A lazy September sun slowly slipped beyond the horizon, the blues and purples of the sky turning to reds and yellows. A warm breeze sifted through the trees in a lonely graveyard below, causing leaves to tumble in a silent dance across the lawn and across the path of the two figures making their way down the small cobblestone pathway that wound through center of the cemetery.
The smaller of the two figures grabbed at her wide-brimmed hat that was threatening to be carried off by the wind. Looking up with wide grey eyes, she watched as the red, yellow, and orange leaves tumbled through the trees and into the sky.
"Uncle Hal, are the t-trees getting old?" The girl stammered as her green dress swirled around her ankles. She looked up at the man next to her, an older man with brown unkempt hair and dark brown eyes. Eyes that were staring into the distance as the two walked, yet obviously not looking at anything tangibly in front of the two.
"Uncle Hal?"
"Uh- What?" Hal Emmerich shook his head, as if breaking himself out of a trance. He blinked a few times. "Sorry Sunny. I didn't hear you." He said, pushing up his square glasses to the bridge of his nose.
"Are the trees getting old, Uncle Hal?" Sunny asked again, indicating to the trees that were quickly losing their leaves.
"No, Sunny," Hal smiled gently, reminding himself that before this past year, Sunny had spent her entire childhood onboard the Nomad, their home in the sky, "The trees are just getting ready for winter. When spring comes back around, they will be full of blossoms." The two stepped off of the cobblestone path into the grass, a path the two had made many times over the last few months, "Just like⦠the first time we were here together."
"Oh, T-The trees were pretty then." Sunny said, and the two fell into silence as they passed the last row of graves and made their way up a small hill in the back of the graveyard, to a lonely grave sitting next to a large oak tree. The grave belonged to a man that many had known as Snake; to Hal as David. It had been a cloudy spring night, when he passed peacefully. He went, not with a bang but with a sigh.
There were no decorative flowers, nor any other sort of memorabilia in front of it, unlike a few of the other graves they had passed. There was really nothing to put there, for everything that had once been, now lived in the memories of the two visitors.
In Memory
Of a Man
Who lived as a Beast
And died as a
Hero
