homesick for anywhere but home

Meeting her dcera for lunch was something that she had been thinking about doing since Temperance had come to see her. Anicka knew that they were going to be dealing with what she was finally talking about for awhile yet, but that didn't mean that it was something that they had to deal with at lunch. It was publishing Tuesday, and she knew that she needed to send Temperance back to the office, but taking a break for lunch wasn't a terrible thing. Anicka knew that she needed to go in there anyway. It had been a couple of weeks since she had actually graced the office with her presence, and even if she was still technically on maternity leave, she was writing, and editing, and publishing, and everything else that had to do with her actually owning, and editing, the magazine. It just had a lot more to do with the fact that if she did it from home she could do it in her yoga pants and one of Malcolm's shirts, with no makeup. Coming into London meant that she actually had to get dressed in something presentable, and since it was officially summer holidays for Pippa's primary school, pack up all three kids and bring them with her.  That wasn't so bad really, when lunch was at the park, and she could let the little girl run off and play while she talked to her older daughter. Actually talking was a feat that she didn't know if she was really going to get accomplished, but it was worth a shot. No matter whom it was that Temperance was talking to, Anicka hoped that she was talking to someone. Whomever it was, she just wanted her to find the help that she had. It was something that you didn't just fall into. You didn't just get better, and Anicka knew that she still wasn't 'better'. There was no getting better. Not with the kind of damage that had been done to her in the past. There was just learning to carry on. Learning how to handle what came next, and learning how to be happy. That was what really threw her for a loop most of the time. She didn't think that she knew at all what it was like to really be happy before. And that wasn't fair... Because she had been happy.  Her children had always made her happy. Being a mother had made her happy. When it wasn't terrifying her. But right now that wasn't the case. Right now, she was happy in a different way. She was happy in the way that said that she was getting married next month. That she had found someone that made her well and truly happy, as more than just someone's mother. She could be more than that with him, and not have to worry. Anicka didn't have to worry about doing something that he wouldn't like. About doing things that he was going to think were too objective, things that were too big for a girl to be doing. She had lived like that for a long time, and she thought that HOME was the only thing that Andrew had allowed her to have that could be considered something other than what was expected of a wife. The children were expected, and she was expected to raise them, and take care of them, but the magazine... That was something that he had let her build all on her own, and no one could take that away from her.  He had tried, once, and that had ended badly for everyone, but he had never tried again. And she didn't have to worry about that now. She knew that Malcolm would never try to take anything away from her. She knew that he loved her. And that... Well... That was something extraordinary all on its own. Anicka didn't think that anyone had ever loved her before that. Her children, obviously, but love from your children wasn't the same as love that was freely given. And he loved her. And she loved him. And there was something healing in that. Freeing, in a way. Looking over at the eldest daughter of the group she had around her right now, Anicka let her eyes wander her face for a moment, trying to decide if she was healing, or if she was still the same way that she had been the last time that she had talked to her. The last time that Temperance had run away from her... Running a finger over Eve's arm in her lap, her baby girl wrapped her own hand around her index finger as Anicka finally spoke, "You're quieter than usual..." and that was saying something, for the dcera that rarely spoke anyway...

Anicka's Outfit	Temperance Lucille Mountbatten
Pippa's Outfit | Izák and Eve's Outfits

Temperance didn’t like this.

It wasn’t that she didn’t like being outside, having a picnic, or even seeing her Matka baby bratr and sestry, but what had happened recently, what had been like ripping the scab off of a poorly healed wound, wouldn’t stop aching in her chest.

She didn’t know what to do at this point. It had been brought up after years and years of silence, and all Temperance had been able to do was shut down on her Matka. She had put it in her mind so long ago. I must never speak of it. None of it. Any of it. Not what Matka had figured out, and not the countless things she still didn’t know about Temperance and what she had gone through and was still going through.

Now that she had shut down, now that the wound was open, she wondered how long it would take. How long it would take for her Matka to ask again, to try to work it out of her. How long it would take for her to realize she was hiding more than that. How long it would take for her Matka to get too worried, to get sick of the secrets. How long, even, until Matka couldn’t stand it anymore and she had Ares rip it out of Temperance’s mind? Logically, she was sure that was an exaggeration. Her Matka wouldn’t do that to her. But now that one stone had been turned, how many more could possibly be turned? The anxiety that had circled this for years was taking over.

She was overreacting, to say the least. To think that her Matka would try to get too far into ir here and now - at a bloody picnic in the damn park with roses and sunshine and her younger siblings - was ludacris in and of itself. She was just far too paranoid now. It made her realize how much it had been stored up, and the slightest shift sent her into a paralyzing wave of anxiety, one that hadn’t lost its grip yet. But she would be fine. This would be fine. Everything would be fine.

Temperance watched as her little sestra ran around, and it made her smile a bit. Pippa had so much energy all the time, Temperance often found it hard to keep up with her. She had been chasing her around a bit before sitting back down, as her attention was now captured by a beautiful butterfly. Temperance had waved her wand just slightly and had the butterfly change colors from time to time, which escalated her Pippa’s amusement. She dropped her wand and continued watching her when her Matka spoke, the smile on her face faltering just a bit. “Not much to say,” Temperance said simply, ignoring the beating of her heart in her chest.

Homesick

Anička was getting used to the little kids thing again. She had done this once. She had raised five children into adulthood, and now she was starting over. She had Pippa, and she had the twins, and she liked having them around. She liked being their matka. Because even if she hadn’t given birth to Pippa, she was her matka too now. Not legally. She wanted to make that legal, but she didn’t know how to bring that up to Malcolm. She didn’t know how that was going to work. Because Mirabella was still alive. She could honestly come back at any point, and Anička was worried about that. She was worried that she was going to try and come here and take her away. Especially if something happened to Malcolm. If anything happened to him, and she was left alone with the kids, she trusted that Talia wouldn’t try and take her daughter from her. But she didn’t trust his ex-wife. No one would have trusted his ex-wife.

She was Italian, which had very little to do with it, but Anička thought that she would worry until she knew for certain that no one was going to try and take Pippa away. Biology wasn’t what made you a mother, and Anička could admit when she had first realized that she was pregnant with Ella, all of those years ago. She had been terrified. She had been so worried that she was going to be a horrible mother. That she was going to fail all of them, and she knew that she had. In different ways she had failed all of them, but every day that she was alive and breathing, she was trying so hard to just be the best mother that she could be. For all of them. She had taken his daughter, and she would be her mother. Because that was what a mother did. She would raise her, and love her, and protect her. She would teach her everything that she had taught her older daughters.

That was what being a mother meant to her. She was their matka, and she wanted to talk to Temperance today. Not to push, or anything, but just to see how she was. Out of all of her children, she thought that the one that held her at the furthest distance was Temperance, and she struggled with that. Anička wanted to be closer to them all. She wanted them to know that they could trust her. That she was going to protect them. That was her job. She was their mother. But it wasn’t that simple. Not in this case. Because what she had done to protect her was exactly what the space in between them was made up of. It was made up of the distance that she didn’t know how to bridge. And she knew that she couldn’t talk about anything hard in public, but she also thought that there was less of a chance of her dcera up and walking away in public.

There was a smile on her lips as she watched Temperance enchant the butterfly that Pippa had been watching. It was a burden lifted off of her that they had all accepted Pippa was their sibling now. She knew that Philip was protective of her, just the same as he was of his other sestry. She wanted that. She wanted them all to know that she loved them equally. “Oh?” It was a prying question, and she thought that there was a chance that Temperance wouldn’t say anything, but she had to try something. They had gotten her out of the office, and that was a start, but Anička knew that she had to go to the office anyway a little later. She had plenty of errands to run today. She would have to see how the afternoon went, whether she asked Temperance or Thea to take Pippa home for her, or finish her errands in her stead.

@ temperance - 664 - anička's outfit

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Tempy knew things were going to have to change sooner or later. She couldn’t continue on like this, the way she had been for so many years. She had been molded and changed by so much, but each thing was like another dead thing inside of her, like she had squelched the life right out of it somehow. It was how she dealt with the pain, by not dealing with it. By making a habit of it, she managed to destroy so much, yet she had tried so hard to make it seem like nothing was broken and she couldn’t harm a thing. She didn’t know if it was working anymore… Gwen said it wasn’t. She said that there was never a Mountbatten who had been harmless, and never one who anyone had even believed was harmless. That...really stacked things against her.

She couldn’t keep up an act forever or she was going to break. She had broken before, but not in ways that she had ever let anybody see. She had learned quickly when she was younger to be a princess on the outside with the demons in her head. The demons had made her do...a lot of awful things. And if she wasn’t careful, that was going to burst one of these days. She couldn’t let that happen. She couldn’t hurt the people around her. Most of them were hurting already.

She had to do something. She didn’t know what, but something. She had started, she supposed, but honestly, she felt worse. She was afraid of that, because it was almost more dangerous that way. She was already at the edge of herself… She didn’t have a lot of fight left in her, at least not the kind of fight she had been using for so long. What if she didn’t have enough left to get through the harder times that were inevitably coming?

Temperance couldn’t think like that. It was just another thing that she was going to have to shove to the back of her mind and let whither and die before she dealt with it. It was a vicious cycle, but it would work out. One step at a time. As she sat in the park, she realized she had more reasons than just herself to heal. Her matka had done so much for her… Was it really fair to let her lose a daughter? Tempy had her own fighting thoughts about that, but on the surface, she knew. And now...well, she wasn’t the youngest sestra anymore. There was Pippa and Eve now… What kind of a sestra would she be if they could only see her as a shell? She had to be better than that, if not for herself, then for her family.

Temperance wouldn’t really meet her matka’s eyes. She couldn’t, not right now, so she kept looking at Pippa even as she spoke. She loved her little sestra… “I guess not,” she answered evenly. She knew her matka was prying, but what in Merlin’s name was Temperance supposed to say? She would cease to function like a human being if she dragged all of the deadness out right now. That wasn’t something she could do, and it wouldn’t help matters.

i get homesick

i get homesick

for anywhere but home

When she had met Malcolm, she had known that he was going to come with Pippa. That they were a package deal. And she had been perfectly okay with that. If Pippa would let her into her life, Anička was more than willing to be a part of it. She wanted to be there, she wanted to be the matka that the little girl didn’t have. But she knew that it was more complicated than that. Because she knew that Mirabella could come back. She knew that Pippa’s mother being alive was something that they didn’t talk about. It was something that they tried to avoid most of the time. But Anička could admit that she was a little worried about it. She didn’t think that there was any real reason to be. She hadn’t come back in years after all. But now they were together, and now they had Izák and Eve, and she was worried that getting married, that actually finally replacing her in a way that the world could see, was going to cause a problem.

The last thing that she wanted was to harm a relationship that Pippa could potentially have with her mother. But at the same time, she knew that she really would have liked to replace her. That wasn’t fair. She had replaced her in Malcolm’s life. Mirabella’s existence in their home was that only of Pippa’s mother. And Anička knew that she didn’t want to go that far. She would take never being Mother to the little girl, but she thought that she would have given quite a bit to go from being Nika to being Matka. She wanted that, but she knew that she wasn’t going to push for it. She wasn’t going to offer it yet. She was little, after all. She was only seven, and she knew that it was much more complicated because of the fact that Mirabella was alive. Though she had realized, that somewhere along the way, in the course of the last year, Pippa had stopped talking about her as much.

Maybe she was asking Malcolm about her when he put her to bed or drew her a bath. Maybe she was asking Talia when Anička wasn’t around. She didn’t honestly know. But Anička knew that the mentions of the Italian witch where far fewer than they had been when she had first met Malcolm and Pippa Nott. Watching her play with the butterfly that Temperance had created, Anička was reminded of how proud she had been of her elder children when everything that come to pass. They had accepted Malcolm. Liked him, even, and they had embraced a little sister in Pippa. Even before they had known that there were going to be two more. If she would have put money on having a child with Malcolm, she would have bet that would do it. Even just the once. She would have offered, somewhere along the way. To try. To try and get him a son. Because she had a son, and she knew that as much as Philip looked up to him, and wanted to be like him, it wasn’t the same thing.

She would have offered. But she hadn’t expected for it to be a surprise coming home from a mini-vacation. And she certainly hadn’t expected that it was going to be twins. No matter how sick she had been, or what it had taken to get them here, she was glad that they were here. A boy, and a girl. They had one of each that were half each of them. Izák with his daddy’s blonde hair, and Anička’s blue eyes. Evangeliná with Anička’s dark tresses, and eyes that were so bright green you had to be right up on them to realize that they weren’t blue… Both of them, reflected back in each of their twins. Pulling her eyes away from the twins in her lap, Anička focused instead on Temperance and she shook her head a little bit when she didn’t really answer. She wasn’t going to push her, but she thought that it was better to worry about something like this, than it was to worry that there was something going on that she wasn’t telling her. “Just remember that the door’s always open, okay?” Even if she didn’t want to talk now, maybe someday she would.

@ temperance • 729 • anička's outfit

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