Fic: Tools of the Trade (Lilo & Stitch, The Grand Councilwoman)

[tiamatschild.livejournal.com]

Title: Tools of the Trade
Author: tiamatschild
Fandom: Lilo & Stitch
Rating: K
Characters: The Grand Councilwoman
Summary: It’s meant to make life livable.
Notes: Written for katarik’s prompt: “Grand Councilwoman, bureaucracy”.

Tools of the Trade

The bureaucracy that wrapped around the law was built to be a tool. Or perhaps, the Grand Councilwoman occasionally thought to herself, sifting through the thousand things that needed to be done simply to run her own office, it might be more accurate to say it grew.

She knew a young mathematician from a local gas giant who made nervous noises and fluttered her long, graceful flukes when she said things like that – the poor child found it almost blasphemous, and was too polite to say so, but too young to effectively hide her shock. Give her another thousand years and she’d state her position or give nothing away with the best of them. Mmm, but perhaps it did grow, in the idle, unconscious, airily mindless way algal mats grew.

Still and all, bloated as it could occasionally be – and really, she’d worked centuries as an intern and low level diplomat and harassed legal clerk, she knew exactly how overblown it all was – it was meant to be a tool. It was there to allow many people, who came from many individual experiences, families, cultural groups, species, and galactic clusters to live peaceful, fulfilling lives to their own best potential, and the wonderful thing about it was that, when it failed to do so, when it became destructive, unthinking, a blunt instrument that punished instead of supported –

It always carried within its vast, contradictory systems and structures a way to put things right.