lazuli ezra, six.

They almost name her Asteria, after the meteor discovered during the war. This is her parents first mistake.





The Capitol does a good job at pretending the Ezra twins have not been banished when they go. Tegan gets called into support the Gamemakers of the 10th Hunger Games, but they find her post doctoral analysis of the situation mostly claustrophobic, stifling and oppressive, with far too much concern for the structural integrity of the sewage system and not nearly enough for ensuring a fantastic show. She pays the price when they sever communication between the Ezra PhD and her children. Neglect turns to abandonment, and when she dies, its without the knowledge that they both made their own way in this world.





Her mother cries when she is born, lungs burning with the exhaustion of carrying another's life in her womb for the better parts of the year. History doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it does feel like looking in a mirror. Thirty eight, established in her career, Tegan Ezra hadn't thought she wanted children either until the Blackstone heir waltzed into her life, took her last name for himself, and proclaimed himself lucky in love. Lazuli's mother grew up with the consequences of a daughter watching as that love died, sick and wasting in a warm bed while the rain tolled away at the stones.

Time worn and weary from the years that same sickness have sucked from her own life, Dillon Ezra welcome little Lazuli as her first born daughter. Like her mother before her, Lazuli is the elder twin by a complicated thirty-seven minutes her parents never never much liked talking about.

A year later they name a little boy Malachai in honor of his grandfather before him, named for another before that, and sadness turns to a memory as time washes away the wounds. 

Years later, a decade into her schooling and too much knowledge for her own good, Lazuli wonders about what it means to carry the Ezra name. Why did everyone keep it. Why was this the thing we couldn't let go.





Lazuli starts planning her own funeral when she is seven.

She starts with the easy to recognize things, scribbles them down in a composition notebook she swipes from Tiernan's room when she isn't looking. The documents she needs to remember to store. The list of people she needs to contact. Maybe a funeral director, maybe a crematorium, maybe a hospital, so they'd know to give every part of her body away they could. She hates the way her mother scrambles through the process, hates the pain in her eyes every time someone asks her a question about flowers, about easy appetizers, about what color the urn should be. She hated the shaking sound that rattled through a room when her mom tried to go through the box of cuff links her father had left behind, unsure which to keep and which to give away.

Precocious child, she surveys the crowd at her father's wake and determines what's a crowd pleaser and what isn't. The plan expands as she grows, until she's twenty-seven instead of seven and she realizes she's planned everything down to the wine pairing that should be served at lunch over hor'dourves, the whiskey she wants Malachai to crack open in her honor once the acquaintances have left and they can get around to making fun of all the stupid shit she did while she still lived. She makes extensive lists, detailing and carefully allocating her belonging to her family members, the few friends that she's managed to make. She stores the collection of plans complete with a filing system, in a cabinet with her birth certificate and a little sticky note with directions on who she's left in charge of the distribution.

She couldn't stand the idea of leaving someone else to do it, leaving someone else responsible for all of that pain, all of that mess. No one else could carry it. 





Hiring nannies had become a time honored tradition. Ava, the first twins Nanny after arriving in District Six, stays with the Ezra's through a generation. Tegan only ever meets her over the phone, knows her by voice alone, but she sends money to their address every month for their food costs and other living expenses. She includes little notes about how she loves them, for awhile, until the decades pass and only the checks keep arriving.

Ava introduces the kids to her own grandchildren, and instead of convincing them on the importance of community, the banished Ezra heirs fly away from their bird cages, nests left behind for someone else to tidy up. 

Decades later, when the robins have all hatched and crafted their own aeries filled with doctors and lawyers, Lazuli and Rion know their friendship was organized by the fates before they were even born. She knows that in other nearby timelines, they never meet. Lazuli is born in the Capitol; she does all her medical training in the original Fenwick hospital; they do not meet when she falls off his bicycle and scrapes her knee while his mother folded the newest Ezra heirs laundry piles. He does not laugh at her, and then blush when Josephine scolds him to be a gentleman and go grab the first aid kit. He isn't there for her when her Dad dies, and she isn't the first one he tells about getting into that creative writing program in One.

So even when she hates him. Even when she wants to set his journals on fire. Even when he throws stones at her glass castle, she is glad she is in this timeline, and not the other strange one, where she is alone with only the robins to keep her company.





When Tegan Ezra discovered 13 Asteria and its damning trajectory, she'd been on her lunch break. Imagine that. Staring into the end of things over a tuna fish sandwich. You, a few sheets of well made glass, and a meteor that would bring the end of everything as you know it. Looking back, decades later, sometimes Lazuli wishes her great grandmother had never said anything at all.





Her friends would call it an impenetrable coldness, a devilish closed-offness that she couldn't let go of, like there would always be a wall she was hiding behind, an elegance she couldn't shirk. Maybe it was too many years of hearing nice girls don't act this way, Lazuli. Light eyed, light-haired, Lazuli perfected the art of moving with the delicate steps of a fawn.

As the legend would go, her mother would tell strangers that Lazuli's first steps were a pas de bourree across the hall floor. She moved right past the stumbling, awkward first steps of a toddler and did a chaseé instead. Her shoulders squared, she doesn't remember decided to start performing.

Still, she knows she hasn't stopped.





Dad dead, he's free from the weight of expectation at least when her mother makes her last mistake. She'd been hiding the diagnosis for weeks, but Lazuli had known something had shifted, that the tides had begun to ebb and the course of the winds was about to change. Remission, five years, they'd been productive. Morning yoga classes together, sipping on coffees someone else made for them, bonding over the trails and tribulations of the medical school years her mother liked to reminisce about less and less often. She'd thrown her all into life again, took advantage of the lenient border control and acted like she was doing community outreach, helping other underfunded medical programs across Panem, giving immunizations she'd learned how to give in medical school decades ago. Color came back to her face, but years of her own schooling taught Lazuli to see the signs.

In the end, it was an abandoned letter from her mothers doctor that gave her away, left on the top of the recycling pile. Remission over.

Two weeks later, when her mother is in the oncology ward for her first round of chemo, the rose petals fall, and the plague sets in. Ground Zero, or Ground One, Lazuli isn't sure what the right language is when an outbreak that's been wrangled gets complicated, shows up again a thousand miles away, only worse.

She does know she loses her mother that month. Her brother, fellow medical student, contracts it while trying to treat those suffering, and Lazuli loses him, too. The roses die out eventually, the disease more a bug under the heel of her boot than a dire circumstance anymore, but that doesn't matter. The damage has been done. The mistakes have been made. The blood has been spilt.

Alone on her blue velvet couch, Lazuli drinks a bottle of bordeaux before bed, and does her best to let the memories drift away on the summer breeze. The next morning, with her hair piled on top of her head in her bun and her hands in their rubber gloves, it's easy to pretend she isn't here searching for answers.

Her Mom taught her exactly how.