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“I’ve been bringing Lucy around a lot lately.”
These words were spoken by a young man named Anthony Lockwood,who was sitting in the grassy strip between four graves. The graves were rather secluded, in an overgrown part of a gloomy, and quiet cemetery. The young man wore a dark suit, and his hair was brown and mussed. But his eyes were what caught your attention, they held a sadness that made him look much older than his seventeen years.
“She’s like you Jess, Looks like you, and she acts like you, sometimes…it makes me feel like you’re still here. And Mum, you’d like how she always sticks with me, even when I have impulsive plans.”
Unbidden the words of Peneope Fitz came to his mind. He hated her, he hated that her words, chosen especially to goad him, to poke at his painful curiosity about his parents had affected him so. She was a monster, yet the simple sentence she’d spoken about how mother’s impulsiveness came to his mind so often.
Anthony Lockwood was ashamed at his childlike longing for simple details about his parents.
It was almost deceiving to say he’d known them, he was only six when they died. And their memory was fading fast.
“I wonder what you’d really think of Lucy.” He said to the headstones. They didn’t answer; they never did, so why was he still here? Lockwood stared at the grey brick wall and realized hot tears were pouring down his face.
He tried halfheartedly to wipe them away, he had thought he was over this. That the miserable hours of sitting beside his family's graves and crying were behind him, but no matter how hard he tried the tears somehow returned.
It would be easier if you just joined them, it wouldn’t bother anyone, that grave is ready for you.
Lockwood was intimately familiar with that evil voice. It had reared it’s ugly head for eight years of his life, ever since the day he had stood, small and shocked, in the front of the freshly dug grave of his sister. That grave had joined his parents which was growing grass. But there was a fourth plot, it was empty. That was his. It was waiting for him, it was ready for him (as his evil thoughts liked to remind him).
No, Lockwood wiped at the burning tears with weak yet stalwart determination. I will not leave Lucy, I’m not giving up my chances to kiss her. I will not give up my chance to see George and Flo be happy together. I will not miss out on Kipp’s bad jokes. I won’t make them all miss me, I won’t make Holly clean out my room. I’ve got a family now, I can’t leave them.
And with that resolve the weak flame of Hope grew in size, fueled by it’s best companion, which is Love.