Epilogue #3
The cable found its correct home. A soft hiss came through the speakers, followed by a clean tone that Lysander killed with a tap on his mobile, and then the room went quiet.
Lysander straightened up. He looked at the mobile in his hand for a moment, then crossed to the armchair and dropped into the space beside Colin, pressing his shoulder into his father’s arm. Colin’s hand came up and settled on the back of Lysander’s neck.
“I want to say something first,” Lysander said. “Before I play it.”
The room stilled. Even Max, who had been gumming the collar of Hamish’s shirt, went quiet.
Lysander’s thumb traced the edge of his mobile. His gaze moved over the faces around him, and landed back on Colin.
“I couldn’t tell this story without you and Stevie,” Lysander said.
“That’s not — I’m not being sentimental.
It’s a practical impossibility. You were both literally there from the beginning.
All of it. Every single thing that happened to me, you two were already in the room.
” His jaw tightened. “I’ve had days where I wasn’t sure I should be telling it at all.
There are parts of our lives in there that are mine to talk about and parts that aren’t, and I’ve gone back and forth about whether I’ve got any right to open all of it up for others. ”
Colin’s fingers tightened on him.
“But you both told me to,” Lysander said. “When I came to you and said I wasn’t sure, you said the story needed telling. Because of other omegas out there like us.” His gaze moved to Cassian, held there, then back to his father. “And the alphas in their orbit.”
Stephen’s chin lifted from his knees. He didn’t say anything. He reached across Hamish’s lap and found Lysander’s hand, and their fingers laced together.
Lysander pressed play.
The speakers filled the room with a voice Cassian had heard in every register it owned, but never quite like this.
“My father was fourteen,” Lysander’s voice said, “seven months pregnant with twins, and struggling to breathe…”
Cassian watched Colin’s face.
Diwa sat on the arm of Colin’s chair with his hand resting on the back of Colin’s neck, his thumb moving against his skin. His body was curved towards Colin, close enough to hold him together without Colin quite noticing it was happening.
Stephen had closed his eyes. He looked like someone listening to a piece of music he already knew by heart but had never heard performed live.
Ryland had his arm along the back of the sofa behind Stephen, not quite touching him, but close enough that Stephen could lean into the contact whenever the recording reached a part that upset him.
Hamish wasn’t listening to the podcast at all. Cassian clocked it within the first five minutes. Hamish’s gaze was fixed on Lysander, tracking every shift in his omega’s posture, every tightening of his jaw, every time Lysander’s hand moved to the back of his own neck.
The podcast moved through Colin’s story in clean, linear strokes.
Lysander’s voice described the Barking flat without sentimentality, the paper-thin partition between the boys’ bedroom and Colin’s, the cleaning shifts that started at five and ended at eleven, the way Colin ironed their school shirts at midnight because he refused to send them out creased.
But before all that, Colin had got them through the care system.
“They sat him down four times,” the recording said. “Social workers and care staff. They told him he was too young. They told him he couldn’t provide for us and that Stephen and I deserved a stable home with two parents and a garden. Loving us desperately isn’t the same as being able to raise us.”
Colin’s hand found Diwa’s knee beside him and gripped it.
“He told them no,” Lysander said. “Every time. He was fourteen, and he sat in a room full of adults who were telling him to give up the only people in the world who belonged to him, and he said no. He told the woman from the agency to get fucked, which got him written up, and he told the social worker that if anyone tried to take his babies, he’d bite them, which got him written up again.
“He kept us,” Lysander said. “And now I’m here with my family still around me, because a boy in a storage cupboard decided that we were his, and was too stubborn to let us go.”
Colin’s face crumpled. A sob tore out of him as Diwa pulled him in, and the rest of the family converged on him.
Stephen crossed the room and dropped to his knees beside the armchair, his hand finding Colin’s arm, and Colin reached for him without lifting his head from Diwa’s chest. Their fingers locked together.
Lysander pressed into Colin’s other side, his face against his father’s shoulder, one arm reaching across to find Stephen’s hand.
Cassian sat on the sofa with Tala tucked against him, and he watched them.
He’d spent twenty-two years in the Family of Light, and never once felt as much a part of something as he did now, sitting on the outside of a Huxley huddle.
Hamish’s arm hooked around his neck from behind and hauled him to his feet, towards his family, and Lysander spread his free arm out wide.
“Get in here, Cass,” Lysander said, his voice thick and wet, so Cassian let the huddle swallow him whole.