(Essentially, part two to last chapter. Enjoy. But you don't have to. It would be preferable, but you are not obligated to enjoy my story. Love ya all!)

"Nothing, sweetheart. Well, maybe," she corrected herself, and turned to me. I could now see the pain in her eyes. I was tempted to heal her, but I knew that Mommy wouldn't want me to use my...ability on her. Right now, anyway.

"It's about my job, and..." She glanced at the Nice Cream seller, who wasn't looking at us. However, my mother had always been a cautious lady.

She looked at me again and said, "We can talk about it when we get home, okay?"

I nodded, silently identifying that the conversation was serious and private, for my ears only. We started walking home, hand in hand, and I kept eating my Nice Cream.

Now, you may be wondering why I'm acting so mature for my age in understanding these sorts of topics. (Remember, she's seven in this flashback.) It's because my mother raised me telling me things that other children...normal children...weren't 'supposed' to know. Sure, I still believed in the tooth fairy and fairy tales, but my mother has, from as soon as I could listen and understand, told me the truth about the real world. She was always honest with me—almost to a fault—whether or not I could handle it. I knew why we couldn't celebrate holidays like other families. I knew where Mommy was going every night at midnight, except on New Year's. I knew why we've had to move to eight new homes in the last three years. I knew it all was because of something Mommy dearly believed in—and something I was raised to believe in, too.

The freedom, innocence and trust of monsters.

We walked in the door. She triple-locked it, closed the curtains, and brought me into her room, which was sound-proofed. I had never been allowed in...until now.

I didn't pay much attention to the room then because I was too focused on the panicked look on my mother's face.

"Sweetie, listen to me and listen to me carefully," she said as calmly as she possibly could. "I'm sorry about the precautions, but they are necessary. I apologize if they scared you."

I made a shrug.

My mother took a deep breath and began. "Sweetheart, there are people, scary people, that don't like my job, and so they want to hurt me. They want to hurt you. I wouldn't forgive myself if you got killed because of me. Like your father. They are coming tonight, and are going to attack the house. You and I are going to set up the house for Code I7Beta."

I widened my eyes slightly when I heard that. Code I7Beta was the worst form of attack we could expect.

"Once we do, we go to our safe spot and wait out the invasion. When it's over, I expect that we may be on the run for at least a week. Pack the necessities and the few personal items you own before we go. If we manage to get separated, and I don't come back for you, you know what to do."

I nodded, and left the room. I packed my bag with my few clothes, the pictures, my birth certificate and other important documents (She may only be seven, but her mother trusts her enough to take care of these documents.) and lastly, I clipped my locket around my neck. I studied it a moment. It was made of silver, in the shape of a heart, and had a F/C heart in the center of it. I opened it. Inside was an inscription. It read, in a beautiful cursive:

The mind is where
Life is remembered.
The heart is where
Choices are made.
The soul is where
We write our story.

On the other side of the locket was a small F/C jewel in the shape of an echo flower. It was something my mother called a memory gem. It's like an echo flower—which repeated spoken statements until the end of time or it dies—except that someone puts in memories. When the gem is touched, it can recall a specific memory and show it or it can show all memories that have been added to the stone. There is also the option to release all the memories by destroying the stone.

I sighed and closed the locket. I could see memories later.

I pulled my bag over to my mother. She grabbed it and dragged it outside. I followed her obediently.

In the middle of our backyard was a secret hatch. You could only see it if you knew what it looked like. It was a trapdoor disguised as a hill.

My mother opened it and pushed my bag inside. She also shoved some of her own things inside as well, then shut the door. She looked at me, and gently said, "I know we have been here for a while, and you may have gotten used to it all, so...go ahead and say goodbye. I'll give the signal when the time comes."

I nodded and returned to my room. With a sigh, I gazed around at the butter-colored walls and sparse wood furniture. Although it had only been six months, it had felt like forever we had stayed in the old bungalow. I felt actual memories here. Since a few years ago, I never really made good memories—in places, particularly. That's why I preferred memories that didn't attach to a place. But, perhaps, just one last memory here...

I opened the locket and touched the echo flower, concentrating very hard on the Nice Cream from an hour or two ago. A beautiful, peaceful calm before the rage of the storm.

I felt a F/C light traveling through my fingers and into the gem. I sighed, smiling a little, enjoying the last flicker of that peaceful time...before it was forgotten.

Like all amazing things, the memory gem has a price. To store memories in there, you must forget them. Unless someone wanted to bring a specific memory up or the gem was broken—which would release the memories back to the one to which they belonged—you would never remember the things you inserted. But that's the beauty of it all. You will never remember them...but they can never be forgotten. Not as long as the memory gem remains.
I flopped onto my bed, with the F/C duvet and S/F/C sheets, dramatically. With all the good forgotten, given willingly over to the memory gem, it was getting harder and harder to remember that the good existed. However, knowing about the monsters and that good was still here gave me HOPE, something that was rare on the surface nowadays.

It must've been hours I laid there, deep within my mind, because I snapped to reality when I heard whistling, two short notes and one long. The signal.

I scrambled outside, whispering a short 'goodbye' to the house before I jumped in the open trapdoor. My mother slammed it shut behind herself as she barreled in after me. We waited in silence for twenty minutes before the deafening noise began. It was just barely quieter than screaming into a microphone and having your ear next to a speaker turned up to full volume. I could have yelled until my throat was sore and no one would have heard me. However, I stayed quiet, waiting for it all to pass.

My mother and I waited for minutes. The minutes stretched into hours. I could've sworn we stayed years in the secret bunker, just two silent mice.

After what must've been quite a few hours, the noise stopped. We waited for an hour longer before she turned to me, and whispered, "My sweet Y/N, I have to make sure it's safe. Please wait a few hours for me. I'll get you when I'm done. If I don't come back within three hours, you leave by yourself and go to where we planned. Stay safe, my love, and Godspeed if I don't make it." With that, she climbed out of the hatch and locked it behind her. I didn't know it yet, but I would never see my mother again.

I waited. And waited. And waited. Once I felt I had waited for a sufficient amount of time, and Mommy hadn't come back yet, I slowly unlocked the hatch and pushed it open. I stared unfeelingly at the shocking scene before me.

The grass was covered in blood. Dead bodies littered the ground everywhere. I stepped out onto what seemed to be a battlefield. Making my way through the maze of carnage, I stopped in front of the door to the house. I took a deep breath, and twisted the knob, opening it.

More blood, and more bodies. Red and brown was smeared on every wall in the room. Furniture was overturned, broken, and pushed to the side. All kinds of weapons made appearances on the endless list of things that had entered, but not left, the room. But what made it odd was that the ground was positively covered in what looked like ash, but smelled like...dust.

Dust.

I wandered aimlessly around the room, until I found myself in front of a very dead gentleman, with a golden badge of some sort on his trench coat in front of his left breast. It was a symbol of a peacock, with a spread tail, holding an arrow in its beak and a sword and bow in its talons. There were also some letters underneath it—AMEPA. I recognized the emblem. It was the Anti-Monster Espionage and Purging Agency, a government-funded program made to find and eliminate both monsters and monster-supporters. Someone had told them where my mother, the infamous Evelyn L/N, the vice-president of the most powerful monster-supporting group in the world, lived.

In his hands was a pen. Intrigued by this choice of 'weapon,' I gently pried it from his cold hands and studied it. It wasn't a cheap, plastic, throw-away pen—no, this pen was made out of a smooth, beautiful F/C metal, with a (gold/silver) band in the middle, tip and hook on the end. It had initials on it: (your F/M/L initials here).

It appeared to be an ink pen, but the tip had neither fresh nor dried ink on it. So what did it use?

I held it in my hand and frowned down at it. Then I smiled as I decided to make a game out of it. I wrote in the air, with a childlike glee, 'Evelyn L/N started floating for a moment, before dropping onto the ground.' I didn't notice that a small glass part let me see colors start to fill as a sort of ink.

When I was done, I noticed movement in the corner of my eye. I turned and my eyes widened. The pile of dust in front of the gentleman started rising, stopped, then fell onto the floor. I cocked my head in mild confusion. However, I decided, with a newfound DETERMINATION, that I would bring this dust with me as a sort of good luck charm. I wrote with my pen, 'A small, square wooden box appeared in front of Y/N L/N.' As I requested, a box appeared in front of me. I filled it with the dust, closed it, and shoved it in my backpack, along with my pen. My locket I kept around my neck.

I walked out of the house and into the woods. Miles I trudged, until I saw our secret spot: a great big black tree, with shimmering orange leaves. (It's fall, by the way.) I'd heard that in other places or universes, this same tree bears gold and black apples that can do special things to the people that eat them. But then again, that's just stories.

I sat there and waited for days. My mother never came.

~|~

All day and night for the next week and a half I feared for my mother's life. However, at the end of the tenth day of waiting, I breathed in a heavy sigh and finally decided that my mother was not coming back.

That same night I ripped up my important documents and threw the pieces to the wind as I started walking. I didn't know where I was going, as long as it was away from where I was before. The farther away I was, the less likely I was to be found out, I knew.

Without even realizing it, I started towards Mount Ebott. Perhaps I was drawn there from my mother's stories about monsters. Maybe I thought that they would give me what humanity would not—safety, and a sense of HOPE and happiness. Whatever the reason, I ended up in a small town right next to the mountain. A little orphanage took me in, and therefore my new life, or at least a new chapter of it, began...

Sans pulled me from my memories, finally asking me, "Y/N? Is something wrong?"

The river of tears dripping from my eyes should've hinted otherwise, but I shook my head anyway.

He came up to me and held onto my hand. "What's wrong?" he questioned quietly.

With an unsteady voice, I managed to say, "I finally realized, after all these years, that my mother is dead. I finally saw the truth. I finally realized that my mother was a monster." I took a shaky breath, and said, "I finally realized that I'm both human and monster. A hybrid."