Chương 947: Day Nine Hundred And Forty-Five

Dear Diary, Yeah, I been talking about how I've fucked up, and why, and basically spent the past couple days pulling my head out of my ass, but I still haven't done the hardest part of making things right. Because the person I hurt worst, I think, was Marie. I've thought about it a lot, and I think one of the biggest reasons she's into me is because from the very first, I treated her like a person.

Not like part of the murderfuck cult, not like the living incarnation of Nightmare Fuel she looks like when she's bedraggled and wet, but like a whole assed person with a vibrant inner world and shit. I mean, that's not why I did it; or not really. I did it because she is a person, and I saw that maid's uniform and some part of me balked at the idea of treating anybody like 'the help'. Like they only had a name as a convenient label to summon them when there was dirty work to be done.

That shit does not sit right with me, so I treated her like a person, and that tiny bit of caring was more than she'd had in centuries. I'm honestly not even sure the Maenads had been taking care of each other all that well.

Between D not being around, which apparently leaves them a little out of sorts, and everyone around treating them as obviously not human, I think they kinda fell into a role, into a mold, and while Marie really enjoyed the role itself, that role came to define them, maybe even more than their Maenad-hood. I mean, I'm not sure, I'm just spitballing and tryna come up with an explanation for how such beautiful elemental incarnations of murderfuck wound up so straight laced and repressed.

I guess between Marie being able to handle more of the workload, Dionysus showing up on this side of the Atlantic, and all the remaining Maenads showing up, the Maenads who didn't enjoy their time as Maids got to explore other things. Okay, I'm not sure that's why she's still into me. The treating her like a person thing. Let's face it, while I'm not exactly sparing with my intimate affection, if I had to put everybody on a spectrum, she's way higher than 'person'. She's my Wife, and I love her.

I can think of a million reasons why, but when it comes to reasons she's into me, I guess that maybe a lot of them are parallels to why I love her. We've got a lot in common, after all. Okay, she's got class, and self-control, and she's gorgeous, where I'm crass, and wanton, and eighty percent scar tissue by body mass, but we're both way more physical than mental, while not actually being thoughtless idiots. Speaking of, I've still got to apologize to her.

So after spending most of yesterday focused on playing with the kids, and by that I mean both mine and our four visitors, while I Co-Located to do my bodyguard thing with Tallulah and Saffron, not to mention helping out around the Academy, I dropped the kids and Giselle off at the Temple of Love, then returned home to help Marie dish out dinner. Steaks, although for Lindsey and Ria they were some kind of fish steaks. Still seared nicely and done just enough on the inside, with plenty of butter.

Salads, although all the vegetables were kinda wilted, but the kids didn't seem to mind awfully much. I think it's 'cause we don't force any of them to eat any of it, but we've got enough kids that no matter what we throw on the table, at least one of them is into it, and that gets the other ones to at least try it. I still think we're gonna do something like pickled vegetables from here on out, just to avoid that awful wilted texture.

Floating in the Bath, I pulled Saffron over and asked, "how is the hunt for the Spartans going?"

"Incredibly slowly. Not only did the storms cover everything with snow and ice, the cold snap we've been otherwise hunkered down to endure has kept that ice mostly frozen. Worse, the few places where it's melted and refrozen have utterly eliminated any tracks."

"Can't we, I dunno, track them by scent?" I looked over at Marie, "you can smell them, right?" She sighed and shook her head.

"Washed Away." Saffron nodded.

"The Spartans might not be used to this kind of weather, but they understand how to avoid trackers." She frowned.

"I'm actually worried about that for multiple reasons."

"Like?" She shook her head, almost like she was trying to clear it.

"First and foremost, Spartans are rarely subtle. If they're being so even this much, it's because they're taking us, you mostly, seriously." If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

"Well. Shit. Can we Scry on them?" She shook her head again, this time in negation.

"I don't know if they're using Cold Iron to disrupt it, or using some kind of Shaping technique, or if Ares has Blessed them despite themselves, but we haven't been able to find them with Scrying." I sighed, then chuckled.

"Y'know, I never thought Scrying would turn out to be so useless for finding shit." She opened her mouth, then paused as if she'd just realized something.

"Not entirely useless, and I've only just realized what we can do."

"Go on?"

"We cannot Scry on the Spartans, but we now know that they were most of what interfered with our Scrying communication with our watchtowers."

"Okay, yeah, but how does that help?" She nodded.

"We can't Scry on them. But we can Scry on our watchtowers, on our towns, on our Cities and roads and homesteads and farms."

"Unless the Spartans are... Oh, shit, that's brilliant." Then the other side of it hit me.

"Wait, no, that's... That's gonna require more Scrying than me and Larry did back at Lancaster House."

"By orders of magnitude, love. But..." She rolled over and laid her hands on my belly, bracing her chin on the backs of her hands.

"Using Scrying for communication means we have been training up an entire cadre of Heroes and Mages capable of Scrying." I sighed.

"Still gonna be a bit of a pain in the ass, especially if they're hiding in the woods or some shit." She nodded, acknowledging my point.

"It will. Of course, while Jack Frost only dealt with the Spartans who dared to invade Jackville, the winter itself is far harsher than the Spartans are used to. With any luck, they've mostly been holed up trying to endure, only without all the preparation and advantages we've spent the past two years building up."

"Or they've taken over some poor farmer's homestead," I said quietly. She sighed and nodded.

"If they did, given the bestial nature and actions of the ones we've managed to catch so far, it's likely too late for anything but vengeance for those farmers."

"Tell me when you find them." She nodded.

"We will. Honestly, we must, if we are to have a chance of dealing with them."

"C'mon, we gotta have some Heroes who can go toe to toe with them." She rocked her head back and forth.

"Possibly? But it's not a question of combat talent."

"Then what... Oh, shit, mobility." She nodded.

"So do you want me stomping them, or deploying Heroes?" She thought for a second, then sighed.

"Making that decision with as little as we know now would be premature. So let's not?" I nodded.

"Okay. Lemme know if your Scrying Corps needs Mana."

"We will, love." After everybody had a good long soak in the Bath, we carried the kids down to bed. Before I fell asleep, Marie caught my eye, slow blinking at me. I couldn't ask for a better moment, so I snagged her and rolled us both to the Bedroom. She looked at me, her normal prim posture melting into an entirely different kind of tension.

"Wait." She froze, and I moved to her, my hands slipping into her hair.

"Wait, please. It's not that I don't wanna. It's that I gotta get something off my chest first." She stared down at my front, blinked, and said, "Like Them." I laughed.

"Not those, you big fuzzy nerd. No, I mean..." I sighed, slid my hands to her shoulders, then down her arms to interlace my fingers with her claws.

"I'm sorry." She raised an eyebrow.

"For What?" I closed my eyes. Opened them again. Stared into hers.

"I got angry at you, yelled at you, lashed out at you." I paused, but before she could reply continued.

"You didn't do anything wrong, but honestly that's not even an excuse. If you hurt me, I should tell you that you've done something that hurt me, not try to hurt you back." I waited a bit, but it seemed like she wanted to let me finish.

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done that, I'll try to do better in the future." I'm not sure how she did it, but she twisted her hands, brought hers and mine up to my cheeks.

"Forgiven, Vlickies." She pulled me in and kissed me. Not the tongue invasion I knew she could and still might do, but a gentle brush of her lips against mine.

"Love You."

"I love you too, Murder Mittens mine." When she pulled away, she asked, "Hurt You?" I shook my head.

"I mean, not really? I was hurt, but I think I hurt myself. You... You surprised me. Shocked me, really. But only because taking kids to an execution is just such a non-starter where I'm from." She frowned, but not at me.

"I Assumed." I turned my face to kiss the her palm.

"Yeah, well. So did I. I guess we made an ass out of Uma Thurman." She shot me a picture perfect 'WTF, Diaz?' look, and I couldn't help but laugh. Before I stopped her lips found mine again, and the talking kinda ended there. Okay, not entirely, but the rest of the night, and honestly most of today, the words were quiet affirmations, negotiations and confirmations of Consent, all sprinkled between hours and hours of the kind of quiet, gentle lovemaking that neither she nor I did on the regular.

I mean, we'd each done it with others, but normally she and I got kinda athletic. Today, though, was all about lingering touches, about exploring the detailed textures of parts intimate and not. She brought out the acupuncture needles at one point after I'd rubbed her down. One thing led to another after that, and the two of us tried out that two person attachment for the saddle. Only not cranking everything up to eleven, but instead keeping things slow, and lazy, and letting things happen at their own pace.

We talked about assumptions and kids and recipes and even, for a bit, what Sparta was like. Well, what it had been like for her as a girl. I already had a lot of reasons to be pissed at the Spartans. Now I've got another. My Murder Mittens can't talk quietly about her homeland without crying.