Return Home.

It's at least been ten to twelve years since she had last set her foot upon the familiar path towards the large manor.

She shifted- the breeze was gently blowing through her hair, the sky was clear. It's as if she had managed to travel back a few years, as if nothing had changed.

Her two sons are walking ahead, hand in hand. Curious, nervous, excited. She finds herself staring at them, how much they've grown in the past while, and how distant they had become from her.

Just like how distant she had been to her brother.

The manor still looked the same- and had the same aura of comfort, just like the first day she had set foot there.

Her sons had stopped in front of the gate, unsure to enter or not.

"Mom, is there a doorbell? Should we wait?" one of them said, turning to look at her. He nervously pushes up his glasses, unsure.

She stops behind them, calm.

"He never locks the gate, so go on in."

The other boy, shaking his head, pushes past the gate.

"Geez, Hiko, you're too worrysome!"

Hiko, not wanting to be left behind by his brother, followed.

"Wait up, Hiro!"

She watched as they went into the garden. The same familiar garden she had walked in for years.

They stopped to look around- they were intrigued, amazed.

She took a deep breath and continued down the path again- going up onto the front porch, going up to the familiar old door.

She knocks.

Her boys both join her on each side, nervous, unsure what to expect.

"Coming!" a male voice says, and footsteps could be heard, and then the door opens.

A familiar face greeted her.

"Oh! You're home, finally!" he says, grinning. "The wanderer finally missed home?"

She looked closely into his face.
Her twin brother's face.

Her boys were visibly amazed, they were told they had an uncle, but they didn't know he was their mother's twin.

"I'm home, Zach." she says, pushing past him to go into the hallway.

"Geez, at least introduce me to your boys." he comments, shifting aside. "Hello, I'm your uncle Zachary." he says, turning his attention to the two. "Twins, huh? It runs in the family."

The two boys look at each other, then back at their uncle.

"Don't stand there, come on in." he says, pulling them both gently inside the house.

Their mother had found her way to the familiar old living room, and sat down.

"Some mother you are, ditching your sons at the doorway," her twin comments, ushering the two into the room.

She turned to look at them, and smiled.

"Hiko, Hiro, this is your uncle Zach." she says nonchalantly, before slumping into the couch. "I'm tired out, seriously."

Hiko had turned to his uncle.

"Uncle, can I look at the kitchen?"

Zach was surprised- being asked to use the bathroom was usual, but being asked to see a kitchen wasn't.

"Do you two want a house tour? I could give you one while your lazy mom rests." he says with a grin, as his sister turns to give him a glare.

"That'll be great, uncle." Hiro, the other twin, replies.

While Zach distracted the two boys and introduced them to his wife and family, she buried herself in the comfort of the couch- she'd meet his wife later. She closes her eyes and lets the settings slowly envelop her- and slowly distracts herself from her thoughts.

She must have fallen asleep, because her two boys had returned with a little girl and a older pair of twins, one boy and one girl- their cousins.

She sits up- drowsily, and blinks.

"Oh, hello, Megumi." she says to the little girl, who had climbed onto the couch, and then turns to her sons.

"Hiko, Hiro, get the blue bag, there's sweets and things in there you can share with your cousins."

"On it!" Hiko said, and hurried off, while Hiro sat down next to his mother, keeping his eyes on Megumi.

"Auntie come to pway?" the little girl says, looking up at her.

She stares- Megumi looked quite a bit like her father, and her older siblings- Hotaru and Hitomi, was it? did as well.

"Yes, Auntie and Hiko and Hiro will be here for a while, Megumi."

Jessica Adella Wyoming was never a honest person.

She hated herself with all her being- how she had put up with so much abuse before in the past, leading her to have troubles trusting people. How she had stopped caring but also cared too much. How she hated her origins and her beginnings and denied them so much, she feels like there wasn't a point to living.

It's been so many years, and she's still in the same spot. Unmoving. Undeterred. Unchanging.

Her age was starting to show. Her brother still had that youthful glow, he didn't seem to have aged at all. His divorce with his previous wife didn't hurt him, his new life was going well for him.

She herself, well. She was worn, tired, aging. She hoped that she'd probably have saved up enough for her two boys to live comfortably when she's gone in the future. She had no other reason anymore.
Her sons. Her boys.

The distance she had with them was very obvious. They were closer to their father, Yoichi, and their stepmother, Sophie and their little stepsister, Aveline.

She realized that she really didn't have anyone. Her own sons, they're distant. Her ex-fiance, married to her best friend. Her brother, she had abandoned. Her mother...

Mother.

Mother.

Why did you let me suffer so?

Never had she felt so alone than now.

She got up- noticing that everyone was out of the room and in the other room- and decided she'd go visit her mother.

It was a long walk down a trail in the forest, where the old laboratory used to me. A long, quiet, dark trail. Where the old portal was. Lying derelict, abandoned, and in ruins.

It'd been so many years since she killed her father there.

So many years since she last came by to see her mother's grave.

Zach didn't need to know that her father tried to kill the both of them and use them as his experiments. She knew that she and him weren't human. They were... Something. She couldn't tell. Her mother had always told them they were special and came from a land in a different dimension.

Though they seemed completely human, there was always a special thing about them.

They aged differently. They were stronger. They had better sight. They had sharper hearing.

They were also beasts in the eyes of their father.

Dr Artilius wasn't her father. He was the monster, the beast.

The one that killed mother. That killed Maman.

Her mother loved French. When she was younger and Zach would run off to play, she would listen to her mother sing and do chores, learning the language. Her mother had been taught by a kind person, she said. "He was very generous and kind!" She used to say.

The same person that killed her because she wouldn't give up her own children to be killed.

The same person that took Zach and wiped his memory and tested illegal research on him.

The same man that brought the both of them into being.

He was consumed by his greed and his ambition. He fell, down to a place that he could never climb back out of.

And brought his own death on himself.