I love the conversation between Pyrrha and Pash about Wake. Like yes, Wake was ruthless, mean, and married to duty – and she loved her family. She loved her sister, she loved her niece, she was proud of the blood they shared.
This puts her feelings about Gideon in even starker contrast. She didn’t love Gideon. She didn’t want Gideon. She raised and nurtured unborn Gideon for the sole purpose of killing her at the right place and time, and hated every last goddamn second of it.
We could have just assumed Wake wasn’t familial. We could have just assumed she was cold and merciless without discretion.
But Tamsyn Muir wrote this conversation to make it very clear that this wasn’t the case. Gideon didn’t have an unloving mother, she had a mother who didn’t love her.
i kept wondering why wake left gideon alive here; she’d already shot mercy, she clearly has no love for lyctors - which is what gideon was, at that point - and it’s not like she had any particular maternal feelings towards her; the only name she’d ever given her was bomb. she was a thing to kill, a thing to detonate.
this post reminded me that she didn’t feel like that towards all family, towards all children. she spent years in gideon’s sword, a sword gideon probably took with her everywhere, while she chattered to her mother’s niche, while she trained to become a soldier, unconsciously following in her mother’s footsteps - maybe, after all, wake did feel a sort of fondness for her down the line. for her daughter that looked like her, trained like her, was the only person to talk to her in years. maybe she felt the smallest amount of softness for her in the end - enough to spare her life while there were bigger fish to fry, at the very least.