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"Good day to you, mother," Sharon kneels before the grave on the right, then turns to the one on the left, "And to you too, Xerx-niisan."
If not for the cold breezes prodding at her skin (occasionally bringing with them cold memories to prod at her heart), she could hardly believe that it is late autumn again, that a year has almost passed since...
The breeze frolics between her fingers, as if coercing her to recollect his passing, as if coercing her to recollect how his skin was just as cold to the touch.
Back then she dug her nails into his coat until her knuckles turned white as if that would somehow prevent him from slipping away.
Alas, his life was void like this wisp of wind. Her hands feel warm again the next second, not a trace of the scattered zephyr left.
It still feels surreal, how someone she had certainly loved perished in such silence, such mundanity.
And yet she's still here, living out her life with her hands warming up. Not frozen. Not broken. So she really has to ponder, how certain was her 'love'?
Had she loved him for his loyalty? For his many years of servitude? In return for the numerous times he had kept her safe?
Had she loved him as a brother or a father? As family? For all the burdens he had shouldered in consideration of her well-being?
Had she loved him as an individual? As a male? As someone she had wished to stand beside in sickness or in health, until death did them part?
She scoffs. What is she, a novel character? As if pondering about it would change the fact that she never even stood a chance... Never, not against her own mother.
His heart had been stolen from the start, and she knew that.
She was about 11 years old when she had noticed, before then, her head had still been regretfully stuck in the fictional world of dashing princes and pretty princesses who would fall in love with the former.
It had been autumn too, where fallen leaves were swept across the air, along with affectionate words burning with the same colour.
She ran into the garden merrily, about to call out to her mother and her valet as they came into view.
She slowed down. Something hadn't been right.
The two of them stood face to face. Her mother said something, and his eye — one overwhelmed with so much sorrow on the day Sharon had found him 3 years prior — brightened up.
That crimson eye averted its gaze, but her mother gingerly guided it back to herself with a delicate hand on his cheek. Everything around them seemed to have vanished. There was only him and her, alone in a world of their own, segregated from obligations and expectations, in a fleeting moment where they allowed themselves to stay lost in each other's presence.
Everything was so perfectly in place that she had wondered how she never noticed before. Her mother's cranberry-coloured eyes shone lovingly as always — no, perhaps more than 'always' — complemented with a hint of longing, meeting his evasive wine-red gaze.
His lone eye reflected his fear of being unworthy, and yet the joy in it had been far too conspicuous to remain unnoticed.
She should know, because a few years after, when she was mesmerised by the sweet fantasies of adolescence, she had burnt him into her sight with those very same eyes.
Yet she still never stood a chance.
When her mother breathed her last, Sharon was devastated, certainly. She remembers the long days of lamenting and the long nights of weeping, and she remembered her valet offering her a gentle smile in her time of need.
But somehow she sensed that he had been in a far more bottomless chasm of despair than whatever she could fathom.
The vitality and joy which had once returned to his wine-red eye because of her mother had been washed away with the silent tears he had shed for her mother. Whenever she looked into his eye, she would no longer find the elation she once saw in it.
From there on out, she mourned how much sorrow and loneliness she could feel from his eye alone, how little it resembled the eye of a human.
He resembled a specter instead, long gone, only still wandering in this disgusting world because of some unfulfilled love and some crippling regrets.
She knows how he felt. They both chased after autumn breezes destined to cross the boundary of winter before they do.
Yet at the same time, she doesn't know. Because she still lives, still breaths, not even half a foot inside the boundary.
But is that really such a crime? After all, what is there left for her to linger on? Her mother had long since taken his heart to the grave with her.
Yes, when enough time had passed, even he had regained his sweet, silly grin, as if nothing had changed. But that ever melancholic eye of his would never gaze upon anyone in the same way, not Sharon, not anyone else.
Even the scarce moments in which he had looked at her with affection of a similar magnitude, she knew that he had only been looking at her resemblance to her mother.
But it was only fair. After all, she was exactly what he saw. A spoiled, greedy, prissy lady who constantly relied on her knight's protection, who never quite managed to prove herself worthy to stand by his side.
Not like her mother, who had healed him, who had taken his hands and yanked him out from despair into a world he had been blind to, as a benign God would heal a man born without sight.
Sharon was incapable of such a feat, incapable of bringing him solace. It was frustrating, yes, but she understood that she was no match.
For that autumn day she had witnessed their secret was blooming with more life than any spring morning, raging with more passion than any summer afternoon, and shimmering with more beauty than any winter night.
She blesses them, she's still proud of how she insisted if Break were to be buried anywhere, it must be beside her mother. There were far too many limits but never enough time when they were still alive. Maybe that helped them find each other in afterlife. Maybe that helped them perpetuate their somehow warm autumn.
What more could she do, other than wishing them the best...
...and letting him take her heart to the grave with him?
The End