fel:...I feel like i'm failing but eeheheheehehehe ya know whatever

I was thirteen the first time I saw a corpse.

My older sister Elaine and I were playing in the river when her foot got caught in a rock and pulled her under. I got help but you know how drowning is… It's fast and there's no real way to save a person faster than your legs can carry you to get an adult because you have the strength of a potato. I didn't really blame myself during the funeral for what happened despite my sadness. I just accepted I hadn't been enough and that was that.

I miss her and I mourn her when I remember her, but ultimately she just died. Skin cold and tinted blue as the stranger I begged to help me save her vainly tried to pump air into what was obviously a stiff laying on the riverbed. I got to watch her body decay over the few days it took to get the funeral together over the summer and smell that scent of the sugars in her body decomposing that for some reason I remember thinking was pleasant in a morbid sense. I remember a lot of the day we tossed her in the ground and my folks stood and stared throughout the process looking less upset and more like they were empty. Numb and unfeeling with no care or remorse for any of it in a need to just get it over with.

Yuri Lowell's funeral was nothing like that.

I came less because I cared and more out of a sense of obligation. I wasn't happy he died, but I didn't know him enough to mourn at all but I was still the last person to see him alive. It felt right to see it all to the end so I came and sat in one of the back pews noting the girl with pink hair, that is one impressive dye job and I want to ask where she gets it done, but this is so the wrong place for that, sobbing into the side of blonde man who's shoulders shook every now and then. A lot of people looked desperate to try not to cry, but it seems a majority were holding back for whatever reason they might have.

It wasn't that different from what remembered from my sister's in terms of what went on. A lot of Eulogies and a lot of tears as people talked about how it was too soon and too awful for their friend to die like this… I can't imagine what it's like to lose someone you knew who was mentally ill prior to their death and how much worse that makes remembering them. How it changes how you saw their last moments of life from the person you knew to the person they'd become.

Apparently, the folks from the empire that came to visit hadn't even been aware of Yuri's condition at all prior, so they were spared the reality but left to dream of what their friend had become. Dreams are always worse in my experience because you conjure worse things on your own than reality ever could.

One point, Karol thanked me for coming and trying to help Yuri but in the end, I was just left with the awful taste in my mouth and the knowledge that a man died in front of me while I did nothing but call for help again. I got asked a lot by passing attendants I didn't recognize about that moment.

Did he suffer?

Why didn't you get help sooner?

Do you think he could have been saved?

Any idea what happened?

Are you going to keep looking into this?

What do you think happened to Yuri?

Was it suicide?

Was it an accident?

What happened?

What happened?

Why didn't you do something? WHY DIDN'T YOU DO SOMETHING?

I slipped out the back and decided to smoke in the alleyway and was relieved to at last be in an atmosphere that wasn't laden with the musk and sweat of grieving hearts. They have the right to grieve and be mad at me. they have every right, but it doesn't mean I can give them anything that will help and I hate that. I can't bring anyone closer with what I know and what I did for the man, but they crave it all the same.

I really can't blame them for wanting that sort of salvation, but in the end, I was just someone who was there.

I pull out a cigarette and a lighter and start to smoke in the alley behind the place. "Mind if I have one," a man's voice says and I offer without a second thought. It's the blonde man and he's definitely been crying or at least working hard not to if the red in his eyes is anything to go by.

He takes a drag and gives a small cough like you'd expect from someone not quite used to smoking before pulling the smoke in like a regular a few moments later. "Cherry flavored?"

I shrug, "What can I say like it."

"It's not bad." He hums. "I like the smell."

We stand in a comfortable silence against the wall before I finally look him in the eye and ask, "So how did you know him?"

An awkward and strained laugh as the guy tries not frown or shake but his lips tremble a little anyway, "He… Yuri was my best friend. We grew up together and everything."

"Shit." I absentmindedly puff out a few small 'o' shaped smoke rings, watching the clumps of gray air slowly pull apart.

"What about you?" I toss the butt on the ground and smear it under my foot. "Are you a member of Brave Vesperia or…?"

"I'm a member of the local enforcement unit," I say and his eyes light up with recognition.

"So you were the one who saw it happen?" I nod and he breathes out a long and weighted sigh, "I'm sorry. That can't… I can't imagine that was something you wanted to be a part of."

I waited for the question that always seemed inevitable while I was inside, but the guy was silent. Just took snail's paced huffs of smoke and leaned against the wall with me. I got his name, Flynn Scifo, so now I know who the Flynn guy Yuri went on a trip with was and I felt like I should be shocked at the idea that the commandant was out smoking with me during a funeral, but I had prepared myself for that sort weirdness when I was first assigned to Yuri's case.

Then I thought about Yuri's last words and when he snapped, "Hey, that camping trip you and Yuri went on… anything happen that would- ya know?"

"No. We had a really good time… He seemed so happy and I just…" Flynn snapped his second cigarette between his fingers tossing on the ground. "Why?"

I look at one of the windows you can see from the buildings in the alley looking at my reflection. "Maybe he saw something out there."

He shook his head and walked away, "I can't imagine what." I didn't bother sticking around after that.

It was calm after that day and everything was finally back to normal and it stayed normal. I did my job, drank, kept being a mess, and just continued to function as I did prior. Everything was like it had always been and that was fine… I was fine…

Or at least, as fine as I can be.

Nothing happened of interest or note for weeks that faded into months after the death of Yuri Lowell and that was to be expected. There was the occasional whispering of the locals theorizing everything that might have happened, but otherwise, the world was silent about him.

The story did not end here.

No, the tale resumes with the cruel predictability that always follows in something so bizarre and horribly unexpected as this. So the case of Yuri Lowell resumed with the out of place near suicide of Alex. It had been three and a half months since his death that on Monday night his girlfriend was lucky enough to catch him trying to hang himself in the bathroom and after that, it got worse.

Thing about Alex is that despite the fact we're not friends I know just from listening over the years how much this guy hates suicide. Genuinely vomits at the idea of it in his mouth and spits at the bodies when he sees them. I know that's the part that made him angriest about his father's death. Took the easy way out… The idea that he'd even think if attempting is fucking absurd! But he did and begged to be locked away in a dark hole.

I asked why he tried to kill himself and he just would scream and babble nonsense still he started crying. Then he started laughing as he was taken away for treatment and attempted to gouge his eyes out. Last I heard, Alex had taken to hiding himself in solitary confinement whenever at all possible staring into a corner mumbling about how no one can see him. A lot of people in the office say it was work and life finally made him snap and that he probably been sick for a while now and he'd reached a tipping point, but I kept thinking about how when I talked to him he looked like he was fighting against his own body. Fighting desperately to make his mouth form the right words only for his lips to bend in the wrong curves and his tongue against its needed position for a simple sound or syllable was all too familiar. I'm pretty sure everyone else noticed that too, but nobody is willing to say anything.

I came home and drank until I passed out on the floor. I seem to be doing that a lot lately and I would be scared about how I'm killing myself with all this, but I just don't care.

What the hell drove Alex insane?