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Family used to be… a trivial matter to Sancho. Not because it didn’t matter, but because clinging to the idea hurt more than letting it fade into nothingness. It is a concept too distant to mourn, too abstract to crave. The word “family” feels ornamental, like something people would bring up when they want to believe in safety, in belonging. She’s heard it often… spoken in soft tones by those who had somewhere to return to, someone who’d worry if they disappeared. Alas, she never had that. The feeling of waiting at a door, heart lifted by the hope that someone might step through it for her⸺that was a kind of longing the poor girl never had the luxury to dream of.
There was a time when she used to ask, back when her voice was still a curious thing.
Did you know my mother?
Did I have a brother? Or a sister?
My family… have you seen them?
And always, silence was the response she received. Or worse, pity. The caretakers at the orphanage had been kind, that much she could truthfully admit. Gentle hands, lips shaped into habitual comfort, warm blankets folded around her like makeshift affection. But still, pity came wrapped in smiles that didn’t quite reach the eyes. It came as a pat on the head, a considerate redirection, a story about something else entirely. When she asked about her parents, they’d tell her about flowers blooming in spring or the stars that came out early that evening. When she wondered if she had siblings, they’d point out the other children in the dormitory and say things like “You’re all family here.” And when she asked if she had been loved⸺truly loved⸺they’d go quiet, eyes softening with grief that wasn’t theirs to carry before murmuring, “Of course you were,” with a tone so delicate it sounded rehearsed.
So, at such a young age, Sancho learned not to ask. Whatever words she wanted to voice out were lost in the void, long forgotten. She gave up the questions once she realized they weren’t harmless musings, but wounds that never healed⸺they scab over badly, then reopen with the slightest touch. She grew into the kind of child who kept her head down. Who smiled when spoken to, helped when told to, and never cried too loudly. She became easy to forget, and somewhere along the way, it became her way of staying safe. If no one saw her, no one could lie to her. If no one remembered her, no one could leave her behind.
Over the years, she watched the beds empty around her, one by one, sometimes in pairs. Bright-eyed children with open arms and practiced smiles, clutching new toys or backpacks too big for their frames. They waved from doorways, faces lit with hope, delighted that someone was finally choosing them. And Sancho never waved back. She didn’t hate them for it, nor did she envy them either. It just felt like they belonged to a different world entirely, one she had only seen through the glass. Their joy was alien to her, their belief in happy endings incomprehensible. She wasn’t warm like they were. She didn’t press finger-painted drawings into the hands of the visitors, not even running to greet them in the first place. She didn’t shed even a single tear when would-be guardians overlooked her. While the others built make-believe families in their heads, the girl sat in corners and memorized the way rust crawled down the pipes, the exact hour the heating system exhaled its weary breath, this and that⸺all kinds of mundane things to distract herself with.
It wasn’t sadness, not really. Acceptance, maybe.
Then came the time she had to go. There was no ceremony, no parting speech. Nothing more than a handout, a printed map of shelters and job boards, and a secondhand bag stuffed with what the orphanage could spare. By then, most of the staff had changed. The few who have been with her since childhood offered polite nods, well-wishes delivered with composed smiles. She nodded back, not out of gratitude, but because it seemed like the sort of thing a person should do when stepping out of the only place they’d ever known. She was of age⸺eighteen, legally grown, though she didn’t feel any older. All she felt was… loneliness.
Yet, the world had no such mercy. She never made it that far. In the years that followed, life didn’t go as planned. That is, if she ever had any. She drifted into the kind of place people don’t come back from: flat on her back in the dirt, ribs pressing through skin, burns clinging to her body like shame. Hunger and thirst gnawed at her with the cruelty of something never forgotten, and she couldn’t move. How could she, in a sorry state like this? There, beneath an indifferent sky, Sancho had only one wish left in her. To burn, to vanish, to become nothing but ash and the faintest scent of smoke… as if she had never existed at all. Perhaps the fire would be enough to melt the cold lodged deep in her bones.
Then again, who would’ve thought a brush with death would be what changed everything? It happened quickly. So quickly, it felt unreal. One moment she was fading into the dirt, skin scorched and spirit splintered; the next, she was chosen, embraced and reborn. The one who found her was a Bloodfiend, a being others might have feared⸺to her, what she saw in him was not a monster but a strange kind of salvation. He made her a promise, not of safety, just something she never had before: the right to exist beside someone. A family. And from that day forward, as his Second Kindred, she called him “Father.”
However, in the end, it was all taken from her. Maybe she was never meant to have a family. Maybe the illusion was always too fragile to last. What tore it apart wasn’t fate, but faith… a misplaced devotion to Don Quixote’s impossible dream. A vision too grand, too idealized, and too blind to the cracks it left behind. Once they’ve returned from an adventure to retrieve a Relic, the lower Kindred put their plan into action and rose in rebellion. They turned against the very hands that had lifted them out of ruin. Not out of hatred, but hunger; it was the consequence of being denied their nature. And as they revolted, the family Sancho had come to believe in had fractured beyond repair.
So she, too, chose to dream. Alongside the Knight of the White Moon, she went in search of the River of Oblivion. The pain in her heart had grown too vast, too heavy to carry. To escape what haunted her, she would drink. She would let it all go: the memories, the names, the faces, the ache. All of it, washed away like footprints in rain-soaked earth. Thus, thus, and thus again, Sancho⸺the amnesiac child of blood and sorrow⸺was brought to a lighthouse settled in the Ruins. And there, in the hush of its waning light, she found something close to peace. It would be her haven for the next two hundred years.
And then, she was found again. Not that she had expected it… hope had long since been laid to rest, buried beneath years of forgetting. Whatever longing she once carried had sunk ages ago. But it’s not like she recalled any of that. Still, a man appeared and led her beyond the sanctuary she had clung to for centuries. And since then, she found herself among a ragtag crew of misfits, thrown together under the banner of a company, working not alone but as part of a team. She welcomed it, in fact. After all, it gave her a chance to live out her own version of chivalry⸺unbending, absolute, and drawn in stark shades of black and white. Most especially when it came to justice. ‘Tis only befitting of a Fixer, no?
Though over the course of the months, she grew fond of them. In time, she began to see them as an equestrian order of sorts; rough-edged and unorthodox perhaps, but no less noble in her eyes. And in this imagined brotherhood, she was the Grand Cross, their ever-so-steadfast knight! (Mmm, admittedly, that might just be her bias talking.) They fought side by side, bled together, reclaimed Golden Boughs from here and there. They shared victories and defeats, laughter and tears. Grief and joy, bound together in the same story. It almost felt like… what was that word again? Ah, yes. A family.
…
Family, huh? That’s a word she hadn’t heard in a long time. And with it came the weight she thought she had forgotten, the pain that once hollowed her out. Memories she had lost to time began to stir again. The lighthouse may have cradled her, but it also kept her frozen in time. She had assumed she’d erased it all⸺drank from the Lethe, scattered her burdens like ash in the wind. What else did it want from her? Regrettably, the heart, traitorous as it is, remembers even what the mind tries to forget. For a moment, she felt herself slipping back into that abyss called La Manchaland, where echoes of what was there blur into mourning and ghosts wear the faces of those she had known.
But this time, she wasn’t alone.
The Sinners⸺flawed, reckless, and very much alive⸺reached out for her. Not with boisterous declarations, but with a presence that grounded her back to reality. And to her surprise, she let them. They pulled her back from the edge of her own unraveling, reminded her that she didn’t have to wear her pain like armor, that the past didn’t have to be a shackle. She could keep moving forward, they encouraged her. Step by step, wound by wound, heartbeat by heartbeat. As long as she’s still capable of dreaming, that would be enough.
And that… is enough.
In the wake of her arduous yet final clash with her Father, he then lay dying in her arms. With the last of his strength, he gave her a name: Don Quixote. From that moment on, she bore his dream as her own. What he’ll be leaving behind, she chose to continue. And in his parting breath, he made a simple request; to recount the path she had walked since their roads diverged. Tears welled in her eyes as she looked to the ones who stood with her⸺the misfits, the Sinners, the family she had found along the way. Every tale worth telling… was with them. So, with a soft smile, she began to speak. Of battles and laughter, of sorrow and survival, of narrow escapes and long nights, of the warmth she never thought she’d feel again.
Verily, she truly had been blessed with a family of twelve.