by Will Stanton » Thu Mar 01, 2018 11:42 pm
"No. No, I didn't," Will said, shaking his head vehemently. "I'm not a homewrecker, either."
"I was happily married myself. Husband to a wonderful wife. Father of a wonderful daughter. You'd like Robin. You two would get along famously. That, or raise hell throughout Maldon, which may or may not be the same thing.
I was happy and content just being Sam's Champion, and I got along fine with Nailah. I even started sitting in on some of Nailah's magical mumbo-jumbo sessions, to see if I could pick anything up myself. I don't have the knack, though, or whatever the mystical version of 'the knack' is. Mostly just got an appreciation for various flavors of incense, if I'm honest.
And then...Nailah died. Big battle, fate of the university at stake, and she sacrificed herself to save everyone else. Big and dramatic, it was, and earth-shaking. And it left Sam wrecked, as you might expect; it took four or five of us to get her to calm down enough to actually absorb what had happened. But we didn't know then just what had happened.
Nailah was...Nailah was precognitive, so she knew this was going to happen. She knew everything that was going to happen. She knew she was going to die, but she knew she could save herself. Or part of herself. The ba, everything that makes a person unique. She needed somewhere to store it. She needed a vessel in which she could project her essence, for later recovery. She needed something she could mold and shape. She needed some idiot sitting in on her magic sessions, not knowing exactly what she was doing.
The memories...they started coming slowly, at first, but they picked up in regularity. I had trouble distinguishing which were mine and which were...
I remember being a young girl in Minnesota, knowing that I would one day meet this...this wonderful woman and fall head over heels in love. I remember meeting her for the first time, I remember going out on our first tentative dates. I remember our wedding day. I remember how nervous I was that I'd trip over my tail and fall face-first in front of everyone. I remembered everything, just as if it had been me doing it. I remember marrying Samantha McManus and thinking I was the luckiest girl in the world.
Even later, when we were able to re-create a...version, let's say, of Nailah, and restore her ba to herself, the memories...or the memories of the memories stayed, like a residue. My marriage -- my first marriage, my real marriage -- fell apart, and we were estranged for a few years before we came to understand everything and reconnect. How could I love two people with all my heart, especially when one of them wasn't mine? It took a long time for everyone to come to grips with this -- me, Sara, Sam, Robin, Nailah, Miranda. But we eventually settled in to our own little weird, interwoven...family.
So the photos were wrong. Because I remember getting married to Sam. I remember being Sam's wife. And Conduit's photos? They were wrong, and I felt that in my soul.
So yeah. I twigged on rather early," he said, quietly, as he finished up.