The Vale Of Tears

Chapter 4: Sorrow

"Dad? What are you doing here? There's still a few hours until I have to go home," Skye asked, confused.

"Come with me. We have to go home. Right now," her dad said. Skye couldn't understand why his voice was trembling or why he looked so pale.

"What's wrong, dad?"

Even as she said it, she somehow knew that she needed to hurry up. She quickly put back her books in her bag and followed her dad outside, still asking him what was going on. She might as well have been talking to a wall; her dad was ignoring all of her questions and Skye was getting more and more worried by each second. Wild thoughts were chasing each other around in her head and she couldn't shake the feeling that her life was about to be turned upside down.

She eventually gave up questioning her dad and stayed silent for the rest of the ride, gripping the seatbelt as hard as she could and trying to keep away the fear that was slowly consuming her.

Upon entering her house, the first thing she heard was the cries of her mother.

"Mom!" Skye called, running to the living room where her mother was sitting on the couch, crying her eyes out. Her dad followed her and took a seat on the other end of the couch, resting his elbows on his knees and burying his face in his hands.

"Mom, what happened? Can someone PLEASE tell me what happened?" Skye had started crying too by then, but she was also getting mad that they were continuing to ignore her.

"Your brother had an accident." It was her dad who said it.

Skye felt like someone had whipped the floor from under her feet. Collapsing onto the couch, she frantically looked between her parents "What? But he's okay, right? It's not serious, right?"

"Skylar, he's not coming back," her dad said, sinking into the sofa and pinching the area between his eyebrows.

"But it doesn't make sense. He went to help people. How could something bad happen to him?" Skye's young mind couldn't fathom how her brother could have just left her forever.

"We're going there in the first flight that we can get." Her dad said heavily.

"Okay I'm going to go and pack," she whispered, still in shock. Her tears had stopped, it was as if her whole body had frozen. Her words sounded hollow and she felt as if someone had taken her soul and left her empty inside.

"No. Your Aunt Bea is coming to stay with you until we get back."

"What?! You can't just leave me! He's my brother. I have to go. He would want me to go!" She dissolved into tears again and couldn't continue. How could they leave her behind?

As she expected, the only reply she got was silence, apart from her mother's cries. Numbly, without having any idea what she was doing, she left to her room without saying anything. She laid in her bed, not be able to process the last five minutes.

Jasper had finished his senior year and decided to take a leap year and do something to help people in need before he started college. So a few months earlier, he has set off to Africa. He was supposed to return in three months... and now she was never going to see him again. She couldn't wrap her mind around it.

Sometime later, she was aware that her parents had come into her room to tell her that they were leaving, but she didn't acknowledge them. She spent the next two days in her room, without eating or sleeping. Her aunt tried to get her to eat or go out but it was in vain. Skye had no interest in anything but going over and over all the memories she had with Jasper. She thought of the conversation they had had over the phone the previous day. He couldn't call them whenever he wanted, so when he did call, she treasured those few minutes she got to talk to him.

Jasper was the one person she could depend on; it had always been that way. The connection between them was different from what most siblings have. Sure, he was annoying, but he was also the most caring and understanding brother when she needed him. Her brother was her hero, and she looked up to him more than she looked up to their father.

***

Sighing and wiping away her tears, she set the photo in the cupboard where it would be the most visible. Feeling miserable, she abandoned the unpacking and went up to her room.

She had slowly fallen into a pit of depression after the death of her brother. She wanted desperately to know how the accident had happened but she didn't get any answers. Her parents had come back two days later but they had ignored all her questions about Jasper. Instead, they started pushing her to study more. She got no time to grieve the loss of her brother. She and her parents had never been close, Jasper was always their favorite and he had been the one to bridge the distance between Skye and their parents. With him gone, the distance between them seem vaster than ever. Skye didn't know how to get closer to them and she didn't have the energy to try. So she had drawn into herself. She had distanced herself from her friends and started living in her own world. Struggling to meet the demands from her parents to always get the perfect grades in school, participating in all of the activities that they wanted her to and doing her best to give them what they wanted, Skye hadn't gotten any time for herself. There was always something to do with her time. Back then, she had liked it that way. It distracted her from thinking about her brother's untimely death. But over the years, it had become tiring and she wanted to have some freedom to choose what she wanted to do.

She went over the day she had had, and unbidden, Kyan's image slipped into her mind. She decided that this year, her last year of high school, she wouldn't let her parents dictate her. She would give herself the chance to have fun; something she had been depriving herself of for far too long.

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A/N

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