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Equivalent Exchange ( 18 ) - It seems as though this place has been forgotten by the world for a long time, and those laid to rest here were forgotten along with it. Some graves have been given small, strange little gifts, and some have flowers that are old and withered. There are many graves that have nothing. If you bring a gift down to the graves, you will be filled with a soft warmth, and it feels as though your worries are lifted. The sensation follows you home, and when you sleep that night, you have pleasant, safe dreams. When you awaken, you will find some sort of strange gift next to your bed–a dried flower, a string of beads, a small charm–something strange and dated. It is not often something of value, but there is a warmth in the object. It feels like a gift given with love.
Cemeteries were places that held a special fascination for Dahlia.
For one, she emphasized with them. In a lot of ways, she was the living dead. Dahlia had lost the reality of who she was twice now, arguably thrice if the past life she walked while on her homeworld could count too. She had no idea who she had been the second time other than her birthday--April thirteenth, a day that was engrained in her mind no matter how hard she tried--and her third life, while more whole, was still patchy and disconnected and a farce in the first place. Dahlia, too, was a farce, a mask placed upon the dead in an attempt to blend in with the living.
She would never be convinced it was working, no matter how often Elliott and Loren tried to tell her that her humanity was not an act.
For another, it was a place that felt often just as deep and recessed as her mind. This place held secrets that none of the living would ever know, especially as it didn't seem this cemetery had been visited by anyone in a long time. There were things within her that were so deep and recessed that no one would ever know them again.
Not even herself.
No one would know who these people were again either, though. Lost to the years, lost perhaps even to the centuries, perhaps to be known again by someone a thousand years later who would be born with their memories. In the interim, they deserved to have someone who would keep after where they rested, though. The Nembus of the Former hadn't been given that, her world dead until Dahlia had come upon it again, and there was a part of her that felt guilty about that. She felt guilty for things she couldn't control or couldn't know, considering she was unconvinced her second iteration had cared about her planet at all, and her third iteration had been drenched in chaos.
But this was something she could control now, and that was why she found herself going to the most neglected of the graves, holding a small pot of flowers. She figured that by going with a pot and not a bouquet, she gave the flowers a chance to bloom and spread, making a little floral garden around this soul's temporary earthly home. She bent down in the grasses, gently setting down the pot and brushing the dirt away from the lettering on the gravestone itself.
"Johnathan Mahoney." Her smile was light. "May you be resting well until your starseed returns into the living cycle."
Dahlia stayed in the peace and quiet for another twenty minutes more before she headed back to her shared home and went to rest herself for the night, with a surprisingly quiet night that followed her overnight.
Whether it was a ghost or magic that had left her a small dried flower from her pot the next day, it brought a smile to her face anyway.
