A/N: I wrote this about 5 weeks ago, and didn't feel ready to post it. But today is a couple of important anniversaries to me, and this fic was cathartic in relation to them, so I'm posting it now.

There are a few ficlets left to go in this little collection, and they will likely be appearing over the next few weeks.

Also, today is Konstin's 137th birthday! I thought it was tomorrow, but then I re-read some stuff and did maths and realised no, it is actually today.

It is the first time he has been down to visit his father since the war ended, the first time since many months before that. He could not bear to come down alone, not when there was so much still uncertain, not when he—he didn't know.

(He had half an idea, once, that if Antoine didn't—if he got word that Antoine was—if something terrible happened, that he might throw himself into the lake, that it was an option for him. But then he thought of his mother, and all that his father put her through, and he thought of Antoine, telling him to at least try, and knew he couldn't do it, not really, no matter how tempting it might be.)

But his baby sister is getting married in the morning (how is Anja old enough to get married? He could have sworn that yesterday she was running around and climbing trees and insisting on being rescued like a princess in a story), and he can't explain it but it just felt right to come down here. He tested her first dance several times, played it and played it and checked every line for flaws, every note, recorded it on the phonograph so he could play it back to himself and listen to it with a clear head. It's perfect. It could not possibly be more perfect.

And after all that, he just couldn't settle.

He didn't tell Antoine where he was going, just kissed him goodbye and promised to be home soon, and if Antoine worried about him going off on his own, he didn't say anything, just kissed him back and promised to have cocoa ready.

He's probably just happy to see him doing something other than obsessing over music.

(Or waking after nightmares.)

"It's me."

He never quite knows what to say when he's down here. Anything he might say feels trite, feels awkward on his tongue. He can't call him Father because it feels too stiff, but he can't call him Erik because it feels too removed, and he can't call him Papa, not now, not when he used to when he was small and it still feels like something he could only say when he was small, before he knew so much, before everything became tainted with knowledge.

He likes to think his own feelings have not been tainted by all he knows of his father, but they have. And they make the words catch in his throat, longing and anger and revulsion and grief and desperation and love all mingled together, and sometimes he thinks some part of him hates the man, hates what he did to his mother, hates him for what he inflicted on himself, hates him for dying, and then he hates himself for that tiny part that hates his father, and the cycle starts again when all he really wants, all he's ever wanted, from the time he first learned to talk, is to know him, to have him. The one person, the one man, who's always been beyond his reach.

He can go to the graveyard and talk to Nadir, talk to Darius. They buried them side-by-side, because even in death it seemed unnatural for them to be apart. Talk to them and tell them how he's doing and what he's doing and even about the war, and about the way every part of him aches sometimes with remembered pain, how the nightmares never go away, not fully, they're always lingering int he back of his mind, and know that no matter what he might say they would understand, or make him feel as if they understood. But his own father—

He never knew him. He never knew him and that has always been so much the problem, hasn't it? His father never even knew of his future existence, died believing that there could never be a child if he even thought of it in his last days. Who is he to think his father would even like him?

Mamma says he would, and Raoul. And Nadir always said it too. But he knows as well as anyone that his father was a difficult man, to put it lightly.

All he has are other people's stories, other people's memories, nothing of his own, only a watch, only music scores and handwritten notes and books and a house that nobody lives in and a violin and an organ that he doesn't know how to fix. He has all of these things, old masks and clothes and furniture and an old silver hypodermic with a needle that glints in the firelight, and he never told his mother he found it even though he's had it for more than twenty years because it would only upset her, and that old hypodermic is the thing that feels most like his father's, that feels the most as if he once touched it, and held it, and used it.

He can understand self-medication. It is another thing they have in common, like music and the colour of their eyes.

All of these things, and the memories from when he was ill, when he was wounded and dying even though he survived because he would have died and he has no doubt over that, he was just lucky, that's the only reason he's still breathing. Luck and medicine and a skilled surgeon, but he would have died and maybe he should have, maybe it would have been fairer if he had, and so he has the memories, of drifting in and out, of his father's ghost sitting at his bedside, holding his hand and talking to him, and he has no idea if those memories are real or not. They might have been hallucinations or dreams and all authorities on the subject would say they were brought on by the delirium and infection, but he wants them to have been real, he needs them to have been real so badly it feels as if he is still bleeding somewhere deep inside and no one can ever find it and fix it.

But if dreams are all they were? What if you die and there's nothing?

He's tried not to think about it, tried not to think about it so badly that sometimes it feels as if it's all he can think about, the only thought that will stay in his mind. What if he'll die and it's just blankness and he'll never meet his father, his dad, his papa, the man who made him, the reason he ever drew breath at all. What if his only chance was before he was born?

He's never talked about it, never been able to, not really. Nadir was the only one who ever knew, and he's gone too, has been gone for so long that sometimes it feels he was never real, so long that the memories are all faded, that he can't remember the cadence of his voice, the way his eyes sparkled, how gentle his hands were.

God he misses him. He misses him every damn day.

His leg is cramping. He would lower himself to the ground, like he used to when he was small and would chatter for hours telling his papa about everything he'd seen and any music he'd heard and how he loved playing the violin and anything else that came into his mind. He doesn't remember first coming down here, he was only a very small boy at the time, but his mother has told him that he was afraid of the dark and the tunnels, and when they finally reached here, the place where his father is buried, he got excited when she told him that he could talk to his papa and his papa would hear. Then he started bringing little shells and little stones and old buttons off his clothes and pretty feathers he'd found, something special every time he came down as presents to his papa.

When he was fifteen, and Mamma and Raoul were on their honeymoon, he came down here one day (it was a Sunday, a beautiful sunny Sunday) and gathered up the old things he'd left when he was small, as many of them as he could find that time had not dispersed, and buried them in a small hole beside the grave, with scraps of letters that he'd written to a dead man.

Then he left, and dressed in his best clothes with the imperious mask he learned off Philippe, he visited Jules Bernard at the address he'd found for the man, and asked him to tell him everything he knew about his father.

To this day, he is certain that Bernard thought he was looking at a phantasm, never mind that he does not share his father's deformity.

He kneads his thigh, wills the muscle to forgive him. He needs to be able to stand during the ceremony tomorrow, after all, and he would lower himself to the ground now but he is slightly afraid that he would not be able to get back to his feet, so he leans heavier on his cane and feels some of the aching ease from his joints.

"I'm sorry I can't think of what to say." His voice is rough to his own ears. "I've been busy composing for Anja. She's getting married tomorrow, to Valentin De Courcy. You wouldn't know him. You wouldn't even have known his father, but he likes music, Val, even though he can't play a note. He's an excellent accountant though. He's not allowed any active duty because of the damage to his chest, but they've kept him on for paperwork." He swallows. "I couldn't bear another minute of that paperwork." All those body counts, the consolidation of graveyards, the cleaning of the battlefields… so much administration of death. His stomach couldn't stand it. "I've resigned." So has Antoine, though they haven't quite figured out what they're going to do yet.

He scrubs a hand through his hair, winds his fingers in through the buttons of his coat and feels the chain of his watch, the gold warm from being so close to him. It's the first time he's been able to bear wearing his father's watch since everything happened. Maybe that's why he felt compelled to come here.

"I composed a piece for you." His voice is soft, softer than a moment before, so soft it's barely a whisper. "I've composed for you before but this one—this one feels different. I think it's good." Unspoken is the, I hope you would too.

It's sitting in his study, the composition, deep in the bottom drawer, under the battered cigarette case that he has no use for anymore, and his watch that he had in the trenches and all the letters that he saved from Antoine. He had to put it as far away from himself as possible, because it felt too real, too much, too full of everything he's always been unable to say and even composing it was an accident, he never expected the notes to start flowing the way they did, it was as if his hands were possessed.

But maybe that is why it forced itself into existence.

"I'll play it for you the next time I come."

And it will save him from having to speak, from having to think of something to say.

He should be going. Antoine will worry.

But first he stoops down, as low as he dares, good leg bent beneath him and bad leg throbbing, and brushes his fingers over the earth that hides all that remains of his father, in his wedding suit and a shroud of linen and the coffin that he used to sleep in, and there is no mask down there, nothing to hide his face. This is as close to him as he has ever been able to get. "I love you, Papa," he whispers, voice catching in his throat. "And I miss you so much."

Then he swallows and straightens back up, and with one last nod to the grave beneath his feet, he turns and haltingly walks away.

If there are tears on his cheeks, there is no one to ever see.