Arc F1.10 | Chapter 13: Supposed To Be A Joke

Gabrielle frowned at the message her cousin had sent her—a message that had now become multiple messages from several of her cousins and her brother because Axelle and Louis had also received messages from Olivier and were similarly baffled.

As she’d been busy dealing with a bathroom crisis—one of her darling twins had insisted on continuing to play when they had actually quite needed to use the bathroom. It had been messy, and really, she had assumed that by the time five came around she would be done dealing with shit on her hands. Apparently not. According to a MemoryBoard for parents she frequented, she should quite honestly accept that having children would leave her with an always lingering risk of poop covering her hands, one father having told a story of his very adult son having acquired some sort of stomach bug on vacation a few years back.

Bodily fluids, everywhere.

It was, in the end, one of those things parents just had to grin and bear—and, when her kids had been babies, laugh and make funny faces about. The snuggles, thankfully, were worth it.

Gabrielle would happily hold her sweet children in her arms forever, giving them the affection she and her cousins so often hadn’t been given nearly enough of.

“Do you ever think it’s amazing, how, like… well-adjusted we are?” Henri had asked once, back when they were young. Most of them had thought him correct, even if he’d been high on some drug he’d gotten from a pretty silverstrain who was trying to ditch her stash who he had quite literally run into in Roasalia.

So many of their parents were the way they were because their own parents had been terrible—seriously, Gabrielle was always coming up with reasons her kids couldn’t see either her parents or her grandparents because they were all so terrible. There was this trickle down of terribleness through families—this trauma of a million generations and expectations that inevitably broke every member of their family.

Except, it hadn’t broken them—hadn’t even touched a bunch of them, as far as most of them could tell. Sure, they were all a little fucked up, but who wasn’t?

Axelle was harsh, but also so unafraid of ruffling feathers that they knew she would one day be the sort of lawyer no one wanted to go up against.

Louis was so kindhearted that it was actually something of a problem, but better to be the softest of men than be someone like their own, domineering father.

Henri loved everyone and had a capacity for acceptance of differences within those people that was quite frankly amazing.

Clovis was the sort of person who loved giving himself in whatever capacity he could, and they all knew that, one day, he would be their face: the person who answered the hard questions because they all hated media relations, but for them, he would sacrifice himself.

Olivier was awkward and obsessive, but he was the kindest person she knew, and an unending, unfathomable love and a long stream of victories for those the world so often forgot would trail in his wake.

Antoine was… something—figuring himself out, perhaps, and unafraid to do so.

As for her… Gabrielle was someone with a bottomless heart, everyone she met finding a home within her—there was a reason several of the children her twins were becoming friendly with all loved her. A few even seemed to love her more than they loved their own parents, and that was a problem. Her children were already different, as Olivier’s strange message had pointed out, and that created this tension between her kids and everyone else. It created a tension between her and other parents as well because there was this balance between encouraging your kids to be friends with children who were related to important people and discouraging them from being too friendly with children who might turn out to be so different that they caused problems, and…

It was complicated, was all.

In some ways, Gabrielle knew her cousin was right: she really would be better off moving her family to the Penns, in order to make sure her children grew up in the most supportive environment they could. At the same time, it really wasn’t fair—not to her kids, not to children whose parents couldn’t afford to move to the Penns. The most supportive environment should exist everywhere, not simply within a small, affluent community, and to decide to move there—to inherently choose to support a power structure that had created a differentiation within the educational and social environments of the same nation…

It was difficult, was all.

“Why is my Censor sending me listings for houses in the Penns? Specifically, in Oventire?” her husband asked as Gabrielle slipped back into the kitchen. Koprine had tucked their food into containers while she gone to clean the kids—her son had wanted her to help him clean up, his cheeks bright spots of colour as tears lingered in his eyes, and such was the way of things sometimes, and sometimes, children in vulnerable states got to have whatever parent they wanted when they needed help cleaning up. “The city looks nice. Are you thinking we should move there?” Soft grey eyes peeked up at her, edged over with a few more wrinkles than when they’d met, decades ago now.

At almost eighty, Gabrielle was the oldest of her cousin group, but this still made her a young mother by Baalphorian standards—by most of their continent’s standards, really, most people waiting until their hundreds to start popping out kids. Her twins, however, had been something of an accident.

Even six years on, none of them were quite sure how her birth control had given out. One moment, she’d been with her cousins, most of them shifting through the Free Colonies on a summer trip they definitely weren’t supposed to be on; the next, she’d been running into her pretty law professor in Seer’ik’tine—her former law professor.

Most of the time, schools left students and faculty to manage their own affairs, everyone trusting their Censors to alert the administration if consent was ever violated, if anyone felt pressured or like their grade was being affected. Professor Koprine Vargus had, to her knowledge, never touched one of his students. Still, she had seen him watching her at times—had known that he always gave her far more time during their meetings to discuss class than he did any of her classmates. It wasn’t something she could blame him for; Gabrielle knew she was beautiful. The man had never been anything but polite, however—never made her feel his interest in more than looks that lingered a second or two too long, whenever he caught sight of her shifting through campus or town.

So, when she’d run into him in Seer’ik’tine, muttering about little diplomatic brats while trying to wring what had seemed to be an endless amount of water from his coat—it had eventually been thrown out because, even weeks later, the water had still been seeping out of it—Gabrielle had taken the chance to make her own interest in the much older man known.

What had followed was just over two months of them rarely being apart. Koprine specialized in international law—hence him being in Seer’ik’tine—and he had dragged her about on his travels, visiting various nations to check in on some company or another, each dealing with some issue or needing advice on expanding their operations eastward. Her favourite and least favourite place had been Lüshan, where Koprine managed the imports and exports for a company that made… something. It was all hush-hush, and Gabrielle had never bothered to push.

Lüshan’s capital was a terrible place, she thought—dark and dreary and she’d had the impossible feeling that something terrible was happening in that place, despite Koprine telling her she was just imagining it. “The Drini have been cleaning the place up for the last few years, after one of the coren’taz brats broke up a trafficking ring and— Well, it was a whole thing.”

Koprine, she had always thought, knew a lot of the diplomatic group that seemed set to run the world, although he spoke little of them in more than passing comments.

The other thing Gabrielle had felt in Falmíer, however, had been at the end: this overwhelming feeling that she was leaving something important behind. Despite searching by both her and Koprine, neither of them had found anything important, lingering forgotten in their hotel room.

So, they left.

A week later, she had found out she was pregnant. Somewhere along the line, probably around the time she’d run into Koprine in Seer’ik’tine, her birth control had stopped working. It could have been in Seer’ik’tine, in Crishar—where she and her cousins had just come from—or somewhere in Byshire—where Koprine had taken her first. They would probably never know.

Luckily for her, Koprine had never even blinked. There had been no panic, no regret, nor any demands she have the babies or abort; instead, there was just this man, so much older than she was but perfect and they were in love but it was too soon and he was telling her that whatever she wanted, he was there for her.

In the beginning, Gabrielle had sometimes wondered if he married her so things would be easier for her and their children. It was so fast, and as much as she had been his student for decades, they didn’t really know one another, right? The man was just doing right by her—or maybe, at his age, he was just thinking that this was the best he would get? A young wife from a powerful law family and two children that he did actually seem to want and adore, even back when she’d had doubts and sometimes thought that, to Koprine, perhaps she was nothing but an incubator.

Nearly six years on, Gabrielle no longer doubted that her husband loved both her and their children. The man was perfect, as proven by the little frown on his face as he quite seriously examined Olivier’s messages and the listings for houses in Oventire that his Censor had given him—Axelle had connected their Censors a while back, using some sort of hack for people in love, which automatically shared some of their information between their Censors. In other words, because her Censor was aware that Olivier wanted them to move, Koprine’s Censor also knew, and since he was the one who would inevitably end up responsible for dealing with their moving, their Censors had put him in charge of finding a house.

Not that they were moving.

“Why do we need so many bedrooms? Do you think he’s bringing us another child?” Koprine asked, far too little concern in his voice. “He’s on his trip into the Free Colonies, right? Maybe he found us a child.”

“Do not joke,” Gabrielle replied. While they had considered having more children, that was a future thing. Eventually, she wanted to get back to working, of course, but that would have to wait until her children were a bit older—Censor age, perhaps. If she wanted to return to work, Koprine would support her, but Gabrielle liked being a mom—liked being home to get her snuggles and stories from her sweet children. Still, worked would eventually call, and as a result, she didn’t want to wait too long to have more children; at the same time, twins were a lot, and a trip to the doctor last year to check on the situation in her ovaries had revealed that she had a propensity for dropping multiple eggs each time she ovulated.

In other words, the chances of her having another set of multiples were high. Considering that subsequent tests had revealed that she usually dropped three to five eggs each time, Gabrielle was going to need her children to be a bit older before she dared letting her husband’s sperm anywhere near her ovulating whore of a uterus.

Five babies, inside her? All at the same time? All while she was having to deal with shit splattering down legs and little genitals, the kids somehow having shifted from embarrassment into laughing and thinking it the funniest thing in the world in the meantime?

Absolutely not.

“Someone’s at the door,” her husband commented, alerted by the security system—Gabrielle had yet to turn her awareness of their house’s security system back on, having turned it to emergency alerts only while cleaning up.

Turning towards the front door, Gabrielle made a comment about it being a bit late for unexpected visitors. One step—that was how far she made it towards the door before her husband was there, sliding between her and the door. “What? Who is it?” she asked, her Censor scrambling to get the security footage up while Koprine told her to stay put, pressing a kiss to her forehead.

“Should I go upstairs? To the kids—”

“No. It’s— I don’t think that’s necessary,” he replied, hurrying off when the doorbell rang.

The security footage pulled up as he vanished around the corner, leaving her alone in the kitchen. Her eyes skimmed over it just as a message from Henri popped up in their cousins’ relay, asking if anyone else had Hyrat clones at their door.

[Gab:Yes.]

[Gab:They just knocked.]

[Louis:Same.]

[Axelle:Yeah. Just letting them in.]

[Clov:Not yet, but I can see them heading this way.]

[Henri:Did something happen?]

[Olivier:Yes. Sorry. Let them in.]

[Olivier:Busy. They’ll explain.]

Well… fuck. They’d always joked that, one day, Olivier’s trips were going to cause a problem. It was supposed to be a joke—always just a joke.

Apparently, this time, it wasn’t a joke.