Line of Time

Gifts From Them

As the morning came the children woke their parents up and dragged them out into the living room. They all sat around the room as they ate breakfast and then let the kids start handing out presents. Annie went up to the tree and found one for her little cousin, Peter's son but when she looked around for him she couldn't find him.

"Where's Tommy?..." She asked as everyone looked around for the small boy and found him sitting in the hallway as he used his hand as a pacifier. 

"Come on Tom, Ann has a present for you son." Peter said as the child looked at into Mathias's room and then waddled over to them, still in his pajamas. The day went on as such, every so often someone would have to call Tommy back over to where they were but seemed normal for him to get distracted.

The day was filled with stories, memories sad and happy, playing in the snow that was fresh from a new storm that had blown over the night before. But as the kids slowly went off one by one to bed. The adults sat around until Mathias got up and went to his room. They could hear him rummaging around for a moment or two and the he walked out with some old boxes in his hands. He put them on his siblings laps and sat down. They read the labels with their names on them and then looked at him with shocked faces. 

"Mathias... Where did you get theses?..." Sky asked as she seemed to speak all of their minds for them. 

"There were in Gunnar's closet. They've been in there ever since the year he left. I guess he was like mom he did his shopping early so he could skip the rush." Mathias said as Berwald chuckled. 

"She taught us all that but I guess he was one of the only ones that took it to heart... I know I always forget and end in line for hours..." He said as remembered what had happened again this year just like all the ones before.

"Yeah well I thought it'd be a nice thing to do since this is the first Christmas were having with no chance that he's walking through the door. So I guess if he's not around to give them to you, they shouldn't be taking up space in his closet anymore since the tags say their for you guys." Mathias said as they gave a smile that held some sorrow for the fact that their older brother was no longer there to spend the holidays with them. They knew that their individual families were growing in size but at the same time their family that they had grown up with was shrinking at a fast rate. The family they remembered from their past was no longer there. Things had changed everything and everyone that they had back then. This is why they cherished their memories of the past so much. They had their sort of mash up of a family that no one else could compare to. None of the children knew their birth parents or had suffered a trauma of losing them at an early age. 

The woman that had taken them in was old enough to have been their biological grandmother but she had never the less been a wonderful mother to them all no matter how much time they spent with her. They would always see her as their mother due to her love and kindness. Then there was their sort of uncle?... Well he was really just a man that Miss Cooper had a friendship with that had been like a mother and son relationship due to the fact that Chase had fled his home state to be free of his own parents and live his own life in a way that he would no be judged by the ones around him. But he had been like an uncle to them, he played with them and taught them many things. Miss Cooper had made him the man in charge of being the children's male role model. That he was great at for the most part. He acted just like one of them, a child at heart. He had been in a great part of their lives up until he had found someone to be his own reason to live. A son had been something to melt and warm his heart with kindness. A son had also brought a new face into their family, Tino had been a person who had loved them all and wanted to be nothing more than loved by those he saw as family. Tino had been through a lot of things in his life, just like the others that made up the family but it seemed that Tino had been the only one who had suffered the most out of all of them in his short fifteenth years of life on earth.