Elsewhere
The Woman looked down on the proceedings with an expression of vague disgust. Selene regarded Her with detached curiousity.
"I thought you'd be angrier, the way he was talking," she said. "All that talk about irrational wimmenfolk disrupting sensible, fastidious male order, etcetera." She laughed. "Either he hasn't known many men besides himself, or he's pretty well blinded himself to the reality of things."
Venus shook Her head. "I've heard all that before," She said. "To tell you the truth, I really more pity him. He could have so much, if he would only stop insisting that it all be entirely on his terms, at his whim. Yet he refuses to accept the good that he has, and in the process of trying to make it into what he believes he wants, he damages, destroys, or loses it. And all of that is entirely lost on him, while he blames womankind for it."
"And if only he could have a child by himself, why, then it'd be different," Selene said dryly. "You know, some people would take that as just begging for an ironic twist of fate."
The Woman shook Her head. "I half-considered it," She said. "But it wouldn't change anything. Were he one of my daughters, she would still be trying to make everyone and everything conform to her own terms simply because she couldn't bring herself to accept things being any other way. And if he did overcome his need to have everything according to his own whim, he wouldn't need to be able to bear children himself to be the right kind of parent."
Selene nodded sadly. "I suppose. It's just a shame when someone is...what was it Rhett said? 'Throwing happiness away with both hands?' Just a damn shame..." She was starting to feel melancholy again. "But then...even if it were easily done, it's not as if I could just go around making people act sensibly." She sighed. "It wouldn't be right."
"I'm curious, then," the Woman said, "what you were trying to achieve with the deer-girl. If you're not forcibly fixing people, then what do you think this will change in her that all mortal agencies have failed to for all her years? Honestly, I wasn't exactly pleased that you've made her think herself a frail, defenseless thing because she's now a woman."
Selene shook her head. "That wasn't it," she said. "Reminding her of her status as a prey species is part of the larger picture. I want her to understand what it's like to be on the other side of her old mindset, because that seems to be the only way left to make her understand how wrong it was. It has nothing to do with her being a girl, except that she thinks it does - another thing that she should come to understand she's been wrong about. She's not defenseless - not with those hooves at the end of those legs. And if it ever comes down to it, she has enough instinct to be able to make use of them, even if she still does think she's weak and frail."
"Then you're merely trying to scare her out of her old mindset?" Venus asked. "Is having looked Death in the face not enough?"
The moon-goddess shrugged. "Humans - and now other mortals - are stubborn. You said yourself that she hasn't changed her ways in all the years she's been like this. And even in her new form I don't expect that she'll do a complete reversal overnight. It's not so much about one-time scaring her as making her able to empathize with those she would've considered beneath her, if not outright prey, before."
She gazed down on the world that she danced with, down to where Julian was, at the moment, still sleeping, uneasily awaiting the coming school day with a newly-bought wardrobe and a carefully-constructed denial complex. "It's about self-control, too," she said. "Julian's lived with a very warped set of priorities for a long time; as a human, he had turned 'fight-or-flight' into something more like 'fight-or-cheat,' and as a wolf there wasn't much in his instinct dissuading him from sticking to that. Now, instinctually, she's much more geared towards running, with fighting as more of a last resort. Hopefully what comes out of that is that, not liking this new nature, she learns to control it and limit its influence on her, but that it still influences her enough to make her less needlessly aggressive and dominating."
"And the child?"
Selene shrugged. "The baby's the baby," she said. "She doesn't get to just create a mortal mind and then leave it to die without ever having been incarnated, and for as much work as she went to instilling her own twisted view in it, I think it's right that she should have the task of bearing it. Besides, I really do think there's things she could stand to learn from being a parent. As a human, and as a wolf, he thought that everybody else was below him and existed for his gratification; there's a lot she could glean from serving someone smaller and weaker than herself."
The Woman nodded. "I see. There's an awful lot of hoping that she responds the way you think she'll respond in this plan of yours."
The moon-goddess sighed. "Yeah. But...she certainly didn't want to die, and better that I give her more sensible instincts a fair chance to get through to her than just dumping him back into life as he was."
