A/N: I noticed that you all picked C…is this because you genuinely liked the option or you like Levi more?  I’ll just write and hope it was the former…

“This is going to be the worst few hours of your life,” Ellie warned me, sitting down in the waiting room. “Just thought I’d let you know that.”

I couldn’t help but offer her little more than a glare despite the fact that she looked so incredibly like my wife that it almost made me laugh. Until actually getting to know Ellie (and getting past the fact that we loathed each other) I had never looked at her enough to notice how very much like Ariella she really was. The soft gold curls, the blue eyes…I could totally see why my father had loved Ellie. I just couldn’t see how he could get over her overbearing, self-righteous, bitch on overdrive attitude. It almost made me sick.

Her husband, some minister from Nevada, only smiled and continued reading his pocket sized bible. Ariella had warned me not to open my mouth on religion in front of our parents. I knew better than to fight her on it. She was usually right anyway. It still irked me that he would sit there and pray and I would pace wildly for hours until the doctor ushered me in. He nearly forced me into a blue jacket thing that covered me from throat to ankle and some latex gloves. I wondered about that. Did he think I was going to stick my hands somewhere? Hell no. That was his job. My job had been getting her pregnant and I had done that full well enough.

“Now, Mr. Whellan, don’t be alarmed at the blood…” but I wasn’t listening already. I could Ariella speaking rapidly to a nurse in a voice that I knew meant, “I’m in pain and I’m going to kill whoever caused this.” Of course, I knew that I would catch the blame for that. No matter how much you tell a woman it takes two to tango, all they want to say is how they never ever want to ever be near any reproductive organ on the male body ever again.

“Okay, Ariella, we got him.” I hadn’t wanted to be there, particularly. I was not fond of pain nor was I very fond of blood. I could already smell it in the room. I knew that scent, which I owned in much part to my psychotically twisted mother. I shook the thought and knelt next to the wincing girl in the bed. Her blonde hair was sweat soaked and she had tears rolling down her cheeks in steady streams. She had refused the drugs, I knew that much without asking. She had told me she would. I had told her that was stupid. She had hit me. That ended the conversation. We liked to end things easily.

“Don’t you ever touch me again,” she hissed, squeezing the hand I offered her. I chuckled and nodded my agreement.

“It sounds like a deal.”

“And don’t you ever be at work if I’m giving birth again!”

“Of course not, Ariella but if I’m not allowed to touch you how am I supposed to get you pregnant again?” I asked, giving her the half-smile she professed to love. It earned a slight respite from her verbal abuse.

“We’ll…talk about that—” and then she was screaming again, her head up and her hand cutting off the circulation to my fingers.

Now you’re probably all thinking why is he being so corpse cold about this? This is supposed to be a beautiful moment. Well, I’m not a very emotional person when it comes to ‘beautiful.’ The only thing beauty ever earned me was being shackled to a bedpost and beaten like a dog. Outside of Ariella, beauty meant little to me. The only thing I felt at that point was the pain she was feeling. I loved her so…it hurt to see her in that much agony. She was writhing beneath the doctor’s hands, screaming, and the smell of blood and sweat was noxious to me. I leaned forward and kissed her forehead. “Breathe, my love. We can’t have you asphyxiating on the table.”

“Shut up!” she shrieked. I did.

“We’re almost there, Ariella. Just one more…that’s my girl.”

No, doc, that’s my girl. I almost corrected him but I bit my tongue and a moment later, a new, shrill scream had filled the room, short and gasping. My heart stopped. Holy hell, I was a father. Ariella’s head fell back on the pillow and she sighed.

Now, there are a lot of times I can’t feel emotion. In fact, the greater part of my childhood was one entirely black pit, devoid of all emotion outside of hate. I was consumed by hatred. I hated everything and everyone around me. I woke up every morning only to feel that burning thing in my chest and the swelling hope that today would be the day my mother dropped dead on top of me. I prayed for that, is that sick? I think it is. Ariella said it wasn’t but I truly think that it is the sickest thing I ever thought. That hatred kept me alive, made me whole for awhile, and then, with Selene gone and no one to hate, I shattered. I became the bundle of gasping emotions that I was when my father took me to Ellie and her pretty blonde daughter, Ariella. I was sad, hurt, happy, depressed, hateful, joyous, and aching all at once. It’s a lot to feel at such a young age. I didn’t know which emotion I wanted to feel.

I didn’t know which emotion I wanted to feel then. I was overwhelmed, terrified, surprised, and absolutely overjoyed all at once. I couldn’t even hear the doctor and Ariella trying to speak to me. You would have thought I had just given birth, not her. “Dorian?” she asked. “Dorian, what it is?”

“Huh?” I turned toward her and then looked at the baby, wiggling on the table and screaming like it had the lungs of a full-grown adult man that had never had a puff of cigarette smoke in his entire life. A nurse lifted the bundle in a pink towel and laid the baby gently on its mother. “I think it’s a girl…” I managed.

“Really? Because the pink didn’t give it away or anything?”

I allowed a nervous laugh and stared down at the wrinkled, pink, spindly little blob that was my daughter. My daughter, I thought again. She was still squalling, her fists out, her little legs kicking at the air. She had no tears though, only mindless screams of terror, I imagined. I’d be scared too if I had just been forcefully sucked from between the warm legs of my mother. Oh yeah…that had happened to me several times before. I remembered then, it was terrifying. “Wow…” I whispered.

Ariella laughed, not the nervous thing I had given her, but a real laugh. “Shocking, isn’t it? Imagine feeling it.”

“No thanks, I’ll pass. Do you want me to call for your mother?”

The doctor looked up and smiled. “I’ll go get her. You can stay with the baby and mommy.”

Do not call my wife ‘mommy,’ I told him mentally. She is not mommy. She is Ariella. I held my hand out to the screaming girl and she caught my thumb with her fist, holding it an infant death grip. I tilted my head, amused. She was strong and health and had all ten fingers and all ten toes. I couldn’t have been more pleased with a baby. “So what do we call her?” I asked, finally settling into the fact that this unplanned bundle was really as joyous as they said it was.

I knew full well what we would call her. I had wanted to call her Shelby and Ariella had argued for Zoe. We had looked up the meanings at that, and both decided that Zoe (life) sounded a whole lot better than Shelby (sheltered town).

So Zoe Annabelle Whellan was born in July when I was twenty-two years old and just graduating from school with a bachelor’s in psychology. Ariella was one year from finishing her own degree in teaching.

Unfortunately for her, she never kept her vow to never allow me to touch her again. Two weeks after Zoe’s first birthday, Alistair was born. Both the children had my black hair but they had been given Ariella’s blue eyes. Zoe was bright. She laughed so hard she nearly cried all the time and they were hard laughs that came from her stomach. Her big eyes, her mother’s eyes, lit a room when she entered and the smile on her face always made me smile. I smiled a lot more with the children around. I came home from work to Zoe hanging from my arm and Alistair sitting on my feet. Ariella walked in about a half an hour after me, scrubbing her arms down with antibacterial wash before she touched the babies. She was a high school teacher and professed that one never knew what kind of virus was going around.

By the time Zoe was seven, I had parenting all figured out. Alistair, unlike his sister, was so complacent that all you had to do to please him was sit him in a playroom. He did the rest himself. His eyes were a darker blue than his sister’s and he always looked as if he were seeing right through you. Ariella called it “the Dorian look.” Of course, that would explain why Alistair and I got along famously while Zoe tended to drive me mad. It was not that I loved Alistair more. I didn’t. I loved them both with different parts of my heart. Zoe made me laugh and she was beautiful like her mother and I adored her. She was my first baby and would always be special for that. I remembered the wrinkled pink ball she had been and then I saw the vibrant, intelligent second grader that she was. Alistair reminded me of myself with less pain. He was frightfully smart, like Ariella, and was in the gifted children’s program at his school. He delighted in reading and writing. We had painted his room in a special paint that turned into a blackboard when it dried. His walls were always covered.

And so I will delve back into my story two days before the tragedy. Ariella was walking in with Zoe in tow, dragging her ballet bag and speaking animatedly to her mother with wild hand motions. Alistair was sitting on the counter next to where I stood, munching on carrots. He watched intently and then leaned toward me and said, with all first-grade knowledge, “She never shuts up.”

I chuckled and tapped his nose. He turned his attention back to the vegetables I was cutting up and adding to the big plastic salad bowl. When Zoe had ballet, cooking fell to Alistair and I. Neither of us were very talented so it tended to lean on the chicken/steak salad side when Zoe danced. “Dorian, what is he doing on the counter?” Ariella asked me, kissing my cheek as she passed. Alistair frowned and climbed down onto the chair he had used to get up there.

“He was keeping me company,” I answered, slipping him a cucumber chunk. He giggled and tucked it into his cheek. Mother’s rule allotted no snacks before dinner but I always let Alistair eat when it was just the two of us. He was a veggie maniac.

“He can keep you company at the table. Besides, he’s six, Dorian. He shouldn’t be so close to the knives.”

“He knows not to touch them, Ariella. Stop worrying so much.” I would loathe myself for saying those words later.

Ariella shook her head and walked away and I finished the salad, laying sliced steak on top and putting the bowl on the table. Alistair and Zoe slid into their chairs respectively and waited for their mother to dish them out their portions. Zoe tended not to eat enough and Alistair picked over the lettuce and meat, preferring raw vegetables occasionally coated in Italian dressing. Ariella made sure they both had their food groups. I was not the nutritionist. I watched the mental health and as far as both children went, I was pleased. Zoe was an extrovert, Alistair an introvert. They took after their parents and until they started displaying signs of problems, I called them normal though Ariella insisted something was wrong with Alistair. He was too quiet. I always told her the intelligent ones were the quiet ones. She was just a paradox.

“I have a recital in two days,” Zoe said through a mouthful of steak and carrots. “Are you coming, Daddy?”

I looked up at her and back at Ariella. If I went, Alistair had to go, and if there was one thing Alistair did not enjoy watching, it was ballet. “I think maybe Daddy should stay home with Alistair,” Ariella answered quickly.

“But why?” Zoe whined, throwing down her utensils and I was immediately reminded of similar episode of my own in which I had earned being chained in a closet. I shook the thought. Neither Zoe nor Alistair had any inkling of my past or the fact that Ariella was also my step-sister as well as my wife. “He’s such a baby!”

Alistair threw his own fork down then and glared. “I am not a baby! You’re a baby! You’re the one crying because I don’t want to go to your stupid dance!”

“You don’t want to do anything!” Zoe’s voice had grown shrill and I winced at the tone. Alistair looked at me for support while Zoe looked at her mother. “Mommy!”

I leaned toward the boy and whispered, “If you go, I’ll get you ice cream. I promise. No whining, Alistair.”

He stared at me for a good long moment, debating his position and then he nodded. I smiled and answered, “We’ll go. We’ll all go together and then we’ll all get ice cream to celebrate Zoe’s dazzling success.”

Zoe was beaming. She looked so much like Ariella…

Two days later we were packed into the SUV. Alistair was still too small to ride without a booster seat and when he was strapped in, we finally left. Both of them had their little radios in their ears, courtesy of Ellie last Christmas. Alistair’s was blue with a shark on the end and Zoe’s was the shape of a ballerina. I dreaded the recital. Alistair would wiggle and turn and roll his eyes the whole time. I would only pay attention long enough to watch my daughter. Ariella would hold my hand but that made everything worth it. I was still as in love with her as I had been the day I kissed her in the car after school.

As I expected, the recital was painful. Alistair fell asleep, his dark curly hair damp around his face and his eyes shut. I could see the blue veins pulsing in his eyelids as he slept on through the music. Ariella’s hand was warm in mine and Zoe was on stage, a vision of a hyacinth in red. She pranced, twirled, smiled, and stumbled her way through her recital. By the end, she was just as bored as we were and intent on ice cream. I sat in the back of the car on the way to the stand. Zoe had fallen asleep in my lap and Alistair was half-awake in his seat, staring at the front of the car like a zombie. I almost laughed and he looked up at me at the sound. “I want mint…mint chocolate,” he whispered, his head lulling to the side.

“I know you do, buddy. I’ll get it for you,” I told him, mussing his hair.

“I love you…”

“I love you too, Alistair.”

I got out of the car then, toting Zoe, holding her hand. I was holding her hand…I still don’t know how it happened. I reached in my pocket, she was watching a boy throw a ball with his dog, and then she was gone. Her warm hand was absent in mind and I looked down but she was gone. She was so gone it was like a void had been left in my side.

For a moment, I was sure she had gone back to the car and then the screaming started. Tires were screaming, some woman I didn’t know was screaming, and then Zoe. “Daddy!” I turned in time to see her still on the road, lying on her back. There was blood…blood from somewhere and I remembered the day she was born. Ariella was out of the car and Alistair was struggling with his belts, screaming his sister’s name and I was moving. I don’t know what made me go but I was moving and then I was cradling her little head in my lap and she was sobbing my name. Even then I knew it was useless. Her body was crushed in the shape of the grill of the car. There was blood on my clothes and on my hands…why hadn’t she kept holding my hand?

Someone was shouting for an ambulance and Alistair was there, at my side, on the road and shrieking. I had never heard Alistair scream like that. Ariella gathered him up and hauled him off the asphalt, shouting at him to get in the car and stay there. He couldn’t move. His little legs had turned to lead and his sister was dying in my arms and I felt guilty.

I felt so guilty it made my heart rip. I couldn’t tell what Alistair was screaming but I knew it was for me. It took me minutes of processing, struggling above the wail of an ambulance and Ariella’s shouting to know what he said. “Save her, Daddy!” I couldn’t. I held her head and I let her squeeze my hand and she was crying, her face turned away from mine like it was her fault.

Damn it Zoe, why did you run from me? Why did you chase the ball? Why were you in the road?

And then she stopped breathing.