“If you’re heading out, I’m going with. Rules haven’t changed.”
“I’m a grown woman, Sev,” I counter. “I should be more than capable of grabbing cigarettes myself.”
“Still coming,” he says, grabbing his coat.
I don’t budge. “It’s because I’m not real. Isn’t it?”
He falters. “You’re not… I mean that’s not exactly…” His eyes close, and I watch him struggle to compose his next words. “If you already knew, why try to do something impossible?”
“Maybe I wanted to test my limits,” I say with a shrug. “Maybe I just wanted to test you.”
He holds my stare for a long moment before losing the battle of will, breaking eye contact. “How long have you known?”
“How long have I known? Who cares! How long were waiting to tell me that you’re not my mentor, you’re my dad?”
“Please don’t call me that, I—”
“Gave birth to me, more or less, didn’t you?” I don’t bother keeping the anger from my voice when I interrupt. “Granted, not what’s typical for a father, but—”
“Don’t.” Now it’s his turn to give me a sharp glare.
“Didn’t mean it like that,” I respond softly, by way of apology.
He moves on as if it never happened. “Call it giving birth if you like, but I never thought of you as a daughter. I just wanted a partner I could talk to, bounce thoughts off.”
“So this whole charade where you teach me sorcery is just a framing device for your imagination, then?”
Sev’s mouth twists in chagrin. “Not a charade, and not exactly.” He drops his coat back on the rack and starts pacing the room like he always does when deep in thought.
“You were supposed to know it already,” he says, “but whatever I did when I fed you too much attention and made you an independent thoughtform… it’s like I instantiated a version of you from before you learned the first thing about being a sorceress.”
This catches me off guard. “A… version of me? From before…? Am I based on someone, Sev?”
He nods slowly, as if ashamed to admit it. “Someone who died before I was born, who managed to leave behind just enough mementos to teach me some of the basics.”
“So you ended up teaching the person who taught you, in a way,” I muse. “Or at least a reflection of her.”
“A reflection.” He stops abruptly. “Hm. That’s a thought. Maybe I should show you the box.”
“Box?”
He roots through a closet, emerging with an unremarkable cardboard box, opening it on the nearby desk.
“Here, full of everything I could scrape together of yours.”
The box is full of, well, junk. Mostly.
A brooch, a small mirror, a couple of tarnished silver rings, a single bullet, a moldy diary (mostly unreadable), and some yellowed newspaper clippings.
“What am I supposed to be seeing in all this?” I ask.
“A sense of familiarity, maybe? This is everything I could find that could bring me closer to knowing her. It’s what I focused on when I was building my idea of you in my head, the stuff that nourished your thoughtform before it was coherent enough to become independent.”
I stare at it. None of it means a thing to me. “I don’t remember seeing any of this before.”
“Haven’t needed it after you were fully formed. It fed the process of animagenesis, but now it’s exhausted its purpose.”
He pauses, as if waiting for me to respond. I don’t. “You really don’t feel anything about any of this?”
“I really don’t,” I reply honestly. “All I really feel is a desire to cut the umbilical cord, Sev.”
“Yeah,” he says, looking more exhausted than I’ve seen him in years. “Of course you do. But you know as well as I do that you’re not supposed to let a creature like you just… loose. Right?”
I snort. “When have you ever cared about what you’re supposed to do, Sev?”
He scrubs his eyes with one hand. “You know what? You’re right. To hell with it.” He grabs his coat again. “Let’s do that cigarette run. We’ve got a long night if you want to be able to pick up your own tomorrow.”
I smile. “Glad to know you have my back in the end. “