The evening in the Malkor sitting room was a living thing, woven from firelight, full bellies, and the profound, drowsy contentment that follows a day of relentless belonging. Shiro was wedged between Valeria and the sofa's arm, a pliant, warm weight. Kuro, having given up all pretence of personal space, was slumped against her other side, his head a heavy, warm pressure on her shoulder. Aki was a contented curl on the sofa, and Phaenna and Eireneon occupied their own chairs like benevolent monarchs surveying their kingdom.
Eireneon had been talking for some time, his voice a deep, rhythmic instrument painting pictures in the air. He spoke of the Borderless War, the ancient, grinding conflict between Nyxarion and Astralon, but he did so as Valeria had instructed him, with deliberate, protective ambiguity. He was a master storyteller, his words conjuring sweeping battles of light against shadow, of ideals clashing in the void, but he never named which side their family had fought for. He spoke of courage and sacrifice, of choices made in impossible darkness, but the 'why' and the 'who' remained veiled, a secret too dangerous for the hearts listening in the firelight.
"It was a war without maps," Eireneon rumbled, his gaze distant, seeing echoes in the flames. "A war fought in the spaces between loyalties. Some fought for order, thinking it light. Some fought for freedom, knowing it looked like chaos. And in the middle, families... they just fought to stay together. To keep their own little constellations intact."
He was the epicentre of the tale, his presence anchoring the history in something solid and real. Phaenna, seated beside him, contributed not with words, but with sustenance. She moved with a quiet, efficient grace, placing pinches of spiced nuts, slices of sweet fruit, and tiny, buttery pastries into waiting hands Valeria's, Aki's, and, with a particular tender focus, instructions to feed the two boys.
The feeding was a silent language. A grape pressed to Shiro's lips until he automatically opened for it. A piece of cheese placed directly into Kuro's hand, her fingers giving his a quick, reassuring squeeze before withdrawing. It was a stream of care, a physical reassurance that ran parallel to the uncertain history being spoken.
Then, as Eireneon described a lull in the centuries long conflict, a moment of eerie, starlit silence on a phantom battlefield, Phaenna leaned toward Valeria. She was refilling her daughter's cup, but she bent close, her voice dropping to a whisper meant only for Valeria's ear, a whisper that, in the quiet room, carried like a clear bell to the two boys tucked against her.
"So proud of you, my dear," Phaenna breathed, her voice thick with an emotion that was both joy and an old, profound ache. "So happy for you. After everything... after everything you've endured. Especially after losing what would've been your two suns." A tiny, shaky sigh. "A truly cruel fate."
The words landed in the warm room like shards of ice. Valeria, who had been a relaxed column of warmth, went perfectly still. The easy, open softness of her face didn't crumple; it simply... faded. It was as if a light behind her eyes had been abruptly shuttered, leaving her features calm but eerily vacant for a single, heart stopping fraction of a second. Then, as if by a monumental effort of will, the light returned. But it was a different light. It turned inward, pouring over the two boys pressed against her sides. Her arms, which had been loosely draped around them, tightened almost convulsively. She dipped her head, nuzzling first Shiro's white hair, then Kuro's dark strands, breathing them in as if they were the only air left in the world. Her 'two new suns.' Her lodestars.
Shiro had frozen, the sweet taste of the grape turning to ash in his mouth. He'd heard it. He felt the fleeting chill that had passed through Valeria's body, saw the way her smile had become a fragile, forced thing.
Kuro had heard it too. His princely detachment, so hard won in this space of safety, evaporated. His eyes, sharp and assessing, flicked from his grandmother's sorrow pinched face to Valeria's, to his , carefully composed mask. He saw the battle there, the fierce, rapid blinking against a sudden sheen of tears, the way her throat worked as she swallowed down a wave of feeling. Her body language was a scream in a silent room: a spine held too straight, fingers digging just slightly into his tunic, fighting back a tide.
They were intrigued. A mystery had been laid bare, not in words, but in a fracture of emotion. They wanted to press. To ask, The urge was a physical pull in Shiro's chest, a tactical puzzle in Kuro's mind.
But they didn't. Not yet. The atmosphere was too tender, too newly woven.
So they endured. They endured the resumed teasing from Eireneon, who launched into a ridiculous anecdote about Valeria's first, disastrous attempt at diplomacy involving a confused diplomat and a song. They endured Phaenna's relentless, healing affection, accepting more snacks, leaning into the pinches on their cheeks, the kisses on their heads. They let themselves feel, for a little longer, the simple, uncomplicated joy of being part of this loud, loving machine.
Aki, sensing the shift but not its depth, joined in the teasing, targeting Shiro with a story about his childhood fondness for a particular star. She was glowing, alight with the feeling of inclusion, of family.
In the quiet that settled after the laughter, however, the unasked question hung heavy. Kuro, nestled against Valeria's right side, made the decision. He tilted his head back to look up at her profile, her face softened by firelight but still holding that hidden tension.
"Grandmother," he began, his voice deliberately calm, neutral. "What did you mean earlier? About... two lost suns?"
It was the question that broke the dam. Valeria flinched as if struck. The carefully maintained composure cracked.
The words, , didn't just land in the room; they detonated inside Valeria's chest. For a heartbeat, the warm, firelit sitting room vanished. She was back in the cold, sterile quiet of the royal infirmary, the scent of antiseptic and despair clogging her throat. The memory was a ghost with icy fingers, wrapping around her windpipe.
The royal physician's voice, professionally detached.
As if her children were failed experiments. As if the two silent, perfect little forms she'd never been allowed to hold were sketches to be crumpled up and discarded.
She fought it. She clenched her jaw so hard her teeth ached. She focused on the physical reality of the present, the weight of Shiro against her left side, the solid warmth of Kuro on her right. She traced the pattern of the wool blanket under her fingers, counting the threads.
But the ghost was persistent. It brought the feel of the midwife's too gentle hands, the pity in her eyes that felt like condemnation. It brought the hollow, leaden ache in her abdomen that had nothing to do with healing and everything to do with emptiness. And then, the sharpest cut of all: her husband's face. Not the man she'd married, but a stranger carved from grief and granite, standing at the foot of the sickbed. His eyes, once warm, were chips of frost.
His voice had been low, stripped of all affection, leaving only a stark, terrifying accusation.
She had been too weak, too ravaged by physical and emotional blood loss to even form a defence. She could only stare, the silent screaming inside her skull.
He had turned away, his final words thrown over his shoulder like a spear meant to pin her to the bed, to the role of a cursed woman.
The memory was a vortex, threatening to pull her down into the old, frozen silence where she was not a mother, not a soldier, but a monument to failure. A curse.
She blinked, a frantic, physical action to clear the phantom infirmary from her vision. She forced air into her lungs, a controlled soldier's breath that shuddered on the intake. A smile, brittle and terrible, touched her lips, a muscle memory of command. She could not break. Not here. Not now. Not in front of her sons, who were finally seeing her as a fortress, not the ruin she knew she was. She wrapped her arms tighter around them, as if their living, breathing reality could armour her against the dead past. The tremor that started in her core was ruthlessly suppressed, locked down behind a wall of sheer, desperate will.
Back in the room, she looked down at Kuro, her eyes wide and suddenly terrified, not of him, but of the truth he was asking her to share. "Not now, Kuro," she whispered, her voice raspy. She tried to smile, a pathetic, wobbly thing. "It's nothing. An old story."
But Shiro, on her other side, felt the tremor that ran through her. He saw the way her gaze darted to Phaenna, a silent plea for help that went unanswered as Phaenna just looked back with tear filled, apologetic eyes. The protective fury that always simmered in him for her ignited.
"It's not nothing," Shiro said, his own voice quiet but firm. He turned within the circle of her arm to face her. "You faded. When Grandma said it. You... you went away for a second. What suns, Mama?"
The word 'Mama,' usually a talisman of safety, now felt like a key turning in a terrible lock. Valeria's breath hitched. A single, traitorous tear escaped, tracing a hot path down her cheek. She shook her head, trying to dismiss them both, but the fight was gone. The burden of it, the burden of this love that was born from a chasm of loss, was too great. Her mother had seen it. Her boys had seen it. The secret, the foundational grief of her life, was rising to the surface, and she was too tired, too full of love for them, to push it back down.
"I..." she began, and her voice shattered. She looked at them, at their faces so full of concern, of love for , and the dam broke. A sob, raw and guttural, tore from her throat. She brought her hands to her face, her shoulders curling in as if against a physical blow.
"Oh, my girl," Phaenna whispered, starting to rise, but Aki was already moving, her face pale with concern.
But Shiro and Kuro were faster. In a synchronized movement that spoke of a deeper, unspoken pact, they escaped and slid off the sofa, kneeling on the rug before her. They didn't hesitate. They moved into the space of her grief, their own fears forgotten in the face of hers.
"Mama," Shiro said, his voice cracking. He reached up, pulling her hands from her face. Her cheeks were wet, her eyes red and hopelessly lost.
Kuro, uncharacteristically gentle, placed a hand on her knee. "Tell us," he said, and it wasn't a prince's command. It was a brother's plea. A son's promise. "You don't have to carry it alone. Not anymore. Not with us."
Valeria looked at them, the echo of her own words to them, her two boys, her storm and her rain, kneeling at her feet like supplicants before the source of all their pain and joy. The weight of her love for them, a love that was both a balm and a constant, aching reminder, collided with the old, never healed wound. She practically broke under the confluence.
But she told them. The words came in heaving sobs, in gasped fragments, balled into the fabric of their tunics as they clutched her hands.
"I tried to name them," Valeria whispered, the words sandpaper rough. She wasn't looking at them, but at some point in the firelight where the past bled through. "For weeks. I had lists. I'd say them aloud in our empty rooms. Kaelan. Elian. Corin. But they didn't... stick. How could they? They never breathed them."
Her hands, which had been clutching theirs, went slack. Her gaze turned hollow, fixed on a memory only she could see. "The first one... I felt him go still. A flutter, then nothing. Just... an absence. A silence inside me where there had been a dance. The midwives said 'common.' The physicians said 'nature.' My husband... he looked at my belly as if it had betrayed him. As if had."
Kuro's breath hitched. Shiro's fingers tightened around hers, a silent anchor.
"Then the second," she continued, her voice dropping to a thread. "I was so careful. I did everything right. I sang. I talked to her. I begged her to stay." A broken sound, not quite a laugh. "She stayed longer. I let myself hope. I bought tiny socks. I imagined her face. And then... the same silence. The same crushing, hollow ."
She finally looked at them, her eyes pools of unhealed torment. "Do you know what it is to carry ghosts? To feel your body become a tomb? I could feel the weight of them, Shiro. The weight of their . It was heavier than any armour. It was a cold that sat in my bones and never left."
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Tears fell freely now, not sobs, but a steady, silent river of anguish. "People said 'you can try again.' As if they were... replaceable. As if my heart hadn't been carved out and left empty. My marriage became a memorial no one wanted to visit. He couldn't look at me without seeing the grave I'd carried. And I... I couldn't look at anyone. I was a woman shaped around an absence. A walking, breathing monument to 'what if.'"
Her chest heaved. "When Kaya died... it was that silence all over again. Another light gone. And there you were, Kuro. A little baby made of storm and silence, standing in another kind of ruin. And that empty, frozen place in me... it recognized the shape of yours. It for it. Taking you in wasn't just duty. It was... it was a scream into my own silence. A way to pour love into a chasm so deep I thought it would swallow me whole. You were my fourth 'after.' My proof I could still love something and not break it."
Her voice fractured, a new grief rising. "And then there was Daitaro. My , as she called him. He was mine too, in every way that mattered. I watched him grow from a solemn, feeling child of twelve into a young man of eighteen with too much heart for a world that wanted him hard. I loved him. I loved all of Kaya's children as if they'd come from my own body."
The tears came faster now. "And then they took him. I don't know who. I don't know how. He just... vanished. Erased from the ledger, from the world, from . And that chasm I'd finally begun to fill with Kuro... it cracked open again. Wider. Deeper. Because I'd let myself love another child, and the silence had taken him too. It felt like the curse had come back, the one I'd believed in when my two suns went still inside me. That I wasn't meant to keep children. That anyone I loved would be swallowed by the dark."
She pressed a hand to her chest, as if the physical pressure could contain the breaking inside. "Haruto..." His name was a wound. "He was my itty bitty shadow. My serious little boy who followed me from room to room, who let me hold him when the world got too loud. He was eight when he lost his mother, and I tried... I ... to be enough. And for a while, I was. He'd write to me. Long, careful letters full of strategy and questions and little glimpses of the boy underneath. Even after Daitaro disappeared when Haruto was fourteen, the letters kept coming for a while. Shorter. Colder. But still ."
Her voice broke. "Then two cycles ago, they stopped. Completely. Not one letter since. I don't know if he's alive some days. I don't know if he's eating, or sleeping, or if he still remembers that I love him. He built walls so thick I couldn't find the door, and now I don't even know if he's still on the other side of them. He's out there somewhere, carrying everything alone, and I can't... I can't him."
A sob escaped her, raw and jagged.
"Mira... my crow baby." Her voice softened, something precious and fragile entering it. "She's the thread I held onto. She sends letters, beautiful, sharp, wonderful letters full of her life and her work and little sketches of crows in the margins. But she rarely visits anymore. She follows Haruto into the shadows, does the work he needs her to do, and I understand... I , but every time I see her handwriting on an envelope instead of her face at my door, that chasm aches. Not because she's forgotten me. Because I remember when she was small enough to fit in my lap, when her laughter filled rooms, when I could hold her and pretend the silence hadn't claimed the rest."
She looked at them, her eyes wild with grief and love. "Do you understand? I lost two suns I never got to hold. Then I lost Daitaro, a sun I held a boy I'd loved for six cycles, who called me Aunt and occasionally Mama and meant it. Then I watched Haruto disappear into silence, first by degrees, then completely. Two cycles without a word. Two cycles of not knowing if my itty bitty shadow is still alive in there somewhere. Mira's letters are the only proof I have that any of them still remember me."
She reached out, her trembling hands cradling their faces. "But the other chasm... it stayed. Aching. Until I saw a boy who wanted to step into the same quiet I felt forever. And I that silence, Shiro. I knew its hunger. And I would burn the world before I let it have you too. You didn't fill a hole they left. You... you made new space. You made me a mother, not a monument."
She was crying in earnest now, great, heaving sobs that seemed to wring the poison from a very old wound. The weight was being lifted, not because the loss was gone, but because it was finally being shared. "You are . You gave me a gift... a life... I thought I was simply never allowed to have. I love you. Mama loves you so much, so much it ."
For a moment, there was only the sound of her crying and the crackle of the fire. Then, as one, Shiro and Kuro moved. They surged up from their knees and into her arms on the sofa, wrapping themselves around her, a tangle of limbs and desperate love.
"We love you, Mama," Shiro choked out, his own tears soaking into her tunic. "We're here. We're not going anywhere."
"You're stuck with us," Kuro muttered, his voice thick and unfamiliar with emotion, his face buried in her neck. "Your noisy, messy, horrible suns."
The quiet that followed was soft, soaked through with spent tears and the gentle crackle of the hearth. Shiro was the first to move, shifting until he could press his forehead to Valeria's, their breaths mingling.
"You chose us," he whispered, awe threading his voice. "With all that silence behind you... you still to love us."
"It wasn't a choice," Valeria murmured, her eyes closed. "It was a reflex. Like breathing after drowning. You were the air."
Kuro pulled back slightly, his storm grey eyes glassy but intensely focused. He looked younger, stripped bare. "I thought... I was a political obligation. A burden you shouldered for my mother."
Valeria's thumb stroked his cheek. "You were a gift, Kuro. A furious, brilliant, hurting gift. Every time you scowled, every time you pushed me away, called me Aunt instead of Mama, you were . You were alive. And after so much quiet... even your anger was a song."
"I'm sorry I made it so hard," he said, the words clumsy with unfamiliar sincerity.
"You made it ," she corrected gently. "And you, my rain." She turned to Shiro, her smile wobbly. "You with your sky deep eyes and your silent, screaming heart. You let me hold you when you shattered. You trusted me with your pieces. Do you know what that is to someone who held only dust?"
Shiro's throat worked. "Yes, Mama. I know. Because you gave me a home. You gave me a . You gave me a reason to be."
"You gave me a reason to sing lullabies again," she breathed. "To buy socks that would actually be worn. To wake up wondering what your face would look like when you saw the stars, not wondering if the silence would eat me alive that day."
Kuro, hesitantly, leaned in and kissed her cheek, a dry, awkward, utterly sincere press of his lips. It was so unlike him that a fresh tear spilled from Valeria's eye. "You don't have to earn me or us, Mama," he mumbled, retreating quickly, his ears pink. "We're already yours."
Shiro, emboldened, wrapped his arms around her waist and squeezed tightly, like a child clinging after a nightmare. "We'll be so loud," he promised into her tunic. "We'll be so messy and annoying and . You'll never hear that silence again."
Valeria laughed, a wet, hiccupping sound of pure wonder. She gathered them both in, holding their heads to her chest where two heartbeats had once gone still. Now, she felt the strong, living drums of theirs. "You already are," she whispered into their hair. "My noisy, brilliant, healing lights. You're not just my sons. You're my answer. My 'because.'"
They held her, repeating their love like a mantra until their voices were hoarse. Valeria held them back, her heart so full of this painful, glorious love she thought it would break her ribs. She kissed their heads, their wet cheeks, their hair. "My babies," she cried, laughing through her tears. "My silly, silly, wonderful babies. All mine."
Aki finally joined the hug, wrapping her arms around all three, completing the circle. Phaenna and Eireneon watched, their own faces streaked with tears, holding each other's hands tightly, giving their daughter and her sons this sacred, shattered, healing space.
For a long moment, they just held her as she wept, the shuddering sobs seeming to come from a place older and deeper than they could fathom. The initial storm began to pass, leaving her trembling and spent against them, her face hidden.
It was Kuro who broke the quiet, his voice uncharacteristically soft, yet probing with a strategist's care. "He blamed you," he stated, not a question. He'd pieced it together from the shattered fragments of her story, the husband who couldn't look at her, the chilling finality in her tone.
Valeria didn't deny it. A tiny, pained nod against Shiro's hair.
"And you believed him," Shiro whispered, the realization a hurt in his own voice. He understood believing poisonous lies about oneself. "For a while."
"It was... a quiet thing to believe," she rasped. "It fit the silence."
"But it was a lie," Kuro said, his tone leaving no room for argument. He pulled back just enough to look at her, his storm grey eyes fierce. "You are not a curse. You are a... a lifeline. lifeline."
Shiro nodded fiercely, his arms tightening around her waist. "You held us when we were broken," he said, the words tumbling out. "You loved us back to life. So we're here. For you. Always." He searched for the right words, the ones she had given them in their darkest hours. They came to him, an echo that felt like strength. "You don't have to be strong," he whispered, repeating her own promise back to her, verbatim. "Not with us."
"Never with us," Shiro echoed, finishing the last piece to the puzzle they all now shared.
The echo of her own medicine, administered by their small, sure hands, broke the last dam. A fresh, quieter wave of tears came, but these were different, not drowning but cleansing, cleaning her soul of the hurt it held just as she had for them. She looked from one determined face to the other, her boys, her mirrors, her salvation.
Kuro, hesitantly, reached out and wiped a tear from her cheek with his thumb, a gesture so tender it stole her breath. "The silence doesn't follow you, Mama," he said, the title deliberate and solid. "You it. For us. Now let us end it for you."
They weren't just offering comfort; they were offering a treaty, a reciprocal pact written in the same language of relentless, repairing love she had invented for them. They were her fortress now, too, as she was theirs.
When the storm of tears finally began to subside into hiccupping shudders, Valeria wiped her face with her sleeves, then used them to clumsily dry the boys' cheeks. She took a deep, shaky breath, and a new, soft determination settled over her.
"Right," she sniffed, her voice nasally but firm. "My babies have cried enough. It's time for my babies to eat." She looked at them, her eyes still glistening but clear. "Properly. No arguments."
There were none. Shiro and Kuro, emotionally spent and feeling closer to her than ever before, simply nodded.
They ate the simple supper Phaenna brought, seated around the low table, under Valeria's loving, red rimmed gaze. Even Kuro didn't protest when she fed him a bite of stew, his usual resistance utterly absent in the face of the raw vulnerability they'd all shared.
And as night finally descended on them, she carried them to the large bed, a ridiculous, endearing feat of strength, and announced bedtime. No one protested. They changed with her help and slipped under the covers, a pile of warmth in the dark.
They talked then, not of the heavy truth, but of the memories they were building . The stupid game of Stellar Conquest. The rooftop under the true sky. The taste of the chili laced stew. The love, woven through all of it.
Kuro, in the dark, whispered, "I'm sorry. For everything. For being a... well, for being what I was."
Valeria turned and kissed his forehead. "You have no need to be sorry. I treat you like babies at your age, but it's my right and my privilege."
And in the dark, Shiro added, his voice small but sure, "We'd be your babies forever."
The sweetness of the promise, in the wake of the pain, made Valeria's breath catch. "Ohhh," she breathed, pulling them both tighter. "I was planning on forever. You'll be my babies even when you're married with your own children. You'll be mine."
They talked a little longer, their voices growing slower, softer. The drowsy quiet was a blanket around them, but Valeria, feeling the sacred weight of the night and fiercely determined, leaned over them. Her voice dipped into a syrup sweet, deliberately exaggerated register, each word rounded and stretched into pure, unadulterated baby talk.
"Is my widdle stormcloud all tuckered out from his big, big feels?" she crooned, her lips brushing Kuro's forehead. "Did all that thunder and lightning make his itty bitty brain all sleepy weepy?"
Kuro, who would have once recoiled into dignified fury, merely let his eyes flutter closed. He understood the code now. This wasn't an assault. It was an offering, the purest dialect she possessed. "M'brain is very itty bitty," he mumbled, surrendering to the rhythm. "Needs sleep."
Valeria's heart soared. She turned her sing song barrage on Shiro, dialling it up another notch. "And my teeny tiny rain drop! My puddle jumper! Has all his sad water been kissed away by Mama? Is he just a happy little mist now?"
Shiro nuzzled into her side, a soft sigh escaping him. There was no resistance, only a profound acceptance that made her want to cry all over again. "Just a mist," he whispered, playing along. "A... a cuddle mist."
"A CUDDLE MIST!" Valeria squealed, delight making her voice vibrate. She peppered his face with feather light kisses. "Yes! The cuddliest mist in the whole big sky! And my stormy baby is a snuggly cumulus! And Mama is the whole, wide, warm blue that holds you both!" She wrapped them both tighter, her words dissolving into a soft, rhythmic chant. "Mama's blue, for her two, her true blue crew, yes it's true..."
She continued, painting a ridiculous, wonderful picture with her words. "Tomorrow, Mama's going to make you the yummiest sunbeam pancakes! With smiley faces made of berry berries! And we'll have milky milks! And then we'll find all the cloud shapes in the ceiling plaster! We'll find a bunny wabbit and a grumpy dragon and a wobbly boat!"
Each promise was more absurd than the last, a future built not on duty or fear, but on the simple, glorious premise of . The boys didn't stiffen. They didn't groan. Kuro's hand found hers and gave a faint squeeze, his thumb stroking her knuckle in a slow, deliberate pattern he'd never dared before. Shiro's breathing slowed further, syncing with hers, his body becoming a warm, pliant weight against her side.
They were not just permitting the baby talk; they were listening to it, understanding it as the unfiltered song of her heart, a heart that had chosen to rebuild itself in this specific, silly, sacred language. Why would they reject a language that had chosen them, that had fought through silence and grief to find them? This was the sound of their victory. This was the sound of home.
Valeria hummed, the last of her energy pouring into the lullaby, her baby talk softening into pure, musical sound as she felt them slowly slip over the edge into sleep, utterly claimed, utterly secure in the devastating, beautiful noise of her love.
She drifted off first, the emotional weight of the day pulling her under. Kuro and Shiro, before sleep finally claimed them too, held her tight, the woman who had lost two suns and, against all odds, had found two more to guide her home.
They slept, the deep sleep of the cherished, dreaming not of the siblings they might have known in another life, but of the one undeniable truth in their world: this family, this mama, their loving, wounded, fiercely loving mama.
And they hoped, with every fibre of their beings, that she would be here forever.
Because that, now more than ever, was all that mattered.
Does We All Understand Where Valeria's Ferocious Love Comes From?
