Jake Addams June 1st,20XX

I woke up in a panic, and my heart sped up so loudly I could hear it in my ears. I took a few deep breaths to calm down and registered Luca’s tiny hands poking me in the chest and Frona’s tiny but unreasonably strong legs resting on the small of my back. Moving as gently as possibly I started to get up, but two pairs of hands grabbed me by my shirt and didn’t let go.

I looked behind me to the best of my ability and saw Luca and Frona who had taken to sleeping in my room with me since I had gotten back. Their eyelids twitched as they struggled to fake sleep and their lips fought climbing up into smiles as they thought they had tricked me.

“Ah, what can I do. I planned on taking Frona and Luca out, but I guess they’re still asleep.”

Luca was the first to cave, despite Frona’s hand ‘discreetly’ moving to keep him still. His eyes sprang open almost as quickly as he sat up but his hands never left my shirt.

“Where are we going?!”

Instead of replying, I began to tickle him and then Frona when she finally abandoned her plan and joined in on the fun.

I’d moved back home ever since my return from the other world and had to spend extra time with the kids to make up for suddenly going missing. My stepmother had vaguely questioned me on where I went but aside from scolding me for only giving them a phone call before ‘running off’ as she called it. She probably thought I had broken down and runoff from all my responsibilities, but it was better than her thinking I had been in any sort of danger.

I would just have to work harder to convince her that I was okay, and I wasn’t doing anything I didn’t want to do.

“Where are we going, Jake?!”

Frona finally managed to free herself from Luca’s enthusiastic tickling and got down to business. I picked her off the bed and noticed she had grown a bit heavier than before I’d left. I knew it was unlikely that she had grown enough for me to notice in a month, but I couldn’t get the idea out of my head. Luca noticed the unfair treatment and began to climb me like a tree. He got to my hip before I finally caved and lifted him with my other hand.

“Oof. You two have gotten, bigger haven’t you?”

They both giggled and squirmed in my arms but refused to be let down. I had only been gone for about a week, but I guess they had never gone that long without seeing me. Or well, I guess Frona would have when she was a toddler and I had gone to a boarding school. Then I would be gone for months at a time.

“Today is my last day home before I have to go back to school, you both know, that right?”

They looked reluctant to nod but they did. Frona began to mess with my hair as she avoided my eyes and Luca’s hands tightened around my collar, making it more difficult to breathe. Frona was already eight and Luca was six, so they were getting harder and harder to carry for long amounts of time, especially both at the same time. I could only be grateful that they had inherited their mom’s smaller genes.

“Ah! Don’t get upset about it. It just means we have to do something super cool today right? And I’ll still be the one picking you guys up from school, so you’ll see me often.”

My stepmom had tried to relieve me of some of the things I did for the kids but with her new job, it hadn’t taken much to convince her that I didn’t mind.

As for the new job, I had been somewhat suspicious that a big company had bought out the small film studio she had started with her old classmates from college, and a bit of digging or more specifically, a bit of asking around told me what I’d suspected.

Finn, after struggling to contact her and make an excuse for my disappearance last time had ‘thrown a tantrum’ as will had so crudely called it and had made my step-mom his employee.

I put the kids down and ushered them into the bathroom to get showered. Frona was old enough to handle herself if it was a shower, but Luca still needed a bit of help.

“Remember to wash your hair! Your mom told me you’ve been faking it lately.”

She stuck her tongue out at me instead of giving me a response and ran into her mom’s room to use her shower.

“Ah, wait, wait!”

I grabbed the yellow and blue showerhead extension her mom had bought for her and rushed to attach it before she changed her mind about taking a shower. Luca looked on somewhat enviously as I prepared the bathroom for his sister but made no intention of asking to take a shower on his own.

I used a bucket to wash Luca since I didn’t feel like getting wet and wrestled the slippery six-year-old clean.

It was a pain, but I enjoyed the task more than I had before. This was how my life was. No fairies, no goblins and no witches with kidnapping plots.

Even if it couldn’t be called normal, it was what I enjoyed.

As for school. I’d had half a mind to just take the rest of the year off and graduate early but Finn had quickly reminded me and Sparrow about the showcase, something that had seemed so important a mere two weeks ago but now felt so…trivial.

Finn and in the middle of the week, Sparrow, had returned to their places at the school and had started participating in full force to catch up with Alice’s group and win the showcase. Finn had almost completely given up hiding his identity as the head of Volui and now funded every idea the students had.

I hadn’t been around to see it since I had taken an extra week off school but from what Sparrow and Will told me, it was only a matter of time before they put two and two together and figured Finn out. Everyone in the group already knew there was no way he was just a scholarship student, even before our galivant to another world and back.

“Jake! I done!”

“I’m done, Luca. It’s I’m”

Luca’s cries brought me back to reality and I realized I’d completely submerged the six-year-old in bubbles. I quickly rinsed him off and got him dressed, then we waited for Frona to come out.

The Tv buzzed in the background and I assumed my Stepmother had left it on in her haste to get to work this morning. It wasn’t a common occasion, but it had happened before.

“Once again, these mysterious figures swooped in to save a grand total of forty-people from a burning building! They appeared out of nowhere and managed to get in and out of the structurally compromised building before it collapsed. They then managed to save another ten people who may have been hurt by its falling! Isn’t that amazing!”

The female announcer countered the male’s enthusiasm with a colder tone,

“Even so Zenon, these are vigilantes at the end of the day. It's all good and well that it all worked out, but what if it didn’t? What if someone had gotten even further hurt due to their intervention. We appreciate their hard work in saving our community members, but we would all feel much safer if we had faces to put to these actions! Someone to take responsibility if anything goes wrong due to their actions and someone to reward when things go right!”

Frona came out of the room and began to twirl in place in her outfit, plaid pants, a polka-dotted t-shirt and a bright yellow tutu to finish it all off.

I was forced to abandon watching the news and go help her get re-dressed. My stepmom was insistent that I let her express herself through her clothing as much as she wanted but at the same time, I couldn’t have her going out looking like a clown.

After much negotiation Frona agreed to ditch the plaid pants under the tutu and chose some brightly striped sneakers instead. As retribution for making her change, she made me tie her hair up in two large puffy buns and tie them up with bright yellow bands.

I did so absentmindedly while thinking of the news.

Didn’t Finn say most fairies would struggle with using their powers in the human world? Could they be witches then? Or goblins?

All of a sudden there had been an uprising of vigilantes as the news called them or heroes as social media had termed them.

The thought of that world starting to interfere with this one bothered me more than I thought it would. Not because I had any particular hatred toward it but rather the opposite. I admired that world and its inhabitants, but I also knew that there was nothing this world could do to defend against them if they truly chose to arrive on hostile terms.

Finn had said that was incredibly unlikely and had pointed out that it had taken a royal almost a week to get a human back to the human world, never mind placing a legion of fairies into a non-native world.

I shook off the thoughts and loaded the kids into the car, wincing through their piercing screams of excitement as I did so.

Speculation wouldn’t do anything good for me right now, so it was better to avoid thinking of it. Right now I needed to focus on giving these two a great day before I returned to school.