Thread: The War Zone [Assficianado & YellowSmoke]

YellowSmoke said Lara Johnstone Her father had been drinking again. Upon the aged wooden table - itself a door amongst many into Ray Johnstone's childhood - the whiskey bottle gleamed dully beneath the overhead light, and seemed to shoulder the guilt of the man who lay passed out upon the couch. Lara sighed and flicked the light switch upon the wall, and the tobacco smoke haze of the sitting room disappeared into darkness. It was past midnight, and outside the house the English countryside slept wrapped in the gloom and chill of late Autumn. This time last year, the Johnstone's had been living in London and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The twins went to school like most other 15 year olds, Ray and Alice worked during the day and watched television in the evenings. In April, shortly after Tom and Lara's 16th birthdays, Devin had been born. The newborn infant brought a fresh financial burden upon the family, and following the death of Ray's mother, the family upped and left the city for the countryside, moving into the freshly vacated home where the twins' grandmother had lived since before their father was born. They acquired new jobs, and still nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Then Devin had died. A month later, Alice too fell ill and now she lay comatose in a hospital bed, and the doctors said they had no idea if or when she would awaken. Shortly thereafter, Ray had taken to drinking regularly, and a deathly quietude had crept into the house, broken only by drunken fits of rage brought on by the crushing grief of having lost a mother, a son, and for all intents and purposes a wife - all in the space of a season. Lara had often heard that in times of strife, family was the one thing upon which you could depend, as though it were some immoveable pillar of strength amid a tempest of grief. In the Johnstone household there was no sign of such a pillar - only distance - and the silence between them spoke volumes. Walking quietly down the hall, her bare feet protruding from the ends of faded jeans, she knocked upon her brother's door and entered without being admitted. She often liked to sit with him - if only to distract herself from the solitary feeling which pervaded the house - for with Tom, even silence was comfortable. Click to expand... Her soft footsteps gave her away. It didnt matter that there were only three of them in the house, and that of those three, one was passed out on the couch. The small house could have been teeming with people, and Tom would still have been able to pick out her soft tread amongst the many as she approached his door. He had lived with her for sixteen years, and that certainly had something to do with it, but Tom knew that it there was something else to it. He had read something once about entanglement. It was all quantum mechanics and physics and it was all very confusing, but what he remembered was that if two subatomic particles ever merge and then split apart again, each of them will react whenever something affects the other oneeven if they are on opposite sides of the Universe. When he read that, he immediately thought about his sister. In the beginning, in their mothers womb, they had been one, but they had been split apart but this says well always have an effect on each other, no matter where we go or what we do. Lara and I will always be entangled. They were entangled, and they had lived together for sixteen years, but that still didnt completely explain how Tom knew it was Lara. The final piece was that he paid attention. He wasnt obvious about it, but Tom had, from an early age, watched Lara. He watched her, and he listened to her, and he smelled her, and when he could, he touched her. All the time . So much so that he truly knew her better than he knew himself. Oh, he certainly couldnt divine her thoughts, but he was more certain of how she would react to something than he was of his own reactions. He had never really thought about why he did it, for he had always done it, but it all came down to love. He wasnt aware of it, but that was the reason he had a deep, abiding love for her that only grew with the years but as he lay on his bed reading a magazine, he wasnt thinking about love. He was thinking that his father had passed out for the night, and that his sister was coming in to sit with him before she went off to her own room for the night. Shes coming for comfort, for solacebut what can I do to take away her pain? Tom was tough, but he was still just a 16 year old. The blows had come down hard and fast on the familyhis little brother, deadhis grandmother, deadand now, it was almost a certainty that their mother would soon be dead as well. Brain scans had shown no signs of activity, so it was really just a matter of signing the papers and, by doing so, removing the sun from their lives. They had all revolved around Alicefather and children rotating around her eternal goodness and love like little planetsbut the papers would soon be signed. When that happened, their sun would die and their worlds would grow cold. But Tom was determined to prevent that from happening. Between the three of them, he imagined that they had enough love to get them through...but their father was taking it much harder than he or Laraand Tom understood. His mother , his son, and his wife . He and Lara had lost, but not near as much as their father Ray... so Tom understood why their father took to the bottle, and he understood why his pretty little sister came to his room night after night. She was as bereft as he was, but Toms grief wasnt as sharp as hers, for, as always, he was far more interested in her and how she was feeling instead of dwelling on his own emotions. When she walked in and silently shut the door behind her, he wondered, as he always did, how she could be so cute while he waswell, the way he looked. Of course, he couldnt see past the obvious. Their hair and eye color was the same, that he knew, but he couldnt see that he was just as attractive as she was. As always, he was concentrating on her, even if he wasnt aware of it. Looking up at her as she approached, he wordlessly moved a few magazines to clear a space for her beside him. Reaching behind his back, Tom pulled out one of the pillows he had been resting against and propped it against his headboard. Scooting his body over a little to give her room, Tom waited for her to do what she had done every night for the last five nights. He didnt know if it helped her any, but Tom was willing to do whatever he could. Like so many other areas of his life, he wasnt aware that by helping Lara he was helping himself. Wordlessly patting the blanket beside him, Tom looked up into his twins face. He wanted to cry at the grief he saw there, but he knew he had to be strong for his sister. Of course, the grief he saw in her face was reflected in his own, but he felt for her and not for himself. He knew the name for it entanglement.