hey look another one

In the quiet of the same night, when even Anya lay resting, her sister climbed up to the top of their cabin with her guitar. Coming up here, especially when no one else was around but her and the bats, helped her clear out her head when things went sideways. She was an aunt now. That's a thing that happened. It was certainly surreal, to be sure. What now? How was she supposed to deal with nieces and nephews?

But all in all, she wasn't particularly worried about her, for once. She knew she had a good support system, and they loved each other.

Instead, she thought about herself. When she'd heard the news, she felt an odd twinge of emotion. It wasn't anger, no. Far from it, really. More self-centered, maybe? It almost felt like envy. But no. It couldn't be, could it? Yeah, yeah it could. At least she had the possibility. Adoring lovers, a functioning set of bits. Must be nice, that. Gotta be really great having 'functions like a normal person' privilege.

Oh yeah, she was jealous.

But why? Prior to this, she bet some elders would have thought her disinterest was shameful. There wasn't much of a point in being jealous, either. Everything else worked fine, she could still walk, and talk, and eat, and play her guitar, and beat things up. That should be all the important things, right? Apparently not, according to that one little cordoned off section of her brain that was still hooked on the hormonal demands of a broken and barren pair of ovaries. Fuck that section, she thought.

Even if she tried, went out of her way to make it happen, it probably wouldn't take. She got periods once a year at best, and they were agonizing enough on their own. And those were kind of an important part of the cycle. She was always down for some fucking, but there was no way. And even if there was, even if she wanted this, what would she even do with a baby?

Besides, maybe, like, teach it to be a musician like her, and... and hold it and dress it up and give it a meaningful name and... no! No, stop that. It won't happen, she had to tell herself.

Even if it did, there's no way it was going to go right. She would die. She would waste away thanks to the uterine parasite and that would be the end of her. There were a million reasons not to even be thinking about this. So why was she?

A melody stirred up alongside the crickets and frogs, slow and melancholy. A good night-time song, she thought.

Maybe it was just that; envy that she couldn't have something her sister had. They shared everything, even the ability to shift pretty soon, and maybe this was the one thing they didn't. It had been robbed from her just before her first change. All she had wanted was to have a means to make the anxiety go away, not to be used as a guinea pig. Maybe the psychiatrist what did the deed was wyrm-tainted.

But maybe that was taking the easy road, placing the blame on wyrm-taint. It was never that simple, was it? But so it had happened, so it remained. She was damaged. And damaged, she always would be. Maybe Anya would let her share the kid, at least so she could pretend. But that wouldn't really be the same. It wouldn't be hers, she wouldn't get to name it or any of that. They'd never see her as 'mom', only as 'auntie'.

Back to feeling like shit, she figured. She still couldn't wrap her head around why this was happening, but it had been bugging her all day, from the moment the news broke. And apparently Midnight was, too? Well that was just great. And to top it all off, she couldn't remember having felt like this before this point.

The sad melody continued until the sun began to light up the dark sky.

She needed someone to talk to.