Rifling through his wallet for a membership card he hadn't thought about using in over half a year, Inigo had come up to the entrance to the athletic club before he found it, and as he pulled it out the man at the desk waved him through without actually checking it. This came as a surprise to him, as he had been trained on years of needing the card to be thoroughly examined before he could enter, but when he saw the apologetic look on the desk man's face as he walked by, he knew exactly why he was being given lenience on the matter. The man's muttered "I'm sorry" was barely audible, but it stung when it hit Inigo's ears.

Something told him that this was going to be the most emotionally draining dance session he'd ever been to in his life, and he wasn't prepared for it. This was especially true when, after he got halfway down to the changing room, he heard his father calling his name from back at the front desk. "Inigo, get back here for a minute!" Chrom yelled, one of his hands cupping his mouth to amplify the volume of his voice. "I need you to let me in!"

"But I need to go change for class," he grumbled in reply, hopping in place with heavy steps before turning and running back to the desk, pulling his card out again and handing it to his father without any further hesitation. "Okay, now you have it. What are you going to do?"

From behind Chrom a head of long red hair poked out, a scowl on the face belonging to the girl, someone Inigo knew all too well, who was now locking eyes with him. "He's going to get me in, that's what he's going to do right now. Gods, Inigo, were you listening at all when we were on our way over here? Did you bother to question why I was with you?"

"I figured you'd be going to the pool with Lucina, not coming to class with me!" In all honesty, Inigo's mind had been far from thinking about the members of the group that had walked down to the neighborhood athletic club when they'd been on their way. He'd been thinking entirely about the last time he'd been in the building, the last time he'd managed to drag himself to the dance class he'd been taking for the past few years, and those memories were enough to occupy his mind and keep him from noticing anything else around him.

"Why would I do that? I think she said she's going to go swim laps and probably go lay outside to get some sun, I don't want to intrude on her alone time anywhere near the pool. You're going to a class, me going with won't be a huge deal." She stepped out from in Chrom's shadow and snatched the membership card from his hand, presenting it to the man at the desk, who promptly asked her for her name and relationship to the cardholder. "My name is Severa, don't you forget it, and I'm his, uh…" Her voice trailed off as she looked between father and son, hoping one of them would give her an answer. When neither of them did, she put on her biggest and fakest smile and told the man, "I'm his kind-of stepsister? I mean, not legally, or socially, or anything like that, but you get me, right?"

The man shrugged and handed the card back, gesturing for her to go on in. "You could have just said friend and it would have worked, he let me in without even making sure I had my card today," Inigo told her once she'd gotten to right next to him, looking at him eagerly. "Now I bet you've made my dad feel all awkward about labels and all that again."

"He can deal with it," Severa bluntly said, pushing past Inigo and making him sigh, giving him the opportunity to look back at his dad and wave at him in a quick farewell before running to catch up with the girl. There had always been something about her that had irritated him, and he was a big fan of the ladies, but now that their lives had become what they were, he knew he was going to have to get used to her bossiness and her other quirks, all of which were on full display with how she was taking charge in a situation where she should have had no control.

This was made obvious by how she was leading them down the hall, despite not knowing where they needed to be going, and he had to kindly point her in the direction of the women's changing room so that he could duck into the men's and change into his workout clothes as fast as he could. The shirt he was going to wear had been in the bag since he'd packed it after his last time coming to class, and when he pulled it out he was hit with an aroma that instantly brought tears to his eyes. He pressed his face into the shirt, taking in the soft smell of flowers that it held before switching the one he was currently wearing out for it. "I hope I do you proud tonight, Mother," he whispered into the collar of the shirt, holding it over his mouth as he spoke. "You would love to know I'm still going through with this, even after everything."

Giving himself a moment to keep himself from crying, Inigo dropped the collar of his shirt and looked at himself in the mirror, forcing a smile to appear happy before he threw his things in one of the lockers and left the room. Severa was already standing outside waiting for him, dressed like she was about to perform some risqué moves on someone, with her tank-top and her incredibly tiny shorts. "Why do you look like you're about to play some kind of sport, not doing some dancing?" she asked him, giving him a once-over as he did the same to her. "I expected better of you, Inigo."

"I'm wearing exactly what I have worn to every dance practice I've ever attended," he replied, grabbing part of his shirt right over his chest and holding on to it tightly. "I suppose I could ask the same about you, why do you look like you want everyone to ogle you while you're floundering around?"

"Floundering around? I'll have you know that I so can dance, I just haven't ever been taught to do so!" Huffing at the way Inigo was putting little faith in her ability, Severa glared at him for a moment before reaching out, brushing her hand across his blue hair and mussing it up, and laughing while he scrambled to fix it. "You're looking like you're rolling onto a court yet you're caring about how neat your hair is? What a joke."

Finding that his hair was about as straight as it was going to get, Inigo mimicked what she had just done to him, but rather than simply brushing across her hair, he grabbed one of her pigtails and ran his hand down it quickly, causing it to crackle and gather static. "Bet you'll love warmups with your hair a giant disaster," he told her, hearing her distressed noises as she frantically attempted to rein in its wildly-frizzing ends. "Now come on, the instructor doesn't like when people are late. Or newcomers, but I think he'll get over it when you turn around and show him what you clearly think is appropriate to be wearing!"

He started towards the practice room, Severa running to catch up to him as she still worked to get her pigtail back to a non-frizzy state. They entered the room together, stopped after steps inside by a dainty-looking instructor whose presence was making everyone else in the room look hesitant. "Why, this is unexpected," he said, his voice gruff and completely unexpected from someone of his physical appearance. "It's wonderful to see you again, Inigo, how are things? We thought you might never come back after…"

"I felt it was about time I tried my hand at dancing again." Inigo had known this was going to happen the moment he and the instructor met face-to-face, and he was clinging to his shirt as if it was going to give him some kind of strength. "It's what Mother would have wanted, to see her son gracefully crossing the floor once more. It's just taken a while to bring myself to be able to come back here."

"Six months isn't that long of a time away, given the suffering you went through before her passing." The instructor turned his sights towards Severa, giving Inigo the chance to sniffle and nod as his thoughts went back to the moments he was speaking of. He didn't want to dwell on that suffering, he didn't want to think more about what had taken him from trying to follow in his mother's career footsteps, he just wanted to get back to something that had always been there for him. So when he heard the instructor ask, "Now who's this lovely lady you've brought with you today?" he knew that everything was about to get explained about the current situation in detail.

"First of all, I have a name, and it's Severa. Secondly, don't talk to us like we're dating or something, that's weird and I would never date this guy." Her hands ceasing to mess with her hair, its restoration a lost cause, Severa sized up the instructor and quickly decided how else she'd answer his question, before he could make any follow-ups or move on. "And we couldn't date at this point, anyway, now that our parents are together."

Clasping his hands together, not in excitement but in shock, the instructor looked back towards Inigo, who had gone slightly slack-jawed at Severa's wording. "That comes as a surprise to me, your father must have been so heartbroken at your mother's passing that I don't see him as one to move on so quickly."

"He didn't, he just offered Severa and her mom a place to live after her dad died last month." Inigo was still clinging to his shirt, wishing he could handle this conversation like his mother sometimes handled situations she hadn't wanted to be in: by slipping into the background and disappearing from sight. But he couldn't do that, he was completely aware, so he took in a deep breath and elaborated, "Her dad was one of my dad's best friends, so when he died my dad was there to do whatever he could to help their family, even if it meant giving them a place in our house so they didn't have to keep living in their own."

"Come on, Inigo, you always make it sound less interesting when you tell it that way. I happen to enjoy making people think our parents have hooked up, makes them really think about things for a minute." Huffing, Severa rolled her eyes dramatically enough to include actual head-rolling, which sent one of her pigtails flying towards Inigo. He had the thought to try grabbing it and mussing it, but his hands were too tightly clinging to his shirt to allow for it. He was rethinking coming back to dance class after all, especially now that Severa had somehow involved herself in it.

This class was one of the few places he had access to that he could get in tune with what his mother had wanted so badly for him, and it had always been a safe place for him growing up. When he felt less like his classmates in school due to his interests, he would come to class and, back when he was younger, his mother would be there beside him, showing him the same steps the instructor had. As he grew and she fell ill to the point of never leaving home, he would attend the class to remind himself of what she'd given him, something that he hoped would happen once more now that she was gone and he could fathom dancing again in her memory. But Severa had to poke her nose in (undoubtedly at the urging of one of the two adults at home) and now his safe place was going to be tainted by her for the rest of their lives, wasn't it?

Based on how that one session went, as they were walking out he was certain she wouldn't be returning any time soon, if ever. Her bottom lip was slightly swollen, busted open in one place from where she'd slipped and fallen into a rail against one of the walls, and his hand was bandaged up from where he'd tried catching her and ended up smacking the rail himself. "I can't believe the floor's allowed to be that slippery in there," Severa grumbled, running her finger over the cut on her lip. "My mom is going to see my face and think you beat me up, and you know what? She's half-right on that."

"W-what? I'm not the one that told you to run towards the wall, you chose to do that yourself. You were told to stay where you were because you weren't going to properly do what was being asked of me, no matter how hard you tried." Inigo shifted how he was holding his bag of clothes that he'd retrieved from the changing room, instinctively wanting to grab it with his bandaged hand but knowing that he'd cause pain for himself if he did. "I did nothing wrong here tonight, that was all you."

"You could have warned me that I would slip like that, seeing as you had made it over to that wall for yourself already! Seriously, how are you going to handle having me as your sister if you can't—" She was cut off by Inigo turning his head to glare at her, her words falling into nothingness as she read the angered expression on his face.

With her intently watching him still, he calmly (yet snappishly) told her, "You are not my sister, you are not anything close to my sister, just because my father let you and your mother live with us does not make you my sister, please stop referring to yourself like that! I have one sister, that's Lucina, and that's it!"

"I wasn't aware you had such a problem with me saying that. Gawds, next time I'll just refer to myself as your girlfriend or something, make it a lot more awkward to explain that we're not dating but we live in the same house." Huffing after she spoke, Severa waited until Inigo wasn't glaring at her any longer to add, "I just though, I don't know, saying I'm your sister would help make what's going on feel less dark and more fun, I guess? I don't like remembering that I live with you because we both lost parents, I'd rather think there's some kind of happy reason for it."

"You know, following me to a dance class meant for me to get back in touch with one of the few things I shared with my mother isn't going to make me want to accept any of your 'happy' reasons for anything," Inigo muttered, rolling his eyes in time with her rolling hers. "I wanted to get back to something I love that she taught me, and you had to intrude."

Taking offense to the idea of her intruding, Severa moved her hand from examining her lip and pointed a finger straight in Inigo's face. "I didn't intrude on anything, it was your dad who suggested I come with to see if it was something I could see myself getting into to take away from all the dark stuff that's been happening. If you have a problem with me being here for this, take it up with him, not with me!"

"I'll take it up with you, because you're the one that listened to him!" He batted her finger out of his face with his bandaged hand, feeling the broken skin on his knuckles stinging underneath the wrappings. "Just…leave me alone right now okay? I need some space away from you where I can actually think!"

She looked at how angry he seemed to be, and was going to make some kind of digging remark to anger him further, but the sound of someone clearing their throat behind them caught her by surprise. They both spun to see who it was, Inigo changing his entire demeanor from angry to smiling just to keep appearances up, and he was nearly tackled to the ground for it. Not by Severa, as she was watching the events as they unfolded, and not by the person who'd cleared their throat, as she was still standing a few feet away, looking straight at Severa, but by a blond guy with unkempt hair who seemed insistent on getting Inigo's attention for something.

"I told him not to do that if we found you two," the girl standing across from Severa said, shaking her head. "But you know how Owain is, he doesn't listen to a damn thing he doesn't want to hear."

"Hey, I listen just fine! I didn't think we'd really see these two here, that's all." Pulling himself off of Inigo and getting them both back to their feet, Owain scratched at the back of his head sheepishly as Inigo brushed himself off from the collision with the floor. "Mom's been telling me that Uncle Chrom says you're still taking everything super hard, and I figured that maybe I could help you out a bit? Get deep into character and make you laugh until you cried happy tears?"

Inigo considered accepting his cousin's offer of doing one of his insane and obnoxious character bits for the sake of the humor it provided, but then he remembered how much he utterly despised the idea and politely turned it down. "No thank you, Owain. As much fun as you would get from it, I feel I wouldn't get the same enjoyment. You keep those routines to yourself and we'll be just fine."

"Oh, well I mean, if that's what you really want." Sounding rather dejected at being told no, Owain turned his attention towards Severa, who scowled now that he was even aware of her presence. "What about you, huh? Would you like it if I—"

"I would rather drink bleach and join my dad in death than sit through five seconds of a single one of your routines." Severa gave a fake gag, which only made Owain look sadder than he already did. "Seriously? You're going to be upset that neither of us want to listen to you spew overdramatic crap all day?"

"I'm not upset over it," Owain said with a sigh, sounding very much contrary to his words. "I just didn't need you to be so rude about it. At least Inigo did it sorta nicely."

Severa turned from scowling at Owain to looking at the girl he'd shown up with, who was busier looking at the back of her hand than she was watching her friends interact. "And you thought bringing him here to find us was a good idea because…?"

"I didn't bring him here, we were meeting up to work out together anyway and then we heard you two might have been around so we finished up and got to looking." Dropping her hand to look straight at Severa, she continued with, "In all honesty, you really should know that I don't have any control whatsoever over Owain. He does his own thing and I do mine."

"Then why the hell were you working out together? Come on Kjelle, this argument's probably the weakest thing you've ever thrown at me, and you've thrown a lot of things my way before." Severa mimed a couple of punches while not breaking her eye contact with Kjelle, who was smirking at the motions. "Just say you came up with this idea and we'll put it to rest."

"Wish I could, but I'm telling you the truth. Bet Owain would love to tell you all about why he comes here with me once a week now." Kjelle motioned towards the upper part of one of her arms, which she started tracing an invisible design on with her finger. "Or, you know, you could just accept that we're here and move on."

Listening in to their conversation while trying to ignore the fact that his cousin was standing there on the verge of crying for being told to not be so weird, Inigo looked at said cousin and felt like maybe he should be the one to try and fix things. "So, Owain, what's this about you coming here to work out with someone who could probably dead-lift any of us with ease? Are you playing the role of her weight set?"

"A man such as myself has other reasons to be a gym beyond playing weights for a strong and independent woman like Kjelle, although I would gladly do that for her if she asked me to." Owain froze after what he'd just said, looking at everyone who was now staring at him for his admission. "Er, I mean, wouldn't everyone? No one likes an unhappy friend who could break our spines over her legs with ease."

"Get on with explaining yourself before I do the honors of breaking you first," Kjelle said, popping her knuckles on one hand and making Owain visibly tense up by doing so.

"Ri-i-ight, well, I'm here because she's promised to help me out with building some upper body muscles so I can get a cool tattoo on my arm for my birthday!" Flexing one of his arms, the one Inigo knew all-too-well as the one attached to his cousin's so-called "sword hand" that he blamed a lot of his outbursts on, Owain gestured to a spot on his upper arm that was pitifully thin and covered in a long bruise-like mark that had been there since birth. "Mom said that if I made sure to get the same one that everyone else in the family gets, I'm allowed to do it once my arm looks strong enough to make it work!"

"And therefore he needs someone who actually knows how to build muscles to help him out," Severa mumbled under her breath, looking at Kjelle who was relaxing her stance on wanting to break Owain for what he'd said. She leaned over and nudged Kjelle in the side with her shoulder, getting her friend's attention on her so that she could say, "Color me shocked that you weren't lying about him having his idea himself. Never thought he'd ever be the one to suggest some kind of non-nerdy physical activity."

In not responding to Severa's comment, Kjelle chose to not insult someone that was a close friend of hers, at the cost of making Severa nudge her again in an attempt to get her to say something. "Touch me one more time and I might throw you into the gym with me, to see how long you last. Owain's been working for this for a while, even if you can't tell looking at him, and I happen to enjoy the time I spend conditioning him."

"No one enjoys time spent with Owain. No one." In fact, the entire idea was absurd to Severa that someone could actively want to be anywhere near the guy, but she felt that she was pressing enough buttons with everything she'd already said and done. The last thing she needed was to get more people genuinely upset with her over her mouth.

So she kept quiet, even as Inigo tried talking through the whole idea of getting their family's symbol tattooed on his arm with Owain. "I know it's all about covering the birth marks, but that's kind of hard when the mark's on your eye, and I don't know if Lucina or I would like if you could do something our father did while we couldn't," he explained, gesturing to his eye and how part of his iris was discolored. "Can't exactly get the mark plastered in our eyes, even if that would be rather unique."

"I have to get this though, it would make Mom so happy to see me being a real part of the family for a change. I'm not as refined as the rest of you, I need to cement my place in the family tree!" Throwing the arm he'd been flexing the entire time up in the air, Owain sounded enthused about getting this done, even if Inigo had reservations about the whole thing. They discussed it further for a few minutes, the two ladies getting into the conversation once Owain started talking about his actual workout regimen he was supposed to be doing. Even if the focus was on getting his arm bigger, Kjelle seemed to be making sure that he wasn't neglecting everything else in his body.

There didn't seem to be any issues between any of them, until Kjelle offhandedly said, without thinking much about it, "It's always nice to know that others can make use of what my mother's taught me. Almost making as if she's not spent my entire life wasting my time with this self-love and strength stuff."

"At…least you can use what your mother taught you to some degree." When Inigo spoke, his hands were gripping at his shirt again, trying to keep himself composed as he thought about what his own mother had taught him while she'd been around. "There isn't a single soul I know who would be interested in the lessons my mother gave me before she died. No one wants to know about the delicate nature of dancing."

Listening to him, Kjelle slowly brought a hand up to cover her mouth, her having not realized that speaking about her mom like that would strike a nerve with someone who'd relatively recently lost their own mother. "I didn't mean to hurt you right there, Inigo," she apologized, reaching out to him with her other hand but him stepping back to stay out of her reach. "Listen, I did not mean what I might have implied. I just thought, you know, that it would have been okay and…"

"Don't apologize, I know I'm still being too emotional about something I should be over by now. She's been dead six months, why do I even care anymore when I think about her?" Leaving his three companions without words, he turned away and started walking towards the door. "If my father comes around, I'll be out in the garden. Flowers always remind me of my mother's smiling face in happier times, it'll cheer me up to be out there with them."

As they watched him leave, Owain was first to act, starting to run after him before Severa called for him to return, to leave Inigo to himself. "I can't explain why I'm bothering to care that he's hurt, but seriously, give him some space. He needs it right now, after what's happened tonight."

"I tried apologizing, you all heard me," Kjelle reminded her, feeling that those words were pointed at what had just gone down between them all. "I didn't intend on offending him and I guess I forgot that he's more emotional about mothers now than he ever was."

"The issue isn't anything that you said, don't worry." Sighing, Severa ran a hand down one of her pigtails, fiddling with the end when she got to it. "I shouldn't have come and barged in on his attempt at getting back to normal after his mom's death. His dad thought he was helping me in telling me to come to dance class, but all he did was hurt his son more. And me…it didn't help me at all." She shook her head, dropping her hair and turning her back on the two she was still with. "I should go, clearly I'm just burdening everyone by being here."

"Not so fast, Severa." Owain's words came with him grabbing her by the shoulders and trying to hold her down, while Kjelle helped by taking one of her arms and holding it tightly. "You're not burdening anyone, I don't think. You need to find a way to deal with what happened to you, just like he needs one to deal with what happened to him. You're both hurting still, it's really obvious, and beating yourself up over this isn't going to help you."

"Owain's right, and besides, you don't have something here like Inigo has the garden. Where are you going to go? The pool area?" Mentioning that sent a shiver through Severa's whole body, something the two people holding onto her could both feel. That gave Kjelle the idea for a suggestion for what she could do. "Why don't you just stick with us, until your mom or Inigo's dad gets here to take you home? We'll keep you company."

"No thanks, as much as I'd love to not be alone I think I need it right now." There was a moment where Severa regretted turning down their offer, as they let go of her and told her to not do anything stupid and to be safe, but she wasn't going to let them know she changed her mind on what she wanted to do. She chose to be alone right then, and she was going to have to deal with it. The problem with being alone, as she walked away from them and through the halls of the rec center, was that without someone else around her, she was helpless against the thoughts and memories of her father, something she'd tried to keep herself away from ever since she'd found out he'd died.

This was the first time in a month, since the day of his funeral where she finally accepted he was gone, that she was without someone right there beside her, or someone waiting on the other side of the door for her when she locked herself away. This was the first chance those thoughts had to come crashing back at her when she was most susceptible to them, and the very moment she was completely alone she was crying, sobbing about how she felt like a failure about things and how she missed her father so much.

When Chrom came to pick the three kids up within the hour, two of them had puffy eyes from their crying and the third was completely silent, as she'd been since her mother's passing. He didn't ask any questions, only reminding them that he was there for them all and that they'd get past the painful parts eventually. How soon eventually was, he wasn't sure and he wasn't going to make a guess on it, but he was certain that it would happen when the time was right for it.

When they got back to the house that now sort of belonged to all of them, the first thing Chrom noticed was that the lights in one of the bedrooms was on, something that he was certain the kids whose room that was were noticing at the same time. "Huh, it looks like Cordelia might be doing some cleaning to keep her mind off things," he remarked as they all walked up the driveway to the front door, his eyes only moving from the illuminated window so that he didn't accidentally stumble up the stairs. "She was talking a lot about wanting to get some of that done today. Cleaning, that is, not moving past things."

"Let me guess, she cried about my dad being dead from the moment you got back until the moment you left?" Severa suggested, not wanting to hear the answer when it came. She knew that was exactly what her mother had done, and it made her feel miserable just thinking about it. There was something about her mother that she was aware of that she didn't think anyone else had any idea about, that being her mother's almost obsessive secret love for Chrom that she'd tried to mask with her marriage that had crumbled in death. If there was one thing Severa knew very well about her mother, it was that she wasn't nearly as hurt by her husband's passing as she pretended to be, having accepted the death long before it happened and therefore being eager to move on.

There simply had to have been some reason for why Severa had taken to making step-sibling jokes as a coping method, after all. "Er, she did, now that I think about it," Chrom replied, opening the front door to let his kids and their housemate in, but he stopped Severa while she passed him by. "Say, you don't have any reason for why you'd mentioned that, do you?"

"Not a single one," she lied, not wanting to out her mother's secret to someone who'd been nothing but kind to them in their time of need. "She's been really teary when she's been alone with me, figured she'd have done the same to you when she was alone with you. You know I'm the only family she's got left, and she doesn't exactly have a lot of friends to lean on like she leans on you."

"She's been hit hard by what's happened, I know, and it's still rather fresh for both of you. I know I won't forget her tearful call she placed the day of Robin's death, she was the most distraught I'd ever heard her." Chrom gave a small sigh as he saw how Severa shifted where she was standing, her mind going to that very day that he was speaking about. "Not that I want you to go back to that day, mind you. I just…well, I had good intentions here. You head upstairs and see what your mother's up to, will you?"

She nodded, looking at Chrom's face and seeing how he was visibly showing signs of regret for what he'd just said. "She's probably tearing through my belongings making sure I'm not writing anything down anywhere that would make her look bad or something, as an act of rebellion. Jokes on her, I got rid of all those notebooks when we moved in with you." Her laugh was hollow when she gave it, leaving Chrom looking confused as she walked into the house and up the stairs, throwing her bag of clothes in the hall before entering the bedroom that had always been Lucina's but was hers now as well. As expected, Cordelia was in the room, but rather than the bag for trash that Severa had figured she'd be carrying with her, she was instead holding pictures in ornate frames. "Uh, Mother dearest? What are you doing in my room?"

"A thing for Lucina, my dear," she replied, her voice cold and nearly unrecognizable. "The poor girl's still staying completely silent and I figured she needed something to cheer her up in this trying time. So I found some pictures of her and her mother and framed them, but I have no place to put them for her to look at."

"Oh yes, because showing her pictures of the person she misses so much is really going to help her out. Never mind the fact that you haven't bothered doing the same thing for me." Severa came up right behind her mother, grabbing the top frame off the stack in her hands and scoffing at the picture within it. "I'm not even sure this is Lucina in this. Isn't the mark in the wrong eye for it to be her?"

Cordelia took a few heavy breaths before speaking, her eyes fixated on the stack of pictures. "I may have mixed a few of Inigo in, I was rushing while putting this together. These children have had to deal with so much in losing their mother and I want to do what I can to help them both heal."

Feeling like she wanted to grab a big handful of her mother's stringy red hair and yanking on it hard, Severa closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, thinking through her words before saying something. "Why don't you worry about me for once, hm, Mother? Why's it all about Chrom's children, who have a dad to help them out? Why are you caring more about them than you ever have about me?"

"They don't have a mother in their lives anymore and I want to try filling that role the best I can. You've shown you could do without a mother, so why should I bother?" The slow turn Cordelia made to look at Severa, their nearly identical faces staring into the other's with malice in both of their eyes. "If you ever wanted me to try helping you again, you should have received the help I already gave you better."

"That's not what a mother does and you know it!" Severa snapped, nearly throwing the picture in her hands at her mother's face. "Why are you like this? You need me just as much as I need you, you shouldn't be replacing me with kids that aren't even yours just because you want to be their mom too!"

Without a word, Cordelia brushed past Severa and left the room, taking all her pictures with her and leaving the bedroom exactly as it always had been. Within moments of her leaving, Lucina came into the room, having changed from her pool clothes into her pajamas, and she gave Severa a weary smile as she took her seat at her tiny desk in her room, filling the space Cordelia had previously been taking up. As she wasn't going to say anything (she had maybe said three complete sentences' worth of words in the month the two ladies had been living in the house), Severa decided it would be more worth her time to go find someone else to vent at over what had just happened to her.

That someone, naturally, was going to be the living person in the picture she was currently holding on to. Inigo's room was on the other side of the hall, a much smaller space than the one that she and Lucina were sharing, and he kept it as empty as he possibly could at almost all times. When she saw that he was already inside, she pushed the door open without so much as a courtesy knock, to find him with one leg high up beside him, resting against the wall as he draped his body over it. "So, what are you doing now?" she asked, startling him into leaning back and getting his leg down as fast as he could. "Couldn't get over your dance class being over?"

"I'm doing what I used to always do with my mother, when she was able to," he replied, glaring at her for walking in on him. "We would spend hours stretching and working on our flexibility just in case we were ever called up to do actual performances. She was brilliant at what she did, you know, and I wish she was here and well to give me pointers on how to improve what I'm doing."'

"Sounds boring. It's almost like if I was wishing my dad was alive so that he could tell me how to formulate plans for companies like he did for his job." Bringing up her father's profession came with the attached memory of how he had died mid-presentation at work, his body giving out on him in the middle of a sentence, not to anyone's surprise as he had been steadily growing sick in the months prior to the event. She wasn't going to let herself dwell on that memory, however, not when she'd come into the room for something else. "I guess we each handle death differently though, don't we?"

"Sometimes it's hard to believe you've even lost a parent, given how you never seem to be bothered by talking about it." Trying to ignore her physical presence in his bedroom, Inigo switched how he was standing so that he could prop his other leg up against the wall to stretch it instead. "I would really like to have some alone time right now, if you don't mind. You already intruded on me trying to find peace once today, do you have to do it twice?"

Severa opened her mouth for a second, before closing it back up and throwing the picture frame she was holding onto his bed. "You're right, I'm just being a burden on you, and everyone else in this damn house! Forgive me for wanting to try and make things feel normal for myself!" As she stormed out, he sighed and brought both feet back to the ground, heading to his bed to see what it was she'd thrown onto it.

Looking at the picture in the frame, of his little self snuggled up next to his mother, he could feel tears coming to his eyes. "Oh, you had this to bring to me…" he whispered, feeling regret at how he'd snapped at Severa the way he had. "I'm so sorry, I shouldn't have acted that way right there. Mother, if you're watching me, I promise I'm not going to always be like that." The silence that followed in the space he'd been hoping for a beyond-death answer was cut short by the sound of a door across the hall slamming closed, followed by loud, wordless screaming that was quickly muffled by something. It was still audible, and was soon followed by gasps that were indicating crying, but Inigo didn't want to face what he'd caused and so he closed his own door and sat on the floor for a while, trying to think about happier times that had since passed.

It had been six months, and this had been the first day he'd tried to go back to some kind of normal, but the grasp of everything still wrong had too strong a hold on everyone in the house to make it possible.

A/N: The rest of this story won't be as death-heavy and will (hopefully, if it goes according to plan) end up being a rather cute and fun story about how two kids learn to love and respect each other like somewhat-siblings. but for now I hope everyone likes it! c: