[arcade]
"...Sometimes you try your hardest, but things don't work out the way you want them to."
His mother had said them as a comfort, decades before. They sounded hollow and empty even then, spoken through a voice raw from sobbing and anguish. Now they served only to haunt him in quieter moments, any time he stopped and spent too much time remembering.
The grave he stood in front of wasn't hers, or his father's. It didn't belong to anyone he'd really known; another civilian he couldn't do enough for. But the failure was still there; the hole had still been dug, a body too young put away in a ground already littered with tombstones.
He unclenched his hands, cold with sweat, and turned to walk away - back to the Old Mormon Fort, back where he didn't belong. But that was the rub, wasn't it?
Arcade didn't really belong anywhere at all.
He was a pretender, a lie, a charade in a lab coat hardly doing anything more than watching the days idle by. Sometimes you try your hardest - but by his token, he wasn't even trying at all.