Message from the Author: This story has multiple endings, and before reading on, you should go back and choose either the Sacrifice Daniel or the Sacrifice Sean ending. Once you've done that, you can come back here.

Okay, so did you read one of those endings first?

Cool.

I cannot believe you have made it through 160,000 words of this. I want you to know, I appreciate the amount of time and energy you have spent with me and this story. It is humbling.

So, as a "thank you," here is a bonus ending:

# # #

You are back on the screen with the choices that determine the ending of the story.

The first two choices are still there: SACRIFICE SEAN or SACRIFICE DANIEL.

And no matter what you do, no matter what Sean does, his choices always lead him back here.

Except . . .

Now there is a third option hidden just below them:

SACRIFICE SEAN

or

SACRIFICE DANIEL

or

SAVE THEM BOTH

# # #

Secret Ending: Siempre y Siempre y Siempre

1452 Lewis Avenue

October 28, 2016

The Day Esteban Diaz is Shot

Sean uses his powers and lands in his childhood bedroom. A fifty-pound weight has replaced his heart, and it presses on his chest as he walks into his front yard like a man heading to the electric chair. Brett Foster shoves Daniel, and Daniel is so small. Sean forgot how small Daniel was when all this happened.

But Daniel deserves the world, and that is why Sean has to change everything back. Why he has decided to go back to prison. Because Daniel is worth it.

A tiny voice in Sean's head whispers: But aren't I worth it too?

Like a burnt-out actor, Sean mutters his lines. He pushes Brett. Brett falls, and Officer Matthews shows up. Then Dad comes. Everything sucks. Everything is chaos. The bullet rips through Dad's chest, and Sean's ears ring from the gunshot and the explosion as Daniel's powers rock the neighborhood.

This is the worst day of Sean's life, and when he opens his eyes, he's taken back by how much it looks like the other worst day of his life, the day of Daniel's graduation party, the day Daniel was arrested.

Nine-year-old Daniel lies passed out on the grass next to Brett's unconscious body. Officer Matthews is dead by his overturned police car. And Sean crawls to his father, whose lifeless eyes stare up at the sky they cannot see

Dad's unblinking eyes hurt, hurt more than Sean has words for. These eyes that always looked at him with pride and understanding. Even angry, they always held kindness. The only time Dad ever looked at him like a stranger was the night Daniel turned himself in, when Dad kicked Sean out of the house saying:

You ran away and made everything worse.

Sean has often wondered why he ran away this day. It seems obvious—a cop had shot his dad, he didn't understand what happened with his brother that destroyed their neighborhood, more cops were coming. He panicked. He didn't know what to do, and maybe if he had more time, if he knew what was going on, he would have made a different choice.

Wait.

I do have more time.

And I do know what is going on.

A thousand thoughts fire through his brain in a microsecond. There was something Max said, besides that thing about his gift being more time. It was when she was talking about David:

You're not supposed to change the past.

You're supposed to let the past change you.

We can control how we change.

Changing the past was a mistake. Obviously. Everyone got hurt, people died, Daniel ended up in jail. But Sean is supposed to learn from it, and everything from ghosting Sarah in college to Daniel yelling at him on the side of the road to the extra time with Dad to being locked up in prison in the first place has told him that he shouldn't run away . . . but he has to start putting himself first.

So maybe Sean cannot change the things that happened to him. Maybe the scars will always be with him and trying to erase them only replaces them with new scars.

But maybe he can change himself.

"Dad, I hope you are right," Sean mutters, "about how if there isn't a right choice there isn't a wrong one either." He can already feel himself being pulled back to the present. He has only seconds.

So he tries to download as much information into his sixteen-year-old brain as he can, about what has happened and the lessons he has learned:

Daniel has powers—you can handle them if you trust him and never lie to him.

Always stick together.

But you have to take care of yourself too.

You are strong enough to do this.

But don't run.

Don't run.

Don't run.

# # #

Seattle, Washington

August 16, 2026

Nine Years After the Death of Esteban Diaz

The Morning After Sean Diaz's Twenty-sixth Birthday

Sean sits up in bed, and cold sweat glues a t-shirt to his chest. He has two eyes. Dirty fingernails.

And a tattoo on his forearm. Instead of the boys or Cassidy's wolf, it's Dad's car driving down a long, lonely road. 1970 – 2016 is tattooed above it.

Sean's brain is the soupy mess of overwritten memories it was when he woke up in the life where he went to school in Savannah. He has a vague sense that this is his bedroom, confirmed by pictures of him, Dad, and Daniel on the dresser. In the photos, Sean is a teenager, so none of them are recent. Sean picks up an oil-stained work shirt from the thin carpet, and a nametag pinned to it says: Bob's Garage – Sean.

He stumbles to the window, and across the street is the Z-Mart he worked at in high school. So he is in Seattle. That is not as cool as Los Angeles but definitely better than prison. He fishes his cell phone from his pocket, and he has several recent messages:

From Claire Reynolds: Happy Birthday, Sean! See you next week! Love, Claire and Stephen.

From Lyla Park: Happy birthday forever-bestie! Can't wait for you to actually go out tonight since I'm buying all your drinks for you you tightwad

There's more from people who must be his friends in this life. And apparently he met someone when he went out with Lyla because one of the messages is from "Hottie at Bar" and just says Call me cutie!

But he also has a message chain from Daniel.

Sean holds his breath, and his thumb hovers over the contact. What if he and Daniel aren't on good terms here? In that other life, Sean ruined everything by not settling for C-minus. He has his freedom, and so does Daniel. Does Sean risk everything to have Daniel again? Or does he let them both live their lives?

But Daniel is the most important thing, and Sean has to know if they are brothers or strangers.

He opens their messages and finds ten memes from yesterday, all variations of Happy Birthday. One of them calls him "The Best Big Bro," but at least five of them call him a "dork" or a "loser." The last message is from 7:00 PM and says: Cool if I call you before you go out to get totally shitfaced birthday bro?

So things with Daniel are okay.

Sean explores the rest of the apartment, and . . . it's pretty basic. Better and nicer than his one in Los Angeles, but its cheap furniture and sparse decorations screams twenty-something bachelor. In a second bedroom, Sean finds three boxes labeled Daniel's Stuff. And Sean has a feeling in his chest, a kind of vague excitement that suggests that this is a big week, something he has been working towards for a long time. He finds some sketchbooks and journals in his bedroom.

Though there are fewer sketchbooks than in his apartment in Savannah, it is easier this time, putting together the pieces of this new life. It takes time, but over the next few days, this is what he learns:

# # #

The day Dad was shot, the police took Sean and Daniel to the station and assaulted them with questions. But Sean stuck to his story that Officer Matthews shot his father, that he didn't know what happened after that, and were they being charged with anything or could they go?

But the questioning stretched on, and one asshole cop got in Daniel's face and graphically described Dad's dead body. "Did that make you angry? Did that make you or your brother want to lash out?"

And Daniel did get angry. He screamed. And the room shook.

And somehow Sean knew: Daniel is doing this. He set a hand on top of Daniel's, calmed him down, and the police dismissed the shaking as an earthquake.

When Sean and his brother were finally released, Lyla was in the lobby. With her parents, Ellery and his parents, Adam, and even Jenn. And that was the first time Sean cried, because there were people who cared about him. Cameras and protestors crowded the sidewalk, but once they pushed through, Sean and Daniel spent the night at the Parks.

After Sean tucked Daniel into bed in the guest room, he smoked a joint with Lyla in the Parks' sunroom and sobbed like a baby. And it felt weird for Lyla to hug him instead of teasing him. She even cried too. Then he curled up in bed with Daniel, hugging him like a child holds a teddy bear.

"I miss Dad," Daniel whispered.

Sean didn't even realize Daniel was awake. "I do too, enano. But we'll be okay. As long as we are together."

And saying it didn't feel like one of those lies you tell a little kid to keep them from being scared, but a fact, a knowable truth in a chaotic universe.

Dad's funeral was a mess, with television cameras and protestors. And afterwards, Claire and Stephen took Sean and Daniel back with them to live in Beaver Creek. Sean begged them to let him stay. He technically owned the house. He could stay there on his own. Or with Lyla or Ellery. But Claire and Stephen told him he was just a kid. And, besides, Sean realized he couldn't leave Daniel.

At least the police did not press charges against him. They wanted to. But with the protests, it wasn't worth prosecuting the son of the unarmed man they had murdered. That didn't mean that Sean escaped all of the bullshit, though. A right-wing asshole named Bill Waltz with a shitshow podcast and a YouTube channel took the death of Kindred Matthews as his personal crusade.

"Why isn't this thug, this Sean Diaz, behind bars?" became Waltz's mantra, one that echoed thousands of times across Facebook and Twitter. Sean had to delete all of his social media accounts, cutting him off from his Seattle friends and from sharing his art, because assholes flooded his wall with death threats. More than one morning, Sean woke up to Stephen cleaning racial slurs off their driveway. At one point, President Trump even shared a tweet about "Cop-murdering, MS-13 poster-child Sean Diaz", and that led to maybe the shittiest weeks in Sean Diaz's already shitty year.

In Beaver Creek, Daniel was fine. He immediately became best friends for life with their neighbor Chris, but Sean missed Lyla and Ellery and everyone back home. And the mostly white kids at Beaver Creek High School were not cool with the brown-skinned kid who their shitty parents whispered had killed a cop. Sean butted heads with Claire a lot. She was stricter than Dad, treated him like he was six instead of sixteen. Dad basically trusted him to manage things on his own, and Claire didn't, and things came to a head when she found his weed. Admittedly, he was in a bad place and smoking more than he should, but Claire overreacted and Sean told her she could go fuck herself.

He had inherited his father's car, and he drove it through the night straight back to Seattle.

For a week, he crashed at Lyla's. And he didn't come back until Daniel called and said, "I need you here, Sean. Please come home."

"That isn't our home," Sean said. He was standing across the street from their old house on Lewis Avenue, which they had sold. A new family, one with two small girls, was moving in.

"It doesn't matter where we are," Daniel said. "But you said we had to be together."

So Sean went back, prepared for Claire to murder him. But instead, she hugged him tightly and said that she was sorry, wanted him to be okay, and didn't want him to scare them like that by running away again. And he said he wouldn't.

That was near the end of his junior year, and his week in Seattle, on top of everything else, had dropped his grades to F's. He managed to pass his classes, but his GPA never recovered. He was no longer the honors student in AP English classes. And without a track team at Beaver Creek High School, he wasn't a star runner either.

He wasn't Sean Diaz anymore.

And a lot of the time, he felt like he was nothing except Daniel's brother.

Daniel's powers . . . never surprised Sean. He thought that was strange. Like, it was weird his brother could float things with his mind and scary when they exploded that truck in the junkyard, but Sean always had a sense that he knew what to do, that he could handle them. He and Daniel would go out to the woods and practice, and Daniel beamed when Sean would tell him good job. They tried to keep the powers a secret. But then Chris found out. And then Stephen. And then Claire. Claire was weirdly cool, though she prayed about it a lot.

And though he knew what to do with Daniel's powers, they were still a responsibility. Something to manage. Something Sean worried about.

The only thing that seemed to bring Sean peace was working on the car.

Sean and Daniel inherited all of Dad's things. The house, which they sold. The garage, which they sold to a douche named Bob back in Seattle. But also Dad's car. Since that meant Sean had his own wheels, he didn't need the car Dad was fixing up for graduation.

So Sean fixed it up for Daniel.

Sean's mechanic skills were rudimentary, despite Dad's best efforts. But through YouTube videos and car forums, he slowly figured out his way around the engine. Daniel would come out and help. Often, Daniel used his powers to hand Sean tools. Other times, he asked questions. Sometimes he was just company. And though Daniel often slowed him down, Sean realized why his father was always so happy talking in the garage. Putting something together with your own hands, sharing that with someone else, that felt like a true act of love. Seeing himself covered in grease to his elbows always made Sean feel closer to their father, and these were his favorite moments with his brother.

But overall, the two years in Beaver Creek were hard. Sean had a hole, and happiness leaked out of him.

The small town. The racism. His grandparents' rules. Only being "Daniel's brother." All of that was suffocating like blankets snuffing out the already dimming light inside him.

So after graduation, he took off.

He said it was a road trip. That he wanted to see America.

"Can I come with you?" Daniel asked. "It's summer break. It's not like I have school."

"No, bro," Sean said. "Besides, I'll only be gone a couple of weeks. I'll be back before you notice I'm even gone."

That was the first lie he had told Daniel since their father died.

Sean didn't know where he was going, but he brought his passport and the house key that was among Dad's belongings, so he wasn't surprised that he drove straight to Puerto Lobos.

There, Sean found the house his abuelos left to Dad, which Dad left to him and Daniel. It was on the beach, two-stories, wind-beaten. Paint flaked off the side and danced in the ocean breeze like snowflakes. Rocks had smashed two of the windows, and shingles from the roof lay shattered by the front door. Inside, two inches of dust covered everything, and empty bottles, sleeping bags, and even a used condom suggested the house hadn't been completely empty in the decades since Dad left it.

Without knowing why, Sean started to clean the house up. It felt like something he should do. That first night, Sean laid out the sleeping bag he had brought and slept on the floor of his father's childhood bedroom, and he wondered what Dad had been like at seventeen.

Using his cellphone internationally would have been expensive, and Sean was already struggling to pay his own phone plan, but he found a local shop with public wifi. It was shitty but enough to send Daniel a message that said: I'm okay will be home soon.

That was his second lie.

Because one week in Puerto Lobos turned into two.

Which turned into a month.

Which turned into the whole summer.

And he was not good about turning on his phone.

He was finally free from all of the bullshit. No training his brother in his powers. No conservative assholes calling him a criminal. Hell, for the first time in his life, he was somewhere where most of the people looked like him. Most days he cleaned up the house, but some days he sat on the beach, smoked a joint, and felt free. Like he could be Sean Diaz.

Whoever Sean Diaz was.

One cop's bullet had ruined everything. He lost Dad. He lost his friends. Lost everything that was cool about Seattle like music and skate parks. No track meant no track scholarship. He had always wanted to go to art school, but those were expensive, and even with the money from Dad's house and garage, the first thing that came up if you Googled "Sean Diaz" were a hundred memes from the dregs of Reddit calling him a gang member and a cop killer. No good school was going to take him.

So what was his life?

What was his future?

In Puerto Lobos, it didn't matter that he didn't have answers.

He got a job with a small store, stocking shelves and helping the few tourists who didn't speak Spanish. And he met a man named Eduardo, who had been best friends with Esteban Diaz.

They hung out a lot, and Eduardo had stories about Dad that Sean had never heard before. Stories that made Dad seem less perfect. Stories where Dad fucked up. Stories where Dad was a person, which made Sean feel closer to him. "It means a lot to me to know Esteban left here and had a good life, even if it ended too soon," Eduardo said. "I see a lot of him in you, Sean. I think he would be proud of you."

Sean wasn't sure that was true, but he hoped it was.

Then one night after his eighteenth birthday, Sean was sitting on the beach, drinking his first legally-purchased case of beer and wishing he could have shared it with his dad. The house was as fixed as he was going to get it without tools and real money, and he was drawing a sunset which painted the ocean fire-orange and red. He heard someone swearing, and when he walked around the house, the neighbor stood in the street, shaking her head at the open hood of her car.

"Do you need help, señora?" Sean asked in Spanish.

And the woman blinked. "Esteban?"

"No, sorry," Sean said, staring at the sand stuck between his toes.

"My apologies," the woman said. "You look just like the boy who used to live here." She said she needed help, but it was only a hose that had become disconnected. Sean fixed it in about ten minutes, and the woman thanked him over and over and over, though he assured her it wasn't a big deal.

"I don't know if you knew them, but the family who used to live here were very helpful too," she said, setting a hand on his shoulder. "Everyone in town admired them and misses them very much."

After she left, Sean went back to the beach, picked up his sketchbook from the sand, and the lighter his father had given him fell out of his pocket. And when he picked it up, he suddenly knew what he wanted to do. With his life. It came to him suddenly and completely, and the next morning he locked up the house and drove back to the United States.

When Sean pulled up to Claire and Stephen's house in Beaver Creek, in the driveway, Daniel was using his powers to help Chris get air off a ramp on a Razor scooter.

Great job keeping the powers a secret, Sean thought. When he got out of the car, Daniel suddenly dropped the scooter and his best friend to the pavement. Chris rubbed his bruised ass but didn't say anything.

"Are you really here?" Daniel said quietly.

"Yeah, enano, I am," Sean said.

"Then go fuck yourself," Daniel said, and Chris's eyes grew wide because at this point Daniel didn't swear.

Daniel didn't talk to Sean. Not that afternoon. Not during dinner with Claire and Stephen. Finally, Sean knocked on Daniel's bedroom door and asked to sit next to him on the bed. "You disappeared," Daniel said after Sean broke him down. "You could have been dead. Like Dad. Or worse, I thought you had left me forever."

"Why would I leave you forever?" Sean asked.

"Because I cause you trouble and I make your life harder," Daniel said so quietly that it broke Sean's heart, made him feel like the world's biggest piece of shit.

"I am so sorry I did that, enano," he said. "But I needed to figure things out."

After some crying and swearing, Daniel said, "I know things haven't been good for you since Dad died. But please, Sean, you can't disappear. You said we could make it through things, but we had to be together."

"I promise I will never leave you like that again," Sean said, and finally his brother hugged him. And though Sean had cherished his three months of freedom, holding his little brother felt like finding the piece of his heart he hadn't realized he was missing.

It felt like maybe, one day, he could plug that hole inside him.

"So, I figured out what I want to do," Sean said. "And if I work really hard, I can do it on my own. But it would be better if I could do it with you."

"What's that?" Daniel asked, intrigued.

"I want to move back to Seattle, and I want to buy back Dad's garage." He watched his twelve-year-old brother's eyes light up. "I don't want to set your life for you, so when you get to be eighteen, you can obviously back out. And even if we can make this happen then, I think you should still go to school. But if I save up, and we use the money left from the house and when we sold the shop in the first place, I think we can do it."

"So we would run the garage?" Daniel said, sitting on the edge of the bed. "Together?"

"Yeah, enano. It would be like when we fixed-up the car. Only always."

"'Siempre y siempre,'" Daniel said quietly. "That's what Dad would say when he said he loved me in Spanish."

"I know, enano," Sean said, putting an arm around his brother. "He would always tell me that too."

And so Sean moved to Seattle.

And he got a job at Bob's Garage, which used to be the Diaz Repair Shop. A couple of the guys who used to work for Dad still worked there, and one of them, Juan, told him, "This place used to be a lot better under your father."

And at night, Sean took classes from a community college that didn't care about the Google searches that turned up with his name. And he waited. And saved his money. And got an associate's degree in business management.

And then one day a couple of months before Sean's twenty-sixth birthday, Bob stomped into the garage, flustered. He couldn't handle the customers. The scheduling. The mechanics who weren't loyal to him because he wasn't a good boss. He wanted out.

And so Sean called his brother, made sure Daniel was still in. And with Daniel chipping in twenty-five percent from his savings, Sean was able to buy his dad's garage.

And that is why this week Sean has landed in is a big week. Next weekend, Daniel moves into the apartment and transfers to a local community college in Seattle, to be a part-time student and part-time business owner. And next weekend is the grand reopening of the Diaz Repair Shop, only with a cooler logo and a slightly different name:

The Diaz Brothers Repair Shop.

# # #

Sean is still adjusting to the rhythms of this new life when it is time for the Diaz Brothers Repair Shop's grand opening—which is an odd term because the garage is actually closed for a cookout with Sean and Daniel's now-employees, friends, and family. There's punch and cake, and Juan brings a grill. He insists Sean take a hand at cooking burgers, which Sean is not good at, and thankfully Juan takes back over. "It's okay, boss," he says. "One day your cookouts will be as legendary as your father's."

Definitely going to take some time getting used to being people's boss.

Sean wonders: Am I ready for this type of responsibility? But then again, he raised a super-powered nine-year-old while homeless and running from the police, so operating a garage probably isn't harder than that.

When the food is ready, Sean feels Daniel's bony elbow hit him in the ribs. "Everyone is waiting on you to make a speech so we can eat."

"No way," Sean says. "I suck at speeches. Besides, you're the one who likes attention. Why don't you give a speech?"

"Hey everyone!" Daniel shouts, and his voice cuts through the chatter so everyone's eyes fall onto them like spotlights singling out a soloist. "Sean has some words he wants to say!"

Sean's fingers sting as he punches Daniel in the shoulder, and Daniel laughs, and everyone is looking, so Sean has to say something.

"So, I'm not good at speeches," Sean says, rubbing the back of his neck.

Daniel boos, which draws a laugh.

Behind the freshly-painted words Diaz Brothers Repair Shop on the top of the building, some of the letters for Bob's Garage still show where the blue paint around them faded in the sun, a sign that some scars do not go away. When Sean was a kid, he hated Dad for making him give up weekends and school holidays to work here. Most of his duties included watching Daniel or handing customers their keys, but he would doodle on a notepad and imagine life anywhere else, and he swore he would never end up back here.

But in his short life, Sean has been a fugitive. He's faced down guns and worked on a weed farm. He's walked across a desert and lost an eye. He's torn down a wall. And been to prison. He's gone to art school and lived in Los Angeles. He's had some great days but mostly some really terrible ones. And even though Dad might say, "You're a Diaz. You were born to roam," at some point, you can have your fill of adventure.

He is tired of running. He is ready to try being home.

In front of Sean stand his and Daniel's five employees with their spouses and a couple of kids.

Beaming at him are Claire and Stephen, who took Sean and Daniel in when it was hard to do so, who did the hard work of raising Daniel when Sean couldn't.

Chris, who has grown into a gangly, awkward young-adult, scratches his arm, probably wondering if helping Daniel move into the apartment is worth the free food. This big-hearted nerd was the friend Daniel needed when it seemed like the kid's childhood was a thing of the past.

Lyla bites her lip, smirking, clearly waiting for Sean to make an ass out of himself with this speech. She's Sean's partner in crime, a freaking fighter who is with him forever as long as he is with her.

And Sean imagines Brody is here too. This week, Sean has checked Brody's blog, which updated on Thursday. So Brody is still out there, traveling the road. Being good enough to help desperate kids at their lowest points.

He imagines Cassidy, Finn, Hannah, and Jacob who taught him that there was more to life than the narrow confines of society. Sean couldn't find any obituaries about vagrants sucked under trains, so he hopes they are okay.

He pictures Mom, who he called yesterday though she was shocked to hear from him. She did the hard thing of showing him that it's okay to look out for yourself. And that maybe you can still be there for people, if you give them a reason to give you a chance.

He thinks about Max, and he hopes that the lessons she has learned have helped her, the way he thinks they have helped him.

And he imagines Dad. Who died both a decade ago and also last week. Who raised him to be a good, selfless man, but, in the end, gave him permission to take care of himself too.

"After our dad died," Sean says, setting a hand on Daniel's shoulder, "there were nights when I thought life could never be good again. I know it is hard to care about me and Daniel, but all of you do. And we could not have done any of this alone. I'm sorry we were difficult to love, but thank you for doing it anyway. For being bright spots in a lot of darkness. You will probably never understand how much it means that you showed me that there can be good days again. So thank you. For everything. Always and always and always."

# # #

At sunset, Sean sits in a camping chair on the tiny, concrete balcony of his apartment that overlooks the Z-Mart. A bucket of beer sits beside him, and he takes a slow sip of one of them. In the morning, Daniel is heading to Beaver Creek to take Chris home and to get the last of his stuff, but right now, the "Spirit Squad" is setting up the PlayBox. Sean getting his memories back, learning he's a mechanic, being people's boss—it's all exhausting, and he is thankful for this bit of quiet.

Sean opens his phone and scrolls to Toby's Instagram. About two months ago, Toby posted of picture of himself in a suit with another man in a suit, on a beach, both of them wearing wedding rings. In the photo, Toby grins ear-to-ear, and this hurts, but seeing Toby that happy makes Sean more happy than not.

Like Cassidy before, it's weird to miss someone who you are a stranger to.

Shit, did I do the right thing this time? Sean wonders. Is there going to be another storm?

At least for right now, there are only clear skies over Seattle.

The glass door behind Sean slides open, and Daniel throws himself into the other camping chair. "We have got to get a bigger TV or Chris is going to own my ass at Overwatch."

"Is he okay sleeping on our couch tonight?" Sean asks. "I can get him more blankets or something."

"Do you know how many nights he and I slept in his tree house? The couch is not worse than sleeping on splinters and nails." Daniel holds his hand over the bucket of beer. One of the bottles rises into his palm, and with a flick of his wrist, the cap pops off without a bottle opener. "Chris started watching this week's episode of his Twitch show about Dungeons and Dragons. It's kind of cool, but also like a million-hours long, so we have some bro time."

Sean holds out his bottle to Daniel. "I'm good with some bro time."

"With me moving in, it can be 'bro-time' all the time," Daniel says and his bottle clinks against Sean's.

Daniel's scrawny arms stick out of his tanktop like toothpicks poking out of a hotdog. The shirt barely covers a tattoo on his chest that says Dad. And he has a really bad goatee. But overall, Daniel looks good—for a total dork. And he seems happy.

Even if things fall apart—which, in life, always eventually happens—right now, everything Sean has been through is worth it.

"So I have to tell you something," Daniel says, picking at the label of his beer. "I went into your room."

"Nineteen-years-old and still can't respect my privacy," Sean laughs.

"I was looking for deodorant! But I saw the sketchbook on the bed, the drawings for something called Superwolf. They looked really good."

"Thanks," Sean says, sipping his beer. "I'm thinking about publishing an online comic."

"Dude, Sean, that would be so cool!" And Daniel's eyes light up like they did when he was little on Christmas. "It made me sad when you stopped drawing so much. So I'm glad you're doing it again. I always thought you would be an awesome artist."

"Maybe in another life," Sean says quietly. "There's kind of a lot of things I wish were different. And I guess having an art career wasn't meant to be. But I think that's okay. Sometimes you have to look at what you do have and realize, hey, this is good. This is enough. You can deserve good things but not have them be the things you wanted, and it's maybe brave to be 'just some kid from Seattle.'" In that first life, Sean made a promise to Daniel when Daniel found out their Dad had died. And in this one, it was one of the lessons Sean passed on to himself—to always be honest with Daniel and to never lie to him. So Sean opens his phone to his text messages. "I have something I need to tell you, too, enano."

Daniel takes the phone and squints at the screen. "'It was good talking to you, and I hope we can do it again,'" Daniel reads. "The contact says it's from 'Mom.' What kind of freaky girl—or guy—did you meet that makes you call them 'Mom'?"

"Gross, dude," Sean says, taking his phone back. "That's our actual mother. Like, the woman who gave birth to us."

Daniel blinks. Then stands up. And there's not much room on the balcony, but he paces back and forth, pressing his knuckles against his temples, and then he almost trips on the camping chair before he sits back down again. "You talked to Karen? The Karen Diaz?"

"Karen Reynolds, actually."

"You hate her. The last time you even mentioned her was after she sent that 'bullshit letter' after Dad's funeral. Being pissed at Karen is, like, the only thing you and Grandma Claire ever agreed on. You have to tell me how the hell this happened."

"It's kind of a long and shitty story," Sean says. "But I promise I will tell you all of it. But not right now. If that's okay."

And Daniel pesters him for a bit, makes an exaggerated show of begging before finally saying it's cool, they have plenty of bro times ahead.

"You know what the best part of today was, Sean?" Daniel says. "It was seeing you happy. I don't think I've seen you happy since Dad died."

And Sean draws in a long breath, one that stretches across multiple lifetimes and all the way back to October 28, 2016. "For the longest time, I didn't think I could be. And then I realized that me being miserable didn't help anyone. That I deserved some happiness."

"You do," Daniel says. "You deserve all of the happiness. You're, like, the world's second-best brother."

"Only second-best?"

"Well, obviously I'm the best."

The sun has almost sunk over the horizon, and a cool night has drifted over Seattle when they finish their beers. Daniel uses his powers to open another one for each of them. He raises the bottle to his lips, but before he drinks, he says, "Do you think Dad would be proud of us?"

"I know he would be, enano," Sean says. "Of both of us."

"I still miss him. I remember he used to tell me stories to make me feel better. I liked how, in his stories, no matter how bad things got—"

"—in the end, everything always worked out okay," Sean finishes. He takes a long swig of his beer, and the alcohol warms his chest and tingles his arms. His brother is only shadows in the dim light floating up from the street lamps below. It would be great if this moment could freeze and stretch on forever. But life isn't like that. And you only have so much time. And sometimes you have to plow through the bad parts to get to the good. "So I have a story that is like one of Dad's. It'll answer how I got back in touch with Mom. And probably raise a lot of other questions. It's kind of long. And a lot of it is sad. But if you stick with it . . . things turn out okay in the end."

Sean takes a breath. And he begins:

"Once upon a time, in a wild, wild world . . ."

Soundtrack – Outro: "Be More Kind"

by Frank Turner

This has been "The Bravest Wolf in the World"

A Life is Strange 2 Fan Fiction

Episode Four: The Storm

Siempre y Siempre y Siempre Ending


the wind blew both of us to sand and sea

and where the dry land stands is hard to say

as the current drags us by the shore

we can no longer say for sure

who's drowning or if they can be saved

and when you're out there floundering

like a lighthouse i will shine

be more kind, my friends, try to be more kind

like a beacon reaching out

to you and yours from me and mine

be more kind, my friends, try to be more kind

in a world that has decided

that it's going to lose its mind

be more kind, my friends, try to be more kind