Milliways Again

[her_imperial_radiance]

It lurks. Oh how it lurks.

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[her_imperial_radiance]

Orfeo laughs. "I don't think he would, no. A few supernaturals have named kids Isabella - I think there are three, now, a puppy and an adopted human and a quarter-vampire - but no one has tried naming anyone after Edward."

[prima_sequentem]

"What would you name your kids, if you had any?"

[her_imperial_radiance]

"Haven't really thought about it," he said. "Would be up to my - well - heh. I didn't exactly forget you were my imprint when I started that sentence, but I have a script for this kind of question, you know? And wolf guys are pretty much not supposed to date apart from imprints. Too much potential for predictable heartbreak and drama. So I've always figured if I ever had kids at all..." He shrugs. "Then by that point I would be pretty thoroughly bossable on that or any other question."

[prima_sequentem]

"I don't intend to be particularly bossy," says Libby. "I never exactly said why I run a massive international organization, did I?"

[her_imperial_radiance]

"I don't think you did," he agrees.

[prima_sequentem]

"Well, there are a lot of reasons, but the most relevant one is this: I like to find where people fit, and put them there. Not just in terms of location, but in terms of what they're doing, who they know, the whole situation of their life. Which is also why I am doing all the recruiting for Bella's new government. I'm your imprint; where you fit, the place you'll be happiest and most productive, is with me. But there's a lot of leeway for fine details once that's settled. And even though I bet you'd be satisfied with pretty much anywhere I decided to put you as long as it was nearby and doing me some good, I don't just want you to be satisfied because it's what your imprint wants. I want to find where you fit, as yourself; the best place you can be, given the obvious constraints."

She smiles slightly.

"Does that make sense?"

[her_imperial_radiance]

"Maybe?" he hazards.

[prima_sequentem]

"Can you tell me what parts don't make sense, so I can try again?"

[her_imperial_radiance]

"I don't mean partly, I mean maybe," he says. "I have a working mental picture, I just don't know if it's sensible or not."

[prima_sequentem]

"Okay. Why might it not be sensible?"

[her_imperial_radiance]

"I'm not clear if people have 'fits' in the sense I'm picturing," he says. "I mean, single ones per person even setting aside the fine details, anyway. Maybe I do, but if you don't have werewolves, that's not something you're usually using as a guideline. And if people have fits, I'm not sure what 'putting' them there would mean, and I'm coming up with weird guesses that involve more physically picking them up and depositing them places than you probably use."

[prima_sequentem]

"All right... how about I give you some examples," she suggests. "Besides the most obvious one of Bella, who is mostly putting herself in the place she fits, which is benevolent sorcerer-empress of the universe in case you were wondering. I'm just giving her the occasional hand there. For a better example: I had this student a few years back who was an absolutely brilliant cryptographer, but cryptography was absolutely the last thing she wanted to do with her life. I had a certain amount of fellow feeling for her, one math genius to another, and I hated to see her heading straight for a career path where learning the subject made her happy but the work was going to make her miserable."

She taps her fingers together in her lap.

"So I asked her about her other hobbies, and she said she liked listening to music, which didn't immediately set any wheels turning. But then I was talking to another friend of mine who was trying for the third time in two years to put a band together. Incredibly talented musician, perpetually disorganized, enthusiastic but bad at follow-through. And I realized that if I put the two of them in a room, they would probably get along really, really well. And she was more than organized enough for the both of them. So I introduced them to each other, and he convinced her to try playing the keyboard, which she took to with all the energy and capacity for mathematical analysis she had been putting into her schoolwork up to that point; they called up the guitarist I'd suggested on this guy's second try, she was willing to give it another shot, and the three of them are now a successful indie rock band."

[her_imperial_radiance]

"Huh," says Orfeo. "It probably wouldn't have occurred to me to call that sort of thing 'fit' but it's cool."

[prima_sequentem]

"It's not that I believe every single person has exactly one spot they're meant to go," she says. "It's not like a jigsaw puzzle, it's more like... a mosaic. I have this field of coloured rocks in front of me and every single one is a different shape, and I can see that if I move this one over here it'll fit in way better than it does where it's sitting. Except that people are obviously a lot more complicated than rocks, and their 'shapes' change over time. Like you, for example. If you'd never laid eyes on me, you definitely wouldn't fit best in my universe. But you did, so now you do, and we have to figure out how and where."

[her_imperial_radiance]

Orfeo nods. "Well... what else do you need to know?"

[prima_sequentem]

"That's the tricky part. Sometimes I don't know what the thing I need to know is until I know it. So really I just need to know you as well as I possibly can—your sister, too, if she comes with us, because then I need to find a fit for her too. But bringing us back to the reason I started saying all this in the first place, I don't get anything out of overriding you on preferences like naming hypothetical future children. That's exactly the kind of thing where if you had an opinion, I'd want to know about it and take it into account."

[her_imperial_radiance]

"Oh. Well, I haven't thought about it, but I can, if you want me to," he said, furrowing his brow. But he looks vaguely confused by the entire idea. For some reason "imprint" and "mother of his children" are not snapping together much less hypothetically than they ever did before. "I don't think Elena will want to stay, if she doesn't have to," he adds. "She likes video games. Moving to 2005 would be hard on her."

[prima_sequentem]

"In that case, I hope we don't need her to."

[her_imperial_radiance]

Orfeo nods solemnly. "This is probably really hard on her. She sees herself like a buffer between me and the world. Our half-sisters tended to pick on us and when our parents didn't catch it, she'd wind up defending me - and then the role of our sisters was played by 'everything else in the world', later on, when we were all a little more grown up."

[prima_sequentem]

"This may be a pipedream, but I'm still hoping to find a solution that doesn't leave anybody actively unhappy."

[her_imperial_radiance]

"Tunnel between the worlds?" Orfeo suggests. "Can your sorcerer-empress do that?"

[prima_sequentem]

"We've never tried. Another thing to put on the list of experiments."

[her_imperial_radiance]

Orfeo nods. "So... what's it like, not having any wolves or vampires around? I've lived around and in packs, near covens, all my life..."

[prima_sequentem]

"Good question," says Libby. "I could ask the same thing in reverse. My aunt's an ingot, so I have been generally aware of magic all my life, but I never actually met a non-aunt magical person until much later."

[her_imperial_radiance]

"...Okay, going by comparisons to movies and stuff... I assume everybody I meet can live forever if they have the least interest in doing that. I divide relationships into 'fated perfect eternal' and 'doomed'. I grew up referring to myself as though I were a baby dog instead of a baby goat and so did most of my friends. People around me don't get sick. If we get injured, it's over with in a week, and that's if we were seriously mauled and shot full of venom just shy of killing us. Within a pack, the silent treatment is not an option - telepathy is not optional. Wolves are at the bottom of the mental totem pole among the supernaturals until you get down to some pretty thinly bred hybrids, but compared to people I see on TV or that I've interacted with while out in human civilization, I think we might really be quicker or something - I'm not talking myself up personally, but they don't seem to operate on the same time scale, and that makes sense, we move faster than them. I'm not used to adults aging, and it weirds me out to see movies made by the same actor ten years apart. Everybody around me at home is buffer and prettier than random people I see in Oslo or wherever. No one complains when it's time to move furniture for some reason. My friends are all on liquid diets or capable of demolishing supposedly family-sized packages of anything for morning snacks." He pauses. "Does that help?"