Episode 44: Adoption Part 1 (Spence)

Spence knew his mom wanted to see him, he could smell it from the conference room when he arrived home.

He kissed Ach, “I’ll see you in a bit?”

He felt bad, heading off onto another task without seeing his kids. He wanted to spend more time with them but the past few days had been chaotic. He would do something special with them soon, just him and Ach. Something that reminded that that he loved them and was there for them; they came before his campaign.

He opened the apartment door and his mom was sitting on the couch, the light of the TV flickering as each scene turned. She had a box of tissues next to her; she was watching one of her romantic comedies again.

He wasn’t sure if she had the tissues for laughing or crying or because she had changed the channel when he walked in the room, and was secretly watching a much more emotionally intense sob story she didn’t want him to notice.

“You know I don’t live here, right?” he asked as he grabbed a bowl from the cupboard. She had a warm loaf of bread resting in the oven, the light turned on so he would notice it. He pulled it out after he had spooned the meat filled soup into his bowl. While it cooled, he cut three slices off of the loaf.

The fire had gone well, overall. He was alive, and he never felt close enough to death to be anxious about it.

“I knew you’d be home,” his mom insisted as she walked toward the kitchen.

She walked just like Emma. It amazed him how much she had in common with his kids. It was an amazing part of being a dad – an infinite supply of new things to notice. Not just things, but things he cared about.

He sat on a stool and she leaned across the counter, from inside the kitchen. She sprinkled cheese on top of his soup.

“I met my brother,” he threw in casually. “Also, some girl tried to hit me with a chunk of house then asked for a job.”

His mom laughed, “Zach? You met him?”

“Zach, also known as Rhyss Hartmann,” he said, because Rhyss had made such a clear statement that he was a Hartmann and not a Lavesque.

Emma called herself a Hartmann on Pavish too. It wasn’t even a big deal to Spence. He was Spence Alandrial unless he needed to be Spence Lavesque. He was also Spence Hartmann on Pavish.

“Emphasis,” he stated, “and extra volume to the Hartmann part. He’s a bit on the angry side.”

Spence dug into his soup, tasting the rich layers of broth from spoon and bread. He loved his mom’s soup. It wasn’t worth what earned him the soup to begin with, which involved a fire tonight and other nights heartache or struggle, but he still loved it.

“You know you’re the best mom ever right?” he said. He looked around the room, toward the pile of blankets and pillows and Cora, his brother’s bear, on the couch. “Unless Talise is here, then it’s a tie,” he joked.

His mom was definitely the best mom ever.

Talise was definitely an amazing mom, she just didn’t make him soup. It would be weird if she made him soup.

His mom laughed again, so at least he was making her happy too. It was, in his eyes, the price of soup – unfiltered Spence.

“He’s still angry? I hoped he’d calm down. I guess that’s too much to hope for in one afternoon.”

Yeah, because his neighborhood was also on fire in the same afternoon as his life.

“Did his house burn?” his mom asked.

“No, it’s fine. It was the houses across the street.” Spence brought the image back into his mind, of families that were displaced and houses that would never be the same. Families that would never be the same.

Kids. Kids who would never remember their parents because of how young they were. There were two orphans, who were now moved to the Sylem Orphanage which was a resting point between life and death, for most kids.

“Seven are rubble and five are damaged,” he summarized.

She would ask about people, but for his Konrad training he needed to be able to report the facts. Fatalities were facts, but he wasn’t ready to remove his emotion from it. He hated knowing that a town like Clovercrest only made the news because he was there trying to help it. They should have been in the news years ago when the houses were below livable standards; his livable standards.

“Fatalities?” his mom asked.

“Six,” he said. Six dead people for no reason. There was no war, there was just poor housing and neglect. “Five because of broken alarms, one because he ran in, to save them. Nothing worth saving; they’re part of the ashes.”

“Do you think it went well?” his mom asked.

No, people died.

Except she meant the campaign.

He wished he could be like Aadya and just fix things without having to tell people why they should let him.

Then again, she probably had to convince them too. He wondered how she did it without being annoyed by the process. She was modest, like he was. Even Talise was modest at the end of the day; her blushing proved that she was proud of herself but she didn’t want the world watching her all the time. Except when she was on stage with Niels, that wasn’t about the world watching her it was about being drowned by a light and having nothing to distract her. He could see it in her movements – the world ceased to exist on stage.

“Yeah,” he replied. “Someone offered free hotel stays.” And Ach was amazing. He could have gone on about Ach for hours, and how he had handled the situation with Rhyss and how Ach was really there for him on this.

“There are two kids who lost their parents,” he mentioned. “Which sucks because I can’t rebuild the foster system overnight.”

Foster system. More like sacrifice system. Maybe his mom would adopt them.
“How old are they?” she asked.

He drank the broth at the basin of his bowl, and began contemplating seconds.

“Like… one seems just younger than Fort and Emma, maybe even the same age. The other is just younger than Orris and Olida?” He was just guessing, but he had been around kids enough to know that they were good guesses.

“I bet Damien Forrester makes a big show of adopting them,” she stated.

It was a two bowl night. His mom wasn’t going to adopt them, even though she could. Damien would sacrifice them someday; he was running against Spence to prove that the same old would work. The same old was not going to work, because now the row houses were destroyed and there was no room in the original budget for them to be repaired. Things like burnt rowhouses were more likely to come up as areas to annex from their region than areas to improve.

“Why would he adopt Clovercrest kids if the same thing works?” Spence asked.

Damien would have to keep those kids for a year; the entire probationary period. He would have to prove he could love them. He would have to be loving.

Damien Forrester couldn’t even love his own familiar, which was led around like some prancy toy by guards.

The familiar was part of your soul, so Spence wanted to give him some benefit of the doubt since his soul was pretty unlovable.

His mom laughed.

He hadn’t said that aloud right? He got up to fill his bowl, so she would talk more.

“I bet he does. Poor kids. He’s been a piece of slime for years. Even Xander doesn’t like him.”

Xander was a jerk with standards.

“Well Xander or Caz can stop the adoption on the platform that he’s a slimy jerk,” Spence stated. He sat back down with another slice of bread.

“They’re not allowed to interfere in the election. It’ll make a mess for you if they try.”

“It’s an adoption!” Spence exclaimed, too loud with Silas sleeping. “Those are real kids not election pawns,” he said in a lower voice.

His mom’s face danced in delight, like she had woven him into the direction she wanted him.

He had six kids. He didn’t need two more right now.

“I don’t see a way to stop him,” she said anyway, “unless you get to it first.”

“Why don’t you get to it first,” he suggested.

“We can. It would look better coming from you, but we can.”

Three bowls.

He added extra cheese to this one.

“I just took in Orris and Olida,” he reminded her.

“Exactly. All Forrester has to say is that you favor fairies over wiccans. You live here, your fiance lives here, you adopted kids from here.”
She had a point.

These were kids, not campaign tools.

“It’s timing not preference.”

He would have adopted them in a heartbeat if he hadn’t just adopted two other kids, or been overrun by kids in general. Yeah, he had two more parents for most of them and really the four were easy. He didn’t have to cook or clean or do laundry. Still, there were toy fights and story times and one-on-one moments.

His mom started to put the soup away, “Timing is not ideal.”

“If I adopt them, I will have as many kids as you,” he pointed out.

He figured he was adopting them, because ultimately he could give them a better home and he had a support system. In the palace, having kids wasn’t like you and someone decided to be parents – it was a community working together to raise awesome people that felt loved. The two kids from Sylem needed people who wanted them to succeed not people who wanted them to be sacrificed in a year.

They weren’t campaign tools, and no one else would treat them the way they deserved.

Reality sucked; reality was why he wanted to run for office. He needed reality to change because he couldn’t adopt every orphan out there.

“And we didn’t even raise Zach,” she joked.

His mom must have known she was winning the debate, since she had shifted topics back to the Zach thing.

“I hate that he’s so angry. I wish we’d known.”

This is why he loved his mom. She wasn’t just let me be your boss parent thing, now that he was older – since he had become a parent – she had been more open about life. She talked to him like a person. He loved their relationship, because no matter how she opened up he still felt like her son at the end of the day. She was amazing at that, even if she wasn’t the best at comforting physically. He wasn’t sure she knew how well she handled the balance between being open and not burdening her kids with her own crap.

He admired her; he hoped he was as good of a dad as she was a mom. He had a lot of different role models to work from. Rhyss hadn’t had much, it seemed like. He had his mom, who was apparently not interested in a fire across the street.

Spence figured part of Rhyss’ issue was that he was taking on the parent role more than the child role. The way he handled the kid from the street was evident that he was someone to be respected.

“Maybe he just needs something to make him feel cared about,” Spence suggested.

He didn’t want to shove parents down Rhyss’ throat, but he knew the value of his mom and his dad. Beneath their name and money they were normal.

“You have ideas?” she asked.

“You really want me to have eight kids at eighteen?” he asked.

“I want you to win the election. Besides, how hard is normal parenting.”

“So?” Spence argued. He wasn’t collecting kids. He cared about them and bringing two more in would detract from the attention the others got.

“So you don’t have to do laundry or cook or clean.”

They had the same thoughts, apparently.

“We have daycare and free school,” she added.

“I get it,” he said. He would adopt them, if Ach agreed. Ach was more reasonable than he was.

“I don’t know about Rhyss, Zach. Call him by his name to start.”

If Rhyss called himself Rhyss, they would never move forward with any sort of positive relationship by calling him Zach.

Zach probably presented the kid with parents that let him die, instead of the kid that lived and was a badass neighborhood hero. Even if he didn’t see himself that way, he had respect in his community.

“Rhyss,” his mom said, playing with the word like she could taste it. “I’ll talk to your dad about him. Figure something out. Magic happy beans.”

She needed to go bed.

“Maybe he likes soup,” she added.

Because soup fixed everything. How she had decided that he didn’t know, but even Fort was responsive to the soup-cure on a bad day.

He laughed anyway, “I’m done at eight, Mom. That’s it for this century. Eight kids.”

“Does Ach know that?”

Yup, he had just been upstairs and told Ach eight was his magic number.

“Do you think he wants to assist in repopulation efforts like his mom and sister?” Spence asked, because for the first time he wasn’t sure where Ach stood. Ach liked things clean and orderly but he loved their kids. He liked quiet, but he kept letting them add more.

He didn’t know, which was new when it came to Ach. He always knew what Ach would want.

“I think you have kids that are yours and someday he’ll wake up and realize he doesn’t have any that are his,” his mom said.

Ach kids. There were ways to make that work without Ach having to be with a girl.

“Yeah, that’s true,” he said while he tried to imagine little Ach’s in the house.

He was an idiot for wanting them, but he was pretty sure the palace’s agenda to repopulate was magically enhanced. There was no reason to have more kids any century soon. He had centuries to live and experience things.

“I planned to have this round of kids after Sawyer stopped having rotting frogs in his room, but I thought it would be a good idea to be done sooner,” she said, reading his mind,

There had to be a balance between having kids and living life to its fullest. With ten thousand years…

He was already on the kid path now. The adoption wouldn’t be that bad. The kids were older, in that phase where they would play with the others well.

“Everyone knows the frogs aren’t a phase,” Spence joked. “Someone needs to make him a pixie so his love for animals is not overridden by inability to remember them. What’s done for you? An even ten? Twenty-five?”

She snorted in her laughter, which really meant they needed to sleep soon – her at least but him too.

He wanted to cuddle his kids.

“If he loved animals,” his mom started, “they wouldn’t be rotting.”

Then, she answered his other question, “Two or three, for now. I may stop after this boy comes.”

So he wanted Spence to have all the kids, but she would pace things out.

Or maybe, part of it was that she would help him. The adoption would make a huge campaign statement.

The stupid campaign. He promised there would be change; he would not lose.

“Done sooner for now?” he joked.

“For now,” she replied as she slid him a piece of fudge cake.

“I think I need another sister, not that I’m thinking about it. You should at least try until you get a girl.”

Spence had three sisters, and he loved them all in the most obnoxious way.

His mom laughed again, drunk off of exhaustion but happy to stay awake for him, “I know it doesn’t fit with the other names, but I was thinking Elliot for this one.”

Spence’s siblings followed a distinct S for boys and M for girls pattern, excluding his oldest fairy sister Camilla. There was Stetson, Mara, Spence, Spaden, Mallory, Sawyer, and Silas.

“I’ve been calling him Smelliot to make it fit,” she joked.

An imagine of them in hazmat suits entering a destroyed apartment appeared in Spence’s mind: “Sawyer and Smelliot: Hazardous Material Specialists.”

They both laughed for a minute.

“We’ll help,” she promised. “With these two wiccans and the others.”

His parents – his mom and both his dads – had helped him every step of the way from the moment they found out Talise was pregnant.

“At least they’re at sleeping age. I bet Jo will love the girl,” he said.

“It does help. I bet she will too, she needs a sister. Emma and Ella are so close.”

Spence smiled, and just like that he had room for two more in his home. It wasn’t just his kids, or his and Ach’s. They would be his family’s – with Talise and Niels and his parents. He had help. He had love. They needed love too, and this place was built for that.

“Yeah, they are,” he said about Emma and Ella. The best thing he had ever done with this life, so far, was try to be with Talise. It gave him his four kids; little monsters he didn’t know he needed in his life. It gave him Ach, who may never have gotten the courage to admit his feelings… Maybe that’s why he would make a good governor. It wasn’t that he was gay that made him different from the same crap everyone had already experienced. It was that he was eighteen and cared more about everyone else than most people of any age did. He loved being a dad. He loved his kids. He loved Ach and knowing at the end of the day he was going to face the next one with someone who was unmatched for depth. Ach was what made him whole and capable. He wouldn’t mention the gay thing again during his campaign; it was Ach. Just Ach. He didn’t care what Ach was, and he wanted Sylem to look at Ach as his partner and nothing else because it didn’t matter. What mattered was the person he was with Ach – a loving father, determined, motivated, hopeful, and strong.

“Get some rest,” his mom said. “You should be downtown at eight to file adoption paperwork.”

“Yeah yeah,” he replied as he hopped of the stool. She came around the counter and hugged him.

Spence looked down , so he could meet her eyes, “I think you should have a girl named Lucy. Or Lindsey. Lindy. How about Lindy? It’s like Mindy with an L, so you can pretend she fits the pattern in your head, and you love the lindy hop.”

Spence loved L names, even though he hadn’t used one himself. Talise had picked Fortinbras and Jax, and he had picked Emma because it felt right and Ella because it fit a pattern.

Her eyes widened, “Lindy and Indy? You need sleep.”

They hugged again, and while they did he said, “If I end up with another girl, I’m naming her Lindy.”

He let go.

Because part of of him was sad, thinking he wouldn’t have another girl. He wanted another one.

Someday, not right now.

“Night, Mom.”

“Good night,” she said. She held the door open for him and he walked upstairs to his place.

He hoped Ach was awake enough to talk life. It wasn’t often that he wanted to talk about things like that, but he wanted to tonight. Hopes, dreams, fears, goals… everything.

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