After

Oris Norma had a ritual for the dead, it turned out, though nobody had thought to mention it until the morning after, when Ar found William sitting alone in the workshop, unable to bring himself to touch a single tool, and gently explained what would happen next.

"There's a garden," Ar said, careful with each word. "Not a graveyard, not in the sense you'd recognize — we don't bury, not anymore, haven't in longer than the archive can fully account for. The settlement returns what remains to the soil directly, and something is planted above it. A tree, usually. Sometimes something smaller, if the family prefers. It grows for as long as it grows, and people visit it the way your world once visited headstones, I understand, though I confess I've never fully grasped headstones as a concept until watching you all these months."

"A tree," William repeated, testing the word, finding it strange and, somehow, exactly right.

"If that's acceptable to you. To all of you. Xavier has no family here to consult, so the choice falls to whoever loved him best, and I understand that to be the three of you."

William thought of Priya, of Maya, of a whole family line Xavier had only gotten to meet in fragments and photographs, four million years too late for any of it to matter in the ordinary way family mattered — and understood, with a tired, aching clarity, that Ar was right. Whatever ritual honored Xavier now belonged to the people who'd actually carried him through the end of his life, not the family history he'd spent his final weeks reconstructing out of decayed data.

"A tree," he said again, firmer this time. "Yes. That's — yes."

He sat with the strangeness of it a while after Ar left him alone again — a tree, standing in for a headstone, growing slowly upward instead of sitting fixed and unchanging in the ground. There was something almost unbearably tender in the idea, he thought. A grave that kept living, kept changing, kept reaching for more light every single year it stood there, long after the person beneath it had stopped being able to reach for anything at all. He wasn't sure whether that made it easier or harder to imagine standing in front of it. Possibly both, he decided. Possibly that was simply what grief was going to feel like now, for the rest of however long he lived in this world — both, always, at the same time.

They held the small, quiet ceremony three days later, once the practical machinery of a foreign world's grief customs had finished running its course — paperwork Darrell handled numbly, decisions about placement and marking that Rachel made with the same careful precision she brought to everything, and William himself contributing nothing except his presence, unable to summon the focus for anything more complicated than simply showing up.

The garden sat at the edge of Oris Norma's central district, wide and quiet, dotted with trees of every size — some young, recently planted, others ancient and sprawling, centuries of the settlement's dead grown up into something that looked, from a distance, almost like an ordinary forest, if you didn't know what fed its roots.

Seli came. Ava came, standing a little apart, her composure visibly costing her something, though whether the cost was for Xavier specifically or for everything his death represented about the choice closing in on all of them, William couldn't say for certain. Fen came too, unexpectedly, gruff and awkward in a setting so far outside his usual element, offering William a single, wordless clasp of the shoulder before retreating to the ceremony's edge.

They planted something small — Ar had suggested it, gently, understanding that a sapling felt more honest than an ancient tree for a man who'd only gotten thirty-one years of life before the universe took the rest of it from him early. William watched the soil settle over roots that would, someday, long after all of them were gone too, grow into something that might shade this quiet garden for centuries.

"Seems small," Darrell said, quietly, standing beside him. "For everything he was."

"Trees don't stay small," William said. "That's sort of the point, I think."

Rachel spoke a few words over the freshly turned soil, simple and unrehearsed — not a eulogy exactly, just a handful of true things said plainly, about a man who'd worried more about everyone else's fear than his own, who'd asked, at the very end, only for something good to hold onto rather than comfort he didn't believe. William found he couldn't add anything to it. Rachel had said all of it better than he could have managed, and he was grateful, standing there, not to have to find his own words on top of hers.

He went back to Fen's workshop two days after that, not because he particularly wanted to, but because sitting in the guest quarters with nothing to do except turn his own grief over and over had started to feel unbearable, and some old, stubborn instinct told him that his hands needed something to do even if the rest of him didn't yet know how to want anything.

Fen didn't say much when he arrived, which William was grateful for — no careful condolences, no awkward attempts at comfort, just a gruff nod and a gesture toward a fault that had been waiting, patient, for someone competent to address it. William worked in silence for the better part of the morning, and somewhere in the third hour, elbow-deep in a panel that reminded him, distantly, of every panel he'd ever fixed on Hope , he found himself crying without quite meaning to, tears falling onto components he had to be careful not to short with the salt of them.

Fen noticed. Of course he noticed. But he didn't say anything, didn't stop his own work, just let William have it, the two of them working in a silence that had room in it, for the first time since the garden, for something honest.

"He'd have liked you," William said, eventually, not entirely sure why he was saying it out loud, except that the words had been sitting in his chest for days with nowhere to go. "Xavier. He'd have liked watching me fix things with you. He used to tease me about it, back on the ship — said I talked to broken equipment like it could hear me, like I was negotiating instead of repairing."

Ar, who'd arrived sometime during the morning to check on him and stayed, quietly translated, and Fen's weathered face did something complicated, something almost gentle.

"He says," Ar relayed, "that most good engineers do talk to the work. Says the ones who don't usually aren't paying close enough attention to notice what's actually wrong."

William managed something that was almost a laugh, wet and unsteady, and felt, for the first time since the garden, something in his chest ease very slightly.

Rachel found him there that evening, tired-eyed, having clearly come straight from another long session with Ava, and settled onto the bench beside him without asking permission, the same way he'd have done for her.

"How are you holding up?" she asked.

"Bad. Better than yesterday. Bad in a way that's starting to have edges to it instead of just being one enormous shapeless thing." William set down his tools, giving her his full attention. "How about you?"

"Same, probably. Different flavor." She was quiet a moment, watching the workshop's low light catch the dust in the air. "I keep thinking about what he said, at the end. About the model. Finish it, whatever it takes. I don't know how to hold that as a promise and not as pressure, if that makes sense. Like I owe it to him now, not just to Ava, not just to the settlement."

"I think you're allowed for it to be both," William said. "Owed and wanted. Doesn't have to be one or the other."

Rachel nodded slowly, absorbing that, and turned to look at him more directly. "I need to ask you something, and I want an honest answer, not the answer you think I want to hear."

"Alright."

"Has this changed anything? Xavier. Losing him. Has it made you reconsider staying?"

William thought about the question longer than he might have a week ago, turning it over the way he'd turn over a stubborn mechanical fault, looking for where it actually sat rather than where it first appeared to.

"No," he said, finally, and found, saying it out loud, that the certainty of it surprised him a little, given everything. "If anything, it's made me more sure. Not because losing him made staying easier — God, it's made everything harder, every single day since. But he told me not to let grief make me smaller than I'm allowed to be. Right at the end, that's what he said to me. And I think if I let this loss talk me out of the one thing I've actually found worth building since we got here, I'd be doing exactly what he told me not to do."

"That's a heavy thing to carry. A dying man's instructions."

"Maybe. But I don't think he meant it as a burden. I think he meant it as a gift. The last thing he had to give any of us, and he spent it making sure I didn't waste what I'd found here out of guilt for surviving him." William's voice caught, and he let it, no longer trying to manage every crack in his own composure the way he had in the early weeks. "I miss him, Rachel. I'm going to miss him for the rest of whatever life I build here, however long that ends up being. But missing him and staying aren't opposites. I don't think they ever were."

Rachel reached over and took his hand, squeezing once, firm. "I think you're right," she said. "I think that's exactly the kind of thing Xavier would have wanted you to figure out."

They sat together a while longer, the workshop settling into evening around them, Fen long since gone home, Ar quietly occupying himself with some archive fragment nearby, giving them the privacy of his presence without the intrusion of his attention.

"I told Ar yes," William said, eventually. "The teaching position. I decided this morning, actually, standing over the tree. Figured if I was ever going to say yes to something, that felt like the right moment to finally mean it."

"I'm glad," Rachel said, and meant it, William could tell, fully, without reservation. "You're going to be good at it. I've watched you explain things to Fen's apprentices this past month. You've got a gift for it."

"Learned it from you, probably. Watching you argue models with Ava all these weeks. You're both so patient with people who don't understand yet. I always figured patience wasn't really my strong suit. Turns out I just needed the right thing to be patient about."

Rachel smiled, small and tired but real, and William felt something settle in his chest that had been unsettled since the garden — not resolution to his grief, which he understood now would take considerably longer than a few days to properly hold, but resolution to the question underneath it, the one Xavier had asked him without asking, in his final clear moments: what are you going to do with what's left of you, now that I'm not here to watch you decide?

He was going to stay. He was going to teach. He was going to keep fixing things that mattered to people who'd stopped believing, mostly, that fixing was worth the effort, and he was going to carry Xavier with him while he did it, not as a weight but as a reason, the same way he suspected Darrell was going to carry Mara's unfinished sentence home across four million years, and Rachel was going to carry a promise about a dying star all the way to whatever ending she and Ava eventually built together.

Xavier was gone. But William understood, sitting in the quiet workshop with Rachel's hand still warm in his, that none of them were going to let that be the only thing his life had amounted to.

He'd wanted them to keep looking. All of them, in their own directions, toward whatever they'd each decided was worth reaching for.

William intended to keep his promise.