you, me and a grave . elegant

He thought that it would be different, making the pilgrimage to his father's grave. There was something that he was supposed to feel about it, he knew that. Maybe some strange sense of belonging to something fully at last.

There were just fields for hours, endless things that sped by the train windows as fast as they came up. Ky stared out at them and let them blink away as an interviewer asked his mom questions and a cameraman took shots from afar. Ky had been allowed to stay out of that, they'd wanted to watch him brood. So he tried to, didn't get very far.

It was hard to, he was just different lately, not happy, not sad, just different. Maybe a little bit tired. Not like before though, kind of just in a good way. He'd spent his life waiting for so many things to happen and now that they had he didn't know what to do with himself. All that was left was the reaping and while the threat was always there, his mom's missing finger was his ticket out.

There was nothing left to fear, his stomach hurt anyway.

Asher had done a good job on the wound. The knife had missed anything important in the end. It just hurt sometimes still. He'd wake up at night to a wide-open window and a silent room and the wound would burn in the darkness. Ky had thought he'd always known loneliness but it wasn't until he'd made a friend that he actually understood it.

He'd never been here before.

The sun beat down on where they stood at the entrance to Eleven's graveyard. Rows of tombstones littered the path on either side in front of them and Ky just stared. He didn't know which way to go. His mom's hand was odd in his. It no longer fit right with her missing finger. The wedding band his dad had given her was absent but he'd built his life around that warm metal.

Ky wondered just how much his mom had fallen apart in the last year.

"Do they have to come?" he asked and tipped his head towards the interviewers, "Haven't they got enough?"

He squeezed his mom's hand lightly, a sad little smile on his face. The weight of his father's ring around his neck felt heavier than usual.

"I don't know where to go, you have to lead, mom."

Maybe it was because he'd been raised by her, but Ky often forgot that his mom was a killer.

It was easy enough to, when she smiled it was like the sunrise. When she cupped the flower of a plant in her palm so gently, as if it might break, it was hard to remember that she'd used those hands to kill. It wasn't as if he'd been there to witness it.

Death had never been foreign to him. He'd grown up in a house haunted by a dead father and a district so savage that it had begun to eat its own tail. His mother, his best friend, the woman his mother loved, they were all murderers. Ky regularly walked into a room inhabited by someone that had killed before.

He lived in the lioness' den but the Capitol took predators and draped them in fineries, flashed cameras in their faces and caged them in the training centre yearly. They manipulated the victors with threats, kept them docile by holding the lives of their loved ones captive.

Ky winced slightly, his fingers overlapping his mom's hand so oddly over the hole in her fist where her ring finger was supposed to be.

Opal was staring at the interviewers like she wanted to kill them, her gaze was so intense that he saw the cameraman drop his gaze. Ky almost felt bad for his small request. He had to look at the bright side, if the Capitol had this new footage then maybe they'd stop circulating the security footage of Emmett and him from last year.

That hurt still but a little less than before. Lysander, the new victor from five, had handed him a polaroid of Emmett on her way through One. He kept it in his wallet for awhile until that had felt wrong. Now Emmett just lived in a small frame on his desk. Sometimes when the sun was setting, a band of light would hit his eyes and Ky would see that blue-green again and the sound of waves would fill his room. It was not good but good enough all at once.

"This doesn't feel like..." he started, trying to understand his own self, "It doesn't feel like dad's dead sometimes, mom."

He'd visited him the last two years, a strange ghost in a museum that didn't even know it was stuck in a loop. His dad didn't feel dead to him, just stagnant, a little model ship in a bottle. "It's just never felt final to me and I... I think I probably need this, even with them watching."

She led him through the graveyard and Ky read names as they walked. He knew his grandparents were probably there too, they had to be. Ky'd never met the rest of his family, just Nightshade and Val and it wasn't like either of them were around much. How many generations of Earnests were buried here, he wondered. It occurred to him that he knew nothing about his family on either side, just that his father had been a good man.

Opal stopped and knelt in front of a headstone. It was white marble flecked with bits of black and his father's name was carved into it in a serif font with the day he died and his games year. Ky stared at it, at the curve of the stone and the way that it had been tended to.

The stone was clean, no trace of growth was on it but it did look slightly weathered. The grass in front of the stone was cut evenly and looked untouched. There was a small scuff at the bottom left of the stone, as if it had been scratched by something at one point. It came up to Ky's hip.

He watched his mom kneel in front of the rock and greet it, realizing belatedly that while he'd been to a cemetery before he'd never gone to visit a particular grave. He didn't know the etiquette.

She gestured for him to join her so he did, clumsy for a moment, awkward in his movement as he knelt down as well. "Uh... hi dad," he said.

Ky didn't know how he was supposed to feel in that moment. He'd been half-hoping that something would click inside of him and everything wrong that he'd been feeling for so long would disperse as if by magic. A hole in him should have filled, this experience was the missing piece or at least he'd thought it was.

But there was just this heavy silence and the knowledge that even though his father's bones might be beneath him, it was meaningless to him. They were just bones and his father wasn't here in this final hiding place, there wasn't even a ghost nor the pretence of one. He felt cheated somehow, played.

What had he expected though? His dad to be sitting here, a smile on his face with silver in his hair and a key to the district?

The man was dead.

Ky would never know him.

When he looked at his mom, he could see how special this visit was for her. Her hand was resting on the stone as if she were cupping the head of a flower in her palm. The anger was gone from her eyes and all that was left was an empty sort of sadness. Ky getting to be here with her was a privilege that she'd paid for dearly. So he wanted to play along.

"It's nice to be here dad," he said, "I'm glad, it feels peaceful here, a lot smaller than One too. It's cool to see the place that you grew up." He gave his mom a gentle smile and brushed his fingers over the letters of his dad's name.

"But I really wish you were here, I wish that this was where I found you."