Ram Ficlet: Mourning

oh nakhrewaali

@oh_nakhrewaali

Ram Ficlet: Mourning

Ram looks on, his father's smiling face looking down on him. 

Honestly, Ram wants to yell at him. Yell at him for driving at such late hours, yell at him for not informing anyone before leaving, yell at him for not even hinting that it was the last Ram would see him. But he can't. 

"Puttar!" He had always called him that, a reminder of his Punjabi roots. Now, there is no one to call him that. He knows he has a family, but they aren't really his family, not his blood, are they? 

Do they even consider him his family? Ram doesn't know, and at this point, about ten years since his father's second marriage, Ram doesn't care. He had promised his father that he would consider them his family, that he would do everything in his power to love them. 

But love shouldn't be "promised". Ram knows that. So he settles for the next best thing. Ram respects his stepmother and adores his step-siblings. He had always thought that he had time to love them, but the shock of losing his father makes him question this. 

Does he really have the time to love? Does he have the time to take someone for granted? Can he ever love someone again? After losing two people in almost one year and losing his baby sister and mother ages ago, Ram doesn't really think he has in it to love someone. Now that he thinks of it, he never really mourned his sister, who died within hours after her birth and their mother’s death. He had mourned his mother. He was six year old when he lost her, and had cried for a year. He had then had sort of pushed his mother’s memories to the back of his head, but never his sister, he hadn’t been that old to fathom that loss.

He loves his friends. They are his soul. Heck, he can't imagine himself without Brinda and Adi, he would die, probably, but again, it's not the same. They have a life beyond him, and even if they are holding him, they will still not be called his.

So yeah, he looks at the last person he could call his, his father. Now, all that remains of him is his ashes. Ram sighs, and Aditya looks at him, bless his soul. He comes forward to help him, but Ram nods his head. He picks the urchin and leaves the vast living room of the Kapoor Mansion, looking almost dead after the death of its owner. 

He doesn't want to go back, but he doesn't have the choice anymore. The second the rogue car hit his father's car, he had lost his choice of giving up, because now, he has to live for the step family, as he had promised his father, and so, the choice to just give up on life and continue mourning his lost family was off the book. 

But he walks to the pad of roses in the garden, his father's favorite part of the mansion, to show him the roses for one last time.