Craven In A Graveyard

They're places of solace, you know.
Graveyards.
I've never much understood where the fear of them stems from in society.  Society plants its dead there.  It holds gatherings, flocks there to remember friends and family alike.  Everyone ends up in some sort of graveyard eventually.
Well, perhaps not everyone.
I might continue on until the end of time, somehow.
But then oblivion would be my casket, wouldn't it?
Musings, musings.  Hooray for monologue.

We sat in a graveyard, he and I.  I don't know why he was there- he seems to follow me around like a lost dog sometimes.  Perhaps because we're "brothers"- not biologically, but rather we share the same master and creator.  Our "father."  Haydn.
Not a monster like the world says he is.  But not a man, either.  Somewhere between the two.
We all get that way after a time, I think.
Steelwind sat on the ground not far away, staring at a gravestone thick with lichen, words and names eaten away by time.  In Loving Memory, it said, just barely.  Of whom, or what?  How could we remember something that we can't even read?
That's the difficult part.  Being forgotten, going through the years and decades knowing your own family doesn't remember you, or hasn't been allowed to.  Yet you're here, all right: you're always... here.
Jesus.  Something's made me sentimental.  Maybe it's the moonlight.
You know that song from the musical, Cats?  "Memories" I think it's called.  The one the female sings at the end.  Grizabella.
That song always sends a shiver down my spine, makes me feel lonely.
Not that I show much of that any more.
You can't be weak in this world and survive.
Steelwind looked up to me suddenly.  His blue eyes were luminous in the dark, champagne hair turned shock white.  "What's wrong, Craven?" he asked softly in that irksome English accent of his.
I sniffed.  "What do you mean?" I asked.  My voice is nearly always a hiss.  That's the kind of person I am.
"Your face got soft for a minute there," he said, and he frowned a bit.  "You're nostalgic."
I kept quiet.  He looked at me for another minute before he looked to the moon again with a shade of melancholy.  We were having the same thoughts, evidently.
"We'll always be here, won't we?" he asked softly.  "The only thing that stays the same will be our bodies."
Leave it to Steelwind to sum it up in such sad words.
"Maybe.  Maybe not.  It's only a disease.  There could be a cure someday," I said quietly, shrugged.  "The Vatican has something like that, right?  The Vatican has everything.  They could cure you."
He looked at me evenly.  His eyes were accusing and deeply hurt- I hate it when he does that to me.  Trace Steelwind looks so... sad.  He's a sad man.
Something about that in a song, too, if I'm not mistaken.  By the Who.
Apparently, Steelwind does know what it's like to be the sad man behind blue eyes.
I turned my eyes away after a moment or so.  We both knew the reason of his sorrow: even if he was returned to his natural state, his family would still be dead, even the new family he has now at the Newman Diner.  He'd be forgotten and left to wander the world alone.
That's the case with all of us.
When I looked back to him, he'd turned his face away again.  I considered him for a moment.  There was no consoling him at these times, other than holding him and whispering reassurances.
I'm not into that.
"So easy to forget us," he whispered.
"Yes," I added.  "And so easy to sink into the mire of self-pity, isn't it?"  I arched an eyebrow.  He looked back at me and sucked it up.  Trace is good at that, I'll admit.  He endures.
I stretched and got up and yawned.  "Up!  Before the others sense that you're weak," I said into his ear.  He hunched his shoulders a bit.  Normal reaction to someone being close to his throat, especially someone with teeth as sharp as mine.
He got up while I dusted lichen off my pants and kicked grave-dirt from my boots.  Stubborn stuff.
I leaned backwards and popped the vertebrae in the small of my back.  It hurt a little, then felt better.  Trace's knees clicked when he stood up.  Maybe we aren't as indestructible as we think we are sometimes.
"Craven?" he asked as we descended the hill, towards the gates of the cemetery.
"Mmm?"
"Next time, we're bringing Summer."  Because Summer is the only one of that lot who can get the truth out of me, yadda yadda, ramble.
I hissed at him through my teeth.  He smiled a little, that crooked, endearing little grin of his.
Not that I found it endearing.
Our conversation was cut short by a shadow suddenly under a streetlamp outside the gates, standing centered in them, framed.  Randolph waved to us meekly.  Trace waved back.
Steelwind's the youngest "brother"; Randolph is in the middle.  I'm the eldest by a hundred years or so.  They're both somewhat faint of heart in general, and therefore made friends quickly.
Well, after Randolph had gotten over the initial shock of a rather fun verbal brawl between myself and Steelwind.  He'd yelled at Randolph for getting in the way, too.  Over Summer; he thought we'd done something to harm her.
Pfft.
Anyway.
We moved up to join Randolph in relative silence, except for the faint sigh of the ground as our shoes met with it.
"Time to go?" Steelwind asked.
Randolph nodded a little.
I took the lead in the trek down the old street.
The trek towards home.

Maybe Steelwind and I did hit on something there in that forgotten corner of existence.  Maybe we are only destined to be forgotten.  Maybe that's the punishment for behaving ourselves and trying to remain human in our actions, rather than becoming the horror-movie parodies of ourselves.  You know the kind.
But.
Even if that is our destiny... No.  Destinies change as the person does.  Nothing is set in stone.  If anything, it's written in sand.
Call me sentimental, nostalgic.  I've been called worse.
As long as we stay together, we'll never be forgotten.
Not even that little cemetery is entirely forgotten.
Some memories will never die.
Constant.
Eternal.
Immortal.