Sometimes he wished he could risk visiting the graves. Not that his family was there any more, not in any real sense of the word other than that what little was left of them had been laid to rest there. That had been the worst part of it, in his first encounter with loss: their father's body, when they were finally allowed to view it, untenanted and empty, like a house that had been a home with all the rooms cleared out and all the lights turned off.

One of the ladies who'd been at the viewing had commented how peaceful he looked, like he was just asleep. Jordan had turned and left the room then, his feet going faster and faster, and by the time he got out of the funeral home he'd been running and he'd climbed a tree so if they came looking for him it'd take longer so they wouldn't see him crying. He'd ruined his suit, but his mother hadn't been angry. She'd just looked at him with those tired deep sad eyes, gentle and sympathetic even with the infinite invisible weight of her own grief pressing her shoulders down into a slight, pained hunch. If she'd been angry, he'd thought then, he would have been able to yell back. But she'd just been sad, tired, ten years older all at once, and he'd felt guilty, wondering for the first time how much of a problem he really was, how much of that exhaustion he'd put there.

Grief expressed itself in different ways, the therapist had said. She liked to talk, liked to explain things, and Jordan hadn't wanted to talk about it, so that was fine. He'd never talked about it, any of it, silent through the professional attempts, stubbornly close-mouthed with too-sympathetic adults who just wanted to say how terrible it was, your mother with two young children, and then, later, what a horrible tragedy it was, the two of you kids, alone at your age. He'd learned the right phrases and expressions to make them feel better about themselves for it, and then they'd leave.

He turned the slip of paper from the fortune cookie over in his fingers, looking at the back, then the front again. No answers for anyone. There never had been and there never would be, and Death himself treated it like a cosmic joke.

If he'd wanted to talk about it, he wouldn't have known what to say. Jordan put the scrap of paper down on the coffee table and rested his elbows on his knees, clasping his hands and letting his head hang down. What's it like to come back from death? he asked Ferros.

The dragon stirred. I don't know. I might not ever have died.

And you wouldn't remember even if you had. I should know that. Jordan sighed. Sorry.

Ferros rumbled and settled in Jordan's mind, giving off a sense of attentive warmth.

Jordan closed his eyes against the sharp sting of tears, a grief two years old and still catching him off guard when he wasn't thinking about it. It would be doing that for a while. Two years wasn't a long time, not at all. He knew that, but it didn't make it any easier to deal with. He'd been busy. He hadn't thought about it much, hadn't wanted to.

He wasn't much of a Christian any more, but he was certain now that there was something past death, somewhere that human souls went, because souls were cores were souls, and it only made sense to him that both should endure past the expiration of the body. The bodies of Halloweeners, made of Fear, could form again for the core to return to. Human bodies could not, and therefore the soul must go somewhere else.

He'd see them again someday, probably, and that was sort of comforting, and he hoped they'd be proud when he did, when he could meet their eyes again and say I worked hard. I did good things. But even that thought couldn't armor him against the grief, neither the low dull ache that faded into the background but never quite went away nor the sharp sudden spikes that leaped unexpected from the smallest things.

He wasn't sure he was ready to accept that. He wasn't sure he would ever be ready to accept that.

Jordan opened his eyes, picked the slip of paper off the table, read it one more time. When Andy died. Was it quick? Then he crossed the room to where he kept his mission bag, pulled out the cheap lighter he kept in his kit, and took it over to the sink. A snap of the wheel, and a small clean flame leapt up.

The fortune burned like paper, which was probably all it was, in the end.

(( OOC note: Jordan's thoughts on cores and souls don't reflect canon - they're just his ideas.))