Dear Diary,

Sometimes I forget exactly how driven, how methodical, and how... I wanna say something like 'pragmatic', but the truth is, the word I'm looking for is 'ruthless', Saffron can be.

I sort of know why I don't. I love her more than life itself. I feel a little guilty saying that I love her more than I love our kids, because I was absolutely raised in an environment where you're supposed to value your kids more than your partner, because partners leave all the time, but your kids will always be there.

I'd like to set that aside, and I will, but for now I'm just gonna say that if your kids never leave, you've fucked up. A parent's job is to prepare their kids for their own lives. To go out and find their own partners, their own kids, their own vocations and avocations. To become mature adults. I guess for the AroAce crowd, 'partners' might be less dates and sex and more literal creative duets and watching each other's backs and shit, but still. Failure to launch and arrested development are not signs that you're a good mom. They're signs that something went wrong.

Okay, unless things have improved drastically back where I'm from, the thing that went wrong might be 'the world has gone to shit and a PhD in Electrical Engineering doesn't guarantee employment', but that's just fuckin' life. Yeah, I'm tryna make that shit better here and now, so that kids can leave home and find their own lives, then come back and tell their parents all about it not because there's no jobs or affordable housing, but because they love the people who loved and supported them as they grew and learned as kids.

Yeah, I got close on two decades of trauma to work through, and I've been here and now less than three years. Ain't likely I'm gonna hit 'healthy' any time soon, even if I'd like to think I'm headed in the right direction. Part of that is using what I've stumbled into to make the world a better place.

Which brings me back around to my love, my life, my Kitten, my Wife. Saffron. Always Saffron.

She is without a doubt fully capable of being the most cold blooded bitch I have ever met, laid eyes on, or read about.

After clutching at the rails and letting out a long exhale, I turned around and smirked at her. "Don't do that to me."

"What are you..." She trailed off as I glomped onto her, burying her head in my chest. Which part?

"Making me worried that you weren't gonna come back from that."

Ladies, search and rescue. Marie, if we had any fatalities, confirm whether they'd prefer escort to the afterlife of their choice or Revival. After using my brain as a repeater tower for that, she pulled away and looked up at me. "If I fall fighting for the world you've shown me, helped me envision? I would consider it worthwhile so long as that world comes to pass."

I took a deep breath. "Still gonna Revive you if that happens."

She tilted her head. "What if you can't?"

That hit me. Hit me hard. I stood there, holding her, as recovery efforts went on around us. The Seeking hadn't really been hit hard by the kaiju Saffron killed, not least of which was because she'd engaged it more or less at its own size, well away from the ship.

Ladies, sing out if any of you need assistance.

When Saffron announced that, I followed up with, yeah, let us know, we shouldn't be seeing anything else any time soon.

Some part of me felt like I'd missed something, but I couldn't for the life of me figure out what. After standing there until near dawn, once or twice lending a hand when the sailors needed main strength or a crane, I shook it off as post-fight adrenaline and accumulated hurt. Over the course of the night it turned out Marie, with her ability to pick out body heat, wound up being the most helpful at finding the few sailors who'd been washed overboard.

Once everyone was accounted for, and all five Tentacles underway and headed back to port, Saffron stepped us home, and the accumulated unhealed damage hit me as I collapsed back to one of me and the adrenaline wore off. "Ow."

Ladies, please meet us in the Bath. "Siobhan, would you be so kind as to handle Assessing everyone?"

Siobhan, who'd been in the middle of yawning herself awake, which went from cute to unbearably adorable when I realized Hailee was doing the same thing, said, "I'd be glad to."

A few minutes later we all stood in the Bath room and I got a good look at all of us. The only one who looked as pristine as she'd started was Tallulah, who assisted Siobhan with Assessing the rest of us. Mostly just by confirming the Assessment and helping support Hailee when Siobhan needed both hands.

Marie looked a little foxed. Like she'd had a rough night on the town. A really rough night. Bar hopping through Nazi bars and applying appropriate corrective measures rough night. A few ugly bruises and welts showed through her seawater creepified fur, and she grumbled out, "Need Sparagmos." More than once, really, although it sounded more like a gripe than a desperate desire.

Karen and Madeline both had a lesser version of the kind of skin irritation I'd had from the digestive tract of the big whale kaiju. Karen also had a funny looking goose egg across the top edge of her forehead, and Madeline leaned on Karen, mostly due to an ankle swollen to twice its size.

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"What happened to you two?"

They looked at each other, blushed, and laughed. Karen nodded to Madeline and said, "this one attempted to get her foot taken off by getting it pinched in that thing's spine."

Madeline snorted and said, "at least I didn't try to headbutt it from the inside."

The two of them mock glared at one another for like half a second before breaking down laughing again. Karen turned to me and said, "honestly, neither of us could see where we were, what we were going, or where the other was, so we just kept trying to move away from one another. Then it fell. Threw us around a bit before we Translocated out."

Meanwhile Saffron looked rumpled, annoyed, and by the bags under her eyes, exhausted. But she also looked like she was not about to settle down until after she saw to everyone else. "So, Siobhan, what's the word?"

Siobhan nodded. "None of your injuries are life threatening, or even likely to cause permanent harm, so long as they're properly treated and you have time to heal and rest."

"Can you do the treatment safely?"

She pursed her lips. "For Madeline, Karen, and even Marie, yes. For you, I believe so, although you aggravated some of the injuries from your earlier fight."

"I thought you'd healed those?"

She rolled her eyes. "Yes, but as I told you once before, overuse of battlefield Healing like Heal Injury can cause long term deleterious side effects, and more comprehensive Healing requires time and rest to fully restore a patient."

I shook my head and grinned. "Yeah, sorry, Darling. I'm kind of a shitty patient."

She smiled. "No. Difficult, perhaps. Challenging, likely. A test of my patience and Skill as a Healer, certainly. But... What were the words you used, Mistress?"

Saffron just smiled up at me. "Never change."

I smiled down and hugged her to me, then pulled the others over to stand pressed together for a bit. Then my brain did some counting. "What about Saffron?"

Siobhan sighed. "She is not injured in any way I can Heal."

I frowned. "Anything I can do?"

Siobhan smiled up at me and nodded. "Yes, but..."

"Siobhan..."

Ice Pop drew herself up and looked down her nose at Saffron, not unlike what I'd expect from a mother about to read the riot act to a naughty child. "Imperator. Mistress. Saffron. Do you trust me?"

Saffron sighed, then nodded. "I do."

Darling leaned into Saffron. "Then trust me in this." She turned to me. "Do not do this now, because it will interfere with your own recovery, but when I tell you the time is right, I will need you to Smite Saffron with as much Mana as you can safely do."

I blinked. "The fuck? Why not now?"

"Because you yourself pushed too much Mana through too small a portion of yourself multiple times last night. At least once by your own devices, once by what Saffron did. So I'm going to set you on the path to recovery, and then at what I judge to be the best balancing point between your own recovery and Saffron's, you'll set her as right as you can as well."

I shook my head. "Shit. We can't keep doing this." I looked down at Saffron. "You can't keep doing this either. You're the Imperator."

She drew herself up. "I am also the Priestess Most High Above All Others of Mimic." Then she winced and slumped back down. "Beside that, you cannot be everywhere."

I frowned. "But..."

She shook her head. "You cannot. I know you want to be, and I know you can Co-Locate to dozens of bodies, but you won't be truly there in more than one of them, and you can't really pay attention to more than a few."

"Yeah, but..."

"As I said before, the Navy needs morale. Beyond that, each successive group of kaiju has been more numerous, but smaller individually. By facing them as Champions, as High Priestesses, as Heroes of our Cities and the Alliance, we have shown our Heroes, our Troops, and our Allies that they can be beaten."

I frowned. "Even at half that size, if somebody fights them, some of our people are gonna die."

She nodded. "But if none of our people fight them, even more will." I opened my mouth, but she shook her head. "No, love. Should the Earthshaker manage to coordinate them even slightly more, there will be more of them than there are of us," she nodded at the group. "At that point, our people will need to be ready. Even if all they can do is slow them enough to protect the non-combatants until you arrive, that will still save lives."

I sighed. "You pulled me out and set up the rest of the fights, didn't you?"

She shrugged. "Not exactly. But I did hold you back until Marie called for you. Beyond the crew needing to see Marie fighting it, hurting it, you needed as much rest as you could get before diving back into the fight."

I pursed my lips and glowered down at her as hard as I could. "Let me know about those kinds of plans next time."

"Will you listen when I'm that calculating?"

I huffed. "Yes, dear."

"Fine. Then... Tallulah?"

"Yes, Saffron?"

"Please let Siobhan guide you in applying whatever Healing can be done now, and watch over us and the Alliance while we rest, in case the Earthshaker tries anything else?"

"Of course, Imperator."

She did just that. Turns out that I'd managed to fry most of my arm when I hammered that one kaiju in the brain pan with my Mana Lance, and couldn't feel it because of some weird after effects of the earlier Healing. I'd also done something, I'm not sure what, but something that caused light Mana Burn symptoms. No clue how that happened, but a big assed Smite made me feel a thousand percent better. It also made me hella tired, and after Tallulah finished, my ladies and I flopped right into the Bath and went to sleep. Okay, Tallulah, Siobhan, and Marie stayed up, but the others and I did not.

Woke up briefly when the girls came to the Bath to get cleaned up for bed. That's when Siobhan had me pull a shit ton of Mana and hit Saffron with the mother of all Smites. Couldn't stop giggling at how not only did her eyes and all her orifices glow, including nostrils and ears, she curled up around me like she'd just smoked all the primo weed in the Alliance, and sacked out again right there using my tits as a pillow. Couldn't really argue with that, especially when a pristine Marie slid into the bath behind me.

I rolled my eyes. "Who?"

"Siobhan Darling."

I looked over at where Ice Pop floated with Hailee. "Really?"

She shrugged. "It's a method of Healing. I'm familiar with surgery, even if I've never learned any of the advanced techniques. I can sew wounds closed and perform amputations if needed. Which it hasn't been, thankfully, since I became a High Priestess."

"That's not exactly surgery."

She smirked at me, her arms accidentally on purpose covering Hailee's ears. "No, it's not." Then she ran her tongue over her lips.

I shook my head. "Y'all are all insane."

"Complaints?"

"Not a damn one."

Went back to sleep after that. Woke up in the middle of the day to the girls all parading in with lunch. They'd gotten pretty good at making paninis.

I don't think meat mush was ever intended to be used as panini filling, but the kits made those, and they ate them all, so I'm gonna call that a parenting win for the day.

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