#half-siblings

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. 

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.”

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.

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.