#thanks capcom

or: lana skye, thirteen years later

major spoilers for rfta, tw knives

your sister picks you up from prison on the day you finally come home.

she is twenty seven. she has been driving for almost a decade. you are forty, and have not seen gas stations or cars or the newspaper for thirteen years.

ema has seen the world, worked overseas. she has moved on, with friends and a boss and a girlfriend you keep hearing about. you, meanwhile, are stuck somewhere between twenty-nine and your dead girlfriend’s ghost, twenty-nine and the ruins of your unit, twenty-nine and damon gant’s uncanny grin.

she does not meet your eyes for fifteen minutes, driving in silence and perfect stoicism. you expect this will continue the whole way, but you forget that, while you have been static, ema has grown.

instead of continuing onto the highway she turns the wheel, pulling into the breakdown lane.

the cars flash by. you exhale.

“i’m sorry,” you say, because you rehearsed a whole thing and lost it the minute you saw her. it was different from when she visited, all those years, or called from europe. she is almost the same age you were when you went away. you feel almost equal.

you have seen the inside of a jail cell for many years, and now you are seeing your little sister cry and not knowing what to say.

“you’re allowed to me angry with me,” you say. it’s easier if she is.

she stares. “i’m not,” she sniffs, “not anymore.”

“ah,” you say. the words continue to dance at the edges of your brain.

“i missed you,” she says, reaches across the center console to wrap her arms around you. you grip back — you’re crumpling her shirt. it’s okay. it’ll be nice to do laundry again. you don’t cry, but you think you might be able to, someday.

(god, the odd things you’ve missed —)

then she steels herself — you can tell she’s been doing it for years — and pulls back onto the highway. it is silent again. you think — hope — that there will be time for talking.

Ken is a dad

Dante is an uncle ft Vergil is a deadbeat

Even Mega Man X got a bunch of clone children