[CLOSED] a new you for the new year

[3ofswords]

WHO: Kira Akiyama
WHERE: The Inn
WHEN: December 22nd, afternoon
OPEN TO: Credence Barebone
WARNINGS: Mentions of bodies and mass graves, possible mentions of Credence's backstory content
STATUS: N/A

---

The disease had swept through Manhattan before the heavy snows, bodies abandoned in their neat bags along ditches dug in the park soil when it finally fell in earnest, coating them entirely. January had looked deceptively clean, the untouched snow a blanket over the looted vehicles, the abandoned furniture, the piles of garbage and the corpses of those who had laid down and died in the streets--from the virus, from starvation, from stray shots on either side of a waning conflict.

The moon was always sharpest in that phase, and there had been every reason to stay inside. Snow was hard to weather on an empty stomach, but harder still to see in, to know if the person approaching was friend or foe--for them to know the same of you. The circumstances of their isolation were different in the village, but Kira still finds himself itching all over to wander out, to-

To finish what he started. It's been a week, as best he can tell the rising and setting of the sun in the greyed out skies. He's been back to the fountain, he's walked as far as his body can stand along the river, he's sized up the people who seem most capable of escape and yet, remain here. The only preservation for his hope and sanity is the absolute insanity of the situation: seven days in a place where Latin-shouting senators eat with Victorian women and Credence tries to explain what must be Depression Era games with dust motes and household items, might not be seven days at all. The strange gaps in his knowledge might be indication that this is a delusion of the cold and stress of quarantined Manhattan after all.

He could still wake up. He could still fix it.

But the grey days blur on, and he wakes from a fitful slumber to find the sky darker than it was when he dozed off in his small room.  His body is starting to resent the rest, might even be ready for another trek along the river when the snow clears, but there's so little else to do.  His mind needs it, to shut down and not scratch at the walls of its cage over and over.

It's certainly easier to stay awake when he isn't staring at his own ceiling.  Rolling himself out of the bed, he wraps the thick blanket Credence had found for him in his closet in lieu of the woolen coats, and crosses the narrow hall to the opposite room.  He leans at the door for a few moments, rubbing the sleep out of his face, before extending his hand further from the cocoon of warmth to tap his knuckles on the door.  He doesn't bother to call out: there's something in the room, and if it isn't Credence, he'd probably rather it not answer.

[CLOSED] a grave it is

[3ofswords]

WHO: Kira Akiyama
WHERE: The bee hives, behind the Town Hall
WHEN: December 27th, well after the storm
OPEN TO: Kylo Ren
WARNINGS: Possible violence, certainly threats of it
STATUS: N/A

---

The other clues hung from the bottles of beer had taken some of the surprise out of the gift Kira had found in the old schoolhouse.  Follow the cards hadn't seemed much a priority without a deck to follow, unless the place was trying to send him back into the fountain for another round of aching limbs and needles stitching his skin to his bones.  Not exactly the afternoon he was after when the snow finally cleared a bit, so he'd asked after clues to the other--a library, archive, and finally been pointed south along the trail to the building.  It had been as strange and antiquated as the rest of the village, wooden desks and chairs, the slate of the blackboard as cold to the touch as the rocks and earth outside.

Credence's gift had been balanced on its edge, seeming old and new at once--old fashioned, but glossy to the touch.  His hands had been fidgeting for days without his deck, and somehow Credence had willed into existence a replacement.

Smaller than the deck from home, and just a standard deck of 52 playing cards, but beggars couldn't choose, and they were charming--far less inexplicably than the giver.

Once he'd found them, he'd spent an hour in the dark schoolhouse, shuffling them between his hands, getting used to the feel of them.  Sensing the weight, asking them basic questions, testing if they'd respond.  That extra sense was still weak, and they were hardly made for this purpose, but eventually they'd rolled over like the sharp-eyed cats on the jokers, and stretched, and fallen into a kind of shape he understood.  He'd halved the deck, taking top and bottom cards from each pile, and made himself a compass: spades in the north, hearts to the south, clubs and diamonds for the east and the west.  Shuffle, halve, do it again: after four, the cards slipped in his fingers and scattered on the desk as he shuffled, defying another test of what they both already understood.  

Interesting, that the deck wasn't near as polite as the person who had conceived it.  Kira had smiled, and picked them up, and set out to see where they wanted him to go.  He still couldn't travel far, especially in this weather, but a five of clubs seemed a reasonable distance to walk from the schoolhouse door.  It took him around the large building opposite, into a large field of white snow, until he was standing at a low wall, a chorus of odd stumps with boards laid over their tops standing along it.  Everything appeared untouched, blanketed in the new snow falling gently from the grey sky, and he was about to pull another card to see where he might now turn, when an unnatural black caught his eye.

Ice formed on its side, as if it had been caught in a thaw before another freeze, a small black shovel stood unfolded and struck into the roots of a tree.  Kira brushed new snow from the top of the handle, and a tag dangled free, its nondescript text and final message strangling a laugh in his throat.  He still had the strange toy from the piles of gifts in his room, still unable to remember how he'd dreamed up such a creature, and he wondered if Kylo Ren had thought up his own gift in that tense moment of their first real meeting.

"Time to dig a way out," he read, "or a grave."  His first tug of the handle didn't free the shovel from the frozen ground, and he considered just leaving it.  Who had time to be this dramatic, he wondered, before brushing his thumb over the cards he'd spent an hour shuffling in a dark schoolhouse.  "What an absolute piece of work."