be discreet

[msmage]

It's not much later, in Isabella's room, that she asks:

"So... is Alex really a dom?"

Comments

[msmage]

"I mean he doesn't really care about you. What I just said. It's a type, this thing you're going through, and I expect either he'll get tired of you eventually and move on, or he won't but he'll keep doing enough of, of this, that you won't really even be you anymore in the end, the half hours of happiness will become fifteen minutes, then five, then they'll disappear completely."

[alicornucopia]

"How do you know."

[msmage]

"Because it's a type," she insists. "It's the sort of thing they warn about on sex ed classes, or books, or pamphlets. Just like the way you describe yourself is basically textbook clinical depression, the way you describe your relationship and the way you look sometimes is textbook abuse."

[alicornucopia]

"It is not," objects Jackson. "He, like, lets me have friends and stuff, and - stuff."

[msmage]

She sighs. "There's more than one textbook on abuse."

[alicornucopia]

Jackson frowns into his lukewarm chocolate.

[msmage]

"The choice really is yours, in the end, Jackson. I can't save you from yourself. I want you to be happy - actually happy, for real. And I don't think you should give up on that, not this early."

[alicornucopia]

"I don't want to be - be thirty with a dozen cats."

[msmage]

"That's more than ten years away, you have a lot of time before starting to worry about that, and besides I am planning on figuring out how to make everyone immortal and perpetually young and healthy so your prime will never end if it's up to me."

[alicornucopia]

"I don't want to be thirty and look eighteen and have a dozen cats," clarifies Jackson, "either."

[msmage]

"You could look twenty-four," she suggests. "The apparent age and number of cats are entirely customizable."

[alicornucopia]

"Do you even understand language."

[msmage]

"You have time, is what I'm getting at. It's not the end of the world if this one relationship fails, you're not doomed forever if you don't find someone who really loves you now, or in the next ten years, or in the next hundred years, and I don't think it'll take that long."

[alicornucopia]

"Oh god I can't go back to being alone for ten years just because you imagine that somebody who is definitely not you or anybody you've ever met might want me one day and not be into electrical stuff."

[msmage]

"But that's what I'm saying, it won't take that long. And you haven't even been past puberty for nearly that long, you don't have enough information to presume this level of terribleness."

[alicornucopia]

"I can assume it's longer than I've already put up with!"

[msmage]

"Not counting from now."

[alicornucopia]

"...Huh?"

[msmage]

"You can't assume it'll longer than you've already put up with from now."

[alicornucopia]

"You said ten years. You also said a hundred years but I can't even think about that."

[msmage]

"I said ten years because you said you'd be thirty with cats," she waves her hand. "I also said it wouldn't take that long."

[alicornucopia]

"You don't know that, you're making it up."

[msmage]

"As much as you're making it up that it will. Less, even."

[alicornucopia]

"You don't have a real reason to think I'd ever be able to find anybody but Master and I'm just going by my entire life so far."

[msmage]

"More than half of your entire life so far you spent as a child, and trying to predict what your life will be based on the few years of adolescence you've had so far is... tunnel vision. The reason I have to think you'd be able to find somebody is that most people do, regardless of how awful their life is when they're teenagers, especially when said awfulness has a name and a treatment."