August 27, One Year Later
Ethan Yeager flopped down into the bean bag chair next to Daria and glanced at the TV and groaned at the sight of a news story playing.
"I hate the news," Ethan complained while his eyes roamed the room for the remote, "All it's about is sex, violence, and the weather."
"The essence of human existence." Daria said in tones much flatter than Ethan was used to hearing from her.
"Uh, Daria?" Ethan asked, stopping in his quest for the remote control, "Is something wrong?"
"No." Daria replied and after a moment she sighed and contradicted herself by adding, "Yeah, there is."
"Well what is it?" Ethan asked as he spotted his prey by pure chance.
"Do you know what day it is?" Daria asked back, not taking her eyes off of the television set.
"August the 27th," Ethan said after thinking about it, "So whats... up... Oh."
The oh came out as flat as Daria's current speaking voice.
"Yeah," Daria replied in a monotone that she hadn't used in a while, "That day, one year exactly."
Ethan sighed, "I'm sorry Daria, it's just, I mean... Aw hell I don't know what I mean."
"It's ok Ethan," Daria replied as she turned her head to look at him for the first time, her eyes and face swollen from crying, "It feels weird to think that it's only been a year for me too."
Silence then fell on the two of them like a curtain and Ethan turned to face the TV, now willing to cope with the crappy news if that's what Daria wanted to watch.
At his side she picked up the piece of black plastic without really seeing and changed it to a movie channel playing a cheesy Kung-fu flick.
"You don't have too..." Ethan began to say before Daria shushed him.
"I need to vegg and the News isn't doing it for me." Daria replied matter-of-fact.
"I understand." Ethan answered softly before he settled himself in and watched the badly dubbed movie with her.
As it played Daria found her thoughts turning back to what had happened.
The only good thing was that she hadn't been forced to see what had happened, then again if she had been in the car with them rather than stuck in the moving van because of Quinn and her massive wardrobe that she refused to part with, even in the car...
"I would be dead with them." Daria thought sadly.
It had been pure chance, she and the rest of the Morgendorffer clan had been a mere ten miles away from their new home in Lawndale, Maryland and away from the hellhole that was the Lone Star State.
At a busy intersection the light had changed and her father's new Lexus had the right of way, however the brakes of a tanker truck decided to breakdown, sending it careening through a red light and right into them.
Daria hadn't seen it, but sitting on a box filled with her books in the back of the moving van right behind it all had been more than close enough to hear it.
A year in she could still hear the screeching, the crunching of metal on metal, the smell of gasoline, and above all else the screams from the bystanders, the driver of the moving van, and her own.
What little good there was to be found was that her parents and her little sister hadn't lingered, they had all died on impact.
The days that had come afterward had felt like a waking nightmare, the arrangements for the funeral, dealing with her Grandmothers and their bickering, Aunt Rita and the ever distant Aunt Amy trying to bury the hatchet while coping with the loss of their middle sibling.
Not to mention meeting her parent's old friends, the Yeagers.
Coyote and Willow had come down with their son Ethan as soon as they were called by Amy, who had met them a couple of times before the final breakdown between herself and Helen.
While she had been polite to them, Daria hadn't been able to see them as anything more than background noise, which was how she viewed everyone during that time.
It was the only way she could cope.
Then came the reading of the Will and her relatives learning that Helen hadn't trusted any of them with the care of her children in case of the unforeseen.
Daria's custody was transferred to her parent's old Hippie friends, Coyote and Willow Yeager.
Daria was certain that if anyone had spoken up that the Yeager's would have allowed them to take her, after all they were her blood relatives and they, the Yeager's were simply her parent's college friends.
"But no one did." Daria's inner voice whispered to her bitterly, "Not even Aunt Amy."
Granted she did at least call one a week to stay in touch, it was a depressing fact that it was more than either of her Grandmother's or Rita and Erin had done.
"Hell you didn't even get an invite to Erin's wedding." Daria was reminded savagely.
The only reason she found out was because of Amy, she had gotten an invite and had been planning on saying she wouldn't come and then crash anyway.
Finding out that Daria had been snubbed killed that plan, Amy hadn't bothered to crash at all.
The Yeager's on the other hand had opened their arms and their hearts to her.
They had all stayed at the home that her parents had bought for about a week, sorting out the legalities, during which time Ethan had proven to be a surprising source of good humor.
He had pointed out that his previously stuck-in-the-past parents were warming up to the modern world very quickly.
It had been nice to meet a fellow cynic, even in a clan of tied-dyed hippies.
In that week Daria learned that the Yeager's made their money mostly by selling stuff made out of hemp. But the business was faltering a bit, and due to developing a fondness for a house where you didn't have to think about how many times you flushed the toilet in a day. The Yeager's decided to sell what was left of their commune and use the money to start a small business in Lawndale proper.
However when the Morgendorffer's finances had been completely sorted through, keeping the house her parents had bought was out of the question, the taxes alone would have been murder on all of them.
So with Daria's permission they had sold the house, and had placed the proceeds in the trust account that her mother had established in case of a situation like this.
Luckily for the Yeager's they were able to locate a dilapidated house that the local bank had repossessed a few days before and bought if off of them dirt cheap.
A little sprucing up later had turned it into a functional home, and at that point there weren't any excuses left, Daria and Ethan had to enroll at the local high school.
Which turned out to suck even worse than their old High Schools, Highland and Scrubville High respectively, but having a companion to bounce sarcastic commentary with back and forth made it semi-tolerable.
It still felt surreal that it had only been a year, to Daria it seemed like centuries had passed her by.
So much had happened, so much bad, so much agony and pain, but also a little bit had gone right.
"Kids!" Willow yelled from the kitchen, "I've got dinner ready, I made Vegetable soup and some bread, the way we used to make it."
Daria noticed Ethan grinning a little at that, since that meant that Willow had made the bread from scratch rather than with her new breadmaker, or the stuff from the organic grocery store.
"Soup, then sneak out for flesh?" Ethan whispered to her as they got up.
"Oh yeah." Daria replied as they headed out of the living room, forgetting to turn off the TV set.
Coyote wouldn't be back from the Yeager's new trinket store for another couple hours, but soup and bread was easy to heat back up, in the new microwave.
Daria stepped into the kitchen right behind Ethan and took in the smell of vegetarian cooking and felt her stomach rumble.
"Who would have thought that I'd come to love Willow's rabbit food?" Daria asked herself with a suppressed smirk as she and Ethan took their usual seats at the small table.
Willow brought them each a bowl of soup with the bread floating in the center, her idea of giving it extra flavor.
Oddly enough Daria had come to love it.
As soon as the bowls were set down, the two teens dug in with gusto, Willow smiled widely and once they were distracted looked at Daria a bit more wistfully.
"This will never be a good day for her." Willow thought to herself mournfully before turning back to the stove and the large pot where more soup waited, being kept nice and piping hot.
Willow poured herself a bowl and took a minute to compose herself, the last thing Daria needed on the anniversary of the death of her family was pity.
"She needs us," Willow thought firmly, "Supportive but not intrusive, loving and caring but not forceful and controlling, in essence we're her family now."
So as Willow took her own serving of food and joined her two children at the table, the day of August the 27th continued.
It wasn't a good day for Daria, or anyone in the Yeager household.
But they got through it, and would do so again when it came around the next year, and the year after that, and the year after that.
Until the day that they all died.
FIN