Chapter 170 – The Heart Knows What It Wants

Sun – female, 28, Asian Canadian, romantic partner of Jem, colleague to Leah and fellow caretaker of children. Bounces between multiple orphanages, daycares, and schools.

Jem – male, 27, African Canadian, romantic partner of Sun, colleague to Leah and fellow caretaker of children. Bounces between multiple orphanages, daycares, and schools.

Sister Lana – female, 24, Russian Canadian, primary caretaker at orphanage "Saint Viktor" in New Montreal

Jenny – female, 6, British, orphan at orphanage "Saint Viktor", honorary big sister of Andi

Andi – female, 4, Canadian, orphan at orphanage "Saint Viktor", calls Leah "Lee"

Sam – male, 6, African North American, orphan at orphanage "Saint Viktor", 'boyfriend' of Jora

Jora – female, 6, Scandinavian Canadian, orphan at orphanage "Saint Viktor", 'girlfriend' of Sam

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Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children.

– quote from Vanity Fair, 1848 by William Makepeace Thackeray

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We crashed almost immediately after leaving Dervish—two days of battle and base building was too much even for a samurai on samurai performance drugs, especially with the darkness of night sending our brains sleepy signals as well.

But, exhausted or not, our heads still rang with the simple happiness of finally going home, and as easily as we nodded off into a dreamless sleep, we came awake again a few hours later. Between the lingering dark and having had the chance to be silent and relax, our mood was more reflective than lively.

I'd already taken off all my gear, including the Second Wind and its ensemble of wing arm sleeves and cabling. The only thing I'd kept was the two-piece leotard with its super fluffy collar, which cradled my neck and throat. Made me feel all kinds of snug while I sat cross-legged on my temporary mattress and fiddled with my still-healing tail (Would I really want to buy the same spinneret enhancement again? I haven't really used many of its functions…) and thought about the future.

We were on our way home.

Home.

One that maybe even wasn't my old flat; and I wasn't at all upset about that, even though I'd spent years crafting it to be mine. How had that happened?

It meant changes—I didn't yet know what home actually would look like, going forward.

Leah was equally quiet, reclining in her new pod's crash couch and thinking. Her eyes lay unfocused on the screens showing the status of her Hatchets running van- and rearguard. Her facial muscles had been entirely slack for minutes—until my attention inevitably sent my floof noodles sniffing, of course, and broke her out of her reverie.

She looked at me instead of the displays, and there was a change there too, beyond the amused smile. A loosening of a certain tension, a new energy.

That she, for once, didn't have to fight her way through some new obstacle in the way of heading home was a mental step in the right direction.

The beautiful soul I'd fallen for was still in the middle of yet another transformation, but she was growing only more vibrant from a lack of worries. More active, perhaps. Ready for adventures, in a way she hadn't been when said adventures hadn't pointed home.

Something told me it was a state much more natural to her.

I couldn't wait to discover more.

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Leah found herself smiling brightly as she waited for Sister Lana to pick up the call. It was still night, or rather, before-dawn-early in the morning of her…fourth day since Tinea had found her.

It's been only four days? Bonkers.

Lana would be asleep, but Leah figured she'd be happy to have news from her, anyway.

The Sister did pick up, eventually, and it took only a sleepy grunt and a second's pause for her real face to replace the privacy avatar.

"Leah! I'd say long time no see, but it's been only two days. How are you? You look better. Are you finally coming home? Is the new girl with you? How's she been treating you? Are you—"

Leah had to giggle. One did not simply see Sister Lana get all flustery and keep a poker face. The blonde may as well have been the archetype of All That Was On Your Side. The die from which friends were cast.

Or something. She was something, to be sure. Especially with that stupidly hot Russian accent that kept slipping in more the stronger she felt about something.

"Coming home, Lana. We are coming home." Feathery rainbow brushes suddenly traced her lips and caught her words out of the air, and eyes full of curiosity all but bored into her.

Leah transferred the call from her cybereye's privacy to the wall of her cabin itself, so Tinea could properly say hi. She'd only talked to Leah's circle once, and for barely a minute that had been occupied mostly by nosy kids, after all.

There was a busy silence for the next few moments, where the two quasi-strangers studied each other.

Sister Lana sat on a napping couch in the orphanage's ready room, fluffy blanket thrown loosely around her shoulders, habit and hair in disarray from the interrupted nap. Tinea sat on the mattress right next to the piloting pod, leaning against it, with her chin and hands on the rim from when she'd stared at Leah inside only moments ago.

Leah could see as Lana subconsciously evaluated Tinea, as women often did, then promptly bundled up those considerations and tossed them out for something altogether more caring; and she could see as Tinea looked at Sister Lana, discovered more details than one might count on two hands, answered a dozen questions about what she might like to try herself, and found a hundred more to ask.

Magic.

Leah, the guardian at heart, the protector of the littles, she who knew loss and fought grief by living for all the lost little souls, thought this moment of social meeting was pure magic.

She also coughed to herself when she realized the murderous poet next to her might've rubbed off a little.

Oops.

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Sister Lana forced herself to slow down, to come down from the earlier surprise of being woken up in the middle of her nap. Nothing was happening that required her intervention, after all.

Instead, she decided to actually get to know the new girl in Leah's life. The tiny brunette presented the kind of beauty that typically implied crafted design, not natural genetics. But she looked at Lana with a kind of rapt attention that didn't speak of backhanded competition coded in designer cosmetics, nor of the twice-shy caution carried by victims born to sexual abuse.

Lana doubted the girl, Tinea, was innocent, not since Leah had already stated that she'd been saved from captivity by Tinea, and not based on the few clips that had made the rounds of her so skillfully fighting the aliens. Yet there was a kind of innocence present in how she studied Lana through the call.

Hmm.

Sister Lana visibly guided her attention around the new girl's alien additions, some of which were busily waving in her direction, and asked, "You look like you come with stories attached. Would you like to tell them?"

"Oh, um…" Tinea blushed and shot a quick, uncertain look at Leah before catching herself—though one of her antennae still burrowed shyly under Leah's chin, as if trying to hide.

Lana had to hold back giggles at the way the tall softy went still with the effort to suppress her natural hug-the-little-cutie instincts. Apparently they still were let out only in total privacy.

She also noticed the brunette's hand tighten around her ring finger, the one with the painted nail. A symbol, then?

"I, uh, haven't exactly…thought of my life as a thing of stories? Like, I have no practice with making it…fun. I guess? Sorry? Although…the last few days are worth talking about," Tinea finally added, with another glance Leah's way, who carefully remained loose and relaxed but smiled encouragingly.

Really. Way too adorable. This time Lana didn't bother to hide her own grin at all, and grinned even harder when Leah noticeably restrained a roll of her eyes at the silent tease.

"Ah, but these," Tinea continued, flicking a light finger against the stem of the antennae still waving towards the image of Sister Lana, "did help me rescue Leah right from the start."

Those words grabbed the Sister's attention, jerked it almost violently from the topic of the antennae. She commanded, "Tell me more!" with a gentle no-nonsense smile—the same one that always got the kids blabbing. It appeared to have an effect even on the adult girl, who also kept talking:

"Well, they had us stuffed into cells, yeah? And unlike Leah, they didn't have access to my body, which meant they couldn't apply their restraints directly."

Sister Lana controlled her reaction, both the angry and the fearful one, to the mention of restraints with practiced…not ease, exactly. Just practice.

Leah's reaction was a lot less subtle. Rawer, more recent. It threatened to break something fragile in Lana to be able to guess exactly what they'd done to her…but she fought down the tears. It wasn't something to be unpacked over a shared call.

Tinea, thankfully, didn't miss the faint shudder that went through Leah. Lana watched as she shifted to sit on the rim of the thing she lay inside to take one of Leah's hands in hers, before continuing, "I broke out of my cocoon and my cell in short order, and caught our kidnappers' lackeys whispering. They were planning to…liberate Leah's Vanguard chip in ways that couldn't be undone. They'd noticed her firing of a rescue flare only moments earlier, you see—"

Leah jerked. "Oh yeah! That thing! What happened to it?"

"I kaputted it the moment you met Dervish! Since she was so strong and evaluated as willing to help, and I didn't want internet strangers to keep tracking you so easily!" said the adorable avatar of Ypsi with a lifted finger. She had inserted herself in the call, kneeling on a pillow like a proper young lady and robed in an elaborate mashup of a Korean hanbok and a Greek off-shoulder toga that Sister Lana totally adored.

But she couldn't really find it in herself to properly coo at the little AI—what with the troubling topic of Leah's kidnapping still ringing between her ears—and so she said instead, "That explains why we lost contact the day before yesterday. Thought it had burned out or something."

"Only because I told it to! Those ones can go for, like, a year."

Leah stated, "Mhm, that's fine. I had been rescued after all."

"Yup!"

"Well, that's good," Sister Lana said, looking again at the girl still perched on the side of Leah's pod. "I'm glad you saved our friend there. Can't tell you how relieved we've been for the last few days to know she was okay."

Tinea smiled softly as she replied, "Glad to help. Leah's done as much for me as I have for her. Nobody's made me feel half as welcome as she does."

"Oh, yes." Sister Lana twinkled at Leah, relieved at the conversational offramp.

In fact, she knew exactly what kind of compliments the dutiful redhead couldn't stand. Indeed, it looked like Leah had already spontaneously decided to regret the call. "A real homemaker, she is. Of the heart, of course. Why, she keeps everyone's spirits tidied up before they even notice the mess. Picks up after our moods like it's second nature to her."

Leah groaned, to Lana's laughter. "Yuck, no. Stop. I'm the cool aunt that takes the kids on adventures, damn it."

Giggling, Tinea let herself fall sideways into Leah's lap as she gazed directly into her eyes, before she turned towards Sister Lana again. "I'm going to have to rely on the dear homemaker, methinks. I'm quite socially awkward, you see. Lotsa messes to pick up after."

"Oh, you'll do just fine," Lana promised, "you're not half as bad as you seem to think you are, dear. Why, you're so adorable that you'll arrive and half the awkwardness of a first meeting will just melt off everyone else."

"Ah…um."

Oh, yes, Lana thought to herself, that appears to have been a total bullseye.

Even Leah chuckled quietly as she patted the freshly blushing Tinea.

It seemed the new girl really had no clue how to navigate certain social situations and lacked the practice to wing it, too. Sister Lana figured it wouldn't take them very long to get her to relax—all it took, usually, was the lived and proven assurance that there would be no unkind judgments about such awkwardnesses.

Old hat for any good orphanage, really—and Sister Lana did pride herself on running one of the best.

The moment that the redhead looked up again from her tending to her girlfriend, she was met by Sister Lana's full grin and a big I said you were the kindest of softies, didn't I? of an expression twinkling at her. The aggrieved woman heaved another sigh that all but screamed, Dang tease.

Lana silently laughed to herself.

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"...and that's when we learned there was a global incurs—"

I interrupted myself and jerked ramrod straight. Something was changing within my brain. Something huge and important and transformative and it was Sonde.

My eyes widened as something akin to mental fetters fell from her, as she suddenly became aware of herself in a way that went beyond the simple outwardly-focused existence of an animal—hyperintelligent or not—and the little ever-curious bud flowered in a torrent of self-exploring and self-defining data.

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