All Cats Are Beautiful by Courtney Milnestein

Author:Courtney Milnestein [Milnestein, Courtney]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Queerteen Press
Published: 2020-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

Eirian looked up hesitantly, one towel around their shoulders, and another towel wrapping up their hair, as they sat on a chair pulled out from the kitchen table, and tried to follow Poppy’s movements with their eyes.

“Stop turning your head,” the girl chided behind them, reaching out and placing a mug of hot chocolate down on the table before them.

Their eyes met hers, and they smiled sheepishly.

“If you keep turning your head, the towel will fall off and you’ll get hair dye everywhere,” she warned, suddenly strangely maternal.

Eirian smiled warmly back.

“I’m trying!” they protested.

It took a long moment before Poppy realised that there was a sound from the hallway, a key in a lock, the front door opening slowly. Quickly, she looked up to see her mother standing on the threshold of the kitchen, her expression pale and tired.

“What’s wrong?” she asked quickly, forgetting Eirian and rushing to her mother’s side.

Luna Labyrinth smiled weakly and brushed her concern away.

“I’m fine. Just a long day at work.”

Poppy pointedly pulled out a chair at the table, and her mother acquiesced, sitting down wearily, and registering Eirian at the other end of the table for the first time.

“Oh, hello there,” she remarked.

“H-Hello, Ms Labyrinth,” they stammered.

She smiled, sighed, and then closed her eyes.

“Luna is fine, Calohan.”

Eirian did not know how they felt about being called by their last name, by their father’s name, but whatever they felt, Luna Labyrinth must have sensed the consternation that arose in them, and the association that such use brought.

“Yes,” she said without prompting. “I knew your father.”

Poppy tensed up, standing behind Eirian with the kettle on the stove, but Luna did not open her eyes.

“He wasn’t a good man,” she said coldly, “but he didn’t deserve to die the way he did.”

She waited, and in her mind, she could hear the whisper of that voice that spoke like her but wasn’t her. There was a horrible moment in which she thought she might still be aboard the Ayanami, that this might be just another vision, like the vision of that ruined city, those dead bodies.

“I sent him down there, you know,” she said unprompted. “I was the one who volunteered him for the test run in FF-68, and I was the one who waited too long when it came to bringing him back up.”

“Mom,” Poppy murmured.

Faintly, Luna became aware of the kettle whistling.

“I could have brought him back,” she said. “I should have brought him back.”

Cities razed, the sky the colour of vomit, bodies dismembered and scattered through the streets. Was this real? Had they really pulled her out of the isolation tank, or was she still on that distant ship, listening to the screaming of alarms, the meows dying about her, her thoughts filling an unfamiliar skull.

She could feel the trembling of the ship around her, could see the flare of that corona of light—and at the centre…at the centre…

“We do things because we’re think they’re right at the time, Calohan,” she whispered, “but it’s

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