Bittersweet Candy Bowl is the property of Veronica "Taeshi" Vera, whose characters are used without permission for entertainment purposes only. This story is not written for profit.

*THUNK*

The loud clunk reverberated throughout the household, but it was only a distance from the sound's point of origin that anybody took notice of it. Several rooms away, one individual was reluctantly roused from his sleep. The noise interrupted what was otherwise a silent and calming night; early into the AM as it were, it could not have picked a less welcome time to occur. Despite the sudden sound, nobody was aware of it…nobody, except Sam, who always seemed to be a much lighter sleeper than the rest of his family.

Inside Sam's room, old springs from the worn mattress creaked from the displacement of weight as the bed's occupant stirred; the sound having done its job in disturbing his sleep. His eyes were bleary as they reluctantly accepted his brain's command to open. Sam groaned – was it morning already? – as he tried rubbing the traces of sleep out of his eyes, to surprisingly quick success. The usual symptoms of grogginess set in swiftly; for a few moments, his mind was blank of everything except the simple desire to lie back down and get more sleep. Failing to stave off the powerful yawn that threatened to escape from within him, he offered no more resistance and let loose, as if he were bargaining with time itself so that it would listen and stop moving forward for the purpose of extending his snooze.

Sam lay his head back down on the pillow, closing his eyes, his eyes feeling much better now that his eyelids were in a more natural position. Though he attempted to return to his slumber, he would have no luck at it; regardless of how exhausted he was, how relaxed his eyes now felt, or the ungodly hour in which nobody should be awake, his body refused to let him drift off into dreamland for some reason. Frustrated, he gave up on this endeavor and simply lay flat in his bed, resigned to the fact that he wasn't getting any extra sleep now.

His thoughts slowly returned to him from nothingness, though they were far too hazy for him to make any sense of them at first. Eventually, though, his thoughts managed to straighten themselves out slightly and he, seeing as he wasn't getting back to sleep anytime soon, let himself dwell on whatever his mind could focus on.

"Right…right…I'd been sleeping," he thought to himself drowsily, "then…then there was this loud sound, and I…"

His eyes suddenly flashed open once more, now wide awake and unable to let himself get more sleep with the onset of this revelation. With all traces of sleep gone from him, his eyes – mismatched in color; one blue, one a solid yellow – flashed in the darkness. Owing to the felinity of his sense of vision, the darkness of night, though it blanketed his room in shadow, failed to keep him from being able to discern the objects of his room – at least once he put his glasses on.

"…I woke up. It was sorta loud, wasn't it? Damn, what was that noise, anyway?"

His mind conjured a million hypotheses at once, any of them equally likely to be true – something fell from a shelf; somebody walking around, possibly to use the bathroom – but as the list of causations continued to dwindle, it was the worst of the possibilities that his mind eventually settled on. "If somebody had broken into the house, and was inside right now…" Sam was completely confounded on his logic; why exactly had he decided on that conclusion that quickly? Was it simple frustration at being woken up and a desire to take out that frustration on something? Short tempers ran in his family, after all.

Eyes drew themselves towards the alarm clock on the nightstand near his bed, his curiosity getting the better of him just enough for him to delay the investigation. 2:14 AM, read the clock in bright red, the face of the clock being the only thing one could see in the near-pitch blackness of the room; one who did not have Sam's feline eyesight, anyway.

"This seems like the kind of time that robbers would break into a house, anyway. Probably nothing, but…Screw it…Looks like I'm not getting any extra sleep tonight, so I may as well check it out. Better to take action and find out nothing happened than to do nothing and let them possibly get away with it."

His course of action decided, his paws then scrambled towards his nightstand, intent on finding his glasses – without them, anything more than a few feet away was little more than indescribably-shaped blobs of light – and, finding them, slipped them onto his face without hesitation. With his impaired eyesight no longer a problem, Sam sighed as he propped himself on his elbows, trying to stay as stealthy as he could – too much noise would alert the possible robbers. If the robbers were armed, it wouldn't do Sam any good to get noticed. If they weren't, they might flee, and should there actually be criminals around, Sam greatly preferred the idea of actually catching them.

He was in the process of moving out of bed – taking all the care he could to remain silent – when he gave a start; his right elbow, which he had chosen to lean on, collapsed underneath him as Sam discovered that his respective arm had lost a lot of feeling. He concluded that he must have fallen asleep on it, that much was clear, but what was more worrisome was the suddenness of the movement – the springs on his mattress didn't take the sudden stress displacement well, and protested loudly in kind. Sam quickly ceased his movement and strained his ear for any other sounds, signs that he could've been heard just now. While Sam's sense of hearing was normal for his species, there were other felines with an extraordinary ability to hear – his sister Lucy's friend Mike, for example – who could've easily figured something was up.

Hearing nothing, this left Sam with one of two conclusions: either there were actually no robbers in the house, or there were and they had merely stopped moving for the time being when they heard him just now. Despite the far greater likelihood of the former option, the fact that the latter was a possibility pressed him to investigate anyway. Swiveling his body carefully, so that he exited his bed feet-first instead, Sam stood, now able to see clearly in his room thanks to his eyeglasses. Silently opening the closet door, Sam instinctively reached inside with his right arm – noting that the feeling in his right arm had returned in the process – and pulled out a baseball bat, a relic from his stint in the sport in his youth. It hadn't been used in years, and the only time hands had even touched it recently was when Sam had to move it around while tidying up his room. Even then, it had been casually discarded, as noted by the fair amount of dust that had collected on the wood in the meantime, though it was in otherwise good condition. Regardless of the neglect, it still had a fair amount of weight to it, and Sam always had one hell of a swinging arm – this was as good an opportunity as any to get some use out of it again.

One more obstacle lay in Sam's path out of his room; his bedroom door always tended to squeak loudly if opened too quickly, another facet to his room showing symptoms of age. Though he figured that opening the door slowly would mitigate this, it instead produced the opposite result: a long, drawn-out squeal that probably wouldn't leave a soul in the house sleeping, let alone not alarm potential burglars. He froze for a moment, again straining his ears to hear what was going on, but continued forward when he again heard nothing. Sam was initially perplexed at the lights remaining off, though the possible reasons for it struck him quickly; his feline vision had no trouble distinguishing all the stuff in front of him, so it was a foregone conclusion that any robbers, likely being cats as well, would have no more difficulty. He briefly considered flipping the light switch on, but thought better of it – if the noise was caused by robbers, then lights suddenly coming on would no doubt alert them, and if there were no robbers, then there was the possibility that he may wind up disturbing the rest of his family's sleep, and there was no real point in that.

Descending the staircase, he also knew, from experience, exactly which steps squeaked when stepped on and which steps didn't. "Avoid the 3rd, 5th, and 9th steps. They squeak," he mentally instructed himself, though it was a lesson he had already learned often. Adrenaline coursed through his veins, bringing to mind an altogether familiar feeling. Any criminals in this house would not be leaving of their own accord. Baseball bat in tow, he brought it to bear as his feet touched the first floor of the house. Sam looked around, seeing absolutely nothing amiss. That, combined with the lack of noise beyond whatever initially woke him up made Sam suddenly feel incredibly silly for all the caution he exhibited earlier.

"Oh, Sam…haha…nobody would want to rob this place anyway. It's a nice house but there're far better ones to invade in this neighborhood," he chastised himself. All of his worries and his justifications for his actions now looked incredibly ridiculous. Burying his face in his paw, he shook his head, resisting the urge to laugh out loud, instead letting small chuckles out.

"Well, at least nobody was here to see you embarrass yourself on this grand a scale," he continued, taking a few cursory glances up the stairs to confirm it. Seeing nobody, Sam yawned, taking note of the adrenaline high gradually fading from his body, leaving him feeling exhausted all over again. It was a more welcome feeling now that he knew nothing had gone wrong.

"Just in time," he yawned, "back to bed for me. No more of these silly overreactions."

Ascending the steps – again avoiding the noisy ones – Sam paused at the top of the stairs and stretched his white-furred arms above his head again, using the opportunity to let out yet another yawn that had been struggling to show itself. Taking advantage of the innate knowledge he had of his family's house, he traversed the hallway to his room with his eyes shut, confident that he would reach his room unimpeded.

It wouldn't go so smoothly.

He hadn't walked for more than three steps when his left ankle caught under something laying in the hallway, the resulting momentum shift causing him to drop his bat and fall forward towards another door, one he didn't intend to enter. Sam mentally cursed his tall stature as he fell, seemingly in slow motion; his standing at least 6 feet, 4 inches tall caused anything smaller than his knee to go unnoticed by him, yet another obstacle in moving around beyond his impaired eyesight. The door gave way as his body crashed into it – the door to the room had already been open a crack, allowing Sam no support as he collapsed into the room.

As his vision lifted from the floor he had involuntarily placed his face into, and looked towards the room's bed as well as its occupant, it was instantly that he recognized where he had fallen – the room of his sister, Lucy. Sam froze once again, his breath catching in his throat. Lucy had the kind of temper people could only have nightmares about, and her waking up at 2:15 in the morning would do her irritability no favors. He wasn't necessarily scared of Lucy, though she was one of the toughest girls anybody who was even acquainted with their family had ever met; he had nearly a full foot of height advantage over her and more than enough strength to take her down, should she get physical. It was her voice; more specifically, the volume of said voice and her uninhibitedly abrasive demeanor when she doesn't get enough sleep that worried him. She had been going through an increasingly bad bit of depression in recent times, too, which hadn't done anything towards improving her mood. If she woke up, she would undoubtedly yell and alert everyone else in the family, and given the, in retrospect, embarrassing situation he had experienced a short while ago, he didn't feel much like explaining to no-doubt angry parents and siblings why he had gone downstairs, baseball bat in hand, to investigate a small noise.

However, all of that seemed a moot point, as – Sam let out the breath he had been holding at this – it seemed Lucy hadn't been awakened by his noisy entrance after all, continuing to lay flat on her back. Lucy must have been a heavier sleeper than Sam thought. Getting to his feet slowly, he nevertheless acted stealthily, recalling for a moment all the times in the cartoons he watched so many years ago in which a sleeper didn't wake through hellacious amounts of noise, only to spring to life at a much tinier one. Granted, those were only the cartoons, but anything that could be done to make sure she didn't wake up and start a lot of unnecessary drama was a good idea. Yet she remained asleep, none the wiser of her brother's involuntary barge in. He chuckled slightly at the drool line running down her cheek – he had not known that she drooled in her sleep, either, and made a mental note of this as something he could hold over her head next time he needed a favor once her depression passed.

When he turned to leave, though, his curiosity got the better of him as he randomly sniffed the air and was surprised to catch the whiff of something very foul. He couldn't describe the smell other than "bad", but it was definitely not a smell he was accustomed to in the house. The smell roused other sickly feelings from within him, and soon he no longer resorted to breathing through his nose, instead using his mouth in order to keep the scent from affecting him too strongly. As his eyes darted around the room for the possible source, his eyes ran over Lucy once more. He only looked over her similarly white-furred body for a moment, but it was all the time he needed to know that something was wrong with her. Horribly wrong.

Her body lacked the telltale indications of breathing: the slow rises and falls of the chest and the slightly audible sounds of breath were two signs that were missing from her in this moment. Now feeling incredibly panicked, and completely removed from the sensations of fatigue for the second time this evening, Sam took note of the drool line that exited her somewhat parted lips and trailed down her cheek in one small, thin stream. Upon closer inspection, it was not drool at all - it was actually a small vomit trail! Quickly, he pried her mouth open with his paws, now no longer worried about the possibility of waking her up, and was horrified to find that her mouth was filled with the stuff. The sudden uncovering of all the regurgitation caused the most potent, foul scent of all to hit him like a physical blow, something he managed to ignore out of worry for his sister.

"Shit, shit, shit…What's going on? What do I do?" Sam's mind was drawing a huge blank, and a part of him tried convincing the rest of him to accept the worst; that she was lost to asphyxiation, but he refused to believe it. There's no way this could've happened. Feeling her wrist for a pulse, he found that her arms were warm, which gave him a tiny glimmer of hope, only for that hope to be dashed again in the worst way when there was no pulse for him to find.

"She-…She's…" He wouldn't dare allow himself to finish the sentence, as though finishing it would make it an undeniable fact. Her depression couldn't have progressed to that high a level. It simply couldn't have. Sam wanted to yell out loud, but couldn't bring his voice above a whisper. "Oh God, what the hell? No no no…no no no, this couldn't have happened, no no no…"

Sam thought for a moment that his own breathing might have stopped, but upon taking notice of it, he found the opposite result; he was on the verge of hyperventilation himself from the realization, from what he found. He backed away from her body, feeling like his own blood had frozen solid, experiencing fright on levels he had never experienced before; all the horror movies in the world couldn't hope to match what he was feeling right now. His left foot slipped as it stepped on something, causing him to trip and fall backwards. His paws scrambled towards the object he had tripped over, only to feel the cool touch of glass. Lifting the object in his paws, he saw it was a bottle of a very powerful alcohol, half-emptied and with absolutely no reason for it to have been in her room. His mind put two and two together very quickly, although, despite the evidence, he still refused to believe what had happened.

"It had been this," he realized, holding the bottle, "this fell and made the noise that woke me up." His fingers rummaged through her bedsheets, hoping against hope that he wouldn't find what he thought he was going to find, but it wasn't long before he cradled something else in his paws: a mostly-emptied container of sleeping pills that had been prescribed to her by the family's psychiatrist in order to help her sleep better had been hiding under one of the folds of her bedsheet, shielding it from view.

Now with absolutely nothing he could use to further deny this to himself, he left her room. He left her room and never again wanted to enter it. He fell once again as he left, though it wasn't the fault of anything he could've tripped over; his own legs felt like jelly and could not hope to support his weight. This time, when he fell, his head struck the floor much harder than he would've liked, although he hardly felt it either way. It was a few seconds before he realized the noise he left as his head impacted; he heard the sounds of other people, his brother and parents, getting to their feet from their beds; the reactions he had tried so desperately to avoid and now couldn't care less about.

He had never felt this helpless in his life; he was a little kid once more, one who depended on his parents to fix any and all problems, like a pair of superheroes. His senses seemed to no longer register anything; the only thing he heard was his own heartbeat and the muffled, yet worried voices of his parents as they asked questions he found himself unable to answer, as though he were six feet underwater. All he saw was his vision fading out, his paws moved along the floor around him, feeling for his glasses only to realize they were still firm upon his head. His intense breathing would not relent, and he could do nothing but sit there as his senses failed him until the overload of oxygen threatened to knock him out.

Ahead of him, his younger brother, Jordan, ran into Lucy's room, taking a far shorter time than he did to notice something wasn't right. "MOM! DAD! Get in here," he yelled. Both of his parents, with a quick glance back at Sam, left his side and entered Lucy's room. What their exact reactions were, Sam never noticed, as he simply fainted right then and there where he sat, denying reality every step of the way.

Lucy's body was later cleaned and inspected. It didn't take long for the inspectors to conclude it was a suicide, despite Sam's fingerprints on the alcohol and pill bottles. She had intentionally overdosed on the pills and taken a giant swig of alcohol, the two working in tandem to take her life. The sleeping pills acted as enough of a depressant to relax all of her body's natural self-preservation instincts, so she simply lay there on her back as the alcohol induced vomiting, which she promptly choked on. Minutes later, asphyxiation claimed her.

She was only 15.