let's take it to the grave [closed to several]

[3ofswords]

WHO: Kira Akiyama
WHERE: Southwest of the Town Hall, under one of the tallest trees nearest the village
WHEN: Feb 7, after the discovery of Ren’s death
OPEN TO: Open to but not requiring tags from: Casey, Credence, Veronica or Mark, Jyn
WARNINGS: Grief, character death, a dude literally digging a grave for a friend
STATUS: Yes, from the above people

---

Time to dig a way out, or a grave.

The message had seemed a threat, at first: Kira had wondered if meeting Ren alone might put him six feet under. What he should have done, what he should have paid attention to, was the invisible force the man spoke of, the way it connected all things. The way Ren had reached out with it, and had wanted to help him test his own strengths. There would be no more time alone with him. There would be no more meetings, no taking him into the forest to hunt the wendigo, no looking for the way out.

Taking a deep breath, Kira lifted the short, unfolded shovel again, and speared it into the hard earth. The snow had stopped falling, and the air had warmed enough to melt some of it from the ground, but the soil at the base of the tall pine was packed tight and cold. Kira was sweating under his clothes, his coats laid at the roots, and every impact of the shovel travelled up to his injured hand and tested the healing skin.

It hurt: so did his fingers and palms, the muscles strained by sudden labor. So did his arms and back, and his hamstrings, his calves, from standing and bending and tossing the dirt he moved off to one side. He’s outlined the hole to an approximation of Ren’s height, and started to sink it in.

Ren had only just returned the tool to him, after his meeting. It made Kira’s heart crawl up to his throat to think about, how thoroughly the place had punished the man for his efforts.

Maybe it was chance. Plenty of people had been injured, but so far only Ren had died. Only his home had been torn in with a symbol burned across it, and Kira took another breath, lifted again, rattled the impact up his shitty narrow frame, again. It was exhausting work, worse than deep cleaning the kitchen or scrubbing out the tub. And those were his only points of comparison, as physical a project as he undertook, to prepare him for this one. He had lain awake most of the night, wrestling with the glimpse of Ren’s body, well after it had been removed from the house; he had lain awake in a silence that denied even Casey’s concern, the cat’s attentions, his own prickling flop sweat of weariness.

And at sunrise he’d gotten up, the question of what to do with that body mixing with the question of what must have been done with Ty’s. The question of his own worthlessness tying itself to both ends, marrying them to each other, tethering him to this single purpose: dig one of them a grave, at least.

It wasn’t lost on him that Ren might have predicted this. That he might have known, and Kira hadn’t recognized it about him.

It wasn’t lost on him that, with his full abilities, he might have told him not to go home.

He’d stolen Casey’s gloves on the way out. It was almost habit, to pull one over his injured hand, to see how much he could get done in the kitchen. Today he wore both of them, and he could feel the soft new skin tear and ache for the work, under the leather. Sweat made a slippery layer between his flesh and the interior, but the gloves saved his grip, and he put his weight into it. There was no strength left, the sun directly overhead, his breath rattling dry in his throat.

On the next attempt, the shovel hit the side of a rock; slid; and sent him falling forward into the hole. It wasn’t so deep yet as to swallow him, but he tipped awkward inside, scuffing his shoulder and hip on the dirt, jabbing the handle against his ribs. When he sat up, his head and shoulders, hunched as they were, showed over the edges. His limbs shook from the long effort, and he slowly unclenched his hands from the handle: it was time for another break, whether he wanted one or not.

There was so much left to do, and not enough strength in him to do it.

He felt like he was facedown in the snow again, exhausted, out of his element, following a feeling in the hopes of doing something concrete. He’d been an idiot then and he was an idiot now: wasting time with people, getting attached, having a sliver of hope, when he knew how it ended. What awful place would he be whisked away to before he finished this task? Was he going to push a boulder up a hill, over and over, stripping away his sanity every time it crushed him on the way back down?

Lifting dirty hands to his face, Kira hid his mouth and eyes against them, and the sounds of the shovel chipping at the cold earth were replaced with soft and solitary sobs.

There was still a long way to go before even the top of this hill.

[Kira, owner of the Village Shovel, can be found either crying in his initial attempts at digging Ren a grave, or if you prefer to skip the waterworks, after he's gotten up and gotten back to work a while later.  The list of characters are those who can tag, but no one is required; kept it short due to the emotional nature of the post for Kira himself]

Comments

[theroadremains]

Ren's death had set something in motion with Kira that Casey both understood and tried to avoid. He had not specifically tried to avoid Kira, but he had given his roommate his space. Casey had not known what to do, or how to do anything. He had feared reaching out, and the implications that would exist around anything he said or did. He had distanced himself from the kind of loss Kira was suffering for too long.

When Kira doesn't return for breakfast, and still wasn't there as lunch came around, Casey had risked everything to take a tiny bit of the rations from the kitchen and slip out of the inn in search of Kira. He didn't have cards to lead him, and it was only through chance and wandering that he found Kira at all.

He stood for a moment, and watched Kira sobbing in the hole he had made in the ground, a conflict warring within him over what to do now that he had found him. He said nothing, he had no words to offer, and he instead stepped down into the hole and crouched beside Kira, gently removing the shovel from his possession and replacing it with the bit of food.

He didn't ask what Kira was doing, or why. Whatever he was doing, it was clearly important to him, and not something he could continue in his current state. In silence, he left Kira to cry in the hole he had made, while Casey continued the work he had started.

[3ofswords]

There's only a moment of fight between them, his hands finding the shovel as it was moved away and holding, then letting it go. They closed instead around the familiar texture of Kate's flatbread, the slightest crumble to it in the ugly state of Kira's grip.

His face was a wreck: he was still crying, through red and dehydrated eyes, coughing as snot slid down his dry throat. He felt like an infant, like something helpless and stupid--and he was, wasn't he? Wasn't this how it always wound up: a dire circumstance, a hole to sit in the bottom of, the tears shocked out of him and someone else doing the work? He's seventeen, sent upstairs while his mother finishes with a client, an ugly prediction bursting up out of him and sending him to hysterics. He's twenty, and Flor is calling them a cab, shouting over his shoulder at the man whose touch had made him clammy and sick, who hadn't wanted to let go.

He's twenty-three, on the bathroom floor, sobbing into Ty's shoulder over promises to do their fucking laundry together, to be alive when things got better, ignoring the blood on Ty's knuckles where they held onto his arms.

Part of him wants to just stay there, and let Casey dig him deeper in, cover him up, and leave it done. It's several minutes before he sucks the tears and snot back with a great, long breath, chokes on it, and pulls himself to sit on the far end of the shitty rectangle with shaking arms. Once deposited, he's a miserable sight: all skinny stick limbs in a loose slope toward the bottom; dirt streaked, sweat shined, ugly cried and loosely holding a lump of bread in gloved hands. The cool air lifts the hair from his sweaty brow, and he sighs, tears still leaking down his face. "I can see why you prefer not to stick around these places," he says, voice thick.

[theroadremains]

Casey hesitates in the next hard dig of the shovel into dirt, not immediately lifting the still slightly frozen ground up when Kira breaks the silence of soft coughs and choked, phlegm filled breaths with his words. His grip tightens on the shovel, shoulders tensing at the light tug of the words and the ache that had never left his feet. How long had he stayed? Far too long, he knows, and Kira is there still, and Casey knows his name and a couple others. Faces have broken down the cardboard cutouts of his mind, stories have dug their claws into his mind.

He swallows and tosses the dirt onto the pile, slipping back into the routine of metal cutting through earth and dirt tumbling down with a loose skittering. He's methodical and the labor is a welcome distraction, but he can't ignore the state of Kira, or the unintended knife of his words against Casey's chest. He remembers their chat, and that alone should be enough to send him walking, looking for the road he lost. He shrugs the urge and the discomfort off and works.

"It's easier." It's the same response he offered before, he thinks. It isn't hard to understand why Kira is upset. He had not missed what had happened. He didn't know the man who had died, though he had seen him walking around a time or two. Casey shrugged out of his coat and tossed it to the edge of the hole and fell into a rhythm with the shovel.

"Still doesn't stop it from happening." He adds as an afterthought, his eyes drifting over to Kira for a moment. Was it better to never let anyone close and not stand to be haunted by the pain of loss, or to have memories of friendships and interactions with that pain? Dog and John linger in his thoughts, but he can't say which is better. He knows he's too removed from everything to offer the right words. He can at least help with this.

[3ofswords]

"Maybe if you know how to do it," he thinks aloud, his body relaxing into the place he's left it with a twitch sparking along a cramp in his thigh, a burn in his knees, a place in his throat and chest that seethes when the cold air drags into it. He's never dug a grave before--never dog a hole, period, though he'd been able to see the trench they had started and abandoned in the park across from the shop. As long as the row of body bags, and almost deep enough, but the workers killed or chased off from finishing the job.

Ty would just be another one on the pile. They wouldn't even have the bags any more, and Kira tries not to imagine him having to share, or wrapped in the quilt and swaddled in emptied trash bags. Surely Nicky wouldn't put him in a dumpster, surely he wouldn't be burned away with trash.

The tears take him again, breath hitching and held against another sound, even as they fall hot down the chapped skin of his face. This was the burial he could control, this was the death he could cry for without having to say a word. Ty could be the far away thing, a grief he could earn by finding his way home. By getting back to see it put right, even if it just meant telling his mother what happened to him.

"Why don't you teach me about that, while I teach you to spell," he says thickly, giving more of a choke than a laugh. He'd always held people back in the hopes they would avoid the messy affair of caring about him--short of the drug induced haze of his late teens, he hadn't found a way to avoid caring about them first.

[theroadremains]

Casey had also never dug a hole. He had been coaxed away from John's body, and had left him in the middle of the road he had made his son promise to keep following. This was the first grave he had tried to dig, and he didn't even fully comprehend the purpose of it. He could feel the repetition and the constant shock working through his hands as he dug without his gloves. It didn't bother him, but he was sure they would both have blisters when the digging was through.

He was keeping his digging even, continuing to hollow out the outline Kira had made. He was sure Kira would stop him if he did anything wrong. As he digs he thinks about the rough 'joke'. He doesn't stop digging, but his voice is soft, his accent heavier but the rasp less pronounced.

"I could. It hasn't been working as well, but I could try to teach you." Despite the joke, his offer is earnest.

[3ofswords]

Casey digging gives him an excuse to just sit, and an excuse to let his tears keep falling: Casey wouldn't look at him. Casey was good at distance, and Kira didn't have to worry about making sure it stayed in place. Didn't have to force Casey back, because he kept himself there. He was safe in a way most people weren't, and Kira doesn't feel so awful to have cried in front of him, or look this tired, or not really be joking as they spoke.

It lets him feel level enough to crumble the bread in his hands, lifting small pieces to his mouth between sniffles and coughs, between short silences and words. He accepts the help enough that he even strips the gloves from his hands, needing to air the sallow new skin of his left regardless.

He tosses them at Casey's knees, giving the task over to him for now. "What's the first rule then?"

[theroadremains]

"Don't let them get a foothold in your head." He twists the shovel in the dirt, forgoing deep, tugging heaves of the shovel for the moment and just breaking ground with repeated stomps down onto the shovel's top. Sinking it over and over again, creating a furrow and twisting. Anything to dislodge and loosen the earth and make the repetition move more smoothly when he returns to shifting it. "Replace them with something flat and uninteresting. Focus on the impersonal and shut the rest out."

He's never had to articulate what he does or how before. He's not even sure he can, or if it will help. It had only helped him because it had been paired with a dedication to leaving before he could fuck it up with being around for too long.

"When that fails, distance." He slams the shovel in harder than necessary and the shock of the shovel glancing off a rock has Casey cursing a string of words under his breath, low and sharp. He shakes out his hand and bends down to scoop up the gloves, tugging the sweaty workgear on over his hands. When he's done he kneels down to dig the rock out of the ground with his hands, hefting it up to drop on the edge of the grave when he's done.

[3ofswords]

"I guess I'm fucked then," he says, sinking into the hunch of his own shoulders and staring blankly at the bread in his hands. It's a weird thing to admit, to be vague about, saying, "I don't get to decide if people get in my head or not," but why try too hard to explain it, to someone who might not understand, or believe, and who doesn't want to know him at all.

"Sorry," feels safer to say. He wonders if that's what Casey does, when he gets personal, when he talks at all. If he just makes him into someone else, and does his best not to feel much one way or the other. Maybe it explained the steady calm of him: can't react to things you don't let yourself care about.

Kira can't imagine it, dug in so deep he's crying at the foot of a man's grave. He'd have to undo the rest: spit something in Credence's face to make him go away, kick Casey out of his room, stonewall Benny and Kate, and then--go die in a house, not enough skills to see himself through a month alone. "Sorry," he repeats, softer. Sorry for asking advice he's shit at taking, sorry for making it anything like Casey's problem. Sorry for roping him into digging a hole, and sitting there, picking at a piece of bread. When he looks down at his hands, he can see the pale scar of his knuckles, pink at the edges, and remembers that night, is sorry for that too.

"You don't have to dig this for me," like he's the one they'll bury in it after.

[theroadremains]

Casey stares at the dirt, into it, loses himself in it for a moment as he thinks about Kira's words. It's natural for him to pick up a fallen tool and finish a job. It feels right, regardless of what that job might be or who it was for. But with Kira it had also felt necessary. He had looked at the other man sitting in the dirt, crying, covered in earth in a way he had never seen Kira. His hands had to be killing him, his shoulders to, and yet he was still out there.

Casey got the feeling he wouldn't move on his own. That if Casey had not come along he would have kept pushing himself or fallen over in the hole and cried himself to sleep. He lifts the shovel back up out of the ground. The hole is deeper for his efforts, but it's hard to notice at a glance. He surveys it before his eyes stop on Kira, and he hesitates. Digging was easier and safer. It was a chore he could keep at and not have to think or feel. But digging Kira's hole for him wasn't the help the other man needed, and looking down at him where he sat, while he listens to the smoother voice, devoid of an ash choked rasp and soft with something he assumes is reluctance to speak, he moves over to where Kira is seated instead, and offers a hand to help him to his feet, trying to get the uninjured hand with his angle of approach.

"Come on." They were going. Back to the inn. Back to hot water and a soft bed. Away from the dirt and the cause of Kira's tears as much as they could. Kira didn't like to be covered in dirt. He liked to be clean. And for all Casey disliked the waste of water, he was sure it would be far more helpful to force Kira into a bath than to keep trying to offer advice even Casey was having a hard time following.

[repressings]

Ren is dead.

Credence doesn't cry. He feels bad--he feels awful, that there's someone he knows in the village that's now gone--but Credence remains stonefaced, surprisingly stoic. A selfish part of him--a cruel part of him--is glad it wasn't brought on by him. That it was lightning, and not his Obscurus. This isn't his first brush with death and what it brings about. It surrounds Credence in a peculiar way, and this is no different. This also isn't about him, though, it never was. This is about his friend.

He finds Kira where he was when he first noticed the other wasn't doing his chores. That had been a while ago, when there had been nothing but Kira and a shovel and no other progress. Credence had politely given him time. Now, just like how he pokes his head into Kira's room at noon to make sure Kira's alive, he metaphorically pokes his head into Kira's personal life.

When he arrives, Kira is crying. Kira is strong--so, so strong, and Credence's heart thumps in his chest, mouth dry with worry. He'd expected Kira to cry, sure--he expected most people to--but expecting and actually seeing are completely different things.

"Mr. Kira." Credence's words are hushed. He doesn't address the exact situation because Kira had never with him, during one of his moments. Instead, he has a small bag.

"I thought maybe you were hungry," he says eventually, He holds up a fruit--the very last apple from the gifted bag.

"And maybe I could keep you company."

You don't have to be alone.

[3ofswords]

There's a small gasp, the rush of air into his dry throat as he tries to suck every noise and tear back into himself at the sound of Credence's voice. That hush picks him up and punts him out of the feeling, leaves him sitting disoriented next to it while the train of wild and ugly thoughts leaves him on his ass to run the bases.

Another breath, he looks between the gaps of his fingers at his skinny legs tangled with a shovel in a hole. Dirt streaks on his scrubs, mud on his knees. Credence saying words he doesn't really follow

He sucks the snot back into his throat, fingers sliding down his brows to wipe at his cheeks, the sleepless bruises under his eyes, and he finally turns them up to Credence like he isn't sure how he wound up out here in a hole at all. "Yes," he says, hardly knowing what he's saying yes to. The words catch up as he hunts back for them, voice torn into something soft and ragged, but it works. Tears still leak from the corners of his eyes, blinked away and renewed, but he stops sobbing, and he stops--thinking, turning all of his concern to a person and a task, to get away from himself. "Yes, I--I should eat. Thank you."

Hunger registers only distantly, behind cold, and he finds his coat at the base of the tree, the top of the hole: "If you could just, hand me my coat--I'll be fine. I'll come up and eat." Hopefully the moment it takes Credence to fetch it will give his legs the strength back to carry him.

[repressings]

Credence nods in response, and makes it a point to take his time as he gathers the other's jacket. Kira is not well--he's digging a grave, too, and he knows it's Rens. There's a strange, somber touch to everything. More than usual--and he realizes with a hint of surreal amusement he's wearing his black sweater today.

When he returns, it's with Kira's jacket, ready and waiting for him. Credence doesn't say a word, and his face is neutral as he watches the other quietly, face impassive. He'll be whatever Kira needs. They're friends.

Credence has never had a friend before, but he knows he cares for Kira enough that he'd do anything for him.

It's only when he looks ready to speak that Credence carefully hands him an apple, drawing his knife from his pocket and handing it over, too. That's when he speaks, voice soft and gentle. He talks like he's talking to Modesty after she's had a nightmare--most of the people in his family have them. He's good at assuring them there's no monsters, even if he is one. Kira deserves everything Credence can possibly give him today.

"When things get really bad, and you can't cry anymore, you know--there's a secret."

[3ofswords]

He has to get up. He has to: for Credence, but for himself. No one is served by his sitting tangled with a shovel in a hole, or by his crying. Credence shouldn't have to stand on the edge of a grave and talk to him like he's a frightened child, when Credence has been through so much already.

Maybe if Kira hadn't thought he'd die, he'd have made sure to grow into a stronger person. He'd have learned better skills, or done more things that hurt so he could be prepared for it later. Instead, he'd chased whatever felt best or easiest, whatever had the fewest strings attached. Now he's alive and other people aren't. Now people look at him like he has answers, or like they need him to have them, and he's empty. He's out of ideas.

But not out of strength. He uses the shovel to start himself, to stand, and from there he lets Credence hand him his coat, lets it hang around his shoulders like a dark cape. He takes the apple in one hand and the knife in the other, looking up and up at the taller boy from the bottom of a hole. If he just focuses on the chap of the dry air against his skin, or the texture of the apple in his palm, the knife in the curl of his fingers, he can keep it together. "Care to share it?"

[repressings]

Credence shakes his head. This is beyond a simple apple, this is beyond 'you might be hungry,' but it's the only way Credence knows how to help. He will be there, quiet, because Kira is hurting. Credence has only ever soothed Modesty and Chastity; only ever comforted the nightmares of those younger than him, and this is decidedly different.

It's not a parent, it's not some half-formed figure in a child's mind. It's someone they both knew, and, for Kira, it's even worse. Credence had been on a slight acquaintance level, and this, for his friend, is something more.

He shakes his head, burrowing a little more into his peacoat.

"I've been thinking," he says absently, "about how pretty the sky is. How no matter what, even here, dawn comes."

[3ofswords]

How Kira finds the gentle smile, he doesn't know, but it settles automatic on his face when Credence shakes his head. Even sucking back his own grief, he can't let Credence think he isn't allowed to keep his secrets, or not have the strength to talk about something yet.

If he's critical of Credence, it's only ever teasing, or very of very important things. For all he told the young man fuck the rules, he has many about Credence, and not just because of the shadow that has followed him as long as Kira's known him.

One: he does not make his problems Credence's problems. Two: he does not lose his temper, or act annoyed with him. Three: he does nothing to demand anything of him. When he pushes, it's only through his own actions, the things he's willing to do or say in Credence's presence, the loose way he lets himself approach the world and the people in it, that Credence might see how no one hurts him for it.

So he only nods, an encouraging half-smile wobbling into place as he blinks away the last of his tears, fingers trembling on a knife. "Like the circles," he agrees, hoarse, thinking right now the bad is on a very, very long arc. "Nothing lasts forever."

[repressings]

"Right," Credence agrees despite not quite understanding, and it's soft and gentle and he's about to say more, but he's momentarily distracted by how Kira looks, blinking away tears and trying to pull himself together. It's admirable, and Credence wants to find the words to tell him it's not needed, but as he narrows his eyes and concentrates as he looks at him, he draws a blank.

He settles on digging his hands into his coat's pockets and exhaling softly.

"Maybe he'll come back. Like the man before."

[3ofswords]

The feeling lurches through his heart and sinuses like holding his breath, or stepping down from higher than he imagined. Like the man before--he'd told Credence that, his first night in the village. Repeating it just to commit it to his idea of the place.

He hadn't learned until later, that man had been Ren. That he'd left with another man and returned alone, no memory of any of it. It was likelier he'd leave and return, with no idea who he's met or buried, than he'll get another chance at reaching him.

slipping the apple into his pocket, he raises his hand to try to hold the tears back in his eyes, or just hide them from Credence's sight. "I don't know if anyone's come back a third time, especially when they haven't really left." Maybe the body would disappear, the way the creature had. No one had told him what happened to the woman it killed. His lip shivers its way back against the other, rolling in, bitten in its trembling. When he releases it, he takes a deep breath. Sniffs once, and swallows.

"You were telling me about the sky," he says, hoarse.

[kestreldawn]

Jyn might have been asleep the moment before her head had landed with a thump on the pillow. It felt strange, lush, even luxurious to be coddled in such a thing after what she'd been through. Not just her arrival, but everything that came before it - although her injuries were somehow healed when she'd crawled out of the fountain, the invisible scars, the deeper injuries remained. She had remembered the strange, floating realization that she would never experience another dream, never lay her head down to explore far off worlds and memories - no more Galen, or Lyra, or Cassian. No more imagined words and stolen kisses bound to the sanctity of her mind.

Although she isn't sure if her mind had the ability to dream (she can't remember any from throughout the night), the sound of movement forces her awake. It's instinct, needing to be hyper-vigilant - she remembers her cellmate Kennel, her obnoxious breathing, the promises she'd made to see Jyn's life taken. And for a moment, she almost thinks she's back on Wobani - the only thing that snaps her out of the hallucination and the spectral image of Kennel is the bed. She doesn't budge, not right away, instead allowing her eyes to adjust to the dim light and rustling of bodies, items. She sees Kira, clutching something in his hand, and before she can make a sound, his form has disappeared, slipped out between a crack in the doorway.

There's a faint tickling at the back of her mind, urging her to follow. She can't make heads or tails of it, understand why her curiosity has suddenly piqued. Perhaps it was the bare, desolate melody of his punctuated words, or the utterly empty gaze as his body went through familiar motions without any conviction. Perhaps there's a vague sense of worry, concern for the stranger who'd shown her nothing but kindness.

When she's sure that there's been some time to allow him headway, she swings her legs over the bed and hoists herself up. Every joint, muscle, bone in her body screams and aches, pleading for more time to rest.

"Shh," she hisses at herself, shoes on and body out the door. She hugs her coat in tightly around her slight frame, making her way out of the inn. She follows the path he's taken, keen eyes tracking his silhouette that's up ahead. When he stops underneath a large tree, using what appears to be some kind of shovel, she slows. Digging? What could be digging for?

She watches for a minute or two, thinking that perhaps it's nothing of concern. And yet .. there's a desperation in his actions, in the strain of his muscles and the furious movement of his limbs. She turns, deciding to leave him be - for now. Perhaps a few more hours, just a few, to gather more strength. Then, if he's still digging, perhaps he'd desire help of some kind. She isn't entirely sure what he's digging up or for, but it would be the least she could do to repay him for his generosity.

--

Jyn manages to sleep a few more hours, once she's back in the haven of her bed. She savors the split second upon waking, where nothing hurts quite yet and the suffocating reminder of where she is has not hit her. It only last a moment, a second, a breath - but she lives in it for as long as she can.

When she glances around and sees Kira's empty bed, she remembers him digging. Remembers the decision to go back and see if he would want assistance. She lifts herself off the bed, this time with a fraction less of the pain she felt earlier, and retraces her steps towards the large tree.

Kira is still there, still shoveling - only she can see he's tired, weary. She can see the sloppy, uncontrolled movements of his arms as she continues to hack away at the frigid earth. She's moving at a casual pace - determined, but far from rushing. It's when she's about half-way there when she sees him fall - and in an instant, Jyn's feet are hurdling towards him, no longer concerned with a quiet approach.

[3ofswords]

He hasn't cried but a moment before footsteps and concern break the rustle of wind in the trees, approaching at his back. Before the haze is broken by presence and the need to turn back on, to suck it up and get himself out of the hole, prove that he is sound enough of body and mind to continue the task.

He has to do this. He has to take care of this, to not be as useless as he feels.

Would that he could just get the time for it, alone, in a group of fifty people. There was little precedent, Manhattan hadn't emptied until the epidemic, and even that was a tense thing, giving wide berth to bodies that might be bait, and climbing a fire escape to inspect the world around the next corner before even daring to turn it. At least there he'd had full possession of his gifts, and he could tell Ty or Nicky: there's no one else around, or: you don't meet anyone today.

Jyn's presence is no more predicted than Ren's absence, and Kira picks up the shovel again, holds it to his aching chest and tries to knuckle a grip with shaking, tear-stained hands. Tries to suck the grief back down, to be the empty shell that has no cracks, but it's obvious enough when he bars the shovel across himself and sits against the wall of the grave like a man digging a trench, facing his enemy from its bottom and unwilling to give up his ground. "What are you doing out here," he rasps.

[kestreldawn]

Jyn skids to a halt at the edge of the ditch he's created - her eyes scan the shape of it, the human-sized proportion of the thing. Is it a grave? It would certainly explain the way he's been acting - that look she could see in his eyes that told her he understood in ways no one should be able to understand. But it's not as though she has anything with which to compare him - there's been no time for her to get to know him outside of this grief-drenched husk of a man.

She has no need to know who or when or how. None of those details really matter, she knows that. What matters is the void left behind once that person is gone, the way their names seems to taunt and follow like a shadow, the way their apparition seems to exist in places it never did before. It didn't matter whether the absence was in a literal sense or in a more figurative way. My father, Saw - No, stop retreating into your own empty life. Focus.

She crouches down by where he is, though a respectable distance away. Does she explain herself? That she'd been mostly curious as to what he was doing so early in the morning, harboring a shovel to his chest? She decides against it.

"Do you have another shovel?" she asks, eyes scanning the hollowed earth, calculating what has to be done, how much deeper it has to go. She's buried far more dead than she'd ever care to admit or even acknowledge - and digging graves is a skill that no one should ever have, but that she is morbidly grateful for now.

[3ofswords]

Kira can only shake his head, still blinking tears from his eyes, still trying to find himself to--not let this be the first thing she has to deal with, in this place. Can he even remember his first night here? Dragged to a fire, put in a tub, interrogated about disease.

That she made the decision to follow him, is allowed to walk away, is logic that knows nothing of the human heart. He hadn't had to lead her to the inn, or feed her, but he couldn't have stopped himself doing them.

There's no deceit in the question, though deceit is a crack in her fed by water and ice, built over time, and only thawed out by recent fire. He'd argued with Sonny, about selfless and selfish people, and he hadn't been swayed from the belief: all people are selfish. All of them, down to their bones, and they only got caught up in things bigger than themselves, and wanted that big identity, so they did things other people could consider selfless. People who had no self were empty vessels, vulnerabilities in the machine of life, easily manipulated if not outright possessed by things they couldn't fight.

Gods, causes, relationships.

Maybe she needs to do something like this as much as he does, and it's a shame there's only one tool for doing it. "No," he answers, "This is all we've got. It's mine."

The shovel, the task, the grief. But it didn't have to be all of him, and it didn't have to all be his. "Here," he said, holding it up like she might pull him out of the hole with it, a lifeline between them. Maybe the only real selfless act was letting someone else act on your behalf. "I can't--manage it on my own."

[kestreldawn]

Jyn doesn't know how to comfort people and their emotions. It isn't that she doesn't have her own, of course, but rather that her way of dealing with them is to simply ignore them, ignore their existence. Wait for the storm to subside. She knows that this isn't a particularly good tactic when it comes to others, but what's the alternative? She's hugged perhaps a handful of people in her lifetime, the bulk of which was when she was small from her parents. It's not a move she keeps in her arsenal. She prefers something more pro-active, hence asking for the shovel.

She nods slowly at his answer, wondering if perhaps she could simply use her hands. It's obvious he's done quite a bit of the work, but given the trembling of his muscles and his voice, the despair-ridden glaze in his eyes, she thinks that he won't be able to continue on much longer on his own. She could even use a piece of bark from a nearby tree, or a rock sharp enough to pierce the frigid earth.

But then, he speaks again - holds the shovel out to her. The need to search for bark and rocks slowly fades into the distance, and she reaches out to him. Grabs the thing and uses her strength to hoist him to his feet. She places a hand on his shoulder, about as much physical contact as she can allow herself to display.

"You don't have to." A pause, a tensing of her jaw as she continues, "You've worked hard. Take a breath."

[3ofswords]

She all but knights him at the edge, the shovel held up at her shoulder, at the ready, her hand at perfect height to rest on his shoulder when he stands at the bottom of the hole. It really is deeper than he imagined himself managing, for how long it has to be, how wide.

The body he aims to bury is not small. He'd found a new use for his cards, a break from sanity, laying them end to end next to the body they'd left in the house, in the end. How had he not cried until just now? How had he felt his body protest the work and kept going, until it now refuses to go any further? He might as well ask the cards, and while he was at it, ask them how he'd gotten up from Ty's bedside in the middle of the night and walked out into the city, aimed himself at danger, not looked back.

It hadn't worked, in the end, but he'd tried.

Maybe he has worked hard. Maybe he has done his best.

His nod is dull, short, a dip of his chin as he eyes the ground adjacent to her feet. All he has to do is lean back, and he can sit on the edge. He doesn't even have to climb: he can sit, and turn himself out of the way. If he thinks it through, maybe he can do it. He can nod again, and lean back out of her grip. He can fail to properly catch himself when he sits, hit the opposite edge, sigh and make a slow show of unsticking his feet from the dirt and physically lifting his legs at the knee, two hands to one, until he's turned and tucked and shifted himself out of the hole.

He releases a puff of breath, takes one, releases again. Even hugging his knees up to his chest strains his arms, but he manages, and buries his face into them. "Thank you," he says, muffled against dark fabric.

[kestreldawn]

Jyn doesn't respond with a verbal acknowledgement of his thanks - though she tucks it away in the vault at the back of her mind. How it hasn't managed to bust itself open, spilling out its contents across the haze of her mind, she doesn't know. She knows that it's harbored secrets and pain before, vows of revenge and spite, intel and strategies. And yet, she continually adds to it - opening it up just wide enough to force the new information in, forcing the door to shut with a shove of her shoulder.

So instead of saying anything to the broken man near her, she simply nods and gets to work. She uses the first few punctures of the spade to test the strength of the compacted earth beneath them, adjust her tactics accordingly to maximize her energy conservation and output in relation to the goal. It's a repetitive, hypnotic sound - a gash in the dirt, a push of a heel as the blade runs deeper, the muted sound of speck upon speck being piled onto each other.

It feels a little like a prayer, or a chant - over and over and over again. To whom or what she might be praying, she isn't sure; perhaps the loss of life that will soon be resting where she's standing. Or perhaps to the husk of a man who's worn himself transparent with his efforts. Or perhaps to the comrades she's lost and the universe she's saved.

It doesn't matter, she thinks.

It's about the act itself, not the destination.

[3ofswords]

It's almost like being alone, if he just closes his eyes and holds his arms over his head, buries his face in his knees. Listens to the same sound of the shovel tearing away the soil, feelings not unlike his own a baleful hearth for him to rest at. And it is restful, in a way he doesn't often find: he can almost feel like himself, live in what he's actually feeling, when he's alone or at least--

--with someone sympathetic.

He'd had a thought, before Ren died. The man claimed to have powers of his own, weakened in the village but capable of picking through the minds of others outside of it. It should have been a terrifying, and yet, the idea of being picked apart and laid bare, with none of the work, and all of the understanding--there had been a kind of anticipation, and disappointment, that they were both too broken to achieve it.

He'd never had a friend like that, like himself. No one but his mother and her contemporaries, and they'd only understood that half of him.

It seems no time at all passes, tears leaking into his trousers, before he's blinking his vision clear and trying to take stock of the world. But the hole beside him is deeper, a sheen of sweat on his companion, and her energy running ragged as his own. She might be better built to it, but there's something bigger behind her movements, something burning her at both ends in the grave of a man she will never know.

"Jyn," he says, voice a rasp against the dry air. "Jyn--"

He has to uncurl, reach for her, despite the warning of fangs in the soft flesh of his hand--don't interrupt her--but she'll hurt herself if he doesn't, and he can't be responsible for any more of that. "Jyn, stop, take a break," as his hand lands on her shoulder, and squeezes a grip.