"In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God…and we commit his body to the ground; earth to earth; ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Lord bless him and keep him, the Lord make his face to shine upon him and be gracious unto him and give him peace." –Book of Common Prayer

Ash. He's turning into ash. She can feel it, thick, sooty in her mouth, feel her skin start to flake away – no, not her skin, his skin, Landon's skin. He's turning to ash, he's smoking, and soon there isn't going to be anything left of him except a pile of dust, not enough to even collect and put in an urn, or to bury. When she goes out tomorrow morning, everything that's left of him will have floated away into the breeze. He's nothing but ash. They're all nothing but ash.

Aunt Freya took her to mass the day after her dad died, turned to ash in the middle of New Orleans, because Aunt Freya said they were still pillars of the community, but she quickly realized her mistake when Hope went up to receive her ashes, and St. Anne's started shaking before the priest could say anything.

You are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Aunt Freya escorted her very quickly out of St. Anne's and into the arms of her surviving family, who were not here, in these woods, with her and the corpse of the boy she liked and his quickly disintegrating body. She can't help realizing that she's the common denominator. Everyone should carry a fire extinguisher around her since the people she loves have a bad habit of bursting into flames and becoming nothing but ash.

Alaric doesn't touch her. She's very grateful, the part of her that can still breathe, the part of her that doesn't taste like the dark magic she carried inside of her for weeks, that doesn't taste like the werewolf venom that got her mother killed, that doesn't taste like both of her parents. That doesn't taste like Landon. She should look, look at Landon. Whatever's happening to him. She should see it, look at what she did to her parents. She didn't have to face the consequences of her actions when it happened to them. Unconscious. Asleep.

She can't. She can't breathe. The fire that's eating away at Landon has sucked all the oxygen out of her lungs. She imagines her mother's last moments. Horrific. Her fault. Everyone told her it wasn't. Her father had taken the blame. Told her that Greta's hate killed Hayley, that her mother sacrificed herself to save Hope.

And that Hope was lucky to be unconscious so she wouldn't have to hear her mother's momentary strangled scream, watch her father scrape her charred bones off the front porch, smell the burnt flesh and hair and taste the soot in her mouth as Caroline Forbes-Salvatore rubbed her arm in the car.

It was still all her fault. All her fault. If she had never been born. If only she had accepted what her mother said about Klaus, if only she could learn to call him that: Klaus. The Original Hybrid, Klaus the Mad, terrorizing Europe – again; she'd seen it with her own eyes, that rage, how unhinged he could be. He read it in Stefan Salvatore's journals (and the old ones, too, from the twenties, that Caroline tried to keep hidden, but that Hope found, desperate for some sort of answer about who her father was, about what he did before he met her mother, before she was born). The stories that made her shudder. If only Hope could see her dad like that. Her father, who she barely knew, who hardly knew her. He lived a thousand years without knowing her. She shouldn't care so much. She shouldn't care so much that he took back the dark magic, that it was a relief to know it was gone, some place safe.

She would do anything for him to be here now. Anything.

If she doesn't look at Landon, it will be like before. Like the last time, and the time before that. She has to look at Landon so she can see him, so she can scoop up the ashes with her own two hands, anoint herself with them the way she couldn't the day her dad died, remind herself that everyone around her was mortal, ultimately. A reminder not to get attached.

She couldn't bury her father. A mercy perhaps. No one would have come to the funeral.

She can bury Landon. She will bury Landon. She will. She stands, shaky. She can feel the eyes on her, MG whimpering, uncomfortable in his vampirism, suffering. She raises her hands – she will gather his ashes. She will bury Landon and she will celebrate his memory. He will be celebrated by people who knew him, and by people who loved him. He will find peace, even if she can't.

Landon is rising from the ashes. At first, Hope is sure she is imagining it. What she said to Lizzie – about not spreading rumors about her being mentally ill because it's definitely bad karma, and a millennia of bad karma has already been after her since before she was born, and she did, in fact meet her own father before he killed himself to save her and he was an actual lunatic who made Lizzie's kitchen-destruction episodes and Hope's own need to wolf-out so she wouldn't rip other students' faces off look normal in comparison – it's coming true now. Too many people in her life gone, and just, bad genetic luck: she's finally lost it. What she imagined happening a thousand times in the days after her mother died, after her father died, is happening to Landon. He's staring right at her, dazed, confused. He's looking at MG, now, and MG has collapsed. Dr. Saltzman is staring dumbfounded at the pile of ash that used to be Landon, only he's looking too high, too relieved. God, was Landon that much of a hindrance to their education, too much of an anomaly for even Alaric Saltzman, PhD in Vampire Hunting and all, to bother keeping around. Imagine how he feels about her, the tri-brid.

"Oh my God." That's Raph. Hope swings around to look at him, staring at Landon. "You're okay." To Landon. Alive. Okay. Somehow – against all odds – the one thing Hope has wanted more than anything else in the world has happened.

Landon Kirby has risen from the ashes. Hope swallows, and now, Alaric rests a hand on her shoulder, steadying her, but she shrugs out from under his touch and launches herself into Landon's arms. He's startled, confused, keeping his distance from MG, but he's alive, his heart beating, his skin warm. He feels normal, and human, and blessedly alive. She buries the memory of Landon's body. Buries it inside of her the way she was determined to bury what she could of him. His hands find their way to the small of her back. He laughs uncomfortably.

"I'm alive," he announces. "Very cool." Hope can feel him looking over her shoulder to hold MG's gaze. "No harm done," he says, quiet enough for Hope and vamp-ears only. Alaric is still speechless, stunned enough that he doesn't reach out to Hope again. Landon turns his attention back to Hope. "Are you okay?" he asks her.

Hope laughs into his shoulder; she cannot let him go. She spent her whole life separated from her father. She never got to really touch him, to be held by him, except at her mother's funeral; he promised her he'd fix all of it, that their situation was not permanent. He believed that. He knew that nothing was. That there was always a way out, a way to fix what was broken. He turned into ash to prove it to her. Nothing, no one, was too broken to be fixed. Everything was impermanent, everything died.

Except, perhaps, Landon Kirby. Hope holds onto him. She cannot bear to let him go.

A/N: hmm...legacies ammirite? basically i don't want to rework the ending to this but i feel like i should because of Finale Reasons, and most importantly, i realized something pretty...crazy about the finale of the originals which is: it's Ash Wednesday. I've got a lot to say about that, and this is only Half of It. Also, I started writing this on Ash Wednesday which is why it's This Way but...you don't care. Legacies, amirite?