Crash and Burn

départ.

PRESENT DAY, CHRISTMAS EVE

10 MINUTES AFTER

LUKAS LANCASTER is waiting to die when his father decides that they are done waiting for him to show up to dinner.

The Lancasters -- consisting of Stewart, his wife Denise, and their fifteen year old daughter Eleanor -- are sitting down at the dinner table, oblivious to just how they close they are to losing a son, or in Eleanor's case, a brother.

They don't know that as Eleanor dutifully sets out the knives, that as Denise puts the finishing touches on the roast, that as Stewart does nothing but plop his rotund bottom at the head of the table ("Where a real man belongs," or so he claims), Lukas is surrounded by brutally torn metal and showers of broken glass.

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It's some sort of poetic justice, he thinks with a wry smile, to die as calm as he is -- the wreckage smoking around him shows how he feels on the inside better than he could ever put into words. He'd stopped feeling pain a couple minutes ago, the snow mind-numbingly freezing as it seeps deep into his bones.

All he has to do now is wait.

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Back at home, Stewart has assumed that as usual, their eldest son is being the miscreant that he believes him to be.

The recent squabble between him and his son weighs heavily on his heart, but his stiff upper lip disallows for him to say anything to make amends.

It's quite impossible, Denise has learned, to coax apologies from the mouths of Lancaster men.

"He's probably having hot make-up sex with Max." Eleanor snickers, watching with amusement as discomfort flickers across her mother's face and rage appears on her father's.

Red spreads across Stewart Lancaster's ruddy cheeks and his hands bunch into little fists, slamming them against the table so hard the poor little thing rattles.

"Don't you start, Eleanor. The last thing I need right now is more unsavory behavior from my children."

Eleanor's smile drops into a magnificent scowl, a baring of teeth and fiercely knitted eyebrows.

She has begun to resemble as shark more than anything else of late; a jagged and rough and predatory beast disguised as a girl.

Life is a set of circumstances, and the cards that Eleanor has been dealt -- an ignorant father that cannot see past his forming belly, a passive mother that cowers behind fake appearances and ideal smiles, a brother who wants to love but is afraid to -- has turned her into who she is today.

The Lancaster household is quiet after that, save for the scrabbling of silverware on plates and the occasional question of passing the peas.

The thing about Eleanor Lancaster is that she loves her brother with her entire heart.

His sexual orientation, she thinks, should not matter.

Her parents - namely, her father - think otherwise.

And as they enjoy the warm meal in icy silence, their eldest son is being dragged out of his wrecked Honda Civic somewhere on the icy highways.

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The paramedics' names are Alexei Rodriquez and Elspeth Chen, and technically, they're off-duty. Their nightmare of a 13-hour shift ended about eighteen minutes ago, and now they're heading back from a job to get some much needed food when they see it.