EVENT LOG: GRAVES

[inthenightmods]

EVENT LOG:
GRAVES

characters: everyone.
location: Bonfire Square.
date/time: July 12-19.
content: mysterious shrines appear and bring visions of death.
warnings: likely violence and potentially gore.

time to pay your respects.

It happens when no one is looking, when most of the town is asleep and the rest are inside. A makeshift cemetery has come to Beacon, taking up residence in the middle of Bonfire Square. Each monument, shrine, and altar is dedicated to someone who now resides here, a memorial of their previous life.

Some may be drawn by curiosity, others by fear, and some may simply have to pass through this strange graveyard to get to the Bonfire itself. Whenever a person gets near, the altars beckon with a mysterious urge— an urge to approach, and an urge to leave something behind. They will feel compelled to make offerings at the various shrines, but doing so has a curious effect; it causes one to experience the death of the person whose grave they've honored.

Whether you resist the compulsion or give in willingly (or something in between), you'll also have to wrestle with the fact that a grave exists for you. Will you let your death be known, or try your best to keep it secret? Destroying it sure won't work, as it will return— with a duplicate somewhere else in town.

However you choose to deal with this, one thing is hard to ignore— this a tangible reminder of your death, and the fact that it's probably permanent.

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Comments

oops

[sulfa]

[ after experiencing jesse's death, after realizing what the small gesture of placing a fresh cigarette on the dusty mound of the unmarked grave would do, wade had immediately resolved to stay far from them. it's simply not right to plunge into another person's memories without asking, let alone to live them, especially where something as intimate and personal as death is concerned - so he won't.

he walks through the firelit square with his arms hanging limp at his sides, not entirely sure what to make of the scene he just lived out through the eyes of someone not that much younger than he himself - but it's wrong to leave jesse without so much as a grave marker over the sandy earth that had covered his body prior to his arrival in beacon, and a wooden cross shouldn't be so hard to make if he can borrow some things from their resident woodworker.

irwin cuts a wide berth around the graveyard out of respect, but he still can't help but to stare at the two battlefield crosses as he passes them - which is when the surface of one of gene's tags reflects some of the firelight back at him from where it's fallen on the ground. he frowns and carefully steps through the sandy corridors between the long rows of graves until he finds himself crouching in front of the marker adjacent to his own. it's probably just an accident that's rolled the thin beaded chain of gene's tags off of the rifle stock they were hanging from, but it's still troubling enough to warrant fixing, so he picks them up, letting the chain pool in his hand.

E.P. HICKS

he studies the tag resting in his palm for a few seconds before he carefully places it back where it belongs, trying not to think of what it must have felt like in the hand of whoever took it from his dead body, when it was still warm with human life from resting on the bare skin of doc hicks' chest. he'd seen countless dead bodies during his time alive - but it's always different when the slack face of a corpse is one you recognize from its time animated. he hates that he can so easily visualize the cadaver of a man he's all but just met - and that his mind doesn't hesitate in producing that image even now that the war that sent them both here is long over.

wade lets the tag slip through his fingers as he straightens up - only to be slammed with bone-deep cold the moment he does. the vision plays out from there, dragging him under the icy waves of the other's memory with the violence of a riptide. it's all too familiar - the banter suddenly giving way to the chaos of a shelling and the scramble to reach the wounded. the small kernel of selfhood that remains in irwin's consciousness as he lives out gene's last moments waits for the shell that'll end him to suddenly hit, to overwhelm him with pain similar to his own, wiping every thought of the friend from before from his mind - but it doesn't come. eugene--irwin--straightens up, adjusting his helmet.

and then there's nothingness.

wade blinks at the dark air, jaw slack as he eases back into his own personhood and attempts to sort the fragments of stolen memories into some logical sequence of events. there had been a shelling, but it doesn't seem like that was what had killed him - the death certainly hadn't been as violent as he had imagined it when they'd swapped causes of death they met. a projectile to the head could have killed him, but he would have felt at least a millisecond of impact first, or so irwin would assume. but what does make sense - straightening up, and only then getting hit, dying instantly - a sniper. there's a chance irwin's own killers didn't see the red cross on his helmet through the smoke and the distance. the man who killed eugene was staring right at it through a scope.

for a moment he forgets how to move - he's not sure how much time has passed, but he'd fallen into a kneeling position, because his calves and feet prickle as he forces them into motion and raises himself up at the same time as the horrible wrongness of what he's just done settles over him in full like a lead shroud. there's the issue of that man walking through a wall, too, and the question of what a SOE operative was doing on the front lines, among other things - but the knowledge that there's something not quite right about that is all he can manage in the moment.

irwin forces a breath into his lungs and resumes the walk to the chapel-slash-clinic, a million apologies he's not quite sure how to word perching on the edges of his teeth and weighing down his shoulders. when he opens the heavy wooden doors and sees gene in one of the pews, however - alive, tranquil brown eyes cast downward and shaded by dark lashes as if in prayer while he sifts through donations, his chest slowly rising and falling at a normal respiratory rate - there pass a few seconds where he can't even think up the words to grab his attention.

he blinks a few times, lips silently forming the motions of at least two different greetings that stop short in his lungs; when he finally manages to speak up, his voice is hardly above a whisper. ]

Eugene. A moment?

[ he mildly cants his head in the direction of the vestry, as if they aren't already the only souls occupying the chapel at the moment.

oh, god. ]

[preseance]

( you mention the war — his an' wade's — to most folk here what're from earth proper, an' you'll get varying degrees of sympathy an' sorrow. folks have lamented his age, his death, the probable violence an' hardship besides.

but the thing is, the war was just a thing what happened. it needed fightin', so he fought it. maybe his weapons were sulfa an' cigarettes an' quiet calm an' steady hands but he was there. in it just as much as the next man, an' the next after him. he don't mind the sympathy — folks find peace in the givin' more than he's ever found in the reception, but there ain't many here who understand the soul an' scope of the matter.

men killed themselves when they were declared f-4. the whole damn country was ablaze with the desire to serve, he weren't special on that account. he an' wade were called on, an' they stood up. and in the standin', they came here. too fuckin' early, they came here.

(he wishes he'd known what else wade's life could'a been like. what he could'a done. would he've gone on to be a doctor too? he's got the disposition for it. maybe married, a kid or two of his own. in some sunny place in california, far removed from the war.)

but the war never wore him down like this. there were cruelties aplenty, but. the simple act of turnin' into the sun, feelin' it sink down into his bones was altogether like sittin' by the fireside of a settled soul could excise that weariness. he's witnessed death, said prayers over those that passed on, spent weeks with blood and viscera on his clothes when there weren't no way of washin' but there ain't never been anythin' so awful as this forced reckonin'. livin' out your own death was trauma enough to these folk, but. bearin' them out yourself all because of an intended kindness is the worst sorta malice he can imagine.

he's lost in that when he hears irwin, an' he glances up at him, his hand stillin' on the foldin' of a bandage. there's somethin' off in him, some whisper of instinct with a clarion bell in the back of his mind alertin' him to a manner of wrongness. his first thought's for injury, but. he's walkin' all right, not favourin' one side of the other. no blood, steady breath. little pale, but that could just be the dark at work. still, gene's jaw works to one side as he comes around the pew an approaches him plain. )

Got plenty of those. What can I do for you, Doc?

[sulfa]

[ gene already knows something's wrong - it's apparent in the way he gets up, how he postures himself when he does, he tiny flex and release of his masseter as his face shifts into slight asymmetry with the movement of his jaw. very briefly, irwin holds the edge of his lower lip between his teeth as he searches for the the right verbiage. there's no combination of words that will make such a dramatic invasion of his privacy okay, but he'd like to at least break the news gently.

subtle, nauseating dread washes through his core as he arranges the apology in his mind. gene would be well within his rights to be upset - it's a violation, accidental or not. and—

while it's not as though irwin hasn't made any friends here... doc hicks would be the worst to lose. if he's to be honest with himself, doc hicks would the worst person to lose even if he wasn't another medic, even if he wasn't the only person here with a true frame of reference where his life is concerned. but he is, and that makes this even worse.

funny how abruptly a person can get attached in situations like these. irwin takes a slow breath against the tightness of his chest and silently exhales before speaking, keeping his voice quiet so it doesn't echo in the high rafters. ]

Gene, when I was... When I was walking over, I saw that your tags had fallen. Figured I'd put them back, but it turns out that qualifies as an offering. [ he pauses, collecting himself, sick with some ungodly combination of foreboding and guilt. ] I saw your death. I thought it was only right to let you know. ...I'm sorry.

[preseance]

( maybe if kyna hadn't come to him first an' told him plain, his reaction would be different. now, all's he does is close his eyes a half-heartbeat longer than a blink, jaw working.

if it had to be anyone else, he supposes he's glad it's irwin. least his death was quick. painless by contrast with what it seems like most everyone else has been through. he's just sorry about his part in puttin' wade back in the war. he closes the distance between them, drops a hand down against the man's shoulder and squeezes. )

S'all right. This place has that way about it, huh? Sorry about the cold. Worst winter on record for the last forty years in Europe, by all counts.

[sulfa]

[ irwin had thought about several possible ways this conversation might go on the walk over here, but the response he just received - an apology for gene's own death - wasn't among the possible outcomes he'd considered, and it's reflected in his brief pause before speaking.

it's a relief - the apparent lack of animosity or hurt, the anchoring touch. wade glances down, collecting his thoughts, then meets gene's eyes again and attempts a comforting smile that's barely more than a slight lift of the corners of his mouth. ]

You don't need to apologize, Doc. You're the one who went through it.

[ he wants to ask about the SOE fellow he'd seen prior to experiencing gene's death, and the unsettling detail of his apparent ability to seamlessly walk through solid stone, but wade paces himself. right now it's enough to just know that by some miracle their tentative friendship hasn't been obliterated in one fell swoop.

he doesn't shrug off the weight of gene's hand on his shoulder, fully intending to let him keep it there as long as he'd like. wade's never been overly fond of being touched, but in this context, in the overwhelming isolation that comes with realizing that you're truly, permanently cut off from the living world, compounded by the depression and discomfort of nicotine withdrawal, the small physical reassurance is welcome. ]

...Your boys really cared about you.