Who: Jesse, Nat, Tony, and Stevie W What: Family meeting to discuss all the new things they're learning. When: Saturday, May 25, 2019 | evening (backdated) Where: Jesse's house, Snowcap. Warnings: FEELS, non-graphic discussion of past child neglect/abuse
The Wyrzykowskis weren't a family that tended to have 'family meetings', so when Jesse had called for one, Tony had been a little apprehensive. Everyone seemed a little nervous, to be honest: Stevie had been quiet all week, Jesse wasn't cracking his usual deadpan dad jokes, he and Nat were glued to each other's sides even more than usual. Even sitting around the familiar kitchen table where they'd sat a million times before, everything seemed slightly off-balance, and he didn't like it.
"So," he said, in a possibly ill-timed attempt to lighten the mood, "if this is an intervention, somebody should probably tell me what I did, because I honestly can't think of anything. I've been really good lately, I promise."
"You didn't do anything," Jesse said, quietly but possibly a little too quick: but since the situation with the Okeanos woman, he'd become unusually protective of Tony. For all the good that had done. "None of you did anything," he added, looking around the table. God, these kids. They were all so young still and problem was, at their age, they didn't even know it.
He cleared his throat. "There's just… a few things we need to talk about, I figured. Some stuff's been coming up lately, important stuff. Seemed like we should get it out there." Though now it came time, he wasn't quite sure how.
Given the things that had been going on that she knew, Nat couldn't help feeling nervous that there could be things to discuss outside of that. She'd known both Stevie and Uncle Jesse had been getting their testing done, to see if they could further narrow down their heritage, but surely these serious expressions couldn't have anything to do with that? Could it? The baby was doing well right now, Tony was moving forward despite the realizations about his past, and the investigations at the Reserve hadn't really touched any of them directly, as far as she knew.
"What things? Is something wrong?" She glanced around at everyone. "Do we need to do a quick check? Isn't that the rule now for starting serious conversations? I'm okay, and the baby's okay."
Tony reached for Nat's hand under the table, gave it a squeeze. "I'm okay," he echoed, which was pretty much true, and smiled reassuringly at Stevie.
Unlike her brother or sister, Stevie did have some idea of why they were having a family meeting. Well, okay, she didn’t know why Jesse was calling one – but she definitely had her own news to share, and it was past time to do it. When Felix had advised her to wait to tell her family, he’d meant wait until morning, when she was sober and clear-headed. But it had been all too easy to take things too far, to keep waiting and waiting and hoping that somehow something would change.
“I heard back about my testing,” Stevie said quietly, looking more at the table than at anybody. It had only gotten harder to say the more she’d kept it to herself. So Felix was right about that, too. “And I guess…” she looked up at Jesse, “Maybe you did too?”
Jesse hesitated, looking back at Stevie. How much had they told her? Clearly it was within her rights to know it all, even if -- as the healer had made clear -- it wasn't in his. "Yeah, I heard."
He cleared his throat, and said gruffly, unconvincingly, "Uh, but I'm okay."
“I’m okay,” Stevie added, realizing that she’d forgotten that part earlier, “but… I’m.” She looked toward Nat and Tony, but couldn’t quite meet their eyes – not when Tony was smiling like that, not with the words she had to say next. “I’m different than you guys. I’m not part-naiad. I’m… something else. Only they don’t know what yet.”
Tony opened his mouth and closed it after a second, honestly having not expected that, and yet even though his startlement it made a weird kind of sense. He'd even told Nat when the half-naiad concept was new to them and they were learning what it meant that everything they found out sounded like the pair of them and not much like Stevie.
"Okay," he said after a moment, and reached across the table to cover his little sister's hand with his own. "So that means we... we had a different mom, right? But it doesn't change anything, sweetpea, you're always going to be our sister." He half-smiled, squeezing her hand to try to get her to look up. "And hey, once they figure out what you are, I've gotten pretty good at researching this stuff. We'll figure it all out." He looked up at Jesse. "So he had a thing for non-humans, huh?" He did not have to specify which he he was talking about.
"No. Shit." Jesse rubbed his forehead. Just rip off the band-aid. There was no way to do this more gently, it was just too much, it was going to rock everything no matter how you said it and he didn't have the words to do it better anyway. "I don't know what he was into or what he was up to. But he wasn't - God. Josh wasn't your father, apparently. For any of you. That's what they told me. That testing, it didn't clear anything up." He sat back and gave them all a bleak grimace. "I'm sorry. I didn't know."
"But he—" Nat started, her mouth getting ahead of everything else. It took only about a second for the rest to catch up with her, and everything felt like it was crumpling in on itself, from the tightness in her chest to the way all of her face muscles seemed to draw together. Her eyes were miraculously dry for the moment, but her bottom lip trembled slightly, lending her voice a wavering quality even as it came out in almost a whisper. "But you're our family."
Thirty years was too long to overcome in a few days. Jesse reached out to her automatically -- but stopped short, letting his hand fall to the table, and shook his head. "Not - like that. Apparently."
"But," it was Tony's turn to say after another moment's startled pause, shaking his head in denial. He released both his sisters' hands and sat back, his arms falling helplessly at his sides. "But how could he not be our -- no. There's gotta be something wrong with that test, Jess, we would've known if he wasn't our dad." He looked over at Nat, frankly bewildered; maybe Stevie had been too young, but he and Nat had definitely been old enough to know who their parents were at three years old. He didn't remember much of anything from before coming to Snowcap, but then he would have remembered. "We would've known," he repeated, at a loss for anything else to say.
Nat looked back at Tony, equally as puzzled, but with an increasing look of near-panic as she filtered through her memories—because she did have memories...and Joshua wasn't in any of them.
Stevie barely heard her siblings' reactions over the white noise that started playing in her brain after Jesse's words. As if it wasn't enough to find out that she was just as much some unknown being as she was human, to also be told that the only family she'd ever known wasn't really her family… it was too much.
"You're still my dad," she whispered, barely able to hear her own words over the white noise. Quiet tears slid down her face as she reached out for Jesse, needing to feel his hand in hers like she was a little girl again. "It doesn't matter, right? You're still my dad." She refused to let these tests take that away from her, too.
His hand found Stevie's immediately and squeezed it tight. This news changed the context of everything in his life for the last thirty years, and you couldn't know until that happened what else would change too.
Jesse had always thought the three of them were his duty, and maybe they were, but he didn't really have any right to them. He'd always known, too, that if Josh came back or their mom showed up he might have to give them up -- or make space for their real parents, once they were older and custody wasn't the issue anymore. Maybe that was why he hadn't really looked.
"You're my daughter." His voice cracked, but it had the weight of a promise. And he raised his eyes, and after a moment, reached out to Tony and Nat with his other hand.
Nat looked at Jesse's hand as he offered it, but it didn't seem right to take it. She stood and rounded the table, eyes blurry with tears, and wrapped her arms around his neck from behind. "You're still my dad, too," she whispered, face pressed into his shoulder. His arm wrapped around her gently, like she might vanish otherwise.
Tony stood, too, but just to touch Nat's shoulder and then Jesse's before he turned away to pace the length of the kitchen, because he couldn't be still with all these thoughts echoing in his head. "You raised us. Nobody else was there. And you're all the parent I ever needed. It's not even a question, okay? We'll always be your kids. But…"
It was a question that had rolled around inside his mind for weeks on end, ever since that first bombshell had dropped that they weren't quite human. Tony turned to look at his family, one hand raking through his hair, putting it in disarray as hopeless as his thoughts.
"Who are we?"
Nat kept her arms around Jesse, but turned to look at her brother. "Whoever we are, wherever we were before we were here...it wasn't good. I don't remember much, but I remember that."
Stevie watched Tony pacing, her eyes still shining with tears. She didn't have any answers to Tony's question, or memories to agree with Nat. "Are we…" she looked back and forth between the twins as a horrible new idea unfolded in her mind. "Are we even related? I mean, if we have different mothers… and Joshua isn't really our father…" They arrived together, but that didn't have to mean anything, did it?
Jesse didn't speak, but his thoughts went back to the healer the day before, and what he'd stopped himself from saying.
"We had to be somebody to him. He didn't just find us on the side of the road. I mean… right?" Tony started pacing again, his hands running through his hair again and again as he talked, words running over each other as he tried to reason through a wholly unreasonable situation. "Maybe he was our stepdad. Or adoptive dad. I don't-- I don't remember that night, except--" He met Nat's eyes. "We had to hide," he said in sudden realization. "Somebody told us to be very quiet, and it was dark and cold. Nat, was that real? I think I had dreams about it when I was little. It could have been a dream."
Nat pulled away and turned so that she could sit against the edge of the table; childhood admonitions of being told to put her butt in her chair flashed through her mind, not unpleasantly, but she figured this was an exception to that particular rule. She wasn't willing to step away from Jesse, but rather kept one hand on his shoulder while the other rested on the side of her belly. "I don't think it was a dream." Her own recollection was too similar for that. "But...I remember a lot of that. Being alone." She shook her head, clarifying for the benefit of the other two. "Me and Tony, I mean. In a locked room, or in the dark, or in the corner. Alone, cold, quiet. Hungry. I don't really remember any adults in particular, but groups of them being around. That's it: alone, or in crowds. No faces except yours." This she said directly to her twin.
Tony shook his head, his eyes cast down as he tried and failed to reach for those memories. "I don't know. I don't remember, but that sounds like-- like something really bad." The world swayed around him, and he came around the table to ease himself back into his chair, resting his elbows on the table and dropping his head into his hands. "Jesse… when we were little, did we say anything about… before?"
Jesse frowned. "Didn't say much at all the first weeks. Not around me. Once you were playing in the other room and I heard you talking together, and when I went in to check you just clammed up. I just figured it was a new place, I was a stranger, you weren't comfortable yet. A few months eased it up." He could still picture them, those big-eyed little kids who barely spoke but were always looking questions. "But Nat hid things a lot. Blankets, toys. Clothes. Food. Especially food." Claire had said it wasn't normal but he hadn't known much about normal kid behavior.
"Josh knew your names, though. He told me when you were asleep that night. So he can't have been a total stranger." Jesse hadn't thought anything of it at the time. Of course a dad would know his kid's names. But they'd known them too, and answered to them. The twins had known Stevie's. There had to be some familiarity. He just hoped it was the good kind.
“I don’t remember any of this,” Stevie whispered, squeezing Jesse’s hand so hard her knuckles were going white. This man, this house, this town – it was the only home she’d ever known, and there was nothing in her memories to suggest she didn’t belong here.
"I'm not surprised. You were so little," Nat said, looking over at her sister. "I do remember you, though. Or...." Nat frowned, and her face scrunched up in concentration again. Did she remember Stevie? Specifically? She remembered a baby. Or babies? It wasn't nearly as clear as the memories that included Tony. Could Stevie be right? Was it possible they weren't even related? "I don't know. It's pretty fuzzy."
She turned to Tony once again. "If there was anyone who cared that he brought us here, wouldn't they have found us again by now?"
"Yeah, I guess. I don't know. Maybe if there was</em> somebody, they didn't know where to look. And it was thirty years ago." Tone shook his head again, not looking up from his hands. They'd made so many assumptions since they were old enough to understand parts of their own history, or what they'd thought was their history; it was hard to separate what he knew to be true from what he'd always just taken for granted. That Jesse's brother was their father, that he hadn't wanted them and that's why he'd dumped them here, that they didn't have other family out there to be looking for them.
He cleared his throat, though that didn't dislodge the lump of so many questions he couldn't give voice. "What do we do now?" Despite being fully an adult, Tony still automatically looked to Jesse at that question. "Do we look for Josh? Is there any way we could find him? And…" He looked at his sisters, pressing his lips together for a moment. "Do we want to?"
"I want to," Jesse said suddenly. "He's my brother. I wanna know what happened to him." If Josh had been in trouble, he owed it to him to try and find out. And if he'd just taken these kids for no good reason and dropped them off with no intention of returning, he wanted to know that too.
He should've done it years ago, and maybe he would've if he wasn't such a coward. "You guys don't have to know anything you don't want to, and you don't have to do anything with it. But I need that much."
"If you want to, then I think we should," said Nat, even though her own feelings on the matter were very much still in flux. What had always been a huge pile of unknowns co-mingled with a handful of certainties had suddenly become a vast empty space where nothing really made sense. Nothing, that was, except for the people in this room. "I'd rather know what you know than keep sitting in the dark. Especially if" —she glanced down at her belly— "well, there's no knowing whether or not it might be important."
Stevie was inclined to agree with whatever Jesse decided – he was still her dad, and she trusted his judgement. And besides, she wanted some sort of answers, and the doctors certainly weren’t giving her any. Maybe Josh could. But even if she hadn’t wanted to find him, Nat’s last sentence would have pushed her over the edge.
The baby deserved better than spending thirty years thinking she was one thing only to find out she wasn’t. They had to find out, if not for themselves, then for her. “I think we should, too.”
Tony swallowed back his doubts and worries about this venture, and firmed his lips. For Nat and for his little defenseless niece who didn't deserve to come into the world as a big question mark, he could face whatever might crawl out from under this rock once they turned it over. "Okay," he said, low. "Then I guess we're going to find out who we are."