I thought the world would end if I walked in and saw him, my dad sick, I never even thought that was possible.
Instead, I walked into the ICU with a small hurricane tucked under my arm and a sensible woman at my shoulder who moved like she carried plans instead of panic.
"Dwyn," Cecil said, voice low and firm as she buckled a mitten on one of the triplets. "You need sleep. You can't fight from an empty cup."
I wanted to argue. I wanted to argue until my throat split and someone handed me a map of everything that had been happening and every face that would have to answer for it. I wanted to stay in that humming room until my eyes bled all the facts into me.
But Liora had already found me, that fierce little pup with her elbows out, and she planted herself between me and the machines as if she understood stakes better than most adults.
"Are you staying?" she demanded, big blue eyes glittering like she already knew the answer she wanted.
Viora's posture said she'd already decided the opposite and would cheerfully drag my protest out by its ears. Fiora was wiping her thumb across my sleeve—haste and affection in equal measures—and inhaling the antiseptic air like it was perfume.
Cecil put a hand on my shoulder. "Short visit," she reminded the nurse, who smiled and nodded like everyone in the room had agreed this was the only sane thing to do.
We lined up. The nurse pulled the curtain aside like it was some fragile veil and Liora strode forward like a general. They took turns — fingers to his wrist, whispered nonsense, promises traded in childish currency.
"Papa," Liora said, very serious for a nine-year-old. "You can't go. You have to wake up. We haven't finished teaching you how to be cool."
Viora informed him in a tone that brooked no argument that someone had to start carrying logs and it probably shouldn't be him if he was fainting from mystery poisons. Fiora clipped on the end with the kind of certainty only a child could wield: "Also, an army of stuffed animals will keep you safe."
Duskthorn didn't open his eyes. His chest rose and fell under tubes and pixels and beeping things. His Alpha mark glowed a faint, tired pulse. But when they finished, when they filed out to the hallway with Cecil shepherding them like migrating birds, there was a movement — a twitch at the jaw, a tiny shift that made Dawn loosen the tight coil in my ribs into something less jagged.
It wasn't a miracle. Not yet. But it was a promise in motion.
They bundled in the corridor like they were taking a sleepover to the center of the world. Liora held my hand like a rope that would not snap. Viora argued with Cecil about whether they should bring the giant purple blanket (the one filled with glued-on sequins), and Fiora insisted on bringing the emergency stash of marshmallows "just in case."
"Come home with us," Cecil said, voice soft. "They need normal. You need rest. We'll keep them close and you can be there in the morning."
I watched the kid storm that had been my family—the three blond whirlwinds I'd memorized before the world learned to say my name like an accusation—head out into the light like it was the most ordinary thing in the world. Home. Food. Crayons. The thought of their small, relentless life made my chest both hurt and unclench.
"I should stay," I said. It came out too small.
Cecil looked at me like she'd known I'd say that. "You are staying, but not here. Your pack will not need you if you have a breakdown in the corridor. Rest is still a weapon."
Her logic felt like a hand on a cliff. I let it pull me.
Outside, the night air hit like a confession. We moved fast—Cecil with the triplets in tow, me trailing like a prop whose strings had been cut and were only just catching. The pack house lay in the dark beyond the clinic, trees like tall black witnesses, but we didn't go there. We took a road that wound through a small cluster of houses until the world shifted into a neighborhood that remembered me as more than headlines.
The house was the same rough heartbeat it'd always been: cedar boards breathing in the night, the porch light like a promise. Cecil's hands moved like a mapmaker—unlocking the door, turning on lamps, producing pajamas from a bag as though she'd carried a small department store in her bag all evening.
The triplets chattered a nonsense storm as soon as shoes were off, flinging themselves at every familiar thing like they were trying to reattach pieces of home that had come loose while I was gone. They pried open drawers for socks, commandeered the living room rug for a puppet show, recounted their hospital visitation with dramatic gestures and the inevitable exaggerations of kids who think grief is another story to embellish.
"We've got to sleep in Dwyn's room," Liora declared with the kind of finality that has saved nations. "It's tradition."
"Since when?" I managed, even though my voice trembled. The house felt too big for me and too small for everything I was carrying.
"Since forever," Viora said, and somehow that made it true.
Cecil, who was both mother and marshal, gave me a look that folded up every bad idea I might have had. "Go. Get in the bed. They'll be in with you in five."
Up the stairs creaked like an old friend, and the door to my old room opened on a kind of soft night I hadn't allowed myself. My bed: the quilt I'd sewn together as a teenager, flecked with patches and the echoes of lullabies, waiting. It smelled like the ghosts of countless sleepovers with Mera—cinnamon, old paperbacks, the faint tang of sweat from late-night trainings. It was dangerously ordinary.
I sank into the mattress like someone collapsing on a raft after a storm, and for the first time in nearly twenty-four hours my muscles forgot how to tense.
They barged in like the sun — all three of them at once, and then all at once on top of me. Liora flopped across my stomach, Viora wedged herself between my legs like a human brace, and Fiora curled at my shoulder with a postcard solemnity that made a laugh tear out of me — a wet, surprised sound that tasted like everything.
"Tell us the river story," Liora demanded, as if my presence could be proven by the performance of old tales.
"The wolf and the singing river?" Fiora added conspiratorially.
Cecil turned off the hallway light and stood in the doorway, watching us with her cape of care. "Five minutes for stories, then lights out. Dwyn, you stay until they sleep. I'll check on you in the morning."
The way she said it—firm and final—meant I had no choice but to obey. Not that I wanted to disobey. I wanted the plain warmth of it, the absurd reassurance of being the center of three small soils of breath and hair.
The triplets' weight was immediate and grounding. They smelled like toothpaste and warm milk and the faint musk of the pine-scented blanket they dragged everywhere. I ran my fingers through Liora's hair and she sighed like a furnace being stoked.
"Dwyn," she murmured. "Don't make a sad face. Daddy might wake up and punch the wall if he sees that."
I laughed at that, forced and raw. "He's not going to punch a wall, Liora."
She peered up at me as if measuring whether I was telling fibs. "How would you know?"
"I'm sure he won't," I lied, and she didn't call me on it. Eight and nine are ages that tend to accept the edges of grown-up lies as fact.
"Tell the river story," Viora insisted again, and this time I relented.
I told them the river story—the one about the river that sang when the moon was full and how the wolves used to find their way by following the song. They knew the chorus and sang the part about reeds shaking and the moon laughing at the water, leading their voices into the little room until it felt like the story was a blanket over us all.
Fiora fell asleep mid-sentence, chin tucked into her chest like a small, fierce flower closing. Viora's breathing slowed until it matched the cadence of the lines I murmured. Liora's fingers curled in my hand until her nails left tiny crescent moons in my palm.
When the last line faded, the quiet came like snow: thick, muffling, holy.
I lay there in the dark with three small, steady heartbeats pressed into me and the raw, animal ache of the day folding into something softer. Dawn eased her weight into my ribs, her presence a slow, reassuring heat. Anubis is still here, she breathed into me in a thread of feeling. He will hold.
I held my breath until I felt like I could breathe again.
The house kept its small noises—a heater ticking, the distant strain of a highway, the soft settling of wood. It was not the sterile, fluorescent lull of the clinic. It was flawed and full of crumbs and all the things that meant life could continue even if pieces of it had been poisoned.
Cecil returned to the bedroom door as if she had a map to the night. She set a steaming mug of her signature calming tea on the bedside table—chamomile—and glanced at us like she'd been carrying worry for miles. "I'll be two rooms away," she whispered. "Phone by the pillow. Morning calls at dawn."
"Okay," I said. My voice wobbled around the word like it was testing its legs.
She kissed the top of my head—soft, a stamp of permission to be small—and disappeared down the hall with the surety of someone who had learned how to hold storms in one hand and sandwiches in the other.
We lay like that for a long time. I let my fingers drift across Liora's back, felt Viora's small knuckles curl against my thigh, and breathed in the perfume of childhood—the sharp sugar of crayons, the stale chocolate of a snack snafu, the faint musk of a hoodie. Tears sluiced behind my eyes until they were the only clean thing left. I wiped them on the sleeve of my pajamas, not bothering to hide them anymore.
"Don't be sad," Fiora whispered in her sleep, and for a moment the child sounded like a prophet. "Papa will wake up. He can't miss pancakes."
"Yeah," Liora agreed in a somnolent mumble. "And if he does, we'll tell him he promised to make them."
My laugh this time was quieter, more honest. I let my cheek rest against their hair and let the world shrink to the warmth and the small, furious loyalty of three tiny people who would not let go.
Sleep found me—slow, brittle, then steady—as if the house had exhaled and let me breathe in the same air as the living. Dawn draped across my ribs like a guardian. Anubis's thread buzzed faint in the dark, and meeting it felt like a tether that wouldn't break today.
For the first time since the call, I allowed myself to believe I could wake.
Tomorrow we would go back to the hospital. Tomorrow we would try to stitch a strategy together from pills and testimonies and whatever proofs could be found. Tomorrow might be a battlefield. Tonight, in this crooked, warm room, we were just a family that had learned how to sleep together when the world tried to make them forget how.