Closure

"Hey. How've you been?"

Unsurprisingly, her gravestone doesn't answer me. Because, hey. It's not Ida. It's a gravestone. A rock, cold and frozen, slowly being covered by a layer of snow. But it has her name on it, and that makes it okay to talk to, just as if it was her. Kind of.

Not really.

"I don't know why I'm here. Just... overdue for a visit, I guess." That's kind of true. It has been a few years since I left Norway. But the gravestone glares at me reproachfully. (It does! Really! Or it would, if rocks had eyes.) "Not buying that, huh? Can't blame you."

It's not that I needed to come home. Norway isn't home, and never was – though not for my relatives' lack of trying. I was a bit of a brat, back then. For a while, Ida was my home. But now the Sanctuary is. "You know, you would've loved the Sanctuary. I can't believe how many new recruits we've gotten this year. We're going to have to add a new wing at this rate."

Keeping it conversational. The first time you visit your lover's grave, aren't you supposed to get all emotional? Shed a few tears? I've shed a lot of tears, this past year. After the fight with Darva, when I finally gave myself time to process… everything. And more than a few of those tears were shed over the row of graves behind the Sanctuary. But I didn't come here to cry over another grave.

Ida and I, we've made our peace. You know how I can tell? Thinking of her doesn't hurt anymore. Yeah, I miss her. But thinking back, remembering her, it's not all pain anymore. It took me a while, but I can remember her with a smile.

"I've always thought of you as the great love of my life, did I ever tell you that?" I watch the path of a snowflake as it just misses her grave, meanders its way down to the flowers I'd placed there. I didn't tell her that, not while she was alive. I should have. But then, there are a lot of things I should've said, but didn't. Well, we can't change the past. Just have to do what we can with the present. "It's true. My very first love." I can imagine her laughing at that. "Okay, so there were a few other girls I happened to go out with first." And I liked them all well enough; women are amazing things. "But I didn't love them. You, though. I knew I loved you the moment I met you."

And hadn't that caused problems. My uncle I'd met before, but I met Ida for the first time as I was moving in. I can still remember exactly what she looked like, standing behind the kitchen table, her hair tucked back in a braid, a few strands hanging loose about her face. I've never been shy around girls, but her – I was speechless. My uncle introduced us, a quick exchange of names, and then pushed me forward – I was blocking the path to the stairs, and the bag he was carrying for me was heavy – but then Ida came around the table, took my bag from him, said she'd help me move in. Smiled at me. And for once, I actually wanted to stick around long enough to get to know someone.

Now that I think about it, it's kind of funny how much I've changed since meeting Ida and Eric. You wouldn't know it now, but I was a real troublemaker back when I was in school. "What, Ida? You think I'm still a troublemaker? Shush. I'm not a troublemaker, I'm a beloved pest. There's a difference." I had this hang-up about not needing to rely on anyone – which meant not getting close to anyone. Kind of a side effect of getting shuffled between relatives for most of my childhood. I knew I was a burden on them, and I wanted to be independent - so I made it real hard for anyone to get close to me. I dated a few girls, but I don't think any of them lasted more than a week.

But then there was Ida. I don't know what it was about her, some kind of magnetism – nah, that's too small a word. Electricity. Gravity. Some huge, universal force that ran through both our veins and made her completely irresistible. And I wasn't chasing her, like I did with most girls. And she wasn't chasing me, like some of the girls at school had. There was just something between us, from the first moment we saw each other. And we both knew it.

There was that whole cousin thing, of course. So we kind of skirted the issue for a while, did a little dance of advance and retreat, neither of us quite working up the courage for anything beyond casual conversation. Those conversations, though – sure, we weren't saying anything particularly deep or meaningful, but the way we talked with each other was like I'd known her all my life. It was obvious from the start that Ida was not just some crush, not a fling. She was The One. And eventually, neither of us could keep pretending otherwise.

She took me out to show me this lake she liked to walk by – not The Lake, as I've come to think of it, but a small lake in a clearing, very private, secluded. Quiet. A nice place to go to think, or talk. We didn't talk. We didn't do anything, either. We walked, and then we watched the sunset, and somehow, while we were lying on our backs watching the stars, her hand wound up in mine.

The storm came up out of nowhere; one moment we were looking up at the stars, the next, we were getting soaked. And we cursed, and scrambled to our feet, and ran all the way back the house, Ida with my coat draped over her head, me bareheaded and probably looking like a drowned cat.

We were laughing as we tumbled through the door, though I can't remember why now. And we stumbled up the stairs in the dark, trying not to wake anyone, and I fumbled my way down the hall to my room.

And Ida followed me inside.

She had a fiancé. I'd probably heard this mentioned before – on the drive down with my uncle, I think, before I met her, before it mattered. It didn't register at the time. It did a few weeks later, when he flew back home for her birthday. A surprise.

When he showed up at the party, I had no idea who he was. Ida didn't react at first, just stared at him. And then she ran to him, and threw her arms around him, and he swung her around and kissed her.

I stared, and seethed, and asked someone who the hell he was. And they told me. Ida's fiancé.

I don't remember his name. He wasn't a very memorable guy. Awfully dull, zero personality, and a face that reminded me of a rat... "Okay, okay, I could be biased," I admit to her gravestone, which is glaring at me again. Very expressive rocks, gravestones. They probably have more emotion than that fiancé of hers. Apparently he'd been abroad, studying to be a doctor or an accountant or a mad scientist or something.

Ida and I had the sense to keep our relationship secret. This meant that as far as everyone at that party was concerned, there was absolutely no reason for me to be scowling at her fiancé as he walked around with his hands all over my girl.

I didn't like him. He didn't like me, although I can't imagine why. I didn't beat him to a pulp, showing an incredible amount of restraint, and I think I should get a reward for that.

Ida's family loved him. He had A Future, capital letters audible. As opposed to a certain boy who had a habit of picking fights in school and forgetting to turn in his homework and looked to spend the rest of his life working in his uncle's shop. (Actually, I'd planned on becoming a skydiving instructor, but for some reason my uncle never took that idea seriously. Go figure.)

Funny thing about that – when my uncle did eventually catch us together, it wasn't the cousin thing that he ranted about. That hardly even came up. No, the problem was that I was scum, and I was trying to ruin Ida's life, quote endquote.

"Think I should visit my dear uncle while I'm up here?" I ask Ida's gravestone. "…Yeah, I don't think so either. He's probably not up for reconciliation." I wrote him a letter once, after my first year in the Sanctuary. I never heard back from him. That's fine with me; we didn't exactly part on the best of terms.

My uncle's not a bad guy. I'd gotten along with him pretty well, up until that point. But see, up until then he'd been thinking me as just his poor nephew that he was taking in. A bit of a nuisance, a bit of a troublemaker, but family; he even said I was a lot like he'd been at my age. Which was part of the problem, really – he wanted something a lot better than that for Ida. Something like Mr. Doctor/Accountant/Mad Scientist/Ratboy.

I can't blame him for that. I can blame him for punching me, and for yelling at Ida, but I can't blame him for the 'you are scum and she is better than that' thing, because I kind of agreed with him. I didn't have much of a future, and I couldn't take care of her the way I wanted to. Really, the best thing I could do for Ida was leave her.

Even when she chased after me, even when she told me she loved me, all I could think to do was leave her. For her.

"Yeah, I know," I tell her gravestone good-naturedly. "I'm an idiot."

Let's just take a moment to repeat that. I am an idiot. An incredible, monumental, irredeemable idiot. Yep.

Now, see, the absolutely amazing thing is that I can now say that without hating myself. Took me quite a few years to get to this point. I was really, really stupid, and I wish to God I'd done things differently – but we can't change the past. Just have to accept it, and learn from it what we can.

My lesson: pushing people away is bad.

Yeah, I learned my lesson, eventually. You'd think that would be common sense, or something that they teach you as a kid, but apparently not. It was Eric who taught me it. What happened with Ida should have been enough to drive the lesson home, but actually, if it wasn't for Eric I probably would have just pushed people away even more than I had before, curling up around the pain of loss and not wanting to hurt like that again. It was Eric who stayed up with me late at night in the Sanctuary as I hugged my knees and stared at the stars, Eric who talked to me until I started answering, who noticed every time I tried to close myself off from people and dragged me kicking and screaming out of my shell.

But not only him. Terje, Hans, Sigmund, Niels… it sounds cheesy, but while I had tons of relatives back in Norway, it was at the Sanctuary that I finally figured out what a family was.

And now I've lost them, too.

I take a deep breath in. A properly cold breath, the kind with bite. I'd missed this, a little, the Norwegian winter. I've been avoiding coming back to Norway all these years, but there's something fresh and clean about this kind of cold.

I've lost them. But I'm not closing myself off, I'm not pushing people away. They'd never forgive me if I did.

I don't think Ida would forgive me, either.

"I think you'd like my fiancé," I tell the stone. "One of the new recruits, Alice found her… You'd like Alice too, I bet."

The gravestone doesn't say anything. It doesn't glare, it doesn't smile. It doesn't help me unpack, or watch the stars with me, or run its hands under my shirt in the darkness of the storeroom. It's just a rock.

Still, somehow, it's enough to give me the closure that I need.