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

[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.