The search doesn't end so much as it empties out.
My hands stop moving before my mind catches up, pausing mid-reach toward another unremarkable patch of forest floor. There's nothing to find. There was never anything to find. The rift closed behind itself like a wound healing wrong, and whatever remained of Hitman One—of Monarch, of everything we were—exists now only in the spaces between worlds I can't navigate.
I sit back on my heels. The broken moonlight filters through the canopy above, casting fractured shadows across my dirt-caked hands. Appropriate, I think distantly. Everything here is broken. The moon. The sky. Me.
Then something shifts.
It's not a decision, exactly. I push myself to my feet, ignoring the complaint from my ribs, and begin walking the perimeter of the clearing.
I'm looking for stones now.
The first one I find is smooth and gray, about the size of a child's palm. My palm, I remind myself. I'm the child now. I pick it up and feel its weight—solid, real, present in a way that nothing else seems to be. I set it down at an arbitrary point and go looking for another.
The second stone is darker, flecked with something that catches the light. The third is rough-edged, almost sharp. I carry them back to the first one, arrange them in an arc, and keep searching.
Roman watches from the tree line. I can feel his gaze on my back, curious but not intrusive. He doesn't ask what I'm doing. Maybe he already knows.
Stone by stone, the circle takes shape. I choose each one deliberately—testing the weight in my small hands, examining the color and texture, discarding the ones that don't feel right. There's no logic to my selections, no criteria I could articulate if pressed. Just a sense of rightness or wrongness that operates below conscious thought.
When the circle is complete—thirteen stones, though I didn't count until now—I start on the branches.
The fallen wood is everywhere in this forest, and most of it is wrong. Too curved. Too short. Too rotted through. I sort through the debris with the same careful attention I gave the stones, building a pile of candidates before I begin the actual construction.
The first branch forms the fuselage. It's longer than the others, roughly straight, and I lay it down at the center of the stone circle with something that approaches reverence. The second and third branches angle out from either side—the wings of an aircraft that no longer exists, suggesting a silhouette that probably means nothing to anyone on this world.
I know what it means.
Monarch would laugh at me for this. He'd point out that the wing angle is wrong, mention that real F-4s don't have branches sticking out at forty-five degrees. But he'd understand. He always understood the rituals we built around ourselves—the superstitions, the traditions, the small ceremonies that made sense of senselessness.
I add more branches. The tail section. The stabilizers. A curved piece that suggests the canopy where he sat, hands on the controls, steady as he always was while I calculated trajectories and threat assessments and all the things that didn't matter in the end.
When I finish, it looks nothing like an aircraft. It looks like a child playing with sticks, arranging them in patterns that mean something only to her.
It looks like the best I can do.
I kneel before the memorial, my knees pressing into the soft earth. My posture straightens automatically—spine rigid, shoulders back, chin level. Military attention, or something close to it, performed by a body that never learned the posture in the first place. The memories are mine but the muscle memory is gone, and I have to consciously hold the position that used to come naturally.
The fractured shadows play across the stone circle, mimicking the shattered moon overhead. Light and dark interweaving. Presence and absence. Him and not-him.
My hand moves to my breast pocket.
The photo is there, where it's been since I woke up. The only tangible proof that Monarch existed outside my memories. The only evidence I have that I didn't imagine three years of partnership, of trust, of something I never had time to name before the sky tore open and took him from me.
I pull it out.
The edges are creased from being clutched too hard, smoothed from being touched too often. The image itself is unchanged—Monarch laughing, me grinning, the F-4 behind us looking battered and beautiful and *real*. I run my thumb across his face, feeling the texture of the paper, memorizing details I already know by heart.
My pilot. My partner. My—
I place the photo at the center of the stone circle. It sits there against the dark earth, his laughing face staring up at the broken moon, and something in my chest tears loose. Not grief, exactly. Something harder. Something that feels like finality.
"Best funeral gifts ever," I say. My voice cracks, wavers, comes out sounding nothing like me and exactly like me at the same time. "Sorry I couldn't give you better."
The forest doesn't answer. Neither does he.
I remain kneeling, motionless, for what might be minutes or might be hours. The shadows shift. The light changes. My legs go numb and my ribs settle into a dull, constant ache, and still I don't move.
Footsteps behind me. Soft, careful, approaching from the tree line.
Roman stops just at the edge of my peripheral vision. He doesn't speak. Doesn't offer platitudes or commentary. He just stands there for a long moment, his presence a kind of acknowledgment that I'm not alone in this, even if I am alone in the ways that matter most.
Then his hand touches my shoulder.
The contact is brief—barely a moment, barely any pressure—but it's warm and real and human in a way that makes my eyes burn with tears I thought I'd exhausted. He steps back immediately, respecting the boundary of my grief, respecting the ritual I've built around the absence of someone he never knew.
I stay kneeling before the makeshift grave as the shadows lengthen and the fractured light fades.
Monarch is gone. The evidence of him is gone. All that remains is this circle of stones and branches in a forest that doesn't know his name, and a photo I've surrendered to the earth because keeping it felt like holding on too tight.