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"They finally said yes," Cecil said. "I can go visit her."
His wife gasped. "Cecil, that's wonderful! When are you leaving?"
"Tomorrow," Cecil said. "But I just-" he sat down in the armchair, the red one they'd gotten just before Hunter was born, the one that still had teeth marks on its legs from when Diego had learned to crawl and liked to gnaw on everything within reach. He felt shaky, tremulous, afraid, which was unusual, considering that he'd just gotten permission to see his sister for the first time in nearly fifteen years. You'd think he would have been excited.
"She's going to hate me," he whispered. "I didn't do anything for her..."
"You couldn't have done anything," his wife tried to comfort him.
"I could have done something!" He thumped the arm of the chair with his fist. "I should have done something..."
"Against the kingdom?" his wife pointed out. "Besides, you told me, she was...she was different..."
Cecil laughed bitterly. "That's one way to put it. I wouldn't be surprised if she loathes me now."
"Just go," his wife urged. "Speak to her. See how she is..." She hesitated. "Who she is, now." Cecil's wife had never met his sister, but he'd told her enough about her. "No harm can come from just talking to her, can it?"
She looked different.
That was the first thought that went through Cecil's mind as he stood on his sister's doorstep. She looked different.
It wasn't just that she was older. That was only to be expected. He was older, too. His face was slightly lined, and he had a few streaks of grey in his ginger hair. But his sister-
Her hair was longer, more wild. The ebony side of her hair was as midnight-black as ever, but the snowy side was closer to silver than white now, but the dichotomy was as apparent as ever. White to silver...it was unnerving, like he'd encountered a stranger in his sister's body.
There were crow's feet around her dark green eyes, which were glaring at him. Her face was lined. Her skin was pale and sallow, unnaturally so.
She did not look like the Estella he remembered.
She recognized him instantly, and began yelling at him-a scolding he made no effort to deflect. It was only what he deserved, after all.
"How dare you come here?" she demanded, her voice a high-pitched screech and yet sounding rough and husky at the same time, like her throat had been damaged from breathing too much smoke. Did she smoke? Cecil hoped not.
"You traitor!" His sister's eyes burned green fire. "You left me here to rot!"
"I - I know," he managed. "I'm sorry. I-"
"What do you want?" she demanded. "Get out! I won't-"
She stiffened suddenly, and turned sharply, as though her attention had been caught by a noise Cecil couldn't hear. Cecil squinted into the gloom behind her, but he couldn't see anything. Apparently she couldn't either, because she turned back to him muttering "just the brat again." When she looked at him again, her eyes seemed...softer, somehow. Younger, perhaps. Less burdened.
"What do you want?" she repeated.
"I just - I wanted to talk to you."
For several moments his words hung in the air between them. The tension was so thick, it could be cut with a knife. Their history, the strange events that had separated them, the different paths their lives had taken, the one disastrous meeting they had had fifteen years ago, the long gap since, and most of all, their mother-all these seemed to hang between them, encapsulated in Cecil's short, fragmented, hopeful sentence.
She sighed theatrically (she'd always been a bit of a drama queen) and opened the door only slightly wider. "I suppose you'd better come in, then."
Cecil followed her down a dark hall. It was clean, but everything still looked dingy somehow. Everything was very fancy and ornate, but very old, as if this had once been an opulent Victorian mansion but hadn't been changed since. No new furniture, no nothing.
"What was that?" he asked.
"What was what?" she demanded.
"Before. You turned - there was something behind you?"
"Oh." She waved a hand in flippant dismissal as they entered what was clearly the kitchen. "That was just Carlos."
"Carlos?" He felt as though he'd stumbled upon something very important that he was missing entirely. "Carlos who?" His sister's friends had been named Jasper and Horace, he knew. No Carlos.
"Carlos Oscar de Vil," she said, clearly thinking she was clarifying her statement by saying Carlos' full name.
"Carlos Oscar - Wait." De Vil. His sister's chosen surname. Which meant that if this Carlos had it too...
"You have a son?"
"Yes," she said with a shrug, filling a kettle with water and putting it on the stove, which she then lit. "Why? Do you?"
"Yes - three, actually - that's not - when?"
She shrugged, sitting down by a small table. "Dozen years ago or so."
Cecil took the chair across from her. He looked around the empty kitchen, listened to the silence of the (nearly) empty house. "Who is your husband?"
"None of your business," she snapped.
"Where is he?" Cecil asked. "Is he here?"
"And that's none of your business either!" She glared at him.
He raised his hands placatingly. "All right. I was just wondering."
He very carefully did not think about the Baroness von Hellman, who had married the aging, wealthy Baron von Hellman, birthed their supposedly stillborn child, and created a fashion empire.
The Baron had not lived to see it. He had died shortly after he was told his daughter had. Stress, grief, and his heart, people said.
Other people said that the timing was suspicious, and that the Baroness would stop at nothing to be the sole possessor of the von Hellman fortune, and that in fact several suspicious deaths had been linked to her besides.
He wondered how much his sister was like the Baroness.
He wasn't thinking of all this. No. He definitely wasn't.
"Why didn't you tell me you had a son?" he asked, and knew instantly that it was the wrong thing to say.
She glared at him. "How, exactly, was I supposed to tell you? You just left me - no letters, no phone calls, no visits, no nothing!"
"I wrote you letters! They were all returned, marked Return to Sender! The Isle of the Lost is cut off from-"
"And you're only showing up now? Where have you been all this time - living it up in Auradon?"
This - the rapid-fire argument, the accusations, the glares - they were familiar and strange at once. It reminded him of when they were children, getting into fights about things that were entirely ridiculous but mattered very much when you were seven and ten ("He took it!" "I did not!" "She snuck into my room!" "Only to get my book back! Which you took!"). He felt disconcerted, displaced. They weren't children anymore. It was out of time - they weren't children anymore, bickering over breakfast. They were adults, staring at each other over an empty table with the weight of lost years between them as the kettle boiled.
"Estella," he tried, quietly. "I-"
"Don't call me that," she snapped.
He blinked. "Estella?"
She nodded. "I'm Cruella now."
There had always been two sides of Cecil's sister when they were younger, and Cruella was the nickname that their mother had given her darker side, the side that was ruthless and forbidding; the side that had shone through when she'd tramped up and down the living room, vowing revenge on the children who bullied her at school, her dark eyes shining strangely, eerily; the side that threw ferocious tantrums and wouldn't speak to him for hours.
Their mother had come up with a system to handle her dark side. Sometimes she simply let her exhaust herself. Sometimes she humored her; when she began coming up with elaborate vengeance schemes, their mother would indulge her in her imaginings, saying things like "Go on," and "Then what?" to encourage her fantasies - until Cecil's sister realized on her own how futile it was. Their mother would tell his sister to take deep breaths, to focus on her face, to squeeze a pillow, and to say-
"Thank you for coming, Cruella," Cecil said carefully. "You can go now."
It had helped his sister to treat her alter ego like a guest: let her have her say, and then politely show her the door. It had worked, most of the time. It helped her regain control.
It didn't work now.
She stared at him for several long moments. Then she laughed, loud and long and hysterical.
"Cecil," she said, and any trace of mirth was instantly wiped from her face; it was uncanny, really. Unsettling. "I've been Cruella since I was twenty-five. It's sweet, how Mum tried to protect me from myself. But that isn't going to work anymore."
"Estella-"
"Cruella! Call me Cruella!" She glared at him, but Cecil thought she seemed almost scared beneath the anger. Like how when they were little and there would be a thunderstorm outside and she would start yelling at him for the randomest, smallest things (He got dust on her wall? Really? Although looking back, it was endearing, really.) in an effort to distract herself from the thunder outside.
It had been around then that Catherine had started teaching her to sew. Better to distract herself with something useful than by fighting with her brother. And she'd loved it, had taken to it like a fish to water.
He blinked back the memories. "Can I call you...Ella?" he asked slowly.
When they were younger, he'd gone through a phase of trying to find a good nickname for his sister. He'd gone through every possible nickname-Estelle, Stel, Esta, Esti, Est, Ella, Elle, Stella.
None of them had stuck, though. "I'm Estella!" she'd told him. "Don't call me anything else! Or else I'll call you...um..."
It was a good thing that Cecil was not a name that lent itself to nicknames.
But things were different now. She refused to be called Estella, yet he could not bring himself to call her Cruella. Ella seemed like a good compromise - a nickname for both of them. Would she see it that way?
She paused, her dark eyes staring into the distance. "Ella," she repeated slowly, as though tasting the word. "I suppose so. For now, at least."
"Thank you," Cecil said, and then wondered what exactly he was thanking her for. Permission not to call her by that horrid appellation she'd embraced?
The kettle whistled.
She got up, removed the kettle, turned off the flame, and poured the tea into two mugs, one of which she plunked in front of Cecil - all in complete silence.
She'd often made tea, when they were younger. All three of them had, and enjoyed it greatly. Tea was Britain's finest good, after all - well, that and fish and chips, in Cecil's opinion - and he, his mother, and his sister were nothing but a true Englishman and Englishwomen. His sister, notably, had been very proud of the way she was able to make a proper cup of tea and design a skirt at once, doing one with each hand.
Cecil didn't know this, but his sister had taught her son to make tea, and to enjoy it, as well as she did, and she still took pride in doing it herself, instead of making Jasper, Horace, or Carlos do it for her.
The tea was hot and bitter.
"So," his sister said, breaking his train of thought. "Did you know?"
"Know what?"
"That Mum wasn't my mum." She held her mug tightly, her knuckles white. "That I was actually the daughter of the Baroness von Hellman. Did you know? Were both of you hiding it from me?" Her eyes were wide, dark and angry; a vein throbbed at her temple and her voice rasped.
Cecil was thrown at the sudden change of topic and mood. He spared a brief thought wondering what it was like for young Carlos, navigating his mother's sudden mood swings, more severe, it seemed, than when the two of them had been children, before their mother's death; then he turned his attention to answering his sister peaceably, to navigating her mood swing himself.
"Est - Ella-" He raised his hands placatingly. "I didn't know. I was three years old. Mum told us that our father died a month before you were born. I - we had no reason not to believe her."
Except for her hair and her lack of resemblance to the two of you and the picture of Mum's wedding labeled "Catherine and Cecil" implying that you were named after him, a little voice in his head whispered.
Cecil rubbed his forehead. He knew now that his father, Cecil Miller Sr., had actually died a month before he had been born, in an automobile accident, and that he'd been named after him, and that Catherine Miller had then taken on a job working for the Baroness, and had been allowed to bring her infant son with her in exchange for being paid less, and that three years later-
"I didn't have ginger hair like the two of you," she noted, as though reading his own thoughts.
"Not all family members have the same color hair," he pointed out.
She took a hunk of her own hair - from the black side, it shone like ebony - in her hand and yanked it savagely, as though angry at it. His eyes widened. She'd always taken pride in her unusual hair color - hair colors, for while black was a perfectly ordinary shade to have on your head, white was not. Not when you were below a certain age, and both of them even now were far below it. And white and black, split right down the middle...the dichotomy was startling. Cecil had seen perfect strangers stare, mouths agape, in varying degrees of surprise and even fear. But his sister had always loved her hair, until-
"Everything bad that happened to me was always connected to my hair," she muttered to herself. "Got me recognized at the Baroness's party, got me bullied at school..."
Cecil remembered that school.
He'd been all right there. He hadn't made friends so fast, but what teenager did? He'd met a few other kids, and they were friendly to each other, ate lunch together and so on.
His sister hadn't been so lucky. She'd been taunted for her "skunk hair," for the alterations she'd made to her clothes, for anything the other children could use as ammunition against her.
("If you would just try not to stand out, things might get better!" he'd told her once. "You don't need to make the inside of your uniform jacket bright yellow!"
"I want to!" she'd snapped, stomping her foot. "It's boring! Why can't I liven it up a little? It's not against the dress code, I checked! If they can't recognize style when it's right under their noses, that's their problem!")
Cecil had looked out for her, at school. People were less likely to start up with the weird new girl when her teenage brother - albeit also a new student - was standing right next to her with his fists clenched glaring at you. But he was three years older than her, in a different wing of the school, and he couldn't be with her all the time. Even their recess breaks overlapped only by five minutes.
Besides, she wanted to prove herself. Nobody would respect her if her brother had to rescue her all the time.
Then a group - a gang - of kids had bodily thrown her into a Dumpster, and he'd decided that enough was enough.
"I might come home a little later than usual today," Cecil had told his mother and his sister, as the latter huddled on the sofa, hugging her newfound puppy to her chest and blinking back furious tears (she was staying home today). Then he left quickly, before either of them could ask him why he thought he might be home late.
Cecil came home an hour later than usual, with a black eye, a bloody nose, and bruises on his cheek and all down his side.
"Cecil!" Catherine had shrieked in horror. "What happened to you?!"
"You should see the other blokes," Cecil had said as he leaned against the doorway, wincing (he'd be sore all next week, but it was worth it) and probing his teeth with his tongue, to make sure none of them were loose. His eyes met his sister's dark ones, widening as she realized what her brother had done for her, and he flashed her a grin.
During the next week, the boy his sister had dubbed "Ginger" (he'd found that half-amusing, half-insulting. "I have ginger hair too!" "Well, I have to call him something!" "You can't find out his actual name?") had left her alone, not daring to do any more then shoot both of them glowering glances from swollen eyes.
But between Cecil and his sister's little green ink incendiary devices...they'd been lucky not to get expelled. Well, they would have been. Their mother had withdrawn them both at the last minute. But Cecil wouldn't have cared if he had been expelled, because it would have been for his sister.
"And then I had to dye it because it would have gotten me noticed, which in our profession is the last thing you want," she muttered now, and Cecil got the impression she wasn't quite talking to him. Her eyes were distant.
"Est - Ella?" he asked carefully.
She blinked. "What?"
He fumbled for a moment, thrown. "You said - you dyed your hair?"
"Yes." She sipped her tea.
"Why?" he started to ask and then decided not to. "What color?" he asked instead.
She took another sip. "Ginger."
Ginger. The same color as his hair, the same color as Catherine's.
When they were little, she'd gone through a phase of wanting ginger hair, just like her brother and their mother. By the time she'd been four or five, though, she had grown out of it, and was completely infatuated with her own black-and-white tresses.
"But you - you like your hair now?" he asked.
"I never stopped liking it," she snapped. "It's part of me. It's just - have you ever loved and hated something at the same time, because it causes you trouble?" Before he could answer, she continued. "But I'm not little hapless Estella anymore. My hair is part of what makes me Cruella." She smiled.
Cecil felt frozen. He'd heard the expression "my blood ran cold" before, but he'd never experienced it until now. She really believes...No. Change the subject...any subject...
And of course, he picked the most complicated emotional one for the two of them he could possibly have chosen. He couldn't have mentioned, like, puppies or something. No, it had to be this.
Then again, perhaps it was best not to mention puppies around his sister anyway.
And to be fair, he'd been wondering what the answer was to this question for years.
"Where were you?" he asked. "After Mum died. Where were you? Where did you go?"
"Where were you?" she countered. "I couldn't find you!"
And so Cecil haltingly began to tell the story of where he had been the night Catherine Miller died.
The two of them had been in the car as their mother ran in, looking out of place, awkward, and extremely nervous in her olive-green dress. She'd warned the two of them to stay in the car until she came back, which they had done for some time, wondering where they were and who their mother knew here ("Maybe she used to work here." "Wouldn't she have said something?" "I dunno. This place gives me the creeps."). Then his sister's new dog had escaped out the car window and run past the iron gates onto the grounds of the mansion, and his sister had gasped and called, "Buddy! Come back! I'm just going to-" before scrambling out of the car herself and running after her pet.
"Estella! Wait!" he'd called after her; she'd lifted a hand as though to acknowledge that she'd heard him, but she couldn't listen to him right now, she had to get her dog back, she'd come back right after; the hat their mother had put on her head had been bobbing as she ran, obscuring her hair completely. Her small form had rounded the corner of the gate, and she'd been gone.
That had been the last time he'd seen his sister for years.
He'd thought of running after her and bringing her back to the car, but then all three of them would have been wandering around the mansion; his mother would all but have a heart attack if she came back and found them both gone. This way he could explain to her where his sister was, and Catherine, presumably familiar with the layout of the mansion, could go find her herself. Besides, wasn't the first rule of getting lost to stay where you were?
So he stayed in the car, and stayed in the car, and stayed in the car. Neither his mother nor his sister returned.
Two hours in, the security guards at the gates of the mansion began looking at the car suspiciously, so he moved it around the corner. (At fifteen, he knew the rudiments of driving. His sister was always begging him to teach her, but he refused until she would be at least thirteen. He wasn't foolish enough to teach a little kid how to drive.
He would never get to teach her to drive.)
He hoped his mother and sister wouldn't think he'd vanished. But look, it was just around the corner. You didn't need to walk that far.
So he'd waited in the car, getting more and more nervous as the hours ticked by, wondering if he should call someone and realizing he didn't have anyone to call. He fiddled with the radio to pass the time, idly flipping through different stations. And then, as the rising sun bled scarlet and fuchsia into the lightening sky, he heard something on the news.
An as-yet unidentified body had been found at the base of the nearby cliff. Female, aged approximately forty, red hair, brown eyes, green dress-
He'd known instantly.
It hadn't quite set in at first. He'd wandered away from the car in a daze, looking for his sister. He climbed over the gate, wandered the curiously-deserted grounds, and finally climbed down the cliffs.
The body had been removed, but the area had been marked off with police tape, and he'd seen a big brownish-red stain on the rocks.
Blood.
His mother's blood.
He'd run away from there as though death itself was stalking him.
He didn't fully remember the next few days. He'd stayed with the car, clinging to the hope that his sister would find him. He'd slept in it. He'd gotten food from somewhere or other. He'd cried. He'd gone into the woods and hit a few trees.
When people started looking suspiciously at the car, and him, he'd moved it to a small parking lot nearby.
He needed to stay in this town, because otherwise his sister wouldn't be able to find him.
He didn't turn himself in to the police, because otherwise they would send him to an orphanage or foster home somewhere, and his sister wouldn't know where he was when she came back. And even if she did find him, they would probably be separated.
He found a part-time job at a grocer's. It helped that he was tall for his age, so nobody asked him why he wasn't in school.
He was paid decently. He didn't spend the money on much besides some food (he got a discount at the grocer's anyway, since he was an employee) and once in a while, when the customers began to look at him askance, a new shirt or pair of pants.
He didn't have anyone else to spend money on, so he was able to save up a bit. When winter set in, he had enough to rent a room in a run-down inn for the worst of it. After a few years he'd saved up enough to rent a small flat, and moved out of the car entirely. He still kept it parked in front, though.
It was a full ten years, and Cecil was twenty-five, by the time he finally gave up and moved on, leaving the town his mother had died in behind. His sister hadn't found him in all this time, and never would, not if he stayed here and stagnated. And so he left.
"I came back three years later," his sister said now. "To have my revenge against the Baroness."
"I know," he said. His head ached. If I'd just stayed for three more years...
"What about you?" he asked.
She sighed, curling her hands around her mostly-empty-and-no-longer-warm mug of tea. "I panicked, I suppose. I ran out, back to the car, but it wasn't there-" he flinched-"and I didn't know where it was, or where you were, and I was afraid the people at the party would find me, so I just got on the nearest trolley and ended up in London."
"Homeless?" he asked. "Like me?" He was pretty sure living out of your mother's car for three years counted as "homeless."
"I did have a home," she snapped. "Just not what most people would call a home. Our home."
That word, our, somehow managed to exclude him perfectly. Her and some other people - her friends, sidekicks, whoever they were. Not him.
"You just let them take me!" she hissed, changing the topic again without any warning, leaving Cecil feeling discombobulated. "I came to you and you did nothing!"
"I couldn't have done anything!" he protested. The words rang hollow in his ears, as they had whenever his wife or he had told himself that, as they had for the past fifteen years.
"You didn't even try." Her face twisted. "Why? Am I too much of a devil? If I don't scare you, no evil thing will?"
Cecil blinked. He had no idea what she meant; that was completely out of context. But after a moment, the words rang a bell.
"That song," he said slowly. "The one whatshisname composed..."
"Yes," she hissed. Her face was starkly white, even more so than it had been before. Veins throbbed in her temple; her nostrils flared and her dark eyes narrowed. She took out a cigarette and lighter from a pocket, and lit the former with the latter. Cecil stared at the small flame but consciously said nothing.
"After everything I did for him!" She exhaled, blowing out a stream of smoke.
Cecil coughed, his eyes watering. "Didn't you get him fired?" he asked before he could stop himself. He stiffened, unsure of how his sister would take his blunt statement, but she just snorted.
"I gave him a dog," she pointed out, as though giving someone a dog to feed and care for when you had just indirectly cost him his job made up for it.
"You later stole his dogs," Cecil pointed out.
She shrugged. "The parents were mine originally. I was just taking the children back."
"I don't think it works that way."
She waved a hand dismissively. "Whatever."
It felt like they were children again, having a conversation/argument/discussion about something or other...school, clothes, a book.
They weren't children anymore.
They had both changed. But his sister...she was different now, even more so than him, and not just because of the years they'd spent apart from each other, and the hardships they'd both faced.
He remembered more verses of the song his sister understandably seemed to hate. Only fragments, but it was enough for him to hate its composer-what was his name? Ratcliffe?-as much as his sister did.
To see her is to take a sudden chill...A spider waiting for the kill...You've seen her kind of eyes watching you from beneath a rock...
The last lines he remembered fully. This vampire bat, this inhuman beast, she ought to be locked up and never released! The world was such a wholesome place until Cruella, Cruella De Vil.
How well had this Ratcliffe person even known his sister?
He remembered something else he'd heard. "Didn't you once try suing Ratcliffe for defamation?"
"Radcliffe," his sister corrected. "Roger Radcliffe." She took another drag on her cigarette. "And yes. I rather enjoyed that." She allowed herself a small smile.
Cecil couldn't blame her. To hear a song describing you in such terms...to realize that this was how the rest of the world would know you...Well, maybe this was why she'd embraced her alter ego. What was the point of fighting it, in that case?
And she had, indeed, been locked up. And, to date, never released.
"Estella," he said.
She glared. "Don't call me that."
He ignored her. "I truly am sorry for not helping you when you were sent to the Isle. You-you're right, I probably could have done something-"
"Yet you didn't." She glared at him. "So much for being my older brother, eh? Only when it suits you?"
"Estella-"
"Don't call me that. Leave."
He felt like he'd been punched. Like he was fifteen years old again, in a fistfight with the boys who dared to hurt his younger sister-
His younger sister, who was now on her feet, looking at him with not a trace of warmth in her eyes. For just a moment, her impenetrable mask seemed to crack, and she buried her face in her hands, although Cecil couldn't tell if she was angry or crying. "Leave," she repeated, her voice muffled through her fingers. "Please."
Cecil stood. He gently, carefully, put a hand on her shoulder, and she didn't put away. "You can't mean that," he whispered.
"You left me here." She withdrew her face from her hands. "Not a word for fifteen years, and then you come back and expect me to act like all is forgiven. No. You want nothing to do with me, I want nothing to do with you. Leave. Now." She slapped his hand off her shoulder.
"Estella," he whispered.
"Don't CALL me that! I said leave!"
Her eyes were fire now, in a way that he had never seen before, only heard rumors of when he'd heard tell of his sister's desperate race for Dalmatian dogs, and he physically flinched to see such hatred directed toward him.
He stumbled toward the door, hating himself for leaving her (again) but realizing that if he left her on even worse terms than they already were he would have no chance of reestablishing contact.
When he reached the door-she'd followed him down the hallway, albeit at a distance - he turned and looked back. "You're not Estella," he whispered.
The words, the truth, rose up from within him, as though he'd known it all along, known it for the past fifteen years, ever since she'd showed up at his doorstep in a fur coat made from Dalmatian skin, and yet denied it to himself, his wife, his children, and everyone in Auradon.
But the truth always found a way to rise to the surface.
The woman who had his sister's face shook her head. "No," she agreed. "I'm not. And if I was Estella, then I'd be sorry. But I'm Cruella now. So-" she shrugged again, flippantly, casually, as though nothing mattered. "Hate to say it, darling, but I'm not."
His hand found the doorknob, but he hesitated. He looked back at her one more time. "Why de Vil?" he asked. "I understand Cruella, but why de Vil? You do know what that sounds like?"
Her face twisted. "My mother's name is von Hellman, Cecil." Her eyes were red but dry. "What else was I supposed to be?"
My mother. Not "the Baroness." Not "my birth mother." My mother.
It was the first time either of them had referred to the woman who had given birth to either of them as "my mother." Not "our mother." My mother.
It marked a chasm between the two of them.
They were not siblings. They did not share a mother, a father, a surname, hair color. He was Cecil and she was Cruella, and they had nothing in common except twelve years of a shared childhood and the woman who had loved both of them. Nothing else.
He stumbled out of the house in a daze, barely seeing where he was going, blinking furiously, nearly stumbling over the boy he found outside.
The two of them stared at each other in surprise.
The boy was young, twelve or thirteen. He was the spitting image of Cecil's sister.
He was male, of course. And his hair, rather than being split half-white, half-black down the middle, stared out as black and then gradually faded into white.
But it was black-and-white. He only knew one other person with that combination.
The resemblance was uncanny.
The boy stared at him with wide, dark, wary eyes.
There was only one person he could be.
"You must be Carlos," Cecil said.
"How could you abandon her like that? She’s your sister!” Carlos stood as tall as he was able; Cecil could see him shaking with anger. When he was angry, he looked just like his mother - his skin whitening, his eyes widening, his fingers curling.
The lad had a fire in his eyes that Cecil had only ever seen in his mother's; a fire that would scorch the world to ashes if only it could.
"You're a coward!" Carlos glared at him in contempt. "You hear me? Coward!"
The boy was right. Coward, when he didn't even look for his sister when they were children. Coward, when he refused to help her when she was taken to the Isle. Coward, coward, coward.
"So, how was it?" his wife asked as soon as Cecil walked in the door.
Without even bothering to take off his coat Cecil sunk into the armchair and put his head in his hands.
His wife sucked air through her teeth. "Kids, all of you, go upstairs. Your father needs some quiet time."
"Is he okay?" Hunter asked anxiously. "He looks upset."
"He'll be fine," his mother assured him. "He just...needs to rest. Which is why all of you are going upstairs, now."
"But you're staying here!" Patrick Howard, the second-to-youngest, complained.
"I," his mother said, "am your mother."
"Um," Diego said nervously, "is this about your - our - who you went to visit?" Having an aunt was new to him, new to all of them.
Diego's siblings all instantly perked up.
Cecil took a deep breath. "Yes," he said, relieved that his voice was steady. "It is. I visited her on the Isle of the Lost...she was not happy to see me."
"'Cuz she's a bad guy?" Patrick Howard asked. "'Cuz she's on the Isle?"
Cecil flinched.
"No, but she can't be a bad guy," Hunter objected before either of his parents could say anything. "She's Dad's sister!"
Cecil winced.
"So why is he sad?" Patrick Howard wanted to know.
"We...had a fight," Cecil admitted. His wife's eyes widened; he mouthed Tell you later. Obviously, any attempts at having a private conversation for the next hour were going to be foiled.
"About what?" Patrick Howard pressed.
"Patrick Howard!" Diego said. "If you ask him he won't tell you! You're supposed to wait until he's telling Mum-"
All the children froze and glanced toward their parents.
Cecil's wife folded his arms. "I see," she said archly.
Cecil smiled. It felt like the first time he'd smiled in months.
"You have a cousin," he added a moment later. A cousin who (rightfully) wanted nothing to do with his uncle, but a cousin nonetheless.
"Cool!" Hunter said. "I always wanted a cousin!" He looked at his parents accusingly, as though it was their fault both of them were only children.
"How old is he?" Diego asked. "What's his name? Does he-"
"One at a time," Cecil laughed. "His name is Carlos. He's about twelve, I think."
"Is he going to come visit?" a new voice piped up.
Cecil looked at his youngest child and only daughter, the only one of his children who had inherited his ginger hair: Catherine, his mother's namesake, six years old and with a heart to match her grandmother's. She beamed up at him, brown eyes sparkling.
"I don't think so," he said quietly. "Not soon, anyway. He lives on the Isle of the Lost, and they don't let people off of the Isle. But one day he might, and until then-" He lifted her up in his arms and kissed the top of her head. "I have you."