She wonders if it is something wrong with her, that all of her children are such broken things. She watches each of them as they struggle with their various curses and hardships, and the guilt gnaws at her in a way that she cannot shake. It must be her fault, she reasons; it must be something to do with her own wretched blood that she has bled into them, that her own misfortune turns itself into the thing they inherit most from her. They break a thousand different ways, and sometimes they come to her and sometimes they don’t, and either way she feels like a failure.

She fails to keep them safe and she fails to not be something they think they need to hide away from, but how can she blame them? She has never managed to piece her own life back together. It is no wonder they assume she cannot do it for them.

And they are all painfully beautiful even in their brokenness — all of them lovely and striking in their own ways, though none of it is because of her. Her heart was known for being a foolish thing, and when she learned that she could not keep those that she tried to love, she learned she could take something from them that would be hers forever.

Even if it is wrong to have children as the keepsakes of romances that were harder to hold onto than smoke, she does not regret it.

When she sees Sela in the golden afternoon light, when her starless-dark eyes find his, she does not see him for all the things that he counts as faults. She sees him only as another thing too perfect to have come from her, an angel carved from ice—another version of his father’s darkness combating against her light. “Sela,” she says his name, soft and almost a whisper, afraid that speaking any louder will send him back to the outskirts he always seemed to prefer. Another failure on her part, because he had been born during the eclipse with a twin not meant for the dark, and so much of her energy had been spent keeping Este alive that Sela inadvertently fell through the cracks.

“I’ve missed you,” she tells him once she has closed the gap between them, taking in the familiar yet unfamiliar angles of his face, because he has grown since the last time she saw him. There is a pain that alights in her eyes, an ember that never quite goes out as she stares at him, all the unspoken apologies sitting in a tangled knot in her chest where they never learn to take shape on her tongue.

His apology snags against an already-existing crack in her chest, and pulls it apart just a little further.

Because she wonders what she has done to make her children think that she needs to be avenged; that they must become killers themselves when something happens to her. For all her faults (and they are innumerable), murder has never been one of them—not even when Carnage had lifted her own hoof over the paralyzed xenomoph’s head, positioned her so perfectly to where all she needed to do was do it. But she had looked down and all she could see was Ripley, and she thinks that it would be a different version of the same thing in every situation. She has loved too many, has tossed her own roots so far that they were  tangled everywhere. Anyone that she was faced with killing she is certain she would see the echoes of someone she loves, or had once loved, and she would never be able to see the action through.

Or perhaps she is just a coward, and these are her excuses—just as innumerable as her failures.

Perhaps the fault does not lie in the idea that she has failed her children because they think they need to seek revenge, but rather she is the flawed one because she seems to be the only one that does not look for it.

“Sela,” she murmurs his name again, and she steps closer to him. Gently, she brushes her nose against his cheek, follows a glimmering crack of ice along his skin with her touch before withdrawing. “You don’t need to kill anyone. I would never want, or expect, you to do something like that. I would never want anyone to have a reason to come after you, and especially not at my expense.” She doesn’t know if Gale would have done that, but she does know that part of his fixation had been on angels specifically—like Sela. She does not think Gale held any special dislike for her, and that if it had not been her, it would have been Sela, Este, or Baptiste.  She’s glad it was her, even if she had not been entirely aware of the sacrifice when she made it.