"Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, you are the proud parents of two bouncing baby boys," announced the nurse as she brought over the newborn boys and placed one of them each into their arms. From both Jim and Stephanie's perspectives, their twin sons looked alike and there was no way to tell them apart.
"Do you have names picked out for them both?" asked the Nurse to the flabbergasted and yet proud looking pair of parents.
"We had settled on Michael James Smith if a boy," said Stacey.
"But we hadn't expected two boys..."
"All right, so Baby one is Michael James Smith," noted the nurse.
"Which one is baby one?" asked Stacey.
"You're holding him, dear," assured the middle aged nurse.
"Can we have some time to think about our other son?" asked Stacey as she saw Jim get wrapped up with playing with the other baby he held.
The nurse said she'd be back in a few minutes anyway to take them to take the babies to be weighed, and that as long as they came up with a name before they left the hospital that's all that mattered.
After the nurse had left, Stacey spoke plainly to Jim.
"Do you remember if Mikey had a middle name or something the first time around?"
"I think it was... uh... Thomas... yeah, Michael Thomas Miller--that's what his name was."
"There we go, you're holding Tommy, while I have Mikey."
"Don't you mean Thomas Anastasios Smith?"
"TAS? I can just hear the kids on the playground calling him the Tasmanian Devil. Why Anastasios? Seems like an odd choice." asked Stacey
"Cause Stacey is short for Anastasia originally, and since you gave Mikey my name for the middle name..."
"Aww, Jim, that's sweet, but if you're going to give Tommy a middle name after me or my family, I'd prefer it if we named him after my Dad."
"So Thomas William Smith?" asked Jim, who didn't like how that name came out. Stacey caught his hesitancy.
"Rather than just William, let's go with the more popular nickname for it nowadays: Liam?" asked Stacey.
"Thomas Liam Smith... I like it. What do you think, Tommy?" asked Jim to the baby in his arms.
Mikey and Tommy along with Mommy came home not long thereafter and Jim and Stacey settled into a new rhythm of life. As the twins grew up, they seemed to both remind Jim and Stacey of the Michael they'd known before in little ways. They were both identical to the baby that Mikey had appeared as before disappearing into Stacey's womb several months before. Mikey had all his patience and good nature and was a positive angel of a baby, while Tommy seemed by comparison a little hellion, and rather suspicious by nature. If Mikey was easily satisfied, Tommy seemed to contradict everything that his brother was on principle. And by the time the two were ambulatory enough to toddle, walk, and run, they began wrestling and fighting each other almost constantly. While Mikey never seemed to start a fight, he always made sure to either finish it or get proper revenge in some manner on Tommy. Stacey secretly dreaded the day that both brothers learned to team up against them. And when the two had finally tired each other out, the two would dog pile on each other and fall asleep entangled in each other's embrace and complain loudly if separated. If they weren't so destructive when awake, Jim and Stacey would think their insistence on sleeping together like they did absolutely cute. As they learned to talk, it became apparent that Mikey's original memories were hazy, ill remembered, and spread across them both. Often Mikey would start to talk about a vague "dream" he had during a nap which would spark a memory that Jim had of Michael, only for Mikey to forget what happened half-way through. And then later for Tommy to pick up on the other half of the memory in a dream not long thereafter. The first time that had happened, that had freaked Jim out, but after talking with Stacey about it they came to grips with the fact that Mikey had split into twins and as such he was part of both their sons, not just one or the other, but both.
By the time both brothers were two going on three years old, both Jim and Stacey were absolutely tired out from their sons' antics.