The day settled on our mansion like a weighted blanket, mirroring the awkwardness that had seeped into the family fabric. We’d survived sixteen years together, a unit capable of wrestling any external force into submission. But this disturbance came from within. This time, I was the epicenter.
They couldn’t fight me. Not really. Not the one they loved most, the boy who’d grown into this unsettling presence among them.
Scratch that—it was worse. Every single one of them was fighting a primal urge, a clawing urge to simply cling to me, to anchor themselves in the eye of this strange storm swirling around their brother, their son.
I could feel it radiating from Mom, from Sarah, even from the usually detached Charlotte: a desperate, almost painful need to touch, to connect, to reassure themselves against the unnerving changes they sensed crackling in my aura. But they held back. Politeness, fear, confusion—they shackled the instinct.
Every one of them fought it. Every one, except Emma.
She didn’t fight that surge of need to be in my space. Not one bit. If anything, she embraced it, weaponized it.
When Sarah finally grabbed her backpack and departed for school, the front door clicking shut behind her felt like the firing of a starting gun. Emma emerged from the hallway, moving with a deliberate, visible limp.
"Sick," she announced, her voice carrying just the right note of practiced weakness to Mom, who was wiping down the kitchen counter.
Mom eyed her, a flicker of concern warring with deeper, unspoken worries in her gaze, but merely nodded. "Rest, sweetie. I’ve got the late shift today."
Emma ignored the implication that Mom wouldn’t be there to fuss over her. Her target was clear. She limped pointedly across the living room, her gait a performance that almost masked the deeper exhaustion humming beneath her skin, and collapsed onto the couch beside me.
Without a word of explanation, without asking, she folded her legs underneath her and laid her head squarely on my chest, settling in as if it were her birthright. Her breath came out in a soft sigh, and within moments, the rhythmic rise and fall of her breathing deepened into sleep.
I understood the bone-deep weariness. After five relentless hours of what we’d done last night... even Emma’s formidable teenage stamina, her sheer physical resilience, had finally hit a wall.
She was human, gloriously and achingly so. And I... I was something else now. The supernatural energies coiling within me, the alien strength humming in my veins, they didn’t tire like hers. They demanded, they consumed, they changed.
Her action, seeking refuge in the solid warmth of my chest, raised no immediate eyebrows from the others either.
This was sanctuary, a familiar ritual. The twins, Sarah and Emma, had done this since childhood, seeking comfort after bad dreams or scraped knees or whatever reason they came up with to cuddle with their little brother.
Sarah had largely outgrown it, reserving such closeness for rare moments of extreme distress or unknowingly like how she’d fallen asleep on my shoulder in our old house back when I just got the system.
But for Emma? This spot had always held deeper significance.
Only, in the past, she’d cloaked it in a veil of teasing deniability. She’d drape herself over me, laughing, claiming she was "teaching me" so I "wouldn’t freeze up" if a girl ever deigned to touch me.
It was a flimsy façade, brittle even then. Yesterday, peeling back the layers of our explosive new reality, I’d finally uncovered the raw, vulnerable truth beneath the lies: this wasn’t education. This was home. This was safety. This was where she’d always longed to be.
Mom watched us for a long moment from the kitchen doorway, her expression a complex tapestry of maternal concern, bewilderment, and a flicker of that repressed urge to reach out.
She hovered, then finally sighed, quietly gathering her purse and coat for the hospital. Afternoon to midnight on Fridays and Saturdays she’s always on duty.
Sunday was her only respite.
"Okay, honey," she murmured, more to the space around us than to Emma directly. "Call if you need anything. Love you both." Her gaze lingered on Emma’s peaceful face nestled against me, then shifted to mine, holding a thousand unspoken questions, kissed us both before she turned and left, the door closing with a soft finality.
Silence descended, heavier now. Charlotte, perched stiffly in the armchair opposite us, hadn’t moved. She simply watched, her posture rigid, her eyes sharp and unreadable as they tracked Emma’s sleeping form, then flicked up to meet mine.
There was no judgment in her stare, not exactly. It was more... assessment. Calculated observation of this new, untenable dynamic.

Three hours later, we emerged disheveled but satisfied. Charlotte was gone, but evidence of her departure sat accusingly on the dining table: a handwritten note in her precise script. Shameless and moral-less siblings.
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