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No True Pair 2026 Mini Round (1300 words) by
MerfillyChapters: 6/6
Fandom:
The Talents Series - Anne McCaffreyRating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Angharad "The Rowan" Gwyn/Jeff Raven, Afra Lyon/Damia Raven
Characters: The Rowan, Jeff Raven, Afra Lyon, Isthia Raven
Additional Tags: Drabble Sequence, Complicated Relationships, Cross-Generation Relationship
Summary:
5 double drabbles and 1 triple drabble, exploring the dynamics of Afra, The Rowan, Isthia, and Jeff for the mini-round at ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
no_true_pair
Propriety
"Isthia," Afra began, considering the next step in this dance of protecting his Prime, "now that clean up is well on its course, and the galaxy is breathing a bit easier, I have to ask you for a favor."
The matron of the Raven clan looked at him, and the same humor he'd seen in Jeff danced in her eyes.
"I will," she said.
"But I haven't asked!"
"You wish me to be your escort for the public ceremony to invest Jeff with his official duties, because you are known to hold a particular place in The Rowan's life. Being escorted by her husband's own mother is a benediction in its own manner."
He flushed, deepening the green complexion, making him feel half his age and new to Tower life all over again. "Yes. I think my logic is sound? As the staff at the Earth Tower are very aware of why Callisto finally stopped having such a high turnover."
"I think it is a good choice to make," Isthia said. "Like it or not, there are politics involved, and this will help quell many rumors." She then smiled impishly. "Care to show me Earth, after?"
He grinned, nodding happily.
Empty
Jeff had let her rage, knowing his wife needed the catharsis away from their children. Jeran and Cera were processing the shock in their own way, while Damia — and Afra — were in the care of his mother to recover and grieve.
When the Rowan stopped using her gifts to fling things around and dropped on her bed in frightening silence, then Jeff left off the reports and went to lie beside her. He touched her hand and her mind in one moment, and almost recoiled, feeling his wife wrapped around the empty silence where Larak had been once.
"You can't… linger there," he said aloud, gentle in his tone. Deneb had lost so many; he remembered the raw aching loss under everyone's need to keep building, to fix all they had lost. But some… some had succumbed to their emptiness.
"I won't," she answered him, eyes opening to look at him clearly in the dimmed lighting. "But… it is easier to face that than — "
Jeff sucked in a breath as the complications of their third-born and the Rowan's long-time anchor intruded around the edges.
"Because Larak is gone, but they will remain, and you will have to accept them."
"Yes."
Reaching for Understanding
"What even is this, Afra?"
The diminutive woman glared at him, but there was something imploring in her mind as she quested for answers.
"I don't know," he said, harsh and self-critical in ways that had a chilling effect on the woman that had, for years, loved him so deeply, credited him with her very sanity, until Jeff Raven had helped break the imposed mental conditioning. "I didn't… set out to fall like this!" he said, eyes meeting hers in a need for forgiveness.
She thought over the situation once more, then made herself let go of him, on that level, the one that had existed since the first time he charmed her with origami gifts.
"Then we must find out together, Afra. All of us, as a family." She closed the distance and reached to rest a hand on his cheek. "I can't stay angry with you. You never meant to, she certainly didn't put a thought to it, and … I want you, both of you happy.
"I let the shock flavor too much of what has been said since it came out."
He took a deep breath, brushed into her hand, and accepted all that was now changed.
Motherly Warning
Isthia looked at her son more firmly than she normally did.
"If this is some last minute, all out effort to avert what those two adults have chosen, I will make certain your wife hears every embarrassing story of your childhood," she informed him.
Jeff opened his mouth, then closed it again.
"No. I mean, I'm still trying to figure out how it came to happen, but Damia is as much a force of nature as her mother."
"And that's the part you're worried about, if it is a displacement of the original feelings?"
That made Jeff drop his eyes, as she pierced the wound adeptly, draining it into a more logical view of the emotional context.
"It is not," Isthia continued. "Afra is as shaken by finding his feelings matured to this as you and Angharad both are. And, no matter what once lay between your wife and her friend, it was never what I see now in my granddaughter and him."
"Trust you to see it all more clearly," Jeff said, managing a smile. "And… that might help me settle her."
"I am all but certain she and Afra already came to terms on this," Isthia said wisely.
Managing
Afra gently patted Laria's back, his eyes never leaving Earth Prime Jeff Raven, who had shown up with the last inbound supplies. He didn't want to know why, and yet finding out was going to get the man back to Earth all the faster.
He'd naively thought, when he married Damia, accepted his posting to her Tower, that he was done being in the middle of The Rowan and Jeff.
"How do I manage to balance being head of everything, and her husband? You have to have ideas, given how adeptly you managed Callisto's morale under her."
Ahh. Very much not the thing Afra wanted to give pointers on, and yet… he was the one that understood the Rowan's ego and id and all the needs attached to them.
"You've raised up children, managed this long…" Afra began on a leading note.
"The children are grown, moved into Towers, and she's … fretting."
Too many changes. Even the changes in the Towers themselves had added to that weight for a woman that had lost everything, been a ward of the state, and grown into the dynamo she was.
"You need to make time to reach for her, and not on a schedule. Do that? And she will settle."
"That's it? I was expecting an education in origami, or culinary mixtures," Jeff said with surprise.
"That's why you came instead of just 'pathing me?" Afra asked, as Laria finally gave a solid belch, and he could shift her to her bassinet to kick and wave her tiny fists as an infant needed.
"Yes?"
Afra started laughing, shaking his head, and reached out. "I'll teach you her favorite meal I made for her, and then you go back as soon as we're out of shadow."
"Thank you, Afra."
"I love you both, still."
Moving Fully Forward
"They really should be honoring you today," the Rowan said very softly on the Remembrance Day of the first Hiver battle at Deneb.
"Hush that," Isthia said, continuing to work the tiny crystals into her daughter-in-law's hair.
"Don't hush me, Isthia! I mean it! Even with me taking point in the merge, I felt you smoothing things out! And all untrained!"
Isthia looked at her in the mirror. "I gave you instincts, and a mother seeking to protect her extended family from any more losses. But you were always the true spotlight then, pushing all the effort into proper place."
The Rowan crinkled up her nose in distaste. "I think people make more of my part than they should," she amended. "It was truly a group effort."
"And has remained such ever since, with all we've learned and managed alongside our allies. But people, Angharad, require singular heroes, people to look up to and admire and to strive to meet the examples of.
"So we will attend this as a family, you and Jeff will be those heroes, then each of the other pivotal persons involved since then will also take their moments. And the galaxy will heal even more."
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