SHIN KIDOU SENKI GUNDAM WING

SAINAN NO KEKKA
Epitaph: Etille

There were no flowers on her grave.

He hadn't expected any. Her family was long gone from this place, and technically it wasn't even her grave, as there had been no body for them to bring back.

No matter. He'd brought flowers just to show that he could, that he, at least, still remembered. He knelt, pressed them into the dirt, as if with that small gesture he could make them somehow take bloom in the slightly damp soil. He crumbled a bit of it in his fingers, imagining he was feeling her on his skin.

Ridiculous, because she wasn't there.

The sun was beginning to go down and the wind was rustling the trees of the cemetery softly. He'd always had a fear of cemeteries at night, but for some reason never this one. He'd spent the night here once, fallen asleep by her grave when he'd stayed too late talking to her. He admitted it - he talked to dead people. And call him crazy, but he was sure she listened.

As soon as he knew he had to take Milliard Peacecraft back to the old Khushrenada estate, he'd known he would be coming here. Anytime he was back, the old family graveyard was like a beacon, calling to him. The Catalonias hadn't been back once to visit it, as far as he could tell, but it was still well-maintained by a few of the neighboring villagers who were too kind-hearted to let a beautiful old graveyard like this go to rot.

He was sure she would have laughed, flung her arms out and said that it was just a graveyard. Who cares about a graveyard, Dermand? Bunch of dead people.

He had loved her.

The setting sun glanced through the trees, catching the etching of words on the tombstone that would someday be rubbed away and erased, bit by bit, by the biting winds and forces of rain and snow and sleet, but for now the surface was still smooth, like a baby's cheeks, smooth and bare and stark in its simplicity.

ALICIA MARIA OFELIA CATALONIA

There was no date, no epitaph. He wondered why that was. He knew she was at odds with her family, but her brother and she had been on good terms, and he didn't think that even cold Duke Dermail would have spurned his daughter so. Perhaps it had been on her own orders. She was like that. Never conventional. She probably would have said it was proper, had she been alive. She needed no epitaph.

He looked up into the distance, at the bulk of the old Catalonia estate and the sparkling river beyond, fading into the sunset. He didn't know who lived there now - some other old rich family, he assumed, or maybe it was a summer home now. It was a rather small house, as far as manors went.

Her brother's grave was next to hers, a respectable distance away even though, like hers, there was no body to be buried. His remains had been burned up among the coldness of space. He'd never known Leon Catalonia, but she hadn't ever talked much about him.

LEON ALEJANDRO PHILIPPE CATALONIA. AC 145-179. Él está con Dios.

He wondered why Leon's middle name was French.

Doubtless his father had wanted to name him after some French king, hoping his boy would grow up to be like him. From what he knew of Duke Dermail, it was likely. The duke himself had harbored such ambitions, and he'd almost ensnared Dorothy in his grasp. Almost.

She was stronger than that.

She had Alicia's blood.

He lingered, watching her grave as the sun sank below the horizon, but no ghost appeared to comfort him and the wind was just getting colder and he had a flight to Geneva tomorrow morning. The flowers had become slightly scattered by the breeze and he knelt again, pushed them together, this time actually patting the dirt over them in a little mound before standing up and retracing his steps back to the cemetery gate. The villagers would find that tomorrow and know that their work was being appreciated. In some small way.

And for a little while, at least, there would be flowers on her grave.

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