[ complete ] 𝐌𝐀𝐅𝐈𝐀'𝐒 𝐈𝐍𝐃𝐈𝐀𝐍 𝐖𝐈𝐅𝐄 || 𝐉.𝐉𝐊 𝐅𝐅

Epilogue.

They tell you a story about monsters and how the world shakes after they fall. They never tell you what comes next — the long slow mending, the small, ordinary miracles that stitch a life back together after it’s been torn. I learned that the hard way. I learned that endings aren’t made of single triumphant roars; they’re made of quiet breakfasts, busted-up toys, and the sound of my daughter singing off-key in the kitchen while the kettle hisses like a living thing.

We came home under a pale morning sky. The house felt like belonging before I remembered how fragile it had been — like a thing that had waited, patient and stubborn. Y/N stood in the doorway with the twins and didn’t let go of me for a long time. That first hug was a small planet of its own. I breathed them in and felt something that had been hollow for months fill up, not all the way, not yet, but enough to keep me standing.

For a long while after that, we lived like people who had learned how to appreciate the ordinary. I woke to the sound of the radio — cheap, tinny, stuck on an old pop song — and Aarohi would leap into bed and insist on breakfast in bed because she’d decided pancakes tasted better like a treat. Advait would be stoic and slightly ridiculous about the quantity of jam on his toast, as if there were a science to being eight and recovering from abduction. Y/N would laugh at the two of them, that laugh that used to make my knees weak, and I’d feel like I’d been granted a minute-by-minute miracle.

“Appa,” Aarohi would say, her hair a wild halo from sleep. “Make mine with extra syrup. It’s an emergency.” She always said it like there were very important emergencies. She liked to nestle in my arms like a cat and tell me about her dreams, and sometimes she’d whisper things she’d learned in school like a treasure: today we learned about constellations, Papa, she’d say, and then draw a star in the air with a sticky finger.

Advait was quieter — more watchful. He kept a ruler on his desk and drew tiny perfect lines, as if he could measure the world back into order with a pencil. At night he sometimes pressed his small hand into mine and said, “You’re not allowed to go anywhere again.” I would laugh and say something solemn that was also half a promise: “Never. I am glued to this spot.” He would roll his eyes and snuggle closer, and I would swear to myself again, in a way that had nothing to do with threats and everything to do with honor.

We went through the patchwork repairs that come after violence. There were doctors and police statements and court hearings that felt like slow machinery; there were nights when Y/N couldn’t sleep because she replayed the calls and the pleading voice of her child on the line. We brought therapists into the house — gentle people who spoke in soft, firm voices and gave Advait games to do that turned the things he’d been forced to feel into pictures he could put in boxes and close. Aarohi, fiery as ever, refused to do the ‘sad-time breathing’ and insisted the therapist learn her favorite dance moves instead. The therapist learned them, and then she danced with Aarohi in the living room and the whole house felt like it could bear anything.

There were scars that you could not see. Advait would sometimes flinch at a door slam in a restaurant and then look up at me as if to test whether I would go down the hall to make sure the noise hadn’t come from outside. Aarohi had nights where she woke up crying from a nightmare where shadows were hands; I would scoop her up and tell her the same thing every time until it sank into her bones: “We are safe. You are here. We are stronger than the dark.” Those repetitions, the small, stubborn truths, began to anchor them. Slowly, the bad sounds stopped stealing the room.

We rebuilt rituals. Saturday mornings were sacred pancake-making hours. I learned to braid Aarohi’s hair the way Y/N had taught — clumsy, and then with practice, gentle and exact. Advait and I built a blanket fort in the study and read books that had nothing to do with monsters — books about faraway places and cunning animals and occasionally the kind of silly nonsense that made him snort. Y/N got back into the flow of designing again, small sketches on scraps of paper she'd call “experimentations,” and her world of machines and graphics poured light into the house. She picked up a camera again and started capturing the twins in stolen moments — Aarohi grimacing at a lemon, Advait with jam on his chin — and those were the images I pinned to the inside of my skull.