R47 - Back to Wonderland

[with_my_teacup]

Hi, kids.

[Anyone unaffected may notice something about Riddick; a little less aggressively edgy, a little more of a wall. Because Riddick as she is got more mileage out of having a mountainous will, a sledgehammer self, than being an unpredictable razor-blade of a person.]

Room full of large clothes, cut for small hips and big shoulders, for anyone who needs to borrow them. Missing all my t-shirts, but life's not always fair. [She shrugs, massively. What are you going to do.]

Comments

[fridgetothefire]

Anya did.

[He's so mad, though at which one of them - for which one of them - is harder to pin down.]

[with_my_teacup]

What interesting priorities.

[It's a bare murmur. She coaxes Anshel a little more onto her lap and chest, and the gentle scratch of her fingernails on his scalp turns into a soft stroke over the shoulder.

It's very like them, to talk cold about the psychology of the potential enemy while cuddled up together like this. They're both hunting animals and wolves don't stop being wolves when they snuggle up together.]

Killed Wanda, kept Magda.

I might have gone the other way. But then I didn't have a mother, so I don't know what's at play.

[fridgetothefire]

You know some.

[It's not softer, it's certainly not sentimental, it's just - solemn. Less angry. He sighs a little, breath and tension huffing out of him against Riddick's chest, fingers curling up in the edge of her shirt, the kind of tightness that is holding on instead of holding back.]

[with_my_teacup]

I know a mother's job is to take care of her children. Not the other way around. I do know that.

What are you gonna do about this, sweetheart?

[fridgetothefire]

[Half a headshake, aborted where his cheek is already smushed against her, firm nonetheless.]

No. I can't. I can't be the one who carries her choices.

[More applicable to her than to him, he knows distantly, when the flood ends, but that's not a productive line of philosophizing. It brings him up short anyway, a difficult lesson for both of them to learn, a steadying relief to remember.]

It's just. It's just strange.

[with_my_teacup]

Strange.

Let's bake something. The guy I'm replacing has a kitchen too, we can whip something up. You can tell me why it's bothering you. [Or try to figure it out while his hands are busy, whatever.]

[fridgetothefire]

Mooooom.

[...he's not actually dumb enough to say 'boys don't cook,' and he's actually done plenty of it, but he still feels compelled to go through the motions of resenting it even though he doesn't, at least in private. Hence, cursory whining.]

[with_my_teacup]

[She plays along indulgently, kissing the top of his head loudly.] Humor me.

[fridgetothefire]

Uhg. Fine.

[He slouches off to the kitchen and promptly starts assembling ingredients for carrot cake muffins.]

[with_my_teacup]

[She chuckles and goes to roust up the ingredients for icing once she sees what he's chosen. Male-her keeps the sugar in the back of the farthest cupboard to, so her sense of taste didn't change with gender. There's something.

Partner comes sneaking over to lurk for fallen scraps. Just because he can't taste it doesn't mean he doesn't know that it's the best food ever.]

You care about her choices, Anya's. Because they don't make sense to you. [Question mark?]

[fridgetothefire]

[He starts grating the carrots, enjoys the sound of it, the resistance and the rhythm.]

She tried to behave so long she got maneuvered into a corner. She got out of it well - hell, she still got out. She killed him and left, and that's the most important thing, but.

I don't like that it's so different. I guess no one else knows how different they are, since nobody cross-checks their own files. But it seems like a lot.

[with_my_teacup]

I do. But you hit it on the head. We can't carry their decisions.

Different identities, different starting points... I've had biological children in at least two floods now.

So we ain't fixed in stone. I find it reassuring. We're all made by our environments, nothing's a prophecy. I like that we adapt. [Fuck prophecies.]

[fridgetothefire]

Adapt to being a girl? That shouldn't - it's not about determinism, it's the opposite of that or, it's the same thing in the other direction. There isn't a prophecy but that shouldn't determine her choices either! It's just. It's just a body.

[The anger creeps back in, simmers and flares, as he grates and scowls with equal enthusiasm, settles into genuine disgust by the end, digs his teeth in, almost cracking through to the marrow of it. Almost.]

[with_my_teacup]

Baby boy... it's not just a body. [Riddick looks over. Riddick with her massive body, secondary sexual characteristics that read 'male' like a neon sign.]

It's how people treat you. It's what they try to make you into because of the body.

Richard B and I have such close lives because people outside us reacted to us the same. Not because we were the same people. Our body shapes our environment as long as there's even one observer in the environment.

[fridgetothefire]

[That helps. And it doesn't.]

The body is still the variable. That's what changed. It all comes from that.

[He doesn't hate his body. Not the shape of it, not how it looks, not what he can and can't do, not how he feels moving inside it, day to day, head to toe, stretch and stride. But somewhere deep, deep down there's still a little bit of hate for his blood, for the thirty-seven trillion tiny coiled places where human is written inside him. He knows it's defined everything about his life, every reaction he got from anyone in between the ages of nine and nineteen. And yet. It stings, to run into it all over again, that it matters, maybe not for the reasons his father told him it did, but just as severely.]

[with_my_teacup]

Feeling a little too deterministic for comfort?

[She's found creamed cheese, is whipping sugar into it by hand with a sturdy fork.]

[fridgetothefire]

It's not - there's no center. Nobody diverges from anybody else. If all her choices are the way they are because of her body, than so are mine.

[So. Yes.]

It sucks. It feels like I'm back in a cage, or - like I was in one all along and just didn't see it.

[with_my_teacup]

Middleground, sweetheart. Middleground. Not all your choices, not all hers.

Not all mine, not all his. Right? Right. Don't get too reductive while you're sulking.

Pass those walnuts I'm folding some in the icing.

[fridgetothefire]

I'm not sulking.

[He is having a legitimate existential crisis, mom. Gosh. Dignified cat bristle. He passes the walnuts. And soaks some raisins in brandy, because really, why else bake anything that includes raisins.]

[with_my_teacup]

Mmm of course you aren't.

[Without getting her hands dirty, she leans over and kisses the top of his head again. Then folds walnuts lightly into the icing.]

What if the choices are influenced more by the body? Why's it stuck in your throat?

[fridgetothefire]

That's the variable. This time. The only one, instead everything with breaches.

And I just. I've got limits, I can work with that. But I didn't think my body was giving me directions, too.