She hadn't thought that she would have ended up with children from that encounter. It had been a blurry, dark evening with little to do with sight and more to do with feeling and recklessness and trying to find a place in her own skin. It felt pathetic, knowing that even her skin did not fit right. She balanced herself precariously on a rock trying to feel her body disappearing into that point of balance where everything is tense and relaxed at the same point, holding her up on the edge of everything.She barely started when a voice floated out of no where, asking her, "If you could have anything in the world, what would you wish for?"
That was much too easy of a question for a doe like Farewell Smile who faced her deepest desire everyday. She left out a thin, breathy laugh that seemed to disappear into the wind like her breath on a cold day. "I want to feel like myself, always.""Do you not feel like yourself?" The voice asked and Farewell Smile did not turn to see its source.
"Almost never," she began, but she paused and conceded. "Or perhaps myself is to feel out of place in my own skin. I feel the need to be somekin that I am not and I do not like who I am and so I do not feel like myself."
"You're a legendary, aren't you?" And there was something like mirth, however false, in Farewell Smile's voice. She knew well how to act and how easy it was to slip into mockery and sharp edges because it was something different and it was not what was expected of her.
There was a pause, the wind whistling through the leaves. A breath before, "I am."
"You came because I'm pregnant and you can bless these children. I don't know if I have it in me to care how they turn out except to spare them the pain of not knowing themselves," Farewell Smile allowed easily. She stated these things as if they had no weight, as if they meant nothing at all even though they meant quite a lot.
Another pause and then a concession, "Perhaps."
Farewell Smile laughed then, full and bright, flinging her voice into the wind. She swayed for a terrifying, exhilarating moment before she was still once more.
They stood in silence, or perhaps the voice's owner was not standing, but it did not matter; Farewell Smile stood in silence, her eyes far away as she tried to forget all that she tried to be, all the she was, and all the she could not be. She let out a low shuddering breath.
She barely heard the voice's last words, carried away by the wind, "May your children know themselves and may they know what their mother has learned, even if only by instinct and dreams, and let this knowledge guide them."
And Farewell Smile was alone again, left only with herself, a self that she didn't even quite believe in.