a place that ends here

They're in a different cemetery, of course.

Even freshly dead, no longer a promise and not yet a legend—even murdered by a scraggly twelve-year-old minutes away from the crown that by any reasonable measure should have been hers—Dru had status and support here. Your sister's headstone carries a little more dust these days than it did last time you saw it, longer than Kieran's lifetime ago, but it still sits well-lit and clearly marked in a gated plot, with visitors or more likely a groundskeeper to care for a spray of flowers beside every grave. The scattering of tokens around it remains as well, thinner than you remember but still enough to make you smile at the thought of her reaction: a private scoff, you suspect, even as she accepted them as her rightful due.

(You idly rearranged those as you sat curled against her headstone, long enough for heartfelt rambling to give way to peaceful silence, and eventually tucked a palm-sized plastic falchion—a gentle thing, nothing like Dru's, that apologized to you when you couldn't smother the smallest of old flinches—into the center of the groundskeeper's bouquet. You thanked the others before you left, and wished you could thank the people who brought them here, for remembering Dru after almost twice her own lifetime. For loving something about her, even if most of them would never love her.)

But it took you nearly an hour breathing dust to track down the name Tamura, and another twenty minutes to feel certain about Bonnali and Kenta; your mother's documents vanished in the shuffle of excited Capitol reporters after Anani surfaced, and her parents were no stranger's treasured memory. (No one's treasured memory at all, anymore. You used to know a lullaby they liked, but you never felt sure about the melody after Anani died; you sang it to Kieran only a few times, stumbling over the unfamiliar words—nennen korori yo, okorori yo—until you lost hold of it, in the end, like so much else.) With a surname to start from, Arieh and Marietta Petros were easier to find—or at least, you had to apologetically send the harried Justice Building clerk on fewer trips between the records and your reading room—but they were a cook and a sculptor: jobs that would signal wealth in District Twelve as surely as the softness in your face or the sturdy make of your jacket, but offer no place among the gilded elite of District One.

You don't have time to find them. Every minute spent with your feet in prickly unkempt grass, squinting at faded names and politely extracting yourself from conversation with headstones, is a minute you should spend preparing for the business meeting that brought you to One; setting up new contacts always involves a measure of risk, and you mean to honor the trust the Sublinos have extended to you. (You suspect, too, that any prayer of getting a permit to visit Ten approved someday hinges on making good on your noise about antiques. You pushed for that trip less subtly than you should have; it wouldn't help, now, to give the Permit Office an excuse for more red tape.) At the very least, you should be making yourself useful in the home Bette's family opened to you, or paying Topaz a visit while you have the chance. The Justice Building took enough time already.

In retrospect, you're not sure what kept you from quitting the first time the clerk returned with a shrug in place of a document. You have a family: Mace and Kieran and the whole web around them in Ten, Viveka and Rune tumbling into their futures and Illario and Kette at their backs and your side, Arbor at your kitchen table in the small of the night and Cedar safe down the block. Anani and Dru forever bright in your heart, Ms. Cherise with echoes of her voice still firm in your ear, a father whose eyes linger sometimes on the edge of your memory. (Several dozen children you'll never excise from your heart.) And if Papero's journal sits unopened in its place of honor back home, after all, and if you're never gone closer to the holograms of your siblings than you were forced to at the exhibit's opening gala, it makes no sense to chase the lives of people you've never known enough about to miss.

It makes even less sense to chase their graves after looking at their death certificates and feeling nothing but calm acceptance. "Okay," you said when you found the last one, and you thanked the clerk and stacked the papers, and until you paused outside the gate at Dru's cemetery you truly thought that would be it.

Strangers are easier, your rock suggests, to which you return the feeling of tracing your hands down lists of tributes who died before you were born. After a moment of consideration, it offers instead, No grief.

Not none, you counter. But not... You sigh a little, then hum tunelessly, thinking about doors to what could have been and windows to what was. All you know about the concept of grandparents is a handful of Anani's vague stories and the wrench of joy-longing-hope when you hear Emerson burble over the phone, but you owe these strangers your life. Whether they held you once and spent the rest of their lives wondering what happened to you, or never even knew you were born, that means something.

Little by little, the worn engravings get harder to read as shadows lengthen around you.

You make time.



Title from "The Police and the Private" by Metric (there's a place that ends here; I know / when they close the gates, I'll cry), which was the Metric song on Aranica's playlist before "Art of Doubt" supplanted it. This is temporally vague tbh, but set somewhere several months after the Ratmas Markets, either before or shortly after the 81st Games.

(I've been thinking about this idea for a very, very long time, and was psyched when last Ratmas presented a way to make it happen. Then, well, :glacial:. Got back to it the other week with the intention of posting it on my anniversary of coming back! I missed that, but still, I'm sappy about it! I could emote for a while in these notes, but it would all boil down to: thanks, and lots of love, y'all.)