The blue-violets were blooming, dashed with the mad brush of early summer across the grass, crowding their way around the polished white of Ciel's gravestone.
He would be younger now than her own children, Lizzie thought, with the soft edge of a smile at the strangeness. Sometimes, caught up in a memory of him that floated in on the scent of summer air, the reporting of a gruesome crime in the papers, it would amaze her, suddenly, how young he had been, and how accomplished, for all that—the kind of genius that would surely have blossomed as he grew, if only given the chance. And how, for all his driving ambition, he had never seemed to see that future for himself, the future she had always tried to show him, unfolding like a ribbon over the hills. With such a tragedy as he had experienced, it was no wonder he found it hard to conceive of.
She had never told anyone this, but his servants knew: he had left that day dressed all in black, as though he knew of his own death. And he had acted so strange before he went. Whatever fancies her childish mind had conceived of with the glint of reddish eyes, it was true that there had been some unease in the air around him, some kind of palpable end. It made Lizzie wonder, then, if the killer had ever really been unknown, if Ciel, who scoffed at fate and disbelieved in heaven, had taken his own life, helped by the hand of his ever-faithful butler. Her heart yearned to deny it, and yet she could never banish the thought.
And so he had gone, and she no longer faulted him for the parting, although she ached still to tell him there had been no reason for it, to try to make him believe (and this time he would!) tell him almost as if he were her own child that no matter what tragedy may have befallen him, hope still remained in himself and the strength of his own soul.
And yet he had stayed, and the world had gone on without him, the wildflowers still grew. Even the most faithful must move on, though they would always think of him; and through the veil of ever-spanning years, growing ever wider between them, Lizzie thought she could even now catch a glimpse of a boy and a girl, playing in a garden, on a summer's day in paradise.
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