The sun hung low and swollen in the sky, orange shreds of clouds scattered across its horizon. The landscape looked stripped bare, and Lockon wondered who had chosen such a desolate place. Shadows were long and the ground was hard, rocky. He wondered who had dug the grave; when they had dug it. How the weather had been that day - if there had been rain beating down, soaking clothes and chilling to the bone.
It didn't really matter, of course. He felt a faint gust of wind creep by, gently cajoling icy cold down his collar. He scuffed his foot against the dirt and pulled his jacked more tightly around himself. Sometimes the solidity of the earth felt like a strange thing, and irrationally, suddenly, he wished he were in space now. Anywhere else now.
Lockon turned to go, but a voice cut through the silence.
"You can't even make it as far as his grave?" The tone was unfriendly, almost derisive.
"Tieria." He slipped his hands into his pockets and glanced around. The other was staring at him, posture tense, mouth set in a hard line. It wasn't cute at all.
To Lockon - Lyle- it felt like an accusation. So he shrugged. There was silence, and he watched Tieria's eyes narrow for a split-second, before the other turned and walked away.
Lyle didn't hesitate - he followed. He knew Tieria was aware of it from the clenching of his fists and the stiffness of his back, but silence still prevailed.
He didn't need to ask when they reached it - Lyle felt his heart twist strangely at the sight of the grave. It was the only one which didn't look decades old. The soft dark earth was carpeted with grass, but moss was still just a shadow on the headstone.
When Tieria sank to his knees he felt like an intruder. Lyle took a step back. This was a kind of mourning he didn't understand.
"Why did you come?" Tieria's voice was quiet and steady. The breeze had disappeared.
He felt his throat work silently, trying to voice words that just wouldn't come. Lyle gritted his teeth and watched the moisture spread on the muddy knees of Tieria's trousers.
It seemed like a dirty and intimate scene.
He cleared his throat, "I should go." The hollow emptiness in his chest was weighed down with sadness. Tieria's shoulders trembled, and Lyle turned away.
He thought he'd wanted to say goodbye.
But minutes later as he felt Tieria come to stand beside him, Lyle lifted a hand to his face, fingertips coming away wet. Tieria watched silently with unreadable eyes and a pensive expression.
Lyle felt like a fraud.
These tears... he wondered bleakly if Tieria knew that they came not from real grief - the honest grief that he seemed to have suffered through - but instead from the sudden realisation that he had said his goodbyes years before, without even knowing it.
And in the dying rays of the sun, Lyle Dylandy wept for the brother he had barely known.