Chương 897: Day Eight Hundred And Ninety-Five

Dear Diary, So weird, that we only celebrate the one midwinter holiday here and now. I mean, as far as I know. There might be some Jewish people in the Alliance, although I'm entirely uncertain as to that. Sure as fuck haven't heard anybody going on about Kwanzaa like, at all, and if I remember right that one only dates to the mid nineteen hundreds. Festivus was like an early two thousands thing, I think, and Christmas just isn't a thing either. I mean, not that I've seen.

Decorated trees, and wreaths, and a lot of the other midwinter holiday things, yeah, which has made me increasingly aware how much appropriation happened with the Catholic Church back in the day. Then again, I'm not sure that's entirely fair. For all I know, the folks back in the day wound up being all 'oh, yeah, we've converted, this isn't a Yule Tree, it's a Christmas Tree' and kept doing their pagan stuff while rebranding it as 'Christian'.

Mom took me to church a lot as a kid, and even if I never really bought into it the way some of my friends did, some of the folks there really did seem like they meant it when they talked about 'doing unto others as you'd have them do unto you'. Like, legit doing the right thing instead of just looking for an excuse to hate. Then again, down on PR folks tended to go super hard into Catholicism or get real weird with 'old' religions, or faiths, or whatever.

Then there were the real funky ones who just mixed and matched to get whatever they fuckin' wanted. Don't get me wrong, some of them were pretty cool people, just looking for an excuse to do the right thing for as many people as they could. Or maybe just looking for an excuse to do as many drugs as they could get their hands on and call it 'religion', but back in the day I wasn't gonna judge.

Okay, that's a lie, but I was a edgy little bitch who liked judging people for doing mainstream shit, or anything closer to the mainstream than where I was standing at the time. Nowadays I can't exactly say shit about shit, what with me being friends with Bedroom benefits with the literal incarnation of intoxication. Oh. Oh, shit. I just realized, I am not copacetic with our relationship remaining in that status right now.

I'm not sure I'm gonna be cool with it going back to that, even, not for the foreseeable future. I fuckin' nursed his ass and changed his diapers. I'm pretty sure Sarah is living in South House at the moment, sneaking in whenever she needs to in order to nurse him. Then again, it's been awful quiet when we sleep, it's possible she's nursing him there. Shit, how the fuck did I lose a baby? I'm a terrible mom. Okay, I had a rogue Deity to deal with.

The same one, in fact, who killed D in the first place and wound him up in his currently infantile state. That said, I'm pretty sure I ought to be getting both of them Yule gifts, and even if I'm not sure about where and how she and he and my surprisingly large nuclear family stand in relation to one another, I feel like I ought to let her know that she and Baby D are absolutely welcome in the big bed of cuddly awesome any night she chooses.

Speaking of nights, Saffron kept shooting me looks all through dinner, then curled up atop me, chin in my cleavage, when we got to the Bath.

"You wanna tell me something, Kitten?" She just purred at me and said, "Do I need to?"

"Need? Nah. But you might want to tell me if there's anything in particular you're looking forward to." She just blepped, then turned her head to lay it on my breast. I'm not sure if she felt me Mimicking a couple relevant skills. I am sure that I set a personal best speed record for 'Bedroom arrival to Kitten teetering on the edge', and I'm also sure she heard me laughing as the words 'you unbelievably cruel bitch' when I tinkered with time to keep her there for half the night.

I'm also sure that holding her right in the middle of that apocalyptically explosive climax for the rest of the night probably ought to be illegal. Not sure if she agrees or not. No, seriously, I even asked. Sort of. As her eyes should have been showing blue screens she kinda whined out, "ledger." To which I had to reply, "good or bad?" The only answer I got before she passed out completely?

"Yes. Fuck. Yes." Then when she woke up she absolutely refused to acknowledge any of it except to give me that cat creamery grin. Okay, not until it got close to dinner time, anyhow. She just taunted me all day. And it was all day, because everything was shut down for the pre-Yule break. I mean, not Homestead stuff, although I guess people were more 'preparing for the holiday' than 'doing jobs' at the moment. Then again, all the adults in East House were doing the same.

That reminds me, I managed to surreptitiously poll not only the other members of the Aetos-Diaz Mom Collective, but Isnomi, Maze, and Ria as well about Garde's hobbies, preferences, and general personality. Turns out she sounds like a kind of larval proto-goth. Honestly, when I spoke with Ria, who'd been working with Lindsey on something in Ria's room, to which I was pointedly not invited, which makes me think I know where my Yule gifts are, Lindsey sealed it. Stolen story; please report.

"Dead things." That did not bode wonderfully, but I wasn't about to write my kit off as Dexter-in-training just yet.

"You mean like, killing things, or things that are already dead, or...?" Lindsey, who gave the Maenads a run for their money in the stingy with words competition sometimes, thought about that, then sighed, obviously resigning herself to splurging on something like a complete sentence or three. Maybe even a paragraph.

"She collects them. Stores them in my room. Things she thinks are... Pretty?"

"May I see?" That gave her a bit of a moral quandary, but I didn't push either way. Eventually she said, "no touching." She'd given up the second highest shelf of her not-bookshelves. The rest were taken up with interesting botanical specimens and drawings, but that one shelf, Garde's shelf, had a few butterflies, some really pretty iridescent beetles, a whole assed horsefly, and even a pair of spiders; one wolf spider and one of those with long skinny legs.

All of them had that look of having been dried out in whatever pose they were in, but oddly enough none of them had curled up the way I expected dead bugs to do.

"They're really beautiful." Lindsey just nodded, then escorted me back out. I spent part of the day with one of me Blended and watching her, and when I saw her watching David model the girliest girly dresses in her wardrobe the idea finally crystallized. I snagged her half a dozen fancy Gothic Lolita dresses, a nice diary with a matching pen, both of them in a deep almost black violet color with black trim, although both of those were just part of the flower pressing kit I got her.

I mean, it wasn't exactly a 'flower pressing' kit, it was a desiccation kit, but it had everything she'd need to dry pretty shit out so it wouldn't go bad, and it could press some of the thinner stuff so it would wind up fitting in the diary. Not sure why I'd think somebody would want a diary. Not like anybody here and now keeps one that I've seen. My conversation with Lindsey also gave me my idea for Conrad's gift.

I'm not sure if he'll like it, hate it, or find it funny, but I got him one of those portable DVD players, the kind you can charge up and then watch for hours. I'm also getting him a collection of DVDs, and if there's a bit of a theme, it's not like it doesn't remind me of him. The whole Dexter series, all of the Hannibal Lecter movies as well as the TV series, and the whole Riddick series. Couple stand alones, like House that Jack Built, Se7en, and Mindcage. I'm sure if he likes them, he can get more on his own.

I'm also not sure if he'll get the point. Then again, that's mostly because I'm not sure what the point is. Maybe that I get who he is, and accept him for who he is. Maybe, hopefully, that he can be who he is and not be irredeemably evil or something like that. Maybe that good or evil, seeking redemption or simply existing as a veiled threat to anyone who violates the social contract badly enough, he's my son and I love him.

Which is a weird thing to say about somebody orders of magnitude older than me, but there you go. My life is weird. Got little D a big play mat and a bunch of infant and crawler activity centers. Remembered that Sarah is in fact looking to become a Hero, and is also a fuckin' seven foot six inch Maenad her own damn self, which means she's hell on wheels in melee but might have some problems drawing a traditional bow with her claws.

I got her a Barret fifty caliber, with a couple cases of ammunition and a nice reloading kit. Figure if she's half as sneaky as Marie, she'll make a hell of a sniper, and it's not like she'll have the same problem most people would hauling it around.

Once I had everything collected and hid, when Marie and I had the evening's feast all in the ovens and cooking, with every bit of food storage already full of food that could be heated up or just eaten cold, I was standing in the closet trying to figure out what to wear when a familiar pair of arms snaked around my waist.

"Why not skyclad?"

"There's like four feet of snow on the ground out there, Kitten." She snorted.

"Six inches at most in the courtyard and walkways. The women, especially the Maenads, have kept things clear."

"Your good bits are gonna freeze off." She leaned her head against my back, and I felt her smile.

"So I'm to be skyclad too?"

"I didn't say that." She chuckled.

"But how else are my good bits going to freeze off?" I spun to face her, only to have her cling to my back, giggling. I used my tentacles to carefully pull her off and pin her to the wall, smiling as her eyes flashed.

"I do not want any of your bits frozen off. Especially the good ones."

"Which are those again?" I put one hand on her breast, the other between her legs, then brought them together over her belly.

"From about here." I moved one hand up to the top of her head and the other down to where her feet dangled. Had to Shapeshift a little to reach.

"To here." She smiled at me as I stood up.

"Flatterer." I knelt in front of her.

"Maybe I just wanna Worship my wife a little."

"How is that rel..." When she got coherent enough to talk again, she said, "ledger. Definitely ledger." I stood and leaned in to kiss her, letting her arms and legs go around me as I did.

"I can't tell if you're mad at me or not." She smiled.

"Oh, love. Why would I be angry? I need not. Any offense you give I carefully hoard, and will pour it all upon you on that day."

"I thought you were saving up good stuff too."

"Oh, I am. I so very am." She pulled me in to where her hair covered my field of view, her mouth next to my ear.

"When that day comes, love, I will inflict on you such pain that lesser beings would expire just thinking of it." Before I could really engage my brain to reply, she continued.

"I will deliver unto you such pleasure that any other being in the universe would explode if they experienced it." I smiled into her hair and murmured back.

"Oh, that is a fuckin' roller coaster." She hummed a question into my hair, and I said, "from that depth to that height? Or the reverse?" She chuckled, and I kinda needed a towel as the sound hit exactly like I'm sure she intended.

"Whatever made you think I'm not going to do both at the same time?"