(no subject)

[electro_kinetic]

The office of the New York City Medical Examiner is not a happy place. It's sterile, all mint-green tile and stainless steel, fluorescent lights and the overwhelming scent of cleaner. Bleach.

Noriko comes through the door seeming to lack something of herself. She doesn't look any different, dressed in a pair of jeans and a sweater against the cold, same blue hair and all, but somehow...subdued. It's not every day a normal person sees a friend's dead body, and even for someone like Noriko for whom it's more usual than she likes, seeing one that has nothing to do with mutants hits a part of her she didn't think about. From the happiness last time to this has left her insides feeling like they're doing a spectacularly unpleasant free-fall. And it's not like she's never known people who've died, either: this is just the first one from before she was an X-Man.

Comments

[aka_casanova]

"Noriko?" Giovanni comes in from a successful practice session, flushed with the cold and the exercise, and his smile fades when he sees her face. "Is something wrong?"

[electro_kinetic]

Nori looks up, seemingly listless, and blinks at Giovanni.

"...Yeah. A friend of mine is dead, I think that counts as wrong," she says. "I got a call from the morgue to positively identify a body, because mine was the only number on his rap sheet that picked up."

[aka_casanova]

"I'm so sorry", he says instantly, heartfelt, and reaches for her hand. "Does that mean you have to... make the arrangements?"

[electro_kinetic]

"Not that I have a lot of options about what to do, but yeah," she says on a sigh.

"He's going to be buried, probably win an unmarked grave on Hart Island, and I don't have the money to do anything else."

[aka_casanova]

"That's not right", he says sadly. "Do you... can I... help?"

He doesn't want to offend her, and his family aren't exactly super-rich, but he can find the money for a gravestone at least.

[electro_kinetic]

"I don't...I wouldn't want you to spend your money on something like that," she says, shaking her head.

[aka_casanova]

"At least a stone, if not a full funeral. Nobody should lie in an unmarked grave, and it would be no trouble."

[electro_kinetic]

"There are no headstones on Hart Island," she says. "And they'd take it up anyway if they go through with making it a park. The city government is considering it," Noriko elaborates, pinching the bridge of her nose in a measure of extreme frustration coupled with her distinct desire to just sit down and let herself feel terrible.

[aka_casanova]

Giovanni squeezes her hand.

"What can I do to help? Tell me."

[electro_kinetic]

"Not overdosing on heroin is a great start," she says, more brusque than she means to.

"I just...I don't feel good. This is someone I knew and really liked and now he's gone, and I could have done something to prevent this."

[aka_casanova]

"I can promise that for sure", he says with a lopsided smile that quickly vanishes. "If you'd known it was going to happen, you would have. But you didn't, you couldn't."

[electro_kinetic]

"I hadn't talked to him in a year and a half," she says. "I couldn't find him, he moved around. I knew him when we were both homeless, he was one of the first friends I had when I got here."

[aka_casanova]

He hasn't let go of her hand, and he lifts his other hand to cup her face gently, trying everything he can think of to comfort her.

"You tried to find him? Then I think you did all you could, short of spending all your waking time on that. Do you want to tell me about him?"

[student_of_impossibility]

"What happened?" The question is quiet and gentle. He knows that look, he knows that feeling, and it is not one of the good ones. And he's already doing his best to fix things at home; this is one of the more personal kinds of things. Smaller scale, maybe, but never less important. Maybe even more so.

So he'll try, at least.

[electro_kinetic]

"I got a call from the morgue," she says on a sigh. "Someone I know died, and I was the first person that answered the phone and didn't hang up."

[student_of_impossibility]

"Crows." With so much loss lately in Alera, he hates even more than usual that extra-dimentional friends are also under that strain. "The arrangements are now yours to make, then."

[electro_kinetic]

"What arrangements, precisely? It's expensive to bury someone in New York," she says. "And I don't have the money to do it."

Which frustrates her to no end, considering this is a friend.

[student_of_impossibility]

For a moment Tavi's eyes are a little haunted. They won't be able to bury most of the dead from Third Calderon, and he has no idea what to do about Aquitaine. "May I help?" He has money, and this will likely barely be anything. "Will there be anything you can do for his memory?"

[electro_kinetic]

"I don't know," she confesses. "He'll be buried, probably cremated, but there are no headstones. And I'd ask his parents, but given they disowned him when he came out to them, I'm not betting on a lot of help there."

[student_of_impossibility]

He nods. He briefly rubs his forehead with his palms--there is far too much of this going around. But after a moment, a thought occurs to him.

"There's more than one way to leave a mark, or memorial." He does not recommend a volcano. "There may be a way to do something, one no one would notice except those who want to know, and that wouldn't be disturbed." Parents disowning children makes him uncomfortable, and it may mean more in Alera--but it just means friends need to do more.

[electro_kinetic]

She blinks at him. "Okay, we're clearly not on the same page here. He's being buried by the city, so probably on Hart Island. The entire thing is a grave site. There are no markers."

[student_of_impossibility]

"There is soil there, yes?" At least, there has to be, somewhere down deep--or so Tavi thinks. It's the sort of thing that wouldn't occur to him that might be different.

[electro_kinetic]

"Yeah, there's dirt," Noriko says. "Mostly dead people but there's dirt between."

[student_of_impossibility]

For a moment Tavi chews his lip quietly. He never did really go into some things about his family... but this much, at least, he can do. "My father wasn't buried with the rest of the family," he explains. "My grandfather was the one who saw to it. He left a bit of a garden there--self-tending and permanent."

Sextus also raised a monument of marble and left it totally calm inside, all without aid. But the woodcrafting is the relevant part.

[electro_kinetic]

"It wouldn't stay permanent, though. They keep tearing up the ground to put more people in it." An entire island of people taking a permanent dirt nap.