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Immortals are good at grief, Raphaella told herself for the millionth time.
She didn’t even need to change the sheets. She felt like she should, though, and so she changed the sheets and pillowcase and every blanket and also mopped the floors and scrubbed the walls and scoured every thing in the room that could have been tainted, even though every single inch of the room had been just as spotless before she started. The room had been spotless since the day they left.
Well, they hadn’t really left, per se. They had vanished. They had spent so much time in this room, deteriorating and bleeding and trying not to be a burden — but even when they cried for her to leave because she would die, Raphaella had stayed and taken each death in stride — that when they disappeared the only thing she could focus on was how clean the room was. It should not have been clean. It should have been stained in silver shimmering in every hue she could see and some she couldn’t. It should have been streaked with gore and distress. It should have been stained with blood and vomit.
But the instant they had ceased to exist, it all faded away.
Now the room was clean, and immortals were supposed to be good at grief, and Raphaella still doubted that Lyf had been real. She passed a hand across her forehead to brush away the sweat collecting there, down on her knees with a rag she was using to scour each crack in the metal-paneled floor. With each stroke of the rag, she obsessively checked for any trace of glowing iridescence or unnatural silver that might have been left behind. There never was any, what did she expect? Perhaps the person she had loved had been an elaborate hallucination; she certainly worked with requisite materials often enough for it to be possible. But no, she had died so many times and she remembered each painful one of them, surely those were real?
She shook her head. Perhaps she would find a spot of shimmering blood under the bed. It was all she had left to do, and she was very tempted not to finish. If she never looked down there, she could pretend that there was evidence of their existence (alas, she was a scientist, and thoroughness was important).
She ducked under the low-hanging quilt and once again repeated the process of checking each spotless seam of the floor for blood she knew with 99.31% certainty would not be there. Stupid hope. Stupid fear. Stupid pain. Stupid grief.
She was good at grief. She had to be.
Her rag caught on something in one of the cracks, and she pulled her hand back to see a small paper corner poking from the crack. How had it even gotten down there? Still, she was nothing if not meticulous, and the room needed to be clean (it had been clean when she started, there could have been biohazards, she had to clean the room), so she carefully pinched the corner with her fingernails and managed to pull the paper out.
It was small, barely the size of her palm, and not perfectly square, but it was thicker than normal paper and she recognized it as one of the types of photo paper she had used to collect mementos. Aurora had insisted she had any photo Raphaella needed on her data banks, and Raphaella had wanted something physical. How did this one end up here, she wondered again. She almost didn’t want to turn it over to see the image. No, she really didn’t. Not after she had helplessly scoured Aurora’s footage for evidence of them and found only the slightest patches of distortion on the cameras that hadn’t just completely short-circuited for days at a time — not after she hadn’t been able to find a trace of them there.
She turned the image over with a shaky exhale.
Her chest exploded with a pain she had told herself she didn’t need to feel — were there tears in her eyes? Was she laughing or crying? Her insides roiled with the agony of sorrow as heavy as the endless black of space, scintillated with the painfully pinprick stars of hope. Gods, she missed them, but there they were, their familiar face actually smiling back at her from the paper. Look at them! Their hair was done in an admittedly messy braid (Raphaella had been out of practice the first time they had allowed her to braid it) and they wore their oh-so-common expression of sardonic amusement, tempered by the circles of exhaustion under their eyes. In the picture, Raphaella was looking back out at herself, one arm thrown around Lyf, her eyes sparkling with happiness that was only a distant memory to the Raphaella of now.
They were real. They were real and now Raphaella knew she was crying, and she had to cast the picture aside to keep her tears from marring it.
She abandoned the rag on the floor and moved to sit on their bed, the bed she now knew with certainty she had knelt next to so many times to help them take a drink of water, to put a cool rag on their forehead, to try and soothe them no matter how their blood and bile poisoned her. The grief of leaving them on Midgard knowing they were likely doomed had been bad enough. But this — this pain in her chest that was a horrible accumulation of centuries spent watching them deteriorate, knowing that each drop of blood lead them closer to death without the mercy of killing them quickly, praying they’d ask her to finish it so their body wouldn’t have to but knowing they never would — this kind of grief was so, so much worse.
Shouldn’t she be good at grief? She was immortal. She had grieved so many times.
Why?
Why did they leave, why did they have to bleed and fall apart, why did she get attached, why did she let them back into her heart, why did they vanish without a trace, why did she have to feel this horrible pain for them again and again and again?
Why wasn’t she good at grief by now?
Why did she have to sit here now, trying not to cry at one imperfect image of them, knowing she failed to help them, hoping they would forgive her? Raphaella stared at the picture on the floor, Lyf’s voice playing in her head.
“It’s painful. Of course it is. But I think I’d prefer to grieve Yggdrasil than forget about it, you know? I can’t forget, or nobody would know it had ever existed.”
Raph smiled through her tears. She would remember them, because she knew they had existed and she knew how radiant they were. She would remember the Yggdrasil system for them, she would remember their family, she would remember what had happened there.
Perhaps she didn’t need to be good at grief.
Immortals are good at memory.