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The place for a father's name on both birth certificates is blank.
When Bellamy was born, Aurora had toyed with the idea of naming heroes or gods. Writing in some pun or allusion she was convinced no one on staff would notice. Father: Hector Regem, maybe. Or Zach Iovem. If not for the legal complications, she might have gone through with it just to get some use out of her Classics degree.
Her children have no fathers. It's a line she maintains, steadfast, until she forgets what those men's names had been. Her children were hers, and hers alone, from the moment she felt them inside her, and she refused to entertain the idea of sharing them with anyone.
---
A lot of things fall by the wayside as the focus in her life narrows down to the two small people she loves so much it knocks her flat. The graduate program and all the years she'd thought she'd spend combing through first person sources and slogging through translations in poorly lit archives morphs into a job at some hole in the wall dry cleaning and alteration place. Aurora is good at it because she has to be: it's a steady job with steady hours and steady pay.
So, by day she mends. Takes in, takes out, patches and hems. She thinks of Arachne and Athena and the cost of pride. It isn't a cost she cares to worry about, considering the hundred other costs she manages raising children.
At night, she's a teacher. Bellamy picks up reading more quickly than she dreamed he might, sounding his way through pages of her old college textbooks by the time Octavia is born. She reads to them both, and he re-reads to Octavia. There aren't many children's books in the house, no television except the over-the-air static, so they read Aurora's personal collection until the pages fall loose from the binding.
Aurora doesn't have the forethought to censor any of the stories and myths, and when she considers it after a choice question about just what scorching a baby meant, she decides retroactively that she doesn't want to. That she won't lie to her children or shield them from the truth of the world, and that no matter the nightmares the truth might encourage, it is better than letting the truth creep up on them with no way of knowing it's even there.
---
She tells them that fear is a demon, which is probably not the usual soothing tactic among the few mothers she knows well enough to know what a usual soothing tactic might be.
Still, she tells them that fear is a demon. That they can fight it and defeat it, that they have to. Octavia cries, once, in anticipation of this speech when she desperately doesn't want to go to school, and Aurora is at a loss for how else to fix the problem. So, she doubles down.
With her daughter's face held gently between her hands, she says, "You are strong, Octavia. Do you understand me? When you fight fear, you'll win. Every time. Because as soon as you decide to fight, it loses."
Octavia nods in response, sniffling but solemn as her mother wipes the tears away with her thumbs.
Bellamy, thirteen and with all the attitude the age demands, slinks through the room behind them and says, "You know, Mom, other moms just say, 'You'll be fine.'" Octavia's mouth turns into a tiny 'o' of shock, but Aurora doesn't miss a beat.
She only turns to him and says, "Other mothers don't have warriors for children. Right, O?"
There's a fight the next day in the first grade class, a suspension, and have ice cream after dinner for the first time in a month.
---
Having children makes Aurora feel whole, but it doesn't fix anything.
She is still uncompromising, intransigent. If anything, being responsible for them makes her more so. The men she sees, when she sees them, never see her kids. Some never even know she has them. Every interaction she has with the world outside her family is coarse and prickled by her own design, because it is easier in her mind to love her children more, most, when she shows none of that affection to any other living creature on the planet.
Octavia takes after her that way. Mother and daughter constructing obstacles between themselves and the world, imagining rivalry and animosity where there probably is none, as if the predisposition is genetic. Aurora worries a little about how few friends she makes outside of Bellamy, at least when she is called in by teachers and guidance counselors to discuss her social progress, but only a little. She worries more about how Octavia wants to walk to the store alone, wants to go and do and leave.
It's different with Bellamy. There's some fine line he seems to imagine himself walking between family and the world. He has a capacity for caring about other people that Aurora does not understand, in a way that calls her own methods into question. Still, he doesn't have many close friends, he prioritizes family first and learns to clench his jaw against his own tendency for outbursts. Aurora never worries about him leaving, only about what he lets in.
---
When you see your children, you realize your mortality.
That's the assumption, the myth of motherhood. Aurora had always assumed the opposite, that she would be immortal in them, live forever in every word they remember her saying. It's an idea that makes her feel powerful, so she holds it close.
It isn't until Bellamy is about to graduate from high school that she realizes this might not be true. That she might be Thetis, never meant to finish fortifying her children for the world ahead of them. Doomed either to leave them incomplete or, in horror, watch them die before her.
What really terrifies her is that she has no idea how to change it.