Fated: The Alpha's Unwanted Luna

"If you want to, we can go. I think my mom will be happy to see her daughter-in-law and...her unborn grandchildren. Will that make you happy?" He asked his wife, and Alex almost turned the wheel wrong on the slippery road.

It had been twenty years since they had died, and for ten of those years Alex had done his damnedest to get this man there but had failed, and just like that, he agreed?

"What kind of flowers does Mom like? Can I call her that?" Viola peeked at him awkwardly, trying to bring back normality to completely cover up the past that wanted to come between them, and she saw Sebastian beam.

"She would be offended if my wife didn’t address her that way. Mom likes sunflowers, and Dad... he likes roses because they remind him of our mother’s signature scent," he told her.

He tightened his grip on the hand she had placed in his and searched her eyes for that fear, but it was gone, or perhaps simply buried beneath the resolve of his strong wife, who he knew would fight against it.

And Sebastian realized that if it took visiting all the ghosts of his past and finally seeing his parents’ graves and his sister to make his wife feel free again, then so be it. Today he would face them all with her and prove Vaelor wrong, that his mistakes wouldn’t affect his own life.

"Let’s get Zoe flowers too, we can get artificial ones because of the water..." He said, and Viola agreed, and they made a stop there, and then it was time to go down to the sea.

___

(Music Recommendation: Will And Anna by Trevor Jones, London Symphony orchestra.)

~°~

Sometimes, the hardest part of losing someone is not the day they leave, but the day you return to the place where you left your grief and discover it has been waiting for you all along.

___

The water around him felt colder than anything Sebastian had ever known, colder even than the winter air above, but he barely registered it, too consumed by the sight in front of him.

Aquaville.

He had never imagined what it looked like below the waters, in a world beneath their own, but today he was in a place called Aquaville, among creatures his kind had taken for food for centuries without ever wondering how those creatures felt.

He was in their world, and he was stunned by what he saw as they passed by, with Ivy in her mermaid form leading them and conversing with the fishes to light their way.

The potion made it possible for them to breathe underwater for a few hours, no more, and Sebastian hadn’t expected the vast, endless world here, his wife’s hand tight in his the entire way as he held the flowers clutched in the other hand.

The mermaid graves stretched out before them, rows of bodies suspended in their living cradles of leaves. Sebastian’s eyes moved past them all, searching, until Ivy pointed ahead, toward the place where she had laid his sister.

The mermaid moved her hand, and the leaves opened like covers to reveal only his sister’s head for him to see.

And there she was.

His little sister, the first child he had ever raised and failed at, his heart prickled.

Sebastian’s body stopped moving, something inside his chest seizing up so tight that he thought, for a moment, he had forgotten how to breathe at all, potion or no potion.

She looked peaceful. That was the first thing he noticed, the thing that broke him open before anything else could. The leaves had wrapped around her gently, cradling her the way he used to cradle her as a baby, her silver hair drifting softly in the current, her face smooth and untouched by whatever horror had taken her from him. If he didn’t know better, if he could pretend hard enough, she looked only asleep.

Viola’s hand tightened around his, and then, slowly, she let go, stepping back and murmuring something to Ivy, giving him and his twin space, giving them time with their sister.

Sebastian moved forward on his own, until he was close enough to reach out, close enough to press his palm flat against the barrier of leaves holding her. His throat closed up so completely he couldn’t speak, not at first, the words lodging somewhere behind his collarbone like a stone he couldn’t swallow down or cough back up.

"Zoe..." He finally managed, her name coming out broken, barely more than a whisper lost to the water around them. "I’m here. I finally came to see you. You’ve been gone for months now..."

He had meant to come sooner. He had told himself that, over and over, these past months, that he would come the moment he was ready, and he still didn’t feel ready, not really. Looking at her only broke something inside him more, and he turned to his twin, who was standing at a little distance with a bitter smile.

Sebastian looked away from him and back to his sister’s face.

"I’m sorry it took me so long." He said, his hand still pressed against the leaves, as close to touching her as he could get. "I kept telling myself I needed more time, but the truth is I was scared. I was scared that coming here would make it real in a way I couldn’t take back anymore. I...failed mom and dad, I failed you."

His chest ached, a deep physical throb that had nothing to do with corruption and everything to do with grief finally being allowed full room to exist.

"You always said I worried too much, remember? That I treated every little thing like it might kill you, like the world was something I had to fight off you, piece by piece." A broken sound escaped him, not quite a laugh, not quite a sob, somewhere trapped between the two. "Turns out I wasn’t wrong to worry. I just worried about all the wrong things. I was so busy trying to protect you from everything out there that I didn’t see the one thing I should have been watching the closest."

He pressed his forehead lightly against the wall of leaves.

"I keep thinking about all the things I never did. I never took you to Paris. I never stopped executing criminals, the way you always begged me to. I never told you enough how proud I was of you, how you walked into every room like you owned it, how you made people believe in second chances just by existing in front of them. I was always so afraid of being soft towards you that I forgot to tell you the things that actually mattered."

His voice cracked entirely on the last word, and for a long moment, he said nothing at all, only stood there, the weight of the water and the weight of everything unsaid pressing down on him in equal measure.

"Viola told me there’s a chance, someday, that you could come back. You and everyone else resting here might open your eyes again." He swallowed hard, forcing the words out past the lump still lodged in his throat so he could get out everything he had come here to say to her.