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ALTHOUGH I NEVER MET MY biological mother and had no desire to, I was no stranger to having nightmares about her. Most of the time, it was when my mind was wandering around before I went to sleep, but this time, I didn’t know what brought it on. I just knew we had stopped our search and returned to our original warehouse to regroup for a moment or two since Nine and I both had roaring migraines forming. I laid down to try to sleep it off for a little while and the next thing I knew, I saw her face again.
❀
My mother - at least, the woman that imagined to be my mother - looked quite a bit like me with the red hair, green eyes, and freckles galore. She was tall and lean, but she had much stronger features that I could only dream of having. She didn’t look anything like my Uncle Newt did, though she was his older sister by eight years. Her arms were covered with needle tracks and her features were eternally marred with reminders of the things that she chose to use in her free time... which was all the time, as far as she was concerned.
According to Uncle Newt, when she went into the hospital after going into labor with me, she first tried to give the doctors and nurses false information so that she wouldn’t get into trouble for all of the substances that she had in her system (Uncle Newt always said that she had at least five in there, but it was likely that she had more than he remembered), but he showed up at the hospital and made sure to clarify everything with the doctors.
Before my mother gave birth to me, she’d already begun to sign away her rights to me away to Uncle Newt, who was still quite young for a demon at the time and had no business raising a baby with no sustainable job or permanent living arrangement.
She refused to hold me and Uncle Newt wasn’t allowed to as I was rushed away to the NICU where I began to go under a rigorous detox. Given that I survived from the mixture of genes that I had, the doctors were almost certain that I would have some other consequences from the choices that my birth mother made. Somehow, I managed to survive without any lasting complications, and Uncle Newt and King Victor were convinced that I had my being a demon-angel hybrid to thank for that.
For once (and, essentially, the only time in my life), being a hybrid wasn’t such a bad thing.
One of the nurses there - a fallen angel by the name of Constance - was particularly interested in my story and she quickly began to focus on me more than any of the other babies... much to the dismay of basically everyone else involved. When she met my Uncle Newt, the two of them fell in love - though they would never say it out loud - and it was Constance that first suggested my name to Uncle Newt.
He told me that her reason was that Athena was her favorite Greek goddess and that she believed that the goddess, in a way, had given me her strength before I was born. I was skeptical of the actual occurrence of that conversation, but regardless Uncle Newt fell in love with the name, and from that moment forward, I became known as Athena Constance Marie Forte (Marie being after my grandmother - another person I never got to meet since she died before I was born).
Even after Uncle Newt took me home, Constance (whom I began to call Auntie Constance) would come by the house quite a bit when she wasn’t working, trying the best she could to teach Uncle Newt how to be a father when he was barely a functioning adult himself. Our life wasn’t perfect, but I wouldn’t have traded it for anything.
I remembered the first time I had the nightmare of what my life would have been like if my mother decided to keep me. It was the same day that Auntie Constance came by to tell Uncle Newt that she’d been diagnosed with breast cancer. I don’t think she meant for me to hear the conversation, but I did and I was devastated. I was only seven years old at the time and I was afraid that, if she died, Uncle Newt wouldn’t want me anymore and would send me away like I’d seen so many parents do to their children - or worse - back to my birth mother.
That night, I got to thinking about my potential life with my birth mother. Using what little knowledge I had of her at the time (collected from the many conversations between Auntie Constance and Uncle Newt), I was able to come to some conclusions.
I knew that she was now in Louisiana - wherever that was, because I surely didn’t know (Baby Athena was... geographically challenged and Adult Athena wasn’t much better) - and she was still addicted to drugs, having already skipped out on rehab three times if those conversations were to be believed. What was the most terrifying to me, though, was the fact that Uncle Newt admitted to the nurse on many occasions that, if he didn’t take me in, she either would have killed me herself or gotten me killed by someone else and - if not on purpose - solely due to her own carelessness. That night, I dreamt about all the ways that my little brain could imagine getting killed by my mother.
Back then, death was the most terrifying thing in the world.
Now, the nightmares weren’t quite as dramatic as they used to be, but they still terrified me and - when I had them - they were relentless until I managed to all but force myself to open my eyes. Sometimes, though, that simple act could take me hours to do.
❀
As I pulled free from the chains of my nightmare and sat up, I found myself immediately looking for my uncle. That was a habit that I had had since I was a young child and I was never able to shake it, no matter how many times I desperately tried to do so.
Uncle Newt was sitting right beside me, waiting for me to wake up. I moved close to him, wrapping my arms around him as I fought back the tears in my eyes. He hugged me back.
“You’re safe,” he whispered, “Did you have that nightmare again?”
I nodded. I tried to speak, but nothing came out. He sighed and pulled me closer to him. My Uncle Newt was the only person I ever allowed to see me in the kind of vulnerable state that I was in and I had no intentions of letting anyone else have that privilege any time soon.
After a few minutes, I pulled away from him and studied his face. “Thank you,” I said finally.
Uncle Newt seemed surprised to hear those words come out of my mouth, but I wasn’t sure it was just because I didn’t say them nearly enough - especially not to him.
“For what?”
“For taking me in,” I replied and moved around, curling up and bringing my knees up to my chest as I thought, “And for raising me all those years... you had no idea what you were getting into when you let my mom give me to you. You weren’t even really an adult yourself yet and you had no obligation to take me in, but you somehow managed.”
Uncle Newt smiled a little, “I think we both have Constance to thank for that, Athie. You probably wouldn’t have survived - actually, scratch that. Neither one of us would have survived if it wasn’t for her,” he chuckled.
I laughed a little, too, but shook my head and looked back at him. Uncle Newt was always so busy taking care of other people and making sure other people knew how much they were appreciated that he never stopped to listen to other people thank him without insisting that he wouldn’t have been able to do it if it wasn’t for someone else. Sure, Auntie Constance helped a lot, but he still had no obligation to take me in in the first place and he had no obligation to keep me under his roof. He could have just as easily stuck me in a foster home somewhere and no one would have really batted an eye.
Like I said, demons didn’t have the inherent familial bonds that humans did. Mothers didn’t even look at their children and think “that’s my daughter”, they just saw another demon however small and helpless they were. Uncles were no different in that aspect, but... maybe Uncle Newt was a little bit different from the norm. It seemed, though, that I knew a lot of demons that weren’t like the norm.
“Still, thank you,” I said.
Uncle Newt shrugged, “I still don’t know what you’re thanking me for. You’re my niece, Athie, I love you and you’re more important to me than anything else in this world. There was no way that I was about to hand you off to someone else.”
I smiled and rested my head on his shoulder, trying to relax myself. I could still feel a little bit of adrenaline running through my body after waking up from my nightmares and I wanted to try to get rid of it. Apparently, the universe had other plans.
I looked up as Nine, Koa, and Finn ran into the warehouse. They were all breathing heavily, sweating, and - to be frank - looked terrible. I also noticed that Nine seemed to be carrying himself differently from usual, but I chose to ignore it as Uncle Newt and I got to our feet.
“What hap-” Uncle Newt began, not able to get his question out when we looked up and saw what was happening for ourselves. At the door stood Gabriel and that other angel from earlier that I thought looked like Eddie.
Immediately, the five of us went to start trying to fight them off. We thought, since we had five people and they were just two, that we had the upper hand, but Gabriel promptly let us know that we were wrong.
“We have the whole building surrounded,” he warned, “Come with us peacefully and we might go easy on you.”
I looked at them and immediately allowed a fireball to appear in my palm before approaching. There was no way I was going to be going with them peacefully - at the very least, not that easily.