When I was in eighth grade, my mother told me that she was going to bring her Alpha friend and his twin children home to take care of them for a while.

I remember that the man who had lost his fated Omega in a sudden accident was very thin and pale.

My parents explained that the twins, who were three years old at the time, were also mentally unstable due to the sudden loss of their mother and were crying and screaming to the point of turning blue.

They were in an uncontrollable state and since they couldn’t bear to see them like that, my parents decided to bring them home.

That’s how I met Mr. Raizo and the twins, Jin and Zen.

They were taken to a purely Japanese-style house that was built next to the main house to entertain guests from abroad.

They lived together with us for a year after that.

In the beginning, the twins’ babysitting duties were shared by my father and the housekeeper. However, they never stopped crying no matter who held them.

Their crying was so loud that their cries would reach the main house day and night.

Since I was on summer vacation, I went to check on them in the middle of the night when I heard them crying so loudly and I found Dad trying to put them to sleep.

“Dad”

“Oh, Wakaba. I’m sorry, did their crying wake you up?”

Dad looked tired and pale from taking care of the twins every night.

Unfortunately, Dad was just a few days away from coming into heat, if the cycle didn’t go wrong.

Dad’s estrus was heavier than most omegas and he was more likely to get sick as the estrus period approached.

It was essentially a time when he needed adequate rest.

“You don’t look so good. Why don’t you get some rest tonight while I watch over them?”

“No that’s okay. I can’t leave them alone when they’re crying like this.”

The twins were clutching their little hands, red-faced and crying like monsters.

Dad held them both on his knees, rocking their bodies back and forth to soothe them.

“I’m thinking, What if? I told you about your delivery, didn’t I, Wakaba? I just can’t help but think that if I had died that day, leaving Wakaba behind, you’d be crying like these boys right now.”

I don’t remember anything about the time I was a baby, but my mother told me every year that it was such a difficult birth that she had to choose between life and death.

If my father had lost his life, would my mother have ended up like Mr. Raizo?

“It’s sad for both the one who leaves and the one who gets left behind.”

Thumping the twins’ backs with a constant rhythm, Dad muttered sadly as he remembered those days.

“She was beautiful. She was tall and strong for a female omega. Raizo and Kanade were childhood friends.”

“Kanade went to France when she was in elementary school due to her parents’ work, and when she returned to Japan temporarily after her grandfather passed away five years ago, she met Raizo again and realized it was her soul mate.”

“They looked so happy when the twins were born. I didn’t know it was going to be like this.”

“Oh. That’s all right. Stop crying. Your throat will dry up if you keep crying so much.”

One of the twins stretched out on his back with his hands on my father’s chest.

My father hurriedly supported him as he was about to fall off his knees while now the other one was trying to get away by sticking his face under his arms.

It was like his whole body was expressing that this wasn’t the arm he wanted.

“Dad, let me hold one of these little guys.”

“All right, can you help me out a little bit?”

I picked up the child who had escaped from my father’s arms.

He was sweating from crying too much and his pajamas were wet and soaked with sweat.

The child jerked at the unfamiliar hand and stopped crying for a moment and then began to cry again, as if he were on fire.

“Your throat will hurt from crying so much. Father, what are the names of these children?”

“The one in the blue pajama is Jin and the one in the green pajama is Zen.”

So this is Jin, then.

I wiped his wet cheeks with the palm of my hand and walked around the room in a circle, holding him vertically.

“Jeez! Jin-kun^[1]Kun is used to address men who are younger or the same age as the speaker., Jin-chan^[2]Chan expresses how the speaker finds a person endearing.. Stop crying; let’s go to sleep now, okay?”

It was quite a lot of hard work to mimic my dad and shake my body as I patted him on the back and walked around the room. He was so heavy for a little guy.

As I walked around, holding him up again from time to time, he gradually stopped crying and started doing cute little hiccups.

His eyes were starting to roll back so he rubbed them with his free hand in a clenched gesture.

When the youngest child in my cousin’s house made this same gesture it was a signal that he is getting sleepy, so maybe Jin-kun is about to fall asleep.

He stuck his cheekbones to my neck and I thought he had already fallen asleep, but then he got a cute hiccup and started crying again with a funny little whimper.

“Oh, okay. I know you don’t like hiccups. Go away bad hiccups, go away!”

So close! He was so close.

As I continued to pat him on his back, I heard his breathing slow down to a regular pace as he finally went to sleep.

“I’m surprised; I didn’t know that Wakaba had a talent for babysitting.”

When one of the twins stopped crying, the other in Dad’s arms stopped crying in sync, and he looked at his sleeping brother with a strange look on his face, sucking his little fingers in wonder.

“Is it okay if I put him on the futon?”

“Be Gentle and try lying him down.”

I bent down slowly so as not to wake him up and let Jin down on the futon.

After a single cry of frustration, he fell asleep with his face buried in the quilt.

“Dad, give Zen to me too.”

Zen, who had already stopped crying, didn’t take long to fall asleep as I held him and walked around the room, just like I did with Jin.

I tried to lay him down next to Jin, but he wouldn’t let go of my hair, so I was forced to lie down with him.

“Dad, why don’t you go get some rest? I’ll be watching over them tonight. If they start crying again and things get out of hand, I’ll call you on the internal line.”

“But…”

“Mom has been sad because she can’t sleep with Dad.”

With that, Dad’s expression melted away.

It looks like the alpha mom is protecting the omega dad, but in reality it’s the male omega spoiling the female alpha.

He must be thinking about how cute she is now.

“Just for tonight” Dad said as he walked out of the bedroom.

I spent the night lying next to the twins, occasionally patting them on their butts when they cried or whimpered in their sleep.

I started singing the lullaby my dad had sung to me when I was a kid.

The warmth of Zen’s body snuggling next to me and holding my hair made me sleepy.

I smiled as I watched over them and fell asleep in earnest at some point.