Work Text:
A knock at the door stirred Alex from his doze.
It took his brain a moment, sleepy as he was and unexpected as she was, to process who was standing at his office door.
“Did I wake you?” his mother asked, taking a slight step back out of the doorway. “I apologize. I can leave if you’re busy.”
Alex shook his head numbly. “No, no, I, uh… I think I was falling asleep, anyway. I need to get this work done. So…"
“Have you eaten yet today?” she asked, glancing over at the kitchenette. She didn’t wait for an answer.
Alex rubbed the sleep from his eyes, trying to get his mind back up and running. He hadn’t realized he’d been falling asleep with the book open in front of him. He shook his head, shaking a few thoughts back into place, and took another look at the scattered work across his desk, sketches and notes and about five different textbooks of varying sizes. Right. He was still working on the new Quill housing, so the Quillens could go home.
He glanced up to where his mother was standing in the kitchenette, carefully cutting up an apple for him. The sight was otherworldly. Sure, he knew she’d be here, if she’d made it out of Quill; pretty much everyone had. Still, something about seeing her here, in Artimé, surrounded by the crisp counters and technology in the little kitchenette… His brain felt even foggier than it had from his half-nap.
His eyes returned to the book in front of him. It was detailing the architecture of things called apartment complexes, which seemed relatively similar to the mansion here in Artimé: one big building, with a few connected rooms for each individual housing unit. He sighed and closed the book. As much as that saved space, the people of Quill would never accept it. Even if they didn’t want grass, they still wanted backyards, to bury their scraps in size-regulated holes. Besides, Quill wasn't nearly so small as Artimé. They certainly had the room for their own houses. At least that would give some other wayward child the chance to doodle in the mud, he thought.
Mrs. Stowe returned, placing the bowl of apple slices down on Alex’s desk. She sat down in the chair across from him, folding her hands in her lap, her posture perfect. Compared to his own, she towered over him, but he knew she would do that even if they were both standing. It was just one thing he hadn't inherited from his mother, along with her black eyes, her cautiousness, and a million other things that mostly boiled down to why he was here, and she was… Well. Now she was here, too.
“How did you get in here?” he asked.
“Hm?”
“The not-so-secret hallway. Where we are now. Did you find the 3-D door?”
She stared at him blankly with those jet-black eyes. Some of her eyelashes were white, he noted. Had he ever noticed that before? He’d noticed the streaks in her hair, sure, but he wasn’t sure he’d ever looked in her eyes long enough to notice her eyelashes.
“I just walked down the hallway,” she said softly. How bizarre it was to hear her voice once more. How many years had it been? Then her eyes went wide. “Oh. I— I’m sorry, I didn’t realize this area was off-limits, I just…"
Alex waved his hand before she could stand up. “It’s not. It’s just that it’s enchanted to only show to people who…" He paused. What were the qualifications to see this hallway? “I think it has something to do with magical ability, but I really don’t know. Aaron could see it, though, even back in his Quill days.”
He almost wanted to ask how she felt about Aaron being here after all, a polite little definitely-Unwanted-but-refusing-to-accept-it-still, but it felt wrong to tattle on him that way. Across the table, his mother looked away. Alex could see the scales moving in her brain, weighing two unknown possibilities against each other.
Instead, he said, “Aaron told me about the...girls.” He didn’t say our sisters, or your new daughters, or even the twins. None of those options felt right. “How are they settling in?”
“Well." Her eyes moved to the apple slices he still hadn’t touched.
“Did you get a room in the family wing?”
She nodded. “Yes. Bigger than the house back in Quill, that's for certain..”
“And…our father?”
“He’s dead.”
The silence stretched between them, an unfathomable gap of emptiness. He could fall into it, if he really wanted to. He could claw at the edges, beg for her to take him back and forgive him for all the things he’d done and hold him tight and never let him go again. The distance might swallow him, though.
Alex didn’t say that he was sorry to hear it. He wasn’t, really.
His mother broke the silence first. “Alexander—”
“Don’t,” he snapped, shaking his head. “Don’t start with that. Don’t try to make me empathize with you after what you did. You never cared about me. Never. Ever since that first infraction, you’ve always looked at me differently, strangely, like I’m something to be feared, like I might explode at any second and make a mess of the house that you need to clean up. The only care you ever showed me was caution.
“You didn’t care when you told me I was Unwanted. You didn’t care when they called my name and took me away. You didn’t care when you thought I was dead, and you didn’t care when you found out I was alive, either. Or when I was starving to death, or when they tried to kill me, over and over, none of it, never, you never cared.” He wiped his sleeve over his eyes, trying to quell the tears that threatened to spill over, breaking his voice.
“Go crawl back to Aaron if you want someone’s boots to lick and something to clear your conscience. I can’t offer you that.”
His mother didn’t nod, didn't argue. She simply stood up to leave.
“Why did you have more kids?” Alex asked before she could walk out of the doorway. She paused, but didn’t look back at him. “You thought I was dead. You knew what could’ve happened to them.”
“We knew about Artimé,” she replied, "when we made the decision. We knew…that there was a chance they’d be safe. Even with Aaron’s threats.”
She stood in the doorway for a moment longer, still not making eye contact, as Alex’s mind whirred. His brain was still struggling to catch up with the moment at hand, trying to fit the pieces together—his mother was here, she was alive; his father, gone; there were two babies that existed, somewhere, who shared his parents and his brother and he didn’t even know what they looked like; he had to fix Quill, still; his mother was here. She’d sliced up an apple for him. He still hadn’t touched it, the flesh starting to brown.
“I think you should meet them. For your own sake,” she said cautiously, softly, as though for the first time, she didn't want to push him to do something. “I don’t even have to be there. You could go with Aaron, or alone. I don't mind."
His mother walked back out of the not-so-secret hallway, closing the door behind her with a click. Alex put his head in his hands. He desperately needed an actual nap.