I had never felt so weary yet so awake as the morning our son was born. The sun rose, and with it Elena’s hands and the beautiful baby boy held in them. My own beacon, borne of me, blinding in his innocence.

Had I ever been the same? Or had I always been tainted? When I looked back, I found my parents and their disapproval nipping at my heels. I had thought them so long past, dead and buried along with Junko.

My scars had faded, but I still carried them on my heart.

“What are you going to name him?”

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Elena woke as if from a dream, and I remembered Klaus telling me how people can change, how they could get lost in the lighthouse and its light, so warm and inviting, so soft and demanding. Elena woke from a dream, and Klaus grinned through his pain, and I cherished my light, my son, born with her freckles, his eyes, and my hair.

Elena turned to me, and my eyes felt the pull of her gaze. There were cracks in it, the fruit of too much work and too little sleep. Empty cracks, chasms in the storm, fissures in the paths I used to walk with her, hand in hand. But love, light, had begun to well up from the abyss to fill the darkness, and in that moment, I truly believed I could find my way to her and she to me, that this rift would not beat us.

“We were thinking William.”