Chương 944: Day Nine Hundred And Forty-Two

Dear Diary, Yeah, there are definitely days when I realize that no matter how much time I've spent working on myself, my partners are older and more mature than I am. Not like in any kind of awful way, just in the way that in any given relationship, people are going to grow and change and mature at different rates. They'll learn different lessons from the same events, acquire different trauma from the same tragedies.

Shit, that's another thing, different people have different traumas, even different amounts of trauma, and that will affect how they see the world, how they react to it, and sometimes even whether something is traumatic or not. It's not like I'm never the best adapted to a given situation, even if I leave out all of the 'raw physical, magical, and divine power' aspect of things.

My impeded object permanence helps me out with some things; if I'm not looking at something and nothing's reminding me of it, it might as well not exist emotionally speaking. I mean yeah, when something reminds me of whatever it is I wind up feeling some guilt at forgetting, but even there I'm not upset by the thing itself all the time, but the fact that I forgot about it. But when it comes down to dealing maturely with shit, I am objectively the least capable adult in our family.

Although now that I think about it, none of us are really as mature as we might be. I mean, Siobhan could be, maybe. Shit, maybe that's why I think of her as the best of us so often. It's not like I've never seen her have an unkind or selfish impulse. Shit, I've made a hobby of indulging those impulses sometimes. Huh, I wonder if that's part of what I think of as 'maturity', the ability to look at one's own impulses and tell oneself 'no'.

Then again, she's the most mature of us, not a perfect saintly bastion of perfection, no matter how often I think of her like that. Because when we had to force her not to starve herself when there wasn't a reason to, she's obviously taken 'controlling her urges' a step too far. Then again, that might be why she's such a freak in the Bedroom, since it's a place and topic where everyone in her life has absolutely told her that whatever urge she has can and should be indulged.

Living proof that it is always the quiet ones. Then there's Tallulah, who from the outside, kinda like Siobhan, looks to be in complete control of herself at all times. Don't get me wrong, she's got a shit ton of self-control. I'm not sure anybody who doesn't could actually become an Archmage. For me at least controlling Mana is controlling a part of myself, and given the sheer amount and complexity of the Mana Shape she had to weave and maintain for the System Spell, she's got self-control in spades.

Ria's another example; from everything I've seen Tallulah loves her daughters as much as any mom, but she was willing and ready to sacrifice her for the greater good of her City and the rest of her siblings. Not out of lack of love for Ria, but because she's got enough self-control to lay her hand on a hot stove and comment on the aroma of the bacon burning.

But all of that self-control comes from a lifetime of The Morrigan being a very real bogeyman willing and able to fuck over everything she loved for no good fuckin' reason other than the fact that The Morrigan is a selfish, entitled bitch. Okay, she was, not sure if a year of becoming an ever wider tube has improved her attitude. Need to check on that at some point. At any rate, Tallulah's got shit tons of self control, loads of maturity, I guess, but cPTSD is a thing, and she sure as shit has it.

Like recognizes like, after all. Now Marie is a whole other kettle of fish. I don't think about it a lot, but I do remember the whole thing that a solid chunk of the Maenads are women who joined the murderfuck cult in its aspect of 'battered women's shelter'. Okay, maybe not battered, but all of them had survived some kind of trauma that made them think being torn to shreds and living in the wilderness was a less painful option than just, y'know, living.

Apparently Marie was a highborn Spartan woman, and wound up being used as a pawn by the King of Sparta, who killed her lover way back in the day. After that she joined the Maenads. Okay, I'm pretty sure it was after that. My point still stands, though, she wound up hurting so bad potential suicide sounded okay. Yeah, it's been a couple thousand years since then, but it doesn't sound like she spent it meditating and healing so much as partying hard to forget about it.

Fuck, she probably healed and grew more over the course of the past couple centuries at the Academy than she did in the couple millennia before that. Something she has in common with Tallulah on that, the whole 'immortals don't have to worry about time'. I read about that once, somebody asking why 'elves' and other immortal races were seen as wise, when most of what we call 'wisdom' comes from dealing with trauma and the idea of trauma, and you don't get much more 'idea of trauma' than mortality itself.

Seriously, if you can just literally run away from your problems and subsequently outlive them, there's not a whole lot of reason to learn to deal with them in a productive fashion. I never got to that point back in the day, but at some point I would have had to pull on my big girl panties and clean my fuckin' house, if only because there weren't enough horizontal surfaces for me to get my groove on clean enough to do so without skeeving myself or any potential partners.

Meanwhile if I were immortal, I could just do the 'invest a dollar, wait a hundred years, then buy a new place whenever the old one is trashed' thing. Okay, in Marie's case, where the negative of being outdoors is discomfort, because she is a fuckin' Siberian tigress, she wouldn't even need that. So yeah, Siobhan is probably the most mature of us, but almost pathologically so. Tallulah and Marie both have different flavors of arrested development going on. Then there's Saffron.

Shit, Saffron is literally the youngest of us, physically, and I'm pretty sure she's as mature as Siobhan. Fuck, she might be more mature, what with my maturity barometer being 'not giving into bad urges', and Siobhan's worst urge being to ask for another orgasm in the middle of her orgasm. Or try for the same with someone else; she's not exactly selfish, even if she can be a little passive. Meanwhile Saffron...

Shit, she almost fed Siobhan into my Maw, and even if I don't think she really intended to, she dragged Siobhan and I through all that with an iron grip on our will via our libidos. She absolutely has the darkest impulses, and she's even said so. She's said she wants me to be the strong one, the righteous one, so she can be the decadent, dark, sultry, sexy one. Which I gotta say, I'm down for.

But the fact that she knows she can't be that yet, and doesn't push me about it, definitely makes me think she might be the mature one. Short version, the fact that I'm the least mature isn't exactly a low bar to go under. I can be plenty mature and still be the least mature. But I really gotta get better at not indulging my least mature impulses. Like angrily washing dishes. Because I'm not just the young athletic partner in this particular polycule.

I'm a fuckin' Elder Primordial, and if there's one thing this world has suffered from, it's Deities behaving like entitled children. So I do not have the privilege of indulging myself that way. I have to be the grown up in the room. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Which is maybe why I got so wrapped up in my own head about this, because when it comes to our living situation, our kids, I count on my ladies to be the more 'mature' ones, while I'm the one who plays with the kids on their own level. What I think I missed is how shit I grew up thinking of as unsuitable for children is just a fact of life here and now. Lindsey showed me that in the abbatoir, but like the dumbass I am I forgot about that.

So yesterday, after holding me down through the afternoon, my ladies continued the cuddle puddle through the evening, returning to the bed to let the girls join us at bedtime. I slept fitfully, dreaming of my ladies crooning soft, wordless hymns as they drifted together in the middle of my Maw. In the morning, after the kids had breakfast in them and they and the ladies had gone about their day, Saffron took me by the hand and stepped to the Bedroom. I sighed.

"You gonna try to bribe me into forgetting about this?" She smiled at me, combing my hair back with her fingers.

"If you tell me you want that, I doubt I will ever object. Do you want that?"

"No? Fuck, I dunno. I just feel..." I trailed off, but she waited patiently, sitting tailor style on the edge of the Bed while I sank nearly to my knees in front of her. Eventually I sorted enough of my thoughts out to say, "I think there are couple things to unpack." She nodded, her apparent fascination with my hair letting me speak while still making me aware how she focused on me.

"Go on."

"First of all, I feel like everybody ignored how I'm the girls' mother, and I'm very much aware that I am one of five people in that position, which means I need to be as respectful of their decisions as they are of mine." I paused, thinking.

"Decisions. Opinions. Ideas. Shit, preconceptions?"

"Like?" I thought about that for a bit.

"Yeah, that gets to the rest of it. Where I'm from, most people would consider taking a kid to an execution to be some kind of child abuse." That got a puzzled look from her.

"Why?"

"Even seeing someone die is traumatic. Adults are supposed to protect kids from trauma. Fuck, the only reason we had anybody watch executions was to make sure that they happened, and happened in as painless a way as possible." Her confusion deepened, and I gave her a minute to express it.

"Why would anyone want an execution to be painless?" I shrugged.

"Hurting people hurts people. The more you hurt others, the easier it becomes to hurt others. We're all connected, and by hurting somebody else you can't help but hurt yourself." I paused.

"Y'know, the more of this I say, the more I think most of this is bullshit, but it's bullshit over a real thing, y'know?" At her slight wave, I continued.

"I think there's something real here, where seeing violence and harm is traumatic, and we ought to minimize all of it, but I think back in my old world it got coated over by bits of woo and arguments that felt good but didn't hold up. Like, people knew it needed to happen, but couldn't just come out and say it, so they put together all kinds of bullshit to sell it."

"So if someone has harmed others so much that there is no Just choice but to execute them, it ought be done painlessly, not for their sake, but for the sake of the executioner?" I thought about that, then nodded.

"Yeah, that's about the size of it."

"Well. I hadn't thought of that. Obviously. But... May I meditate on this and respond later?" I shrugged.

"Shit, sure. I'm kinda flattered that you're gonna actually think about it in the first place." She chuckled a little.

"So you, to forget that you are still my Goddess. Also, beyond that, the world of your birth had evolved and adapted and learned over the millennia, which ours has not."

"Yeah, not sure everything we did was better." She nodded.

"Just so. Which is why I will meditate upon that, upon how we can learn from the lessons of the world of your birth, perhaps to avoid repeating those mistakes, to learn from them and surpass them." I smiled.

"Would be nice."

"Was there anything else?" I sighed.

"Yeah, I kinda wasn't too happy about our kids being on a battlefield with monsters like the Spartans." She just shot me all the side eye, an impressive feat since she was looking right at me, still combing my hair out.

"Love, the Spartans were literally frozen solid. While some of them might have had the Endurance to survive that, possibly, they were no more capable of motion than so many statues. Beyond that, all of the Maenads were there. Each and every one. Which means that there were almost literally dozens of Maenads watching over each of our girls." She paused, thinking.

"Two of whom were Euryale and Stheno, who may themselves still be Gorgons as well as Maenads."

"How's that matter?"

"Even if one of the Spartans managed to thaw themselves? Those two could turn them into statues in truth." I sighed.

"Yeah, okay, I know. Some part of me realizes this was just a kind of highly chaperoned 'bring your daughter to work day'. But I'm still not happy about it." Her fingers threaded through my hair, she pulled me to her breast.

"On behalf of myself, Marie, and Tallulah, I apologize for worrying you, for doing something that upset you." I sighed.

"You guys didn't even think there was anything to be worried about, did you?" She shook her head, but before she could respond, I asked, "I get Marie, but why you and Tallulah?" She shrugged.

"Tallulah went along, mostly to provide a single adult who wouldn't be involved in the execution. She and Marie asked me if I wanted to attend, which meant I was fully aware of their plans." I sighed.

"Yeah. I get that you guys didn't mean to upset me, didn't mean to do anything to hurt the kids."

"But?"

"Up here?" I tapped my head.

"I get that. Down here?" I tapped my chest.

"Not so much." The Grin made an appearance.

"While some of that will require time and patience, might I perhaps distract your heart," she gently pulled me away, then slipped one hand down to my chest, "by manipulation of something further down?" Her fingers splayed across my belly. I rolled my eyes, laughing as I did.

"Tell me you just wanna bang me until I can't think straight." Faking solemnity, she nodded.

"I do, in fact, want to apply all of my Skills at intimate physical encounters to you, in order to... What was the term you used? Factory reset your emotional state?" I snickered, snorted, then laughed. Then stood up, which, since she didn't move her hand, slipped it down my front, while her fingers of her other hand tangling in my hair drew her up to her knees.

"Okay, go ahead, convince me." She frowned, absolutely hamming it up.

"I am reminded of how cavalierly you used me the other day."

"I thought you were okay with that?" A sly smile ruined her frown.

"Oh, I absolutely was. I loved every moment of it. But..."

"You wanna reverse those roles?" She nodded.

"Except you don't wanna hold back, because you don't have to?" Her tongue darted out to lick at her lips, and she nodded again. I thought about it, realized that while I needed to maybe talk with Tallulah and Marie and even Siobhan at some point about weird cultural disconnects, I wasn't up to that now, and above all Saffron was right, I had a bunch of assorted emotional baggage that could do with a bit of a reset.

"Okay." Hands taking a firm grip on me, she asked, "any preference?" She shifted to boy mode.

"This?" Then back to girl mode plus a bit.

"This?" I smiled at her, leaned in against the tug of her hair to brush my lips across hers.

"Any. All. Whatever you want, Kitten." I took a deep breath, closed my eyes.

"Wreck me." Forgot that whole 'strong enough to manhandle me' thing. Fuck it. Worth.