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"...Long time, no see."
She didn't say anything. Not that he'd been expecting her to. It was better this way, anyhow.
"A friend of mine had to tell me where to find you. I had no idea you'd ended up in this dump."
Niles sighed and made himself comfortable, sitting on the ground in front of the grave marker. His mother's name was barely visible, much of it starting to wear away without the maintenance of a nicer graveyard.
"I'm afraid I can't say I think you deserve any better. This is a place to remember people. I sure don't remember you, and I don't see anyone else coming around to leave flowers, either."
He picked a piece of clover from a patch of grass next to him. "I'm not even sure why I'm here. I don't miss you. There's nothing to miss. I sure as all the hells don't forgive you."
Niles plucked each leaf off the clover before grabbing another one.
"I'm a lot older now. Been through a lot you don't know anything about, thanks to you deciding I wasn't your problem anymore. I've had a lot of time to figure out why that was. Used to come up with a lot of reasons why maybe you were right to do it. Maybe you couldn't afford me and didn't want me to grow up starving, so you left me out and prayed I'd die young instead. Maybe it was an honest mistake. Maybe you were sixteen and terrified your family was gonna hate you. Maybe I had my father's eyes and you couldn't stand to look at me because I was a breathing, crying memory of something you wish you could forget."
A stiff breeze blew through, and Niles tensed against it, pulling his cape tighter over his shoulders.
"But you never gave me the chance to ask you. Maybe you just hated me for no good reason. Maybe you really thought just leaving me somewhere forever was a good idea. Maybe you didn't give half a shit about what happened to me in the end, as long as you never had to see me again. I can't ever know for sure."
He fell silent for a moment before laughing suddenly, tired and under his breath.
"If it is my father's eyes, you'll be pleased to hear I'm down to one. Not keen on giving up the other, but maybe that's a compromise."
He looked at the ground.
"But I can't even know that. You left me with nothing to go on. I could tell you anything about anyone in Nohr, except for you and my father. It's been nothing but guesswork for twenty-five years, and now the only thing I know for sure about you is you got buried in a shitty graveyard with a shitty gravestone a few spots over from another woman who abandoned her child at the first opportunity. It sounds like the punchline to a terrible joke, doesn't it?"
A stone had come to settle in the pit of Niles's stomach. It ached, though he couldn't point to why. He stood up, dusting off his pants with a grimace.
"I don't know why I came here. I don't care if you know what I'm up to. You haven't earned a place in my life. Did I just want to tell you off? Do I just want to be able to say I've finally gotten to meet you? Maybe it'll make my story sound a little less pathetic if I have. Can't say I have any interest in coming back, though. I've said all I have to say to you. I made my peace with you being gone a long, long time ago."
Niles turned around and set off for the castle, fixing his cloak and patting the dust off it. He thought for a moment about saying "goodbye," but when he glanced behind him, only a cold, run-down bunch of stones stared back at him.
So he faced forward again and took another step down the road. And another.
He'd have to thank Beruka for the information one of these days.