Mommy and Daddy. And Mommy and Daddy. And Daddy.

Day 03 - Your Parents

I have five (And you thought three was more than normal, Rory?). Dream Ryan and Dream Emma (as the Victorian alternates called them), Victorian Ryan and Victorian Emma (as the dream alternates called them), and the vampire Ryan. Seven if you count this world’s alternates of my parents, which I don’t.

Dream Ryan and Emma raised me, and they’re usually who I mean when I say “my parents.” They were very much like the Ryan and Emma from this universe, and since they like to be secretive, I won’t go into detail.

They were good to me, but abusive to each other. We had our share of issues, but we were a close family. In some ways, they were very much like normal parents: worried about my education, my career, and when I’d settle down and give them grandchildren.

Their marriage was interracial, interfaith and interspecies, and they fought hard to make it work. Sometimes that was because they were obsessive, sometimes it seemed like it was sheer stubbornness, but it was obvious that they deeply loved each other.

My dad was killed when I was nineteen. My mom was killed when I was twenty-six.

Victorian Ryan and Emma weren’t married or in love, and they were only barely a couple. I never knew them.

Ryan was obsessed with finding the person who murdered his wife. He hated everyone and everything, especially himself. My dad didn’t like to talk about him, except to use him as an example of how destructive revenge is.

When I went to that reality to look for my second set of parents, I found him. By then, he suffered from a delusion that’s fairly common there: that he’d drowned and was dead. I tried to talk to him, but he wasn’t coherent. All I could do was study his tattoos.

Emma was obsessed with manipulation. She got herself involved with the politics of court and the politics of Hell, and she was involved with several of Hell’s representatives.

When I looked for her, all I could find were her journals. They were more about other people than herself, and a lot of it’s in code that I’m still trying to understand, but they’re all I have of her.

When my dad died, he became a vampire. I know he’s not the same person that my father was, but I’m not the same person as that father’s son, and we were still left with enough memories and emotions and attachments that I’d rather call him “Dad” than “Ryan.”

For a while, he pretended that he wasn’t killing because he knew my family would kill him if he did. Then, he pretended that he wasn’t killing because we had a common enemy and he wanted our help killing her.

That common enemy was the vampire my aunt became. He was always on her side, and lying about it. Together, they destroyed everything I cared about.