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Mourning Song – Chapter 3

This wasn't her first trip here. That much became apparent as the afternoon waxed and waned. The comment about the horses, it meant that was something she'd never made peace with, suggesting she'd been here before and been equally frustrated those times too, though Eliot wasn't entirely sure why. She didn't consult a map either. Where ever it was that she was taking them, she knew the way by heart.

They'd moved off the roads accessible by car and onto a narrower one, pavement giving way to loose gravel. The jarring motion of his bike had grown even more unbearable with that switch. An old carriage road, Parker had told him when he'd given it a closer examination during one of their water breaks. That was as much of an explanation as he could hope for.

He was about to ask for a break when Parker abruptly pulled off to the edge of the road again. He shook his head and followed. She dismounted from her bike and walked it off the road and into the trees. A minute later it was mostly obscured by some brush she'd arranged to cover it. It was an admirable job, if you weren't looking for it, you would pass it right by. He duplicated her actions and then went to stand beside where Parker was adjusting the straps of her backpack, redistributing the weight across her shoulders.

"We'll walk from here."

Walking was not a fair term for it, Eliot decided. They weren't using a trail and Parker wasn't picking the easiest route up the mountain side. She was driving them in a straight line up the steep slope toward the apex of the mountain. She'd weave around insurmountable obstacles – large tree trunks and boulders – but when it came to smaller, inconvenient things like thorny bushes, she simply unrolled the long sleeves down to her wrists and plowed forward. She at least had a hair tie to pull her hair back. Eliot hadn't had such foresight and twice already he'd been jerked back by his hair being caught on a thorny branch.

The shrubs eventually started thinning out; the trees started becoming spaced further apart. Instead of the tightly tangled understory he'd come to expect, they all of a sudden had breathing room to walk without holding a hand outstretched in front of them to clear a path. Hell, Eliot muttered a silent thank you to whatever higher power might be listening he saw the first patch of sunlight on the otherwise shaded ground. Things might finally be getting easier for the first time since they'd started this uphill, and progressively more difficult, journey.

Parker stopped in front of him. He didn't see it and bumped into her with a grunt. She caught her balance and stepped to the side to reveal the view beyond to Eliot. He whistled low under his breath. The wilderness stretched out beyond them, first in a deep valley that allowed for him to truly appreciate the trek they'd made. The land stretched back upward to each side as the shoulders of other mountains jabbed toward the sky. "Wow, it's beautiful Parker." He unconsciously held one hand out against a nearby tree, almost a physical tether to the earth. They were on the precipice of a steep ridge that dropped off into a sheer cliff below.

She nodded and set her pack on the ground. She flipped open the rucksack and dug through it a bit until she drew out a series of items. Her body was turned in such a way that Eliot couldn't make out what they were.

Almost reverently, she wove her way along the ridge, unphased by the idea that one slip would have her plunging hundreds of feet below. She finally crouched down by a small pile of rocks. Eliot released his grip on the tree trunk, steeled himself, and stepped up closer to the edge next to Parker.

The rocks were of all different types, a few shone brilliantly in the sunset-red light that bathed their surroundings. There were a few rocks that had obviously been smoothed to perfection in a river bed at some point. And then there were ones that hinted more strongly of Parker's influence in bringing them here. He recognized a ruby, for sure, and a diamond that would fetch at least a few million dollars.

He stood there, silently, aware that something was happening here that meant a lot to Parker. This was some sort of ritual for her. He could read it in her confident movements, as if she had repeated this exact series of events until her body could execute them without conscious thought.

But Parker didn't move fast or quick like she would with something that she was trying to get done fast to show off or just because she could. There was deliberation in each movement, in the way she set out the Batman comic book at the base of the rock and then a small teddy bear. It flopped to the side when she first set it down, but she carefully righted it and brushed flat a tuft of fur that was standing up at an odd angle. She sat down then, crossing her legs, refusing to readjust her body to position it more comfortably on the rough rock.

Eliot settled himself down next to her. He wanted to speak, there were so many questions to ask. But this was Parker's time, and he would wait for her to share what she was willing to share on her own time.

"It's been fifteen years. I've made this trip ten times in those fifteen years," she spoke quietly, finally breaking her silence.

"What is this?"

"Nick died fifteen years ago today," she said, looking up at him with a solemn expression on her face. "We were out playing, riding bikes. Or at least trying. I was teaching him."

Eliot swallowed deeply. He knew the rest of the story. A heartless, fake psychic had teased the story out of her to the world at large on public television. In the moment he'd watched the TV screen and watched tears glistened in Parker's eyes, he'd wanted nothing more than to wrap his calloused hands around the man's throat, to choke the words down before he had a chance to do any more damage and punish him for taking his friend and doing her an insurmountable harm. In a ploy to boost ratings the fiend had taken her bubbly personality and popped it. He'd stripped away the careful walls that Parker had erected to bury those memories where they couldn't torment her and caused tears to bead in the corner of her eyes. He'd dredged up a memory that had caused Parker to flee at the mere mention. There were two kids playing innocently enough. There was a big sister trying to bring even a small smile to her brother's face by giving him a few fleeting moments of freedom from the harsh reality that kept them chained to the earth. And then there was a car and a collision and then the endless guilt that a person should never have to shoulder, let alone by themselves as Parker had apparently done for years.

"It wasn't your fault, Parker."

She nodded firmly. "It was. I was the one to take him out there that day. I was the one who chose to ride in the street where we would have more room and I could run alongside him and catch his bike if it started to lean one way or the other."

"Parker-"

"Eliot, stop. It happened fifteen years ago. Arguing over this doesn't change the fact that my brother is dead. He's been dead a long time; I've come to terms with that."

He opened his mouth to respond, and then closed it. Maybe there would be a time for this conversation. But it wasn't up here where something very intimate and personal to Parker was occurring. He wasn't here to impose. The hitter cleared his throat. "So, um, what are we doing here?"

"He died. But that doesn't mean I get to forget about him. Maybe he would've grown up to like riding a bike as much as I love rappelling."

He nodded, the bike ride up here suddenly taking on a different context.

Parker pulled out a few weeds that had started to grow in around her tribute to her brother, tidying the area. "I used to think it was stupid, burying someone and going to speak to their body. When a person dies, they're gone and dead. One of my foster parents took me to the graveyard one time and all I could think about was how they were talking to a pile of rotted bones and a stone that someone had placed there to mark their presence. Nick died, and our foster parents at the time buried him on their plot in a graveyard. They laid him out in a row with so many other dead people. Acres and acres of dead people."

She opened her hand, letting the wind carry the limp weeds over the edge where they spiraled toward the earth below. "I went there once, years after I ran away. Nick wasn't theirs to keep like that with their family. He was my family. He got his life stolen, and then they took his death away from me. I was left with nothing."

"What did you go back there for, to visit?"

She shook her head vigorously. "I didn't understand at first, why people would go and talk to a dead person like they were still alive. I didn't do that when my parents died…They were just people in my life. Mean people. But when Nick died...my family was gone. And I wanted to remember. I wanted a place to come and sit and remember who he was and what we had. That's what people like having graves for. I picked this place. It's some of the best bike trails in the country. If Nick had really grown to like riding, maybe I would've brought him here someday. And he liked parks and nature."

Eliot wanted to reach out and touch her, to comfort her. To tell her it was okay to mourn and that it was alright to feel this, and that she shouldn't have to do this alone. That she should never have had to make this trip alone. She wouldn't in the future; Eliot vowed that to himself silently. But he knew better than to reach out and settle a hand on Parker's shoulder. It would snap this fragile moment clean in two and draw her back into the private recesses of her mind that she so often kept to. "He would've liked it here." And he spoke the truth, in that. This place was a fusion of many things. It was part of the life Parker imagined might have pleased her brother. It was the things her little sibling had loved in the world. But it also spoke to Parker's joys too. Despite the solemn nature of their visit here, there was that spark in Parker's eyes. It wasn't there all the time. He really only really saw it when she was high up on some perch looking down on all the world below her as if it were her kingdom to reign over.

She nodded, rolling one of the precious stones between her fingers. "I didn't want him to be there, surrounded by so much death and all alone with that family that was never really ours. I went there, just once, at night with a shovel and a flashlight. I planned on taking back what they stole from me and bringing him up here to rest. It's much better to be surrounded by life, than death. I went there and I stood there for hours, just pinned there. I couldn't move. I couldn't do it. Some thief I am, huh? I couldn't steal back the most important thing that was ever taken from me."

"So he's still there?"

She shrugged. "I suppose. Resting there among all those dead people. But, Eliot, it's so overwhelming. So much death and sadness all concentrated in one place. You go there and see people in black outfits wearing black, desolate expressions as they lay flowers on the ground. I…I couldn't do that. I can't do that. I come out here, every year, and I remember who he was and imagine who he might've been."

She pulled a lighter out of her jeans pocket and flicked the wheel a few times until a spark finally rose into existence. She lowered it to the base of her memorial and set flame to the edges of the comic book and the stuffed bear. The fur started to melt and a strong chemical scent rose into the air, overwhelming the slight scent of pine. The edges of the comic book blackened and curled.

"I always had my rabbit. And he had his bear. And he always made me read these comics to him. I didn't even like comics. If superheroes were real they never would've left us to live like we did. He actually kept believing that someday one of them would swoop in and carry us off to a better life."

The black smoke rose into the air as her offerings were reduced to a pile of ash. They sat there for a long time, watching the flames smolder and the sun sink further behind the ridge off in the distance. Goosebumps freckled Eliot's exposed arms as the cool evening breeze beat against him. Parker had pulled her legs up against her and wrapped her arms around them to maintain body heat.

Eventually the flames died out and the orange embers faded to a dead grey. She uncurled herself and scooped a handful of the ashes in her cupped hands. She stood and walked to the very edge of the precipice before parting her hands, the tiny grains of her offering slipping between her fingers and down into the world below. Eliot rose to stand behind her.

She spoke again then. "He was a good kid. He would've been a great man." She turned her back to the world beyond and went to her bag. She pulled out her climbing harness and started fitting it to her body and buckling the various straps.

Eliot started to speak. "What-"

Parker cut him off, a trace of her mischievous grin finally gracing her face. It was the first time had seen it since he'd first started in on this pilgrimage with his teammate. "You learn to live, Eliot. All the sad things, it makes living life that much more important. Nick would've wanted that."

She threw her spare harness at him. "It'll be tight, but it adjusts quite a bit. We have to go soon, it's getting dark."

He shot her a confused glance. But a cursory inspection of their surroundings had his eyes settling in on the rappelling rig she'd drilled solidly into one the sturdier looking trees. "Hell no, Parker…no. I don't do this stuff."

She shrugged as she uncoiled her rope and started attaching it to the pulley system. "Walk back if you want."

"I don't know the way…"

"Guess you got one option then," she suggested, that glint in her eye flaring even brighter.

He growled.

She dropped a second rope into his hand. "Gotta learn to live sometime, Eliot."

-THE END-

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