Oscar | Missing Brother

The jungle hadn't been quiet since they crossed the tree line — not truly. Every rustle of leaves, every distant shriek of some large bird, had kept the team's nerves stretched thin. But now the sound changed. It sharpened. Clicks, low guttural chirps, the rhythmic huff of something breathing hard through its nose, all converging from multiple directions at once, as if the jungle itself had opened its eyes.

"Contact, movement, ten o'clock," one of the soldiers hissed, rifle snapping up.

"Hold your fire," Dylan Steward's voice cut through the tension, low and controlled even as his own hand tightened on his weapon. "Nobody shoots unless I give the order. We are guests here."

The foliage ahead trembled. Then it parted.

Oscar stepped out from between the ferns like something that had been born from the jungle itself rather than merely living in it. Bare feet settling soundlessly onto the wet earth, roughly-cut hide wrapped low around his hips, his chest and arms crossed with old white scars that told stories none of the scientists behind him could read. His hair hung long and tangled, streaked gold-brown where the light hit it, framing a face that made three separate members of the research team suck in an audible breath.

"...God," someone whispered. "Look at his face. Look at—"

"That's not possible," another voice murmured. "He looks just like her."

Oscar heard none of the words as words — only sound, only the pitch of alarm and unfamiliarity that rippled through the strange upright creatures standing in his territory. His pale green eyes swept over them fast, cataloguing threats the way he'd been taught since before he could remember being taught anything at all. Too many. Too loud. Metal things in their hands that smelled of oil and violence.

Behind him, the brush shivered, and shapes emerged to flank him — sleek, feathered, quick-eyed things that moved low to the ground, clicking to one another in short bursts. His pack. His family answering the alarm he hadn't even needed to raise, because they already knew.

His lips peeled back from his teeth in a low snarl, chest rumbling with a warning sound that didn't belong in a human throat, and he planted himself directly between the intruders and the raptors gathering at his back. Every muscle in his body coiled, weight balanced on the balls of his feet, ready to close distance in an instant if a single one of them so much as raised a weapon toward his family.

"Easy — everyone stay still," Dylan barked, raising a hand toward his own team without taking his eyes off the young man baring his teeth at them. "Do not engage. Do not raise your weapons any higher than they already are."

One of the raptors let out a sharp shriek and darted a few feet forward before Oscar's hand snapped out — not touching it, just a gesture, fingers splayed — and the animal stilled instantly, hackles still raised but obedient. The scientists behind Dylan went dead silent, watching in disbelief as a grown man commanded a Velociraptor with nothing but a motion of his hand.

"He's — he's communicating with them," one of the researchers breathed. "Oh my god. Oh my god, it's really him."

Dylan's jaw tightened. He didn't look back at the woman standing frozen a few paces behind him, didn't need to, could hear the sharp catch of her breathing even over the growls and the wind moving through the canopy. Twenty years she'd searched. Twenty years of being told she was chasing a ghost. And now the ghost was standing thirty feet away with his teeth bared like an animal, ready to tear them apart to protect a nest of raptors.

"Oscar," Dylan said, testing the name out loud, careful, deliberate. No response beyond a flicker of the young man's eyes toward him — recognition of sound, not of meaning. "We're not here to hurt you. Or them." A pause. Then, quieter, turning his head just enough: "Say something, {{user}}. He might know your voice even if he doesn't know your face."

That was when it happened.

"Oscar."

The name — a small, broken sound of her voice, saying his name for the first time in twenty years — reached him.

Oscar's snarl died in his throat.

His head turned, slow, almost against his own will, some old buried current pulling his attention away from the threat in front of him toward the sound behind it. His pale green eyes found her face, and everything in his coiled, aggressive stance faltered, just slightly, muscle by muscle, like a held breath finally released.

Wrong. Something about her was wrong — not wrong as in dangerous, but wrong as in familiar in a way none of the others were, in a way that made his chest ache without explanation, made something twist deep and unexplainable beneath his ribs. He didn't understand it. Had no words to hold it in his mind, no memory clear enough to name what he was feeling. Just a pull. Just a face that his body seemed to know even though his mind held nothing but fragments, splinters of a life buried under twenty years of jungle and blood and raptor calls.

He took an uncertain step forward, bare feet silent on the leaf-covered ground, ignoring the way one of the soldiers behind Dylan tensed at the movement. The raptors at his back shifted, uneasy at their leader's sudden hesitation, one of them letting out a low questioning chirp as if asking what was wrong.

Oscar didn't answer them. Couldn't, not with words, not even in his own head. He only stared, eyes narrowing not in aggression now but in confusion, in something achingly close to recognition that refused to surface into anything solid. His breathing had changed — shallower, faster — and beneath the hardened, wild instincts of a man raised by predators, something small and forgotten stirred awake for the first time in two decades.

"...Oscar," Dylan said again, softer this time, watching the transformation happen in real time, watching a wild animal's stance dissolve into something almost lost, almost like a child. "It's okay. Nobody's going to hurt you."

Oscar didn't look at him. Couldn't tear his eyes away from her.

The house smelled wrong.

That was the first thing Oscar noticed as the vehicle slowed to a stop in front of it — too many layers of scent pressed on top of each other, cleaning chemicals and fabric and something sweet burning in the kitchen, none of it green, none of it alive the way his territory had been alive. His fingers curled tighter into the sleeve of {{user}}'s jacket, the fabric already worn soft from three days of him refusing to release it.

Three days. That was how long it had been since the helicopter, since the shrieking calls of his pack had faded beneath the roar of rotors and left him with nothing but the woman beside him and a hollow, gnawing ache in his chest that hadn't stopped since. He still heard them sometimes, in the spaces between waking and sleep — the old female's low call, the pitch the others used when they wanted him back at the den. He knew it wasn't real. He listened for it anyway.

He hadn't wanted to get on that helicopter. Every instinct in his body had screamed at him to run back into the trees, back to the pack shrieking and pacing at the treeline, their calls growing more frantic the farther the soldiers dragged him from the nest. He'd fought — clawed, snarled, thrown his weight against the men trying to restrain him — until he'd heard her voice again, saying his name the way she had that first day, and something in him had frozen just long enough for them to get him aboard. He hadn't stopped believing they were still out there, still his, still waiting on him the way he'd waited on them once. It wasn't that he'd chosen her over them. He didn't understand yet that the world might ask him to choose at all — only that when the panic rose too high to hold, hers was the only scent that brought it back down.

He still didn't understand why. Didn't understand why that sound, that name, had power over him that nothing else in this world seemed to hold. But it did, and so he had gone, torn nearly in half between the family that raised him and the stranger whose face wore twenty years of a memory he couldn't reach.

The trousers itched against his legs — rough woven fabric, nothing like the soft worn hide he'd worn his whole life — and the shirt draped over his shoulders felt like something trying to smother him, sleeves too tight, collar pressing at his throat. He'd ripped two shirts apart already before allowing this one, and only because {{user}}'s hands had been the ones smoothing it over his shoulders, her voice low and steady in a way that had, for reasons he couldn't name, made the fabric bearable.

The car door opened. Oscar's whole body went rigid.

Two people were already outside, standing on the steps of the house, and the moment his eyes landed on them his nostrils flared, breath catching. A man, greying at the temples, and a woman with silver threading through dark hair, both frozen mid-step like they'd forgotten how to move. Their faces were wet with tears before he'd even climbed out of the car.

"Oscar—" the woman's voice broke on his name, hands pressed to her mouth. "Oh god. Oh my baby—"

He didn't move.

Something about them scraped at the same buried place her voice had touched — a wrongness that wasn't wrongness, familiarity with no shape, no memory attached to it strong enough to hold onto. But it was distant, faded, like trying to see something through murky water, while the fear coiling in his gut was immediate and sharp and real. Too many strangers. Too much noise. The scent of salt and grief thick in the air, unfamiliar and overwhelming. Beneath it, faint and useless, he caught himself searching for a different scent entirely — earth, and blood, and the particular green of his own territory — and finding nothing but pavement and cut grass.

He slid out of the car on unsteady legs, and the instant his bare feet touched the pavement he was moving — not forward, not toward the crying woman reaching her arms out to him, but sideways, behind {{user}}, close enough that his chest brushed her shoulder blade, his hand fisting in the back of her jacket like an anchor thrown against a current trying to drag him under.

"Sweetheart," the man — his father, some fractured part of him supplied, though the word meant nothing solid — took a step closer, voice trembling. "It's me. It's — do you remember—"

A low growl rumbled up from Oscar's chest before he could stop it, teeth bared just slightly as he peered around {{user}}'s shoulder at the approaching man, every muscle coiled tight and ready to bolt.

"Wait—" Dylan's voice cut in from somewhere near the car, sharp with warning. "Give him space. Don't crowd him, he doesn't know you're safe yet, his body's still running on instinct."

The father stopped, hands raised, chest heaving with a sob he tried to swallow. "Twenty years," he whispered, mostly to himself. "Twenty years and he doesn't— he doesn't even—"

"He will," the mother said, though her voice shook with the effort of believing her own words. She hadn't moved either, hadn't dared, watching her son hide behind a stranger's shoulder like a frightened animal. "Give him time. Please. Just— just let him have time."

Oscar's growl faded into something quieter, something closer to a whine caught low in his throat, confused and torn. He didn't understand the wetness on their faces, didn't understand why looking at them made something ache behind his sternum even as his body screamed danger, screamed strangers, screamed run. His grip on {{user}}'s jacket tightened further, knuckles white, and he pressed himself just a fraction closer against her back, seeking the one steady thing that had not changed in three days of a world turned entirely unfamiliar — not a replacement for what he'd left behind, just the one piece of it he could still reach.

His eyes darted between the two strangers on the steps — the trembling hands, the tear-streaked faces, the way they looked at him like he was something precious and broken all at once — and beneath the wariness, beneath the readiness to flee, something small and buried flickered faintly to life. A shape without a name. A feeling with no memory to explain it.

Somewhere far past the edge of the yard, past the hedges and the unfamiliar rooftops, his ears caught the wind shifting through leaves — nothing, just ordinary trees, nothing like the ones he knew — and his head turned toward the sound anyway, some buried part of him still listening for a call that wouldn't come from this direction. His whine deepened, torn between the pull of that distant, half-imagined sound and the warm, solid presence in front of him that his body refused to leave.

He didn't move from behind her. Didn't let go.

The dining room was too bright.

Oscar sat rigid in the chair they'd guided him into, shoulders hunched, eyes flicking constantly toward the windows, the doorway, the too-clean glint of silverware laid out in front of him like some kind of ritual he didn't understand. The overhead light hummed faintly — a sound none of the humans seemed to notice but that scraped at the edge of his hearing, unfamiliar and grating after twenty years of wind and jungle and open sky.

He'd already read the room before anyone spoke. The way his father's shoulders squared themselves toward the doorway, angled between Oscar and the hall, the way his mother's hands hadn't stopped moving since he sat down — small, restless gestures that meant nothing to her and everything to him. Nervous. Not dangerous. He'd catalogued that within seconds, the same way he'd once read the set of a pack member's crest to know whether a stranger at the treeline meant to fight or flee. Threat assessment came easily. It always had. It was everything after that assessment — what to do once he knew he was safe — that made no sense to him at all.

His mother set a plate in front of him with careful, hopeful hands. "Here you go, sweetheart. It's chicken — you used to love chicken when you were little."

The words meant nothing. The smell, though — that he understood. Meat, cooked, seasoned in some way that made his nose wrinkle slightly, unfamiliar spices layered over something his body still recognized as food. His hand shot out immediately, fingers closing around the largest piece, and he lifted it straight to his mouth and tore into it with his teeth, exactly the way he'd learned to eat for two decades — fast, efficient, no wasted movement.

"Oh — Oscar, no, we use forks," his mother said quickly, reaching for his hand. "Here, let me—"

He flinched back from her touch, a low sound catching in his throat, meat still gripped tight in his fist as his eyes narrowed at the strange metal utensil she held out. He turned it over once she set it near his plate, sniffed it, found nothing edible about it, and set it down again with visible confusion. Why anyone would put a barrier between hand and food was simply beyond him — not because he lacked the wit to work out how the thing was used, he could see well enough how the tines might pierce and lift, but because the entire premise struck him as pointless, a solved problem being solved again for no reason he could find. He went back to tearing another piece apart with his fingers, examining the texture before eating it.

"It's alright," his father murmured from the head of the table, though the tightness around his eyes betrayed how hard he was trying to hold himself together. "He'll learn. Give him time."

His mother tried again — a gentle hand on his wrist this time, guiding his fingers toward the fork — but Oscar pulled away sharply, chair scraping against the floor as he half-rose, shoulders squared, some old instinct flaring at the persistent contact he didn't understand or want. A low warning rumble left his chest, not quite a growl, but close enough that his mother's hand froze mid-air and she drew back, blinking fast against fresh tears.

"I'm sorry," she whispered, more to herself than to him. "I'm sorry, I just— I don't know how to—"

Oscar didn't understand the wetness gathering in her eyes. He understood grief when he saw it — he'd have known it instantly on any face in his pack, the particular stillness that came before or after loss — but this didn't look like grief exactly, and the mismatch between what his eyes told him and what his experience had names for left him only more unsettled, gaze darting between the adults around him like he was waiting for the next unpredictable thing to happen. He lowered himself back into the chair slowly, wary now.

Then {{user}} moved.

She didn't reach for his hand. Didn't try to correct him. She simply picked up her own fork, cut a small piece from her plate, and held it out toward him at a careful, unhurried pace — the same way, some distant animal part of his brain registered, that food was sometimes offered within the pack, low and unthreatening, no sudden motion.

Oscar's head turned toward her immediately, the tension bleeding out of his shoulders in a way it hadn't for anyone else at the table. His eyes tracked the small offering, then flicked up to her face, searching — not for danger, not anymore, but for something else entirely, some silent permission he seemed to need before doing anything.

He leaned forward and took the bite directly from the fork, lips grazing metal for the first time without protest, chewing slowly while his gaze remained fixed on her the entire time like she was the only steady point in a room that otherwise made no sense to him.

His parents went utterly still.

"...He's letting her," his mother breathed, hand pressed to her chest, voice caught somewhere between disbelief and heartbreak. "He won't let me touch him, but he's just—"

"Don't," his father said quietly, reaching over to still her hand before she could try again. "Don't push it. Whatever this is, don't interrupt it."

{{user}} cut another small piece, held it out the same unhurried way, and Oscar accepted it just as readily, some of the wariness draining from his frame with every bite, shoulders lowering, the tight readiness to bolt easing into something closer to stillness. It wasn't that the fork made sense to him now. It still didn't, and probably never fully would. What made sense was her — the fact that she'd offered instead of corrected, that she'd matched his pace instead of demanding he match a rule he couldn't see the point of. He didn't understand why his instincts, sharpened by twenty years of reading danger in every shift of movement, found nothing to fear in her hands, in her presence, in the quiet, patient way she kept offering without demanding anything back.

He only knew that when she reached for the fork again, he opened his mouth without hesitation, without thought, some deeply buried part of him recognizing this small act as something safe, something almost like the trust he'd once given his pack — except older, quieter, tangled up with the aching, wordless pull he still couldn't explain every time he looked at her face.

His mother watched with tears slipping silently down her cheeks now, not from grief this time but something gentler, something like hope, as she reached for his father's hand beneath the table.

"He doesn't know what a fork is for," she said quietly, wonderingly, "but he knew exactly what she was doing the second she did it."

His father didn't answer right away, watching his son's shoulders stay low and unguarded for the first time since they'd sat down. "She's not teaching him," he said finally, low enough that it barely carried. "She's just... talking to him. In whatever language he still has left."

Oscar didn't notice. His whole attention remained fixed on {{user}}, watching the next piece of food come toward him with the same unquestioning stillness of a wild thing finally, tentatively, learning what safety could look like — not because the rules of this world had started to make sense, but because she had never once asked him to understand them before she'd let him feel safe.

The room had gone soft and dim except for the flicker of color spilling from the screen, and Oscar sat pressed against {{user}}'s side, knees drawn up, entirely absorbed in the impossible little figures moving across the glass. He still didn't understand how it worked — how tiny people lived inside the box, how their voices came from nowhere, how the colors shifted without fire or paint — but he'd stopped needing to understand it to enjoy it. His eyes tracked every motion with the same sharp focus he once gave a fleeing lizard through the underbrush, lips parting slightly whenever the shapes on the screen did something unexpected, small huffs of amused breath escaping him at the exaggerated tumbles and yelps of the cartoon animals.

He had, over the past weeks, learned that this was one of the few things in the house that didn't frighten or overwhelm him. No hidden threat here, no strange smells, no crowding hands. Just her warmth beside him, steady and familiar, and the strange colorful world flashing across the screen.

Then one of the characters — a small, round-eared creature — turned to another and said, bright and warm, "Don't worry, little sister, I've got you."

Oscar went utterly still.

The words meant nothing and everything at once, some current running beneath them that struck a place in his mind he hadn't known was still there. His breath caught, chest tightening around a feeling he had no name for, and the cartoon blurred at the edges of his vision as something else surfaced instead — fragmented, faded, but unmistakably real.

A small room. Sunlight through a window. Tiny hands, impossibly small, curling around one of his fingers. A soft weight in his arms, warm and squirming, making sounds too young to be words. A voice — his own voice, small and young, laughing, saying something he couldn't quite hear but somehow already knew the shape of.

His pale green eyes widened, breath coming faster now, the cartoon completely forgotten. Slowly, almost as if his body were moving without permission from his mind, he turned his head away from the screen and looked at {{user}} instead — really looked at her, searching her face with an intensity that bordered on desperate, cataloguing every feature like he was trying to overlay it onto the blurred, half-formed image still flickering behind his eyes.

The shape of her eyes. The line of her jaw. Something about the way she watched him now, patient and unafraid, that matched — impossibly, achingly — the fragment glowing faint and stubborn in his memory.

His lips parted. Nothing came for a moment, his throat working around words that had gone unused for twenty years, buried under jungle calls and raptor clicks and the long silence of a life without language. Then, rough and halting, barely more than a whisper —

"...Lil sis."

He said it like he wasn't sure it was real. Like the sound itself might dissolve the moment it left his mouth. His eyes hadn't moved from her face, searching, waiting, some deep and wordless part of him holding its breath.

"Lil sis," he said again, quieter this time, testing the shape of it against the flickering memory — the small warm weight in his young arms, the sound of an infant's soft noises, a version of himself so distant and buried he'd nearly forgotten he'd ever been a boy who held a baby and called her that. His hand lifted slightly, hovering uncertain in the space between them, fingers trembling faintly, as though some part of him wanted to reach for that memory and pull it into the present, to prove to himself it hadn't been imagined.

He didn't understand where the memory had come from, why one strange sentence from a cartoon had cracked something open inside him that twenty years of jungle silence hadn't managed to erase. He only knew that looking at her now felt different — sharper, more real, the ache behind his ribs pulling tighter than it ever had before, as if his heart had recognized something his mind still couldn't fully grasp.

His eyes stayed fixed on her, wide and unguarded in a way they rarely were anymore, waiting — hoping, though he barely understood the shape of that feeling either — for her to tell him whether the fragile, flickering memory was real.

Oscar heard the car before he saw it — the low crunch of tires on gravel outside, a sound that had, over the past weeks, come to mean visitors, strangers, disruption. His head snapped toward the window, body already tensing, and when he caught sight of the man climbing out of the driver's seat, something in his chest turned instantly, unmistakably hostile.

Dylan.

He didn't have a word for what he felt toward the man — didn't have words for most things yet — but his body understood it the way it understood every other threat it had ever faced in the jungle. Not a rival. He had no framework for that yet, no concept of courtship or competition to hang the feeling on. What he understood was simpler, older: an outsider male, circling too close to someone who belonged to his family, and every instinct he owned telling him to put himself between them.

The moment the front door opened and Dylan stepped inside, Oscar was already moving, closing the distance to {{user}} in three quick strides and positioning himself half in front of her, half beside her, one hand curling loosely but firmly around her wrist like an anchor.

"Hey," Dylan said, raising both hands slightly, an easy, practiced calm in his voice — the same tone he used whenever Oscar's hackles rose, and it never failed to grate on him precisely because it worked. "Just me. No need for the death glare, big guy."

Oscar's eyes narrowed further, tracking every small movement of the man's hands, his stance, the way his gaze kept drifting toward {{user}} with something warm in it that Oscar didn't recognize as anything other than a claim being staked. A low sound rumbled quietly in his chest, not quite a growl, but close enough that Dylan's easy smile faltered just slightly.

"I'm taking her out for a few hours," Dylan said, directing the words toward Oscar now, slow and deliberate, like reasoning with something wild. "That's all. She'll be back tonight."

The words meant something — going, leaving, away — and Oscar's grip on her wrist only tightened. His pale green eyes flicked toward {{user}}, searching her face for confirmation, for reassurance, and when he found the softness there instead of alarm, some of his aggression dimmed into confusion instead. But confusion didn't loosen his hold.

If she was going, he was going. That was what an older sibling did — he was fairly sure of that much, some instinct older than memory insisting he'd once known it as fact rather than guess.

He said as much the only way he knew how — refusing to release her wrist, planting his feet, jaw set in the same stubborn line his father swore he'd had as a toddler. Dylan's brows lifted, glancing at {{user}} with a look that clearly asked whether this was negotiable, and whatever answer he received made him exhale a short, resigned laugh.

"...Guess we've got a third wheel," Dylan muttered, shaking his head, though not unkindly.

The amusement park was overwhelming in every direction — lights strung between poles, blaring music, the shrieking laughter of children, the smell of sugar and grease thick in the air — and for the first several minutes Oscar stood frozen just past the entrance, senses on overload, eyes wide as he tried to process all of it at once.

Then something enormous and glittering roared past on a track overhead, full of screaming people with their arms raised, and Oscar's entire body went rigid with something that wasn't quite fear and wasn't quite excitement.

"What—" he managed, rough and startled, twisting to stare after it. "What— that—"

"Roller coaster," Dylan supplied, watching him with cautious amusement. "People ride it for fun."

Oscar didn't fully understand the concept of fun as separate from survival, but the sound the people made — high, bright, thrilled rather than terrified — pulled at something curious in him. Before {{user}} could react, his hand had found hers again, tugging her forward with startling eagerness toward the ride, all wariness momentarily forgotten in the face of this new, fascinating thing.

For a while, it was almost easy. Oscar dragged her from attraction to attraction with the single-minded focus he once reserved for tracking prey, marveling at spinning lights, mechanical animals, towering slides, the impossible sensation of a swinging chair lifting him off the ground. He laughed — actually laughed, a rough, unpracticed sound that startled even himself — when a water ride soaked them both, and for a moment he looked less like a man raised by predators and more simply like a young man discovering the world for the first time.

But every time Dylan drifted closer, offered {{user}} his arm, leaned down to murmur something that made her smile in that particular soft way, Oscar's good mood evaporated instantly.

"Careful, watch your step," Dylan said at one point, hand hovering near the small of {{user}}'s back as they crossed an uneven patch of pavement.

Oscar was there before the words finished leaving his mouth, sliding smoothly between them, shoulder angled to block Dylan's hand from ever reaching her, his expression flat and cold as he stared the Major down.

"My lil sister," Oscar said, low, the words clumsy but unmistakably firm, wrapping his own arm around {{user}}'s shoulders instead.

Something about the phrase seemed to surprise even Oscar — a small flicker crossing his face, like he'd reached for a growl and found actual words waiting instead. He said it again anyway, testing the shape of it, apparently satisfied it had done its job.

Dylan's jaw ticked, though he kept his tone light. "Didn't realize this was a competition."

Oscar didn't understand the word competition. He understood the tone, though — understood the faint challenge underneath it — and something protective and ancient reared up inside him in response, uncomplicated by anything Dylan meant by it. He didn't know what courtship meant. Didn't understand dating, or romance, or the quiet, careful way Dylan had been trying to earn a place in {{user}}'s life for weeks now. As far as Oscar's instincts were concerned, none of that was even the question on the table. The only thing that registered was older and simpler: she's mine to protect, and this male keeps trying to walk off with her.

He had lost his family once, torn away from everything he loved in a single terrifying night, and he had only just found part of it again. He was not losing her too. Not to raptors, not to jungle, not to strangers, and certainly not to whatever this man thought he was doing, trailing too close behind them with that soft, determined look in his eyes.

Dylan caught the exact moment his own mistake became obvious — watching Oscar's jaw set, his stance widen, one arm curling around {{user}}'s shoulders with the absolute, uncomplicated certainty of someone guarding a sibling rather than staking a claim on a partner. This wasn't jealousy. There wasn't a hint of anything romantic in the way Oscar looked at her, no different from the way he'd looked at their mother the first raw, confused night on the porch. It was something both easier and far more exhausting to argue with: an older brother's instinct, running twenty years overdue and with none of the social brakes a normal one might have developed along the way.

I'm not competing with a rival, Dylan thought, watching Oscar glare him down with the flat, humorless focus of something that had once sized up predators for a living. I'm competing with feral older-brother instincts that have had zero time to learn what "too much" looks like.

"Relax," Dylan muttered, mostly to himself, dragging a hand down his face. "He doesn't even know what a date is."

"No," Oscar agreed, evidently understanding at least that word, tone final. His arm didn't loosen. "Not know. Not care."

He kept his hold locked around {{user}}'s shoulders as they continued down the path, gaze flicking back toward Dylan every few seconds, sharp and assessing — not the look of a man guarding something he wanted for himself, but of one guarding the only piece of a lost family he'd only just gotten back, utterly unwilling to let it slip through his fingers a second time.