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

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

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]

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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.

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?"

"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.

"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.

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.

For a moment he is dead weight, his legs a pair of roots laid to a sick purpose. And he knows it's sick, he knows he doesn't have to be the one to dig this, and he doesn't have to lay anyone to rest. He knows, on some level, that this is not his fault, and there's something ugly to the way he clings to the idea that it is, like a man can't just be dead, and he can't care in a way that isn't--self-flagellation.

Ren wouldn't want to be an excuse for Kira to hurt himself, to go beyond his usefulness.

It's a near thing, that Casey is pulling him back from. He wonders if it would be better for the both of them to ignore the hand, to let Casey walk away from him instead of literally dig himself deeper. They're both at risk, every time he reaches out, every time Casey lets his hand close on a sleeve, a hem, a hand. He keeps relying on Casey to walk further away, instead of learning not to reach for him.

His fingers shake, his hand lifts as if through sand, not even guided by thought. He's still wondering if he should when their fingers touch, slide each to each, over the palms: Casey's close around his wrist, his own hang open, still shaking, the tips touching the skin just over the edge of Casey's gloves.

Come on he says, and Kira doesn't want to go with it half-finished, but he doesn't have the strength to make a choice. His legs burn all the way up from his ankles when he tries to stand, and he slumps a bit at the edge, a single nervous glance up at Casey--surprise for how badly he's pushed himself, and a moment to wonder how much he's allowed to need before Casey bolts.

Casey buries himself in the purpose of it. He pulls Kira gently until his shaky knees are upright enough that Casey doesn't have to worry about him immediately collapsing. He could leave. He could bolt. But right now he has work to do, and that work is making sure Kira doesn't work himself sick or dead. It's hypocrisy at its finest considering his daily routine of working himself to the bone, but he'd never learned that word or the meaning behind it.

He slips an arm around Kira without asking. He tugs Kira's by the wrist around his shoulder and takes some of Kira's weight for himself. If he thought Kira would let him, Casey would force the other man onto his back and just carry Kira back to the inn. He wouldn't be the first Casey had done so with in his life and he knew he could manage it fine.

Instead he takes a step to test, to make sure Kira's going to move his feet when Casey does. If he refused, then he would have to deal with being carried like a backpack back to the inn.

Edited 2017-02-14 06:20 (UTC)

Kira would let himself be carried, only to regret it the second his feet left the ground. If he were just stronger, if had just prepared himself better, he could have dug it himself. He wouldn't have to be picked up and led away like a child, one slow foot in front of the other, leaning on the person who doesn't let people lean on him.

Kira would let himself be carried, and he'd be helpless but to think of Ty, imagine the nights he partied too hard and someone got him home. I'd had this stupid fantasy, Ty had said, that I'd come back from training and some guy would be bothering you, and I'd make him fuck off.

He'd given him hell for that one, laughed in his pink face, but he'd also tugged him down into the bed and given him the reward he'd wanted anyway. Ty had disappeared for years, missed his opportunities, come back with hands trained for rifles still clumsy on Kira's hips or face.

Kira can't pull a face over Casey's without making this worse. All he can do is look at their feet, wonder how long he's been in his boots, trip over them and find them again. It's a long walk back to the inn, and he wonders what he must look like, dead on his feet and covered in dirt, being supported and dragged in turns. Another victim of the lightning, just not in the obvious way.

Tripping at the inn's entrance, he curls all of his fingers into holds on Casey's shirt, clings as an arm braces around him and keeps him upright. "We left our coats," he says dully, head swinging against a shoulder to look past it.

It doesn't even spark concern, that he might lose the cards with it.

"I'll get them later." His voice utterly lacking in concern for the coats, he steadies Kira as the other shifts his grip to brace, and then keeps going, straight through the inn without a glance or a spared moment of acknowledgement to anyone else.

Other people would only make a mess of it all, and Casey keeps Kira moving, taking the steps as slow as necessary to be sure Kira doesn't slip and crack his jaw on the staircase. It's a slight labor to get Kira to the bathroom, but he eventually manages, and deposits him against a solid surface in the small room before moving to the bath.

There's a familiarity in the action of turning the faucets hot, and setting the water to run, the tub stoppered. A familiarity that doesn't live in his own muscles, but is there as clear as any other skill he's learned or picked up from others.

He spares a glance over his shoulder after testing the water pouring into the tub, and kneels at Kira's feet to work on the laces he's sure his roommate's hands would only struggle with.

He's hit the kind of exhaustion where the lines on the walls won't sit still for his eyes, blurrier than ever on the other side of the room. His eyelids itch from the dry air, his body molds to the angle it's been left in and doesn't move, except where Casey's hands move it.

Has he done more than rest his eyes since yesterday? When he closes them now, he still sees the body laid against the earth, stained and empty, and he blinks them open again.

Just Casey, tugging the first of his boots off. Glancing up at him before tugging the other. Kira knows well enough what he means to do that he doesn't fight it, doing his best to lift his hips and lean forward when the pants and shirt have to be pulled away next. He wouldn't be surprised to be stripped entirely by calloused hands, flat eyes, and dumped in the tub without ceremony. He wouldn't care.

"I have to finish it," he says, voice thick and far away sounding. "After, I have to finish it."

"You have to sleep, or you'll be face down in it." Casey does strip Kira down entirely, unbothered by what might have been awkward or uncomfortable with someone that possessed a keener understanding of modesty or shame than he did. But far from dumping him unceremoniously, Casey helps to ease him into the water when the tub is close to full.

His hand catches a wrist, studying the scarred and damaged skin of Kira's burn with a frown before leaving that to Kira as well. He couldn't let the bone weary man leave back to the hole in the ground after the bath and he knew it. Whatever had possessed Kira, it wasn't letting go of its hold on him, and Casey wasn't going to stand by and watch him keel over in the grave out of exhaustion. Over exerted for physical labor he wasn't truly built to handle.

He tugged back on Kira's hair, a light pull to coax him down further into the water instead.

Kira still puts up little fight when Casey catches the elastic of his brifs, or when he tugs him up by the arm to guide him over to the tub. He'd been manhandled on his first night, fighting a case of exposure before he'd even come through the water, and before that, when he'd been sick and drowning in his own fluids, Ty or Nicky stripping him down to shove in a working shower and hitting his back to knock the fluid loose for him to cough out.

This isn't so dire as that, and he tries to show it by climbing in as best he can, by tugging his hand in Casey's grip before he's let go.

"Can't sleep," he says, in that same thick voice, that doesn't sound like his own. Can't close his eyes, bruised and hooded as they are in the steam of the bath. "Can't look at him anymore."

It's nonsense, fragments, and he sighs in lieu of explanation, letting the tug draw him against the tub's edge. Sunk to his chest, he's dirt streaked and bruised from the work, marks darkening across his legs and ribs from the fall. The water eases the ache, but not the image left on his eyelids.

"End up not looking at anything ever again." Casey retorts with a bit of bite, but no anger. Only a tired insistence in his tone. He pulls the water up in his cupped hands and forces it to run down through Kira's hair, ignoring the mess he makes of the floor and his own pants. It takes little effort to work his fingers through Kira's hair until it moves from damp with sweat and rough with dirt to wet with neither. The water is likely to be a mess when they're through, but for the moment his focus is just in scrubbing the dirt out of Kira's skin, and lightly rubbing it off his skin, determined to help Kira get back to some state resembling a shadow of his usual self and less like a cannibal waif lost in the ash fields.

There's nothing he can do to help save Kira from the nightmares, waking or asleep. He doesn't have the power to take away mistaken connections, or anything else in Kira's mind. All he can do is help get the earth and the salt off his skin. Help him come to something resembling the clean he sought out so often and force him into bed. Physical rest with mental turmoil was better than no relief from either. He finds a scrap of cloth and dips it into the water, letting the barrier between them put some level of distance into the scrubbing of Kira's skin, but no such barrier for the hand still scratching Kira's scalp in a slow, soothing pattern, familiar only because Kira had used it on him.

He didn't think there were tears left in him, but they salt his eyes, well up hot and close his throat. All for kindness, for the fact of Casey aiming his care right back at him, with his tone and his scratching hands. No one's washed Kira's hair in a long time--no one but his mother, really, when he'd wake from a nightmare of fire and metal. She'd put the low wooden stool by the tub and sit with him, no matter how old he got, how close they were to the dream becoming reality, and she'd wash and rinse his hair before putting his damp head on her shoulder.

What a coddled thing he is. What a hole torn in his life, being ripped away from them as he has. He's never experienced tragedy deeper than this, even when the city was burning around them.

He was looking at Casey when he said it, eyes dull and staring, but he drops them when the hands in his hair give him the excuse. When the tears burn down his cheeks anew. "You think I don't know that," he answers quietly, more an admission of exhausted desire than to a plan of action.

Casey's fingers only still for a moment. A hiccup in the repetitive action of scrubbing dirt and oil from Kira's hair. There's an internal kick, trying to jump start the old alarm that warns him when he needs to run. When it's time to leave a camp behind and press forward. Casey ignores it, and it passes. He tilts the other man's head back just a little more to get at the water with better ease and goes back to work.

He doesn't tell Kira he can't do anything like that. Doesn't order him not to think that way, or let John's words fall from his mouth like the forgotten prayer they were. He just works on getting Kira clean and ignoring the sick twist of his gut that drops Kira face down and half buried in a pile of snow ans ash.

The rest of the bath is given in silence from Casey's part, and it's nothing new from him. He was quiet more than he spoke and then some. He fetches an old, short, cut apart towel when he's done and offers it to Kira by leaving it folded at the edge.

"I'll grab some clothes." He disappears, trusting Kira maybe more than he should not to drown himself in the darkened water of the tub while he's gone. The benefits of Kira not wearing all his clothing the way Casey did meant he was able to find a shirt and something resembling pants for him to wear instead. He doesn't look, just grabs and moves back to the bathroom with a faster step than his usual so he can set them down on the sink for Kira to change into.

Drowning himself would require the strength to shift his body face down in the water, instead of only staring dully at the oil risen to the top, particles of dirt rising to catch in dark patches. He's been this exhausted before, ten years old and so overwhelmed by the people around him that his own feelings shut off, trying to protect him.

The only feelings overwhelming him are his own, and his body is done trying to perform or support them. He blinks his tears into the water a drop at a time, skin going clammy where the air touches it, but he doesn't move.

On some level, he knows Casey comes back: there are footsteps, and the shape of him takes up the room, arranging clothes and taking stock of Kira himself. But he doesn't look at him, or move to get up from the water. He wants to say, I'm tired, or, I can't get up, but his mouth won't move. An infant has more will and skill with which to demand its survival: Kira just closes his eyes and breathes, and hopes each new breath is enough.

For a few moments Casey just watches him, before finally giving in and pulling the plug on the tub. He leans over it, gripping the far edge with one hand and using his other arm to try and lift Kira from under his arm. He pulls the other man up and helps, as much as he can, to make sure Kira gets out of the tub without slipping before letting him either stand or sit on the closed toilet.

He grabs a towel first, what's left of the one he could find, and drapes it over Kira's shoulders as well, leaving him to dry himself while Casey fishes out the clothing items, one by one, to help his roommate get dressed again.

"You're going to bed." Casey won't take no for an answer on that. Kira could finish what he started later. Right now he needed to rest before he worked himself to the point of sickness or death. He would lay down with Kira for a while if he felt Kira needed it. Be the warmth at his back or side until he fell deep enough into sleep that Casey could slip back out and get the things they left behind, and dig a while longer to make sure there was less left for Kira to do.

It's hard to distinguish between where his body does not want to push itself to move, or stand, or straighten its spine--and where he simply has no effort in him to make it. He sits on the toilet, naked, dripping water, and stares dully at his own feet. The growing nails, the long toes, the thin hair on the arches. Casey keeps moving, speaks, and seems farther away than the room would allow.

His hands feel heavy when he tries to move them, the new skin gone a translucent pale in the water, blisters swelling with fluid; he manages to grip the edges of the towel and pull it over his head, as if to dry his hair, so he won't have to see, won't have to respond to anything.

When the fresh pair of underwear lands on his thigh, he stares down at it--then, spurred at the idea of making someone dress him, he drags them down and gets his feet through, pulls them up to his knees, stares another moment in the realization that he might need to leave his towel-cave to pull them on. Instead, he rocks at the hip, jimmying them up his damp thighs until he's done. His thermals follow, and he repeats the action, taking his time, head bowed, his head and shoulders the only part of him halfway dried.

The shirt forces him back into the room, pulled up his arms until he can't sustain the towel, pulled up over his head to knock it free. He emerges from his cocoon an exhausted, wrinkled butterfly, dried by his clothes, hair still dripping down his face.

With a belated nod, all of him dull and operating several beats off from the present, he extends a hand in the direction of Casey's voice.

Casey puts in as much work as necessary to get Kira to his feet. He takes the hand and tugs Kira's arm around his shoulders, his arm scooping around Kira's back to his other side. He's felt the utter bone-weary exhaustion many times in the past. Nights or mornings when his energy was so low and his stomach so empty that the prospect of just not getting up had been all too appealing.

Were it not for the inescapably haunting voices of John and Dog in his mind, he likely would have long ago.

But Kira's exhaustion now seems something deeper and heavier than even that, and after considering walking Kira to the room he just lifts the other man into his arms once he finds his feet and it's a bit easier to maneuver. He doesn't bother filling the silence with unnecessary words or questions. He just carries Kira to the room and settles him down on the bed, leaving him to figure that out while Casey shifts the blankets to pull them from under Kira's body and drape them back over him.

When he's done, he toes off his shoes, shrugs off his shirt, and lays down on the bed beside Kira before there can be any offered protest or attempts from Kira to get up or keep Casey from leaving. He wouldn't sleep, but he could lay there until Kira did.

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

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