For Siege‘s Prompts.

If Jean had learned anything in the five years he’d been married to Zoe (and twice that if you included dating), it was that when her family said “tradition,” the best thing to do was to shut up and get out of the way. Zoe’s family did tradition like it was a religion, an obsession, and an obligation all wrapped up into one.

So when she told him, over lunch with her mother and her grandmother, that it was time to start planning the family reunion, Jean asked, wisely, he hoped, “what can I do to help?” Not quite as wisely, he added, “I’ve been with you for ten years now, and I’ve never heard of you guys doing a reunion.”

Zoe’s irrepressible Grandma Francis cackled gleefully. “We can’t stand each other, so we only do it every seventeen years. We let weddings and funerals fill in the gaps in between.”

It turned out, as three generations of Carter women explained to him, that planning this thing was a year-long event, much like their wedding had been. For one, they all stressed, every Carter still living had to be invited. Every one.

Lists came out: their wedding guest list, Jean’s family tidily crossed off. Grandpa Herbert’s funeral consolation-card list (Jean had never heard of such a thing), likewise with people X’d off. Birth announcements. Death announcements. Wedding photos. And, hidden in the back of his mother-in-law’s closet, the extensive preparations from the last Carter Family Reunion.

A new list was made, and checked, and checked again. Flow charts were made. More begats flew over Grandma Francis’ kitchen table than there were in the entire Bible. Divorces, affairs, bastard children – the gossip flew with a cheerful malice and a lot of sniggering. Carter women had, Jean learned (not for the first time), amazingly ditry senses of humor. He spent a lot of time drinking with his father-in-law and brothers-in-law, only to find them just as obsessed, and gossiping just as much; in the middle of a beer, Dad Carter would shout into the room, “Hey, did you remember Amber? That stripper with her kid we’re pretty sure is Uncle Todd’s?”

“Really?”

“Really,” his brother-in-law assured him. “The eyes. And, well, the habit of shoving dollar bills into little girl’s dresses. That’s all Uncle Todd.”

Eventually, it seemed as if everything had been planned, everyone invited. The biggest three pavilions at the local state park had been rented, the caterers booked, the decorations purchased, the invitations sent. Zoe was still frowning, though, and Jean hated it when she was unhappy.

“What is it, hon?” he asked, in a rare moment he got her alone.

“I feel like we’re missing someone.”

“That’s natural. You’ve invited half of the state, by this point it has to feel like you’ve been staring at lists for a century.” He knew that’s how he felt.

“No, I mean… I really think we missed someone.” He couldn’t talk her out of it, and for days, she wandered around frowning, lips pursed, eyes squinched. Finally, at just about the least appropriate moment, she shouted “Claude!”

“Jean,” he corrected.

“No, no.” She sat up and pulled her robe on, reaching for her phone at the same moment. “We forgot Claude.”

Claude, it turned out, was the son of Aunt Helga and her estranged ex-husband; the boy had been born about sixteen years ago, and soon afterwards, former-uncle-Adam had filed for divorce, taken custody of their young son, and vanished. Nobody had tried to stop them; as Grandma Francis put it, “Everyone knew Helga was a crazy bat already. Good for the boy getting out. But now we have to find him.”

The whole family turned to Jean. “I knew you married a PI for a reason,” he grumbled.

“Please?” Zoe’s puppy-dog-eyes were legendarily. Her father still winced when she turned them on. “It’s important, Jean.”

“They probably are happier not being connected with the family,” he offered, already knowing he’d lost. “Helga’s pretty bad. I wouldn’t want to come back, if were them.”

“Adam doesn’t have to. But Claude needs to be here. It’s important,” his mother-in-law reiterated. “Very important.”

Grandma Francis added the magic words. “We’ll pay your going rate.”

“Important it is,” Jean agreed. He and Zoe were trying to have a baby. He couldn’t afford to be proud about money.

Tracking down former-Uncle-Adam turned out to be not a very hard proposition. He’d moved two cities away and started going by his middle name and a variant spelling of his last name – nothing complex, but if the Carters had chosen not to go after him, he probably hadn’t needed anything elaborate. Once Jean and Zoe paid him a visit, however, things began to get tricky.

“I’m glad I got out when I did,” Adam admitted, “and I never want to go back, but if Helga and I had a son, she never told me about it.” He lived in a one-bedroom walk-up, a nice place, but nothing fancy. There were no signs of a child anywhere around.

What was more, Jean had a knack for telling if people were lying – a side effect of his job as an investigator. Former-Uncle Adam wasn’t lying; he had no idea what they were talking about.

But neither had Zoe and her family been lying when they’d told stories about Adam bringing Claude around, cradling him, packing him up in the middle of the night and leaving. And now, Zoe was white and tight-lipped. “I was afraid of this,” she whispered.

“What?” Gruesome images floated through his mind, but all he asked was “did we get the wrong Uncle Adam?”

“No, this is him. But… this is why we have reunions, Jean. Why we stay close to our family.” She stood and, followed by the bemused eyes of both Jean and Adam, walked to a wall between two doorways. “We, ah. We tend to fade if we don’t.”

“Fade?” Fade. Was she losing it? Her family had a history of mental illness.

“Fade. We’re, ah, a little bit imaginary. I’m sorry, I meant to tell you eventually. But what it means is, we need each other to anchor ourselves here. It’s why what the cousins did to Helga is so bad, ignoring her like that. But she deserved it.” She opened a door. Jean could have sworn she’d been staring at a wall, but then she opened a door. “Claude? Claude, you can come out now.”

Jean knew he was staring; he could feel Adam staring as well. “Claude?” Adam whispered. “Claude? Oh, oh, shit, son, son, come on out.”

As the father and very thin, almost transparent teen requited, Jean found himself looking at his wife. “A little bit imaginary?”

“Only if you don’t believe in us.” He had never seen her look so vulnerable. But he had never believed so fiercely in her, either, or in her love. He smiled, the sideways smirk she liked so much, and made it a joke.

“I’ll believe in you when as long as your grandma’s check clears.” He’d had imaginary friends growing up, more than real ones. He was pretty sure he could handle an imaginary wife.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/328526.html. You can comment here or there.

For ellenmillion‘s Prompts.

When Silver Hawk’s daughter was born forty weeks to the day after Paradox Maverick died, we tried not to hope.

People come back. We’d always known that, or at least we’d always heard it. There were whispers, rumours. Hints in the old books, if it was RitualView who was doing the reading, RitualView who could really read those things.

(Not like me. Me, I hit things.)

And Paradox’s death had already been littered with strangeness. First the death itself – not a clean death, not a fall the way Game Alpha had gone down, or Detonator Two, but a sparklie death, of all things, falling into a quadrillion tiny shards of silver.

We’d swept her up and waited, but there was no mind there, no soul, as far as we could tell. So we mourned her, buried her, and tried to move on.

But the first day of the funeral, and every day for three weeks, a casserole showed up at our doorstep. Mac and cheese. I never knew there were that many kinds of mac and cheese. At the door to our lair, mind you. No attacks. No poison, just a casserole full of tasty goodness when none of us felt like making food.

And the weirder stuff. The paper that printed the obit burned down. Little silver trinkets kept showing up all over town. We got e-mails from nobody, e-mails that sounded like they had to be from Paradox.

CanoJade locked himself in his room and wouldn’t come out for three weeks. RitualView locked herself in the library. And then we found out Silver Hawk was pregnant.

Not mine. Not Cano’s. Not Barrage Scorpion’s. As far as Hawk was telling, the baby wasn’t anyone but hers. Her right, of course. But it made it all a bit more mysterious. And we were sort of up to our eyeballs in mystery.

When Marciana was born, we tried to put all that behind us. Of course, we were also looking at the calender, and back at Marce, and back at the calendar. Thinking about Paradox. Thinking about the stories of those who came back.

It was hard not to look at this tiny thing, small enough for me to hold her in my hands, and not look for signs of Paradox Maverick. It was hard not to think every time she smiled, “Pari had dimples like that. She hated them.” It was hard not to hope.

It didn’t get any easier as she got older. Everything she said, everything she did. Her first words – “get ‘em,” practically Pardox’s catchphrase. Her first steps. And her first birthday.

On her birthday, we ate mac and cheese. On that first birthday, and then on every birthday. It was easier to celebrate that than it was to celebrate Paradox’s death – but doing it that way just made it easier to forget Paradox was really gone, and easier to think of Marciana as a returned Paradox.

Returned paradox. That should have told us what we needed to know. Peri had never been predictable. She’d never been regulatable. She’d never been within normal parameters.

But we were blinded by hope and by love, and we held Marciana close to us, hoping to see our Maverick in her features, or hear her in the girl’s voice. We kept looking, kept holding on (and kept eating mac and cheese), year after year, birthday after birthday. Even when Marciana began to get angry with it, began to mold herself into an agent of the most regimented order in rebellion. Even when we should have known better. Even when it was too late.

If we hadn’t been so focused on Marciana, if we hadn’t been blind to any other possibilities, we might have remembered that our side wasn’t the only one to suffer losses in that fight. And we might have remembered, too, that our side wasn’t the only one to bench a warrior to maternity leave nine months later.

Our Paradox Maverick came back to us, all right. If only we’d been thinking about exactly how she’d do so.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/326661.html. You can comment here or there.

For kay_brooke‘s Prompt and stonetalker‘s Prompt

Names from Fourteen Minutes

When the Irvill won the war against the redacted, they did not celebrate. They didn’t even mention it. They cleaned up, swept up, imprisoned the few remaining redacted, and razed the redacted city to the ground, planting fast-growing vines over every inch of the land to further obscure the ruins.

The Irvill had survived horrors at the hands of their ancient enemy, been enslaved, tortured, and suppressed for generations. They could have, some said should have, been throwing parties, marching in parades, singing songs about their victory. But to do so, the Wise argued, would have been to give the redacted power that they did not deserve. Worse, it would entrench in memory the atrocities that had been done to them, making them forever a nation of victims.

The Wise were called thus for a reason, and so they were heeded. The few surviving redacted were imprisoned, enslaved, or executed, banned from ever speaking of their home nation, banned from ever mentioning that redacted had existed. All mentioned of redacted were stricken from the records of the city, back to the oldest books, the best-made statues. In a generation, the Wise declared, it would be as if the redacted had never existed.

Within the city-state of Irvya, this worked fairly well. The Wise had a wide reach, having been the only government the redacted had allowed the Irvill. While they worked on replacing themselves with a secular, elected council, they could still censor everything they wished to, and they did, with a broad and liberal hand.

But they had no such control of the other city-states of the Aniorg peninsula… indeed, having been a vassal-state for more than three centuries, they hardly knew the other city-states existed until their envoys came knocking on their gates. The Wise could negotiate, and did; they could sign treaties, and did. They could broker trade, and did so with glee. But they could not convince the other city-states to stop talking about redacted.

It became a bone of contention, and from the bone, a monster was grown. The Noremintim were the first: their envoy laughed at the wise.

“You cannot make a nation go away by saying so,” the envoy declared.

“We have made them go away,” the Wisdom who was negotiating the treaty declared, “and we say they never were.”

War followed quickly. The Irvill had learned much from their former masters, and more from destroying them. This battle was quick, sharp, and nearly painless, a scalpel rather than a sword. The Noremintim, wishing to keep their own name, learned quickly to forget about the redacted.

They had not been expecting the attack. The Euserglio had some idea, and thus gave the Irvill a bit more trouble. The Damiendan managed to stay quiet about the redacted for almost two decades, until their new, young king said something unwise.

There was almost no-one alive in Irvya who could remember the redacted when the armies of the Wise finished conquering the Aniorg peninsula.

The leader of their army, a Wisdom who had been a youth when they had won their freedom, sat in a chair in the highest tower in the land, overlooking what they had conquered. He was dying, of age and a lifetime of war and old injuries. But he had been born a slave, and he was dying an Emperor.

“All for want of a parade,” he whispered, and died.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/325492.html. You can comment here or there.

For Lilfluff‘s Prompt.

Several generations before Learn-to-Knit-Day (LJ)

“So what are we doing again?”

“Lost Day!” Raquel, Smith Tertia Vestis, grabbed Ward, Jones Secondus Ludicrum, by the hand, dragging him down the hall of the megacomplex.

“You misplaced a day? There’s a bureau for that.”

“No, no. It’s my personal holiday. I get to take one person with me, and I tapped you.”

“Don’t I have some say in the matter?”

“If you ever read your forms, you would have.” She stopped to grin at him. “Look, it’s just an extra holiday for you, because my Personal Holiday Form says I require a friend to celebrate Lost Day with.”

“What, pray tell, is Lost Day?” He held up his free hand. “If you tell me it’s your personal holiday again, I’m going to throw things.”

“I started back in University. The first time was an accident – I missed a day of classes because I’d gone driving with a friend and gotten lost, so I had to burn a personal day to stay out of trouble. After that, well, I’d declared Being Lost to be my personal holiday.”

“Seriously? How do you celebrate that?”

“Like this.” She took a random left turn down a hall. “It’s why it’s celebrated on a Saturday.”

“It’s… Raquel, what’s in the backpack?”

“Three days’ worth of food and clothing for both of us, and enough chits for restaurants and hotels if we can find one. We’re getting lost, Ward. Really, truly, Lost.”

“I…” She had an amazingly strong grip. “I bet this was easier when there were cars.”

“This was easier,” she confided, “before all the Regulations.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/324824.html. You can comment here or there.