Anakin hadn't been aware how quickly he had got re-accustomed to the concept of breakfast, until he had to delay it for the day of the burning. The sun had barely risen, but he had gone to bed early the night before so that he could be woken while it was still night, have his bacta therapy and be washed and dressed so that he looked as presentable as possible. Did it make any difference, really, that the robe with empty sleeves tucked into the waistband and skirts folded over the stumps of his legs was the black cloak he had borrowed from Severus and not a warm bathrobe? Probably not, except that he had been awake for long enough that his stomach was demanding breakfast.

Spark helped Hephaestus set up the brazier on its tripod in the spot they had chosen outside the house, in what was going to become Severus's garden. It looked ideal for cooking scrambled eggs…

You lived with intravenous feeding for a quarter of a century, he reminded himself. You didn't complain about going hungry when you were a slave. And many Jedi rituals begin with a period of fasting. But to him as a teenager, fasting had always seemed much more like being deprived of food as a punishment when he was a slave than the spiritual discipline he knew it was supposed to be. And this felt the same. It was going to be harder than ever not to relapse into Sithly habits when his blood sugar was low…

He mustn't. He looked from Konstantine and Erik, who needed just as much as he did to find alternatives to murder as a stress management technique, to Hephaestus who preferred revenge to take the form of practical jokes, to the newly repaired Wonder with dents barely visible on their bodywork, to Severus who was unlikely to let grumpy moods make him do anything worse than hand out sarcastic remarks and detentions a bit more freely, yet had made a mistake that had caused the death of the woman he loved, to…

The new figure approaching looked broadly like a human woman from the neck down, apart from her golden wings, and – Anakin squinted at her, his eyesight really wasn't up to much these days and it wasn't very light yet – skin that looked rather greenish and scaly. She wore a simple short-sleeved, knee-length dress, and sandals. On her head, she wore a sort of combined headscarf and veil, gathered by a drawstring at the neck. She looked as if she had a big, bushy hairstyle – but perhaps she came from a species that had lekku, like Twi'leks or Togruta?

Severus's fur stood on end, and he arched his back and hissed angrily. Something inside the woman's headscarf hissed back. She patted her own head soothingly. 'Cool it, guys,' she murmured. 'He's not breakfast. You can have some meat when we get home.'

Konstantine stepped closer to her, so that he could hold her hand without her needing to come any closer to Severus. Erik stared at them. 'Your girlfriend is Medusa?' he asked incredulously.

The pair both nodded. 'It's been a few years now,' said Medusa. 'When I first arrived here, I decided I wanted to train as a sculptor, but I needed to start exercising first to build up my muscles, so I started coming to the gym, Kosta was my coach, we became friends, and, well, it went from there.'

Clearly, it had. Konstantine didn't look noticeably different from normal, but his presence sensed more relaxed and happy than Anakin had ever sensed him before.

'In my world, they said that there is no marriage in the afterlife,' said Erik.

'We're not married!' said Medusa, laughing at the absurdity of the idea. 'We're just – friends who enjoy having sex with each other.'

That, Anakin thought, was a fairly good description of the emotional radiation coming from both Medusa and Konstantine. They weren't romantically in love – or at least not in the obsessive, maniacal way that most of the people here were used to falling in love. They were two people who were close friends, trusted each other and enjoyed each other's company and cared about each other – and one of the things they enjoyed doing together happened to be sex. Anakin wondered whether, if he hadn't been brought up as a Jedi, he would know more about whether many couples were like that.

'I wasn't sure if we could be lovers, at first,' Medusa went on. 'I mean, not just because I'm a gorgon and I can't let anyone see my face, but because – well, some people are demisexual; that means they don't just look at a stranger and think, "Oh, that one looks sexy," they can only feel sexually attracted to someone they know and love. And some people are – sort of the other half of sexual – semisexual? Hemisexual? – so they can feel lust for victims, or have sex with a prostitute when it's just a business arrangement with no emotional commitment, but don't feel sexually interested in anyone they like as a person and a friend. And at first I wondered whether Kosta was like that. But – well, it worked out in end, didn't it?'

Konstantine didn't answer in words, but gave her hand an affectionate squeeze.

'I thought Barrayarans hated mutants?' said Spark.

'She's not a mutant,' said Konstantine.

'Right! I'm just – not human. Actually, I'm Cheiron's cousin, Hephaestus's cousin-once-removed. Mother Earth and Father Sea had sea-god children, including my dad, but Mother Earth and Father Sky had Titan children, who were the parents of Cheiron and the Olympian gods. My boyfriend before I died was another Olympian, Poseidon. I was expecting twins by him when a hero came along and chopped my head off.'

'I am sorry,' said Anakin, not quite sure whether he meant it as sympathy to Medusa, or apology to Padmé.

'Yeah, it was sad not being around to see them grow up. They just sprang up from my blood when it spilled on the ground, apparently. So I never got to meet my boys. I've got pictures of them, though.' Medusa reached into a pocket of her dress and drew out a picture. 'They're fraternal twins. The human one is Chrysaor, and the horse is Pegasus.' The various onlookers passed the picture around, and Erik held it up to show to Anakin. Chrysaor was a handsome-looking man with light tan skin and dark brown eyes, dressed in bronze armour that covered his torso, head and shins but left his face, arms and thighs unprotected, and holding a sword which looked like pure gold (though surely it must have been made of some tougher and lighter metal?). There was a relaxed smile on his face, and his right arm rested on his brother's withers.

Pegasus was a creature with a quadruped body, legs and tail very similar to Cheiron's, but instead of a human torso he had a muscular-looking neck rather like a fathier's, ending in a long-snouted head. There was a crest of hair running along the top of his neck, clipped short like Konstantine's hair so that it stood on end. His powerful, feathery wings looked like his mother's, except that they were indigo like his mane and tail, only slightly lighter than his glossy black coat. The only parts of him that weren't dark were his glowing red eyes.

Medusa took out another picture. This one showed Pegasus with another horse, like him but with a pure white coat and blue eyes, lying in a nest on a mountaintop. Five younger horses snuggled against them, one pink, one orange, one yellow, one sky-blue, and the youngest, barely fledged, black with fluffy white mane and tail, white nose, and white feathers on the edges of his wings.

'That's my daughter-in-law and grandfoals,' said Medusa proudly. 'People who use the words "mare's nest" to mean a mess clearly haven't met my daughter-in-law. Of course, I haven't, either, but – it's good to know they're doing okay. D'you know if your daughter's planning on having kids?' she asked Konstantine.

'Shouldn't think so,' said Konstantine wretchedly. 'Not with me for her shame.'

Medusa hugged him, and he relaxed into the embrace and hugged her back, though keeping his arms well out of reach of the hissing, writhing turban. It was a long time before either of them spoke, but eventually Medusa said, 'I'm not saying what you did wasn't wrong. But you didn't mean to do wrong, any more than I meant to kill all those people by turning them into stone. We're monsters, so we had to be slain. But being monsters doesn't mean we're not parents too. And if Chrysaor can cope with having a gorgon for a mother and a horse for a brother, young Elena can live with what she's found out about you.'

Konstantine didn't reply, but Anakin could sense currents of curiosity rising among the clouds of guilt and misery in his mind. Would he ever have grandchildren? Would Anakin? Were they allowed to find out?

In the meantime, Konstantine took out from a cloth bag a few handfuls of tree-bark and twigs with fine needle-like leaves and dark blue berries, and a razor-sharp knife.

Severus miaowed questioningly, pointing his muzzle at the twigs that Konstantine was arranging in a bowl.

'Juniper,' Konstantine replied, without looking away.

Severus miaowed again.

'I think he is asking, why juniper particularly?' Anakin suggested.

'Tradition.'

Severus miaowed a third time, clearly not satisfied with this as an answer.

'It's supposed to protect against witches and evil spirits,' offered Erik. 'There are vengeful juniper trees in legend, too – whether they are avenging the murdered people buried under them, or taking revenge on anyone who dares to cut the tree. So – as two of us here are wizards, most of us are murderers, there are likely to be people who want revenge on any of us, and collecting twigs involves cutting the tree…'

'Basically, you're doomed,' Spark concluded cheerfully.

'In my day, humans used juniper smoke to purify temples because it helped their clairvoyance,' suggested Hephaestus. 'Oracles who breathed it could contact us gods, or the dead in the Underworld, more easily.'

'It brings good luck,' said Medusa. 'Wards off sorrow, protects houses, gives strength and determination, healing and hope, sexual energy and fertility.'

Neither Severus nor Konstantine seemed convinced that any of these really explained why you should burn it for the dead – or, in this case, why the dead should burn offerings in the afterlife to apologise to the people they had wronged. Konstantine just repeated, 'It's tradition,' and continued with the ritual.

Taking the knife, he shaved off a swath of his short hair, from forehead down to the back of his neck, and then cut a few strands of the wispy silver-blond hair that was finally starting to grow back on Anakin's head. Severus held up his left forepaw, indicating for Konstantine to shave off the fur from the part of his foreleg where the skull-shaped scar was. Next, Konstantine passed the knife to Erik, who cut off one of the long, lank wisps of hair plastered across his scalp. Hephaestus cut off a lock of his thick, wavy hair. Anakin wondered whether Medusa was going to amputate one of her snakes, but instead she reached into a pocket in her dress and took out a handful of dried snakeskins.

After they had placed all these offerings on top of the twigs in the brazier, Konstantine laid the long black braid of hair that he had treasured as a talisman for so long on top. They waited in silence for a few moments, and then Hephaestus gestured with a hand towards the pile, which began to burn briskly.

There weren't any particular words that needed to be spoken at a burning. The ritual itself was enough, when no words could express what you felt. The three humans, one god, one gorgon, one cat and two droids, watched in silence as the hair and twigs crumbled to ash. Then Wonder began to sing:

It's a lesson too late for the learnin'
Made of sand, made of sand.
In the wink of an eye my soul is turnin'
In your hand, in your hand.

Are you going away with no word of farewell?
Will there be not a trace left behind?
Well, I could have loved you better,
Didn't mean to be unkind.
You know that was the last thing on my mind.

'You have – a good voice, for a robot,' Erik grudgingly admitted at the end.

'Thanks. You upgraded my voice synthesiser when you repaired me, didn't you?'

'As nothing I could do would ever deter you from singing, I considered it self-defence,' replied Erik drily.

'Fair enough. Spark and Marvin and I are planning to start an all-robot band. Marvin showed me some of the songs he'd written, and – they're pretty good.'

'You mean, for songs that just complain about everything?' retorted Spark.

Author's Note: Since Snape had speculated a few chapters back that presumably some people on the Rock have a sex life and he didn't want to think about what Bothari's sex life here might be like – I had been wondering about it. I decided that it would be at least as weird a pairing as Miles/Taura – but I didn't want them to have met in as emotionally charged circumstances as Miles and Taura did, as I didn't think Bothari could cope with that much stress. I wanted him to have the same chance that Mark gets, to have anything as normal and untraumatic happen to him as simply meeting someone he gets on well with, and gradually going from being friends to being lovers – or, as Medusa says, friends who enjoy having sex with each other.

You can hear Tom Paxton, the writer of 'The Last Thing on My Mind' singing it on Youtube (sadly I'm not allowed to post links on this site).

And yes, my image of the pegasi was blatantly taken from Fantasia, my favourite Disney film and the reason that Beethoven's Sixth Symphony was the first piece of classical music I learned to recognise.