logsinthenight | EVENT LOG: GRAVES

EVENT LOG: GRAVES

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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By now Cao Pi has grasped the basics, so placing an offering is a conscious choice. He can't help his natural curiosity, especially about people he's met and spent time with. After their brief adventure in the woods, he feels like it's only right that he and the commander share their experiences. This is genuinely much easier than talking.

At least, that was his train of thought prior to placing the scrap of paper with a line of poetry scribble in Chinese. He's never felt the impact of bullets into flesh before, just a few pings off his armor, but the sense of bleeding out in the snow...how very real. The sense of desperation, the quietly simmering feeling of love for someone who means something, even more real. So when he snaps out of it, his flippant decision becomes firmly cemented into something he needs to take seriously. For now, though, he simply remains there in the glade, thinking, while crouched before the cross. When Rosinante comes around, he'll still be there, pencil and paper in one hand, presently blank while he grapples to shape his thoughts into ideograms that would tumble together into perfect poetry.

So that's how it is, hm? He steps away for a moment to place an offering on another grave, and comes back to someone at his. Unfortunate.

He grows less annoyed when he approaches closer and the lamplight helps illuminate the previously backlit Cao Pi. He has yet to find the other man's headstone, but he had intended to visit it himself, so fair is fair. He'd been a reliable traveling companion, sharp and thoughtful. It must end up being reflected in some similar tendencies when it comes to gathering information.

"Have you already looked?" he asks, tone neutral, and he stops while his lantern swings gently with the remnants of motion from where it hangs atop a branch he'd collected on their walk. The walking stick doesn't actually help him much, but it's nicer than just carrying the light manually.

The question registers, helping to snap him alert. "...I have," Zihuan intones, low and quiet, before he pushes himself to his feet and brushes his coat off. "The prying can't be helped. It seems to be something we all share, whether we want to or not."

He itches to ask about the kid in the chest, the family member (he noted the resemblance if nothing else) and the conflict, but some of it is probably still too personal to ask after. He inclines his head slightly, the vaguest of bows. "Sacrifice is the noblest of deaths, they say," he hints, wondering if he should be more direct or just leave it be.

He exhales audibly, then runs a hand through his hair, under his hat.

"Thank you," he manages. Were it many of the other people here, he might retort back at them. Do they say that? Who is they? But even though their journey together was short, he and Cao Pi had to rely on each other, and he's gained some respect for the man, even if he's still definitely sort of arrogant. Being called noble is an honest compliment from him, probably.

But now, as with Kuai, it feels awkward to say much else. This isn't the sort of conversation he's well-equipped to handle. "You were... writing something?" he tries.

The whole scene is awkward, Cao Pi won't deny it. His gaze goes to the paper and pencil clutched in his hand. "...poetry," he admits, "though every vision throws me off enough that I can't manage more than a line or two at a time." He looks to where he's tossed the scrap of paper at the foot of the cross. "You're welcome to read it, poetry is meant to be shared rather than hoarded by the writer."

You know, if you can read Chinese, that is.

Which he can't, but thanks to Kuai, he recognizes it. It's that language that looks sort of vaguely like one he's used to, but manages not to make sense. He focuses on the paper to see if it will translate itself like much of the writing and spoken words here do, but when it doesn't, he reaches into his coat pocket to pull out his tablet for that photographic translator app he'd seen.

Except in the process he also knocks the packet of cigarettes Gene gave him, foreign and yet plenty familiar, out of his pocket and onto the ground. With an irritated grumble he stoops to retrieve those first and leaves the tablet on the ground temporarily. The cigarettes are way more important. They're the only thing keeping him halfway sane today - but only halfway, since he has to ration them.

"I was going to try and translate it, but I guess you could just read it to me, right?" What a mess. Today is not his day. This isn't really his week, actually. You know what, cancel the whole goddamn month.

Raising an eyebrow at the collection of what the fuck did you just spill, Cao Pi thankfully refrains from snarking further. This isn't the time for it, and he gets that Rosinante is probably feeling similar to the way he does so why make it worse? He turns a shoulder back toward the grave, looking down, even though he knows precisely what he wrote.

"Peach blossoms fall like snow," he says in a low tone. If he had time to flesh it out into a full poem, it would probably be about the way the snow falling on his face in the vision put him in mind of peach blossoms wilting and dropping to the ground as they die. The metaphor is there, he doesn't need to go into it. Instead, he offers, "There are peaches and plums in the garden of my estate in Xuchang. Beautiful, yet fleeting."

For a moment he's quiet, and then lets out a shaky, slow breath. It brings that cold reality back too quickly, too viscerally. Every moment on that island had been one tragedy after another, set to the slow, gentle beauty of falling snow. How long had it taken for it to erase all signs of the battles that had gone on there? How quickly had it erased Law's fleeing footprints?

"I... thank you," he manages, and says no more. He doesn't want the other man to hear how close he is to tears, both from reflecting on what happened and from the gracious, thoughtful gift in writing.

At least, such expressions of emotion are not foreign or unwanted for someone of his era, even if Cao Pi himself is rather icy and solemn. He decides to look more closely at the marker, and notices something else. The name of the month means nothing to him, but he saw it on his tablet and can easily make the connection. "The date...it's tomorrow, isn't it?"

"Yeah."

How twisted the universe must be. He doesn't remember it being July already, but he'd been preoccupied and time had flown past so it's not really out of the question.

There's a soft noise under his breath, the most humorless chuckle. "How terribly inauspicious."

As ironies go, it's the worst. At least, birth dates are not usually celebrated after one's coming of age, in Cao Pi's reckoning, so maybe it's merely irony and not a massive kick in the face after all. He turns slowly again, facing Rosinante directly. "Brother against brother is a tale as old as time, though. You would not be the first nor the last to have to deal with it."

It's not like he was planning much celebration anyway. Until the marker showed up, he hadn't even intended to tell anyone his birthday was approaching. Why would he? None of them know him well enough to care, and he's fine keeping it that way. His ideal celebration would simply have been to have an extra drink, smoke an extra cigarette. Spend some time alone by the water. Nothing has really changed, except that it will be hard to enjoy any of it much now.

As for the rest of what Cao Pi says, though, that's not really very encouraging either. It's true, but it's not really what he wants to hear. It makes it feel like there was an inevitability to it, that it's normal for two siblings to be so completely opposed in values and actions. And that shouldn't be the case - or if it must be so, then let it end in argument, but not death.

"It shouldn't be," he replies. But it's hard to find the words for anything more. He failed in every way to stop Doflamingo. The list of clients and contacts, all of his findings, vanished in tatters in the snow. All he can hope is that the little he was able to tell Sengoku over the years will amount to something, and that the Marines on that island that day might still have made some sort of impact. He'll never know, now.

"It shouldn't," Cao Pi agrees, "and yet it is." At least none of his brothers actively challenged him, but there's that whole thing with Zhi that he doesn't need to go into. Suffice it to say, he understands to a point, having witnessed relatives, brothers, cousins, constantly at each other's throats under the Han. "I don't know the circumstances, and if it were me I would not want to answer any questions about it, but you must know that I can't help but be curious."

"Not right now," he replies with a shake of his head. "Maybe later."

But it's nice to know this about Cao Pi, that he has something underneath that arrogance, if he's offering to talk and writing beautiful, touching poetry. It's more than he'd taken the man for at first and it's a relief. But for now, the suggestion of later will have to truly mean quite a lot later - some indeterminate time. Just because Cao Pi is being pleasant doesn't mean Rosinante is willing to talk about his family. It's a can of worms nobody needs to open.

"I'm sorry, this whole situation has left me struggling with conversation," he admits.

"Understood." Cao Pi doesn't quite bow, but he does bob his head slowly down in acknowledgement. He's beginning to see why some people are extremely thrown by this situation, though for himself there's nothing intensely personal nor embarrassing about his own death. Just the unpleasant tragedy of being faced with something he literally could not handle and having to stand there and accept it.

He steps away from the cross and passes closer to Rosinante, looking like he'd be just fine heading off to bother someone else, though he pauses beside him. "How rude of them to reveal our darkest secrets in this way," he murmurs in commiseration.

Rude, right. Miserable. Cruel. Rude is not just understating it, it's almost flippant. But then again, it's beneficial from a logical standpoint. Genuinely helpful to know who went through what to get here, especially if it reveals anything about the sort of person they are. So he's hurt, but he's not exactly wishing it had never happened. The pain will pass in time. And if his own grave here is any sort of example, there are plenty of secrets far darker that people can still harbor. His death, though difficult, is not the part of himself he would choose to keep hidden if he could choose only one thing.

"Indeed. Hopefully their motives become clear. It's hard to imagine anything could justify this," he agrees.

Cao Pi sighs long. "If these forest spirits are even half as capricious as the mystics I know," he says wryly, "then we may never know the reason." And a hearty fuck you from the afterlife, gods.

He lifts his head to nod at Rosinante once more and continues on at last, going to see what other sorts of trouble he can make. Now that he knows what leaving his poems at the shrines means, he's going to be far more careful about whose to explore. No more getting intrigued by dragon statues.

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EVENT LOG: GRAVES

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