AU of the AU Apocalypse
Jun. 19th, 2012 12:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kasihyaA couple of separate doodles in an alternate universe where somehow everyone from The End of Days ends up living together in the suburbs of Violet's Earth. This is, like the Supernatural fic, me getting out all of my domestic ~feelings~. Neither of these are anything like finished. Or even make sense. Whatever.
Tanwen — 20
Eirian — 23
Ƈhatma — 24
Kephri — 21
Marat — 12
Alanna — 32
Violet — 16
Andras — 4
Oh my god, how awesome would that be? Like, okay, there are all of these people, and I am super-tempted to write a short story about the alternate universe where the survivors from the End of Days hit the reset button and ~somehow~ end up all living together in a house in Gallows Hill? And then they all raise Andras and Marat together, or whatever, and all of these adventures because Andras is five now, and it’s a whole new ball game, explaining to your kid that now there’s a whole new world out there, with new rules, and whatnot, and they’re all going to have to live by them but it’s okay because he’ll have other kids to play with now! But he’s grown up with this one family, all speaking the same metaphorical language and playing by post-apocalyptic rules, so how well are they all going to make this adjustment?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Maggie Corner had seen many things in her nineteen years as a real estate agent. Mostly, she worked for your typical white, middle-class couple looking for a house to raise their children, or one to move to after they had finished with the first. There had been other people too, of course: the increasing number of same-sex couples, the groups of recent college graduates looking for a communal home, and, on one memorable occasion, a group of religious sisters in search of a new place to found their convent. But she had never had prospective buyers quite like the ones she had on the phone now.
‘Yes, Miss Black,’ she said. ‘It’s on the left; if you keep going past Old Pitch Post Road, the sign is hidden behind a lilac tree. Turn directly left, and keep going. I’m standing outside right now.’ She puts her phone back into her pocket, and waits by the end of the driveway with her clipboard and pen.
Approximately thirty seconds later, a blue van with fake wood paneling comes barreling down the street. It slows abruptly as it approaches the house, and by the time it pulls into the driveway, it has reached a respectable crawl. The whole vehicle slides back a bit as the driver yanks on the brakes; Maggie winces. A strange assortment of people pile out of the van once it has been parked: the driver is a dark, curly-haired girl who looks barely old enough to have her license; the woman in the passenger seat could be her adoptive mother; but that fails to explain the three colorful young men who climb out of the back, assisting an adolescent boy with midnight-black skin and a woman about their age with a small boy in tow. Save for the young woman and the boy, none of them look at all related; they look as though they’ve all walked off of the poster for
The woman in the passenger seat walks up to Maggie and gives her a firm handshake. ‘Hi,’ she says, in her curious lilting accent. ‘I’m Alanna Black, we were just talking on the phone.’
Maggie’s knees nearly go weak with relief at the calm self-assurance in the woman’s voice; she likes working with people who have their act together. Better than the flighty, fidgety couple from this morning. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you, Alanna. I’m Maggie.’
Alanna smiles. ‘Good to meet you. This is my family: Violet,’ — the driver nods at her — ‘Julian,’ — the young man who looks like a member of a Japanese boy band tilts his head — ‘Ƈhatma,’ — the second young man waves enthusiastically — ‘Kephri,’ — Kephri turns out to be the Indian boy with yellow nail polish — ‘and Saorise, Marat, and Andras.’ The young woman gives her a small smile, the little boy clings to her hand, and the last member of their party gives her a mechanical wave.
‘Oh my, you have a large family,’ says Maggie, blinking, and then silently berates herself for sounding so surprised. People these days do all sorts of crazy things; the point is to sell them a house, not cast aspersions.
‘She’s my legal guardian these days,’ Violet says, with a jab of her thumb at Alanna. ‘And Marat’s. Everyone else is too old, but we’ve all been through the foster system together.’ She says the words freely, easily, but Maggie catches the flicker of resignation on her face. Ƈhatma drapes his arms over her shoulders and hugs her to his chest; she grabs his hands. They are hilariously mismatched, heightwise, but the effect is still heartwarming. Maggie smiles.
‘I’m glad you’re all still together,’ she says. ‘And now I can see why you needed such a large house. Come on in. The owners are out right now, but they gave me a key.’ She leads them up the driveway; the whole troupe straggles behind her.
As she guides them around the house, several things become abundantly clear to Maggie, with regards to this odd family. One, she’s fairly sure that the boy with the nail polish and the tall, lanky boy are a couple, as they do a lot of hand-grabbing and snickering together. Two, that at least some of them have been together for years: twice, she’s sure that they must be communicating telepathically. (Violet walks into a room. ‘Kephri!’ she shrieks. He pulls his hand away from the other boy and comes leaping over. ‘No,’ says Alanna, from the bathroom at the other end of the hall, ‘Stop it,’ and Violet and Kephri laugh like they’ve just shared some private joke, though as far as Maggie can tell, nothing has happened except for an exchange of glances.) Three, the smallest boy is not, in fact, the girl’s brother, but her son, and Boy Band Julian is the father. He runs between them like any other child would, and when he runs smack-dab into a glass door like he’s never seen one before in his life, Julian picks him
up and holds his face to his neck, looking simultaneously much too young and much too used to this already.
Violet attaches herself to Maggie about halfway through the tour, after the incident-that-wasn’t-really-an-incident with the bedrooms. ‘I like this house,’ she tells Maggie. ‘I don’t think we’re likely to buy it, though.’
‘Why not?’ asks Maggie, amused.
‘The yard doesn’t have enough trees, and we don’t have the capacity to add them,’ she says very seriously. ‘Not to mention that the house interior is a little … cramped. I’m looking forwards to the newer ones. More expensive, but more room for the human pterodactyl over there to spread his wings.’ Her eyes dart to Ƈhatma, who has picked up Tanwen and is carrying her, bridal style, up the stairs to the third floor. Julian follows them with little Andras, smirking. Maggie looks between them all and smiles.
The others don’t speak to Maggie much; it takes until halfway through the second house that she realizes that Marat and his parents don’t speak very much English. She has to go outside to take a phone call from her son (John, who is eight and still feels the need to call her after he gets home from school every day) and when she gets back in, she hears Tanwen and Ƈhatma talking in a sweeping, choppy language that is most definitely not English.
When they see her, Tanwen says something sharp to him and smiles at Maggie. Ƈhatma shrugs. ‘That sounds beautiful,’ Maggie says, which is not strictly true, but won’t likely hurt their sentiments towards her. ‘What language is that?’
Tanwen and Ƈhatma turn to each other in confusion. ‘I don’t know how you say in English, but we say it, Ixcatec.’
‘I don’t think they have a translation, honey,’ says Ƈhatma. Tanwen laughs. Maggie smiles because she’s not sure what else to do.
The fourth house, Violet declares, is the one. Maggie wonders why a sixteen-year-old girl has become the spokesperson for a family of eight, but she isn’t going to even pretend to understand the full dynamics of a regular couple, let alone an entire group of people.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The thing with Andras is that Tanwen doesn’t understand the value of school, but Julian does, he puts his foot down and says, ‘No, this will not do. No son of mine will grow up uneducated’ even when Tanwen slaps him and reminds him that he is not Andras’ biological father. He is the father that she chose because Ƈhatma and Kephri are already working on Marat, so he had better buck up and pay attention.
However, Violet points out to Tanwen that here, it is technically illegal for her to not send her child to school, unless she can prove that other suitable arrangements have been made, and then Violet tells her that other suitable arrangements are usually the type that lead to alienated children, and if there’s one thing that Tanwen doesn’t want any child to ever go through, it’s alienation. She’s had enough of that, thank you very much.
Which is why, that September, Tanwen and Julian sit on the curb with Andras and a backpack full of what Alanna assures them are necessary school supplies, waiting for the school bus. Tanwen is more than a little skeptical of the concept of mass transportation, but then again, she is more than a little skeptical of the concept of motor vehicles in general. Her fears are allayed somewhat by Violet and Marat, who climb onto the bus that comes several hours beforehand to take them away to high school.
When the bus comes, Tanwen has to walk Andras across the street to get to it, and she prays that this is normal and that the other small children on the bus aren’t going to make fun of him for it; she knows how cruel children can be. But then she watches him settle into a seat next to a girl with cream-colored skin and freckles, and some of the tension eases in her chest.
And to her slight bemusement, Andras takes to school like a fish to water. The other kids love him: he spent the first five years of his life living with seven older people in a world where not obeying, sharing, and sticking together meant death. Of course he’s going to have all sorts of wacky and wonderful things to talk about, and he’s smart so he catches on quickly, and he’s more than willing to share because he’s never seen so many things in one place in his life.
(Side note: I see Tanwen as being maternal in the same way as a lioness: you’re my kid, and that means I love you and will beat the shit out of anyone who threatens you, but you are low man on the totem pole of life right now. Get used to it.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The one awkward point of school is the point at which it intersects with home. No one tells Tanwen that she should dress in anything other than her huipil and scarf to her first parent-teacher conference — they know better than that. Julian is busy that day because it turns out that, what with the reintroduction of stoves and electricity into his life, he actually enjoys cooking, and managed to worm his way into being a line chef at a hibachi restaurant.
She shows up outside of Andras’ kindergarten classroom and immediately notices that something is wrong. Well, not wrong, but … off. There is a couple already inside with the teacher, so she sits down on the desk outside and waits. When they come out, the mother looks at Tanwen with narrowed eyes. She’s a light-skinned, heavyset woman in her mid-thirties; Tanwen refuses to let this bother her. In her past life, as she thinks of the first sixteen years, she had commanded armies and stared down women three times her age. She gets up and breezes past her into the classroom.
Andras’ teacher is a short, stocky woman about the same age as the couple who just left. Tanwen catches a quickly-concealed look of surprise on her face, and trains her own expression into a pleasantly neutral one. ‘Hello. I’m Andras’ mother.’
‘Hello, Ms. Sisawain,’ says the teacher. ‘Please, take a seat.’ Tanwen bites her tongue, because that’s how people are addressed here — no matter that her brother would have laughed himself sick if he heard her addressed like the leader of a caravan. Even though she supposes she is, now: the last remaining Sisawain.
‘Julian is working today, he couldn’t make it,’ says Tanwen, as she sits down in the small plastic chair.
‘Ah, his father,’ says the teacher.
Tanwen shrugs. ‘Stepfather,’ because she can learn to speak the language of this country, and couch her experiences in terms that other people can accept, even if they aren’t entirely accurate. ‘He’s a line cook.’
Mrs. Green smiles and asks her what she does with herself all day. Tanwen answers, easily. Some things never change from country to country, and polite conversation that no one really wants to have is one of them. ‘I work at the library.’
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The only other sticky part is Mother’s Day, because Andras never called Alanna ‘mother’ but she’s raised him nearly as much as Tanwen herself: sixteen years old when he was born, and Alanna thirty-two. And of course the day that Andras’ class is making mother’s day projects, he comes home confused because everyone else only has two parents, one mom and one dad. Which, oh shit, how did they miss that? Of all the ways that they tried to prepare him for the world, how did none of them think to mention that their family is incredibly odd by most standards of normal in this country? So Tanwen has to sit him down to explain, although Ƈhatma walks in on her struggling halfway through and it’s actually him who ends up doing most of the explaining. His explanation goes something like this:
Listen up, short stuff. You’ve got to understand, the people in this country are a little backwards. They think that you can have a real full house with only two adults. And it works for them, because they’re not like us, and even if they try to tell you that you’re just like them, they’re wrong; don’t ever think otherwise. You are the child of the apocalypse, and it takes a special kind of family to raise such a child: it takes all seven of us.
Well. Except for Marat. We kind of had to raise him too.
And Andras wants to know, what about Violet, didn’t you have to raise her too?
To which Ƈhatma just laughs, and laughs, and laughs, and then passes him back to Tanwen and tells her to remind him that he’s still low man on the totem pole in this household, and that she should go to the school to talk to his teacher. Tanwen thinks that’s a good idea, until Julian reminds them that there are telephones here, and that she should use one of those instead. So she does, she calls the teacher, and has an incredibly awkward conversation that consists of the following:
Hi. My son came home from school on Thursday upset about the Mother’s Day project.
Oh, Andras. Yes. What did he tell you?
He said that his friends kept telling him that he could only have two parents, and that one of us must not be a real parent. He then said that you told him to just pick anyone, and make a card for them.
… Yes, that’s more or less what happened. We didn’t have enough supplies for him to make two or three or however many.
Listen to me. Andras has two mothers. He has me, and he has my aunt Alanna. He has three men who have helped me to raise him in equal parts. They are all his parents just as much as me and my late husband, and I will not permit anyone else to tell him otherwise. This is a good country, Mrs. Green, and you should make contingency plans. Buy a few extra sheets of paper or whatever it is that you need, but do not let anyone feel left out for having a different family.
And then Tanwen hangs up and is pissed because she feels disrespected, and she has had enough in her life of the fucking disrespect, seriously, everyone needs to just get over themselves, and Ƈhatma, why couldn’t we have moved to your country?
Ƈhatma looks at her incredulously. Because there’s television here, he explains, as though it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
Tanwen — 20
Eirian — 23
Ƈhatma — 24
Kephri — 21
Marat — 12
Alanna — 32
Violet — 16
Andras — 4
Oh my god, how awesome would that be? Like, okay, there are all of these people, and I am super-tempted to write a short story about the alternate universe where the survivors from the End of Days hit the reset button and ~somehow~ end up all living together in a house in Gallows Hill? And then they all raise Andras and Marat together, or whatever, and all of these adventures because Andras is five now, and it’s a whole new ball game, explaining to your kid that now there’s a whole new world out there, with new rules, and whatnot, and they’re all going to have to live by them but it’s okay because he’ll have other kids to play with now! But he’s grown up with this one family, all speaking the same metaphorical language and playing by post-apocalyptic rules, so how well are they all going to make this adjustment?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Maggie Corner had seen many things in her nineteen years as a real estate agent. Mostly, she worked for your typical white, middle-class couple looking for a house to raise their children, or one to move to after they had finished with the first. There had been other people too, of course: the increasing number of same-sex couples, the groups of recent college graduates looking for a communal home, and, on one memorable occasion, a group of religious sisters in search of a new place to found their convent. But she had never had prospective buyers quite like the ones she had on the phone now.
‘Yes, Miss Black,’ she said. ‘It’s on the left; if you keep going past Old Pitch Post Road, the sign is hidden behind a lilac tree. Turn directly left, and keep going. I’m standing outside right now.’ She puts her phone back into her pocket, and waits by the end of the driveway with her clipboard and pen.
Approximately thirty seconds later, a blue van with fake wood paneling comes barreling down the street. It slows abruptly as it approaches the house, and by the time it pulls into the driveway, it has reached a respectable crawl. The whole vehicle slides back a bit as the driver yanks on the brakes; Maggie winces. A strange assortment of people pile out of the van once it has been parked: the driver is a dark, curly-haired girl who looks barely old enough to have her license; the woman in the passenger seat could be her adoptive mother; but that fails to explain the three colorful young men who climb out of the back, assisting an adolescent boy with midnight-black skin and a woman about their age with a small boy in tow. Save for the young woman and the boy, none of them look at all related; they look as though they’ve all walked off of the poster for
The woman in the passenger seat walks up to Maggie and gives her a firm handshake. ‘Hi,’ she says, in her curious lilting accent. ‘I’m Alanna Black, we were just talking on the phone.’
Maggie’s knees nearly go weak with relief at the calm self-assurance in the woman’s voice; she likes working with people who have their act together. Better than the flighty, fidgety couple from this morning. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you, Alanna. I’m Maggie.’
Alanna smiles. ‘Good to meet you. This is my family: Violet,’ — the driver nods at her — ‘Julian,’ — the young man who looks like a member of a Japanese boy band tilts his head — ‘Ƈhatma,’ — the second young man waves enthusiastically — ‘Kephri,’ — Kephri turns out to be the Indian boy with yellow nail polish — ‘and Saorise, Marat, and Andras.’ The young woman gives her a small smile, the little boy clings to her hand, and the last member of their party gives her a mechanical wave.
‘Oh my, you have a large family,’ says Maggie, blinking, and then silently berates herself for sounding so surprised. People these days do all sorts of crazy things; the point is to sell them a house, not cast aspersions.
‘She’s my legal guardian these days,’ Violet says, with a jab of her thumb at Alanna. ‘And Marat’s. Everyone else is too old, but we’ve all been through the foster system together.’ She says the words freely, easily, but Maggie catches the flicker of resignation on her face. Ƈhatma drapes his arms over her shoulders and hugs her to his chest; she grabs his hands. They are hilariously mismatched, heightwise, but the effect is still heartwarming. Maggie smiles.
‘I’m glad you’re all still together,’ she says. ‘And now I can see why you needed such a large house. Come on in. The owners are out right now, but they gave me a key.’ She leads them up the driveway; the whole troupe straggles behind her.
As she guides them around the house, several things become abundantly clear to Maggie, with regards to this odd family. One, she’s fairly sure that the boy with the nail polish and the tall, lanky boy are a couple, as they do a lot of hand-grabbing and snickering together. Two, that at least some of them have been together for years: twice, she’s sure that they must be communicating telepathically. (Violet walks into a room. ‘Kephri!’ she shrieks. He pulls his hand away from the other boy and comes leaping over. ‘No,’ says Alanna, from the bathroom at the other end of the hall, ‘Stop it,’ and Violet and Kephri laugh like they’ve just shared some private joke, though as far as Maggie can tell, nothing has happened except for an exchange of glances.) Three, the smallest boy is not, in fact, the girl’s brother, but her son, and Boy Band Julian is the father. He runs between them like any other child would, and when he runs smack-dab into a glass door like he’s never seen one before in his life, Julian picks him
up and holds his face to his neck, looking simultaneously much too young and much too used to this already.
Violet attaches herself to Maggie about halfway through the tour, after the incident-that-wasn’t-really-an-incident with the bedrooms. ‘I like this house,’ she tells Maggie. ‘I don’t think we’re likely to buy it, though.’
‘Why not?’ asks Maggie, amused.
‘The yard doesn’t have enough trees, and we don’t have the capacity to add them,’ she says very seriously. ‘Not to mention that the house interior is a little … cramped. I’m looking forwards to the newer ones. More expensive, but more room for the human pterodactyl over there to spread his wings.’ Her eyes dart to Ƈhatma, who has picked up Tanwen and is carrying her, bridal style, up the stairs to the third floor. Julian follows them with little Andras, smirking. Maggie looks between them all and smiles.
The others don’t speak to Maggie much; it takes until halfway through the second house that she realizes that Marat and his parents don’t speak very much English. She has to go outside to take a phone call from her son (John, who is eight and still feels the need to call her after he gets home from school every day) and when she gets back in, she hears Tanwen and Ƈhatma talking in a sweeping, choppy language that is most definitely not English.
When they see her, Tanwen says something sharp to him and smiles at Maggie. Ƈhatma shrugs. ‘That sounds beautiful,’ Maggie says, which is not strictly true, but won’t likely hurt their sentiments towards her. ‘What language is that?’
Tanwen and Ƈhatma turn to each other in confusion. ‘I don’t know how you say in English, but we say it, Ixcatec.’
‘I don’t think they have a translation, honey,’ says Ƈhatma. Tanwen laughs. Maggie smiles because she’s not sure what else to do.
The fourth house, Violet declares, is the one. Maggie wonders why a sixteen-year-old girl has become the spokesperson for a family of eight, but she isn’t going to even pretend to understand the full dynamics of a regular couple, let alone an entire group of people.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The thing with Andras is that Tanwen doesn’t understand the value of school, but Julian does, he puts his foot down and says, ‘No, this will not do. No son of mine will grow up uneducated’ even when Tanwen slaps him and reminds him that he is not Andras’ biological father. He is the father that she chose because Ƈhatma and Kephri are already working on Marat, so he had better buck up and pay attention.
However, Violet points out to Tanwen that here, it is technically illegal for her to not send her child to school, unless she can prove that other suitable arrangements have been made, and then Violet tells her that other suitable arrangements are usually the type that lead to alienated children, and if there’s one thing that Tanwen doesn’t want any child to ever go through, it’s alienation. She’s had enough of that, thank you very much.
Which is why, that September, Tanwen and Julian sit on the curb with Andras and a backpack full of what Alanna assures them are necessary school supplies, waiting for the school bus. Tanwen is more than a little skeptical of the concept of mass transportation, but then again, she is more than a little skeptical of the concept of motor vehicles in general. Her fears are allayed somewhat by Violet and Marat, who climb onto the bus that comes several hours beforehand to take them away to high school.
When the bus comes, Tanwen has to walk Andras across the street to get to it, and she prays that this is normal and that the other small children on the bus aren’t going to make fun of him for it; she knows how cruel children can be. But then she watches him settle into a seat next to a girl with cream-colored skin and freckles, and some of the tension eases in her chest.
And to her slight bemusement, Andras takes to school like a fish to water. The other kids love him: he spent the first five years of his life living with seven older people in a world where not obeying, sharing, and sticking together meant death. Of course he’s going to have all sorts of wacky and wonderful things to talk about, and he’s smart so he catches on quickly, and he’s more than willing to share because he’s never seen so many things in one place in his life.
(Side note: I see Tanwen as being maternal in the same way as a lioness: you’re my kid, and that means I love you and will beat the shit out of anyone who threatens you, but you are low man on the totem pole of life right now. Get used to it.)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The one awkward point of school is the point at which it intersects with home. No one tells Tanwen that she should dress in anything other than her huipil and scarf to her first parent-teacher conference — they know better than that. Julian is busy that day because it turns out that, what with the reintroduction of stoves and electricity into his life, he actually enjoys cooking, and managed to worm his way into being a line chef at a hibachi restaurant.
She shows up outside of Andras’ kindergarten classroom and immediately notices that something is wrong. Well, not wrong, but … off. There is a couple already inside with the teacher, so she sits down on the desk outside and waits. When they come out, the mother looks at Tanwen with narrowed eyes. She’s a light-skinned, heavyset woman in her mid-thirties; Tanwen refuses to let this bother her. In her past life, as she thinks of the first sixteen years, she had commanded armies and stared down women three times her age. She gets up and breezes past her into the classroom.
Andras’ teacher is a short, stocky woman about the same age as the couple who just left. Tanwen catches a quickly-concealed look of surprise on her face, and trains her own expression into a pleasantly neutral one. ‘Hello. I’m Andras’ mother.’
‘Hello, Ms. Sisawain,’ says the teacher. ‘Please, take a seat.’ Tanwen bites her tongue, because that’s how people are addressed here — no matter that her brother would have laughed himself sick if he heard her addressed like the leader of a caravan. Even though she supposes she is, now: the last remaining Sisawain.
‘Julian is working today, he couldn’t make it,’ says Tanwen, as she sits down in the small plastic chair.
‘Ah, his father,’ says the teacher.
Tanwen shrugs. ‘Stepfather,’ because she can learn to speak the language of this country, and couch her experiences in terms that other people can accept, even if they aren’t entirely accurate. ‘He’s a line cook.’
Mrs. Green smiles and asks her what she does with herself all day. Tanwen answers, easily. Some things never change from country to country, and polite conversation that no one really wants to have is one of them. ‘I work at the library.’
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The only other sticky part is Mother’s Day, because Andras never called Alanna ‘mother’ but she’s raised him nearly as much as Tanwen herself: sixteen years old when he was born, and Alanna thirty-two. And of course the day that Andras’ class is making mother’s day projects, he comes home confused because everyone else only has two parents, one mom and one dad. Which, oh shit, how did they miss that? Of all the ways that they tried to prepare him for the world, how did none of them think to mention that their family is incredibly odd by most standards of normal in this country? So Tanwen has to sit him down to explain, although Ƈhatma walks in on her struggling halfway through and it’s actually him who ends up doing most of the explaining. His explanation goes something like this:
Listen up, short stuff. You’ve got to understand, the people in this country are a little backwards. They think that you can have a real full house with only two adults. And it works for them, because they’re not like us, and even if they try to tell you that you’re just like them, they’re wrong; don’t ever think otherwise. You are the child of the apocalypse, and it takes a special kind of family to raise such a child: it takes all seven of us.
Well. Except for Marat. We kind of had to raise him too.
And Andras wants to know, what about Violet, didn’t you have to raise her too?
To which Ƈhatma just laughs, and laughs, and laughs, and then passes him back to Tanwen and tells her to remind him that he’s still low man on the totem pole in this household, and that she should go to the school to talk to his teacher. Tanwen thinks that’s a good idea, until Julian reminds them that there are telephones here, and that she should use one of those instead. So she does, she calls the teacher, and has an incredibly awkward conversation that consists of the following:
Hi. My son came home from school on Thursday upset about the Mother’s Day project.
Oh, Andras. Yes. What did he tell you?
He said that his friends kept telling him that he could only have two parents, and that one of us must not be a real parent. He then said that you told him to just pick anyone, and make a card for them.
… Yes, that’s more or less what happened. We didn’t have enough supplies for him to make two or three or however many.
Listen to me. Andras has two mothers. He has me, and he has my aunt Alanna. He has three men who have helped me to raise him in equal parts. They are all his parents just as much as me and my late husband, and I will not permit anyone else to tell him otherwise. This is a good country, Mrs. Green, and you should make contingency plans. Buy a few extra sheets of paper or whatever it is that you need, but do not let anyone feel left out for having a different family.
And then Tanwen hangs up and is pissed because she feels disrespected, and she has had enough in her life of the fucking disrespect, seriously, everyone needs to just get over themselves, and Ƈhatma, why couldn’t we have moved to your country?
Ƈhatma looks at her incredulously. Because there’s television here, he explains, as though it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
