Please, remember me, fondly...

With apologies to Pablo Neruda; Silverlock and Aya, after a funeral.

(Playing FFXII has made me write ridiculously, and I apologize for that, as well.)
(I blame this on Nick and Liall, and listening to "Trapeze Swinger" and "Like a Waltz" far too much. Aya is in her 80s here, though she more or less stopped aging at 50, and she lives another 40 years after this. Occasionally the women of the DeLavrey family are...more than human in their characteristics.)

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"I thought I might find you here." The burial grounds of the Ishkhahareni were empty save for the two of them, but the incense on many of the graves was fresh. The Ishkhahareni always left behind more mourners than they had any right to.

Ayanna knelt before the Zanadreths' offering plate and placed a small carved ivory horse there. "I saw your priest's funeral procession, and thought it time to visit this place again; loss calls to loss, and new pain reminds one of old wounds."

"So it does; so it ever has." He knelt beside her and dropped a silver earring on the plate. It was something Liall would have appreciated; he doubted Vanick's soul would accept any of his offerings even if he were to tender them. "How do you fare, General? I've not seen much of you these last few years."

She sat back on her heels and stared at him, her eye moving to record every single detail of his face. "I grow old, and I survive. But you- I do not think I've ever seen you so naked, my friend." She touched his bare scalp, the lines of his cheekbones, and curled her hand around the back of his neck. He closed his eyes against her touch, and smiled. "This is not a face I know," she whispered.

"I feel that way whenever I walk past a mirror." His smile fell crookedly. He thought of Blaine's body, weighted and sinking to the bottom of Venani's well, and felt sickened and lost. "It is an old tradition: a symbolic death, followed by a rebirth. I ought be someone else, now, free from my old life. Yet I feel no different. Colder, perhaps, but it is the sort of cold that aches."

"The pain grows softer with time."

"I know." He took her hand in both his own and twined their fingers together. "I have lost other loved ones, though none that I have loved so well."

"I did warn you once, that you were too easy with your heart." Aya leaned forward until their foreheads touched. He could feel the bright, alien warmth of her soul, and taste every nuance of her sorrow, and feel it feed and redouble his own.

"So you did, my lady. But I'll tell you a secret." He kissed her hand, then her cheeks, then her lips. "'Tis you I loved best of all."

She laughed softly, and closed her eyes, their mouths still close enough to kiss. "You say such pretty things to an old woman on the day of your lover's funeral."

He laughed as well, though his voice caught on the edge of a sob. "'I do not love you as if you were salt rose, or topaz, or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off: I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.'" He recited the words, secret-soft, against her lips.

"'So close that your hand on my chest is my hand, so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep,'" she finished, just as quietly, just as near. "But these words are not meant for me, old friend."

"If it comforts you to think so, I'll not stop you, dear General." His smile was nothing more than a mask of wearied grief. "And, for all that I am too generous with my heart, and you too miserly with yours, I've no one else to tell them to."

"Then I will hear your pretty words for the one they were meant, and remain a miser. My pain is no longer all-consuming, but the wound that caused it was still a crippling one." She pulled away, and touched her eyepatch. "It is remarkable, what the body and soul can learn to live without."

He stared at the Zanadreth's grave, with its with its collection of jewelry and its menagerie of tiny horses, and the space for a third name beneath the two carved there. Vanick and Liall had died as they'd lived: together. He'd never thought to consider them lucky, before. "Ayanna."

"Yes?"

"Do you stop seeing their deaths every time you close your eyes?" It repeated endlessly in his mind: the white wrapped body, weighted with gold, sinking, sinking, into icy darkness. And all he could feel was the terrible lurch of reaching out for a soul that wasn't there.

"Aye. Eventually."

"Thus we all survive, somehow." He sighed, and closed his eyes against the tears he'd sworn not to shed. "But do you stop wishing that you'd followed after them?"

She covered his hand with her own; a pair of matched silver bracelets slid down her wrist. "Never."

"Ah." He tilted his head back and looked up at the watery gray sky. It wouldn't do to give in to such a temptation; clearly the only proper solution was to live forever. He swallowed back more tears. "I thought as much."

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I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
-Pablo Neruda