Part I – http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1082356.html
Part II – http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1082751.html
Part III – http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1091513.html
Part IV – http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1095923.html

Regine pulled up the computer program that kept all of her student data, glad once again that she had upgraded her machines just before the catastrophe. You could still buy computer parts in a few select enclaves, but their methods left something to be desired and they almost always included as much spyware as actual computer.

She performed a search on extant and incoming students into the school, and then performed the search two more times. “That…” She stared at the screen with a decidedly unpleasant feeling before finally raising her voice. “Hayley!”

“Yes, Director Regine?”

“Call in Luca Hunting Hawk and Michael VanderLinden. Now.”

~
Regine was gone, the door was closed, and her footsteps had faded away. Slowly, Cya let herself grin.

“That took her longer than I’d expected,” she admitted to Leo. She turned to look at him, a little concerned about his reaction. After all, they were his children too.

He was still watching the door, looking thoughtful and uncharacteristically somber. “This was the thing you told me about a while ago, isn’t it?”

“It is,” she agreed quietly. ”Twenty, thirty years ago would have been nice. But now… well…” Her grin had faded in the face of Leo’s solemnity. ”I wish we could do more, but I still haven’t found a way to break the oath.”

“It’ll help.” He looked over at her and smiled. “More than I could’ve managed.”

“There’s a bonus, too.” She felt her smile coming back. “As of five years ago… every student entering Addergoole is descended from Boom.”

Leo stared at her for a moment. Cya didn’t let the smile slip from her face, just watched him. She saw the surprise on his face slowly give way to amusement, and that give way to outright laughter.

“Of course they are.”

Cya let herself laugh when he laughed. ”It took a bit of doing and, uh, quite a bit of being pushy with some descendants,” she admitted. ”But Aunt Cya – grandma Cya – can always pay back favors.”

“Great Ancestor Doomsday.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek. She felt heat coming to her face. All these years, and she still felt a blush coming on every time he did that.

She grinned widely. She’d been a little worried he’d be angry… ”It was a long shot… but it worked. I wish I could be a fly on the wall when she finds out.” Which she would, and soon.

“Mm. I think I can come up with an excuse to go see my old Mentor.”

“…brilliant.” Cya’s grin grew even wider. ”Yes. I want to see how this falls out.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1097360.html. You can comment here or there.

Part I – http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1082356.html
Part II – http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1082751.html
Part III: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1091513.html

Cya was not smiling. It was very important for some reason that she was not smiling.

Regine had lived with Michael and Luke as her crew for quite some time, and she could predict with some accuracy what they might say in this situation.

“She’s not playing a game.” Luke had said that on more than one occasion. “Even when she is laughing, she is not playing, any more than you are. It’s important to remember that.”

Michael did not like to talk about Boom quite so much, although he seemed quite fond of Cloverleaf and several of their other projects. When he’d been advising Regine about this trip, he had said a few pertinent things, including “Remember you’re talking about her children and descendants. Remember how biased even you can be about your own blood.” and “If she smiles, she’s comfortable, confident. If she stops smiling, you might do well to be worried.”

The expression on Cya’s face right now was intense. She had leaned forward, she hand her hands on her lap, and she looked as if she would just as easily skin Regine as allow her access to her children.

Leofric’s expression, on the other hand, was carefully neutral. Regine was uncertain she had ever seen him looking quite that blank. It was more than a bit disturbing.

Regine was worried. Luke and Michael had both told her she should be worried and now — now she understood why. She cleared her throat.

“Your terms,” she repeated carefully. “You want a ‘get out of jail free’ pass for each one of your descendants?”

“Each one of the Addergoole descendants of Boom,” Cya clarified.

“Hrrmph.” Regine gave honest consideration to the data she wanted. Was she willing to give in this far to this particular woman, just for data?

Of course she was. The question truly was, could she do so in any sort of good grace? Regine cleared her throat. “And you’re looking for an agreed-upon staff intervention into any one situation that the student finds untenable?”

“Here.” Cya reached for a stack of paper and a pen on her side table. Regine noted that as Cya leaned over and began writing — with a fountain pen, no less — she kept in contact with Leofric, her side pressed against his leg. She wrote without hesitation, her handwriting crisp and legible even upside-down.

Regine took a moment to contemplate her crew’s responses. Luke would probably be glad. MIchael might be ambivalent — they were going through another cycle in which the Daeva’s Students were the most likely to cause problems for other students.

The others? Shira Pelletier would give Regine that tired, knowing look and say only the Boom children? How is that fair? and Regine would have to answer because Boom happened to hold on to a nasty negotiator who trained at the feet of Feu Drake, although the answer could be just as easily Because Boom is still a crew.

In her particularly self-aware moments, Regine wondered how much of what Boom had become, she had wrought. In morbidly thoughtful moments, she wondered if she had truly wrought her own destruction.

“There.” Cya glanced at Leo, waited for a nod, and then turned the paper around so that Regine could read it more easily. “As discussed.”

Regine read the paper twice. It was exactly as they had discussed, the language suitable for a lawyer.

This woman who had not gone to college had not only written the laws for three city-states, she’d founded a university, Regine remembered. She was not stupid. She read the paper a third time.

She found nothing she could argue with, nothing except the general premise of the agreement, which she was not, she believed, going to get Red Doomsday to budge from.

She signed.

Epilogue – http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1097360.html

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1095923.html. You can comment here or there.

Part I – http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1082356.html
Part II – http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1082751.html

Regine barely managed not to gape at Cya like a fish. But the fiend was still going. “In addition, I want access to all of the data you access in this manner.”

Regine could not help a supercilious eyebrow raise, no matter how many times Mike had told her Do not raise your eyebrows at her. Do not. “Do you think you can follow the genetic data?”

“Well, if I can’t, my house geneticist can.” Cya shrugged as if a lifetime of studying genetics was nothing.

Regine cleared her throat. “Well. Be that as it may, I’m not going to allow your descendants to skip out on the Addergoole school. That might be as much as half of my population by this point.”

“Skip out?” Cya laughed. “No, I can’t imagine you’d agree to that. No. Just an agreement that, while attending Addergoole, each and every one of Boom’s descendants gets a pass. One time, when they’re in over their heads — bad Keeper, bad promise, the current big-bad-wolf — you, the staff, will help them out of it. The Keepings aren’t real, the promises aren’t real, you’re not damaging the Law by doing so.”

“But what lesson do we teach them, if they can get out of trouble at the first drop of a hat?” Regine had conducted this argument several times over the decades. She didn’t flinch.

And neither did Cya. The smile grew, as a matter of fact, and got sharp. Her voice was edgy now. “You’d be teaching them that the adults who Mentor them are their backup, are there to protect and guide them. You’d be teaching them to have allies.”

“We teach them to have crews, to find help and allies in their cy’ree, to be friends with their former Keepers and Kept.”

“After their first year. You isolate them from other first-year students, do not push the idea of a Mentor until they are either already collared or soon to be, and sometimes allow the interference of the Keeper in Mentor choice. The staff generally frowns on the idea of first-year students finding crews, and, while you may pretend to like and encourage them, you discourage crews actively standing up for one another.” Cya was still lounging against her couch, but her words were anything but casual.

And they were accurate. “It’s proven beneficial to encouraging the Keeper-Kept relationship…”

“Which you encourage, I assume, to ‘encourage’ the production of more little babies for your project. A point which is pretty moot when you do not allow students to leave until they’ve provided you with those babies.”

“Students also need to understand the dangers of Keeping and the problems inherent in both sides of the relationship before they are out in the world,” Regine insisted. Now Cya was no longer smiling. Regine was not sure that was an improvement.

“I’m certain you’re aware that you and I will never agree on that point. Be that as it may, there are other ways to encourage Keeping, and by encouraging good Keepings and allowing the possibility that the ‘trapped’ Kept could ask for a reprieve, you allow students to understand what a healthy Keeping should look like, before they go out in the world and perpetuate bad habits.”

Regine opened her mouth and closed it again, her lips curling into a frown. “Surely you’re not insinuating that Addergoole is responsible for the actions of its students once they’ve graduated?”

“No. I’m saying that you and your choices are responsible for a great deal of misery in the world. However,” Cya plowed on blithely, “that doesn’t matter. You’ve done some awful things, and now you want a favor from me. Does that about sum it up?”

Regine bit her tongue and counted to ten. “I come asking a favor of you, yes,” she answered levelly.

“Therefore, your justifications really don’t matter. The question is: will you agree to my terms?”

Part IV: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1095923.html

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1091513.html. You can comment here or there.