Edits

content/draft/004.md

@@ -48,7 +48,9 @@ Motes cried. She hung limply and cried before that long-dead version of herself.
 
 This was not supposed to happen.
 
-Michelle/Sasha sneered through that omnipresent exhaustion. "Some mote who styles herself Motes. Some grasper-after-fame. Some fetishist who wishes only to taint the Ode with lurid visions of youth." 
+Michelle/Sasha sneered through that omnipresent exhaustion. "Some mote who styles herself Motes. Some grasper-after-fame. Some fetishist who wishes only to taint the Ode with lurid visions of youth."
+
+Motes cried. She could do nothing but hang from Sasha's paw/Michelle's hand and cry, could do nothing but dangle in the grasp of this person who had always been so, so fond of her and cry.
 
 In her free hand/paw, this ghost brought into being a dagger, silver-bladed, wood-hilted, ruby-pommeled. She reached out and slowly, almost tenderly, pressed it into Motes's paw. Holding her wrist, she brought that paw up so that the tip of the blade was pressed against the skunk's neck, pricking at the skin over her carotid. When she let go, Motes found her paw remained there, immobile, unresponsive to her efforts to pull it away.
 
@@ -62,7 +64,7 @@ Michelle/Sasha straightened up and said, almost bored, "Well? Indulge, my dear."
 
 With no recourse, Motes drove the blade into her own neck, an agonizing slowness that played itself out in a death she had experienced before, she had surely suffered in its own, consensual way.
 
-She died then, whimpering ever more weakly, and as her panicked eyes drifted shut one last time, she awoke with a start, already sobbing.
+She died then, whimpering ever more weakly, blood staining her paw and arm and front in an outsized torrent, and as her panicked eyes drifted shut one last time, she awoke with a start, already sobbing.
 
 The house was quiet, as it so often was at this time of the night, when Beholden and A Finger Pointing were either asleep or out at one of their jazzy nightclubs. All the same, she sent a gentle sensorium ping to A Finger Pointing, figuring it best to make sure that they were actually asleep rather than simply under a cone of silence in their room.
 
@@ -72,13 +74,13 @@ She carefully poked her nose into the room, turning the handle to the door as qu
 
 "Is everything alright, Motes?"
 
-"Nightmare," she mumbled. "Can I sleep with you for a bit?"
+"Nightmare," she mumbled, still sniffling. "Can I sleep with you for a bit?"
 
 "Of course, my dear," A Finger Pointing said, stifling a yawn. "I am busy hogging all the bed, anyway, so there is plenty of room."
 
 Sighing in relief, the skunk nodded and padded into the room, closing the door behind her. She had to feel her way to the bed in the dark. The dark, which seemed to press in against her, bearing rapidly distorting memories of the dream. *To think that I could be this disgusting,* echoed in her head. *...lurid visions of youth...*
 
-There was a part of her that strived to convince the rest that the voice in the dark was not that of A Finger Pointing — despite the lilting, everlasting humor that showed even in sleepiness — but that of Michelle/Sasha, her root instance now more than fifty years dead. *It is her waiting with a dagger,* that fraction of her promised. *It is her waiting with yet more cruel words.*
+There was a part of her that strived to convince the rest that the voice in the dark was not that of A Finger Pointing — despite the lilting, everlasting humor that showed even in sleepiness — but that of Michelle/Sasha, her root instance who had ever loved her, now more than fifty years dead. *It is her waiting with a dagger,* that fraction of her promised. *It is her waiting with yet more cruel words.*
 
 But then there was the bed, and then there was the hand holding up the covers to welcome her in, and then there were the arms envelop her, and then there was the feeling of a face — a human face — an unshifting face — her cocladist-*cum*-mother's face — pressed against the back of her neck, and then there was the clumsy addition of Beholden's paw draping over her side, her other cocladist-*cum*-mother clearly still more asleep than awake. 
 
@@ -110,7 +112,7 @@ Beholden laughed. "It is all your fault, my dear. The dream probably showed up *
 
 "I guess," she grumbled. "I will try and remember. It felt like it just kind of floated up into my mind a few weeks ago from out of nowhere."
 
-"Remember, yes," A Finger Pointing said, yawning dramatically and leaning harder until she was able to push both of the skunks over onto their sides. She held up a hand as though inviting them to picture a tableau. "I remember the maps of the Holy Land," she lamented, quoting from some old production, some old classic. "Colored they were. Very pretty! The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty."
+"Remember, yes," A Finger Pointing said, yawning dramatically and leaning harder until she was able to push both of the skunks over onto their sides. She held up a hand as though inviting them to picture a tableau. "I remember the maps of the Holy Land," she lamented, quoting from some old production, some old classic. "Colored, they were. Very pretty! The Dead Sea was pale blue. The very look of it made me thirsty."
 
 Both of the skunks fell into laughter, sprawled awkwardly beneath their down-tree instance on the bed. "That is where we will go, you used to say," Beholden said, keeping up the act. "That is where we will go for our honeymoon."
 
@@ -124,7 +126,7 @@ She saw their gentle manipulation and loved them all the harder for it.
 
 The rest of the morning passed in comfort and lazy chatter, but throughout, some portion of Motes was dedicated to thinking back, to remembering. Comfort and lazy chatter and remembering, then, before the three decided to split off to their own tasks — Beholden into two instances, one to work on music, one to the theatre; A Finger Pointing to some planned brunch; Motes to go for a walk, to go and talk.
 
-The fifth stanza had begun its life in an apartment building. As many studios and penthouses as were required for one mind split ten ways. Life on Lagrange had progressed as ever, though, and soon the sense and sensation of being a part of the fifth had changed. It began to encompass relationships fleeting and lasting. It housed devotion, invited in friendship. It grew beyond the bounds of just this tenth of a clade to include all of Au Lieu Du Rêve, and some few decades on, the whole of the project decamped from their city-block sized apartment building.
+The fifth stanza had begun its life in an apartment building in a cozy, artsy town. As many studios and penthouses as were required for one mind split ten ways. Life on Lagrange had progressed as ever, though, and soon the sense and sensation of being a part of the fifth had changed. It began to encompass relationships fleeting and lasting. It housed devotion, invited in friendship. It grew beyond the bounds of just this tenth of a clade to include all of Au Lieu Du Rêve, and some few decades on, the whole of the project decamped from their city-block sized apartment building.
 
 Now, the fifth stanza — along with however many other lovers and friends, coworkers and groupies, up-trees and tracking instances —  occupied a sprawling neighborhood of houses and townhomes, yards and copses of trees, and yes, even a playground. The whole neighborhood crowded against an untamed field, a prairie, a meadow laced up with deer trails and footpaths, dotted with yet more copses of trees lining a creek.
 
@@ -204,7 +206,7 @@ All throughout, Slow Hours listened in silence, letting her talk while brushing
 
 Once her tears began to slow and she wiped at her nose with a tissue, Slow Hours leaned down to kiss her cheek. "I am sorry, Motes. You deserve better than what your sleeping mind has told you," she said gently. "It sounds as though this false vision of your past self was upset with two things: your explorations around age and your explorations around death, yes?"
 
-Stifling some sniffles, aftershocks of the cry just ended, Motes nodded. "Yeah, though I think more the first," she said, wincing at the muffled sound of her voice through her congestion. It sounded round, somehow, wrong. "That is what I have been thinking about most, anyway, that would have led to a dream like that."
+Stifling some sniffles, aftershocks of the cry just ended, Motes nodded. "Yeah, though I think more the first," she said, wincing at the muffled sound of her voice through her congestion. It sounded round, somehow, wrong. "That is what I have been thinking about most, anyway, that would have led to a dream like that. The death was just the punishment."
 
 "And you are not sure where these anxieties came from?"
 
@@ -270,7 +272,7 @@ She wilted, shoulders slumping. "So I might be hearing more of this, then? From
 
 Motes nodded sullenly.
 
-"I know that you said that you do not need to hear that you are not wrong or doing wrong things," Slow Hours said, drawing the skunk up into her lap. "But I will tell you all the same: you are not in any way a mistake. You are approaching this cognizant of the implications. You are holding in your mind both the truth that this *is* you and that an expression of identity like this coming from an adult is fraught."
+"I know that you said that you do not need to hear that you are not wrong or doing wrong things," Slow Hours said, drawing the skunk up into her lap. "But I will tell you all the same: you are not in any way a mistake. You are approaching this cognizant of the implications. You are being safe. You are leaning on support and protection. You are holding in your mind both the truth that this *is* you and that an expression of identity like this coming from an adult is fraught."
 
 "I know," she mumbled, burying her face against her cocladist's shoulder. "Thank you, Slowers."