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Aura was nine and two-thirds when Simon was born. There were stories told at family events about how upset she was when her meticulous countdown had failed and the baby decided to come two weeks early. She scolded him about it once while he played with her finger, perfectly aware that he wouldn't understand a word she said. Still, it bothered her, and it felt good to explain to her captive and guilty audience.
The baby's one saving grace was that he was cute. She'd forgive him for that, maybe.
He didn't seem that way when he was crying and screaming, though, somehow going from silent to blaringly loud within seconds. It was hard to concentrate when he did that, and more than once she'd had to stop reading and cover her head with a pillow as her parents went to feed him or burp him or change him or figure out what else he needed.
Babies, she concluded, were cute but annoying, and definitely not worth the trouble.
Simon was a very curious toddler. He loved crawling about and getting his hands and mouth on everything, whether he was supposed to or not. She'd had to restart her science project twice because Simon had grabbed the drying clay and tried to eat the papier-mâché.
The third attempt was a simple robot that she built in her room, with a GET OUT sign stuck to her door. (Simon couldn't read yet, but the message seemed to get across anyway.)
She'd won an award with it, and tried not to be too angry when someone suggested that Simon had been her good luck charm.
As the two came into their own, it was clear that they could hardly be more different.
Simon was drawn to cultures and traditions, loving to hear the stories from both sides of his family. It didn't matter if it was Grandad reading Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or explaining of colonial conquests and crown jewels, or Obaasan explaining the art of the samurai and the ways that tradition lived on in the post-war world. Simon drank all of it up. He learned about High Tea and tea ceremonies, practiced fencing and iaido. He watched Doctor Who and the Nickel Samurai, and avidly wrote and drew each.
Aura was more interested in the future than the past. Stories bored her; they took away from the time she could be spending tinkering with something, understanding how it worked, and finding ways to make it better. She'd watched with excitement as cell phones went from portable bricks to miniature computers, and as memory storage got exponentially bigger in space and smaller in size. Her family said that she thought in 1's and 0's, she wasn't quite sure if they were joking or if it was the truth.
When she was left in charge of him, he seemed quaint at best, boring and annoying at worst. Really, the one saving grace was that she could put on whatever superhero or tokusatsu video she could find, and she'd probably have an hour or two to work on her own things before he needed her attention again.
When her parents died, Aura already had her graduate degree and was beginning a serious career in robotics. Simon, however, was still in middle school. Life went on hold for nearly a month as they'd said their farewells, put the majority of their affairs in order, and sold the house.
It shouldn't have taken something that drastic to bring them together, but bring them together it did. They looked at old photos and keepsakes, determining which to keep and which to discard, and shared their memories and laughed.
Aura was surprised to learn that they dealt with grief similarly: a mix of quiet melancholy and cold fury, needing to be alone to deal with the shock, and only sometimes needing touch and support with which to cry.
Perhaps they weren't quite as polar opposite as she thought.
As it turned out, neither quite despised the other's style. The apartment they shared remained new-age at base with a few hints of antique beauty here and there. Simon's room was the inverse: an odd mix of Japanese and English decor almost out of a storybook painted over a Modernist base.
Simon usually hung out at her work after school, and he fit in there better than she ever imagined he would. He was intrigued by her coworker Metis, her interest in Japan and her use of psychology, and found himself adored in turn by Metis' daughter. Aura discovered that she didn't mind Simon's traditional nature when it was combined with psychology, when it mesmerised Metis' little girl. And Simon was more interested in the future once it was tied, somehow, to the past.
Between the Cykes and Blackquill families, they seemed an almost cohesive whole. Together, they seemed closer than ever, and it was a wonderful thing to discover.
And Aura found herself reimagining the future: one where they'd live in that happy and stable balance for a very long time.