Arc F1.9 | Chapter 35: Incident Reports, Seriously?

One of the easiest parts of parenting, Miles had always found, was letting his children make their own mistakes. There was something so nice about watching your children mess up—and he knew what that sounded like!

It wasn’t some perverse desire to see his children suffer—something he had realized, with significant horror, some parents did actually enjoy.

“I love it when they mess up,” someone he had been seated near during a work dinner had once laughed, long before he had children of his own. “It’s a reminder of how far I’ve come—and my goodness, some of the things my child and their friends get up to? I cannot imagine ever being so stupid. It’s like a little ego boost, allowing me to look back on my own youth with fresh eyes, and think, at least I wasn’t so bloody stupid.”

A few months later, that woman’s entire family had been removed from the Inner Court, not due to her children’s admittedly often ill-thought-out activities, but her own error in judgment and later attempt to shift the blame another someone else. Perhaps that boost to her ego got to her.

Instead, Miles loved knowing that his children were confident enough to make mistakes—confident in the knowledge that he and his wife would back them up, no matter what. Of course, the errors and the confidence that led his children to make those mistakes were different for each of his sweet children.

They—his children themselves and the things that powered and stymied them—were not things to be measured against one another.

There was his sweet little starlight, Emilia having the confidence to head into an unknown situation for Olivier de la Rue—not that he necessarily considered this is a mistake, although her not telling anyone that her friends were on the way there might have been a mistake. Currently, Miles couldn’t even say for sure if it was, simply because they were saving people. A collection of children and adults were safe because of them—would potentially be allowed lives of hope and safety that they had never thought to have—and while it wasn’t their job to protect any of them… Miles couldn’t necessarily say, were he to go back in time knowing how things were currently landing, that he would stop them.

Of course, if something terrible happened to any of them, Miles wasn’t sure where he would land. What was the value of one life versus another? Did him knowing and loving the child connected to one of those lives make a difference?

Miles didn’t know; generally, he hadn’t found himself in such a situation. A few times, there had been smaller incidents with his daughter and his employees; never had there been something like this.

Emilia’s confidence was so bright as to be suicidal, at times. His other children were significantly less chaotic in their confidence and mistakes. That didn’t mean he didn’t worry for them at times.

His little villash’ was all confidence when it came to being who she was. Indigo might lack confidence in her mind and strength, but she had never shied away from being exactly who she was. Sometimes, this had made making friends difficult, especially in her later school years, after she, Emilia, and Atticus had ended up in different classes. Despite some advice on how to potentially make herself more normal—advice she had asked for—Indigo had decided against dampening herself and never seemed to regret her decision.

Now, she had a few friends, largely people she had met on Memory- and AetherealBoards. Increasingly, she was finding confidence in heading out to meet them herself, letting a clone accompany her in case she got lost because she knew she could be a distractible thing. Her Censor would always bring her home, and if she were truly in trouble and without a clone shadowing her, another clone would come find her.

It wasn’t a mistake to be herself, even if Miles knew she had suffered for it at times. It was her mistake to make, and despite hearing from other parents that he should force her to conform, nothing in Indigo’s behaviour was so strange and counter to societal expectations that he’d ever found the need to step in… except that one time that she’d tried to gift one of her friends a skull she’d found in the forest.

Was her interest in carcasses and bones strange? Yes. Indigo followed proper safety precautions when dealing with the rotting corpses, and as long as she wasn’t gifting the bones or carting them around with her—outside of a few Free Colonies with, admittedly small, groups who used bones for clothing and other things—Miles wasn’t about to demand she stop being interested in them, gross as he thought her interest to be. It was more the bugs that Indigo used to clean her findings that made him exceptionally uncomfortable. Miles was not a fan of the bugs; thus, Indigo had her own little workshop, located far, far from the house.

Let her accidentally infest the workshop, and not his house, with the fuckers.

Atticus, his quiet little boy, had always struggled with his confidence in anything. It wasn’t something he could blame the boy for, his Dyadism and high D-Level giving him more than a few physical and mental health issues. Still, he tried, and when he failed, he tried again. It was a slow thing, the expansion of his son’s capacity to do things, but it was there. Atticus just having the confidence to leave their house and go to local stores to order things by himself was a big thing. Sometimes, he got overwhelmed and ordered the wrong thing, coming home with extra items because he hadn’t wanted to trash whatever he’d accidentally ordered.

The first time, he hadn’t bothered ordering again, in order to get the correct item; instead, Atticus had accepted that it was a failed mission.

The twenty-seventh time, after alternating between ordering correctly and returning with nothing but an incorrect order, he had ordered correctly after receiving something he hadn’t meant to order, returning home with that extra.

The two-hundred-and-seventy-seventh time, he had ordered wrong, ordered correctly, and returned with nothing extra. Miles had been able to see the bank record of the wrong order, and had wondered what happened to it. A few weeks later, the same thing happened. Again, a month later. Interspersed were times when the extra would return home with his son and land on the kitchen counter, open for the taking.

Eventually, Atticus had revealed that, each time, he’d run into Halen, after the boy had visited their house to exchange books with Emilia.

“I asked if he wanted the extra. He said yes. Now, if I have extra and run into him, he takes it,” Atticus had explained, and Miles had been almost positive that Halen didn’t like at least one of the items that his son had accidentally ordered that first time the extras hadn’t materialized within his house.

“Does he know why you had extras?” Miles had asked, sending Valor—who always seemed to know everyone’s business, always listening as the boy seemed to be—a query as to whether Halen might have overheard something from Emilia and her friends when Atticus had said that no, he hadn’t told Halen.

Valor had replied that even he hadn’t known Atticus occasionally bought the wrong thing. Probably, Emilia had thought it no one else’s business how her brother was learning to be more independent. It was something to celebrate, and yet not, all at once. It wasn’t anyone else’s business, even if her friends would never be anything but kind to him—would never bring it up, for fear of embarrassing his son.

“What?” Halen had asked when Miles had tracked him down a few days later, intent to ask if he knew why Atticus had extras to offer. “No? I mean, I wondered why he had extras, but I assumed someone at your house changed their mind about wanting it or something.”

“Why did you agree to take the zivhta tea? I know you don’t like them—oh, don’t give me that look. My daughter literally gets snacks for your class made of the fruit so you can’t eat any.”

Through his glare and mutters about revenge, Halen had explained that he knew Atticus was a little nervous about anything new. “I wasn’t about to make him feel like he did something wrong by offering? And I was upfront that I would be giving it to Alaric and Cyan—I even sent him a picture of them enjoying it later.”

Miles still thought Halen and Emilia were as liable to be a disaster as a love that would transcend time. At the very least, Halen would make a good older brother to Atticus—probably Indigo as well, although he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen the pair interact.

This was all to say that he loved seeing his children expand their worlds and risk mistakes, accept their mistakes as not mistakes at all, and even regret what they’d done with the whole of themself.

Sometimes, they asked for advice, and Miles always gave it. Sometimes, he really wanted to tell them what he saw in something they were doing. Generally, he had taken the stance that, unless it put his children in danger, he would hold his tongue, especially since his wife had a much harder time of holding her tongue. Marina wasn’t terrible at telling her children they were being stupid, but she definitely did it occasionally, to differing reactions.

Emilia laughed and said she was fine being stupid but did generally think over whatever had been said.

Indigo brushed her mother’s concern’s off.

Atticus devolved into a puddle of stress.

As he looked over the information Halen, Rafe, and Leerin were sending him about the situation with Janie—Simeon had apparently been assigned to get to know their new bone puller friend after Miles had confirmed some of the information the woman was supplying them with which, while not definitive proof of her allegiance to his friend, certainly supported her claims—Miles regretted not voicing his concerns about the girl to his daughter long ago.

Janet Van der Floom was… Miles was never really sure what to think of her, honestly.

The girl hadn’t been the only quiet member of Emilia’s friend group, but her energy had always felt so much different. Rafe was awkward. Simeon quiet by nature. Even amongst the other, quieter members, their quietude had always been natural. There was nothing strange about happening across Valor enjoying some alone time as he stared into space. Sometimes, Baylor or Emilia would be asleep in his lap, or enjoying the silence with him as he ran his fingers through their hair and it was normal.

Lux and BJ could both be quiet, slipping into the background of the chaos through active intention rather than an accident. Even Leerin’s quiet, brought on by annoyance and dislike of whatever was happening felt like her.

Janie’s quiet had never felt right; yet, it had also been the sort of strangeness where, if she had never changed and never shown her true colours, Miles would have thought himself wrong in his feelings towards the girl.

There was just something about her quiet—about her constant ability to vanish during high-stress and potentially dangerous moments—that had never sat well with him. There was having good luck; then, there was never being around when something bad happened, especially when the entire group was wonderful at finding themselves at the centre of a disaster.

According to the incident reports Leerin had compiled—and he was not getting into how strange it was that his daughter had apparently programmed a function for creating incident reports for the shit she and her friends got up to—Miles had been wrong for a long time: more often than not, Janie had been present at many of the worst moments of his daughter’s life; then, the girl had run off.

Miles was confused.

Miles was angry.

Miles was horrified.

In his lap, Malcolm snuffled and buried himself further into Miles’ warmth, the young man having sobbed himself to sleep after Miles confronted him over his strange and wary behaviour. Who would have guessed that the eldest Laprise brother would worry that Miles would take his daughter away from him.

Truly, the things that could go on inside people’s heads. While it was true no one had ever told him outright, he knew that Malcolm was the one primarily responsible for keeping his daughter safe from predators these last twenty-four years. Sure, the boy had messed up a bit by not coming to get him sooner; he was still exactly that, however: a boy, liable to make mistakes for a long time yet, and in no world, would Miles ever try to take his daughter away from him.

Emilia would never let him, for one thing, each of the Laprise brothers finding a place inside her heart before he’d even known they’d met. If he tried to ban his daughter from seeing them, even back then, when she’d been nothing but a bright, overly confident cannonball of energy, Miles knew she would have found a way.

His little starlight was born to find a way.

“Do you think Malcolm would have killed me? Or stolen away Emmie, if I dared try to take her from him?” Miles asked, tilting his head back to gaze up at Finn, the clone diligently managing their xpherns and transmitting the important information via relay for a number of them. Most importantly, Samina had been reached, and as much as she wasn’t in a great spot, they at least knew she was alive, and worst come to worst, her friends would be able to use the sketchy map she’d managed to send via her xphern to find her… probably. Might take a while. Miles knew that until they found her, alive or dead, her friends would never stop searching.

“Probably not,” Finn said, his fingers moving more and more smoothly over the xphern’s many buttons as time went on. “Emmie would be sad to lose either of you, but knowing Malcolm was still alive out there and simply banned from seeing her would be better than knowing you were dead. I also doubt Emmie would have obeyed such a ban, so even if Malcolm had wanted to kill you, I would have talked him into waiting a bit.”

“Ah…” Miles breathed out, suddenly over aware that these boys might be friendly with him, but that was simply because they loved his child—loved her perhaps too much, in Malcolm case, if what he’d heard was true.

It was probably true; Miles had once though that, were his brother still around, his daughter was the sort of person who wouldn’t draw any line at having sex with adopted relatives.

Miles missed his brother—wished he knew what had happened to Porter. Admittedly, he was rather glad to have never had to deal with any situation like that.