He walked out of the stale air of the Mausoleum without really knowing how he had found his way. It was still foggy. It always was.
He's gone. He just... vanished.
The fog was all but invisible in the darkness.
He stumbled along the paths, rewarded with rough ground and tearing thistles when he strayed. Noises echoed in the gloom, muted by distance and fatigue. They were thin and unimportant beside the spiraling malice of his thoughts.
The town was deep and empty. The rattle of rusted armor on inhuman limbs made it emptier still. It was beginning to get bitterly chill.
His nerves were going numb in the cold, and his feet felt like formless masses of flesh and pressure inside his boots-like corpses' feet, deadened and heavy dragging against the grass. If by chance he touched himself, fingers on the thin cloth of his shirt or carelessly scratching the back of his neck, he felt cold and clammy, moisture beading on everything and soaking in. It was sobering in a way even Sukaru's loss couldn't be-nature's cold sweat on a world afflicted with a horror impossible to voice.
The whimpering rustle on the side of the path was leading him back to the village, and he followed it without thinking. The buildings, quaint and peaceful in daylight, loomed like invisible prophets shrouded in dusk.
He crossed the cobblestones, feeling shards of clay crumble where he stepped, and laid a hand on the door to Raine's bar. Frost had crept along the hinges and the latch; it stuck when he pressed it.
He stared at it with a kind of sick betrayal.
The dust would still be thick on the tables inside, the room above still empty and abandoned. The fog would still curl at the windows, all unseen.
Exhaustion tugged at him, but he didn't know what could compel him to sleep in the presence of that one, indomitable truth. He turned from the house and made his way next door.
Ellone told him once that she didn't have many memories of the house before he had come to it-that past existed in kind of a dim grey shroud, fogged by time and distance. Laguna's memories were much clearer, much more pointed-days and weeks and months stretching across each other, a string of hopeful mornings and restless nights in the same puny bed, the same waking dream he never thought would pass.
He looked once more toward Raine's bar, but saw nothing to call him back.
There was a figure staring at him from the center of the Town Square, and Laguna couldn't tell if it was his imagination or something deeper that allowed him to know it. Certainly, he felt, it could not be his eyes.
It stood stricken, staring as if in hurt disbelief. Laguna shuddered and turned away, pushing open the door and pulling it securely shut behind him.
-
The house hadn't been opened in ages, and the air was bitter and stale.
He took stock of the entryway, resting his shoulders against the solid door. It looked so much the same as it had always looked-a spray of bullet holes on the wall, dust and general disorder in the rest. Papers of some long-forgotten function littered the chairs and piled on the floor. They were yellowing in a shade alltogether too much like decay.
He looked away, and it was only then that it occurred to him that there was light to see by, and he had no idea from where it had come.
It was a pale glow, almost ethereal in the night-it did little to illuminate, seeming only to accent the shadows where it glanced. His first thought was of starlight, but it was too subdued for that-too distant, too resolutely unexalted. The only thing he could compare it to was a lonely lighthouse, pressing against the clouds-a condemned light, exiled and reclusive, that could never beckon but ward off.
He was tired-too tired to shiver at the thought, too tired to fully comprehend it or wonder and the dark threat of his musings. The house was a safe place, each bullet hole old and cooled, and the disorder had lost the frantic tinges of life or violent death and acquired the sad posture of disuse. The carpet on the stairs was the same muted shade as ever, and the picture on the desk was the same as it had always been-Ellone's parents staring solemnly at the camera.
He blinked heavily, as if pressing his eyelids through some viscous liquid. His head was beginning to loll.
The picture on the desk was the same as it always was, Raine, startled and half-turned away from the camera.
He blinked again.
The picture was the same as it had always been, and it was a long empty road leading out of Winhill.
The picture was the same as it has always been, and it was two broken flowerpots in the Town Square.
The picture was the same, and it was Sukaru smiling.
Sukaru smiling.
Smiling.
Sukaru with his face smashed in, dark-tinted fog coiling from his ruined features.
Laguna blinked once more, and wondered vaguely if he was going insane.
-
He made it up the stairs as much by stumbling accident as by design, and a soldier's helmet went rolling down the flight with a hollow tuk, pa-tuk when he inadvertently kicked it. It awakened no more than a brief spark of recognition in his mind before fatigue subsumed it.
He made it across the floor of the room to his old bed blindly, and old bits of plastic and the cardboard covers of children's books groaned where he stepped. He took off his jacket and hung it on the beadhead, sitting heavily on the mattress.
It was dark, and he needed to sleep. He stared dumbly at nothing. He would continue his search for Raine tomorrow-if there were tomorrows in this godforsaken place, if there was even today.
His head was dropping and he rose his hands up to meet it. He cradled his face in his palms, and wondered if the moisture he felt was fog or tears.
No sound came from outside the window. He had helped Ellone hang chimes there, once.
"I want to know what happened here" he murmured into his cupped hands. The house moaned in uncertainty. The stairs creaked in protest.
He fell backward, pulling at the covers and wincing at the holes his fingers kept finding.
"...I want to know why..."
The blankets were cold. He shivered.
"Sukaru!"
It felt just like he was drifting.
It felt just like he was bleeding and dying, but he was so tired-too, too tired to care.
It felt just like there was a hand on his shoulder, just like there was a weight on the edge of the mattress, just like the room was alive and holding him in gloom. It felt like the room was sleeping, dreaming, trapped in a grey thing that wasn't a nightmare but wasn't anything else either. It felt sad-as if it had always been sad, cold and empty like the halls of the dead.
"Sukaru..."
"What you want here... you can't have it. You know that."
It was so dark in the room, and he was so tired-the bed was pulling him down, pulling him deeper into the grasp of both slumber and the thick old blankets. Compared to that Sukaru was nothing-a ghost, maybe an insistent one, but thin and insubstantial. "Yeah"
"She's dead, Laguna. She died a long time ago." The house moaned softly, long resigned.
"But I got-I have this letter"
It was folded neatly, tucked into the right pocket of his jacket-the jacket hung from the headboard. Sukaru reached in and took it, undoing its pressed creases, and Laguna didn't have the mental presence to object. Sukaru's eyes skipped over it, pale shapes without light to show them. Soft like fog, and insubstantial. At length, he sighed, tucking it back into the pocket. "You're chasing shadows, Laguna."
"...maybe." Laguna blinked, half-asleep already. "Sounds like what Kiros would say."
"Kiros would be smart." He knelt by the bedside, resting folded arms on the mattress and resting his chin on his arms. "You know that."
Laguna stretched out his hand, running fingers over Sukaru's face-taking in every curve, every contour-the places where bone pressed up against the skin, the places where he could press. "You look so much like him" he said without seeing.
"I know."
He dropped his hand, pulling it back under the covers. "Are you gonna be here when I wake up" It felt as if he couldn't sleep without knowing it. "I can't-I can't let you disappear again."
"I'll be here."
"Good." Laguna closed his eyes, and sunk deep into a slumber that felt so much like death. Sukaru waited by the bedside, watching.