Blood Mother - In Character
Vee was bored. But that wasn't exactly news anymore. She had been bored for weeks. She'd gone to parties and flirted with guys and gals, canoed up the river and camped on the bank, sailed a few short uneventful trips and got tired of being told she wasn't captain, and angrily stabbed at anything and everything that annoyed her - which was everything lately.
This was not a new state of being for her. Boredom. She danced the careful dance of inflicting her annoyance at her boredom on others before they got too annoyed with her. Then she moved on to another victim. In the past, her fathers devised the devious plan of letting her freelance for the church as it looked good for the family, but it only worked when there was freelancing to be done. Their current plan of making sure she had the finances to build a ship had given them temporary relief - until the laborers decided they needed to take a holy day off or some other nonsense. In truth, Vee suspected (and once confirmed) they wanted at a break from her very strong opinions on how she wanted her ship built. She never took it well, but when she checked today, they really weren't at the shipyard which is how she found herself, bored once again, with her favorite and most experienced victim: Pa.
"Yar, but what if it were, like, a lime green?" asked Vee, lounging on the couch in his study, tossing a ball up and down, up and down. Pa sat at his desk, working on some boring charts or something like a boring person does, but giving her just enough attention to make her sit still. Mostly.
Vee looked over just long enough to catch the look Pa gave her before he went back to his boring paperwork. Vee caught the ball, gave a dramatic sigh, and groaned, "It'd be pretty!" to which she received a snort. It was easy enough to interpret: Your dad would still disagree.
She gave a harumph and fell back into a familiar pattern they both knew too well from her many times of doing this boredom bonding over the years: pester him with hypothetical questions, maybe get an answer, ask something more absurd or funny, get an actual answer, slip in a question to test some boundaries, get a stern talk or, if lucky, information to use later on how to get away with something.
The brief silence was filled with the sound of paper rustling, quill scratching, and the up and down, up and down, of the rubber ball. As smooth as Vee believed herself to be, the pause as she caught the ball and didn't immediately toss it back up, that fraction of a second longer she held on to it, alerted Pa to another attempt at slipping in a real, probably boundary-testing question. Anyone else would have missed it, but it was his child and he knew her well.
Tossing the ball back up in the air, eyes on it, as casually as possible, Vee asked, "So what if, on me next voyage, I gets another chance to live in the sea, and I decide to take it?"
Pa looked up and squinted. "We want you to be happy of course. I would miss you terribly, and I would hope you would want to come back and be part of our world again at some point. Life is full of tough choices."
Barely catching the ball before it smacked her in the face from slight surprise, Vee sat up and matched his squint with a suspicious glare. With a careful (but maybe not subtle) test of the waters, she said, slowly, "So yer sayin' if I go mug a guy, steal his water breathin' jewelry - cause all my leads suspiciously been dead ends - and jump into the ocean and don't come back, yer fine with that? Ya don't want to lose me to them mountains or whatever, but ya come to terms with losin' me to the sea? Is that it? 'Cause it ain't the tune yous was singin' years ago."
"Years ago you were a child. If you insist on growing up, we need to treat you like a grown up. Give you responsibilities, let you stumble, watch you succeed." He winks, "the seaweed is always greener, on somebody else's shore. We can't nail your feet to the floor."
"Wait, that's why?" asked Vee, slightly confused. She frowned as she continued, "I always thought it was 'cause you didn't want me to leave you for the sea like the egg donor. I ain't gonna break yer heart, too, Pa." With a sigh, Vee flopped back on the couch and started tossing the ball again. Up and down, up and down. "Tempe keeps pestin' us about some will or something or another, says it be the mature thing to do. I told her if anythin' happens to bring me back to you and Dad. Growin' up is stupid. Can't I just be Captain and run me own ship without growin' up?"
"Growing up leads to growing old, and then to dying. And dying to me don't sound like all that much fun." Pa smiled. You know a wise man once said, "We do not stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing." He snatched the ball as it rose up again. "You go send for your friends, your ship will be ready soon. You will want to show them all their hard work paid off."
"Yer a bag of contradictions, Pa. So yer gonna treat me like a grown up even if'n that means eventually dying but I should keep playin' so that I don't grow up? Which is it? Do ya want me to grow up or not?" asked Vee, dramatically tossing her hands in the air as she sat up. She gave him that annoyed, petulant look he knew far too well from her defiant early teenage years (and current years, and previous years, and all the years). "And ya know, a wise man don't quote himself as a wise man. That's call narcissism, Pa. Yer supposed to say, 'I once heard someone say...' or something like that or people gonna roll their eyes at ya."
Vee rolled her eyes, to emphasize that statement, stood and stretched, and put her hands on her hips. "Fine. I'll get outta yer hair, which I still think would look nice with a streak of lime green, or marine blue in it, let them overzealous studious bunch know they need to visit soon, and take a dip in the ocean."
"But I promise to come back. This time, at least," finished Vee with a grin. She kissed his cheek and left to find a new victim for her boredom. Only a few more days before The Grim Lady joined the world and the world became her oyster.
