Dear Diary,

There are things that seemed so important back in the day that don't any more. Some of them are really kinda obvious, like my fuckin' gamerscore. Nobody here and now is going to give the slightest shit about my ranking in League. My credit rating is entirely a non-issue.

Some other stuff isn't specifically important, but some of the concepts still mean something. Shit like politics. Nobody here and now gives the slightest shit whether I supported Republicans or Democrats or any other flavor of politician. But the basic idea of politics being a thing is still real. Fuck, with me creating the Alliance, politics have gone from something super local, like within a single City, to an inter-City thing. Before I hear anything about the Cities not being in a constant state of warfare before that, they might not have been at war, but they weren't in any way part of the same power structure. Not really. So anything between Cities before now was diplomacy, not politics.

As a reminder for the hard of thinking like myself, diplomacy is not actually the fine art of telling someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip. Even if that is a funny way to describe it. No, as my History teacher once put it, diplomacy is the fine art of dealing with people who should be your enemies as if they were your friends. Talking to them like people. Dealing with them in good faith. Basically interacting with them like they're your friends, with the end goal being them forgetting that they're not.

Politics is the opposite of that.

No, seriously, everything I ever remember seeing from political parties back in the day wound up being, in some way, some rich asshole telling a group of people they had nothing in common with that some other group that they had everything in common with was the ones responsible for everything wrong with the world. From what my History teacher told me, at some point way back in the mid-twentieth century, the rich assholes got told to sit their asses down and shut the fuck up and enjoy being rich, and lo and behold everybody else wound up with some kind of golden age, because everybody involved was more or less tryna make shit better for everybody else. Then, again according to a History teacher, only this time in my senior History class, in the late sixties the rich fuckers got their shit together and decided to fuck over everybody who wasn't them, and the economy has just gotten shittier since then.

I was going somewhere with that. Anyway, yeah, basically the difference being diplomacy is treating enemies like friends, politics is treating friends like enemies. That's just one brown street girl's opinion on things, but fuck it, that's who I am inside.

Back to here and now, Saffron is totally about treating anybody who's not at war with us as friends. Shit, I think we definitely sent the village hunters home feeling friendly toward us. Politics... I'm not sure what she does is really politics. Maybe it is. Honestly, if she's tryna make sure everybody has food, shelter, and whatever else they need to live, I'm down for it.

But the whole reason I started talking about this is that after spending all afternoon working with Alex yesterday, I took her home and saw David looking kinda depressed. Not sure why, but the tutu on my girliest girl's ballerina onesie had lost some of its starch.

I swept in and pulled both of us up to what I increasingly thought of as my 'office', the little shack atop the Bore. Oddly enough, it wasn't nearly as cold as I'd worried it would be, mostly due to a constant warm updraft from the Bore itself.

"Hey, kiddo. What's got you down?"

David looked up at me, then back down at the floor. "Dunno."

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"You know I wanna help, right?"

A big honkin' sight, then, "I don't know if you can."

I shrugged. "Neither do I until you tell me what the problem is."

It took a bit, but finally the words leaked out. "The man the other night... Silk?" I nodded. "He reminded me of my dad."

I pulled my kid in for a hug. "Do you miss him?"

"Yeah. A little. Sometimes."

I realized I definitely needed to get some furniture up here if this was gonna be my go to semi-private kid counseling spot. "Is that what's got you down?"

A quick headshake. "No. No, I don't think... Am I gonna look like that?"

I suddenly realized what might be bugging my little girly girl. "Do you want to look like that?" A quick, almost horrified headshake. "Okay. Do you know what you want to look like?" A shrug. "Do you wanna look like me?"

David looked at everyplace but me, then breathed out, "no."

"Do you wanna look like Larry? Lucas' dad?" Headshake. "What about Lachlan? Liam's dad?" An even sharper headshake. "What about Saffron?"

"Maybe?"

"Okay, how about Siobhan?" That just got a bit of a frown. "You want to look like Marie?"

That got a laugh. "I couldn't look like her! She's all furry!"

I leaned in real close. "Didn't ask what you thought you could look like. Asked what you wanted to look like. You tell me, I'll take care of the rest."

"Really?"

I rolled my eyes, but not in a mean way. Then I Mimicked my girliest girl. "Have you not twigged to the fact that I'm a shapeshifter yet?"

"Yeah, but that's you!"

I flexed my will, granting David the Boon of Shapeshifting. Then the Boon of Mimicry. Then reached in and pushed at it; a moment later I sat in David's lap, only with David looking like Marie.

Her eyes got real, real big. "I... but... really!"

"Is this what you want to look like? Who you want to be?"

Funny watching Marie's face make all kinds of really weird David faces. I realized right then that David's defining characteristic to this point might have been those expressions, those tentative, hesitant expressions that told me that no matter what went on, nothing was ever quite right in David's world. I thought maybe I'd finally figured out why.

"So, you gonna stay like that?"

"How, uh..."

"Just think of yourself like yourself."

A moment later I had my David back. Okay, mostly. Something had changed, I'm not sure what, but the girliest girl to ever girl had just gotten even girlier somehow. "Okay, so here's the deal. You want to look like you, right?"

"Yeah."

"Do you look like you now? Do you feel like you now?"

"Yeah!"

I reversed what I'd done, slipping those Boons back away from her. Because anybody looking that girly had to be a her. "Okay then. If you ever get worried about not feeling or looking like yourself again, you just tell me, and we can do this again."

She looked up at me with the weirdest mix of shy and sly. "But what if I decide I want to look different and you're not around?"

I chuckled. "Yeah, not quite, kiddo. Way too much mischief potential for a girl your age."

I'd never seen her look quite so... I dunno, joyous. She leapt up and threw her arms around my neck. "Thank you, Mama."

I hugged her back, asking, "isn't Marie Mama?"

"Can't I have two Mamas?"

I smiled at her. "Of course you can, kiddo."

"What about three Mamas?"

I shrugged. "I guess you can call Saffron Mama too, if that's what you want. Gonna be confusing some times, but I'm not stopping you."

Her grin got positively Tricksterish, and she said, "what about four Mamas?"

I snorted. "What, you're gonna call Siobhan Mama too or something?" She didn't say anything, she just grinned at me. "Oh, shit, this I gotta see. You have my explicit permission to have four Mamas, just for that."

We hopped back down to dinner giggling almost in unison. When we went up to the Bath afterward, as we all grabbed up a kid or two to scrub down before getting in the Bath, David dashed over to Siobhan, grabbed her by one hand, and said, "I want you to help me, Mama!"

I am very glad I was watching so close and that I can Translocate, because that's the only way I managed to get over to her before she hit the floor. I Stabilized her awake, but before either of us could say anything, David leaned in, laying one hand on Siobhan's face. "I'm sorry, Mama. I didn't mean to hurt you."

As Ice Pop lay there in my arms gawping and grinning at the girliest girl ever to girl, I said, "I don't think she's hurt. Just a little surprised. Right? Mama Siobhan?"

I dunno which was more adorable, watching David help Siobhan up, or watching how the two of them were attached at the hip for the rest of the night.

Okay, the most adorable thing was definitely seeing what euphoria looked like after so long watching dysphoria keep my little girl from smiling.