In the pain that consumed him, he could hear her murmur her name as if from somewhere very far away. It did little to calm him, but it reminded him in the part of his mind that was not completely engulfed by the devastation wrought that he was not the only one who had something - someone - to grieve for. But he couldn't think beyond that, couldn't summon the appropriate response nor get a grip on his suddenly spiraling emotions. He was lost to the current of grief, the maelstrom of images and memories that cruelly splashed in technicolor across the backs of his closed eyelids. A reminder of everything he had last, the things he would never again see or experience.

He wondered how it had happened. If Ranjiri had been there in that moment, if she'd seen. He hoped she hadn't, the big brother in him that still held voice behind his agony praying she hadn't been saddled with such knowledge, such intrusive nightmares. With their luck, with their loss, Cera doubted that prayer would ever be answered.

Her words were fuzzy, like muted, distant echoes. Meaningless in the wake of the information she'd given him, the one he'd begged for. But he was in a way pleased that she had told him. What would have happened if a mere stranger had been the one to vapidly inform him of his father's death? It was a cruelty Cera could not imagine, even in the deepest throes of his thrashing sorrows. This, this was kinder. A sick, twisted kind of reprieve. A place where he could scream his agony, where nobody could venture across them, where his grief had privacy and understanding company to share it with.

But none of it mattered inside his head, so distant were those more composed, intellectual thoughts. Cera was overwhelmed by the grief, shards in his throat and happily trickling through his veins to lodge into his tattered heart. Only when his throat was sore and shredded with his screaming and crying did he simply lay there, limp, a marionette with severed, burned strings. A doll that broke and shattered upon its stage, a hollow cheek and gaping, staring, sightless eyes. Painted, bloodied mouth and shocked, unbothered expression. Somewhere inside him, the part that made him Cera, that part that made him Golden more so than Prince, was tarnished and began to crumble away into nothing.

Only when he had calmed - no, he couldn't call it calm, merely numb and exhausted by his own grief - did he hear what Ranjiri had to say. Listless green eyes rolled to look up at her, never even attempting to move. He wanted to lay there, unmoving, for all of time. Never get up and face a life that he had been living without knowing his father was dead. A life he would have to continue living, because looking up at his baby sister, he knew he had to do it for her.

So he found some sort of bedrock, deep beneath the wilting earth of his soul, and drew upon its strength. Stand first. One step at a time. She needs you. On stilt-like legs he stood, eyes puffy and red, but he wobbled towards her anyways. She would always come before him, always. "Was he buried?" he croaked, a husky whisper after all his crying and screaming. "Where...where is his stuff? His grave?" Cera didn't know which one was more important, meant more to him, which to even say first. He was jumbled and jangled and distraught, his mind was hardly functioning, but looking at Ranjiri's tear-stained face, he made himself do it.