Packing up and leaving the research site was hard. Leaving meant that they were giving up and forgetting about their missing classmate and colleague. It didn't feel right to anyone, but they couldn't stay indefinitely, waiting.
Zanna had left shortly after David die- disappeared. She couldn't handle being so close to the site where it all happened (whatever had happened). Not that anyone could blame her. It must have hurt knowing what had happened and having to see the place it all happened every day.
The hardest part was going into his section of the tent (he shared with a roommate) to gather his belongings to give back to his family. Like somehow that would make everything okay and replace their son or brother or whatever.
Sorting through his belongings, they learned more about David then they had ever bothered to learn before.
He didn't appear to have any living relatives (Did they die too?).
He lived as a tenant with a family called the Pennykettles, but they had all but adopted him. (Oh God. Did they know?) A mother, a little girl, a cat, and lots of clay dragons.
He had a girlfriend that had broken-up with him a few months earlier before she had left to work in Africa. (There was a picture in a little green album)
His dragon, Gadzooks, was a sort of muse for him.
He wrote in his spare time.
All the things that they should have known about him before he disappeared came out now. Afterwards. After it was too late to do anything to tell him they had been wrong about him. That they had judged him too quickly; before knowing certain things about him.
They boxed up all of his stuff and brought it on the plane back to Scrubbley. They had tried to draw straws to see who would actually give his belongings to his family, but they stopped because it had felt so wrong. They all decided to be there when that happened.
His family, the Pennykettles, were waiting at the airport when the plane landed (with one less passenger than it should have had). All of them were there when they handed over the box. (The little girl was crying and it broke everyone's hearts). Zanna was there. She was with his family. She looked a little less sad than when they last saw her, but not by much. It was probably because she wasn't constantly staring at reminders of him.
The woman told Zanna 'He did what he had to do.' and it seemed like it was a strange thing for her to say, but Zanna and the girl seemed to get some comfort from it. (And so did they. It made his death seem a bit less pointless.)
The lady (the mother. David's mother, for all intents and purposes) was trying not to cry, but it wasn't working very well. She wasn't taking this well. No one was.
But he did what he had to do.