Honor, Mission [N]

[kirsi]

LOST SOUL, STRONG MIND

SHALE|| N
308

There's little she can do to help in the way that's needed. Physically speaking she's thin and frail, not built for anything that requires great strength. Instead, the most the Medium can do is lay white sheets over the bodies of those pulled from the wreckage and murmur words to the dead. Their spirits are there; the spectres hover over the body they once gave life. The remorse in their expressions is something Kirsi cannot comprehend. She's not seen sadness for a long time, and even then it was only tears. This is a sorrow that she can not put into words, one that cannot be cried for even if the dead could cry.

"You weren't ready to leave." Kirsi speaks quietly, and blinks once. She has the attention of at least this spectre now. "You still had plans for your life." There's a feeling of understanding that comes from the spirit, unable to do more than drift along silently and make an expression. They cannot speak, they can only leave "echoes" of the emotion they would have felt. It's the only way Kirsi can understand them.

"Was there someone important?"

No

"What did you want to do?"

Goal.

"There may be a time in the future, perhaps in a few years, perhaps in a millennium." She sticks firm to the belief of reincarnation, and is certain humans eventually reincarnate into the bodies of Ghost pokemon with little to no recollection of their human lives under most circumstances.

Promise?

"Yes."

The last word is breathed from her lips, and with something that would have been like a sigh of satisfaction, the spectre hovering over the body vanishes, leaving only a wisp of their pale form in the world only Kirsi can see. The second world she's a part of as a Medium, the intermediary between living and dead.

CODED BY ELECTRIC OF BACK TO NEVERLAND

[N]

He looks like them, one of the specters haunting the battlefield. His eyes are shadowed, his skin pale, and he seems unable to focus his full attention on the scene before him. Instead, his eyes focus on some point past the wreckage, past the bodies, broken and twisted by the war, past frozen expressions of so clear even he can make them out: broken they say, and afraid, and failure. They aren't talking about themselves.

N doesn't help the men pull the bodies from the wreckage. He wants to, but he isn't strong enough for that. With his thin frame and lack of substantial muscle, he isn't strong enough for a lot of things. And with the way he shakes like a leaf in a breeze whenever he actually looks at the bodies, nobody thinks to stop and ask him for help.

The men moving the bodies work in a methodical manner, pulling, and tugging, and twisting almost mechanically, their eyes staring dispassionately at the hapless victims of the war as though they've done this a thousand times. It never occurs to N that they have, and he hates them for their blank expressions, because at least when people are feeling something he has a chance to interpret it. Misinterpretation, misunderstand is frustrating, but this nothingness, he finds, is far worse, and he skirts the edges of the disaster, trying to avoid the strong men with the blank faces.

If circumstances had been different, you might have been one of them. You might have understood. No, that isn't quite right, because he does understand, this if nothing else: Death - it comes in different hues and shades, and here he can see them all laid out before him, a morbid canvas of bullet holes, charred corpses, collapsed buildings, twisted limbs, and those who found themselves drowned by water that has since vanished – death by hydro pump.

N tries not to think about that, about what it would feel like to drown. Some days he thinks he knows, feels throat closing up and his lungs filling with the need for air. You always need more air when panic comes flooding in, but he doesn't know, not really. Some of these people do.

He wants to go quietly into the night, to slip back into the trees and pretend to be one of the shadows before anyone notices him long enough to do more than to tell him to 'get the hell out of the way,' before he tries to imagine anything else, but he can't quite draw himself away. It's like poking at a wound, you know you shouldn't do it - I shouldn't be here - but you just can't help yourself - I have to do this. I have to make it right. This is my fault. So N makes his way to one of the bodies that has already been laid out for shrouding and burial, and kneels beside it.

This time he looks, and he feels the weight of responsibility settle heavy upon his shoulders, and starts to tremble.