On My Own

Hope

Hope, the name I had chosen for my little bundle of blonde hair and giggles, was curled up in my arms and sleeping soundly. I knew the boys couldn't tell who had fathered her, by looks alone at least. She didn't have olive skin like Silas, or red hair like Nathan.

Nor did she have the same birthmark than ran in Kota's family on his butt, and she couldn't talk yet so we didn't know if she'd inherited Gabriel's sailor like vocabulary, or Owen's formal language.

None of the boys had asked, though we all knew that the biological father wasn't a mystery to me. In fact they hadn't said anything yet, they just watched as I held Hope and whispered promises of a better life than any of us had grown up with.

As I did so, I brought up facts like how Owen's mother would have loved to meet her, or that she had an Aunt named Jessica, and an Uncle named Theo, but that Theo wasn't in the country because he had some bad habits. As I told Hope all about her family, the boys seemed to get more and more anxious to say something.

The first one to speak hadn't surprised me, but what he'd said had.

"Sang, Trouble, sweetie. Thank you."

I looked up at his crystalline blue eyes in confusion.

"For what?"

"You saved Clementine."

I thought back to what Edmund had said about her and pulled Hope closer to my heart, unsure how to protect her from the world.

"Well I wasn't going to just leave her there."

Gabriel made a face, "Yeah but you could have. Edmund told you we had replaced you with her, and you still saved her."

I gave a soft shrug, noting the way Kota visibly paled at the mentioning of his cousin's name.

"Sang," a new voice started. Owen looked at me with a calculating expression, "Miss Clementine is not a romantic interest for any of us. She's Gabriel's twin sister."

He continued, watching the confusion play out on my face.

"As I believe you remember, Gabriel's family died due to his father's drinking problems. When his mother was pregnant with him, she neglected to tell her husband that she had twins. Since her husband knew she was pregnant with a boy, she gave up the girl for adoption and kept the whole existence of a daughter very quiet. Years later, when she became pregnant again, she had only done so because she had been under the impression that her husband had changed for the better.

"This was disproven the night that she and Gabriel's younger brother lost their lives. The child that had been given up for adoption, was named Clementine and placed with a comfortable family in a nice neighborhood. When her adoptive parents died of a house fire, she was orphaned once more. This was around the same time we were dealing with your kidnappers the first time around.

"You lost your memory, and we tried to allow you to live an Academy free life. We had hopes that you would be free from the bad things that seemed to follow you thanks to us. A week or two after you settled in to your apartment, Clementine knocked on our doors. All it took as a DNA test to prove her theorized story, and she's been helping us cope ever since. She didn't know your identity until you walked back into our lives.

"Please understand we don't want you to forgive us, because us choosing your fate when you've had zero to no hand in choosing what happens to you your whole life, is unforgivable. We only wish that you understand we'd all agreed to let you live a normal life without our interference, and recently all agreed that without you there is no other love for us. We had no intentions of moving on."