Title: Ashes of Ash
Fandom: Honor Harrington
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 315
Author's note: mild spoiler for A Rising Thunder, slightly larger one for In Enemy Hands, Echoes of Honor and Ashes of Victory
Summary: Misapprehensions are corrected, in time, but something of the imagined lingers in the real.


Honor has a crypt at King Micheal's cathedral. It's empty – a fact she finds herself rather grateful for, finding herself, against all expectations alive and mostly intact. It's a state of affairs that takes rather a lot to get used to. The possession of a crypt, not her mortal status. She's had a number of decades to grow accustomed to the latter, after all.

She's watched the vid of the entire affair, in a briefing portion of the debrief that occurred on her return from the dead, muting the sound only when the eulogy began. She's had more than enough praise of her so called heroics without watching a version produced for the public at large.

It's located between that of Ellen D'Orville and Saganami, and it is empty, as theirs are. The only thing she could find more mortifyingly embarrassing then that – she had done the letter of her duty, and nothing more - is hearing her supposed list of virtues extolled in the Grayson equivalent of her funeral. Equivalents, rather, because although the ceremony proper had taken place in the Protector's Cathedral, a fair few – she would like very much to say not all, but the reception she had received on her return gave her her doubts – local Steadings had followed in tow.

It makes the Royal wedding walk-through, years – although nowhere near enough of them – later, slightly awkward. As cathedrals go, King Michael's holds its own in the size department, but the slow moving procession covers most of it, from entry to the ceremony before the altar, and Honor's position has her in position to direct her gaze towards the nave where her name is marked. Covered, thankfully, with a strip of carpet, but there nonetheless.

Firmly resolves next time she dies she will do it so as unobtrusively as possible so that it stays empty, and retraces steps for another run.