some thoughts about aura blackquill
major spoilers for dual destinies
you are twenty-one when your parents die; your brother is twelve and suddenly all that you have is each other, and finishing graduate school (early, because it seems genius and tragedy run in your blood) becomes an impossible mountain.
you do it anyways, because you have no choice. you get home from grueling lab days to find that your brother has made you both dinner. you don’t talk about it; instead you bicker over your stolen eyeliner and his wrong opinions about your favorite tv shows
you graduate; when you look down from the stage you see a thirteen year old sitting in a sea of parents and relatives, and you promise yourself then, up on that stage, that you will do anything to protect him
you decide to work for the government because your parents always warned you that the private sector would chew you up and spit you out, and so you accept the job offer from the cosmos space center.
it is six months before you meet Her, and eight before you are partnered together. you have never been good with people, have an even worse record with friendships, and yet the two of you latch together like tangled wires
you meet her daughter, athena. there are parts of yourself that you see in her — uncomfortable ones, mostly — but she’s just a child, so you push your reservations down, and eventually you find that she feels like your own child. this above all is the biggest change — in metis and athena you’ve gained what you’ve lost. you’ve balanced the equation, though your parents are still there in the back of your mind, like the ghost of an erased attempt at a problem
simon meets athena before metis, and you can tell immediately that he is to athena as you are to him. it’ll be good for him, you hope, teenaged and largely friendless as he is, to have a little sister. you’ve found that protecting gives you a way not to think about yourself
and then you are a family. you have a family. things are uncomplicated as long as you don’t pry too hard into your own feelings for metis, which you assume will be rejected. metis was just built for better things than loving you
things like — like ponco and clonco, like the headphones she asks you to build for athena, like every paper she publishes and conference she attends, every life her research improves —
like your her daughter, who you think might someday change the world —
and then everything implodes.
you’ve been here before, you realize, except this time you do lose everything.
metis, dead, and simon, who you should have known would take the fall, good and kind as he now pretends he isn’t,
and athena, who the system takes from you, and really, how could you have expected anything different, because you never told metis how you felt
and when athena’s gone and simon’s gone and metis is gone, you find that all you have left are some hunks of metal and your own anger. it’s not healthy, how the blame goes in every direction, but you convince yourself it’s better than tearing out your lungs
and so you become the woman who’s lost, the one who hates, the one who takes twelve people hostage in a desperate attempt to fix all the ways she’s failed
and then, when it’s all over and the dust settles, you become the woman behind bars, the one who burned her life down, the one who’s burdened by forgiveness that she doesn’t think she deserves
(athena and simon are too good for you, you know. and you wish, then, that it had been you instead)
