Their parent's death was sudden and unforgivingly painful. It was a different sort of pain, not like the pain of falling and scraping your knees, or the emotional pain due to strained friendships or lovers. It was the sort of pain that left your mind blank in disbelief and your chest feeling completely and utterly hollow. The tears would always come before they were felt. They flowed down russet cheeks constantly, showing no signs of ceasing. No amount of endearing terms of affection and sympathy could take away the deep gorge left in the heart of the siblings who were orphaned in a matter of minutes due to a car hydroplaning.

The younger sibling, once boisterous and bright, now clung quietly to her older sibling's hand, gripping so tightly that she was sure she was cutting off the blood flow to his fingers. She feared that he too would slip from her grasp as her parents had. They wouldn't even get to see their daughter walk across the stage for graduation, she was nearly half-way through her senior year. 

The older sibling stood tall and strong, although his eyes were bloodshot from having crying while others, most importantly his sister, were at unawares. Everything had fallen to him. The body preparations, the funeral, the caskets, the tombstones, his teen sister. All of it was left to him. Livie, try as she might, could not do too much to help lighten the burden. She was still just a kid, after all, hardly an adult. She hadn't even finished high school. 

After the shock of their parents' sudden death, the panic of not knowing what to do followed when it came down to arrangements for his childhood home and his baby sister.  The will his parents had left behind stated that if they had died before the house was fully paid for that the children would sell it and use the money from it to take care of themselves but, if the house was fully paid for when they died, the children could either keep it or sell it. It was theirs. The house wasn't paid for though, and the fact that there was no way Ethan could afford the payments to buy the house for him and his sister was the straw that broke the camel's back. 

Olivia, affectionately called Livie, had found him in the kitchen of their family's home after the funeral had ended gripping a fist full of hair and choking down sobs. He thought that he'd apologized to her a hundred times that night but she only silently shook her head, there was nothing he could do, nothing she could do, and nothing anyone to do.  "This house is nothing but a house without them. It's not home to me anymore. Home is where my family, that being you, is." Livie had said, which had surprisingly managed to calm her brother down enough for him to get a grip on the situation at hand. 

It had taken a month for the siblings to take care of the arrangements for their parents and what they had left behind for them to handle. That one single month had felt like an eternity and it was an eternity that Olivia had cared to never reside in again, at least not any time soon. She understood very clearly that death was a part of life, that things did not last forever but, the ending of two lives that she had known since she came into this world had come too soon. 

Taking a deep and letting it out, Livie opened the passenger side door of her brother's truck and looked up at the apartment complex where her brother lived, where she now lived. They were the generic apartment complexes that you could find all over the city, all over the state even but, it was where she would be calling home from now on. 

She helped her brother unload her things from his truck, two boxes, at most, at a time. Whatever they could not bring into the apartment was going to be stored in their personal garage that came with the apartments. Halfway through hauling up boxes up two flights of stairs, Livie had paused on her trip back down. Baby hairs from her long ponytail that was now falling from the top of her crown, were slicked back out of the girl's face as she roughly re-tied her highlighted blonde hair back into a more firm bun. She let out a sigh and leaned back against the stairs behind her on the lowest stair step where she sat. 

"Don't tell me you've quit, we have six more boxes Livie and then we're done." Ethan encouraged as he passed her going down the steps to grab two more boxes.

"My arms feel like noodles." The blonde groaned, her head falling back as if she'd completely given up, "Just give me five minutes." She swatted her hand in front of her, ushering him to leave her be.