Chương 1164: Day One Thousand One Hundred And Sixty-One

Dear Diary, Back in the day there were all kinds of glurge posts about how humans are naturally good and kind and sweet, and if we'd only listen to kids everything would be beautiful and wonderful and we'd all sing kumbaya and shit. Don't get me wrong, I love my kids, and in case the whole 'Children as a Domain' isn't a big enough hint, like Children in general.

I think they're important, I generally enjoy spending time with them, and I really do thing one of the whole reasons we do the Society thing is to make their lives better and easier than ours were as their parents. I honestly do not get the entire 'oh, my god, kids have it so easy these days' as a complaint. Like, yeah, Gomer, that's the entire fuckin' point of Society, of Civilization, to make generational progress. To make life easier and better for each successive generation.

Yeah, we fucked it up all the goddamned time, and those fuckups are the kind of things that I can damn with confidence, because some of them wound up self-replicating mutating fuckups. Two of the big ones, idolizing people in the past and treating them as villains because they grew up in societies that didn't know any fuckin' better really ought to cancel each other out, but somehow wind up coexisting and fucking everything else up while not doing shit to cancel each other out the way they ought.

I mean seriously, even those of us with parent based trauma tend to idolize our parents. Sometimes those idols are, y'know, Gods of Wrath, but we still treat them like Gods. I'm guessing that kids whose parents actually cared for and cherished them are even... I'm not gonna say better or worse, but definitely more extreme. Shit, 'mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of all Children' is not wrong.

Which means if we think our parents were good, then the folks our parents hold in esteem must be good, so we wind up treating folks from the past like superhuman Heroes. I can't think that's gonna be any better here and now, where Heroes are frequently Actually Superhuman. Super strong, super fast, some of us teleport, all of us have some facility with shooting fire from our fingertips and shit. Hell, Adventurers from Boltophsberg can even fly.

Not even standing in an Air Shield box, but just surfing around on their swords and shit like that. Wackiest shit I've seen so far. So yeah, there's good reason kids are gonna idolize people from the past, but the problem is that in terms of judgement, I haven't seen anybody who's perfect yet. There are folks who I trust, both to make good decisions and to do their best for those I care about, but that doesn't mean they're perfect.

But then there are folks who look at people who did good work moving society forward and, instead of saying 'okay, motherfucker was flawed, because at the time society was fucked inn ways we didn't even have fuckin' words for yet, but he took this particular step forward and forced everyone to step with him', they focus on all the shitty parts of them.

Like, Franklin from back in the day was a womanizer and hung out with a dude who kept his wife's half sister in a closet for ease of raping, but he pushed for a bunch of shit like education and scientific literacy and even abolition at a time when nobody with money really pushed for that shit. Yeah, I wasn't a historian in my old world. Just a kid with an internet connection and too much time on her hands.

But even I realized that some people were actively trying to make the world a better place, even while they were doing some shitty stuff. Socrates telling his students to question their assumptions, Plato getting the idea that an actual organized school might be a cool thing to have, and Aristotle facing off against a fuckin' pro wrestler and saying 'no, don't listen to the femboy addict, trust your fuckin' senses', while all three of them were banging their students as a standard part of 'tuition'.

We're all shitty in some ways, but that doesn't mean we can't try to do better, it just means that 'better' might be seen as really fuckin' awful a few generations after us. Fuck, if we're doing it right, it will be seen as awful, but maybe if we get it right enough, our grandkids' grandkids will look at what we did and say 'they were sixteen kinds of fucked up, but their parents were seventeen kinds, so that's progress'. A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Yeah, so the 'the ancestors were gods' and 'the ancestors were awful' somehow coexist and both shout down 'the ancestors were fucked up humans fucking up in a fucked up world, trying their hardest to make the world a little less fucked up, and succeeded, because we can see that they were fucked up'. But while kids might need to learn some kinds of complex, nuanced evil, even our kids can get a little tribal at times. Like Alex, Anise, Felicia, Isnomi, and Lindsey are kind of a jock clique.

Maze, Ria, and Daya are each different kinds of intellectual, although Ria does seem to bridge the nerd to jock gap pretty well for a kid who acts like she's somewhere on the spectrum. Hell, while Hailee and Isadora are both sorta lazy, like big cats with a steady food source are gonna be, Hailee is pretty nerdy herself when it comes to Healing, and Isadora's in that weird spot of somebody who is absolutely athletic beyond any of her sisters while also not actually being a jock.

Then there's our quartet of musicians, who have taken Aisling under their collective wings, who kinda ally with Daya when it comes to artistic endeavors. Different kinds of art, but still. Then there's Davey, who is just a social butterfly, and seems to flit from group to group without hesitation. Jack and Karen are still kinda finding their places, but unlike Aisling, who has an absolute gift for music, they're just, y'know, normal kids. Pre-teens, at a guess.

So while they socialize, they haven't really glommed onto any of the subgroups. Which is fine; Davey really hasn't either. So... Today was pretty... I was gonna say 'awful', but while I wound up crying a lot, I'm not gonna say it was bad. At the end of the day I gathered everybody up, got everybody through the showers and packed up to go, then stepped us all to Mom and Dad's place. Weird that I think of it like that now.

'Mom and Dad's place', with Sigyn clearly coming first. Which no, I do not need to know those details about my adoptive mom. Vulcan aside, I've managed to avoid anything more than slapstick threats of incest, and hopefully I'll keep that up going forward. Whoa. ADHD moment. Incest led to thoughts of Adrienne being both literally and figuratively hot in the Autumn, which led to wanting to watch her filling in for her mom while in full on Headless Horsewoman mode, porcelain pottery head and all.

Then again, the only times I've seen her, well, them, like that was when they took down a fuckin' Kaiju. Not sure 'measured response' is something they're good at in that mode. At any rate, after warm pie, and I'm talking about literal food, not lady parts, everybody fell asleep. Dreamt of my ladies scooping goop out of my Maw and laying it along the edges, kind of like those big dredges down in Wildwood would dig sand out of channels and throw it on the beach.

Okay, that's what my sister told me they were doing, and I'm assuming she wouldn't outright lie to me. Didn't get down there much after mom died, and never thought to look up whether that's actually what was happening or not. Woke to find everyone else quietly talking, my eyes already starting to water.

"Are you okay, love?" Siobhan whispered from where she sat on the floor near me, nursing Aoibh. I sniffled a little.

"Yeah. Just... It's kinda fucking me up how even as she was forcing me to kill her, she was leaving me with the means to, y'know, recover from..." While I sobbed, Siobhan pulled herself to me, then put one arm around me, the other one holding Aoibh to her breast.

"Go on, my Hero. Let it out." After crying a while, I smiled wanly at her.

"Thanks, Darling. I think... I keep thinking she gave me a way to deal with her loss, but she didn't. Not really. Although the more I think about it the more I think she thought she was doing so."

"How so?" I shrugged.

"The... I dunno what to call it but the Power she left me, when I embrace it, even a little, lets me cope. Lets me function without constantly breaking down."

"That's... That's good?" I shook my head.

"That's just it. I'm not feeling it then, but it's not getting better. It's not healing. It's like all that trauma is in stasis, just waiting for me to set that power aside. It makes it hard to feel other things, too. So, y'know, I don't want to live like that." She squeezed me.

"But sometimes you have to?"

"Yeah. Yeah, sometimes I do. But..." She pulled my head down until my hair brushed around Aoibh, who cranked until she realized my hair wouldn't interrupt her nursing.

"But you don't have to now." I cried like that for a while. Just letting it out. Letting out the sorrow of loss, the guilt of being responsible for that loss, the... Everything. When I finished I took Aoibh so Siobhan could step back to the water closet. Still Mortal, still needs to do that now and then. And Aoibh's digestion is working just fine, as I discovered moments later.