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The morning of June 1st is bright, sunny, and unseasonably warm. It’s still early in the summer, and the sun has barely risen; but even so it streams in hot through the glass doors overlooking the garden as Julian prepares tea for his wife.
He watches Katerose through the glass as she crouches in front of one of the rose bushes, pruning shears in hand and a small collection of bright red roses beside her. Her hands are smudged with dirt, and under that they are a splotchy and smeared red-pink – from exertion or injury, Julian isn’t sure, but he watches those hands anyway, admiring them as they work.
The tea finishes steeping. Julian pours two cups and carries one out onto the deck. Katerose does not turn at the sound of the door opening: Julian has to call to her to get her attention.
“Shouldn’t you be wearing gloves?”
She turns, then, and glares at him, her brows pinched irritably between her eyes. “I prefer it this way.”
Julian walks over. Her knees are caked in grime, her fingers scratched and bloody from the thorns – injury after all. He frowns and kneels beside her, setting the cup of tea down in the grass and reaching for her wrist.
“You’re hurt,” he says, caressing her palm with his thumb.
“It’s nothing.” Katerose looks away from him, but she does not retract her hand. “Pain is for the living.”
She sighs and turns back to the bush. Julian lets her hand go so she can resume her clipping, and she does, her gaze hazy and faraway. He leaves the tea where it is for when she’s ready for it and stands, ready to go back inside.
“It’s funny though, isn’t it?” Katerose muses. Julian does not know if she’s talking to him or to herself, but he pauses anyway and looks down at her as she sets another rose aside. “That sometimes we can choose to let things hurt us, and sometimes we don’t have any choice at all.” She laughs. “So much for democracy.”
Karin gathers up the flowers. Thin rivulets of blood trickle down her fingers, and Julian can’t help but think that they are brighter and more vivid than rose petals could ever hope to be.
It’s a long walk from their house to the cemetery, but one they make every year without fail, both of them together and sometimes each on their own. Others still, like today, they make with their daughter’s hands between their own and two bouquets of flowers.
Katerose sings her song in time with their footsteps, and she and Julian swing Winona’s arms between them. Her hands are small and soft. Theirs are getting softer with age, too, as their war callouses recede and slowly fade away.
When they pass through the cemetery gate, Karin hands Julian her bouquet of roses, wrapped in thin white paper, and he takes them so she can heft Winona up into her arms. Katerose smiles fondly and shushes her daughter as the little girl shrieks with laughter. Her pale red pigtails sway as she wriggles in her mother’s hold, and Julian looks fondly over at them, pausing only for a moment to breathe in the fresh summer air as they begin to walk ahead.
“Are we here to see Grandpas?” Winona asks.
“Yes,” Katerose tells her. “It’s a special day for them, after all.”
She says it like it’s a joke, but Julian can hear the bitterness underlying her voice. It still hasn’t faded, even after all these years – ten, now, and nine for her.
How time has flown.
It’s a small plot of land where Yang Wen-li and Walter von Schönkopf are buried. Their graves lie side-by-side at the top of a small hill, the headstones – simple, plain things, the sort of grave marker Yang would have preferred and Schönkopf would have hated – only a few feet apart. Neither has much in the way of flowers adorning them, either, which is another fact Walter von Schönkopf would have hated (at least on the surface). Most tributes to the two of them will be paid to their memorial statues in Heinessenpolis, and on El Facil, and on Shampool. These graves are for friends and family only.
There are two bouquets laid across the headstones, though, and they’re nice enough that Julian immediately recognizes them as Hortense Cazerne’s handiwork. They’re both beautiful arrangements, made up of chrysanthemums, gladioli, and pink carnations – which Julian remembers are for mourning, but only because Hortense had taught him a little about flower language a few years back.
("Now that you're married, Julian, I'm going to give you some advice," Alex Caselnes had said. "When you're in the doghouse, buy flowers. The nicest ones you can get. Spare no expense."
"And do you think dear Julian will be the same kind of husband as you?" Hortense had asked with a cheeky smile. "He's got sense, you know. Still, Julian, come with me. I'll lend you a book on flowers – if you take his advice, you'll end up giving having to buy your own funeral flowers, too.")
They come to a stop before the graves. Karin lets Winona down. The girl smiles up at her mother, and her mother smiles over at Julian, though there’s a tension in hers that isn’t present in Winona’s. Julian takes the cue and kneels down beside his daughter, plucking one single rose from Karin’s bouquet and handing it over to her.
“Be careful, Winona,” he warns, pinching the stem between two fingers. “We didn’t cut the thorns off.”
“Okay,” Winona says. She takes the rose in her little hands, both of them on the stem and spaced carefully between the thorns. Julian remembers the first time she’d been pricked by their rosebush, one sunny afternoon about a year ago when she’d leaned in close to smell the flowers’ perfume. Julian had scolded her about getting too close before, but she had been too young to really understand why, or to comprehend that something so pretty could also hurt her; and so, when she’d gone to pick one of the roses, she’d caught her finger on a thorn and cried, and cried, and cried.
She does not cry now as she waddles over to the graves and squints to try to read their names. She looks from one to the other and back again, unsure of which of her grandfathers to give the flower to.
“That one,” Karin says, pointing at the headstone bearing the name Walter von Schönkopf. “And make sure you give him a good kick, too.”
“Karin…”
“What?” Katerose turns to pout at him. “We’re giving him flowers, aren’t we?”
She sighs explosively and Julian smiles, albeit wryly. He doesn’t say anything. Instead, he watches Winona crouch down before the grave and gingerly place her rose down in front of the headstone.
“They’re his favourite,” Karin mumbles, more to herself than to Julian; but she pauses, biting her lip and shifting her weight from foot to foot. “...Actually,” she amends, “I only think they are. I don’t really know. I just kind of assumed…”
It’s a reasonable assumption to make, Julian thinks. “Rosen Ritter,” he says by way of agreement. “Knights of the Rose.”
“Yeah.” There’s a bitter twist in Karin’s smile. Julian can’t tell if she’s angry or nostalgic. “He always styled himself as some kind of stupid fairy-tale knight. A real romantic, but I don’t think he even knew the meaning of the word.”
She shakes her head. Ahead of them, Winona straightens up, clapping her hands together to try to dust the dirt off them, but Julian can see the little smudges of brown still clinging to her. She wipes the last of it off on her little yellow sundress and starts to turn back to her parents, but stops, suddenly, apparently remembering her mother’s second order. With a cheeky, devilish smile, she turns and kicks at the headstone, her feet scuffing the ground and kicking up a clump of grass.
Karin’s smile softens. “My mother used to keep roses,” she continues. “I think they reminded her of him. She was so head-over-heels, even years after he left her. She used to arrange them in a vase and talk to herself. ‘He gave me a rose, once,’ she said. ‘A rose for Rosa.’”
Julian snorts. “That sounds like the kind of thing he’d say.”
“Doesn’t it?” Despite herself, Karin laughs. There are tears in her eyes, but she blinks them back before they can get any further than her pale red lashes. “Maybe that’s why I thought they were his favourite. I was just projecting my mother.”
At least you have something to project, Julian thinks, but wisely doesn’t say.
Winona comes running back toward them, then, and Karin crouches down to play with her hair, tucking some loose strands behind her ear. She praises her daughter, inadvertently sparing Julian the chance to speak (and thus put his foot in his mouth) in the process. Still, he can’t help but think of how he never learned Yang's favourite flower. There was never much room for talk of such things in their household, whether that household was here on Heinessen or out in the vast black nothingness of space.
Silverbridge Street, Iserlohn, the Hyperion, and even the Ulysses: Julian had had many homes, but back then, they had only ever felt like home when he was at Yang's side.
Now, though, he has a new home, and a new face to represent it. He turns his gaze to the side, eyes falling back on his wife: on Karin's eyes, her lips, the curves and contours of her cheeks, the lines of laughter and of sadness that have begun to set in around her eyes.
Lines that will never again form around Yang’s.
“Winona,” Julian says suddenly, banishing that thought from his mind, “do you want to give Grandpa Yang his flowers, too?”
“Yes please!” Winona untangles herself from her mother’s arms and runs up to her father. She stretches her little hands upward, reaching for him in the same way Julian used to look up at the sky and reach for the same stars Yang had gazed at.
He smiles back at her and hands over the bouquet of camellias he’d brought with him. It’s made up of sprigs and branches from both the bush they keep for tea and the one they grow for fun, because its flowers are pretty. He doesn’t know if Yang will like them, but he thinks his late guardian would at least appreciate the fact that Julian has learned to make tea from their leaves.
Julian follows Winona the step and a half to the grave and gazes down at the name carved into its stone. Yang Wen-li, it reads, with no inscription following, because no words could ever properly capture what he meant – what he still means – to those he left behind. There’s an epitaph on his statue in Heinessenpolis, of course, but Julian can hardly remember what’s printed on it. Something Attenborough wrote. He’d gone through six or seven drafts before settling on whatever they’d ended up going with, because the first few were too flippant and the last few too honest and unflattering.
(“Boring and unoriginal,” he’d said when he’d handed Julian and Frederica the final draft for their approval. “He’d hate it, but those groveling worms in the capital we still call politicians will love it.”)
Julian wonders if Attenborough will come here today. Maybe he’s already been. He’s not the type to bring flowers, though, so it’s hard to tell. He’d be more likely to drink half a bottle of expensive brandy and pour the rest over the graves, pretending he was passing it around with friends.
Julian would have been glad to pass that bottle around with him today. Even now, ten years later, today is hard for him. Hard for all of them. Attenborough’s specific brand of carefree, rebellious cheer would be welcome – especially by Winona, who loves her ‘Uncle Dusty,’ because he teaches her bad words and gives her chocolate when nobody’s looking. She would probably like her Uncle Poplin, too, if he ever decided to come back for a visit.
But he’s long gone, now. Off on some faraway planet, regaling all the pretty girls with stories of his daring and valor – and getting into more trouble than a single man his age should ever even be capable of, Julian is sure.
Lost in thought and in the warm, gentle embrace of recollection, it’s Winona who brings Julian back to the present. She tugs on his pant leg to get his attention and Julian startles, but when she makes grabby hands at him, clearly wanting to be picked up, he remembers only where he is and who he’s with now, the faces from his past receding back into the fog of his memory.
Julian scoops his daughter up into his arms. She giggles and clings to his shirt, her big brown eyes, so much like his, shining with hope. “Do you think Grandpa Yang will like the flowers?” she asks.
“I think so,” Julian says. He lowers his voice and looks around conspiratorially, like he’s about to tell her some big secret. Winona leans up to listen, her face pinching in concentration. “But we have to hope nobody cleans them up too soon. Those leaves are supposed to be dried up and made into tea, so if they’re taken away before they’re ready, Grandpa will be really grumpy.”
Winona smiles. “Did you used to make him tea, Daddy?”
“I did.” Julian grins proudly. He remembers, suddenly, when his budding career as a soldier had first taken him from Yang’s side. He’d returned from his stint on Phezzan to a warm welcome, of course, but the thing that sticks the most in Julian’s mind is how Yang had told him, “I almost got used to coffee with you gone.”
A fate worse than death, as far as Yang had been concerned, but it had filled Julian with that same warm sense of pride.
“He liked it enough that he refused to brew his own,” Karin says suddenly, cutting through Julian’s reminiscence just as their daughter had moments ago. She smiles at her husband, as familiar with that particular tale as he is with her mother’s song, and Julian blushes despite himself. There’s no need to be bashful in front of his family, he knows, but he’s never quite been able to break free of the shackles of his humility.
“Really?” Winona asks. She smiles and turns in Julian’s arms to look at her grandfathers’ graves. “Then I hope Grandpa Walter is almost as good as Daddy, and he can make tea that Grandpa Yang likes.”
“What’s this about Grandpa Yang?”
The Mintz family turns around in sync at the sound of a new voice joining them. Frederica Greenhill-Yang comes up the hill, her blazer folded over the crook of her elbow and the slight breeze stirring the waves of her dirty blonde hair. Both Julian and Karin’s faces break out into smiles as they catch sight of her, and she smiles back, her hazel eyes are warm as they take in the three people standing by the grave of her late husband.
She tucks one of the longer strands of hair that’s fallen in front of her face behind her ear. “My, it seems we’re having quite the family reunion today,” she says, her smile growing when it falls directly on Julian. There are new wrinkles around her eyes and in her brow, but she’s just as beautiful as ever. Hard work suits her in a way it suits no other, and despite the inevitable creases of time that have sunken into her face, she has somehow managed to thrive in the years since her husband’s death.
“Aunty Freddie!” Winona calls, reaching out for Frederica so suddenly she almost falls from Julian’s arms. He startles again and carefully sets her down so she can run over to her aunty (or her grandmother, technically, since Yang would have been her grandfather – but both Julian and Karin had agreed when Winona was born that Frederica was still far too young to be called granny).
Frederica kneels down to Winona’s level, smiling gently.
“Hello, Winnie,” she says. “Have you come to visit, too?”
“Uh-huh,” she says. “I gave my grandpas both some flowers. Mama and Daddy picked them from the garden.”
“Did they, now?” Frederica turns her gaze up to the girl’s parents, and they exchange sheepish looks. There are bandages on Katerose’s fingers. Frederica is clever enough to understand why.
She looks back down at Winona. “Why don’t you tell me all about it?” she suggests. “Come on, we’ll go for a walk. We should let your mother and father visit on their own for a bit.”
“Okay!” Winona says, easily appeased. Julian mouths a small thank you at Frederica; Karin simply steps closer to her husband. Frederica winks and stands, offering her hand to young Winona, who takes it eagerly.
The two of them walk back down the hill, Winona chattering all the way down, and Julian and Katerose gaze forlotnly after them until their voices fade into the wind.
Julian turns back towards the graves. He steps closer to Yang’s and touches the cold grey headstone, trailing his fingers over it as though handling something fragile, breakable, sacred. He wonders if Yang would be proud of Winona. He wonders if he would spoil her the way he’s certain Schönkopf would have.
“He would have made a wonderful grandfather,” Karin says. There’s a strange look on her face as she stares at Yang’s grave. Perhaps she’s imagining him now, as Julian has countless times, sitting in an old armchair with their ancient cat on his lap, reading Winona a story. For whatever reason, in Julian’s mind, it’s never the sort of story that’s appropriate for a little girl – it’s always a tale taken straight from a history textbook.
“Yes,” Julian agrees. “He’d have taught her all kinds of strange things, though.”
Karin smiles. “Yeah, but they’d be good strange things. Not like the kind of nonsense this one would have taught her.” She nudges Schonkopf’s grave with the tip of her boot. Julian hands her the roses he’d taken from her earlier. She clenches them in her bandaged hand.
“He’d have told her good stories, at least,” Julian tries, because he knows that if there’s one thing Walter von Schönkopf had an excess of – other than gall – it was sordid tales. He, at least, had had the sense to know which ones were appropriate to tell and when, even if he himself often disregarded his own judgment.
“Maybe,” Karin says, as much a concession as she’ll ever make for her father. “But I guess we’ll never know now, will we?”
She drops the bouquet of roses on the grave unceremoniously, her eyes narrowed and her face flushed.
"You said you didn't want to be a grandfather before you reached forty," she says. Her hands clench into fists at her sides and her jaw tenses, teeth nearly grinding together. Julian watches, wanting to reach out and touch her, but doesn't.
She needs to get this out.
"Well," Katerose continues, "you'll never hit forty now, and you've got a granddaughter. Two, maybe, by this time next year."
She puts her hand on her stomach. Julian's heart swells with pride and he steps just that little bit closer, gazing fondly at his wife where her belly has just begun to round out. She’s only a few months along, but she’s unmistakably pregnant now – or at least she is when they strip down for bed, when she’s taken off all her loose-fitting clothing and revealed herself entirely.
This is the first time Karin has told anyone outside of Julian, living or dead, that they’re expecting a second child. Julian isn’t sure how to feel about that, but somewhere in the back of his mind, he thinks that this is right. Yang and Schönkopf deserve to know, even if they cannot hear her.
"Winona doesn't look a thing like you,” Katerose says, kicking the stone lightly again. “But she goes around the playground hitting boys with sticks. How is it that you're not even here to give her bad habits, but she's still inherited them from you?"
Karin's eyes shimmer with unshed tears. She turns her head away, then, as though she were cowering under the gaze of her father rather than his headstone – as if she were a teenager again, trying to hide her real feelings from him, even though he’d been able to see them plain as day all over her face.
Julian closes the distance between the two of them at last, then, and puts a hand on her lower back, bowing his head to kiss her hair.
“I bet he planned this,” Katerose says. “To die that day. One year after the Fleet Admiral.”
Julian opens his mouth to protest, but shuts it half a moment later. He wants to tell her no, she’s wrong, that it wasn’t like that, that Walter von Schönkopf would never have chosen to die – but when he thinks back to that day, when he thinks of the grief he’d seen on Schönkopf’s face as he’d spoken of Yang and when he’d openly mourned Blumhardt’s final sacrifice – he can’t find it in him to completely disagree. Vice Admiral Schönkopf had always been good at hiding his real emotions, but that day, he’d let just a fraction of them seep through his façade, and Julian had seen right through him. He’d seen how tired the man truly was.
He says nothing of this to Karin. She doesn’t need to hear it. He thinks that, in her own way, she already knows anyway. She may have been her father’s opposite when it came to concealing her feelings, but she’d always been like him in how she could perceive others’.
“He was so dramatic,” Karin says then, sighing with her entire body. “A knight, remember? Following his beloved lord to the death, I suppose. Choosing him over—”
Over me, Julian is sure she had been about to say, but she changes her mind at the last minute, swallowing the words down and biting her lip as she selects new ones.
“—over the living. Selfish to the very end.”
“He loved you,” Julian says. He looks at Yang’s headstone as he says it.
“Maybe.” Karin doesn’t look at him. Her gaze is fixed elsewhere, too. “But if he did, it wasn’t enough to choose to live.”
Winona’s laughter carries over to them on the breeze. Their time is up. Katerose gives her father’s grave one last look, then turns to walk away. Julian, however, lingers, gazing first at the camellias on Yang’s grave, and then the roses on Schönkopf’s.
For a moment, he considers touching those roses, pressing his index finger to the thorns and letting them pierce his skin. He wants to know what Karin felt this morning – what she still feels now. It’s different, he knows, than the way he feels about Yang, who had walked toward his death with no idea that the reaper had been lying in wait for him.
“We all make our choices, don’t we?” Julian says. “You chose not to let me go with you. He chose to follow you. Am I selfish for not doing the same?”
He looks up at the sky. He’s not, he knows. He’s long since come to terms with it, but still, that tiny pinprick of pain likes to make itself known in the back of his mind from time to time.
He was allowed to live because it was what Yang wanted. He was allowed to choose to be a soldier, because Yang believed in letting him decide his own path, even though Julian had never wanted anything more than to follow in his. That he’s got a family now, that every day he makes the decision to live his own life while never forgetting the ones that were lost – while never forgetting the man who gave him so much, and who never asked for anything in return but peace – is enough to have made Yang Wen-li happy.
Julian doesn’t touch the roses. “Enough blood has been shed already,” he says, glancing back at Yang’s grave one last time with a sad smile. “I know you wouldn’t want any more.”
He rejoins his wife and daughter at the bottom of the hill. The wind has picked up a little more, making the afternoon feel much nicer than it is. It’s blown away the stifling haze of heat that had settled over the cemetery, and now Katerose’s hair blows away with it as she chats idly with Frederica. She has to shake her head to keep it from getting in her eyes, and the sight of it fills Julian with a special kind of glee. It’s more endearing to him than he will ever admit to her, because he knows she’ll just get flustered and scold him for his sentiment.
He comes up to Katerose’s side just as she and Frederica finish speaking, and just barely manages to catch the tail end of their conversation.
“Will I see you at the Cazernes’ for dinner tonight, then?” Frederica asks.
Katerose nods. “Yes; Mrs. Cazerne asked us yesterday.”
Winona squirms in her arms, giggling excitedly. “Does that mean I get to play with Charlotte?” she asks. “Oh, and can we bring Admiral, Mama?”
“No, dear. Admiral is too old and lazy to go on visits now.”
“Aww…”
“He really is living Wen-li’s dream, isn’t he?” Frederica jokes. She laughs behind her hand, but Julian can hear the subtle stutter in it, can see the slight redness that’s formed around her eyelids. He feels heat prickle behind his eyes, too, but blinks it away before anything can come of it.
“He really is.” Julian laughs. “I don’t know how that cat managed to get as old as he is, but he’s the happiest cat I’ve ever seen.”
“It’s because he’s so well-loved,” Frederica says. “He always has been.”
“And because Julian spoils him,” Katerose adds under her breath.
“Yes, well, that too.” Frederica laughs again, more spirited this time. “But that’s okay. Wen-li did as well. You should have seen him playing with that cat after we were married; the poor thing was sick of him by the time we left Heinessen.”
“Was he that bored?” Julian asks.
“Oh, yes. For as much as he loved being idle…” Frederica’s gaze moves up toward the hill, right to the very top of it where the twin headstones just barely peek up from over its edge. “He really was terrible at resting.”
Karin and Julian exchange a look. They smile at each other, soft and melancholy, and know, in that moment, that it’s time for them all to go their separate ways: Frederica to her husband, and Julian and Karin home.
“Let’s go, Julian,” Karin says, giving voice to their shared thought. She bids a quiet goodbye to Frederica and turns to leave first, cooing to Winona and telling her they’ll do her hair up nicely for the party tonight so she can show off to the Cazerne girls. She says they have something important to tell everyone, too, so they have to look nice, and Julian smiles at her retreating form, his heart swelling in his chest, so full it feels about ready to burst with love.
He takes a step forward, ready to follow after her the way he used to wish he could follow after Yang – but just as his foot lands in the grass, a hand upon his shoulder stops him. Julian turns to look into Frederica’s warm hazel eyes, his own wide with surprise and curiosity.
“He’d be proud, you know,” Frederica says, her voice soft and her smile so fragile Julian thinks the breeze alone may shatter it. He can feel her hand trembling against his arm (though he wonders, briefly, if that’s really her, or if he’s the one about to fall to pieces).
“Thank you,” he says, unable to convey the true depth of what he feels. Frederica seems to understand anyway. She always has, even when he himself could not look into his heart and understand the things it told him.
Her slight nod tells him all that he needs to know: that she is proud, too, and that there is no more need for words between them.
They are alive, and they have made their choices. Those choices – to live on, and to never forget – will carry them forward in the days that are to come, and in the victories and losses they still have yet to experience.
Frederica removes her hand from Julian’s shoulder. She gazes at him a moment longer, as though seeing something beyond him – something he will never be able to see with his eyes, but has been carrying with him all along. It’s the same sort of look she used to give him when they lived on Iserlohn, when he had just been starting out as a soldier and she had seemed the most capable and competent person in the world to him. It’s funny, he thinks, because even now, it’s hard to resist the urge to salute her. It’s been more than a decade since meeting Frederica and about half as long since she’s been a part of the military, but it still feels as though that’s the proper way to say goodbye.
Frederica salutes him, instead. And then, just as quickly, she turns away to walk up that hill, to tell her husband of everything she’s seen, everything she’s done, and everything that’s yet to come.
Julian watches her go. And then, hearing Katerose call after him, he turns and runs toward his family.