It’s a little nauseating, if he’s going to be honest. Everything is just that slightest bit off from what he remembers, that tiny margin for error between identical twins. Like the image of his mother is the horizon, and all the differences between her and his aunt are vestibular disruptions. A rounder face, darker skin and hair, a missing mole, an additional scar.
Her voice. Her age.
And that’s what really trips him up. Because he remembers his mother as a mother. She had been an adult, in her thirties when she died. He remembers going to the hospital after elementary school, listening to the beeps of her heart monitor, wondering if today was the last…
But this woman… this girl… his aunt. She could pass for his classmate with a different haircut and clothes. She looks twenty at most.
The same age as his mother when his parents met.
With the way his father keeps staring, he must be thinking that too. He must be feeling the same nausea of almost-not-quite-right.
“Sanctuary,” she says again, in that voice a little too high, a little too soft; inflections all wrong even within that single word.
She is sitting in the interrogation room, alone and un-cuffed but still. So still. She has blood spattered all along her right side, her sweater beginning to dry, tackily stuck to her ribs. Her khakis are a loss.
She knows they are watching. How could they not?
“Please,” she adds, as if manners were the issue here.
“What do we do?” His father asks, still new to the idea of magic. Of monsters and hunters and permutations therein. Of impossibilities clashing with determination, of the miracles or catastrophes that result.
Of his wife’s twin sister appearing almost two decades out of her time, drenched in blood, and the center of a decades-long supernatural war.
“I don’t know,” he responds, the mentality of first High Magister to appear in centuries utterly lost behind a child too reminded of a mother long passed. “I don’t know,” he repeats.
~
A/N: Lalalala… who knows what I’m doing.
JackSGreyson Says 