those cocladists.

It was so small, and yet even if there had been a hundred people there, a thousand, it would have felt vanishingly tiny in that vast, open space. 23 billion orbs set into a grid, and this one was ours, our double handful of grief. After all, hadn't dry grass also sobbed openly and freely before the marker of her own loss?

It was so small, and that vast, open space remained silent, empty. The settings on the sim were such that we would only ever see or hear ourselves in there. There might well be billions of others struggling with their own double handfuls of grief, and yet it would only ever be us.

There was more grief to be felt there, layered beneath the exhaustion, confusion, responsibility, and however many more complex emotions had been caked on top. There would come a time when the ability to simply grieve would be laid bare, I knew, and soon, but it was not yet.

And so we stayed in silence.

Dry Grass was the first to break the silence, mumbling into her pillow. "In The Wind."

"What was that, love?" Tule asked, brushing fingers through her hair.

"That was my up-tree instance, yes? In The Wind? I remember the rattle of dry grass in the wind." She turned her head and laughed, choked and hoarse. "A full sentence snuck into a poem. I picked that up from Louie. Eir clade, os Riãos, did much the same: a poem expanded upon from within. I thought I was *so clever.* I thought I had gotten all of my grief out that second day. I thought I could move on, limping, until I heard of the work she'd done, that she made it so far and still did not make it to the end. Until I saw her core."

Tule, more flexible than I, bent down and kissed her on the cheek. Cress gave her own kiss after. Both of them glanced briefly at me, looking a little sheepish. I couldn't quite piece together the reason for their looks until I pieced together their confusion — our confusion, since I shared in it — of how I must feel about her.

The compulsion to echo that gesture was certainly there, too. I knew from countless memories the softness of her skin against my lips, I knew what even the briefest touch would mean to her as she worked to process her own loss. 

I also knew her only as a friend, only as Dry Grass of the Ode clade, only Cress and Tule's partner, with whom I had shared only a few meals.

Thinking rapidly, I opted for a middle ground of squeezing gently on her shoulder. This gained me a rather relaxed-sounding sigh from Dry Grass, and a pleased smile from both Cress and Tule. Dry Grass shrugged my hand off of her shoulder to instead take it in her own, holding gently.

"Can you tell us about her?" I asked.

After a long moment's pause, she nodded. "She was the part of me who remained a systech. After I burnt out, I mean. I had grown weary of the mediation and moderation side of the job. I loved the tech, instead. I loved the feeling of being a caretaker for this vast and wonderful world we live in. I did not want to deal with adults bickering at each other over stupid shit, and I certainly did not want to deal with phys-side. We are the moms of the clade, yes? My stanza? Not the judges and jurors."

Both Cress and Tule nodded, though the statement largely went over my head.

Perhaps guessing at such, Dry Grass continued, "Each of our stanzas focused on something different. I am sure that much is in the stories you have doubtless read, if Lily's reaction is anything to go by. She fusses at the eighth and their politics, perhaps the first with their habit of spying, but mine, the sixth, wound up with all of Michelle's — our root instance — all of her dreams of and desire for motherhood. Motherliness. Caring and cherishing. That is why I have all of that art on the walls: it is all cherished, all lovely creations from Warmth and Motes, the clade's little ones."

"So In The Wind was the one who stuck with that moderation?" I asked.

She nodded. "To an extent. She often explained how she would push the moderation duties off onto other systechs. She really was just as focused as I was on the tech side." She rolled over onto her back so that she could look up to us, transferring my hand in hers from one to the other. "All I wanted to do was take a vacation. I should have known it would wind up far longer than the two weeks I had intended. Michelle had already tried that all the way back in 2124, systime 0, and she got an entire clade out of it, after all.

"She usually got what she want, too. She worked the tech side, disentangling crashes and hunting for problematic objects. She is the one who kept me up to date on the tech side, usually over lunch." I could hear the smile in her voice as she continued, "Those weekly lunches were something lovely, sandwiches sitting unfinished as we talked and talked and talked about this whole confusing mess we lived in. The politics remained infuriating to me, which I suppose they also did for her, given the way she would rant. Even so, it kept the pilot light lit for me, that I might hear about this System I loved so much."

Cress nodded. "It must be hard to lose that."

"It is more than that," Dry Grass said, sniffling. "I loved her, my dear. She was my sister, my twin. Fuck what my down-tree says, I lost *family.*"

"I'm sorry," the three of us mumbled.

She rubbed the back of her free hand against her eyes. "I will mourn the loss of a sister and friend. It will take time, and I can only just touch it briefly now. It is too hot."

*Familiar sensation,* I thought, and from their expressions, I surmised that my cocladists were feeling much the same.

"Need some space from it, love?" Tule asked.

"Please."

He nodded, working on a careful extraction from his role as pillow, replacing his lap with another pillow from the bed as he slid from beneath her. He stretched his arms up over his head, winced at a quiet pop from his neck, and then shifted to lay down beside her instead, arm draped over her front. Cress followed suit, laying down beside Tule and hugging around them both.

I chose to remain sitting for a while, idle gaze settling on the triad beside me, while I thought of the ways in which Dry Grass talked about In The Wind. I tried mapping that onto my own clade. Thinking of Lily like a sister, of Cress like our clade's own little one, felt right in a way that I didn't expect. While it was difficult to think of Tule as in any way that much younger than me, despite being my second degree up-tree instance, but perhaps that was due to his lingering similarities to me. After all, Sedge had forked him off shortly after I had forked into her. It was part of the package deal: Sedge went back to exploring femininity while Tule returned to cis-masculinity; ditto Rush and a further queering of gender. Both of them remained siblings — younger siblings, perhaps, because I was their progenitor. Cousins, maybe.

But Marsh? Were they a parent? Were they also a sibling? Some great-grandparent, perhaps? Or were they simply my root instance? All fit to greater or lesser extent.

Finally, the thought ran its course and, left with a curiously numb and empty mind, I slid down to join the other three in laying on the bed, though I kept what I hoped was a polite distance, laying on my back and staring up at the ceiling.

The polite distance lasted for less than a minute before Dry Grass rolled onto her side and draped an arm across my middle. *"If this is uncomfortable, do let me know, Reed,"* she sent in a sensorium message as both Tule and Cress scooted closer to her. *"Otherwise, I am going to try and sleep."*

Tense, I nodded. *"It's...different. Not bad, just going to take some getting used to."*

*"Should your boundaries change, then, let me know and I will adapt with them. I am simply craving touch. It is grounding for me."*

I nodded once more, patting the back of her hand where it rested on my side.

*"Ooooh, Reeeeed,"* came the barest hint of a message from Cress, and I peeked an eye open to see it peering over Dry Grass's shoulder, grinning.

I smirked and rolled my eyes. *"Shush, you."*

Tule messaged a few seconds later, including Cress in the message, *"You good, Reed?"*

*"Yeah, just confused. Dealing with emotions. Trying to figure this out, maybe. It's taking a lot of getting used to."*

*"I can imagine,"* he replied. *"I caught myself feeling a little sorry for dumping this on you, earlier today. Trying to keep in mind that it's your fault, not mine."*

I did my best to keep my laughter to myself. Dry Grass's breathing had grown steadily slower and I didn't want to wake her if she was drifting off. *"Uh huh. All my fault. Nothing to do with freaking out about the entirety of Lagrange going down."*

*"I guess I'll allow it."*

*"Is there any more news on that?"* Cress asked.

*"I mean, there's plenty,"* I sent. *"Almost too much. All these changes they added to the System are beyond me. Like, they made the Ansible and AVEC more robust, which I guess is good, though we don't use those any. ACLs are whatever, I guess. Not something we have to worry about. Splitting the hardware of the System, though? That sounds wild. Ditto adding cross-tree merging, which the other Odists and Jonas freaked out about."*

*"Cross-tree merging? Like you and I merging?"*

*"I guess so. Answers Will Not Help and Jonas got pretty weird about the whole thing, actually, saying it changed clades into 'gestalts' or something. I guess I can see it, too. We still fork like a tree, branching out and everything, but if we can merge from one branch to another instead of just down, then the metaphor falls apart."*

Tule chimed in with a scoff. *"What about that would make them angry? It just sounds like a minor improvement and a change in terminology. Maybe not even that; we stay clades and cladists, just with this new feature."*

*"Hell if I know. They're old and weird."*

Cress buried its face against Tule's shoulder to muffle a giggle. *"God, if they're weirder than Dry Grass, they'd have to be."* It sighed, added, *"But I guess that cross-tree merging sounds interesting. I can't imagine what a mess the combination of all six of us would look like."*

I stiffened, restraining the urge to sit up straight. *"Like Marsh, maybe?"*

There was silence from both of my cocladists, though I could hear that their breathing had picked up in turn. *"Well, now* there's *an idea,"* Tule said at last.

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