daydream believer & a homecoming queen / theo's funeral

Two days.

He's been home for two days, and Avriel hasn't talked to Billie and Duke yet.

It feels wrong, all this ceremony for their aunt when their parents have been trapped in the between. As their eldest child he was supposed to ensure that custom were followed, he cursed them to obscurity instead.

When he shuts his eyes, he can draw a map to the spot he dragged their parent's bodies to three years ago.

Before his reaping, he'd spent a year just trying to handle everything alone and get back to the kid he used to be. It was as if he couldn't accept that everything had changed so irrevocably. He'd been a child and had the naivety of one. He'd thought he could be okay if he just pretended he was.

Even as he slowly crumbled under the weight of it all, as it killed him, he thought he could die with the lie. When he'd been reaped, he'd finally felt relief for the first time in a year. It was all going to be over soon.

Then he'd come home and the timing hadn't been right. He was afraid to be alone then, his hands still felt wrong wrapped around anything but a knife, the stitches on his skin felt too tight, like if he wanted to, he could open them all back up and unravel himself.

He'd been alright on his own for such a long time, the quiet wallflower in the back of the class, no one cared when he stopped going to school so he could pay the electricity bill. After he won he was afraid to be left alone, afraid of the dark, of ghosts, he needed his siblings.

But they don't need him anymore, not like they once did.

The bills don't need paying anymore, the money he earned from killing is more than enough. Billie and Duke have clothes that fit them, their backpacks are new, no longer falling apart at the seams. They have more than one pair of shoes now and there hasn't been a day in this new life where the fridge has been empty.

And Avriel will be okay on his own.

The weather agrees with the occasion, fat drops fall on the asphalt, breaking three days of suffocating humidity. Avriel shuts his eyes. His hands are clasped in front of him. The air smells like the rain, of warm tar and fresh cut grass, intoxicating.

The collar of his shirt is too tight, he's strung himself up with a black tie for Theo's funeral. Her casket was waiting for him in the station's storage lockup when Av's train finally rolled into Nine. They'd kept the room as cold as they could but it wasn't cold enough.

Her funeral is closed casket.

Avriel stands there wordless in the front row of the cemetery's reception room and when it's his turn to speak, he does. There were things that he was supposed to say but they don't seem like enough. Theo'd known a lot of people it turned out. They spill out into the hallway and when Av or his siblings pas any of them they reach out their hands with condolences and hushed voices.

He tells a story instead, of this time a few years back when Theo had taken him out for dinner for his birthday and slipped him a beer. How even when he had forgotten what day it was, she hadn't.

And it's a nothing story that goes nowhere and she's gone anyway but he's so aware of her body lying in the box behind him that for a moment it feels like she isn't.

They bury her in the dirt beside the empty plots reserved for their parents. There are no markings on their gravestones yet, even after three years, the search posters are still up, they still hope.

The gravediggers are there, waiting a few yards away for the funeral party to disperse so they can fill Theo's plot and finally end what's now been months of her caught between the living world and the dead.

He's not good at words for strangers, not good at condolences or smiling, nodding, all the things he's meant to be good at as a victor. Av hides between Duke and Billie and lets them intercept the messages of goodwill and sorrow from their neighbours.

The last of them disperse and then it's just the three of them. The rain has stopped and the clouds have begun to part. Sunlight filters through, lighting up the cemetery in golden patches. He savers the moment a little too long, lets the silence settle over them like a heavy blanket before speaking.

For a long time, this secret has been a wall slowly being built between his siblings and himself. He used to worry that if he told them the truth then they'd leave him but now Avriel knows that he himself has already departed, he can't go back to how he was before ever again.

He's thought about this so many times that for a moment, it doesn't feel real. This could just be another dream, a simulation he's run for himself in his sleep, but when he turns around to look at them, it's still just Billie and Duke standing there, staring back.

"Mom and dad are dead," he says, "They were never missing, I lied to you."

A hundred excuses lie still in the back of his throat but any explanation he could give doesn't feel good enough. It doesn't matter anymore anyway, the why of it. They'd been a good family. Even though they'd had nothing, they'd been happy. Avriel had taken that from them.

He hadn't known how to deal with it back then, just sixteen years old and stupid. There'd been no long term plan, just a desperation to protect Billie and Duke from a horrifying truth. He hadn't thought about anything else.

And it's painful, to see the way that they look at him has already changed but it feels good at the same time, like he's taken the knife into his own chest and twisted it himself. Like he's saved them in the same way Areto saved him.

"It was my fault," he says it like he's setting them free.

It's fine if they want nothing to do with him now, it won't change anything.

He'll love them still.