"Dairine! Dairine, come here this instant!" A voice screamed down the stairs.
The person in question – a twenty-something year old woman – sighed with resignation. She slapped her freshly made coffee down on the kitchen table, not caring when it slopped over the sides onto the bare pine, and hauled herself upstairs to answer her sisters' call.
"What? I've been helping all morning; can't I have at least five minutes peace?" Nita, her older sister, was kneeling on the floor at the top of the stairs, struggling to seal a large cardboard box up with masking tape.
"Come on Dai, please. Dad is finding moving house difficult enough as it is, without you making things worse. I've nearly finished my room, and that's the last of it – so if you could just give me a hand…"
Rolling her eyes, she knelt to help hold the flaps of the box down whilst Nita stretched parcel tape over them. "I don't see why we need to get rid of the house anyway," she muttered, "It's like we're abandoning mum…"
"Dairine! You know we'd never do something like that. But now that neither of us is living here, dad doesn't need the space and he's struggling enough to pay all the bills as it is, without having a home that he rattles round in. Besides, the new house is really close to the shop; you liked it, I know you did!"
"Hmm. When's Kit coming over?" She changed the subject, not wanting to have to re-hash an old argument yet again.
"Any minute now. He wanted to pop by his folks before he helped load the van, and I think Carmela said something about his mom refusing to let him leave without dinner."
Whilst Nita was speaking, Dairine drifted over to the window, looking out at the treasured garden with its now bare rowan tree and carefully maintained lawn. She would miss this old place, and she knew Nita would too, whatever she said.
Allowing her eyes to roam over the nearly empty rooms, she sighed. It was weird, leaving her childhood home behind. Like she was finally growing up.
"Hey," She exclaimed, spotting something, "I never knew you still had this! Wasn't it due back like, ten years ago? That's one heck of a fine missy!" She held up a rather aged looking book with the words 'So you want to be a wizard?' imprinted on the cover.
Nita felt a wash of sadness at her sister's words. She would never know for sure what had made her sister give up the art; only that she had, and that afterwards she had never quite managed to rekindle the easy friendship they had had before. She wasn't even sure what had happened to Spot, Darine's computer version of the wizard's manual. He had simply been replaced with a normal, run of the mill laptop one morning.
Still, she had Kit. And her father still knew the truth, and she would occasionally discuss things with him. It seemed that Dairine heard some normal sort of conversation when she overheard them, for her replies were invariably about something as banal as the weather or the traffic conditions.
Dairine was still there – as self confident and independent as ever.
But Nita still missed her sister.
Author's note -
I'm British, so it nearly killed me to use 'mom' here – hope you appreciate the effort! This is my first foray into YW fanfic (though I'm no stranger to writing it in other fandoms), so let me know if I'm completely ooc or anything like that!