#gideon learning that the woman who listened to all her 14 year old bullshit and helped her survive the hellhole of the 9th never existed

[theriverbeyond]

also ive been rotating how Gideon absolutely considered Wake to be her MOTHER before having that fantasy ripped away from her and like, that experience of learning the bedrock of your existence is a lie and the person who made you did not love you and did not want you and what do you do with that when you did not ask to be born. and also of course Wake's own experience as someone who likely never saw herself as a mother and whose only claim to the title is the result of a hail mary pass so desperate that it wasn't even a choice at all. something about directly contradicting agencies creating a tangle of tragedy...... Gideon cannot have a mother who loves her because Wake was not a mother but at the same time Wake can never escape the fact that Gideon is a child that she created