Epitaphs Aren't Last Words

by Idon'twriteIleak

When someone dies there is never a clean cut. They leave behind loose ends and broken ties and gaping holes where they used to reside. No one is an exception and some are the rule. When two lives have been bound from conception, how do you sever that bond? Follows Epilogue and character death. Rated for grief and theme of death. Currently One-Shot. Elements of Romance George/OC.

"I forgot people don't always sleep when it's dark." The head bowed before the marble epitaph did little more than incline toward her. She took a step closer to the figure bent in on itself in the grass. The moon reflected off the red of his hair so that even in the dark, it was clear who sat before her. She moved cautiously forward, the moon provided enough light for her to see where she was going, but it also cast a blanket of silence around them that she couldn't bring herself to disturb, like a child that had only just been lulled to sleep.

The scene painted before her could have been construed as eerie by anyone who didn't know the context. The man before her looked very much a boy, shoulders hunched together making him look impossibly small, even though she knew under normal circumstances his frame towered over her own. His knees appeared to have doubled in on themselves and collapsed, unmoving from the place of initial impact. His head hung limp, as if he had forgotten he had a spine. She was sure he had forgotten he had a will to live. He, too, seemed to be wrapped in the shawl of stillness that surrounded them, as not a single blade of grass moved. As she grew nearer she could see the slight quiver of his shoulders, and the wet tracks on the skin of his cheek, though he made no sound.

They remained like that. In mutual silence. Neither one moving. Neither one's breath loud enough to hear over the grief.

He had come here long before no doubt, perhaps when the sun was still peeking over the horizon. She had come when sleep had forsaken her and the call of something more welcoming had beckoned her into the night. Misery was never picky, she just wanted company.

Nevertheless, they had unwittingly met each other there, him, a broken man, she, a husk of a woman. It would have been poetic, or maybe it was, but poeticism is a lot like adventure, hardship with an inflated sense of self.

She had come here expecting to be alone. She wanted to be alone. Wanted to think her subconscious brought her here at this hour so that she would finally face what she had been avoiding for so long. Not the marble stone with 13 character etched onto and into its face, but that fact that it meant that there in the ground beneath the knees of the broken man was a man broken irreparably and that a part of the man before her had been buried with him.

She mourned the loss of the dead. Her eyes had grown red and weary with the tears she shed until she forgot what if felt like to breath with a throat that wasn't raw. Yet, the man in the ground wasn't the man that she came here to see. She had by no means made peace with his death, made peace with the gods that dug his grave, or the bastard that had left his family behind. She felt as much guilt for her resentment as she did bitterness that the only time they had been hurt had been when they were apart. And now, separated by six feet of soil they would surely hurt until time and death brought them back together again.

She wanted to scream into the morbid silence, shatter it with the injustice of it all, and step through the hole she created so they could all be reunited again. She hardly knew another sound besides silence and anguish, and very often they were the same.

She could not bring herself to touch the man crumpled before her. As if even the barest brush of her fingers might cause him to break apart. Whether he did or not, he would never be put back the same way again.

Finally, she reached her hand out reaching, but not quite touching.

"George." Her voice sounded so close to betraying her. To crying out for him when it was him that needed help far more than she ever would.

"George come home." She hardly knew where home was anymore, hardly knew if he had any real home to go back to anymore because home was buried and gone. Yet through the numbness that came from suffocating grief, she felt an ache that began from deep in her chest. An ache for touch, and ache for comfort, and ache for someone to hold while the sorrow washed her clean so that hope could shine through again.

She forgot that there were people in the darkness too.