Inseparables.

[Aurelie (DELETED 3700)]

When Aurelie was ten years old, her mother gave birth to her brother, Jean-Luc. He was a lovely, dark-haired specimen of a wriggling newborn who cried too much. She would sit in his room and sing lullabies to him in French and, so long as their father wasn’t home, would sing to him in German as well, the ones her grandmother had sung to her when she would visit.

He looked like her when she was a child, a smaller one, with wide curious brown eyes and ruffled hair and an insatiable curiosity for banging things together and trying to stick everything in his mouth and up his nose. Aurelie would carry him around and croon at him, inseparable from the boy and as curious about him as he was about his world.

As he grew bigger, Aurelie was given more and more responsibilities as a pianist and student and ended up sleeping in her brother’s room with him instead where her mother would find her and carry her back to her own room. And when he was big enough to move around on his own and sleep in a bed instead of a crib, the two siblings could be found curled up in Aurelie’s room.

Jean-Luc was pushed into sports and he took a shine to football, playing midfield for his team. When Aurelie went off to university, Jean-Luc was nearly the same age she had been when he was born and it was almost a reversal of feelings, the separation of two inseparables. The ache was felt like a phantom limb.

And when she fell into depression after graduating and going on to tour as the fabulous piano virtuoso, Jean-Luc took a break from his own university studies and stayed with her a week to try to cheer his sister up. However, on his drive to his apartment from the train station, he was t-boned by a drunk driver and he was killed on impact.

Her father has never forgiven her, but neither has she. The phantom limb feeling in her chest will always remind her.