after all this ends, can we pretend? wilson.

[✨ zozo.]

When Sophie Fray fired an arrow into Sarina's stomach, and then another into her neck, I screamed.

Immediately my hands flew my to mouth, biting down on the guttural cry that escaped from my heart. And then I watched, tears blurring the image of Sarina on our television screen, as she choked on her own blood in the arms of her friend from Ten.

I could not move. I could not breathe. All I could do was listen to the sound of her mangled throat struggle around words and sounds. It was an awful sound, one which scraped through my head and my heart for hours and hours after we had switched off the broadcast. But I couldn't do anything to stop it, or save her, or save myself. Then Sarina's cannon fired, and I blinked, and the world continued on.

So this is what it means to be an Izar. How I had longed for a family. Desperately wished for those who would claim Kate and I as their own. Hoped that we would be special enough to be chosen. And we had got that wish, but it sat strangely with me - like Wilson wasn't right. He didn't fit what I had thought family was. I filled up that space with Vasco and Kirito and rubbed it in his face, grumbling at home and frowning at his cooking and swearing in Spanish. To be an Izar, I thought, meant something more than a hyphened surname on a piece of paper and a drunk grandfather dozing on the couch.

Fourteen and I understand, now, that being an Izar means family - but at a great and terrible loss.

So I really shouldn't be mad at Wilson, who tries despite it all. Despite the lost years, despite my distrust, despite Abuelo and the empty beer bottles everywhere. He tries, so hard, to be our father. Yet I had turned up my nose at twelve, thirteen, as if unsatisfied with what the orphanage had claimed to be my lineage. Forgetting, so quickly, the little orphan girl who looked out the window longingly waiting for someone to try.

When I wake in the dead of the night clawing at my throat, tears staining my pillow, I know what I must do.

Tip-toeing through the creaking house to the sound of Abuelo's snoring, I knock softly on Wilson's door and twist the handle gently.

"....Dad?" I try into the night, mocked by echoes of crossbow nightmares and white flowers in my cold, dead hands.