for sorrow or inspiration [Tyler]

Only an empty life leaves nothing unfinished behind. That should comfort you—and it does, a little, as long as you only consider yourself. How you'll never run out of stars you've never seen, places you've never been—things to chase, reasons to get out of bed. But it does nothing to ease the weight of the bag on your shoulder.

You hold its canvas against your side with one hand as Safina lets you into her home, exchanging pleasantries. The hold is neither protective nor quite defensive, but you need the grounding, the help carrying a tangle of emotions you can't put down into a house that seems too nice for them: grief, gratitude, tentative hope, a tinge of bitter jealousy not for yourself but at the thought that it shouldn't have taken Orion's death to bring his work to new attention. In a better world you would never have had reason to stand in these hallways, but Orion would have found his way here eventually. Given time, a meeting with the Roys could have been a step on his way out of a factory office and into a career only he controlled; you, who have always needed to work your way piece by piece through things he understood intuitively about momentum and force and tamed lightning, are not the one who belongs here.

As out of place as you feel, though, and as much sense as it might have made to do this with the rest of Orion's papers down the hall, you're relieved that Safina agreed to host you. Long after the last of the funeral flowers wilted and dried, you still can't bring yourself to move away from the family you have left, but your home hasn't gotten any easier to live in, either. Too many things there remind you of Orion—and lately of your mother, as though losing him somehow jarred the old wound of her death. The mug with the chipped handle that she always claimed in the evenings, even though she was more likely than not to allow her drink to go cold as she got swept up in the chaos of the household or the pages of some article. The scratch of leaves in the wind outside that you almost, half-asleep before your morning shift, mistake for the sound of Orion sketching quietly in the living room. The gaps at the table when the rest of you manage to have dinner together.

Better the awkwardness here than bringing a stranger to your ghosts.

It helps that you like Safina, or at least the first impression she made: warm and amiable, the first stranger in a long while to offer you condolences without making you want to grit your teeth. You had worried that it would prove difficult to find anyone outside the family who would look over Orion's work without claiming it later, but for all that you'd heard of each other's families for impossibly different reasons, Safina didn't seem like the type to hold her reputation over someone. You trust her. You think. Either way, it's not her fault that this meeting pains you only slightly less than the thought of giving up on Orion's designs.

"Thank you again for this," you say as you sit, sliding notebooks out of your bag to set between the two of you. Even closed, they look well-used—cared for just as well, to be sure, but scattered with scraps of paper repurposed as bookmarks and and wearing ever-so-slightly soft at the corners in a way that makes your throat tighten for a second whenever you forget to expect it. By and large you've had more luck with Orion's older work, especially the designs he had time to talk to you (or in some cases brainstorm at you) about—but that means that by necessity the newer books have seen more wear in the last year, as they pass from your hands to Corvus' and back again, and sometimes through Leo's or your father's. "Corvus—ah, one of our middle brothers—Corvus and I have pieced some things together, but this was always Orion's territory." Despite only giving it a try after Orion's death, Corvus has more of a knack for the physical tinkering than you do, while you absorbed enough of Orion's explanations to have some sense of how his sketches and notes are organized, if not always what they mean. Sometimes neither approach, even in combination, gets you very far. "We're..." An uneasy shrug threatens; you hide the impulse in gathering your long hair behind your shoulders instead. "A little lost."



Title song is "It Just Is" by Rilo Kiley.