Her hair was in braids.

"I asked you to go," he said. "Not turn up, again, not in a way that makes me feel worse." Because it was her, wasn't it? And this really was not okay. This was not helping.

"You feel worse because you slept outside. That's what houses are for!" Rosie beamed proudly at this astonishingly clever insight, and the sight of it did not help lift Chrono's mood. She had spinach in her teeth. He stumbled to his feet – joints aching, back cracking as he stretched – and surveyed the surroundings. Only a few people, here and there, heads bobbing in and out of sight as they paid their respects to their dead. Dew on the ground, an unfairly sunny sky, and a little girl clearly in her Sunday best and desperate to impress.

Oh, he was pathetic. Not content with the two women he'd cared about most in the world, he'd sent them away to be replaced by a little girl, even littler than any Rosette he'd ever known, one who'd be even more susceptible to the misled belief that Chrono was someone to be trusted and even befriended.

"Please go away. I don't need you any longer. I don't want you to be here. I don't want you to keep seeing me like this!" He took a few steps away, not towards the house but out towards the flower gardens, or towards the path, or towards – well, anywhere, really. Children really shouldn't be allowed near him. He had no right-

"But someone had to wake you up! What if you'd gotten even wetter?" Rosie pursued.

"I'm not talking to you," Chrono said, and he persisted in not doing so for the next half hour.

With the little girl trailing him, he went on the rounds: surveying the cemetery, making notes about groundskeeper duties, planning future gravesites, vehemently ignoring the child who'd periodically reach out to cling to his clothes when he started walking too quickly and then recoil when he glanced at her from the side of his eye. She provided a constant stream of chatter – something that had never occurred to the phantom Magdalene and Rosette. Tally one point for the old ghosts.

Her favourite thing to do was read out the inscriptions carved into the gravestones, little-girl voice stumbling over longer words and foreign pronunciations, murdering poetry in a way Chrono had never heard before. "I like this one," she exclaimed at one point, when he was on his knees, scraping moss away from the back of the stone she was reading from.

"Two hands are resting, one heart is still, two are waiting for you, just over this hill. All the words are short!" Chrono glanced at her over the gravestone; she stood enthralled, little hands clasped to her chest.

"That's...not a good poem for children," he said, marvelling at both her and the poem's morbidity.

"It is. Because it's easy to read! I'm good at poetry, so I know."

"You write poetry?" He found himself just a little tempted to start a proper conversation out of a desire to hear what his subconscious thought a childhood Rosette's poems might sound like. Would they be clever? Awful? Filthy?

"No." Well, that was a little reminiscent of the Rosette he knew. "But I'm named after a poet. So I know good poems."

It had never really occurred to him that Rosette might be named after something. The idea seemed strange. The idea of Rosette sharing her name with someone else was rather foreign. Surely there could only ever be one real Rosette. And besides, what sort of origin story would his subconscious be able to invent for Rosette's name?

He didn't think he had all this much imagination.

"I don't know any famous poets named Rosie." One conversation? Could he allow himself that? She was, admittedly, perhaps a little fun to talk to. Just a little.

"Rosie's not my name," the little girl said, looking horrified. "It's my cute name."

"Oh," said Chrono, and he wasn't all that sure of how to continue his response. Which was lucky, because otherwise he wouldn't have heard the call coming from across the cemetery – "Rosie! Where have you gotten to, child?"

"Oops." The girl looked ashamed. "Bye-bye! Do you live here?"

"Yes, but-" and then Chrono had a turn of being the one left behind as she dashed away, leaving him again, just as quickly as she'd gone, and even though only the day before he'd been so certain about finding his own independence, now he was turned panicked in an instant: "Rosette, wait!"

She came to a halt and turned around, the same expression of disgust on her face as a moment earlier. "Is that meant to be me?"

"I – Isn't it?"

Rosie jerked her head up proudly in the sunlight, looked down at him. "No! I told you, Rosie."

This claim was somewhat undermined by another distant call, a little louder this time. "Roswitha! Here! Now!"

She glared down at Chrono. "You call me Rosie," she hissed, and she was gone.

Chrono's legs were weak. He couldn't recall the last time he'd spent this much time on his feet; never in the cemetery, not for twenty years, at least. Slowly, he allowed himself down to his knees in the grass, and then he brought his hand up to his eyes, closing them tightly as he massaged his temples.

Counting to ten, he peered between his fingers.

She'd left footprints in the dirt. He could hear her still, very faintly, if he strained his ears in the way he hadn't in a very, very long time.

He shouldn't have. He really, really should not have, and he certainly should not have been allowed near children. Not near impressionable, impassioned children –

But nonetheless.

She'd been something real.

A/N: Because some things deserve resurrection.

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