(Unedited)
"You weren't here! You haven't been in a long time so stop trying to act like you were."
Willow grew up in a house with six brothers, one of them being her twin. She's grown up in a two bedroom apartment with an alcoholic mother who never...
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Three months.
That was how long Ian had been searching for Xander.
For months he had been doing everything he could to find his missing brother, searching high and low and in various different cities that whoever it was he called that day sent him too, all on the account that Xander had been there. When, though? Last week? A month ago? A year, maybe? No one knew, just that he had been there at some point and Ian was willing to try anything he could to find his brother, even if it meant running around for another year on a wild goose chase.
Sure, when Noel had first come to him with the idea of reuniting their family, he refused. He couldn't help but be a little hesitant ⏤ scared. After all, they haven't been in their siblings' lives for nearly eight years, and it was all his fault.
He could admit that he made mistakes. After all, it was his fault, right? He was the one who walked out first. He was the one who asked Noel to go with him ⏤ practically begged him to with the promise of everything working out, assuring him over and over again that he had a plan, promising that everyone would be fine. But, apparently, his plans were made to fail. His plans of visiting on the weekends and phone calls everyday, taking his siblings out for ice cream or to the movies and attending all of their events, whether those were a game, a science fair, a dance recital ⏤ anything they wanted. Instead, his family fell apart before he even had a chance to call. And it was all his fault, everything that happened after he walked out of that door was on him, so now, he was doing everything he could to fix it.
It was something he tried before. Fixing his mess ⏤ his family. When Ian first left, he waited a month before checking in with his siblings or mother, he knew he hurt them and so he wanted to give them time to heal and calm down before he stepped back in, but by the time he worked up the nerves to go back, there was no one to go back to. He walked back through that door, ready to make it all better, and the only thing he was met with was an empty penthouse, no sign of his family in sight. He had lost them, and by the time he found them again it was too late, they were too far gone.
The condition Ian had found his family in was something that would always haunt him and left him riddled with guilt. The rest of their brothers had followed in his and Noel's footsteps and walked out, they too cutting off all contact with what remained of their family. Victoria had moved on from drinking herself into liver failure and started doing drugs in replacement, becoming addicted and spending majority of her money on them instead of taking care of her last two kids, forcing them to live in a run down one bedroom apartment that was practically falling apart around, leaving the twins to fend for themselves at the mere age of nine, uncared for and unprotected in the most dangerous area of their city.
