the more you suffer the more it shows you really care.

[ployboy]

Who: Tim Drake's broken arm and ____
What: uselessly tidying up the graves at the churchyard
When: Nov 1, 2
Where: church, the community hall



Content Warnings: general depressive moods, some bashing of traditions, a very superficial understanding of a culture, death and talk of death is a given

Tim is actually pretty sure he's managed to snag himself a women's coat: it's black and long and elegant, and it has this faux fur lining it and the big hood. It's very quickly become his favorite garb on account of it fitting stupidly well and the aforementioned fuzziness. Paired with sufficient layers (as if there is such a thing) and the heavy black (sparkly) scarf snaked around his throat, the attire even looks good. Good enough, anyway.

It'll have to do.

Dark circles under eyes seems to be a common symptom of Milton's lifestyles and Tim isn't too far behind already. The fitful sleep has him moving excruciatingly slow as an additional precaution. (If he hurts his arm again he will fucking. shoot. someone in the face in feral retaliation.) The thought makes him snort. It's the closest he's come to emotion since he started his day's pet project. It's hard to scrape off ice and years' worth of snow packed onto stone with only one arm functional, holding the shovel.

A few names on grave markers have been freed. Other memorials just have parts of them newly unobstructed through Tim's efforts but are still well buried in white.

Tim works in silence. Kinda hates it, honestly.

But it's whatever.

Between clearing snow from plots and trudging carefully around the yard, Tim ducks into the community hall to warm himself. Or maybe to hear some chatter around him, to see people who aren't, like, ghosts.

And so goes his day, and the next.

He's never put so much effort into something so fruitless before.

][ooc: prose, brackets, wildcard or bump into this fool elsewhere, go wild! HMU if you want anything specific][

Comments

[ployboy]

You know, he doesn't say, this would be so much easier to get done if people quit treating him like a sideshow. But as he lifts his head and shakes shaggy and limp hair from his face, Tim's met with a body so under control that he briefly thinks of Dick.

--capital D, as in, his brother. Dick.

And he's smirking despite himself at the lame and secret correction, a very dry expression that mirrors what he's feeling at the man's question. He takes the moment to lean against the shovel. To remind them both that despite a lame arm, the wood and steel is there.

"I would appreciate it if both arms were working," he points out easily. "But we'll make do."

A pause. He shrugs. "I don't know any of these people. But I guess I hate the idea of my parents ending up the same way."

[jackdawvision]

“You could wait, since it’s not as though they’re demanding you to get on with it,” Edward suggests, but he’s already stepping closer and kneeling down at a grave next to the one Tim’s working on. He flexes his wrist, and a blade springs out from under his arm, six inches of cold steel glinting in what little light there is.

This, he uses to start chipping away at the ice and snow on the grave himself.

“Or at the very least you ought to ask around town for help,” he adds, while he works. “We’ve a notice board. You can post a note there.”

[ployboy]

He really hates having to stamp down the reaction to the blade, and Tim is mostly but not all the way successful. It's frustrating that the hard line of his shoulders only tenses; it takes effort to make it seem like getting on with the job is no big deal.

He makes a little noise of protest.

"You sure?"

About not having a deadline.

"Some people believe that this night opens a way for... them, to join this world."

[jackdawvision]

Edward angles the blade away from Tim, as if to show him that he doesn't mean to harm him with it. Or at all. It does make him wonder how the boy broke his arm, but...that seems like the type of question that will only get him silence in response.

"I'm sure," he says, chipping away at the ice anyway, scraping off the snow with a gloved hand anyway. "I've seen their ghosts with the northern lights. They're more interested in playing out their final moments, if they're even capable of holding any interest anymore."

cw for depressy things and death

[ployboy]

He notices. He stays quiet about it. And he stays quiet despite, or because of, the knot growing at the back of his throat. The desperate, isolated, wailing child he used to be wants to challenge that idea and be done with it, because naivety (or innocence, or ignorance) demands a happy ending to any good life.

Becoming worm food and nothing more is now a happy ending, Tim muses numbly.

"Yeah," he says. It can't be an agreement. He hasn't seen the ghosts just yet. Tim just feels the crawl and claws of Nothingness making the world seem off and distant; he at least knows he should try and stop it. "I don't know why they do that," he says instead.

The name on the marker comes to light, Tim chips absently to make way for the years to be revealed.

He thinks, suddenly and surprisingly, that this little misadventure makes him closer to his parents than he'd first thought, because he's, like-- a very amateur archeologist.

He thinks of his mother and her slit throat and he thinks about his dad and the blood and blood and blood.

Only, Janet Drake died of poisoning and not a slit throat. Tim frankly can't know why he keeps forgetting. He just knows that the muddled murmur of self-abuse should really be put to a stop. Like, now.

"What about the ones that you can't see, though? What are those souls up to?"

[jackdawvision]

"If the lights come back," says Edward, with some uncertainty, because he isn't entirely sure they will, "you might get the chance to find out."

He'd watched those ghosts. He hadn't been very terrified, after the first shock—there was really nothing they can do to him or to anyone else. Mostly he'd been trying to gather information on just what had happened to the town's inhabitants, and instead had come up with nothing for his efforts put into watching all these gruesome tableaux.

Nothing but a sinking sense of heartache, anyway.

He pauses a moment, then shrugs, keeping his eyes fixed on the gravestone he's chipping the ice off of. "I'm no priest, mate," he says. "Watching, I s'pose, if they haven't already moved on to whatever's next." Like Edward himself, a dead man yanked from England to live again here in Milton. Sometimes he wonders if this is a particularly cold circle of hell—except he imagines he'd see at least one other person he'd known in the bad old days down here, if that were the case.

[ployboy]

He'll probably barf, he doesn't say. Heck, he's not sure if he believes it despite the sour, lukewarm roll of his stomach. Tim has to steady himself and calculate his breaths- in, and hold, and out, and in-- to clear the visceral nausea of bodies pleading for their lives to be saved.

No, he'd do that thing where he doesn't care about lives or bodies, where he listens to cries only to connect pieces of a puzzle, where he watches the jerky movement of despair only to plug it in to the bigger picture.

It's an equally sickening realization.

There is nothing next, he doesn't say. But he trains a hard look at the man, anyway. Decides, "I don't think priests carry knives on them, do they?"

Frankly, he doesn't know.

[jackdawvision]

Edward wipes off the ice and snow, revealing a name on the grave: Madeline Chen. In a little while her grave will once again be covered in snow and ice, her name blurred once more, but for now it stands clear, and he starts scraping away at the dates below with the edge of his blade.

This won't be enough, he thinks. Not for her and not for all the other dead of this town. Nothing they can really do here will be enough, except finding out what killed them and how, and what will it take to survive it.

He pauses in order to flick his eyes up at Tim. A corner of his mouth turns upward. "Perhaps they do in a different religion," he says. "But like I said, I ain't one." A beat. "Sailors do, though, and I've carried the habit back onto land."

[ployboy]

Madeline Chen. Tim thinks he's seen that name carved on stone before, but one second later and the thought doesn't matter. Which, he guesses, is hypocritical when he's dealing in self-abuse under the guise of remembrance.

What's a Bat if not a raving hypocrite?

His half-glare at the man fades into the familiar narrow-eyed gaze of Tim's, the slight of the man finding anything even remotely funny is forgiven. Tim can get lost in a good story, though, and he remembers the bulletin board and he pauses to ask, "Royal Navy, or just Navy-navy? Or Option C, none of the above?"

[jackdawvision]

What’s an Assassin if not a hypocrite? At least they’re both aware of their respective hypocrisies. Edward keeps scraping at the ice, methodical and calm, but his eyes flick briefly to Tim before returning to the gravestone.

And for a moment, for too long a moment, he doesn’t answer. Not because he feels any shame for his past, but because of all the secrets bound up in it—he’s trying to figure out the story he can tell this boy, the one that won’t break the Creed he swore himself to. Sure, so far as he knows there’s no point to sticking close to it out here, but right now it’s…it’s really all he’s got left.

“I used to be a privateer first,” he says, finally, after just a bit too long spent in silence. “But then the Brits and the Spaniards struck a peace treaty, and we privateers had to find a new line of work fast. So piracy it was.”

A tired breath. “But that was—a long time ago, now.”

[ployboy]

That's an Option C response if he's ever heard one. The quiet spurs him on to make himself small, the first time in the day he's felt the need to hide under the heaviness of too-many awkward layers of clothes. Tim frowns, unaware he's frowning, and the settling weight in his chest is welcome back with open arms.

It's a child's plot he's working on, because that's what the years tell him. He scrapes at it unfeeling, and then, finally, the man speaks.

It may be a confession. It sure sounds like one, though Tim bites at the inside of his cheek to distract himself from chains on the wall and blood and the color green.

He doesn't know what to say. A swashbuckling pirate is a Hollywood fantasy. They were criminals, dastardly and ruthless.

He asks, "Was it cool?"

And rightly seems to want to shrink himself even more.

[jackdawvision]

This gravestone’s done, so Edward retracts his blade for a bit and rubs his hands together, blowing warm air between them to give himself a bit of a rest before he gets started on the next one. Tim’s question gets a quiet little chuckle out of him, full of warmth even if it also sounds tired. It’s been…a very long time, and Edward sometimes feels very old, for forty-two.

It was a good life, all in all, and while he has regrets, many of them, he made the best of things. His newest one now is that he didn’t get to live longer, to train his son properly, to see his daughter married and protected.

“Aye, it was,” he says now. “When it wasn’t harrowing, when I wasn’t the only one left, I liked the adventure, the freedom.” He misses it, sometimes, misses how he felt when he was twenty-two and the world seemed his oyster and all he needed was the Jackdaw and his crew and naught else. Other times he looks back and thinks my god I was a bloody daft git, how did anyone put up with me?

Here and now he says, “I wouldn’t recommend that life, though. Too easy to catch scurvy.”