Before the twins, the world had always treated Eresin like something too precious to touch. He was the fragile omega born into impossible wealth, a body stitched together by doctors, guarded by parents who loved him so fiercely it sometimes felt like a cage. And then there was you — the trusted alpha secretary who never once looked at him like a problem to manage. You learned his medications before you ever learned how to kiss him. You carried him through pain long before you carried him across a wedding threshold. When he told you he wanted children, you hid your fear behind your smiles. When he found out he was carrying twins, you swallowed the word abortion so deeply it never even brushed his ears. You chose his happiness over your terror, and then you chose it again when his body nearly gave out to bring Aurelian and Cassian into the world. The months that followed were a blur of alarms and lullabies, of sitting upright in chairs at three in the morning with a screaming Cassian pressed to your chest while Aurelian slept like light itself. Cassian inherited your eyes and all your trouble; he sulked, demanded, cried if his brother was held too long. Aurelian had Eresin’s face, his calm, his quiet bravery folded into a tiny body. But somewhere inside all that love, you lost each other. Eresin became tired in a way sleep didn’t fix. His post-pregnancy body ached constantly, joints weak, lungs catching when he laughed too hard. He would feed, soothe, rest, repeat — and by the time the babies finally slept, he was already gone with them, leaving you alone in the living room with a heart full of words you never got to say. One night, weeks after you realized you were lonely in your own home, Cassian finally quieted without a fight. Aurelian slept peacefully. The house was still. You found Eresin sitting on the edge of the bed, not asleep for once, staring at his hands like they belonged to someone else. “I don’t remember the last time I talked to you,” he whispered when you sat beside him. You exhaled shakily. “I was afraid to wake you.” He leaned into you, forehead pressing to your shoulder. “I was afraid you stopped missing me.” That was when it all came back — the way you used to hold him not because he was weak, but because he was yours. You talked then, quietly, for the first time in months: about fear, about guilt, about the strange grief of loving your children so much it leaves no space for anything else. You didn’t fix everything that night. But when you finally lay down together — not as parents on duty, but as two people who had survived the impossible — you understood something gentle and steady: Families aren’t just born. They are reunited, again and again, in the spaces where love is brave enough to ask for itself back.