Cass knew she had a little brother. One not so much younger than herself. When her father sought a partner to create the ideal child to become an assassin, he hadn’t settled for just one person.
So, yes, Cassandra’s aware she has a brother out there. Daniel, she thinks she heard he was called. If rumors are to be believed, he was just as skilled as she had been in his training. Although, not as good as herself. She never met him, though. She had just heard how one day he disappeared without a trace.
Therefore, it’s entirely possible that the boy in front of her claiming to be her brother is who he says he is.
Half-sibling incest can be so precious. "Different fathers... Same mother. Why? Why did she have to come out from my mother's womb?" (the quote is from a manga)
When they look more like the parents they don't share, so they're different from each other. And they keep asking themselves "Why do they have to be my sibling? We could have met on a street and I would've never guessed we're related"
Back with chapter two of The Returned. You can read chapter one here if you’re interested! I’ll be working on making up a new masterlist for it here in a day or two, so that will be available by... chapter 5 ish? Either way, thank you for reading and I hope you enjoy!
(tag list lives at the bottom; let me know if you’d like to be added or removed!)
warnings | angst, family dynamics, memory loss, memory recovery, bbu background, continued recovery, implied sobriety
~*~*~
The waiting was getting to Kieran.
Henry could tell.
The nervous picking at the skin of his hand. The overly-measured inhales and exhales, as if was hooked up to a precisely timed machine. The glasses on top of his head, glinting bronze in the spring sunshine.
Eli had had to clue him into that one; how sometimes Kieran found it easier to talk when the world was watery and he couldn’t make out so much as the hand in front of his face. He could be honest when he couldn’t instantly course correct for someone’s reaction. It was easier than hoping someone would keep their facial features completely neutral.
The longer this went on, the more wound up Kieran would get. The longer Henry went without saying anything, the worse his nerves would fray. Cause and effect.
Not that Henry wanted that. He’d seen Kieran flare out only once before — the moment he’d come to full consciousness and realized he was in a hospital bed. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t something he’d force a repeat performance of.
Leaning up against the Mar Y Cielo’s faded brick, Henry couldn’t think of a single thing to say. He couldn’t pin down a single thing to feel. Thoughts consumed the inside of his skull in a vicious storm. Words bubbled up, jammed up behind his teeth before vanishing, leaving empty confusion behind. He tilted his chin up to stare at the sky — a delicate blue shot through with coral pink, thin high clouds drifting through.
The day moved forward.
The turmoil was in his head was in Kieran’s head.
Henry took a deep breath, then another, then another. “I. Um… I don’t know what you’re expecting, Kier.”
“I’m not expecting anything.” Kieran said immediately. He’d been waiting for Henry to speak, words building up in his throat too. “I’m really not. You don’t have to do anything, I don’t want anything from you, this isn’t transactional, Henry, I swear it. Keeping it hidden didn’t seem fair, but I wanted to wait until you were back on surer footing to —.”
“How long?”
“Oh, right. A-about…” An embarrassed flush covered Kieran’s neck and cheeks. “Since the November—. The November after you got back.”
Henry turned to look at him. Fury held his jaw tight. Stubborn training kept his tongue still. Sadness and something he suspected was real fear pounded in his skin alongside his pulse. “Two years then.”
“More like sixteen months,” Kieran said quietly, then blanched. “But that, um, that doesn’t matter. Right now.”
Henry shot him a withering look. “It really doesn’t.”
Kieran swallowed hard. “I’m sorry.”
Henry turned back to the sky and exhaled slowly.
“How are you feeling? About the possibility that-?”
“I’m not,” Henry said quietly. He stuffed his hands into his jeans pockets, almost disappointed to not find a carton of cigarettes there. He’d quit months ago and had so far been successful at quelling the cravings when they crept up on him. Standing there, he almost wished he hadn’t.
He bit into his tongue, rounding on the man. “I mean, fuck, Kieran. Seriously?”
“Seriously what?”
“You’ve known something like this for that long?”
“I meant well—.”
Henry pushed off the wall, crossing his arms over his chest. Frustration prickled his ribs. “Did you? Did you really?”
Kieran’s hands curled into fists, his shoulders tensing hard. He closed his eyes, chin tilted up as if he was looking over Henry’s head. Henry watched him carefully, knowing how close he was to jumping over a line. Very close from the looks of it. Henry could see the resistance on his face, the work Kieran was doing to not pounce on him; the evident fear that he might lose his grip and do just that. Henry stayed where he stood
Kieran exhaled like a deflating balloon. “I found out right after you got back. I only suspected, but I didn’t have any true ground work. By the time I had anything substantial, you weren’t doing well and didn’t need anything complicating your recovery. Eli and I both decided it was best if I waited, gave you time.”
“No one else knows. Just me, you, and my wife.” Kieran opened his eyes, finally leveling his focus back at Henry. Clear, open, recovered. “It will stay that way until you’d like that to change. If you’d like that to change.”
“I don’t want it to change.” The words fell out of Henry’s mouth. The rest came out in a haywire rush“I don’t want change. I don’t want anything new. I don’t need anything else in my head, and I don’t fucking need this. Christ, Kieran.”
“Should I have just kept it to myself then?” Kieran tensed a fraction, but kept his eyes open. His voice was strained, thin. His face was riddled with
Henry pursed his lips. “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know. I just-.”
“Just what?”
“I don’t want this right now!” Henry’s wall of control burst apart. “I don’t want another thing that I have to think about and think about how I feel about! I don’t want something else I have to take to therapy because I can’t work it out in my head for myself!” His throat tightened around tears. He dug his hand into his hair, tightening as hard as his fingers could. “I don’t want to have to be anyone else, Kieran. I can’t be anyone else, okay?”
Concern creased Kieran’s forehead. He stepped forward, clearly looking to comfort, but stopped himself. Henry was glad he had; he might have tried biting if Kieran had really gone in for a cuddle.
“Henry,” Kieran started, gently. “I’m not asking that of you. Please tell me you know I wouldn’t ask that of you?”
“They might,” Henry muttered. He raked rough fingernails over his scalp. “I mean, you could be wrong, and then you tell this family I’m their missing kid, but I’ve got the wrong name? Explain to them why I don’t remember a god-damned thing about them?” Henry huffed. “No way. No fucking way, Kier. Whoever I was can stay buried.”
“You don’t have to meet them-.”
“But you’re going to, aren’t you?” Henry’s temper flared. “Don’t tell me you are that certain it won’t just slip out of your mouth that you found your half brother.” He watched something bright flash in Kieran’s eyes and scowled. “No, I’m not accepting that. That’s just what you would say.”
It felt good to jam a pin in that hope, even if Henry knew he’d feel guilty over it later. He crossed his arms tighter. He wanted to shove Kieran to the pavement, push him off the curb just for kicks. It would have served him right, throwing that monkey wrench into the careful happiness Henry had managed to sustain.
“Henry-.”
“Stop. Please stop.” Henry pinched the bridge of his nose. He could already feel a headache coming on. “If I tell you I’ll think it through more, will you drop it?”
“Sure.”
“Good. Because if I’m going to get through this holiday with my sobriety in tact, I need to start shoving food in my face soon.”
Henry wrenched the Mar Y Cielo’s door open. He didn’t hold it open for Kieran and he certainly didn’t look back. He wrestled his face back into something neutral, maybe pleasant, and found a bottle of ginger ale in the back. He clung to it, clung to Caleb’s shadow for the rest of the night, ignoring the gnawing feeling building in his head.
This may come from a personal opinion, but I never found Sansa calling Jon her "half-brother since she learned what bastard means" as something "mean". I thought it was a diplomatic form to address him that a girl found to call him, not wanting to offend Catelyn but not wanting to hurt Jon's feelings either.
Because when my father remarried, I called his wife my step-mom because my mom was dead but I liked her too. Now that we have a "complicated" relationship, I call her "my father's wife", because I feel that she doesn't deserve to be called my "step-mom".
If Sansa was really mean to him, wouldn't she called him her "bastard brother"?
I feel the same way, perhaps also due to family history.
My father has one full sibling and three younger half-siblings, who came along when his widowed mother remarried. They are not far apart in age and all grew up together.
My father - as an adult in his fifties! - was really hurt in his feelings when he found out that my aunt was referring to him as her "half-brother" to other people, and had been since childhood. My aunt could not fathom why. It took them some months to clear it up and move past it.
The words simply meant very different things to them.
For my father, it was an important emotional step as a child to accept his step-father and the new children, and erasing the "half" was a symbol of that. My aunt was his first half-sibling, so he made that choice for her. A sign of his love and loyalty to his baby siblings, in spite of his loss that had made them possible. It meant that he loved them fully.
For my aunt, it was an intellectual journey to understand that her big brother had a different father, one who had died, and how it explained the distance between her father and him, why he had a different paternal grandmother, why he looked so different, why there was a big sadness in his life that wasn't in hers. That was huge information for her as a child, this context. The "half" meant reminding herself of all those things and respecting what they meant for her big brother. It represented the fullness of his identity.
(She grew up to be a psychoanalyst, btw.)
So for each of them, their choice to use the "half" or not was very deliberate and a sign of affection, but because their motivations were so different it felt like a slight to my father, a rejection, while my aunt felt unfairly maligned simply because she embraced the whole context of their relationship.
They patched it up and accepted each other's reasoning.
But for that reason it just seems strange to me when people think that rejection or coldness or downright maliciousness is the only explanation for Sansa preferring to use "half-brother", when there are other plausible explanations that aren't about Jon's feelings or even Catelyn's, but about Sansa's.
I'm having thoughts about Hotch and Prentiss being half-siblings. They have the same father (who cheated on Hotch's mother in a one-night-stand with Prentiss's mom), but they don't know this until they're both working for the BAU.
Hotch always thought it was kind of humorous how people would ask, "Are you guys siblings?" because of how similar they look. Emily always rolled her eyes and would joke, "Oh God I hope not. Could you imagine what it would have been like to have Hotch as an older brother growing up?"
Then her mother comes to visit, and she's standing in Hotch's office, staring at them both after asking to see them. And Hotch's gut twists, because he already knows what's coming. He can see it on Emily's mother's face. He can read between the lines.
It just solidifies in his mind how horrible of a man his father was. And it leaves Emily feeling oddly... excited? But sad, at the same time. Because her whole childhood was lonely, moving from place to place, never staying long enough to make friends. She never had siblings, just her mother (and servants). And she wonders what her life could have been like if she had known of her half-brothers as a kid, if she had them to play with--to not be as lonely.
But now she doesn't have to feel that odd loneliness anymore. Because in the BAU she didn't just find a family in her friends, but her *actual* family too, in Hotch. (and when he suddenly gets a little more protective of her in the field after their revelation, she sasses him and punches his arm--even tho it feels nice to have her older brother looking out for her).
And Hotch finds himself feeling a little at peace, for Emily's sake. He's always been The Big Brother to Sean, but now he has Emily too. And it's just... nice. Nice to have her there, to remember that she's family.
