Hello, Everybody!

Yeah so…I got nothing. No real comments for this. Not even sure where it came from. I think I was thinking about how sad I thought it was that {…} had no one visit his grave during the ten years or so that he was wandering around the cemetery, and how I tend to feel sorry for the forgotten dead. I've been known to visit graves of people I have never, ever met, just so that someone pays respects to them.

Not a doubt in my mind that if {…} were real and if I had stumbled upon his grave, I would have stopped to say hello, so to speak. Translate that to Hanna visiting his parents and presto! Instant oneshot.

Disclaimer: I do not own Hanna is Not a Boy's Name, nor any of the characters/locations therein. I do, however, own the story.

Ghosts and Forgotten Memories

He doesn't know just how long he's been there. He supposes it's been at least…oh, five, six years? Maybe more. He's not sure. One thing he does know is that no one, in all the time he's been awake, has come to visit him.

Not a single person.

Friend, parent, sibling, lover. No one. He's all alone. And he would say that it bothers him, would say that the absence of loved ones at his grave instills sadness or anger or disappointment or any other number of emotions…if he could remember. The truth is, he doesn't have any memory of who he is or who knew him. So there is no one to miss when no one seems to be missing him.

He wanders around the cemetery sometimes, just to see if he can jog his memory. Other times he just sits up against his headstone – high up on a hill overlooking the rest of the graves. There is a tree there, and he often hoists himself up into its branches to hide from mourners or to see the stars better or just to think. He likes nature, he decides. It is peaceful, calming, and it gives him something to think about other than his own non-existence.

He is apathetic, perhaps, about his predicament. He cannot seem to make himself think one way or the other about how he is dead. Although, if he stops to admit it to himself, that assumption might not be entirely accurate. Every time someone new comes to the cemetery his heart gives a little flutter of hope – even if it no longer beats. Maybe this time, they'll be for him. Maybe this person is there to claim their long-lost brother, husband, son, uncle, college roommate, anything. But no. They don't come to see him.

Never for him.

And in some ways, it does make him sad. But then he just watches the sun as it begins to set and his thoughts turn to other things. For a time. At least until the next person comes wandering into the sea of graves and marble markers.

It is then that he starts to think on his own marker. As he looks at it, there is nothing there. No name, no date, no little poem en memoriam. Nothing. Just a blank slate. He studied it once, long ago when he first awoke, to find that it had been scrubbed clean; the words that had once adorned it erased and swept away. Whether by time or by the hand of someone he knew in life – or even someone he hadn't – he cannot tell. There, just barely visible, are the marks that he supposes had been words at one point in time. Too far gone to read now.

Has he really been dead that long?

But if watching the seasons for so many years has taught him anything, anything at all, it is that time alters all things. Eventually, something will have to change. Maybe someone will come for him, though as days turn into weeks and weeks into months, that hope is slowly dying. There is nothing left for him here. It is time to move on.

But to where?

Where do the dead go when they are no longer dead but not yet reborn as a new, living person? Is this limbo? Is he doomed to stay stuck here, in this cemetery where no one wants him, for all eternity? Was he that much of a monster in life that he has been damned to wander the earth until the end of days? And what of his end? Will he continue to live on in this half-alive state forever? Or will he simply rot and decay until there is nothing left for his soul to inhabit and even then will he finally move on? Does he even have a soul? Ah…there he goes over-thinking things again.

The air feels different today, he thinks, as he stands on his hill and stares off into the horizon. An omen of change, perhaps. Does he believe in omens? No idea. He muses on the thought for a little while to keep himself entertained.

Whether he believes in omens or not, he will have to finish his thinking later, because there is a figure coming up over the line of graves. He can see it. A blot of red – possibly hair – and what could be slumped shoulders. Slouched. This person is somber and depressed, much like everyone else he has seen come through that place. Quickly, he ducks back behind his tree and starts to pull himself up into the safety of its leaves. Soon enough, the mourner wanders by and he can see that it is a boy.

Fiery hair, thick-lensed glasses, hands shoved into his coat pockets. Poor kid looks like he hasn't had enough to eat. But then again, he himself is rather thin and lanky. Coincidence? He can feel that tiny lilt of hope burn in his chest for just a moment. Does he…? No. No, the boy passes the hill and the tree and the nameless grave and just keeps walking. Not for him. Never for him.

Why does he even bother to hope any more?

Human nature, probably. He feels his mind start to wonder on the idea of human nature and how it might apply to someone who defies nature. Would he technically be considered human anymore? Hmm. He'll have to save that one for later, when the boy is gone he has all the time in the world to think. Just him and the moon and stars.

He watches from his perch as the boy – noooo, no, young man, he decides – heads for a patch of partially-untended grass somewhere near the back wall of the cemetery. He squints a little into the sun and spots a pair of matching tombstones. From this distance it is nigh impossible to read the names on the slabs, but he supposes he can just go look for himself later on if he feels like it. Maybe. Maybe not. Wait and see.

The length of a visitor's stay varies most of the time. It really all depends on the person that comes walking in. For this redheaded man/child/ boy/what-have-you, it takes a few hours. He is not particularly bothered by it, though it has been forever – ha! that's almost vaguely funny – since anyone stayed more than about thirty minutes. Or not. He's not very good with time, after all. For obvious reasons. He continues to observe the figure on the not-so-distant horizon. He would very much like to go exploring that area again, it's been a while, but in the meantime he is content to wait. Once again, time, he had loads of it.

At last, the person stands up and dusts himself off. He absently notes that among the weeds are spots of color adorning the graves. Actually, if he looks hard enough, it looks as if the man…boy…(hell with it) has been systematically removing all but the blots of white and yellow, which he recognizes as flowers, daisies specifically, after a moment or two. Huh. Pushing daisies, pulling crabgrass. (Perhaps he should ponder his humor at some point, too. That could be a good few days worth of thinking.)

He finds it…kind of sweet, to be honest. Clearly, this person has no money with which to purchase flowers, so he allows nature to provide the flowers for him. There is a twinge in his chest as he looks briefly to his own, barren resting place. Not even nature remembers him, apparently.

Bitch; and he liked her, too.

The boy (yeah, he's sticking with that for now) starts to drift back to the entrance, his visitation done for the day. As he passes by the tree he stops and glances over to he small plot of forgotten land with something that he – the 'he' in the tree – is unfamiliar with.

And then he feels his dead heart start to figuratively pound, because no one has ever given his grave a second look. Not only that, but the mourner has begun to move closer to his grave and is staring down at it with that same unknown expression.

It isn't choked with weeds and vines, he has made sure of that. He has no name, no family, apparently, nothing to mark his existence upon this earth except for that grave marker. It is all he has and by damn he's going to make sure that it, too, doesn't get swallowed up and forgotten. At least not yet.

But there still aren't any flowers.

He keeps himself still, a feat not very difficult for one of a dead disposition. He wants to make sure that he remains unseen, lest he break whatever spell is attracting this person to his headstone. What he sees is…not quite what he had been hoping for, but he'll take it none-the-less. Anything is better than nothing, and he has had a lot of nothing for a very long time now.

The ginger is sort of rocking back and forth on his heels, looking for something. The boy – and seriously, how old is this guy anyway, because he looks like an odd cross between twenty-something and fourteen – takes a step around to the side of the nameless stone, no doubt looking for that very name. Tired, worn. That's what this kid looks like. It must be grief, he thinks. It ages people. Not that he would know, really. Obviously finding nothing, the kid goes back to standing in front of the marker.

The grave go-er is twirling something in between the fingers of his left hand and he spots it only as it flashes white in the fading sunlight. It's a flower; a daisy. The strange man-child pushes a set of glasses up his nose and smiles a kind of sad, ironic smile. One too many hard blows dealt to his life. There is a chuckle and then the boy speaks. "I was gonna take this home with me but…you look like you could use it more than I could." And then that single, white and yellow wildflower is being placed gently upon his grave. The boy stands straight, walks away, and still he cannot move his jaw back into a closed position.

It takes at least fifteen minutes, if anyone had been around to count, for him to make his way down out of the tree and kneel beside what was supposed to have been his final resting place. He cannot believe it. His hands slowly reach out to lift the daisy up closer to him; his chest feeling both heavier and lighter at the same time. He just cannot believe it. A flower.

For him.

Someone had cared enough to leave a flower on a nameless man's grave. Someone who quite possibly had just barely enough to live on, had shared something with a faceless stranger that they didn't even know was watching. He just…has no words. No thoughts for this, except, "thank you." But of course by then it's much to late to say it out loud. And he feels regret for that.

Maybe someday he can do something nice for someone else, too. After all, time changes all things, and today there has been a change. Something has altered. Shifted. He needs to shift along with it.

He looks to his tree for what he feels might just be the last time and sees something snagged in one of the branches. A scrap of paper, he thinks, or maybe a card of some kind. He reaches up a hand to take it, brings it closer to his face with a fluid curve of his arm and wrist. It is, indeed, a business card. He does not recognize it and figures that it must have come from the boy with the red hair. Fluttered out of his pocket and caught the wind.

He studies it, turns it over in his hand. Hanna Falk Cross, it reads. Paranormal Investigator. He files this information away for a later date. Never know when it could come in handy, right? Absently, he slips the little rectangle of paper into his pocket. He will keep it. Just one more thing that he can say is his.

For a moment, he twirls the daisy between his fingers just like the boy had done. He smiles softly, almost imperceptibly, even for him, (he's going to have to work on that) but he can feel it there. It shocks him a little that he can still do things like that but he just waves it away with a feeling of shifting perspective. He can ponder the mysteries of the universe another time. For now, though, he takes one last look at his gravestone, a sense of finality and, strangely, freedom coming to wash over him. This is it. No turning back now. But then again, why would he ever want to turn back when there is nothing to turn back to?

One last look. He turns his back on the grave, the tree, the hill. He turns his back and takes a step. He keeps walking.

He never looks back.

Just so everyone knows, I have absolutely no clue as to why Hoobastank, of all things, inspired this story. Maybe it didn't really, but I was listening to their song when I came up with the idea for the fic. Eh. Whatever works, right?

Oh, also, forgot to mention this: the title is actually a quote from the videogame MediEvil. It's a line that one of the gargoyles in the Haunted Ruins level says just before you enter the castle. "Welcome to Castle Peregrine…now it is home only to ghosts and forgotten memories." There's another tiny reference to the game in there, too, but I'm pretty sure I'm the only one who'll ever find it. (Freaking love that game.)

Musical Muses:

Hoobastank – The First of Me

Imogen Heap – Let Go