***CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE RUBY CIRCLE***

Stop reading now if you don't want to feel your brain explode...

If you've read it, then your brain's probably already just mush.

It's been about 48 hours since this revelation, and I'm still trying to process everything. This is my attempt to do so, but all it's succeeded in doing is making me want to do the entire book in Rose POV. I so don't have time for that... maybe one day.

DISCLAIMER: Clearly, the Vampire Academy franchise is not mine. If it was, I'd have seen this coming...

It was in a blind daze that I stumbled after Dimitri and Olive, back to the cabin. The birds were still singing, completely oblivious to the fact that the world had jut imploded around them.

It wasn't often that I was caught speechless; in fact, I could count on one hand the number of times I'd been completely floored by the situation I was in. This surpassed all of those times.

Up ahead, Dimitri opened the door to the cabin. Light flooded out of the opening, drowning him in its glow. Olive must have left the lamp on when she left there earlier. It was a reality check- that simple mistake righted my spinning mind and helped me get a grip before following them inside.

Olive was soon deposited on the threadbare sofa, but instead of taking a seat on the one remaining chair, Dimitri leaned against the wall before sinking down to the floor. The movement lacked some of his usual grace. It was something nobody else wouldn't have noticed, but this was me. I could also see through the expressionless mask cemented over the lines of his face- a face that I had not been able to reconcile with that of the drunk Moroi we'd left out in the clearing.

Cautiously, I crossed the room to sit down beside him. The fabric of our shirts just barely brushed, but I didn't make any other move to reach out to him, however much I wanted to.

After a couple of minutes, Dimitri turned his tired eyes to mine.

"I'm fine," he said with all the conviction of a politician making appealing promises that he didn't intend to keep. "Before you ask."

I watched him carefully, watching for any sign of that perfectly unique face relaxing. He may have well have been cast of iron. His eyes were void of emotion, as though the usual electricity that crackled beneath his skin had been switched off at the mains.

"What kind of 'fine'?" I asked softly. "Guardian Belikov fine, or Dimitri fine?"

One corner of his lips trembled up into the shadow of a smile. Despite what had happened, he hadn't lost the ability to translate Rose. 'Us' was a language we could both understand.

"Guardian fine." He looked away again, letting his head drop back against the wall we were leaning against.

I translated that back- he had retreated into his warrior's armour so that the damage to his real self couldn't be seen.

I glanced back at Olive's form on the sofa, hunched into a foetal form to match the position of the being inside her. The cycle would never end, I realised with a heavy heart. There was another child that would grow up without a father- if he was lucky. Either way, it would always be haunted by the ghost of the parent that had hurt their mother and left them without a backward glance. When Olive reached out to rest a hand on her bump, the symmetry of the situation prompted me to do the same to Dimitri's raised knee. He looked back at me, some spark in him roused by the contact.

"I know now's not the time..." I began, "but you know you can talk to me. Please, just don't shut me out."

Dimitri's hand, colder than usual, came to rest on top of mine. "I won't shut you out, Roza. I just... I don't know how to process this right now."

Well that made two of us. "I understand."

Dimitri's eyes closed. "It's not so much the shock of seeing him again; I honestly thought that this 'reunion' would have happened sooner, what with living at Court." He said 'reunion' in a way that made it clear he didn't share Randall's sentiment. "I just didn't expect him to be who he is... or to find the additional family member."

I could tell by the tremulous note in his voice that he'd honestly had no idea about his relationship to Adrian.

God, this was weird. My mind could barely comprehend this, and I wasn't the one living the soap opera. I'd met my own father unexpectedly and helped reveal the existence of Lissa's half sister, but this might beat even that for myriad complications.

My dhampir hearing picked up the sound of footsteps on the porch, footsteps which I recognised as belonging to Sydney and Adrian. No other family members.

Leaning over, I pressed a gentle kiss to Dimitri's temple. "We'll figure this out," I promised, before rising to greet the returning friends and relative.

Lana had sent us to yet another person to pick up supplies for Declan, but the woman we were supposed to be meeting wasn't answering her door.

I knocked again, feeling incredibly impatient. The stress was building, the anticipation to leave mingling with the shock from earlier revelations and the sorrow of Olive's death. I held my tongue though, because I knew that however much of a mess I was inside, Dimitri had to be ten times worse.

"She's not there!" a dhampir woman called from behind us. We turned to see her standing on the path, a baby on her hip. "Just go around the back and wait out there. She's in the infirmary right now, but she said that she'll be back in about ten minutes."

With a sigh I turned to go, but Dimitri caught my arm.

I looked up at him with surprise. It was the first time he'd touched me since he'd touched my cheek in the infirmary earlier, having kept his distance since Olive had been found and Declan brought back to the cabin. He'd kind of been avoiding me in general, actually, offering to take all the different jobs and leaving me to wait with the baby and Sydney and Adrian.

Oh. Maybe it wasn't me he was avoiding after all.

Dimitri motioned for me to follow him, so together we walked around the porch and sat down on the wooden bench that was there. It overlooked the forest, and I was reminded of the saying about the tree falling in the woods.

Dimitri and Adrian had always been cousins, but if we hadn't crossed paths with Randall in this bizarre twist of fate, then the relationship might as well not have existed at all.

But it did, and there was no unlearning that fact.

Impossibly, Dimitri's father was even more of an asshole than I had imagined him to be. I had wanted to punch him too when he brought up Dimitri being a Strigoi. What kind of person made jokes like that? Certainly nobody normal, and especially not about their son.

Dimitri still had a hold of my hand, and began playing with my fingers absentmindedly as he stared out above the treetops.

"I've spent the last 12 years telling myself that I'm nothing like him. That regardless of the fact that he's my biological father, he's nothing to me. Not family, nothing more than a bad memory. A ghost. My only family is my sisters and my mother and babushka. That Randall doesn't deserve the same parental claim over me as my mother does, so he doesn't even get the honour of the title."

"Of course you're right to think that," I consoled. The words weren't born out of sympathy, but out of genuine belief that the drunk man in the woods was no more like my Dimitri than the Strigoi that had ripped Olive from the chance of a life with her baby.

"I just wish that I go back to before I found out. When he didn't have a name, it was easier to deny that he was a real person at all. Just an animal."

Dimitri's head dipped, those stubborn strands of hair falling from the confines of the hastily secured hair tie. Right now, they did nothing to soften the look of anguish on his face. Randall looked more like Adrian than Dimitri, I decided. Olena's genetic influence was obviously stronger than Randall's- just like her family values.

"But I can't do that anymore. I can't just exclude that side of my family anymore." His voice broke on family, and the rough edges of the word tore at my heart. After his decision to forgive himself, I'd hoped never to see him like this again. Not in the sunlight, at least, not in the waking hours. "Not with Adrian involved."

The words sparked a memory of our time in the hotel room when he'd been wracked with guilt over his Strigoi days, and I'd been fighting to break his self-control. This time, I didn't want to move forwards. I just wanted to be able to make him forget the past.

"He's your cousin," I said quietly, the words still feeling like a foreign language as they passed my lips. The realisation of his dilemma didn't taste any better. "Pretending your father doesn't exist means pretending Adrian's not related to you either."

"He doesn't seem fazed by this at all. I know he tends to joke about things to make them feel easier, but he really didn't seem to mind. He seemed almost happy to find out that I was family."

I squeezed his hand. "Who wouldn't be happy? It's like finding out you share DNA with superman." I made a face. "Actually, I wouldn't want to find out I'm related to you. Now that would be a disaster."

Dimitri turned to me, the first hint of a smile on his face. I was glad that my humour had worked, but I knew it wasn't going to fix this.

"You know, I think all of this hangs on your definition of family," I said slowly. I'd have to choose my words carefully here. Say the wrong thing, and I could make this worse. Spend too long waffling on, and the dhampir woman we were waiting for would return. I had no clue when we'd get another opportunity for this discussion.

"How so?" Dimitri's intrigue in the first words of my Zen-like wisdom at least meant he wasn't consumed with his own thoughts for a moment.

"Well," I started, "there's a good chance that Randall has some other dhampir kids hanging around somewhere. If you bumped into one of them now, how would you feel?"

Dimitri frowned. "I guess I wouldn't really care. I've always figured that we weren't the only ones, so meeting them wouldn't make a difference."

"See? It's the fact that it's someone you're already friends with that's causing the problem." The frown deepened, and I realised I wasn't really helping. He'd already said that to me earlier. "Look at it this way. My definitions of family are probably a little different to other peoples'. To me, family is the people you care about, the people that you love and know you will be loyal to no matter what. You, Lissa, Sydney and Adrian, all the rest of our friends, your mom and sisters. Up until a year ago, my parents would have been purely 'relatives'. People I shared blood with but not much else. Now they're real family, but it has less to do with blood and more to do with what they mean to me."

Dimitri's eyes searched mine, looking for an explanation deeper than the one I was currently providing. "Like, Jill never thought of Eric Dragomir as her dad. She never even knew him. But she's accepted Lissa as her sister. They're relatives who've become family." Bringing up Jill was like another lead weight being added to the line around my heart, dragging it down further, but I didn't stop. "So yeah, you're stuck with the shitty Brothers Ivashkov as your relations, but that doesn't mean that they ever have to be classed as family. Adrian, however... he's already kind of family, and you have the added bonus of shared DNA. Plus, I bet that hearing Adrian calling you 'Cousin' would send Nathan to an early grave. Everyone's a winner."

My joke fell on deaf ears, but thankfully not depressed ones. Dimitri seemed to be contemplating my words carefully.

"You're right," he said finally. "Nothing's really changed at all- not for the worse, at least. My father is still the same waste of space he always was, but there are relatives on that side who aren't all bad..." He sighed. "It just feels like I'm betraying my mother. Fraternising with the enemy... though Adrian's obviously not that enemy at all."

This was a delicate subject, and getting more fragile by the moment. I knew that my next words could make or break this conversation, and possibly have the same effect on Dimitri's heart.

"Comrade... Olena wouldn't see it that way. She obviously saw something good in Randall, deep down and back before he started pushing her around. She's a good person, and she wouldn't have let him close enough to Karolina to have three more kids if she thought he was all bad. I really think that she'd be happier that you find peace with this and accept Adrian for what you now know he is than let it ruin your friendship."

Something shifted in Dimitri's features, and he moved his arm to around my shoulders to pull me close. I pressed as close to him as I could get, feeling his tense muscles relax with each of our synchronised breaths.

"You're right, of course," he breathed into my hair. "You always know what to say. And what you say is always the truth."

" I'm just awesome like that," I teased.

"I know," he replied, voice resonating with honesty. "I love you."

I closed my eyes asI listened to his heart beating through the leather of his duster.

"I love you too," I assured him. Even when everything else he thought he knew was in question, that would always be the truth.

I'd done it. I'd managed to work this out in a way that wasn't hurting Dimitri so much anymore. We weren't quite there yet, and I knew the weirdness would persist, but we were getting there.

"Cousins aren't even that closely related anyway," I pointed out. "I mean, you can marry your cousin in the human world, and the Moroi are so inbred that it's basically impossible to trace a single family's history back as 'pure' more than a hundred years or so. Adrian's a distant cousin of Lissa's on his mother's side, and hell, I swear there was a Voda in my mom's family history not too far back. We're all basically related in some way."

"That is also true, if a little strange to think about too hard."

"And that's why the Moroi pretend not to notice that they're marrying someone whose mother's maiden name is the same as their own."

Dimitri didn't reply to that, instead just pressed a kiss into my hair. As nice as this contact was after being good and keeping our distance for so long, I pulled back after a minute, very aware of our already short and ever-closing window of time. Also, an interesting thought had struck me. I wasn't sure whether or not to voice it, though.

"What? I can see you're dying to say something," Dimitri said warily. I couldn't hold back a smirk.

"Well, I was just thinking that in the end, I did get one up on Tatiana. She made such a big deal about keeping me away from her great-nephew... and I ended up with one anyway. All those times I thought she was talking rubbish, she was actually on the right track."

"Doesn't that make her the winner?" Dimitri teased, before his eyes widened and his speech trailed off. He'd come to the same realisation I had a minute ago. "I'm one of the closest known dhampir relatives of the late Queen. All that time my family had financial troubles, and Randall belonged to the richest Royal family there is. No wonder he hid his full name from us." His tone was bitter, but not that empty one from before.

"You think you have it bad?" I asked, not wanting him to relapse. "Try being the girl that unwittingly dated the cousins. Here I am saying that I don't have a 'type', Lissa teases me that I just wanted a -kov surname, but all along it was even more specific than that! I'm a relation rebounder!"

Dimitri laughed outright at that, whilst I was actually having a miniature life crisis. Here I was thinking I'd been attracted to Adrian because of how different he was to Dimitri, because he could take me away from the past and make me forget, and I'd literally just rebounded onto the closest relative of Dimitri I knew.

"Maybe I can work this to my advantage," suggested Dimitri. "Maybe Adrian has another ring lying around somewhere..."

It took me a moment to figure out where this was going, since it was such a turnaround.

"Oh, no way," I warned, threatening him with a pointed finger for impact. "Just because your newfound cousin got Sydney to walk down the aisle, it doesn't mean it's going to work with me just yet. Twenty, remember? At least."

Dimitri grinned, holding my hips and dragging me back towards him from where I'd tried to escape. "I know. I'm just making sure that you don't run after the exposure of these new developments."

I narrowed my eyes, pretending to deliberate. "Alright, Belikov. I'll stay, but when the time comes, you had better buy me a rock star engagement ring."

"If that's all it will take..." Dimitri leaned in to kiss me, and my heart leapt at the happiness and humour that had replaced the hollow desolation in his eyes. Our lips had just barely met when someone cleared their throat down below us.

Resisting the urge to throw a flowerpot at whoever it was and tell them to mind their own business, I turned to see a middle-aged dhampir woman with a purple-lined necklace standing on the grass beside the house.

"Are you here to see me?" she asked, clearly amused.

I looked back at Dimitri, who looked almost as disappointed as I felt, despite having put up his stoic mask.

"Next time," I said drily, "you attempt your convoluted proposal after we've kissed."

I was never entirely sold on the series name of 'Bloodlines', but then this happened, and suddenly it seems completely appropriate.

So if anyone wants to talk (rant and rave) about The Ruby Circle, then pm me. I have yet to speak to anyone who has actually finished reading it, so I need to get these feels out somehow. My mum did not provide a satisfactory reaction when I explained why looked like I was having a heart attack.