Dragons don't cry

Lily is safe.

Where "Safe" is defined as "In no immediate danger, because the Reavers consider her one of their own." It would be a lie if I said this situation pleased me. But given what I know now, what I should have realized before, executing a recovery mission won't have the desired effect.

Oh, there would be the emotional, personal, satisfaction of doing something active to bring her back. But that wasn't the point. Keeping Lily safe was.

I knew there were only a couple of people who could control the Reavers, and one of them is effectively on ice. Which left Aurora. The Tiny Dragon, who the Reavers treated as their queen. Who else would think to have the Reavers capture Lily and take her away? Lily already had an odd relationship with the Reavers. Killing them with child-like glee when they attacked but still feeling comfortable on their boats. The scent, she said.

I don't pretend to understand how she, Lily, Mindo, Blue, and the Reavers all inter-relate. On some level, I do, but my understanding is incomplete at best. Though who but little Aurora would send Lily off with the Reavers to keep her safe?

But now the decision is made. For better or worse. I would accept the consequences of my actions, as I'd accepted responsibility for Lily in the first place. If I'd known then, what I knew now, I would still make the same choices. I might be a little mad myself for letting them into my life. Where others saw Lily as a grown, somewhat erratic, beautiful, demi-feline construct. I saw the child inside. I could barely wrap my mind around the being of Aurora, the child with ancient eyes, yet she was Lily's daughter. Legally, she was my granddaughter, emotionally my niece. She was the key to the future, but a future I couldn't quite see.

It didn't matter. They were my little girls, and I loved them both. The children I would never have myself. Karma made real.

Was this the 'Verse balancing my Karma? Imrhien set me free. Sabrina gave me a reason to live. Where they my trial? Karma balancing itself by doing something ultimately right not for myself, but for the 'Verse.

When I ran into x0x0 last night, I hadn't expected it all to turn out the way it did. She knows a lot about her brother's projects. No surprise there, really. But she knows a lot about Lily too, and why Mindo was doing what he was doing. I know it surprised her when I agreed to go to Firefly's with her. I was, at the time, still preparing to go recover Lily. Somewhere, I was sure, some CorpWatch tabloid would run some grainy still of the two of us sitting calmly in a booth together, in some backwater bar. Some speculative story about the granddaughters of two of the most powerful industrialists in the Core spending time together. And the story would be wrong. Probably more wrong then they could ever comprehend. But that was the way it went.

x0x0 was there for her own reasons. I was there to get a reminder of the people who's lives were affected by the actions, and reactions, on this little slice of Heaven. The people who I nominally lead.

Then Aurora showed up.

She'd changed. Looking a little older. Maybe six now. Longer hair, her skin soft like Lily's, but a patchwork of color like a rag doll. Her behavior was different. Very different. More like her mother. I watched her, while trying to convince Nack that pulling the motivator chip out of that warbot he'd captured on Blackburne was a bad idea. It needed to have it's power core yanked. Not just the motivator.

Stubborn man, our Mister Barnes. But then little Aurora reached out, and I took her hand and let her lead me from Firefly's back across town. She stopped at the new church, such as it was. A half round metal enclosure with a few pews and a place for the Shepherd to give his sermons. She didn't seem to care about the snippets of scripture on the wall, or the pulpit, or anything else, save the statue with the sheep.

She started to move again, quickly. Leading me on through town to the fountain, where she promptly dunked her head under the water for several moments. It brought back Lily's recent baptism and I understood what it meant when, later, upstairs in x0x0's building in the the Blue Sun compound, she asked me "Do I have a soul?"

Yes, Little One. As much as any of us do.

We talked, and I finally started to understand what I should have seen all along.

What had I gotten myself in to?

It didn't matter. I couldn't change it now, and didn't want to in any case.

Lily was safe. I knew that now. But what of us? What of the four hundred fifty odd people on Hale's Moon? There always seemed to be a storm brewing. Or perhaps the storm clouds never really went away. There was a storm coming, whether another wave in the same storm we'd been living through, or something new, didn't matter. It was coming and we would weather it.

We always weathered the storm. In some of the old mythologies, Dragon was the representation of Storm. Aspects of water. In the East, Dragon was more benevolent. In the West, it was more antagonistic. Different aspects of the same primal force. Like my little girls. We were Dragons.

And no matter how much they might want to at times, be it with pain, or joy, or the overwhelming knowledge of what was to come, Dragons don't cry.