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[babies]

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pythia

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[preborns]

[There’s a soft huff of annoyance, at the thought that Alia’s hormones have pushed her anywhere – forgetting the training room, clad only in her own sweat and droplets of water from the bath, forgetting the close thopter cockpit, shoulder-to-shoulder with the ghola, with the man-who-wasn’t-a-man, the way both situations (eyes on her, eyes on her body, her back, her thighs, her chest) made her blood grow hotter, her pulse thrum like a beast. Choosing not to think of nights in Paul and Alina’s bed, the glue between them, squirming into the warm, close space in her flowing nightgowns, finding the sticky sleep-hot crook of Paul’s neck to nuzzle, feeling Alina’s soft curves mould to her back like a second blanket.

Those thoughts stay locked away, far from Jessica’s prying eyes – let her think infatuation and hormones and youthful blood responsible. Do not expose the inner, bleeding core of who you are, Alia, for the disdain and disapproval of your mother. Do not reveal that your heart is promised, claimed, as much as Leto had claimed Jessica’s own heart. She learned love before her birth, drank it along with the bile in her womb, fed on it like a wobbly-kneed calf on it’s mother’s milk. Love for Leto, love for Paul, love (she imagined, she lied to herself) for her. Love and love and love. She would never purge herself of it, and sometimes – sometimes Alia wishes she’d been raised on poison instead. She would never long for poison the way she does for love.

She opens her mouth to retort, to say something snide about the strategic advantages of coital alliances when there’s a sweep of Jessica’s foot, and Alia is tumbling onto the mat, breath leaving her in a rush, wide eyes staring at the ceiling. Her mouth parts – to yell, to retort, to let loose her indignation, but instead. Instead she laughs, props herself up on her elbows, shakes her head, hair coming loose from her braid already.]

You’ve never coddled me. [Huffy, fond, aching, everything she is writ across her face for an instant – lonely and wild and snarling and wanting, always wanting, always scouring the missives from Caladan for some sign, some clue that she’s been forgiven for her crimes of existence, of birth.] And I expect nothing from you. [Alia rises, slowly, makes a show of brushing her clothes off.]

[babies]

( she tips an eyebrow, silently accusatory, aiming attention at the falsehood in the room with them. jessica doesn't need to listen to the rushing tide in alia's blood to pinpoint the lie — her presence is a testament to familial obligation, her resentment proof of a grudge born and belonging to a mother that is and isn't jessica. it would be a greater truth, jessica believes, if alia were to claim she has come in search of something inexplicable, something even she cannot name, under the guise of counsel — love, or punishment.

girl that she still is, it seems she hasn't yet learned love and punishment are one and the same. thorns, by any other name. )

Then behave like it.

( instead of this image of a creature alia has presented: petulant with a golden spoon in her mouth, all of the childish temperament her son had learned to let pass over him as a wave, despite his youth. all of the girlishness jessica and her sisters had never permitted themselves to entertain. she doesn't waste time allowing alia's performance continue — seconds into alia returning to her feet, she latches onto alia's hand — and uses the leverage to try to toss her back, pinned down by jessica's knee to her stomach. unrelenting, unsympathetic. repetition, until the lesson sinks in, until her frustration lends itself to something productive.

her knee presses harder. strands of swept hair dangle into jessica's vision, a stare that bears down into alia, the color of electrified thunder. love and punishment. one and the same. )

Such weighted words you spoke before, daughter. ( do not speak to me of knives. i have not been idle. jessica's gaze says, prove it. ) I expected more from this showing.