Hello! Welcome back to the world of Marrok and Jannali! Only this time, the story will centered on their son Nero. I had a lot of fun creating his character and I hope you all enjoy him as much as I do.

At the end of the lovely Orchard Lane sat a small, yet elegant house. The yard had carefully pruned trees and immaculate flower beds. The lawn was green and lush year-round. It was a beautiful, picturesque home—as well as the envy of the neighborhood. It was here that the Aguillard family lived.

There was only one thought that the people of Everton would ever agree on, that the Aguillard family was very, very strange. No one could ever pinpoint exactly what it was, but there was definitely something off about them despite their apparent perfection. Marshall and Janice Aguillard were known for being beautiful, reserved and highly sophisticated. The former, a devoted husband and accomplished musician, made his living by teaching chorus at the local private academy. His wife, a gentle, generous woman, owned the jewelry store in the heart of town. She was very popular with young children, as she had a habit of feeding them her delicious cookies, perfectly frosted to look like suns and moons. This earned her quite a bit of scorn from the parents, who didn't think that she should be feeding suspicious sweets to their kids all the time.

Together, they had a single son, seventeen years of age. Perhaps it was him that made people uneasy about his family. Nero Aguillard was universally reviled throughout Everton Preparatory Academy for being an utter oddity. He didn't fit in with any of his peers, his classmates that could all speak. He personally considered this to be the greatest difference between him and them. When they wanted to express their thoughts, they simply opened their mouths and the words flowed out coherently. They were all understood. Try as he might, he could never manage to get the words off of his tongue. They always remained stuck in his throat. He could still use words by writing them on paper or typing them out, but that wasn't nearly the same.

It has been this way since he was four. He could remember, so clearly, the day that he was no longer able to say the words on his mind. It was his first time setting foot in a classroom. All the children there already seemed to know each other, while Nero had barely ever left his house before he started school. He decided to go and play by himself with a jigsaw puzzle. The teacher, a sickly man with too great a love for kids to retire, called them all in a circle. They were to introduce themselves, as well as describe their families.

"My name is Rosie," said a golden-haired girl. When the teacher had called her up, he said the name 'Rosaline', but she had quickly corrected him. She wore the prettiest green dress. Nero thought she looked like a princess. "I have two daddies, and they love me very much. We play a lot with my aunt and our three dogs."

"Very good, Rosie." Mr. Pontmercy clapped. "Nero, you're next!"

The boy gulped, but eventually stood up. He could hear a couple of his classmates whispering. "My...my name is Nero. I live with my mom and my dad. I think they love me very much."

"I'm sure they do. Thank you for sharing, Nero."

"That's a weird name," someone piped up.

Nero turned to look at Rosie; those words had come from her.

"It's a dumb name!" A boy in the back joined in. Nero immediately loathed him.

"Adamson! I will not tolerate you being mean in my classroom!" The teacher seemed quite angry. "You're going to have a note sent home to your mother."

Adamson shrugged. "Whatever. You know it's true."

The rest of the class snickered. Nero felt his heart sinking into his stomach. "Leave me alone," he sobbed.

"Alright, that's enough! Moving on!"

The rest of the class stated their names and described their families, but Nero no longer paid attention to what was being said. He instead thought of the delicious dinner he would have that night. His parents always used some mysterious meat in their dishes, and although Nero didn't know what it was, he couldn't deny that it was damn tasty.

Later that afternoon, while all the kids were busy colouring, Adamson leaned over the table and whispered into Nero's ear. "Hey, why do you talk like that?"

Nero bit his lip. "Like what?"

"Lahhhhke theeeeess," Adamson drawled.

Nero quickly realized that he was mocking his accent. "I talk like...like my parents," he mumbled.

"Then your parents are freaks too, just like Neeeeehro."

When the teacher tried to ask Nero why he was crying in a corner and not colouring like the others, the boy found that he couldn't make the words come out. He was petrified of sounding like a freak. This went on for days, then weeks, then years. At seventeen, he was still a mute. He didn't even think that he had an accent anymore.

This is what Nero though made him so different from the others. If one were to ask the students of Everton Prep, however, they'd shiver and glance anxiously. "Whenever we're around Nero," they'd say, "really weird things happen."

Despite having been told by his parents time and time again that he was forbidden from using his gift in public, Nero found that he couldn't help it. It was like instinct. When one of the brutes tried to chase him down, he would render their legs useless and watch them tumble down to the ground. When an inconsiderate teacher harassed him for his inability to speak, he'd make them mute themselves, to see how they liked it. Sometimes, when he wanted the best desserts in the cafeteria for once, he would have the cooks give him one of the luscious cupcakes from the back, usually saved for staff.

He knew all of the rumours—they said that he was cursed, that he was hexed, that he was a witch who could cast spells. Nero thought them all to be idiots. Surely they had heard of a Lunar before.

"It's better if they don't know," his mother would tell him. "Just grin and bear it. That's what we do."

Nero slumped down on the couch. He held his vocalizer tightly. "They don't call you a witch," he typed in. The voice that came out was robotic and dull, but at least it could say words.

"They call me worse, don't you worry. Especially the men who regularly come to the store." She shook her head. "Horny little bastards."

"I still can't believe that one of them asked you out," his father grumbled. He hated it when his wife was talked about like she was a sex doll. Nero couldn't blame him; it was incredibly dehumanizing. He wondered why it didn't seem to affect his mother at all.

"Marrok, quit whining. You know what the office ladies say about you behind your back."

Nero shivered. Something about his parents' real names felt so forbidden and unsettling. Only the two and their close friends ever used these names. Nero knew that he would be slaughtered if he ever dared to address them by their names and not Mother or Father.

"Oh?" Marrok leaned back in his seat. "And what do they say?"

"If you heard those things coming from my mouth, you wouldn't be able to resist pouncing on me," Jannali purred.

"I suppose you're right...and our son is sitting right there."

Nero's eyes widened, and he gagged.

"Horny bastard," Jannali giggled. She let out a squeal as Marrok scooped her into his arms.

Nero hated it when his parents did this. He hated it with a passion. This, he knew, is why they would rub it in his face at every opportunity—they loved to watch him squirm. He decided to excuse himself from the family conversation and trudged downstairs to the basement. To any passing visitor, it would be completely invisible; the door was hidden behind a large painting depicting gods of death from some ancient mythology. There were pictures like that all over the house; Jannali was quite fond of them.

Nero pushed back the portrait and punched in the passcode. The steel door slid open automatically. Per instruction, he closed it behind him. He turned on the lights and breathed in the musty air. It reeked of death and perversion. The basement was where all the dismembering and torture was carried out. On the back wall, there were three metal nooses to display trophies. At that time, only one corpse was hung from there; the old librarian, who had been killed three years ago. Her companions had been taken apart and their bones made into a pretty little table. This table held a rack of axes and hatchets.

It took him a moment to find something to do. All of the weapons from the last hunt had been thoroughly cleaned. So has the laundry. He poked around and came across a fresh body in the cooler, in such good condition that Nero could've sworn he was simply sleeping. The large cut from ear to ear was the only indicator that he was dead. Jannali always made sure to kill cleanly when she intended to keep a prospect for food.

Nero put on an impermeable coat and slipped on some rubber gloves. With all his might, he tugged the body out and attached him by the skin on his back to the meat hook. Nero had been working part-time at the local butcher's for about a year now, so he knew well how best to go about hacking off flesh.

It didn't take him more than an hour and a half to fill a steel box with packages of fresh-cut meat. He would leave the curing and grounding to his parents. He burned the wet remains in the furnace and put the bones to soak in acid. They would eventually be reduced to nothing more than fine powder, to be discarded down the sink.

Nero found this to be quite relaxing. Oftentimes he would nearly forget about his hard day at school while working on prospects. It did feel a little strange, harvesting people to eat, but he wouldn't really use the term cannibal to describe his family. He'd call them resourceful instead. They rarely ever bought meat from the store, only the occasional chicken for when red meat was getting old.

Of course, cutting up prospects wasn't nearly as fun as going out to hunt them. Nero didn't really click with his parents; he hated piano, cared not for science (he was more of an art person), but if there was anything in the world that they agreed on, it was murder. He knew, deep down inside, that it was considered very wrong. Everyone else around him spoke of killing people like it was an unpardonable crime. But Nero couldn't deny how much he enjoyed it. He would imagine, while slitting some poor chap's throat, that it was Adamson he was killing. Or any of the students from his school that would play cruel, cruel jokes on the kid who couldn't speak.

He was, for lack of a better term, a complete mama's boy. He took enormously after Jannali; a fact which greatly pleased her. He had her brown hair, her dark skin, her black eyes. He was tall and covered in freckles, like his father, but the resemblance ended there. Since he was just a little toddler, he had shared his mother's sadistic fantasies and hunting finesse. He was always considered beautiful, and when first meeting him, people his age would swoon and say that he was the hottest thing they'd ever seen. Until they realized how freakishly incapable he was, after which they would avoid him.

He was Jannali's masterpiece. She'd always go on about how much better he was than his sisters—the only child to come from her womb the way she wanted. In Jannali's eyes, the fact that he was mute was seen only as a minor flaw.

Nero wished that he could meet his sisters. In many ways, he envied them; they got to live in a beautiful palace, waited on hand and foot every day. They were seen for the royals that they were, while he had to hide his princehood to keep up his parents' cover. If the kids at school knew who he was, a Blackburn, they would never dare to mock him. He could have them all grovelling at his feet. The thought always made him smile.

Growing up in Artemisia seemed like it would've been pleasant. He wouldn't have been made fun of for his accent there—the other aristocrats would instead strive to sound like him, like his family. The accent of royalty. His sisters got to live in all of that is the thought that made his stomach churn with envy. Such power, with so little to care about...what a dream that must be.

He had first heard of his sister's visit to Earth not through the news or through his parents, but by overhearing the gossip travelling all over the school. It spread around from student to student, hushed whispers laced with both terror and amusement. Everyone had heard the horror stories about the lunar queen, of course, but before then she was more something of a legend than an actual person. The thought that she would actually be on their planet in the flesh freaked a lot of people out. Instead of pointless panic, Nero felt intrigued and excited. So much so that he'd gathered the nerve to discuss it with Jannali over dinner that evening. His father was away with the chorus for a music festival, so he wouldn't be able to shut down the conversation. Nero was glad for this. Marrok didn't like to talk about Levana, especially when he has to endure in silence the awful things said about his beloved daughter.

"Have you heard the latest news, Mother?"

Jannali took a sip of her soup. "There's plenty of news in the world, Nero. Be more specific."

Nero's thumbs flew over the screen, typing out words at an impressive rate. "The prince of the Eastern Commonwealth is hosting a very special guest for his coronation. She's arriving tomorrow in New Beijing."

"And who would this be?" The glint in Jannali's eye told him that she was playing dumb.

"I want to meet her, Mom. Can we please go to New Beijing?"

"No."

Nero bit his lip and put on his best puppy-dog face. "Please? For my birthday?"

"You father won't want to."

"He doesn't want a lot of things. But, you know, I want to go! I think it would be really good for us to have a family trip."

"It would be very dangerous for us if we just revealed our true identities," Jannali sighed. "And there's no way she would even talk to you without proof of your status."

He furrowed his brow. "Well...we don't have to talk to her. I just want to see her."

"There would be no point to that, Nero. We'd just be wasting our time."

He didn't want to give up. He was tired of giving up. Confrontation would always make him run away with his tail between his legs—not today, he told himself. He met his mother's piercing gaze and his resolve was nearly crushed in that one single instant. "Mama, I really want it..."

"You're going to school tomorrow," said Jannali.

So in other words, no, she would not take him to New Beijing.

Nero sank lower in his chair. He no longer wanted the pasta dish that she had prepared. He went to the kitchen and made himself a sandwich. "I'm eating in my room."

"That's it, go and pout." Jannali served herself. "You're very good at that."

His anger flared. Gripping his sandwich, a bit of mayonnaise dripping onto his knuckles, he hid himself away in the only place that he felt truly safe. Nero's room was his little hideaway, where he could draw as much as he liked; a giant netscreen on the wall was hooked up to his art tablet, giving him a pristine workspace. He settled down onto his cushioned chair.

He bit into his sandwich. Hidden between the slices of bread was sliced turkey instead of sliced prospect. His bony fingers wrapped around the pen sitting by him and he put it to the tablet. The images in his head began to take life on the screen as he worked, his eyes narrowed and his tongue sticking out.

He thought of the lunar queen. Magnificent, powerful, perfect...it would be a sin for Nero to ignore what would most likely be his only chance to see his sister in the flesh. The more he thought about this, the more tempted he was to simply disregard what his mother said and do what he wanted for once. He was getting older, after all...she wouldn't be able to boss him around forever. In his mind, it was about time that he started to make his own decisions.

Please tell me what you think of this! I hated to leave this storyline finished. Consider this a gift to you guys who loved Blood of My Blood. (Darth Amidala, looking at you ;)