Donna watched the service from the back of the chapel, her jaw set and her back stiff. She gripped her hand bag--hanging over her shoulder--until her knuckles were white. Her eyes stung.
Why? She didn't even like him. She hardly knew him. They were practically strangers. This was ridiculous. Why was she here?
She thought of a little baby, with chubby white cheeks and wispy blonde hair. He clapped and smiled and giggled, and Donna had wondered why her fathered glared at him like he were the most repulsive thing in the world. She remembered, so clearly, wanted to play with him and laugh like he did, but her mother hustled her from the room, as though afraid the boy's air would infect her with some kind of disease.
The next time she saw the baby, he was not a baby. He was four, though his eyes told a harsher, more horrible story then anyone's should. He smiled at her, though, and introduced himself like a perfect gentleman. She was in eighth grade at the time, so Donna was only partially gushing at the boy, trying to save face. His mother--she had assumed--stood by with a cigarette in her hand and an impatient tick in her feet. Again, Donna's father stayed to the side. They moved from New York, after that, to Pennsylvania.
The preacher rambled on, his voice robotic and his word's reluctant, like he did not believe then as they left his mouth. Donna watched the boys sitting on the pews. All of them looked uncomfortable, like they had never been in a church their entire lives. They kept their heads bowed and fidgeted in their cheaply made suits.
When Donna went to college, she went to visit the boy from the address she had taken from her father's desk. She came upon the run down apartment she hardly remembered, and before she had even entered the building, a voice had stopped her. A boy, maybe eight or nine, leaned against the door, looking at her. "I remember you," he had said. She had to take a moment to recognise him, his white blonde hair and icy blue eyes. She had smiled, a gesture he did not return. They exchanged pleasantries, and she had asked how his mother was, and he had asked how her father was.
"He's my dad, too, you know," he had added, off handedly. She had nodded. She'd seen a copy of a birth cirtificate in her mother and father's bedroom, for a baby boy born around the time she was ten.
She realized they--the boys, the preacher--were moving outside, towards the cemetery, to bury the coffin.
The next she'd seen him, he was sixteen, and she was twenty six, engaged and pregnant. He asked about the baby, husband. She said it was due in a few months, and her husband was fine. He was dirty and thin, like he hadn't eaten in years, and made little expression. When she left, he did not say goodbye. He just nodded, and twitch of his neck that left her feeling guilty, for some reason. It was the last she's seen the boy that was, apparently, her brother.
Nineteen's too young to have a funeral.
They lowered the body of the boy with white blonde hair and icy blue eyes, the same as her and the same as their father. She had not seen his body.
After the priest stopped talking and the grave digger began shoveling dirt over his coffin, she was approached.
First by a girl, about eighteen, with bleached blonde hair and taut, stretched tan skin, "You knew 'im?"
She was chewing gum.
"Yes...uh, yeah," she said, her voice weak to her own ears. I asked who she was.
She snorted, "Sylvia. Shame about him. He really was an idiot sometimes."
She walked away. A boy, maybe fourteen, walked up to her, "Who're you?"
He sounded tired. Donna didn't really look at him, "Donna."
"No," he said, "who are you."
She looked at him. He looked nice enough, with wide, wary eyes, pale skin and greased back hair. He seemed like he was past tears, a glow of intelligence in his face.
"Winston. Donna Winston," she whispered, looking towards the man shoveling dirt into a hole, "Dallas' sister."
The boy seemed taken aback, and he was quiet for a minute. His hair was blonde, like the girl's. Bleached, with roots a light brown that would have looked better on him. "Oh."
"Yeah."
He bit his lip, "I didn't...know. He had a sister, I mean."
She laughed, though she really didn't find anything funny, "He didn't talk about me much."
They stood beside each other for a minute, neither saying a word.
"What was he like?"
It was then, that moment, that Donna decided she was a terrible sister.
She called him her brother, she shared this dead boy's blood, yet she let him walk away from her, knowing he was going nowhere but a corner in an alley. She knew he was living nowhere, she knew he was going somewhere bad, and she let him. She didn't even know him.
"You know, when he was a kid..." the boy added when she didn't answer.
She shook her head and looked at her shoes, "Like he was now, I guess."
She shouldn't be talking. She shouldn't be answering this boy's questions.
Her blonde hair fell into her eyes, and she knew she had to leave. Her daughter would be getting out of school soon, and it was an hours drive back home.
God, Donna hardly knew him.
The sky was grey with condensed rain, and it was cold. She crossed her arms and shivered. The boy began to talk again, bt she dismissed him with a comment she forgot moments later.
He walked off, and she took another look at the half-filled grave before walking to her car.
Dallas Winston is dead, she thought, and I'm crying about it.
Author's Note: A little different from my usual deathfics, methinks? No? Fine. If it sucks, fine. Let me know so I can kill myself. Just thought I'd give a different spin to a sister-fic.