Erm, hello there! My first attempt at writing in a while, please go easy on me. It's pretty obscure, but the idea just kind of popped into my head and wouldn't go away.

Disclaimer: I don't own Flashpoint

August 14th. Lissa's birthday is today. Years ago, the Braddock family agreed that they wouldn't visit her grave on the date of her death, but rather on the date of her birth. Natalie thinks it was her mother's idea.

She hates this day. Not just because it's the day there is a vivid reminder of the Braddock daughter that was killed, the day Sam doesn't bother to cover up the look of harsh agony and guilt on his face, the day her father doesn't say a word.

She hates it most because she knows, deep in her heart, that some part of all of them wish it were her grave they were visiting, and not Melissa's. After all, she is the disappointment. The failure. The one who can barely hold a job for more than a couple months.

Even she can't help but wonder that if it had been her, decaying in this tiny grave that perhaps things would have been different. In her darkest moments, sometimes she wishes it had been her. So she wouldn't have to have disappointed her family so.

Lissa would have gone places, she thinks, would have made something of herself. Even at six she'd had a sort of quiet intelligence about her.

Natalie had been sick when they'd moved, and her mother had kept her in bed despite her begging to go to the park with Sammy and Lissa. The park had been only two blocks away, and she still remembers the squeal of tires, the screaming.

She thinks her father's heart broke that day. After that he became the man she now calls the General. That day had been the first and last time she would ever see him cry.

These days the only thing he discusses with his children is their numerous failures. It's harder on Sam though, the General always bringing up the friendly fire incident at their family dinners that now only happen once a year.

Whereas she gets angry and throws things when her father critisizes her, Sam gets more and more submissive, still desperate to make their father proud. She wishes she could just tell him that he'll never get what he craves, not with a father who is made of ice.

The drive to the cemetary is silent, neither she nor Sam feeling the need to speak. They know where they're going, and they know why, there is no need to discuss it.

Arriving there is a different story. She and Sam are greeted with bone crushing hugs from their borderline hysterical mother, and the broken family makes it's way to their daughter and sister's grave.

Her mother cries shamelessly, her entire body shaking with sobs. Her brother stands rigid, jaw clenched tight, tears wetting his cheeks. She and her father do not cry.

She feels like she doesn't belong here, mourning the loss of the sister that took the family she once knew with her, leaving a bunch of people lost, simply coexisting with eachother and pretending that everything is normal.

When she was young, she'd asked her mother why Lissa had died. Taken aback, her mother had told her it was because God wanted Lissa with him, in heaven. Natalie thinks this God her mother spoke of was selfish, putting her sister on this earth and then ripping her from her family, taking her for himself after only a few short years. It wasn't fair that he got her, and she got a family struck so hard by the loss that it had never recovered.

Looking down at the tombstone she reads every year on this day, she wonders what she'd be doing today if Lissa had lived.

Melissa June Braddock

August 14th 1982 - June 30th 1988

Beloved Daughter, Forever in our Hearts

Her heart breaks a little bit more every year.