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zerohallows · 11 months

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Quiet Places || Zero

Synopsis: Not the usual ghost story.

Zero meets someone among the gravestones.

Sometimes what we want, truly, is to be haunted.

CW: ghosts, mentions of death and mourning practices, child ghosts, reference to animal death, insects

He wasn't, contrary to what people who didn't know him very well assumed, automatically drawn to hollow places, to resting spots, little corners hidden away where people went to, hopefully, not be misplaced.

He'd always mindfully sought them out rather than only being pulled along.

And of all of the places that he had learned people built their monuments and wrapped up their loss in flowers and silent moments, graveyards felt very much like the rest. Special, but only equally as much as the other ceremonies, practices and places the living found comfort over the dead.

Different forms of course, he had learned; there had been months where he had spent hours and hours tucked away in libraries, searching through pages about all the sorts of different ways that people mourned.

Not because he felt he needed to cultivate some familiar kinship with death, truth be told he'd felt more frustration with it in those days than anything else, but because he had a friend, once.

Illness had declared that the world, and himself, wouldn't be allowed to keep her very long. And it was unfathomable to leave her trying to make decisions that seemed incredibly cruel at sixteen, because there was no one else who would help make them for her. Immortality was not, he discovered, the right of youth, even though he still sometimes felt it should have been.

So Zero had learned a great deal about mourning before even experiencing his own for the first time, as an overwhelming effort to help her feel just a little bit better about the things after, the things left behind.

Although searching for a way to convince your best friend the ideas that fell to funerals and ceremonies would somehow be the sort of close to a chapter she wasn't finished writing for herself was awfully hard at sixteen yourself.

So he visited places, still, because he couldn't visit the one where Cece rested anymore since she didn't rest anywhere. She had wanted to be free, wanted to be part of everything, and thankfully humans had customs for that as well and he supposed, even if the notion was for his own comfort, her ashes were still out somewhere chasing sunsets in new places life had never granted her time to see.

It's where fairies go, he'd told her once, to everything, in the end. She wanted the same, to meet again, although he's still not sure if he told some lie, even a kind one, in agreeing perhaps they would.

He doesn't know, really, if humans are made of the sort of stuff that allows for it.

But he hoped then, still did.

It wasn't why he had come to the graveyard that evening though, he'd come because the month was special to him and nearly spent, he liked the quiet, he liked the names on stones he would never know them stories of.

Zero liked feeling connected to what was, sometimes more than he wanted to know what lay ahead. He coveted the somber stone crumbling with time and the mossy burst of life that carpeted them in a silent cry of victory.

Zero found a certain lovely awe in that, a bittersweet poetry.

A wordless shout, the most patient cry he liked to think he could hear, without hearing; I rest here but look, just look at how life grows from my very memory.

See how important my place in this world is while from my very self the leaves curl and the grasses grow and I, truly, am eternal.

If he could only ever learn once he wanted to learn enough.

If being everything is where it ends I would like, he'd thought often, to be just myself for now and look at those names as who they once were too.

Zero rarely felt alone, even drifting amid the stones, the bending branches above and the ground below that he could feel in the core of his being alive with the toss and turn of change in endless motion.

But he was surprised not to have been truly alone that evening as he wandered the graveyard, watching the creeping growth of vines and greenery merge with the headstones, and a flicker of motion among them as his fingertips brushed a few headstones in passing.

It was quite small, no more than a dart, a notion, something barely out of the corner of his eye because for all his connection to the way the world fell apart in time Zero couldn't see human ghosts. At least not the ones who didn't want to make themselves seen.

It that hardly mattered, didn't keep him from pausing and trying to decipher what he finally made out to be the faintest outline of a child standing watchful, as he guessed she may have stood for far longer than any restless soul should have.

"Hello," he had called out carefully, satisfied that the hint of a person didn't suddenly flicker away. Perhaps she, he wasn't certain why the sense of it was there when he could not see her but he felt it clearly enough, was lonely, or curious. He didn't always understand how he knew the things he knew.

Which led him to a comfortable spot to sink down to the welcoming earth where he felt the twisting, curling, timeless growth and fade of infinite tiny lives most never knew of; scurrying, tunneling insects and burrowing creatures who lived and then did not, giving birth to the soil that held tight the roots of the giant above them with its branches turned skyward. He always felt it, always welcomed it, a familiar comfort as he studied the evening's dying light for another glimpse.

Zero continued speaking as though she could answer, knowing she could not.

"I can't see you," and his tone was laced with a bit of regret over that, "but I know you're there. And if you don't mind me staying for a while I was going to spend some time here too."

The breeze was all that met his words but he thought, perhaps, he heard a tiny giggle hidden away in it.

And that was how it had gone, every few nights he returned, because he always felt a bit nostalgic in October and the small motions that gradually became echoing little footsteps and playful rolling of his pencils just out of reach while he drew reminded him of something he couldn't quite place but enjoyed immensely.

"You want to see?" He'd asked once, looking up from the sketchbook in his lap as a tiny twinge of cool air graced his arm and just at the very corner of his eye a figure hinted that someone was there.

She might have been peering over his shoulder, but he knew if he turned his gaze to her she'd disappear into that not quite a place where human ghosts lingered.

The edges of the paper fluttered up, he had come to understand was a gesture of her approval over his work. The image of one of the older gravestones and the flowers that had begun to grow up through the cracks and worn places to decorate its surface in a flourish lay scrawled in sketchy lines there; another marker the peaceful place held.

He wished he knew where she had been meant to rest, where she came from, where she was going.

But he didn't know those things. He didn't know who had remembered her, or if any were left to do so.

That was the only troubling part of mortality to Zero; in its fragile cradle it held so much memory.

He had always entertained a very certain opinion on that, a mantra of let me outlive all those I know.

Not because he was afraid of his own end.

Let me outlast them so I'm not the sadness they feel one day.

No goodbye, no matter how long or how short a time it took to arrive, ever felt as if it came exactly on time and always showed up too swiftly.

"My birthday is very soon," he had mentioned as much before during those one-sided conversations, each time he did the grass stirred and he saw the shift and sway of that almost-shadow of a very small person.

"I'm sorry I don't know when yours is, but you can share mine. I have a present to bring you next time I visit."

The rustle and sway of grass caught his attention, a quiet laugh reaching his lips with it and the excitement he could tell marked the flurry of unseen motion around him.

Children were children, after all, no matter what world they were a part of.

It was a few days more before he returned, the chill in the night air pleasant and his footsteps nearly soundless on the stones, knowing she would find him far sooner than he might have her. With the bending of tall grasses and a gentle sound that might have been a sing-song whisper.

Ghosts did not often forget things, he supposed.

The month had dipped late, drawing closer and closer to its end and that lovely, magical time when the restless souls could reach just a little further into the places they had once dwelt. Zero enjoyed it, the graveyards were inviting when he could feel that subtle hint of energy in the air.

He waited for the impatient little brush of cool air past himself, the stir of echo excitement that blurred around him.

What was it like to have a birthday again after having others forgotten? He wondered, he hoped it hadn't been too many. He wished there was a stone she could have led him to among the others, but she never had. She didn't seem to know herself, if he had to guess by the way the wind wove restlessly through the stones each evening.

So he made due with what he could.

"I promised you a present, didn't I?" He uttered, unclasping his bag to reach into it and remove an unassuming object, small enough to tuck into the palm of his hand as he made his way over to the place he often sat in the nestled spot at the base of the weathered old tree that stood guard over soft, lost souls.

Zero could not see human ghosts, but that didn't mean he was fully detached from the spectral side of things. The ghosts he saw were the lingering presence of other creatures, those bound to places by their remains, far too easily forgotten, too often cut short and unwilling to move on simply because they thought it made no difference if they carried on in flesh and blood or wisps of awareness.

He had a resounding sympathy for them, the Geist, the creatures who flew or crawled or roamed wild places and existed as nature did without connection anymore to the physical; the misplaced animal souls. Because he certainly couldn't imagine what had ever led people to believe that just because they lacked human souls meant any other being had no soul at all.

Fairies did not have human souls either, but he'd always assumed that a soul was only the tie one had to how they reached whatever lay next.

It didn't trouble him.

The breeze drifted, somewhere the not-being and the gray between a little girl lost watched him reach just high enough to work the fragment of bone into the trunk, his fingers urging a crack wider, then soothing it over again with a faint scar in heavy bark.

Watched the firefly flicker of what Zero could see for himself as that anchor settled itself.

The same way many others had when he'd come across them in lonely places they had met unfair or ends they didn't understand; he always searched for better places, more welcoming spots. An empty road was no place to spend your time, especially after the end; he knew this was better.

The curl of motion, thin as a breath of air on a foggy day, stretched and uncoiled itself, a tumble of silvery-gray light fashioned back into four legs and what once might have been the softest fur, when it had been something a person might be able to touch to tell. A pouncing roll and a swat at swaying grasses that dipped in play; but he only saw one side of the game, he could only see the kitten as it delighted in having a playmate again.

Nobody liked to be alone or forgotten.

"I'll still come to visit," he reassured before stepping back to sit on an upturned stone large enough to make a fitful perch. "But I can't always be here, and you both need some company."

He would be back many times, he supposed until the day she found one reason or another to move on, or his time ended; whichever happened to come first.

"Oh, there you are," he added softly, a sort of subtle and pleased reverence at being granted it when, for an instant, there in the overcast evening light from a lethargic moon above he saw a shimmer of a form. A small girl adorned with ribbons in her hair, teddy bear in hand and eyes wide upon him before she flickered away, a spectral kitten weaving against her leg with a soundless purr that made its faint light from within pulse brighter.

He might have missed if he had blinked, was glad he hadn't, although even if he had he would have smiled regardless.

Zero turned to retrieve his sketchbook, to rest his shoulders against the towering trunk of an ancient tree, and let the pencil scratch across the paper in make-believe images of a little girl he couldn't see with her new friend playing among the headstones on a particularly crisp October night.

And the wind still whispered as it filled the space but sounded, to him, a little more like laughter.

#zero inspo #para #swynlake task #mentions: cece #cw death #cw ghosts #cw child ghosts #cw: insects #featuring: the little girl #swynlake ghosts #tbh I really need to just have more paras with Zero hanging out with the local ghosts

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