Dear Diary,

"Vengeance is the last resort,

It should never be the first,

But when you're on death ground, fight."

Doctrine of Tabitha, Book of Vengeance

Yeah, I think I'm gonna wind up spending at least half, maybe more than half of this book focused on 'Vengeance - don't do it'. Mostly because people jump to it way too fast, and that just winds up with everybody lying in the mud bleeding, even people who weren't involved in the first place. That said, I need to find a way to let folks know that if they really were pushed that far? They need to focus on finding the one most responsible and starting with them. Maybe without a lifetime of video games and movies telling them to start with a mook and work their way up to the Big Boss, they'll clue into the fact that that whole process is just a way to help the folks who profit the most from shitty behavior avoid the consequences for it.

Like, seriously, if somebody's really in a position where Vengeance is called for? They're not likely to be in a position where they can climb the ladder to get to the Big Bad Evil Guy. If they were, the Big Bad Evil Guy wouldn't have pushed them. So they need to focus their limited resources on that guy to start with. Okay, training montage to focus everything on project 'hurt the Big Bad Evil Guy to death'. Maybe they gotta go through some bodyguard mini-bosses, but they need know that from the moment the violence starts, that asshole is doing one of two things. They're either armoring up and getting ready to stomp the vengeance seeker, or they're gathering up their wealth and rabbiting, leaving them to die fighting minions. Which doesn't fix shit, because there's always another idiot who thinks they're invincible, or doesn't care if they die protecting some asshole so long as that asshole lets them bully people until they do.

I mean, fuck, a lot of the time even if whoever hit the end of their rope and chose violence takes out the entrenched oppressor, another one just steps up and takes their place, but eventually if you keep hot swapping them, maybe one will learn 'don't push people too far', or even maybe the world hits the jackpot and gets somebody in the Big Bad Evil Guy slot who realizes that one percent of a quadrillion is larger than ninety nine percent of one trillion. 'Enlightened despotism' is the fancy word for it. It sounds great until the enlightened despot dies without actually changing the shit that made them a despot in the first place, and some numbnuts decides to 'go back to the old ways' or some shit.

Y'know, I'm having kind of a strong emotional response to this, and for once I don't think it's just growing up in a supposedly first world hell hole. I think shit like this may have actually happened to me here. Possibly more than once.

So at the end of the day Marie and I took everybody home, and we worked our way through bath time without nearly so much weepiness and clinging this time. It took me until I got in the tub with Saffron for the idea to percolate through to my frontal lobes.

"Did... did they really miss us that much?"

She just smiled softly at me. "Yes, love. As you noted when we brought them here, when we took them in, these are all refugees. Women who were ostracized for one reason or another, driven out of their homes to live in the wilderness. Most of them protected by Maenads, true, but while Maenads are many things, proper homemakers isn't one of those things."

"But... Marie?"

She shook her head. "Marie is an outlier. Her hobby for the past four centuries has been all the incidental tasks one might think of as 'homemaking'. Cooking, cleaning, sewing. She loves those things, they bring her joy, but those aren't what she was made for, not the things that are universal to Maenads."

"Huh. So how does that relate to us?"

"We took them in. You did, really, although I had no objections. I found it heartwarming and wonderful, really. But we took them in, and so they see us... you, mostly, I think, as 'head of House'. Not just that, but you've made it clear through your actions that you intend to care for them, given them every benefit that comes with being part of our household, yet you make none of the demands they've come to expect from someone in your position. You outright refused to take liberties with Devorah, despite her throwing herself at you."

I frowned. "What the fuck is up with 'after' then?"

She smiled up at me as she washed the sweat from all my assorted crevices where it collected. "Your compromise. Really, not just with her. I think you made the same compromise with Hilde when you had her fostered and hidden from me." I opened my mouth, but she kept speaking. "When they are fully able to stand on their own two feet, when the choice is clearly theirs, and clearly a choice, not something anyone could claim was demanded of them, then, if they still want, you won't deny them."

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I pouted a little. "Yeah. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Don't know what they see in me, though."

She smiled up at me, scooted herself up the side of the bath so she could look me right in the eyes. "Strength, and not just of limb. Beauty, and not just of face. Passion, for everything you choose to do." I opened my mouth to reply, but she interrupted me. "And everyone." She kissed me, and that ended any kind of discussion right then and there.

Okay, there were some more discussions when Siobhan and Marie joined us, but that's an entirely different kind of discussing.

Dreamt of my lovely ladies, all four of them tossing each other at my maw. Okay, nobody really tossed Karen, she pretty much stuck to auto-yeeting, but she did team up with Saffron and Siobhan to lob a particularly big Marie Pasta at me. So fuckin' weird.

Waffles and chicken tendies with gravy syrup this morning. Holy fucking god those are good.

I remember them from your birthday. Any chance you could get Sigyn and I an invite to breakfast at some point?

Dad! I'm shocked! Are you asking me how I like my eggs?

It took even the God of Mischief a second to twig to my over the top taunting. Tabitha!

Unfertilized.

Gah! Don't you see her as your mother at this point?

I swallowed, then snorted. Just fuckin' with you.

Loki's sigh reverberated through my skull. That's a relief.

I'm surprisingly okay with the idea of fertilized.

Tabitha!

I snickered, snorted, then decided I needed to stop self amusing before my waffles got cold. Sorry, Dad. I'll see what I can do about making sure Marie makes enough for you next time.

Thank you?

Yeah, and for the record, you're always invited. You are, after all, the best.

I know.

After breakfast we all got ourselves to the Homestead and got to work. Of course, what with the shopping trip yesterday, not everybody had the same definitions of 'getting to work'. One of the women, Chloe, apparently knew something about beekeeping. Couldn't collect any bees or honey at this point, apparently, because it would fuck with the bees or some shit, but she and Devorah went looking for hives. They had long strips of bright blue cloth with them; I think to mark the ones they found.

I spent the morning filling up molds again. Well, okay, like usual the first part was slicing big chunks of stone out of the hillside. I realized about midway through the morning, as I left the 'main' dig, the one that Saffron told me would become our 'House', like, capital H 'Aetos-Diaz House', that we were gonna have three fuckin' stories above the ground, plus the basement. This place was gonna be huge. Like, not quite 'Lancaster House' huge, but still, house of bigness. Then again, while I definitely enjoyed the whole 'everybody piled into one big pile', and hoped there would be a place for that in our new digs? I also totally understood how important it was for people to have their own space. Fuck, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't feel right about doing anything with Devorah until she had her own space to sleep in, one where she could lock us all out if we pissed her off, or if she felt some kinda way about cuddling after canoodling, or just because she wanted alone time.

Kind of interesting watching the Maenads grabbing up the rocks and yeeting them out into the yard to sit there until the edges start to cool down, at which point the women who are otherwise employed doing what I think of as 'landscaping' with maybe a little bit of logging grab them up and fill the molds with them. They just shove their claw tips in, then move like fuckin' lightning until they're in a spot where they can fling them. The Maenads, not the women. Who generally don't have claw tips. Thinking about that gave me some really specific thoughts about Murder Mittens and how I couldn't see her murder mittens any more, instead seeing them as really long fingernails, which made me feel some kinda way.

I poured that into my work, melting the rocks as quick as I could, so I could go join the others in putting pieces together. Of course, right around then Saffron told me she needed me to add another layer to the tower. I wound up standing in a weird little box made out of 'Air Shield's, pouring Fire into rocks filling a mold made out of Filtration Wards. Not quite the same, not quite as fun, and kinda weird how even the Maenads had to stay out of the tower top when I was doing it.

Hella cool thing, though, was the way even after I finished melting it all, it drew air out of the basements and created a really nice breeze coming from the upper, and thus nominally cooler end of our valley.

Two other things really stuck out about the day, at least in a good way. First, at some point during the day it really hit me that this was going to be House Aetos-Diaz. Our House. Our home. Like, not just a room somebody had given us in a communal building, or, I dunno... Just... Home.

Second, that earlier melancholy realization about not being able to see Murder Mittens' murder mittens made the good vibes hit even harder when, as the sun approached the horizon, when I'd decided to do some things to fight that funk with far funner funkier funk of my own, I walked over, put my arms around her, and towed her away from the crowd of her sisters. "Time to go, Mittens."

She looked at the sun, ruffled my hair, and said, "bath time?"

Nothing quite so awesome as the sheer joy on her face when I smirked up at her and said, "yeah. After."

Of course, the really good thing? That I only realized as her sisters all kinda snickered at us? I'd walked up and picked her out of a crowd of identical twin sisters, and I could absolutely do it again any fuckin' time I wanted, even if I had no idea how I did it.