Wounded; A Brallie Fan Fiction *EDITING*

Prologue 2

Brandon's POV:
When I first met Callie, I was transfixed on everything about her, her entire being. Of coarse, she was beautiful. She was beautiful when her hair was short, before Mariana taught her how to curl it. She was beautiful with the bags under her eyes and the cut on her lip. She was just platonically, unmistakably beautiful. But that wasn't what appealed to me. First of all, I wondered what this hostile girl was doing in my kitchen, despite my initial thought, which was that she was another one of Jesus's weekly girlfriends. And second of all, the way she sat; slouched, tense, seemingly uncomfortable with everything from the chair she sat in to the lighting in the room. She didn't look happy. She had the saddest eyes and a plainly broken appeal. Well that's just what she looked like; broken. Wounded. But that was temporary. As I got to know, as a sister, a friend, I came to the realization that she wasn't just a broken girl with sad eyes and wounds on her soul. She was a warrior. She was strong and brave, and her smile in the midst of an imperfect lifestyle went to show for that.

When Callie came to us, she had broken pieces where her heart should have been. But family makes you strong, and I watched as Callie grew into a better person who figured that out in almost no time. Callie deserved nothing but the best things in life. She was an extraordinary person with a beautiful mind and a generous heart. She was incredibly selfless, and sometimes that trait got in her own way. She was always taking care of other people, whether it was me or Mariana or Jude or Wyatt, she never worried about herself. She deserved to be happy.

And it killed me every time she lost something, every time the universe gave her yet another problem to lose herself over. Sometimes, every now and then, she'll get a sad look on her face, and she'll begin to look like the broken girl she was when she first came here. It was every time she talked about Liam, every time she saw me with Lou, every time Jude yelled at her, and most significantly, every time that ignorant judge denied her long-overdue adoption. It wasn't fair to her, and it tore me apart to see her in that kind of immense pain.

I'd been telling myself this whole time that I felt this way because she was my sister, and that it was instinct to care about her this way. I'd been telling myself that my empathy had nothing to do with they way I had once loved her.

But after the interview with the social worker, I knew that wasn't true. Because I began to miss her, I began to miss us. I slowly remembered how much I hated myself for letting her go.

And that night I found myself obsessing over the little things I used to  love about Callie. Like the way her voice would compress when she was angry. Or the way her deep brown eyes would tighten and dilate when she was thinking hard about something. And I loved the sound of her bubbly laugh, the way her cheeks would glow when a smile would stretch across her baby-face.

But if I learned anything from Callie, it was to be selfless. And what she really needed was a family, not a boyfriend. She needed the confirmation of having four siblings and two parents, and the comfort of knowing she'd never be taken out of the house on a sudden occasion. And if I loved her, if I really loved her, I could never take that away from her. And so she'll just continue to be another 'almost' on the list things that broke my heart.