There was one place on Deus that Rep would very rarely - if ever – go. Even on long lonely walks across the island, even on his most bored or weary days. That place was the graveyard and his reasoning for never going there was that it shouldn’t exist in the first place. All his life he operated on the premise that no one ever really died, people in his mind were like objects and things, if one broke you could theoretically fix it or replace it with a better one. As such, logically loss should never hurt because it was simply a temporary inconvenience, an irritation until you rediscovered what was missing. Part of his logical mind embraced this as absolute fact and that was the predator, the aspect who took relentless advantage of others and never once felt regret. The sliver of him that was cold, twisted, bitter and realistic - the part of him that was the victim who never expected reprieve from abuse – didn’t believe that those lost could ever be replaced, nor did the oppressed child in him who still ******** years later, still longed for a mother, for parental security and a sanctuary to hide in.

He was at war with himself and his own grief and the graveyard had always been a reminder that the side of the battle he tried to ignore was ultimately the one who was right. That internal war was part of his problems, deeply twisted into who he was and all he’d ever been able to do was push it down and ignore it. He actively avoided all reminders of those who were gone. Reminders were things which could have threads rooted in that no man’s land of hurt and could pull it all back to the surface and leave him frozen and unable to cope, once again that helpless child or the victim, neither of whom were suited for day to day life, neither of whom could cope with the slings and arrows he endured daily from others at his own provocation.

But today he’d come to the graveyard and he didn’t know why.

It was a choice he regretted immediately, the rows and rows of cold stone testament to the fact that to someone out there, everyone was important, that there was something good rooted in the nature of almost all humans. Normal people mourned their dead, marked that once here had been a person, good or bad, but a person who had done what came naturally to them. And it didn’t matter if they were a p***k or a saint, in the end they came to the same place.

It had been raining that day, it was always raining.

She had wanted to be buried, she’d told him once when the poison had ran fast in her blood, when breathing became tight and difficult and her heart had raced, when they waited, two solitary and cold figures for the ambulance. It had just been one of many terrible times they repeated over and over. She’d told him about the white flowers that would grow there and how she’d always be there, pure and free, and how he was to come and tear up the weeds and keep her beautiful. She was always most lucid when she thought she was dying, when she was in pain. They had that in common.
In the end he hadn’t been able to afford to bury her; it was just as expensive to buy room in the ground for the dead as it was to buy room in the world for the living. Burial was a rich man’s game, people like him and his mother, they eventually returned to smoke and ash, black as shadows. He’d done his best, stood through the sermon where a priest spoke about redemption and celestial mercy and it had ached and he had asked “Why didn’t you come sooner?”

In the end she had no stone to her name, no memorial and no testament apart from the memories of her son. He doubted the men would remember her as anything other than a warm body in a sea of attempts to find happiness in all the wrong ways. He’d scattered her ashes out in the countryside and wished she was afforded the dignity he owed her.

And yet here in this ******** graveyard there were graves for everyone, even the people who didn’t deserve it (everyone he didn’t care for), and it made him furious, and it hurt and he didn’t ******** understand.

He’d witnessed so much death in his life and every time he’d just locked it away with the others, denied its existence and therefore denied its impact. The first death he hadn’t even ******** known, he’d stabbed the guy out of reflex and fear, horrified at the attraction he had felt towards him and then he had ran. He’d assumed he’d survive, most people did. But he hadn’t, and later when he’d found out about it he’d locked down on it. He’d never allowed himself to think.

To imagine what it felt like, to lie there in the rain-slick muddy ground, bleeding out and not knowing why, not understanding what you’d done to offend the other person other than existing. Oblivious to the fact that you were a beautiful thing in the world that he felt didn’t fit, was too perfect and too happy to exist so you would have to cease. Sorrow, solitude and fear.

Dying alone was his greatest fear.

He’d witnessed more death after that but in the wake of the great sorrow that was his mother nothing ever came close, junkies ODing, guys shanked, natural causes, everything had its end and all he cared about was staying afloat, keeping up the pretences of day to day life, never stopping. Nothing could touch him because he never let it near again.

On the island death had become second nature, from that first mission, bodies strewn around in the snow. But it was easy to ignore people like that, for him they were just husks, they had never once been walking talking people, they had never been alive in his mind, they did not need replacing because in his world they never had been. He had never felt the intimate pulse and thrum of their emotions, their sorrow and anger, there was no void left where their life had once shone.

His first intimate encounter with death had been on an external mission not long after, Barney and Sandy, he’d felt like he could have grown to like both or either of them, they had been friendly to the cloud of useless trainees where others had not.

He stopped at the two gravestones and fell to his knees, hanging his head.

Sandra Peirce- Morgans

Barney Espinoza

They had just been two people. And yet they had been willing to give up everything to save that worthless band of trainees, against all logic and reason.

He let himself remember despite the deep and icy terror of those moments, the slither of snakes against his legs under the water and the deep helpless dread of the dark under the jungle. The screaming and splashing as the water rose, hearing the echo of Sandy’s voice ripped away by the echoes.

Staring at a table as he waited, laden with supplies that would never be claimed. He never understood why they saved them.

He hated the graveyard, every step was pain, the sharp lancing agony of being human, of reminding himself that despite everything else wrong with his brain, he could still feel, and that feeling was intolerable agony.

The next death he could remember had been Julie. He had never known her the way Harrison had, or many of the other hunters, but she had been important to him. If it had not been for her ridiculous kitchen mission, he would never have been forced into a situation where he had to co-operate with Harrison, he’d never have felt that spark, the spark that ******** changed everything for him, the spark that was the ******** defining moment that said he didn’t have to be alone anymore. It had been a ridiculous fight in a sewer where both of them had demonstrated that they could be useful and be needed, but it had been the start of a partnership that persisted and endured. Julie had been the one to stave off the sharp hurt in the Sahara with her cookies and give them the breather to realise that the three of them didn’t need to change anything at all to be together.

He never did get the chance to thank the woman.

Instead he’d had to look on, standing in front of the unconscious Harrison as what had once been Julie advanced upon them, as the bugs swarmed and gathered, as her weapon flickered, half alive and terrible. But even that hurt, even that loss had left him with the resolution to be there so that it could never happen to the ones he cared about. He had ******** defended that day, Harrison, Jordan and Jerry and despite all his ******** ups since he’d been defending via offence ever since. A woman he’d never had a conversation with had managed to change his outlook forever and for that, her death too weighed heavy on his shoulders.

In the wake of Julie’s death, pain had come quick and successively, loss, followed loss.

Every time he found someone who seemed to click with him, someone he felt had something to teach him, they would die before he got a chance to get to know them and ask what he’d wanted to. Killzone initially he’d felt was a weirdo, silly, too gay and ridiculous. But the mission in the jungle, zenquest had shown him a man who reminded him of himself, a man whose observations and comments had been valid all along. And then he too, like the others had been gone.

Sometimes, when he was alone and when everything weighed on him, he still went back through the twitter archives and he would just stare at that last tweet from him, and it would give him strength.

“Proud of you, bro.”

He stopped at killzone’s gravestone too, hand on the friendship bracelet he still wore to this day, remembering the dolphin he’d saved on the beach, despite all the odds that it would ever survive. Just because. Because saving it somehow eased the pain that he’d not been able to save Killzone himself. Marcus saying flippantly “It probably was infected with FEAR and died anyway you realize that right?” had brought him close to tears, but had driven home the reason why he did it anyway, he did it because Killzone had done the same with him, he’d pushed him back out time and time again in the hope that rather than dying he might swim away and never come back to the hopeless shores he consistently beached himself upon. That was why he grieved for Killzone and why despite his assurances otherwise he would never find a way to replace the other man.
The most devastating loss he had experienced of late was one he’d never even begun to come to terms with. He’d been out of his mind when it happened and somehow that had made it possible to pretend it had never happened at all.

People like Clarice and Clerise didn’t die. Not really. You couldn’t kill something so strong when it was paired with something so vivacious. There was so much life in them, so much strength and when he looked hard enough, so much love too. They had respectively represented everything he admired in womankind without any of the things he feared or hated.

Clarice had been, in her steadfast but gentle way, the mother he’d always wished he had, even though he knew if he’d told her that it would probably have made her uncomfortable, too much of a burden when she already carried more than her fair share. She’d taken him aside when he was hurtling down into darkness and despair and spoken to him like a human being, not the monster so many people liked to remind him he was. She’d tolerated his embarrassing lack of manners, rudeness and greed and had been patient, stable and even in a way that since then only Harrison had ever managed to be. He’d felt cared for by her investment in Harrison too, because the way he saw it, anyone out to protect Harrison who was one of the two most important people in his life, in turn protected him.

He came to the end of the rows and stopped.

Clerise Wilson.

Clerise, who had pushed the three stupid boys who hadn’t known what they had together and said now kiss. Clerise whose crude hand gestures had made him blush like a little shy kid, Clerise who he would never replace because she was a one in a million, flawed and radiant for it. The nearest thing he’d ever had to a sister and who had carried her naïve optimism about the world with her like a crown. She had been afraid but never afraid and despite being a creature that didn’t understand love and found it hard to love, he’d loved and admired her with everything he was capable of.

But here and now it was wrong. It was all ******** wrong. Clarice wasn’t marked. Not officially anyway. And that was wrong, it was terrible, it was horrendous. It hurt him in a way he hadn’t been expecting. It was wrong and he couldn’t stand to look at the space where her stone should have been, where it had to be, where it deserved to be.

He slumped once again to the ground, grief taking the strength out of him, like a parched man walking through the desert. They’d been together. They’d been two halves of a whole, they’d been dedicated to one another and Clerise had died because when she lost the other half of who she was there was no way she would have been able to survive losing so much. Cael hadn’t murdered her, he’d set her free and in turn he’d done his job, the job the world made him do and he’d taken the blame because for something like him it was easy to take that blame rather than let it fall at Clerises own feet.

And it broke his heart to see it this way, one stone and one unmarked because it felt like someone walking over his own grave.

One day there’d be a stone, or two stones, Harrison and Jordan and then there’d be a gap. There’d be no trace that where there was one was once two, where once there was three two now stood.

People like him and his mother never got stones, and maybe that was why he was so afraid of coming here. And when he did every stone pulled on its threads of denial until like this he stumbled and came undone.

He leaned on Clerise’s headstone because he didn’t think she’d mind. She’d let him lean on her when he’d needed to when she was alive, they all had. It was just one more time. His voice wavered and he stammered weakly, apologetically. “Just one last time sis.”

He leaned on her headstone and he let himself cry for all the times he never had, for all the times he never would in the future, every single locked up emotion. until every breath was a shivering sob, until he could physically feel the ragged hole in him that was left behind in the wake of the people he’d let behind his walls and who had been torn away. He even mourned those he'd never known, the memory of a mother with long black hair who'd hugged another him and called him a princess. He missed her too though he'd never known her.

He let himself stop. Let himself finally cease the rickety wobbling slow collapse he’d been maintaining so long and let himself fall.

Because here was where almost all the people he knew had ever caught him lay.

And only when he had nothing else left to give, shaking, hollow and bleary eyed, did he gather up all those emotions he’d laid at the feet of their stones and push them back into himself like spilled entrails on a battlefield, a wound that he could never heal but one he could hold closed as long as it took, until he was just another unmarked gap in these rows.

Until, like the people like Clarice and Cael, he was exactly what the world needed him to be.