"You too, of course, are of royal blood."

"How can I be of royal blood? " whispered Margarita, terrified, pressing herself against Koroviev.

"Ah, your majesty," Koroviev teased her, "the question of blood is the most complicated problem in the world! If you were to ask certain of your great-great-great-grandmothers, especially those who had a reputation for shyness, they might tell you some remarkable secrets, my dear Margarita Nikolayevna! To draw a parallel-the most amazing combinations can result if you shuffle the pack enough."

From "The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov

The night her uncle died, Juliet dreamed about family. Not her own family, but an important family all the same.

It went something like this:

Imagine a mother.

Now, imagine a world, quiet and waiting. It is empty and full, and full and empty. It is teeming with her silent children. Dutifully, she watches over all the inquisitive lichen exploring crevices with abandon. Lovingly, she cultivates the ambitious ivy waiting for architecture on which they'll creep. Selflessly, she encourages the tentative kelp gardens toiling away to infuse the seas with breath for her future children.

When this mother, the Mother, looks over her land, she is filled with the kind of loneliness that merges the emotional with the physical. Although Juliet's dream provides distance, the young Butler can feel the sympathy pangs of solitude in the very marrow of her bones. The Mother's loneliness is really a kind of proto-grief; its intensity summons a state of mourning for the relationships not yet lost. The loneliness was a small, aching creature that sought each day to crawl in between the spaces of Mother's ribs so that it might consume her heart.

Juliet knew her dream would end in violence when she let the voice spinning the tale wash over her, and behind each word, found a desperation for the pain of the beginning to be understood.

Now, imagine that one day, Mother decides that she can no longer continue as she always has. Maybe she goes down to the river (and in this time, the world is divided by so many rivers). She dregs up clay, plunging her strong hands into the softness of the loamy riverbank, tunic pulled back to her elbows. It is here she truly becomes Mother, and the red ochre of the clay might as well be her own blood.

Maybe it is.

She fashions herself three children, and her craft becomes more skilled with progressive accouchement.

Her eldest is packed too tightly, and though she loves how rigidly he conforms to the shape she made for him, he bores her. She gives him her blessings and makes sure he wants for nothing, but he never bears the full fire of her love.

Incidentally, her middle child is instead packed too loosely, liable to crumble apart and ooze into shapes that are not her design. She is Mother, and she could never hate her child. However, she still cannot bring herself to whisper sweet words of support to her, nor does she bend her world such that it falls to its knees for her.

It is her youngest child she loves most dearly. The clay of this one never set quite right, and she endlessly provides succor, excavating herself and all her gifts for his greed.

All things, particularly childhood, must come to an end. To her dismay, her children grow. They grow, and suddenly, there is no longer space enough for all three. First, she goes to them as a group, and then, she approaches them individually, begging them to come home. Even her youngest, Man, rebuffs her, and she weeps bitterly, her tears spilling into the ground, filling the world with more grief. She pulls back, returning once more to her home. She ignores the fury of the clash between her children outside. She ignores when her eldest, Brother, is struck down, forced to live below the surface of the earth in darkness and gloom. She ignores when her middle child, Sister, is struck down, forced to lick her wounds in the shadows and pretend to be of the same clay as her brother, Man. Mother ignores as Man crawls his way around the world, striking down his children, just as he struck down his Brother and Sister.

It takes eons for it to even register that all her children survived, and even longer for Mother to care.

Juliet's dream is long, and this version of the tale is but one of many. Rather than being from clay, sometimes the siblings are cultivated differently. In one version, the siblings are created when Mother creates a plot in her garden, growing the eldest from one of her milk teeth, the middle from a few drops of her blood, and the youngest from one of her lopped-off braids. In yet one more, she plucks the siblings from the night sky itself, casting her net upwards and dragging back the constellations she caught in its thrall. Their bodies change, as do their virtues and sins, but their natures remain the same. Before the sun rises, Juliet is able to recognize the many faces worn by each sibling.

But then Juliet wakes up. As with many dreams, this one, too, melts away like butter in a hot pan, leaving a patina over her psyche while denying her the dream as a memory. She receives the news of her uncle's death as she holds onto her dead friend, the presence of his coldness making her hope, stupidly, that the Major might yet return to them. Months later, she watches Artemis as he, her brother, and herself sit quietly around the dinner table. There, she wishes she could trade this corpse for her uncle. Perhaps, she thinks to herself as she shallowly drags her spoon through her soup, the problem is that the dead cannot swim.

Juliet remains silent, for explaining these thoughts to her brother would be impossible. Even if he could understand the clumsy explanation she has to offer, even if he could believe that she offered up neither delusions nor metaphors, Juliet knew Butler would refuse to listen. Butler would not be able to stomach the sliver of resentment that painted her recollection of the tale of the siblings; nor would he be able to ignore her tone when she divulged the fact that Butler currently guarded his charge's living remains. For Butler had given too much away when watching over the young boy, had put too many pieces of himself into the rearing of his charge.

In some grotesque sense, the sinking of the Fowl Star had removed some of the awkwardness from their lives, as with the Fowl patriarch dead and the matriarch indisposed, they three misfits were finally able to slot together into the shape of the family they'd always been pulled towards. Juliet could see the cautious curiosity of hope coiling around her older brother during the rare moments of domesticity that Juliet and Artemis permitted. Butler was a selfless man at his core, and thus could not recognize the shape of the nascent desires that secretly fattened within him. Juliet, on the other hand, recognized these fledgling dreams for what they were. In her more paranoid moments, she suspected that Artemis did, too, and she agonized over the ends to which he might use that knowledge.

During their silent dinners, these dreams ballooned until they were almost as big as the room itself, oppressive and distracting. Juliet would eat, and she ignored the whispers that said: family.

She ignored, and she pleaded, and she resigned herself.

Then one day, Artemis brought home a fairy.

And suddenly, Juliet remembered her dream.

AN:

Thank you so much to Lauren_Biru on ao3 for beta'ing this chapter!

So... it's been a while, yall. I apologize for the delay, and I hope this update isn't terribly overdue!

Also, for the epigraph, here's a brief video from Ted Ed on its significance in literary studies: watch?v=miNBicrLiXo . Even if you've already read the book (and if you have, you'll likely find said video's analysis a bit simplistic), the video has some lovely animation, and I honestly adore it.