A Curable Honour - BHD Fic
Title: A Curable Honour
Authors: super-six-one & dustoff88.
Fandom Black Hawk Down
Prompt: 4. Drunk - 10-hurt-comfort.
Word Count: 2,536
Summary: It was his inability to think, his lack of self control… What happens when dream becomes reality, and death is a normal occurrence in the realm of a living nightmare
Rating: R (language, violence, implied slash)
Disclaimer: None of this ever happened, nor do I insist that the events hold truth in writing them.
Notes: Heavy angst awaits, mateys. Heavy angst, and the wisps of an original character we’d like to write again. ( Table )
"It's three a.m., there's too much noise,
Don't you people ever wanna go to bed?
Just 'cause you feel so good, do you have
To drive me out of my head?"
-The Rolling Stones
4. Drunk
Benjamin T. Smith
March 27 1961 - May 4 1990
It was his inability to think, his lack of self control, and his wall of denial piling up behind a schism of tilting emotion and word gone unspoken, barely noticeable by the light of the moon.
It was his dissenting refusal against any and all normalcy, a cracked seer’s mirror within the stuffy tent of his hometown’s annual circus, visions of houses with white picket fences and dogs barking from beneath the wide-paned windows on a cosy morning in December. The future playing out on a pane of broken glass in the hands of an old, crickle-backed hag with mossy teeth clenched around an American Glory cigarette.
It was the mind-numbingly perfect feel of his girlfriend’s hands on his back, her sultry voice speaking sentences that unravelled on his skin like the sweetest disease, infecting him with the promises of their life after death, his years after what lay before them in a crooked line of uncertainties and inevitable betrayals.
It was his rebellion against the higher powers directing him toward that one career, that one religion and that one class that would put him on the path to endless successes upon the shoulders of the ruined beneath him.
That was his life. That same never-ending monotony in the grey haze of the morning path he ran before the clocks struck five; the empty stench of the oceans lapping at the dead shores of New Hampshire, the beaches just sores being licked open by the lonely waters long since been abandoned by the summers’ crowd.
That narrow road leading away from it all, that archway that he couldn’t quite find through the fog that represented a smoky, lackadaisical childhood. Sitting in his car, he would escape by means of a worn Zeppelin tape in the player as traffic passed him by in the falling day, bright white and red lights twinkling over a damp freeway.
But in the gloom, there were the highpoints of his life, the snippets of memory worth living for, worth edging away from that jutting seaside cliff on the morning trail for.
Camping trips with his dad; sitting around a cloudy fire with a marshmallow speared on a rubber-coated wire hanger, smothering laughter as his dad’s friends trip drunkenly toward their tents after long hours around a dimming lantern telling jokes that he himself, was much too young to understand, the scents of the outside world dizzying him and the shadows of the piny canopy thrown across the forest floors.
The night’s tears and Laurie’s beautiful smile as they waltzed their way across the yard of her home, shrouded from view by the back face of her three-story house.
Though her dress hung from her slim figure, and a snagged zipper ripped the silky fabric of the expensive prom gown, and mascara tracks stained her ebony cheeks in dark lines, he held her to him and they rocked the night away as their prom waited for no one, nothing. The feel of soft cotton sheets on the bare expanse of his back, and her body fitting perfectly into his as her parents flew into Sacramento that very hour, wondering if that boy would be over.
With the good came the bad, crash-landing into his recollections of happiness like the cruellest shooting star, set aflame with an omen of the future or lack thereof. The sound of nastiness against a slackened face, and the infinite pain of open-fisted blows across his face as his girlfriend’s boyfriend shielded her from his expressions, whispers to the traitorous and nothing more.
His mother’s biting words as he stumbled into the kitchen with a broken jaw and a bloodied nose, him falling onto the stairs leading up to the second floor, his weight heavy on exhausted thoughts, hands scarlet with the life force of another.
Three hours after graduation, and no direction in life after death, no purpose after polygamy with coursed emotions colliding into the sorrows of reality, it was staring into the mirror of a club he had yet to be carded in.
The smoky club basement and the wholly knowledge that his fingers had knit through hair far too short, that the shadowy figure before him wiped at moist lips with a single masculine finger before a telltale snip of his Levis’ button being snapped shut and the chaste kiss to his sweaty temple, brown eyes widening as his high school’s valedictorian slipped a small card into his breast pocket before walking back to the unauthorised party downstairs.
The realisation that the curvature of lean muscle and chiselled structure was just as fine as the soft, feminine arcs of a supple body; the gravely tone of a man’s static climax was just as satisfying to coax as the shattering pitch of a woman’s teeth-clenching sighs.
With that realisation came his mother’s deafening screams toward her husband as his father swallowed bile, told him he’d be damned to hell for being who he was. And over a decade later later, in 1990, Mike Durant sat perched upon a barstool somewhere in Kentucky, staring down the gorgeous neck of a gorgeous bottle, into the murky liquid that got him into hell in the first place.
“Starin at it ain’t gonna get you nowhere, Durant,” came the voice of Cliff Wolcott, friend and fellow pilot; slurring words, and the man was nearly as wasted as Mike himself. Leaning to the side, Wolcott clutched his beer like he would a woman, caressing the smooth glass with skilled, callused fingers.
Mike despised the feeling he felt, a slick fist clenching at his stomach, at the thought of deft hands. Leading only to the single photograph burning in his wallet, a smouldering hole through thick leather and minted bills. He looked away, eyes focusing in on the glowing neon sign in the front window, a vile taste in his mouth, now feeling more sober than he had been in months.
Carolyn W. Reiner-Smith
February 15 1957 - January 11 1987
“Mr. Durant, line two!” a technician specialist yelled dutifully over the clanking sounds of a Sea Stallion being stripped down outside the huge Fort Lewis hangar. The sergeant cocked a thumb to the upstairs office behind him, and Mike trudged up the steps, weary and bleary-eyed from the previous night’s flight exercises. He nodded to the specialist in passing, entered the absent lieutenant’s offices, snatched the phone from its receiver and fell heavily onto the worn plaid sofa.
He’d barely said anything before being cut off.
Laurie’s voice was cold and unpleasant, her scathing words dulled not by sympathy but enjoyment in the wretched passing of bad news. “Ben’s wife’s dead. Guess she got AIDS from some patient of hers up in Boston’s Memorial, kept it to herself for about a year, and then just signed off while Ben was in the Congo. Everyone knows she did herself in, but Ben’s refusing to give the coroner a permission for an autopsy. Maybe you can talk some sense into him, seeing as he was your best friend before you skipped out and all. Funeral’s at two on Tuesday at Greenlawn cemeteries. We’re not expecting you, of course, but a surprise appearance would be nice.”
And then Laurie White hung up, leaving Mike with the empty, reverberating dial tone following a brief click of the line being cut between the thousands of miles graciously separating them. Mike dropped his head into his hands after throwing the company-issued phone back into the cradle, threading fuel-slick fingers through his lengthening hair.
The sounds of the generators powering the tools currently tearing the marine chopper to bits could hardly be heard through the walls, but the tick of the desk clock echoed in his tired brain as Laurie’s words wrapped around him like a boa constrictor, slowly squeezing the life from him.
--
Weak florescent light filtered in through dirty windows and rusted wire mesh, and Mike slowly left the world behind as rain kicked up beneath the thick wheels of an American Airlines flight pushing off SeaTac asphalt, thick black lettering glittering beneath the dull reflection of covered glass above.
The city cast upon the bottoms of dark thunderclouds an orange haze, and planes flew through them, nothing more than red and white blinking lights sailing through the newfound silence as the remnants of an earlier lightning storm continued its electric hiss in the air.
Mike sat approximately halfway between the class divider and the coach section near the back, a huge dusty pane of glass to his side, a panoramic view of the passing terrain consisting simply of emerald green blur of nothingness and the sickly stench of polluted rain steaming off the cities far below.
With his hands folded in his lap, shivering as cold air rushed through the open vents above, clearing the stale stench of still air and human stink; spilled drinks and leaking airsickness bags left under the seat.
Blue eyes trained on the seat before him, looking past the beefy head of the businessman occupying the worn leather seat, past the shadow of the round man’s damp baseball cap darkening his features, Mike focused on the black television screen.
The night around him spoke in tones beneath the strong headlights of the plane; clouds glittering under its yellow beams, red blinking eyes glaring through the pitch dark of the damp, dank night, fixed lines of neon and black spotting the patched road beneath its great metal hull.
He heard whispers around him, emanating from the men and women who were not brave enough to speak out, for the imaginary handcuffs could now be felt by all, a pitch into turbulence silencing them to a hushed roar.
The men sitting behind him snickered quietly, voices hardly louder than the soft patter of rain beating against the windows. Mike clenched his eyes closed as the man began to recount his younger days: the feel of his wife’s skin beneath his fingertips, and the huge trophy his son received for playing on the first grade flag-football team. The other man was probably nodding his head at the memories that may or may not seem so familiar, so comfortable.
In the overbearing silence of the stretched cabin, Mike heard the steady change of the digital watch he had bought at a small store in Seattle mere hours ago. Seconds clicked away as the small red hands swooped over the digital face, miniature shadows of time on the cheap device.
He felt the soft cashmere of his scarf against the rough of his skin, the same scarf his newest girlfriend had given him for Christmas, and smelled the gentle cologne Christopher had forced upon him after their third date so many months ago. The leather book bag at his feet, a stitched specimen of worn leather and fine rawhide string, presented to him from his mother for his twenty-fourth birthday.
But Mike shut his eyes against the dull glare of the flickering florescent as memories of his own flooded him because the paperwork and the documentations that put him in this place were too impersonal, too protocol, because the plane had not flown out of SeaTac quick enough, away from the storm and directly into another, where a thirty-year-old woman waited calmly on a slab, where her twenty-seven-year-old husband dropped to his knees beside an empty grave, where Mike would see the future in the form of a twenty-second nightmare.
--
The empty seat Mike had so rightfully claimed as his own was suddenly occupied by a man bearing nothing but a skeletal grin and a pair of clothes so tattered that strips of fabrics fluttered from his body as the wind pushed past cracked windows. All around, Mike heard the whispers of the damned as the grinning man took a seat beside him, boots squeaking against the rubber floor as he sunk into the stiff blue cushions.
The man’s knees, all bloody and torn flesh hanging from gleaming bone piercing through scarlet-coloured skin, pressed up into the back of the seat before them, and there was a smell that permeated the air as he exhaled smoke. Sulphur. Mike’s hands met his mouth as he struggled against the urge to vomit when the grinning man turned to him, head cocked to the side and blue eyes clouded over white.
A side of his face retained a sort of a soft handsomeness, strength and ability, while the other side donned a jagged incision running from his left temple to the corner of his mouth, fleshy clumps of torn muscle drooping away from his pouting lips.
Mike became faintly aware of the burnt skin peeling away from the man’s knuckles, the singed sleeves of the man’s tan clothing; of the frazzled brown hair stuck up in short blackening tufts atop of his head, scalp peeling away from that temple to reveal a white sliver of scull.
Visions of black smoke curling up into desert skies over vast empty bowls of sandy planes and broken radios hanging from electric cords hissing and frayed like dying snakes tread on by heavy tires and slack jaws against steel plated aircraft flashed in his mind. The stench of blood and the struggle to regain a consciousness as the sun falls behind a mountain range, animalist howls drifting out over the eerie desolation while dust sifts through the broken structure of what was not his.
Shattered glass, looming faces, burning engines on pitched planes, and shouts for a corpsman as the man he didn’t know pulled himself from a smashed cockpit seat.
And the air grew cold as Mike muffled a scream behind tightly laced fingers. His ring burned his upper lip and his hands shook before frantic pants of breath, but he noticed nothing but the grinning man beside him, matching his wide-eyed stare with an amused glance, nonchalant as the lights around them dimmed to the occasion.
Mike whimpered as the man turned to him with outstretched palms and bloody fingernails, cackled, and in a voice so familiar, said, “You’re drowning me, mate.”
--
And Mike woke up.
Michael J. Durant
July 23 1961 - October 3 1993
“It’s been awhile,” Bull said, nodding to their fallen friend’s grave. “Almost ten years.”
“Yeah,” Wolcott replied, just as soft. “I was almost startin to forget.”
Bull nodded again, lips twitching up in a sad half-smile. “I’ll meet you at the Monument, okay?”
Wolcott watched him retreat, a broad-shouldered man clad in a perfect uniform making his way back down the gentle cemetery hills. And Wolcott turned back to the only thing that symbolised his friend’s past presence before removing his cap and crouching down beside two smooth marble crosses, two white roses clutched in his hands. He placed one on Mike’s grave, the other on Ben’s, and walked away with a sombre grin etching away at his face, a photograph of the two departed fluttering beneath the long stem of a delicate rose upon dying grass.
Authors: super-six-one & dustoff88.
Fandom Black Hawk Down
Prompt: 4. Drunk - 10-hurt-comfort.
Word Count: 2,536
Summary: It was his inability to think, his lack of self control… What happens when dream becomes reality, and death is a normal occurrence in the realm of a living nightmare
Rating: R (language, violence, implied slash)
Disclaimer: None of this ever happened, nor do I insist that the events hold truth in writing them.
Notes: Heavy angst awaits, mateys. Heavy angst, and the wisps of an original character we’d like to write again. ( Table )
"It's three a.m., there's too much noise,
Don't you people ever wanna go to bed?
Just 'cause you feel so good, do you have
To drive me out of my head?"
-The Rolling Stones
4. Drunk
Benjamin T. Smith
March 27 1961 - May 4 1990
It was his inability to think, his lack of self control, and his wall of denial piling up behind a schism of tilting emotion and word gone unspoken, barely noticeable by the light of the moon.
It was his dissenting refusal against any and all normalcy, a cracked seer’s mirror within the stuffy tent of his hometown’s annual circus, visions of houses with white picket fences and dogs barking from beneath the wide-paned windows on a cosy morning in December. The future playing out on a pane of broken glass in the hands of an old, crickle-backed hag with mossy teeth clenched around an American Glory cigarette.
It was the mind-numbingly perfect feel of his girlfriend’s hands on his back, her sultry voice speaking sentences that unravelled on his skin like the sweetest disease, infecting him with the promises of their life after death, his years after what lay before them in a crooked line of uncertainties and inevitable betrayals.
It was his rebellion against the higher powers directing him toward that one career, that one religion and that one class that would put him on the path to endless successes upon the shoulders of the ruined beneath him.
That was his life. That same never-ending monotony in the grey haze of the morning path he ran before the clocks struck five; the empty stench of the oceans lapping at the dead shores of New Hampshire, the beaches just sores being licked open by the lonely waters long since been abandoned by the summers’ crowd.
That narrow road leading away from it all, that archway that he couldn’t quite find through the fog that represented a smoky, lackadaisical childhood. Sitting in his car, he would escape by means of a worn Zeppelin tape in the player as traffic passed him by in the falling day, bright white and red lights twinkling over a damp freeway.
But in the gloom, there were the highpoints of his life, the snippets of memory worth living for, worth edging away from that jutting seaside cliff on the morning trail for.
Camping trips with his dad; sitting around a cloudy fire with a marshmallow speared on a rubber-coated wire hanger, smothering laughter as his dad’s friends trip drunkenly toward their tents after long hours around a dimming lantern telling jokes that he himself, was much too young to understand, the scents of the outside world dizzying him and the shadows of the piny canopy thrown across the forest floors.
The night’s tears and Laurie’s beautiful smile as they waltzed their way across the yard of her home, shrouded from view by the back face of her three-story house.
Though her dress hung from her slim figure, and a snagged zipper ripped the silky fabric of the expensive prom gown, and mascara tracks stained her ebony cheeks in dark lines, he held her to him and they rocked the night away as their prom waited for no one, nothing. The feel of soft cotton sheets on the bare expanse of his back, and her body fitting perfectly into his as her parents flew into Sacramento that very hour, wondering if that boy would be over.
With the good came the bad, crash-landing into his recollections of happiness like the cruellest shooting star, set aflame with an omen of the future or lack thereof. The sound of nastiness against a slackened face, and the infinite pain of open-fisted blows across his face as his girlfriend’s boyfriend shielded her from his expressions, whispers to the traitorous and nothing more.
His mother’s biting words as he stumbled into the kitchen with a broken jaw and a bloodied nose, him falling onto the stairs leading up to the second floor, his weight heavy on exhausted thoughts, hands scarlet with the life force of another.
Three hours after graduation, and no direction in life after death, no purpose after polygamy with coursed emotions colliding into the sorrows of reality, it was staring into the mirror of a club he had yet to be carded in.
The smoky club basement and the wholly knowledge that his fingers had knit through hair far too short, that the shadowy figure before him wiped at moist lips with a single masculine finger before a telltale snip of his Levis’ button being snapped shut and the chaste kiss to his sweaty temple, brown eyes widening as his high school’s valedictorian slipped a small card into his breast pocket before walking back to the unauthorised party downstairs.
The realisation that the curvature of lean muscle and chiselled structure was just as fine as the soft, feminine arcs of a supple body; the gravely tone of a man’s static climax was just as satisfying to coax as the shattering pitch of a woman’s teeth-clenching sighs.
With that realisation came his mother’s deafening screams toward her husband as his father swallowed bile, told him he’d be damned to hell for being who he was. And over a decade later later, in 1990, Mike Durant sat perched upon a barstool somewhere in Kentucky, staring down the gorgeous neck of a gorgeous bottle, into the murky liquid that got him into hell in the first place.
“Starin at it ain’t gonna get you nowhere, Durant,” came the voice of Cliff Wolcott, friend and fellow pilot; slurring words, and the man was nearly as wasted as Mike himself. Leaning to the side, Wolcott clutched his beer like he would a woman, caressing the smooth glass with skilled, callused fingers.
Mike despised the feeling he felt, a slick fist clenching at his stomach, at the thought of deft hands. Leading only to the single photograph burning in his wallet, a smouldering hole through thick leather and minted bills. He looked away, eyes focusing in on the glowing neon sign in the front window, a vile taste in his mouth, now feeling more sober than he had been in months.
Carolyn W. Reiner-Smith
February 15 1957 - January 11 1987
“Mr. Durant, line two!” a technician specialist yelled dutifully over the clanking sounds of a Sea Stallion being stripped down outside the huge Fort Lewis hangar. The sergeant cocked a thumb to the upstairs office behind him, and Mike trudged up the steps, weary and bleary-eyed from the previous night’s flight exercises. He nodded to the specialist in passing, entered the absent lieutenant’s offices, snatched the phone from its receiver and fell heavily onto the worn plaid sofa.
He’d barely said anything before being cut off.
Laurie’s voice was cold and unpleasant, her scathing words dulled not by sympathy but enjoyment in the wretched passing of bad news. “Ben’s wife’s dead. Guess she got AIDS from some patient of hers up in Boston’s Memorial, kept it to herself for about a year, and then just signed off while Ben was in the Congo. Everyone knows she did herself in, but Ben’s refusing to give the coroner a permission for an autopsy. Maybe you can talk some sense into him, seeing as he was your best friend before you skipped out and all. Funeral’s at two on Tuesday at Greenlawn cemeteries. We’re not expecting you, of course, but a surprise appearance would be nice.”
And then Laurie White hung up, leaving Mike with the empty, reverberating dial tone following a brief click of the line being cut between the thousands of miles graciously separating them. Mike dropped his head into his hands after throwing the company-issued phone back into the cradle, threading fuel-slick fingers through his lengthening hair.
The sounds of the generators powering the tools currently tearing the marine chopper to bits could hardly be heard through the walls, but the tick of the desk clock echoed in his tired brain as Laurie’s words wrapped around him like a boa constrictor, slowly squeezing the life from him.
--
Weak florescent light filtered in through dirty windows and rusted wire mesh, and Mike slowly left the world behind as rain kicked up beneath the thick wheels of an American Airlines flight pushing off SeaTac asphalt, thick black lettering glittering beneath the dull reflection of covered glass above.
The city cast upon the bottoms of dark thunderclouds an orange haze, and planes flew through them, nothing more than red and white blinking lights sailing through the newfound silence as the remnants of an earlier lightning storm continued its electric hiss in the air.
Mike sat approximately halfway between the class divider and the coach section near the back, a huge dusty pane of glass to his side, a panoramic view of the passing terrain consisting simply of emerald green blur of nothingness and the sickly stench of polluted rain steaming off the cities far below.
With his hands folded in his lap, shivering as cold air rushed through the open vents above, clearing the stale stench of still air and human stink; spilled drinks and leaking airsickness bags left under the seat.
Blue eyes trained on the seat before him, looking past the beefy head of the businessman occupying the worn leather seat, past the shadow of the round man’s damp baseball cap darkening his features, Mike focused on the black television screen.
The night around him spoke in tones beneath the strong headlights of the plane; clouds glittering under its yellow beams, red blinking eyes glaring through the pitch dark of the damp, dank night, fixed lines of neon and black spotting the patched road beneath its great metal hull.
He heard whispers around him, emanating from the men and women who were not brave enough to speak out, for the imaginary handcuffs could now be felt by all, a pitch into turbulence silencing them to a hushed roar.
The men sitting behind him snickered quietly, voices hardly louder than the soft patter of rain beating against the windows. Mike clenched his eyes closed as the man began to recount his younger days: the feel of his wife’s skin beneath his fingertips, and the huge trophy his son received for playing on the first grade flag-football team. The other man was probably nodding his head at the memories that may or may not seem so familiar, so comfortable.
In the overbearing silence of the stretched cabin, Mike heard the steady change of the digital watch he had bought at a small store in Seattle mere hours ago. Seconds clicked away as the small red hands swooped over the digital face, miniature shadows of time on the cheap device.
He felt the soft cashmere of his scarf against the rough of his skin, the same scarf his newest girlfriend had given him for Christmas, and smelled the gentle cologne Christopher had forced upon him after their third date so many months ago. The leather book bag at his feet, a stitched specimen of worn leather and fine rawhide string, presented to him from his mother for his twenty-fourth birthday.
But Mike shut his eyes against the dull glare of the flickering florescent as memories of his own flooded him because the paperwork and the documentations that put him in this place were too impersonal, too protocol, because the plane had not flown out of SeaTac quick enough, away from the storm and directly into another, where a thirty-year-old woman waited calmly on a slab, where her twenty-seven-year-old husband dropped to his knees beside an empty grave, where Mike would see the future in the form of a twenty-second nightmare.
--
The empty seat Mike had so rightfully claimed as his own was suddenly occupied by a man bearing nothing but a skeletal grin and a pair of clothes so tattered that strips of fabrics fluttered from his body as the wind pushed past cracked windows. All around, Mike heard the whispers of the damned as the grinning man took a seat beside him, boots squeaking against the rubber floor as he sunk into the stiff blue cushions.
The man’s knees, all bloody and torn flesh hanging from gleaming bone piercing through scarlet-coloured skin, pressed up into the back of the seat before them, and there was a smell that permeated the air as he exhaled smoke. Sulphur. Mike’s hands met his mouth as he struggled against the urge to vomit when the grinning man turned to him, head cocked to the side and blue eyes clouded over white.
A side of his face retained a sort of a soft handsomeness, strength and ability, while the other side donned a jagged incision running from his left temple to the corner of his mouth, fleshy clumps of torn muscle drooping away from his pouting lips.
Mike became faintly aware of the burnt skin peeling away from the man’s knuckles, the singed sleeves of the man’s tan clothing; of the frazzled brown hair stuck up in short blackening tufts atop of his head, scalp peeling away from that temple to reveal a white sliver of scull.
Visions of black smoke curling up into desert skies over vast empty bowls of sandy planes and broken radios hanging from electric cords hissing and frayed like dying snakes tread on by heavy tires and slack jaws against steel plated aircraft flashed in his mind. The stench of blood and the struggle to regain a consciousness as the sun falls behind a mountain range, animalist howls drifting out over the eerie desolation while dust sifts through the broken structure of what was not his.
Shattered glass, looming faces, burning engines on pitched planes, and shouts for a corpsman as the man he didn’t know pulled himself from a smashed cockpit seat.
And the air grew cold as Mike muffled a scream behind tightly laced fingers. His ring burned his upper lip and his hands shook before frantic pants of breath, but he noticed nothing but the grinning man beside him, matching his wide-eyed stare with an amused glance, nonchalant as the lights around them dimmed to the occasion.
Mike whimpered as the man turned to him with outstretched palms and bloody fingernails, cackled, and in a voice so familiar, said, “You’re drowning me, mate.”
--
And Mike woke up.
Michael J. Durant
July 23 1961 - October 3 1993
“It’s been awhile,” Bull said, nodding to their fallen friend’s grave. “Almost ten years.”
“Yeah,” Wolcott replied, just as soft. “I was almost startin to forget.”
Bull nodded again, lips twitching up in a sad half-smile. “I’ll meet you at the Monument, okay?”
Wolcott watched him retreat, a broad-shouldered man clad in a perfect uniform making his way back down the gentle cemetery hills. And Wolcott turned back to the only thing that symbolised his friend’s past presence before removing his cap and crouching down beside two smooth marble crosses, two white roses clutched in his hands. He placed one on Mike’s grave, the other on Ben’s, and walked away with a sombre grin etching away at his face, a photograph of the two departed fluttering beneath the long stem of a delicate rose upon dying grass.