Graveyard Friends
If there was one thing Alfred didn't need more of, any thing at all, it was friends.
But if there was one thing Alfred wished he had, it was friends.
The graveyard tainted grass, stained with age, grew untamed and tangled by the wind. It wrapped around his legs and tickled his cheeks, tugged at his hair as he bent forward. He stuck his head past the edge of his knees, letting his neck dangle there as if he were being hanged.
There was something fascinating that caught Alfred's curiousity that day, but then again, the graveyard did that pretty much every day. It was a cryptic little place, just barely fully concealed between a neighbourhood and a highway. An odd place to put a symbolisation of death, but it certainly was there, and it was a place that Alfred had to pass to get to school every morning. He was one of many kids who lived in that neighbourhood, but he was the only one who woke up so early to get to school, as he liked the peace before the highway got bombarded with millions of cars on their way to work. It was a tranquil chill that played with his nose before the sun started to fully rise, and though he'd start to get cold a few minutes after, while he was freshly out of his suffocatingly warm house it was a pleasant change.
And everytime he passed by that god forsaken grave yard, he would always feel his eyes drawn to it.
It was perhaps the way the graveyard felt so isolated from everything else. While the dainty little neighbourhood around it was slowly but surely attempting to be stacked up into a slightly bigger city, and new technology sprung up at every corner, the graveyard looked like it skipped in during the 1900's or 1800's and stayed there. Weeds decorated it in a mystic yet oddly pleasant and mysterious ways, swirling in strange shapes and forms over the gates. They circled and surrounded the gravestones Alfred could just glance in the back. Though the grave stones up front looked the newest, which Alfred still did not think was any time horribly recent, he couldn't tell when the last one was put because they all faced one direction and that direction was angled towards Alfred's high school. If he wanted to see the dates, he'd have to risk being late for school by going around and out of his way to check.
That morning, however, he'd felt slightly different.
Winter was becoming to ebb into spring, and the days were getting slightly longer. At that point, instead of Alfred waking up to walk before the sun had risen, there was a sliver of light to guide him. That sliver of light just happened to high light the front of the gravestones, casting their silluottes and shadows in Alfred's direction, and he swore for the life of him that while he was admiring the admittingly beautiful sight, something had moved.
There was no wind that morning.
Of course, it could have been an animal, but every time he concentrated, it went away, and every time he relaxed, there was another movement from the corners of his eyes. To add, every single time he turned, no matter what direction, the movement was always in the corners of his eyes. Both at the same time, so that he didn't know which way to look.
To summarise, it was certainly a curious thing to explain.
After a moment's hesitation, Alfred decided that he had a few minutes before the other students started walking from their homes in order to go investigate and nearly half ran towards the graveyard gates. He swore that he saw a few weird glances from the handful of adults outside starting their cars, but he could hardly care. Alfred shook the gates lightly, testing for them to open, until he found the latch and turned up the hook, pushing the two bars apart and peering inside.
It was just as it had looked from the highway.
Or so Alfred thought, but as he closed the gates behind him and kept walking on, he felt like he were going back in time. The houses around him started to slowly scatter from his vision as he concentrated on only the yard itself, and the spaced sounds of cars on the high way was the only thing that could possibly drag him back to the modern day and age. He brushed his fingertips on the rugged texture of one of the first stones and turned his head to peer onto the front, where the light was still sketching out what was still visible of the letters.
KIKU HONDA (1909 - 1928)
"I am where the sun rises. _ are where the sun sets."
Alfred felt a jolt of shock run through him after he did the math. 19? The kid was 19 when he died? That was only a few years older than Alfred. Helplessly curious, Alfred searched desperately to see how the teenager had died at such a young age, but the search was in vain. It just had a quote, and only half of which was fully intact.
I am where the sun rises.
He looked up towards the sun, which was finally inching itself over the horizon, and smiled a small bit. He sure was, that was for certain.
Alfred turned his body so he was facing away from the sun, casting his own shadow over the quote, and glanced to the left of the 19 year old's grave, finding a more recent but longer ranged date.
YAO _ANG (1899 - 1939)
"You are where _ sun rises."
He couldn't read the full quote, but he had an idea of what it said as he glanced back from Yao's gravestone and looked at the first one. He felt an overwhelming sense of sadness begin to slowly flood into him. How had they died? It didn't say, but they obviously knew each other. Yao was 40 when he died, but 29 when Kiku died, so it was possible that they could have been lovers (after all, it was the early 1900's, and he couldn't tell if they were male or female). Alfred almost desperately hoped they weren't, because whatever they were, at least one of them cared about the other quite a bit. Siblings? Their last names weren't the same. Maybe they could have been distantly related, or one of them adopted.
After staring for a few more moments, Alfred shook his head to clear his thoughts and started peering in a direction different from Yao's gravestone, towards where he assumed the gravestones got older. A few rows down in that direction, backing up and heading right of Kiku's gravestone, he stumbled upon another one.
TORIS LA_ (1895-1916)
"A faithful servant until the end."
Alfred couldn't read the man(?)'s full name as an entire corner of the gravestone had been clipped off by something unknown, but as it was sheltered beneath a healthy tree, Alfred could read the rest from its protection from the elements (for the most part). He frowned at the quote. Did someone honestly put that on his gravestone as something for him to be remembered by? A servant? It was towards the end of the Victorian era. Maybe he was an indentured servant, Alfred mused. He cringed as he did the math. 21 years old. He glanced at the one next to him.
FELIKS _UKA_IEWICZ (1899-1914)
"A warrior's victim."
Alfred frowned. What was that supposed to mean? He was 15 (that was younger than him, oh jesus) when he died, so he couldn't have been a veteran.
Wait.
He squinted at the dates, and suddenly, his gut clenched painfully.
World War I.
Abruptly, the quote made more sense.
The warmth of the sun was beginning to warm Alfred's mid back as he stared nervously down the rest of the row, seeing most of all of them to be in the 1915 and 1914 range. He knew for certain that there were deaths from World War I in more recent dates than that, but for some reason, the graveyard he was at only showed the early months. He wondered briefly if Feliks and Toris had known each other, or how many people had known each other in that row.
Shivering from more than the cold, he backed up to the row behind.
1914
The row behind that one.
1914
Behind that one.
1914
Two more rows
1914
How many deaths? Alfred's breaths were coming in pants. The entire place felt taboo.
One more row, and he let out a relieved breath to find the dates trickle into the 1913's. However, before he could back up farther (he was already well away from the gate, but he kept feeling drawn farther back into the graveyard, which seemed to stretch on forever), the roar of a truck distracted him from his thoughts, and Alfred was struck with a feeling of slight panic at the sounds of laughter filtering in through the gates. He could even see the neon colours of teenage clothing glint through the bars, so otherwordly different from the setting he had dived himself into.
Watching the students pass by, Alfed decided that he could miss the first few hours of school. The mandatory classes were later on in the day, anyway. He wouldn't be able to satisfy his curiousity if he didn't figure out where the graveyard ended, after all.
With that settling his thoughts, Alfred got up and started to run farther into the gravestones, watching as angelic statues above certain loved graves turned into one winged angels that couldn't fly, and moss covered stone and letters so weathered he could hardly read them began popping up more frequently. Giving off a few more laboured breaths than before, Alfred placed his palms on his knees and looked at the nearest marker.
FRANCIS BONNEFOY (1789-1811)
"The toll _ war."
His fingers slowly grazed off the stone. War? What war did he know of that would involve a 22 year old?
1811.
War of 1812? It was the closest one Alfred could think of, and the name sounded French. He frowned at it one last time, and stood up.
The sun by then had risen fully, but with it came a cool breeze that made Alfred's hairs rise and goosebumps appear on his skin. He covered his arms pathetically with his palms, rubbing up and down to gain some sort of warmth from the friction, and pushed his elbows into his backpack. He was far enough away from the high way and the sun was up enough that he could barely hear the cars passing by, and he decided to take that moment to rest for a second and turn around to face the sun. It warmed his cheeks some, and the sky was turning a pretty pink. Alfred was content to just stand there and watch, but he knew he would get too cold if he just sat there, and thus kept moving. It was more of a leisurely stroll through the graveyard than anything (because, of course, that was perfectly normal). He was staring at the clouds, only occasionally glancing down to make sure he didn't trip over a stone, watching with a peaceful fascination as they drifted uncertainly from colour to colour, pinks and oranges and yellows lighting up the sky. Alfred glanced down at his phone at one point to find it was already 8:10, school having started at 7:35, but he couldn't honestly bring himself to prefer school over his still moment in time.
It was only once the sun was finally dangling in the sky and the last strip of pink had vanished into nothing did Alfred truly look around him again. The air was warmer than before with the sun finally active, but he felt pricks of cold shoot up his spine anyway as he peered behind him and could only see endless gravestones in every direction. It seemed that the yard stretched out on both sides the deeper one went into it.
In front of him, however, he couldn't even recognise a graveyard. It was more of a ruins than a graveyard.
The stones were in horrible shape, neglected and tipped by forces long ago having happened. His breath caught in his throat.
Something moved in the corners of his eyes.
Alfred, suddenly panicked, whipped around behind him to see what was there, but there was nothing. He spun around in all directions, even, trying to catch whatever it was before it left but it seemed that the thing was never even there to begin with.
There was a buzz in his pocket.
|Sender: [Gilbert Beilshmidt] [Sent: 8:37AM]|
Yo where r u luds on my ass bout u
|Sender: [You] [Sent: 8:37AM]|
sick. y is ludwig asking?
|Sender: [Gilbert Beilshmidt] [Sent: 8:39AM]|
Says he doesnt no if to mark ya down or not
|Sender: [You] [Sent: 8:40AM]|
oh cool. no 1 else asking?
|Sender: [Gilbert Beilshmidt] [Sent: 8:40AM]|
no. y should they?
Alfred blinked at the text he got in response, feeling a slight bit defeated, and decided not to respond.
That was the way his friendships were. Hang out with them at school and do stupid shit, and then don't even bother otherwise unless forced. Just like Gilbert said, why should they bother?
If there was one thing Alfred didn't need more of, any thing at all, it was friends.
But if there was one thing Alfred wished he had, it was friends.
The graveyard tainted grass, stained with age, grew untamed and tangled by the wind. It wrapped around his legs and tickled his cheeks, tugged at his hair as he bent forward. He stuck his head past the edge of his knees, letting his neck dangle there as if he were being hanged. The area was so unbelievably old, and he didn't need to check the dates to know that. In fact, he didn't even know if he could read the dates to begin with.
There was movement from the corners of his eyes.
Alfred didn't budge.
Obviously, there was something there, but it could have been something conjured up by his imagination. It probably was. Every single time he turned around, it ended up being nothing, anyway. Even when he swore to god there was a colder than normal and out of place wind next to his ear, he only shivered.
Of course, that was until he heard words. Barely there, distant and unused, yet sweet and smooth. Innocent.
Ring around the rosary,
Alfred jumped up, eyes wide.
pockets full of posies.
He stood stock still, not daring to look around. He only stared straight ahead.
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down!
Alfred thought he was delusional after a few minutes of standing there in silence once the song ended. He relunctantly glanced around him, taking in the sight.
Tumbled gravestones. Broken gravestones. Chips of stone.
Moss. Lichen. Mud.
At one point, the graves disappeared. However, the back gate of the graveyard Alfred could only see many, many yards away, behind a wall of trees. There was one row of grave stones before that wall. In between that and where Alfred stood, however, there was just mud. No markers.
And he heard that song again.
Ring around the rosary,
pockets full of posies,
ashes, ashes, we all fall down!
It was a children's song, so why was it being sung in such a forsaken place as there? And where was it coming from?
It almost felt as if it were coming straight from Alfred's own mind, and the second he had that thought, it repeated again. This time, it was more clear. It actually sounded like a voice, but it wasn't Alfred's own. It was younger.
Ring around the rosary-
there.
Alfred sucked in a breath. He swore that he saw something on the edge of one of the last stones, at the end of the row. A small, translucent wisp that was gone before he could truly focus on it. In a trance like state, Alfred walked with long strides to the corner of the remaining section of the yard, brushing his finger on the small stone. It wasn't even a proper marker, just, quite literally, a large boulder. The engravings on the surface was sketchy and all over the place, and Alfred ended up digging out a water bottle from his backpack and clawing away moss and lichen so he could clean the surface with the water so he could read it better. He didn't stop until he could make out every figure.
1343-49
No quote. Not even a name.
The second he registered the age, he heard sobs. Quiet, tiny little sobs that blended with the wind. He listened for a few seconds, still staring at the number 9, before the sobs started to choke.
Ashes, ashes.
Wails.
Why do we all fall down?
Silence.
The cries started again as small sniffles, right beside Alfred. They came from every direction and no direction at all, and Alfred still wouldn't have been able to pinpoint them until a small wisp drifted from behind the boulder. When Alfred turned to look directly at it, all it appeared as was fog.
But the second he turned slightly to the right-
he could see a face.
It was a child, a boy, of about six years old, curled up in the dirt. Alfred could see a bare chest underneath a small green blanket he seemed to have wrapped around himself. He was shivering, and his fingers seemed frozen. The blanket dropped away too fast for his slowed fingers to catch it, and when it fell, all Alfred could notice on his skin was the bruises.
There was dirt and crust and bruises littering the child's body. His knees were bleeding, the blanket too short to cover them. His palms were also bleeding, except instead of from scrapes, like his knees, they were from gashes, as if from a knife. There were deeper, more precise gashes up his arms, and blood was trickling out of them. Alfred could only watch, however indirectly, with morbid interest. The boy seemed to look up, at someone Alfred couldn't see, before he held out his arm. As he did, Alfred noticed, another small gash appeared, and the child winced and started to cry again. There was another voice on the wind, a voice that seemed to be shushing him.
Alfred could make out only a small bit of colour when the child opened his eyes again. They seemed to be green, but it looked as if the image were bleached of colour and Alfred could only see them as a dim representation of what they must have been. His messy, blonde hair was only just noticed from the pale glow of the sun casting over it, otherwise Alfred would have mistaken it for white.
Arthur, the wind seemed to whisper. It was a sing song type of voice, meant for comfort. The boy, again, glanced in that unknown direction. Arthur.
The fog slowly started to dissipate and drift behind Alfred. He craned his neck a little to see, just from the corner of his eye, it appear fully again on a plot of dirt a foot away. In the image, though, the dirt was higher up. It had just been dug. A hole was in the centre, and there was a boy who looked to be about Alfred's age. He might have had stark red hair, but it appeared rosy in the image at that moment, and his green eyes were the same shade as the child's. They weren't crying. They were just monotone.
He reached behind him, and when he turned back around, the child was in his arms.
He put him into the hole and covered the dirt, kneeling to pray, until his head snapped up in fear and his eyes widened at something Alfed couldn't see, either.
He got up, and he ran straight through Alfred.
Alfred gasped, jumping straight to his feet, and whipped around to see where the hole had been, only to find nothing. It was a flat stretch of mud churned dirt, in the vague centre of the large expanse of stoneless land.
Staring at the spot he was sure the image had appeared over, Alfred walked uncertainly to it and kneeled right beside its general spot.
And he began to dig.
The dirt was cold and hard and sharp rocks cut into his fingers and palms. Mud got stuck in his nails and covered his cuts, making him wince every now and then. After a moment or two, he managed to find a flat cut rock and dig with that.
It was maybe an hour before he reached what he was looking for, and it wasn't much.
Just bones. The remnants of them.
Whether it was the surprise or the sudden realisation that what he had seen was more than likely real, maybe even after all the building shocks of sadness over that morning, Alfred didn't know. All he knew, was that he started to cry, because when he dared himself to reach down and grab a piece; a chip, the decaying shell; it was just so small.
Arthur.
Alfred stayed like that for a long time. Long enough, that he felt his phone buzz again. At one point, there was a frantic series of buzzing, and a couple long ones signifying a call, but Alfred felt like he were in vigil and it was one thing he refused to fail at.
Six years old.
*"Why does thy family leave?"
Alfred craned his ears to listen, and almost didn't understand it, until he really focused on connecting the words to what he knew. His chest squeezed at the sound of the child's voice again.
"I saw them burning in the street, good friend."
Alfred could see the figure, very nearby that time. He wasn't crying. He was sitting on a tree root, staring at a bird that actually had its own figure in the mist.
"They burn with my friends. Thy will burnth, too, perhaps soon."
Arthur frowned, looking at his bloodied hands, shaking.
"I had but few friends at this morn."
Alfred bit his lip.
"Now, I have but none."
It was hard to believe the child was so young. He sounded sad, and confused. Lost. But not young. He didn't sound young at all.
"Does thou wonder my name?"
Arthur frowned, and traced the scars up his arm.
"Arthur, line of Kirkland. The last."
No one believed Alfred when he said that he had ditched school in order to wander around the construction sites nearby, considering nothing at the construction sites had been messed with, but it was a more believable lie than saying he had spent the morning digging up seven centuries old graves in the graveyard. Days passing, mostly while he was locked in his room and grounded, he'd lie awake staring at his hands and remembering the feel of the child's bone in his palm. He spent restless moments wondering if he had accidently disturbed the spirit, as there was nothing else he could use to explain the mist.
Mostly, he wouldn't sleep at all for days, afraid and feeling the sensation of a movement in the corners of his eyes.
He returned a fortnight later, though, and there were men with him. They were lugging an object, and followed him until the dates hit 1693 before claiming that there was as far as they would go and putting down the stone. Alfred accepted the proclamation with ease, and skillfully ignored their whispers, stoic postures and weird stares as the buff men made their way back to the front of the graveyard, got into their truck, and sped away. After all, Alfred had gotten enough rumours of his oddity floating around the neighbourhood. The fact that he continued to get up earlier than needed just to walk to school never helped, either. He could understand it, though. He supposed a normal, sane teenager wouldn't spend their allowance from saving up for a car on buying a gravestone with the date '1349' on it.
It took him approximately 3 hours to lug the heavy block of stone, by himself, back 3 more centuries.
Alfred, sweaty and swearing and ready to buckle on himself, looked over the top of the stone to the spot where he had left a fortnight ago. He had made sure to cover the makeshift grave back up enough that it formed a small mountain, enough that Alfred could pinpoint where the makeshift grave was but not enough that he had to take dirt from what could only be more surrounding graves.
At school the day after his trek through the graveyard, he had approached his World History professor and asked why some people were buried and some apparently burned during the 1340's. Mrs. Hedervary explained to him that was the date of the Black Plague, to which Alfred felt for all the world like he had just been plunged in ice cold water. He had listened intently as she described that at the beginning of the disease, people were still burying the victims, but after a while there was no more space to bury them. There were so many dead that there wasn't enough land to put their bodies. So people burned them in the streets. Few people dared to risk their lives going into the graveyards, or anywhere, to bury their loved ones, especially considering the public believed that the disease was caused by a demon or by the devil. However, burning bodies in the street only spread the disease farther, faster.
When Alfred asked about the gashes on their arms, after receiving a curious look (he figured she would catch wind of his rumours soon enough, anyway), she thought for a moment and said that at the time, their best doctors believed that in order to cure the body of the evil, they were to remove it themselves. Meaning, they often made cuts on their patients and drew the blood, thinking there was bad in that blood and the more they did it, the more evil they took out. In the end, though, it only weakened the patient against the disease and killed them quicker.
That entire week, every time Alfred got home, he researched over and over again information on the Black Plague; caused by rats, first entered England in 1348 (a year before Arthur died) on merchant ships, from Asia, first European country effected was Italy, was in London by November of that year, dirty and close living conditions made the disease spread even more, etc. The most stricking piece of information Alfred found, however, was the same lullaby he had been sung that morning in the graveyard.
And what it meant.
Closing his eyes and taking a deep breath, Alfred pulled the gravestone closer to the plot of man handled dirt on the small wheelbarrow he had been so lucky to acquire by the workers. He gently toed the dirt until it was flat, before digging with tools he had been given in the wheelbarrow until he figured it was deep enough to hold, shaped the soil, and (painstalkingly) dragged (pushed, heaved) the stone into the hole. He fixed the area around the grave so that he was certain it would remain stable in an almost OCD manner, before sitting down and resting. He even took out the lunch he luckily brought with him and ate that, before putting the tools back into the wheelbarrow and beginning the trek all the way back to the entrance.
Alfred looked over his shoulder one last time to admire his work and read the stone, before walking away.
Arthur Kirkland (1343-1349)
"Friends Never Die."
"From your graveyard friend," he whispered to himself.
There was no movement from the corners of his eyes again.
A/N:
*The thing about Middle English, during this time period, is that it was changing drastically. In written texts, you could find one word spelt 15 (or more) different ways in the same document. However, if you read a Middle English sentence outloud, chances are, you will understand it, because it sounds very similar to how we speak today. What Arthur is saying is going off of what it sounds like outloud, so that's how I wrote it.
OKAY there is a lot to this story that ended up not making it in.
Such as, the fact Arthur and Francis were supposed to have been in each other's lifetimes.
"Oops, just a couple centuries off. No biggy."
Anyway, I did my research for this, but there are facts in reality that probably wouldn't have made this story possible to begin with (which I figured out AFTER I wrote it), and I'm just praying that no one notices them (thus, why I won't point them out down here).
This is officially the longest one-shot I have ever written.
NOTE: Before I go, I just want to go ahead and point out that this story is unedited. I really did write this as one would write during NaNoWriMo. To be perfectly honest, I probably wrote faster than I did for NaNoWriMo. I was stuck in a house with people speaking Persian (of which I don't understand) and not knowing English or Armenian, so I was stuck with my laptop and no internet (or tablet) alone in the corner and left to my free will. The worst part probably was, alongside the fact I had no internet, my copy of a fanfiction I've been writing and working on (which I plan to post after I've written at least half of it - it's a time travel fanfiction, so I hope you guys might enjoy it! I don't want to mess it up because the concept is actually building to be interestingly complicated) was left on my father's desktop back at home. Bugger. By the way: if anyone is willing to be a beta and edit this, you don't even have to ask. Just copy it, edit it to your will, and send it back to me in private messaging.
With nothing else to say, I'm off!
(Read and review!)