The morning after the Bellparty (Safesun time), Kerron arrives at Isle Esme in response to Elspeth's invitation and starts looking for his uncloid. He comes bearing a little box of danishes.
"Mum and Harley don't. One of you was for a while but then undid it with magic because he had a fight with his girlfriend or something? I'm sort of peripheral to major social news like that, I don't have the ins and outs of that."
"It's weird that me-s have girlfriends," says Felicity. "It's weird that they have kids."
"I was an accident," says Kerron. "Bear that in mind when you're grown up and carelessly playing with shapeshifting."
"But yeah, most of you have girlfriends or boyfriends or wives or whatever," says Kerron. "Doesn't seem weird to me, but this is probably another place where I fail at neutral observation, yeah?"
"I guess that means I'm the weird one. But I just can't imagine. Well, I can imagine one of me having a kid by accident."
"I dunno, I haven't quizzed what I remind you is my mum's template on their puberty-related experiences, but for humans twelve is on the young end, isn't it?"
His background desires to pet his poof and maybe have another danish abruptly disappear. He continues petting the poof, just as he was - he displays no significant outward signs of stress, nothing to suggest that what he just said might be a problem for him - but he is now completely devoid of wants about things.
Kerron watches the cloud of colorshapes go still.
Kerron is silent for a long moment, then says, "That... is... surprising? I'm sorry, I don't - if you - the colorshapes have all stopped broadcasting anything and I don't have a checklist to go by on how to react when a human twelve-year-old tells me that to fall back on."
"Witches and ingots kind of orient around our powers a lot. I'm really used to navigating by the - you realize Elspeth cannot possibly know this? Same reason - she doesn't do secrecy - I'm not saying if she knew it'd be in the next imperial press release, but she would have mentioned it to me in the course of inviting me here expressly to talk to you. She definitely has no idea."
"She kidnapped me and she didn't even know what from?"
"She knew it was something bad that it would be better to be out of than in. The specifics? I don't think that's usual. Elspeth soaked up a lot of Joker childhood memories as a crash course before she got Harley - if there'd been anything like that in there she would've known or at least guessed, and then because she's Elspeth and works how she works it'd be something approaching common knowledge. Which it's not."
"Someone like... Lily probably wouldn't know," says Kerron. "It wouldn't come up with her - if Elspeth tried to communicate everything in her head constantly regardless of its relevance she'd wind up killing unprotected humans, she doesn't just randomly share absolutely everything. But I'd know, the Imperial Alpha - Jacob - would know, Mum and Harley would know, people close to them like me or Dad or Harley's wolf would probably hear it, Her Majesty would know. So - given that if you don't want me to tell Elspeth I don't have to. She gets that there's reasons to not tell her things."
He shrugs. He pets his poof. He has a vague flicker of actually wanting to pet his poof. It doesn't stay.
"I... don't have a comprehensive definition. You're doing this not-wanting-anything thing except for a flicker about petting your critter and I've never seen it before. I don't know if it means you're hurting or you're shut down or I should leave or I should hug you or what."
"I don't want to make anything worse? I don't know if I'm qualified to make anything better but I hold myself to a firm standard of not making things worse."