Dear Diary,

"Redemption isn't painless,

Nor is it given for free,

But it can always be earned."

Doctrine of Tabitha, Book of Redemption

Yeah, not like I earned mine, but something tells me I paid for it nonetheless. Like, I got it from a lottery or something. But something strikes me as wrong putting that in a holy book. Like, what am I supposed to say, 'you get another chance if you get lucky'? I'm supposed to be encouraging people to get back up and try again, to do better than they did the first time. I think I've done that; my first go round I pretty much checked out when Mom died. I deliberately avoided engaging with the world.

I... I'm engaged here. Like, both in the 'I have skin in the game' sense and in the 'I have a ring on my finger' sense. Fuck, I've got two rings on my finger, and I can't really tell which one is the wedding ring and which one is the engagement ring. Shit, I'm married and engaged. How does that even work? Okay, I'm not a complete idiot, I get that I'm married to Saffron and gonna be married to Marie, but... Monogamy? I mean, I never really expected that in my last life, so I'm not sure why I'm even worried about it in this one.

On the one hand, I think I'd get really upset if Saffron wanted somebody else. But on the other hand, she clearly wants Marie, and I'm fine with that. I do too. So I guess, like, it's okay if we both want her? What about Siobhan? Like, the three of us have all basically done whatever with whoever whenever we've had alone time, and frankly I've been way too busy getting busy with whoever's business I was busy with to be a busybody with anybody else, so I'm not sure exactly what it would be like to actually watch from the sidelines. Or, shit, to see them with somebody else.

Wait, Saffron actively offered to invite Third Hemsworth and his buddy home with us, and I'm pretty sure she wasn't thinking about moving furniture. Not, like, in any kind of deliberate way. Shit, if Marie being athletic didn't move that mirrored bed, I'm pretty sure it's not moving, period.

Speaking of moving, I definitely felt some kinda way that Karen showed up ready to throw down. Even moreso when she looked at me and said, "Goddess, should we remain until sunrise, I believe I can clean you all up."

I shook my head. "I don't want them spending another night alone."

"I could go watch over them?"

I almost nodded, but Saffron said, "wait." She turned to me and said, "you can feel the sun?"

My mouth worked soundlessly for a few moments until I said, "how did you know?"

She shrugged. "You ate Apollo. Consumed his power. A few times since then sunrise or sunset has come at coincidentally opportune moments. A few others, the sun itself reversed its course. Call it an educated guess."

I rolled my eyes. "Yeah, sure, I can feel what it is, but I can't exactly just reach out and pull it back and forth." Without really thinking about it I stretched out the part of me that could tell the sun had set not long before and yanked back and forth.

The moment I mentally shoved it back over the horizon, Karen rose from the floor, glowing. Something siphoned away from me, and that glow reached out from her and wrapped around the little group of us. When the glow died down, every bit of evidence that Saffron had been kneeling in a pool of dirty, bloody water weeping since yesterday was gone. And her makeup was perfect.

Saffron looked up at me, giggled, and waved Karen over. When she got close enough, Saffron snagged her and pulled her into the big group hug on Loki's lap. "Thank you, Karen." Then she turned to me. "So, Tabitha, will you take us home?"

I stared at her, still trying to come to grips with the utterly insane idea that I'd just wobbled the sun back and forth like I had a solar remote control. "The fuck?"

She smiled at me, reaching up to brush at my hair, but never completing the movement. Instead she laughed. "I think this is only the second time I've seen you with your hair perfectly coiffed, and your face done up with cosmetics."

"Uh, when was the first time?"

Hunger flickered in her eyes. "The Solstice, when we demolished Aphrodite's temple to make way for yours." She turned to Karen. "How goes that, by the way?"

Karen shrugged. "Conrad's designs for the foundation are more complex than I'd like, and I'm not sure I like some of his more... esoteric additions, but he's provided very clear, easy to follow directions. Not to mention providing most of the difficult to acquire ingredients."

Saffron looked to me, and I tilted my head and said, "additions?"

She nodded. "There is an oubliette." I frowned, and she added. "He told me to relay a message to you regarding it; 'should you let your supposed peers know of its existence, it ought never need be used'."

I didn't mean to look at Saffron at that point, but the low, feral growl coming out of her wouldn't let me do anything else. "The fuck?"

She looked up at me, and if some of her grins were clearly HR nightmares, this one was an assault and battery charge waiting to happen. "Gods, love. Deities. Those unworthy of the title. If I know our son, you will now have a place to imprison them, should you feel it necessary. One from which they can escape no more easily than your Maw."

I froze with my mouth open for a moment. "Wait. Wait, wait, wait. Maw? Like, when you said I ate Apollo, you weren't being metaphoric?"

She just shrugged. "Oh, it happened in Metaphoric Space, so obviously some metaphor was involved. But our son only retrieved enough of him to form a cane, so I assume you ate the rest."

I'd like to say I felt ill, but honestly? For the first time since I woke up here I felt a little... hungry. "Uh..."

"Perhaps you ought show her, ladies."

Marie ended the argument with a simple, "Yes."

Saffron took my hand in hers, wrapping her other hand around Siobhan's. Siobhan took Marie's hand and asked, "shall I?"

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

My wife just looked at her with the smuggest grin ever and said, "yes, Siobhan. Take us to the place of your defloration."

Siobhan tugged just a bit on us, and the four of us stood on an endless field of... It took me a second to realize they were tentacles. Hundreds. Thousands. Millions of them, until they looked like a waving meadow. The sun shone down on us, only just approaching the horizon to the west. The big, rocky mountains on the horizon. Right about then I realized those were, in fact, the Rocky Mountains, and we could see them because we were nowhere near the ground. "Holy shit." Then Saffron's words hit. "Wait... defloration?"

Siobhan's smile pegged my cuteness meter, and her faint blush didn't hurt either. She stepped over close and stood on tiptoe to give me a kiss on the cheek. "Right here, in the land of the gods, on a field of your tentacles, my Hero, my Goddess, my Tabitha, you took every part of my freely given maidenhead like the most precious gift you'd ever been given."

"Not every bit," muttered Saffron, although her voice had more humor than genuine complaint.

"Oh, hush, you. 'Tentacles don't count'. You two just wanted an excuse to have your way with me." Saffron shrugged, but when she opened her mouth to reply, Siobhan gently cut her off, saying, "not that you needed one. Need one. Silly Kitten."

"Someone wants to get bitten, I see," growled Saffron.

"I answer your attempted threats with the words of my wise and loving Goddess, who said, 'don't threaten me with a good time'." Gotta hand it to Siobhan, she managed to get to the end of that without laughing. No further, though; at that point she started giggling. Every time she got near stopping, she looked at Saffron, who mock glowered at her, which started the giggles again.

"Uh, okay, I think the only reason I'm not freaking out is because all this is way too crazy to register as real." I stopped, then looked at Siobhan again, my brain skipping tracks like a coked up DJ. "Wait, tentacles? Defloration? The absolute fuck?"

Siobhan's eyes went all dreamy, and she totally did a Nestea plunge back onto the carpet of tentacles we stood on. Then, as she blew the last few circuit breakers on my sanity by stroking her hands across the tentacle tips, and somewhere in the back of my brain I felt that, she crooned out, "yes, Tabitha. Absolutely fucked, as thoroughly and passionately and mercilessly as I asked you to. You were wonderful."

I flopped backwards myself, my ass landing on some tentacles that thoughtfully came up to catch my ass like a chair. Because I really wanted a place to sit, and tentacles seemed like a... Goddamn my ass was rock solid, like buns of steel would bend and break if I bounced my ass off them. I think I giggled a little at that point. "I don't see a Maw though?"

The others moved over to me when I said that, Saffron taking a single swaying step that glued my gaze to her hips, Marie stalking over from where she'd been doing... something with one of the tentacles, and Siobhan just rolling over until her head rested atop my feet. "That is your most sacred place, love." Saffron leaned that hip against my shoulder, and without thinking I pulled her around so I could bury my face in her belly to stifle my giggles. "We, along with your lesser Clergy, all visit that when we pray, in our shallowest dreams at night, but... to go there in person? Few have done so and returned."

"You make it sound..." I stumbled to a stop, my train of thought refusing to move. Marie stepped up and put her arms around Saffron and I, a firm, warm, weight at my back. Siobhan wrapped her arms around my ankles like my feet were a pillow. Eventually I managed to force out. "Am I the Bad Guy?"

Saffron shrugged, which did extremely distracting things to the portions of her anatomy sheltering my head from the lack of weather. "Some would say so. Perhaps many. This," she waved an arm I couldn't see, clearly referring to the endless waving field of tentacles. "This is you, love. Mimic. Primordial. Matriarch of the Mor Pantheon by conquest and declaration. Terror Incarnate. Walking Ragnarok. Black Swan with a thousand, thousand young." She laced her fingers through my hair and pulled my face back to look up at hers. I even managed to avoid being distracted by what was framing her face from the angle I looked at her. "Do you want to know what you've done with this vast, dark power, my love?"

"I've... hurt people, haven't I?"

She shrugged. "You have. A Goddess kidnapped our daughter, your daughter, and sacrificed her a little over a year ago. A few weeks ago, when she failed to live up to the terms of her parole, you tortured her to death."

"I... did what?"

"Tortured her to death," the way she said that, so matter of fact, so unconcerned, threw me. "Conrad tells me it took close to twelve hours. I would have had it take longer, but he approved of the 'artistic merits' of your choice to do it from Moonset to Moonrise." She shrugged. "In this as in all things, I bow to the will of my Goddess. Just before last Yule, a man orchestrated an act of betrayal that you believed caused my death. You maimed him as permanently as such things can be done, after destroying the army he sent to follow up on his betrayal."

"Maimed him..."

"You cut his hands and feet off, gouged out his eyes, burned off his tongue and nose, and burned his cock off. Wait, no..." She paused, and for a moment I thought maybe she was about to say I hadn't actually done a 'to the pain' on some poor bastard. "You burned his cock off later, when he betrayed the Alliance. That was when you burned his eyes out permanently too."

"How... how can you all just sit here snuggling with me when I did all that shit?"

"Would you allow me to finish, Goddess?"

"Sure," I said with a hysterical little chuckle.

"The Goddess? You Revived her. Renamed her. And she swore allegiance to you, because she knew as well as you did that she deserved that punishment. The City you broke? Or, rather, the City whose military you broke? When a plague threatened to kill every man, woman, and child in that city of a million Souls? You Cured them. All of them, all at once, so the Plague could neither hide nor spread nor 'mutate' to threaten us again. You did that while slaying not one but two Gods of Plague who stood against you, because those deaths would have given them more power. You Cured the remnants of Calverton, led the Army sent to Liberate that City from the Undead, and..." She stopped, the way somebody will when they can barely believe what they're about to say, "you healed the Undead. You saved people from something which the Gods themselves consider an incurable curse, anathema just for being infected with it."

She shook her head, then leaned down to kiss my forehead. "You, love, are the greatest villain to ever exist for anyone who desires the status quo to remain. The status quo which has left us with 'indoor plumbing' and 'street lighting' as the greatest inventions of the most advanced City in the world. That has left Mortals scrabbling for the crumbs the Gods throw to us to watch us fight over them."

"But to us? Mortals? You are our Goddess. Our Champion. Our Hero." Siobhan's quiet whisper from down at my feet shouldn't have been so clear. But the tentacles cradling her heard it.

"Yes." Marie, like always, ended the debate.

"I... I need to think about this. Can we go home to the kids? Just... spend some time with them? As a family? Please?"

Saffron smiled down at me. "You are our Goddess, love." Her smile slipped just a little. "I wish I could give you more, give you an eternity of lazy days with our children, but I fear one day is the most we can afford you."

I closed my eyes and sighed. "Yeah. I get it. I take it you've got info about the curse?" She nodded. "Can we even afford that one day?"

She smiled down at me. "After all you've done for us? How you've stood against the powers of heaven and earth to give us a chance to make the world a better place? We, your devoted Clergy, will see it so."

I smiled up at them. "Okay. Let's get home then?"

Saffron smiled down at me, then nodded. "Take us there?"

"Uh..."

"You Translocated when you ran from us, did you not?"

"That teleporty thing? Yeah?"

"Just so. Hold us, who cling to you, with your hands and heart and mind, picture the place clearly, and move us there."

I snuggled them all, trying to ignore how much of that snuggling was being done by the field we all lounged on. I pictured the bedroom at Lancaster House. Tension filled me, a sense of potential, but we just sat there. "Um..."

"Move." Marie whispered.

I closed my eyes, shifted, and the next moment sat on the end of the bed, the others arrayed around me much as they had been on the field of tentacles. A moment later, a single voice told me we were home.

"MAMA!"