"Checkmate," Amoretta said, sliding a bishop into position.
"What, again?" Tahlea exclaimed. "That's six in a row! What kind of mean big sister destroys me in six straight games of chess?"
"What's the point of playing if you're not going to try your hardest?" she asked.
"Do you beat Lillet like this?"
"I've never won a game of chess with Lillet."
Tahlea's eyes widened.
"Really? Not in all this time? Don't you play very much, then?"
"Once a week, sometimes twice."
"But that's over three hundred games!"
"Three hundred and eighty-nine, actually." She thought she would do something special if Lillet made it to four hundred. Since she knew her lover didn't keep count of the games it would make for a nice surprise.
"Amoretta, how can you play that many games of chess against someone and never win?"
"Lillet is an extremely good chess player. She thinks many moves in advance and she sets traps within traps, usually that don't even reveal themselves as such until ten or twelve moves after they spring."
"I bet! But that's not what I meant."
"Oh?" Amoretta was confused.
"I just don't understand why you'd keep playing if you knew that you're going to lose."
She shrugged.
"I like chess. It's fun to play."
"Isn't the point to win?"
"I'd be very happy if I did win, but I enjoy myself just playing the game, and also of course because I'm spending time with Lillet."
Tahlea nodded.
"That part I understand. It always feels best to spend time with Father no matter what we're doing. But doesn't she ever let you win?"
Amoretta smiled back, almost dreamily.
"She'd never do anything like that to me," she said confidently. It was something she knew in her heart, a deep and abiding trust in Lillet's love.
"To you? You mean, as if you'd think it was a bad thing and she knows you'd think it so she wouldn't do it?" Tahlea tried to work her mind around the issue. "Wait!" she exclaimed just as Amoretta was about to elaborate, then clapped her hands happily. "I think I see! It's because it's a kind of lying, right, and you hate lying, even out of kindness. So it wouldn't be kind to let you win now and again, and you'd be really hurt if you found out she had, and Lillet knows how you feel because she loves you and so cares about your opinions, and so that's why she keeps on beating you?"
Amoretta smiled brightly.
"That's it exactly."
Tahlea returned the smile.
"So! At last I'm getting to know you better."
Amoretta nodded.
"I'm glad."
"Me, too. I may have been wrong about there being some kind of automatic sympathy between us, but that doesn't mean we can't choose it on our own."
Again, Amoretta nodded. Tahlea was an interesting person, she'd decided. Though Amoretta herself wasn't as eager to acquire a sister for the sake of having one as the younger homunculus was, it was still a nice feeling to build ties of family, friendship, and love, and she enjoyed Tahlea's company. It was interesting, too, to see how they were alike and how different, because it gave insight into her own nature, what came from being a homunculus and what was unique to her own self. Having her there, though, made Amoretta think more about Dr. Chartreuse, and the relationship she should have had with her creator but didn't. Accepting Tahlea as a sister, in a way, was like drawing closer to that relationship.
"You seem to be having fun."
They both looked towards the voice, Tahlea's face lighting up with an expression Amoretta knew well; she showed it herself when reuniting with Lillet after being separated.
"Father!"
"Hello, Tahlea."
"Amoretta's teaching me how to lose at chess. Apparently she's an expert at it, but I'm a fast learner," she added impishly, "since I've succeeded in losing every time so far." The other two laughed at her sally.
"I'm glad that the two of you are getting along so well. But would you mind if I interrupted you, Tahlea? I'd like to speak with Amoretta for a bit."
"Oh. Oh, yes, of course!" she responded, smiling. "Good luck, Father." She hopped up from her seat and scurried towards the door. Chartreuse walked over to the chair she'd vacated and laid a hand on the back.
"May I?"
"Go ahead." Amoretta glanced at the door by which her sister had left. "She wished you good luck."
"Probably that's because she has a very good idea of why it is I want to speak with you." He took a seat.
"The timing is interesting, though." She smiled, divining the reason for the sudden approach when, she was sure, all his instincts were telling him to return to the lab. "Lillet is fond of meddling."
"She loves you very much, and doesn't like seeing you hurt by my folly."
"No, she wouldn't," Amoretta agreed.
He fished through his jacket pockets and took out his pipe. "May I?"
"Go ahead."
He filled the pipe's oversized bowl, lit the tobacco, and took a few experimental puffs. Her creator was nervous, Amoretta realized, perhaps not surprising given his nature. The intellect was his world; when dealing with emotion, he found himself on shaky ground. He wasn't the only nervous one, though.
This is the man who should have been a father to me, who created this body I inhabit, this life I lead.
"I wronged you," he began, plunging in directly. They were very similar in that, creator and created. "I wronged you very badly."
"Yes," Amoretta agreed.
"You are blunt," he sighed.
"I'm not going to lie to you," she said.
He shook his head.
"No, of course not."
Chartreuse lifted his pipe to his lips, drew on it, then exhaled twin streams through his nose.
"I created you as an experiment. I wanted to make the ultimate homunculus--the perfect form of artificial life. I wanted to understand the secrets of creation and to improve on them, to reach up to Heaven and come to know the mind of God. I put the soul of an angel into the most perfect physical body I could craft."
Amoretta nodded, but did not interrupt.
"I was happy with you being who you were. Your lack of memory of your core's previous existence was a setback, but only a slight one. I learned many things from you, about the laws of life, the nature of souls...as an experiment you were priceless to me. But I was badly wrong."
Since she'd already agreed with that statement once, she did not repeat herself.
"I did not see you as a person. I denied your fundamental identity. Worse, I gave you a life in which your mere existence satisfied me. I gave you nothing to aspire to, no purpose to fulfill, and no love to support. Your creation was the pinnacle of my magical studies, and I did it thoughtlessly, without a care for your needs, only my own. I was no different than a man who sires a bastard child and walks away without accepting responsibility. No, I was worse, because your creation was an intentional act rather than an accident. I failed as a magician and as a man both."
He sighed heavily.
"It was not until you rejected your place with me to go with Lillet that I truly began to understand."
"You didn't fight me, though," Amoretta offered, being strictly honest. "You immediately accepted that she could give me what you could not and left me in her care."
He snorted.
"A small enough thing, that. Had I not rejected Opalneria just a few days before, I might have stood on my own pride and demanded that you return to the lab. Since I had just acted the part of the rejecting one, my own ego would not let me deny the justice of that position. I had no real conception of what love meant to you. How could I, when I had no real conception of what love was at all?"
"I think you would have done the right thing, at the least as a scientist if not a man." She certainly hoped so. Amoretta didn't want to taint the greatest kindness he'd shown her with thoughts that it was an accident of clashing facets of pride.
"Perhaps." Wryly he added, "It at least saved me the humiliation of being defeated in battle being added to the humiliation of rejection."
"Battle?"
"Oh, yes; your Miss Lillet was quite ready to protect your right to your own life, and I have no illusions--now--about how that would have turned out."
Amoretta thought of denying that, but then remembered something Lillet had said right after that conversation: "I don't want to fight any more teachers." She certainly had been thinking along the lines of a potential battle. Lillet would have fought Chartreuse for my sake? Even though she wouldn't have wanted to see such a fight, the idea that Lillet had been ready to do so still gave her a feeling of warmth.
"No," Chartreuse went on, "I knew nothing of love, then. In my life I had rejected it in favor of pure intellect; I believed it to be a ghost of biological passions. A parent's desire to protect a child, a child's desire for that protection, an adult's desire for a mate. I didn't realize that love is something else, beyond those basic instincts. You once told me that you were far from holy wisdom, but you shared some with me nonetheless. Only because of you and Lillet could I realize that without love for and from others, our lives are empty. Without that knowledge I had failed badly as a creator, able to do nothing better than to abdicate my responsibility in another's favor."
He shook his head sadly.
"I can only offer you my deepest apologies, in the hope that you will permit me in the future to be, if not a parent, then at least a creator capable of understanding and fulfilling what that means."
And there it was, just like that. He'd come to the end of his recital of his sins, laid his heart bare before Amoretta in the spirit of repentance, and yet the warmth she'd gained from her thoughts of Lillet shattered beneath the sudden coldness she felt.
Because he'd missed the worst one of all.
Was it possible, she wondered, that even now he still didn't understand the enormity of what he'd done to her? Oh, yes, she could believe it. As he'd said, love and emotion were foreign to him, things he'd had to be taught slowly and haltingly as adults learn things rather than absorbing them with a child's swiftness. But that fact was no consolation to her.
Amoretta clenched her fists. She wanted to slap his face, to throw something, to scream aloud in fury.
She did none of these things.
Instead, she rose to her feet, slowly and gracefully, and told him what he'd done.
"Do you have any idea how you made me feel, Creator?"
He shook his head.
"No; it is impossible for me to truly conceive what it could be like, to exist without purpose, a thing unloved--"
"No, not that," she cut off his pointless comments, pointless since they related to the wrong topic entirely. "I...understand that. You did not make a choice to wrong me in that way; it was the inevitable result of your nature as it existed then. You had made of yourself a creature of pure intellect and you could do nothing else. A stone cannot bleed; a machine cannot love."
He flinched from her, the words biting.
"We parted on good terms because I understood your lack, and because you understood that I needed something more than you could give. It was not loving, but at least amicable.
"But then you learned. You came to know what it was you lacked, to know in your heart how you'd wronged me, all just as you've said here today. I...was glad to learn that. Really, I was, not just for myself but for your sake, too. But I do admit that I was happy for myself, because I thought...I thought that you might finally be able to care something for me. Do you understand what that's like? Can you imagine, say, a person that has lost their sight, who has managed to live a full and fulfilling life without it, nonetheless offered a chance to get it back?" It struck her that for most people her creator's own curse would have been a perfect metaphor, except that he himself did not truly consider it to be a handicap.
"I..."
"Except that in the next breath, I was told that it hadn't happened," she slashed at him with her voice. "You'd made no attempt to come to me, to offer me the consideration you should have shown if you'd been able. Instead, you'd become the great experimenter again. You'd shrugged off the failed prototype and moved on to the new, improved model." She jabbed a finger at the door Tahlea had left through. "You made it very clear that I wasn't a person to you at all, just one step along the experimental process! Do you have any idea how that made me feel?" she repeated.
"No, I--"
"Only now, now that you've tried and tested your theory about how love would improve your homunculus research, do you come around to me, and you don't even realize the nature of how you've wronged me." She smacked her hand against the hearth, her feelings demanding some kind of violent outlet. "You're just as ignorant as you ever were, Creator!"
He stared at her, his leonine amber eyes full of pain and shock. Clearly he'd hoped for reconciliation, perhaps been prepared for rejection, but hadn't expected this. Not an attack. Amoretta was sorry, sorry to cause pain; sorry for Tahlea, whom she was genuinely coming to like; sorry for Lillet, who clearly wanted a happy ending for her lover's family relationship. Her feelings, though, were what they were, and they weren't going to change or go away.
"For what it's worth," she said, perhaps to soften the blow, or to ease her own guilt, or just because it was as much the honest truth as the hurt and rejection had been, "you have my forgiveness for not loving me, for your mistakes in my creation. You always have."
And she left, then, without another word being spoken.
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