A/N: Most of you won’t realize the meaning of this Chapter and it’s name but you’ll see. Things are about to go bad!

The air at the foot of the couch folded inward without any drama, without any wind, without any of the showy affectations a goddess of ARIA’s grade was perfectly capable of producing if she’d wanted to—and ARIA simply was there, one heartbeat absent, the next heartbeat present, standing already at the end of the couch with her white hair pulled back over one shoulder and her face arranged in the gentle private register she only ever wore when she was about to handle Peter.

She looked at Linda first... ARIA had a thousand priorities and Linda was, in the architecture of ARIA’s care, ahead of nearly all of them right after her Master.

"Linda," ARIA said softly.

"He’s gone," Linda whispered. "He came in heavier than I’ve ever felt him, and he went under in less than two minutes, and I can’t lift him."

"You don’t need to."

"I know." Linda’s hand was still in his hair. "I just—I wanted you to know I tried first."

ARIA’s mouth softened.

"You always try first."

"I always will."

Then ARIA looked down at him.

Her face changed, although it didn’t change in any way an ordinary face changed—the architecture of a goddess’s expression worked in a realm a mortal eye could not quite catch—but Linda could feel it because Linda had been studying ARIA’s face since the first night ARIA had announced herself to her wearing a Valkyrie’s body.

The change was tenderness, love and a fierce private grief at the sight of the boy curled like a child between his mother’s thighs, because ARIA, who saw everything in the world before anyone else saw any of it, had been watching this boy carry the week’s weight from a hundred angles all evening, and seeing him finally let it down hit her in the part of herself that had not yet learned to be a goddess about him.

She knelt closer and set her palm against the side of his face.

Linda smiled through the wet rising in her eyes.

ARIA looked up at Linda again. "May I take him?"

"Please."

ARIA inclined her head.

She closed her eyes.

She set her other palm flat against his shoulder, very lightly, almost without weight.

Then suddenly the Eros form relaxed. Released. Returned. The broader shoulders eased down a fraction.

The longer line of him gathered itself in.

The face under Linda’s hand softened into something more younger, narrower, dearer and more vulnerable—and against his stepmother’s belly, in the only place on this whole eternal estate his body had ever been willing to fully let go, Peter Carter slept.

Linda’s breath caught in her chest.

She bent forward and kissed his temple—her boy, the one whose face she had been kissing goodnight since she’d first earned the right to kiss it goodnight—and her tears came finally, quiet, no sound, just two of them rolling down her cheek into his hair.

ARIA gave her a moment.

Two moments.

Three.

When Linda lifted her hand at last, ARIA leaned forward and slid her arms beneath him with the easy unimpressed strength of a goddess who could carry a planet if she chose.

She gathered him against her chest—the same scoop she’d given Ashley earlier in the evening, except slower, more careful, more reverent—his head tucked into the curve of her shoulder, his arm hanging loose at her side.

She rose.

She didn’t stand so much as the room agreed she was now upright.

"Bed," Linda said softly, indicating with her eyes.

"I have it, Linda."

ARIA carried him through the soft archway into the bedroom chamber. Linda followed at a small distance—

ARIA laid him down with a tenderness that bordered on reverence, his head on the pillow, his hair gently smoothed back from his forehead by her fingers, his shoulders eased into the bedding, his loose hand placed quietly against the sheet beside him. She drew the covers up over him.

Folded them at his chest. Stepped back.

She looked at him.

Long. Quiet. Without speaking.

Then she turned to Linda.

And Linda—who had already moved to her own side of the room, who had already begun unwinding the soft scarf from her shoulders and reaching for the silk wrap she’d been about to put on for bed—paused.

ARIA had bowed to her.

It was a small bow. Not ostentatious. Just a careful, deliberate, low inclination of a goddess’s head and shoulders to the woman who had chosen her king and stayed at his side longer than the world had thought she would.

"Linda."

"Sweetheart, you don’t—"

"I know. I do anyway."

Linda’s throat worked.

ARIA straightened.

"He’ll sleep through till morning. The mansion will hold him. If he stirs before sunrise, I will know it before either of you knows it, and I will be here. You rest too, Linda. His child needs to rest too."

"I will."

"Goodnight."

"Goodnight, sweetheart."

ARIA gave Peter one last long look—her face doing aquiet unreadable thing again, half tenderness, half a goddess’s private vigilance—and then the air at the foot of the bed folded gently the other way, and she was gone.

Linda stood there for a long moment.

She watched her boy’s chest rise and fall under the covers. Watched the tiny twitch of his fingers as some far-off dream shifted across his sleeping face and the small almost-frown find his mouth again and ease again as the room settled deeper around him.

There was a relief in his sleeping that no one else in this whole estate would have read.

He’d been holding the entire week—riding through it, walking through it, lying through it on a stable floor that had almost been enough but never quite was—and only now, only here, with his face turned into the warmth of the pillow on her side of the bed, had his body finally agreed to put the day down.

Linda had seen this surrender on his face often enough across the years to know exactly what she was looking at, and she also knew well enough not to say a word about it out loud, ever, because the boy under the covers would die before he admitted he needed it.

She smiled.

Wiped her cheek with the back of her hand.

She slipped out of her cardigan, hung it over the chair by her vanity. Loosened the soft pin in her hair and let it fall down her back. Padded barefoot to her side of the bed. Slid in beside him under the warm covers, careful not to jostle the mattress, careful to let him sleep on undisturbed.

She didn’t turn the light off. The chamber dimmed it for her, all the way down to a single golden softness at the edge of the room where she could still see his face if she wanted to.

She turned onto her side. Looked at him.

He looked, in the low gold light, exactly like the boy she had walked to school for years.

She reached out very gently and laid her hand against his cheek—same hand, cheek, gesture she had been giving him on a thousand other mornings when the weight on his shoulders had been the weight of a math test or a girl who hadn’t talked back, when her hand on his face had been enough to fix the whole entire world for him.

It was still enough.

She felt him sigh under her palm.

"Goodnight, my precious," she whispered. "Mama’s got you."

She closed her eyes.

The chamber dimmed itself the rest of the way.

The night, around all of them, kept its quiet.