I can’t see the magic shared between them; I don’t know why it is that I’m suddenly besieged with acid or hostility when I move forward to greet my new daughter, and to scold her mother for being such a stubborn idiot. What I do know is that I hate this magic, and the fire it leaves burning in the thousands of small pockets in my face and joints, in particular, even after it leaves, and as Mordecai’s acid begins to eat through my body, my ears nearly become one with my head, and an enraged sound rips from my lips as I pull away in a powerful pivot and sideways step. Swinging my head side to side rapidly, as if it might shake her magic out, her words strike me like snakes, though I’m too dumb in the moment to understand them as more than how they sound.

The sensation of the child’s lips as she’d reached to return my casual touch, the slick, dancing feeling of her feathers, they both linger on me, strange amidst the pain that otherwise riddles me. Duir’s scream of shared pain fills my ears along with Mordecai’s sharp decrees. Drawing on my own puppet magic in response, I’m preparing to use it, to force her to stop, and to be still, but the pain ebbs away, and I’m left with the throbbing aftermath, and crippled with rage.

I turn my eyes to her coldly again. I replay her words slowly in my head, the frigid anger writ upon my face perhaps only deepening with my confusion.

Kill her?

What sort of monster does she take me for?

She doesn’t know, does she? She doesn’t know the promises you made to those souls adrift in the star sea, or the ones pledged solemnly to your mother, as you learned of the world through her tactful teachings?

Is that why? Even if though not one of them is unbroken…

No…

What the fuck is wrong with her, that she thinks fathers kill their children?

“Back up,” she tells me, and I snap. Stepping a pace closer, instead, I meet her eyes with mine, almost challenging her to try and make me leave, if that was what she really wanted.

"No, I won’t back away, Mordecai. I’m her father! It’s my job to be here for both of you, and I swear, if you try to keep me from being near to her, you’ll regret it," I half shout at her, a thousand resentments against a dozen others hurled with everything I have at her face, because it’s not fair! I haven’t done anything to her kind but love and revere my own! And how could she, the accusation like the violent stab of poisoned dagger in my already rupturing heart, because of everyone... she should know me better than that. "For the last fucking time, I’m not my dickhead parents! I don’t harbor psychopaths, I’m not plotting the downfall of any mother fucking thing, and damn it, Mordecai, I don’t kill kids, especially my own! I shouldn’t even have to defend myself against you! Anyone but you!"

Blowing out a wealth of air in frustration, I try and not shout so much, suddenly remembering there is a kid about, and embarrassed at having thrown so much of myself out there all of the sudden. Quieter, with a softer expression (though still pissed, and hurt, and overwhelmed), I piece together the rest in Dothraki. It’s less… personal somehow, this way.

" Shafka shilat anni," I mutter, remembering how she’d laughed at me for being too soft in the caverns of the Heart, "do you really think I could do something like that?"


[ Translation: Shafka shilat anni, - You know me, ]