Oregonal Sin

Ten days after the flood, John was still in the boarding house and still very much not going anywhere, any time soon.

The cut on his face had healed and the bruises there had faded significantly. The ribs were still painful as hell, but as long as he kept them wrapped and was careful he could deal. Even the nasty break to his collarbone, as long as he kept his arm in a sling, didn't result in more pain than he could ignore.

The headache, nausea and dizziness, on the other hand, were rapidly making his life really miserable, and the alternating hot and cold flashes weren't helping him love the world, either. Actually, the fever was starting to make him wonder just how much longer he was going to be in the world.

He did manage to get downstairs, outside and onto the porch. Not that he'd be there for long or he didn't look like shit, but he wanted fresh air, dammit. What he wanted more, honestly, was just to see people and not be locked up in an upstairs room away from it all.

Even if he wasn't loving the world, he wanted to be part of it.

Alita had been coming in to town much more often since the flood. She wanted to help out where she could and she wanted to escape the memories that the still-sodden pastures brought to mind.

After finishing some more building work down by the docks, she headed to the saloon. She took her normal seat at the bar and glanced around the room to see who else was about.

Aiden was still finding mud and debris in corners of his shop. He'd been able to salvage more than a lot of the shopkeepers, purely because a good portion of his goods were made of metal. But there was still a lot to make up for. He was trying to keep his prices low, to give the townspeople a chance to get back on their feet, but he was really just scraping enough to get by.  Same as most.

Still he had a lot to be thankful for. He still had the roof over his head, and a lot of his personal possessions had been in his rooms above the shop. He also had his life, which a lot of poor unfortunates didn't, although he was finding he had an ongoing hacking cough that just wouldn't shift since the flood.

He was outside on a day that looked slightly better than it had mostly been since then. Tacks in his mouth, apron on and hammer in hand, he was busy replacing some timbers and signage on the front shelter of his building that had rotted away with the waters. It felt good to be fixing things again, physical work when the end was in sight did his heart good. 

Someone caught his eye at the edge of his sight, and he instinctively turned to greet them, if only with a smile around the tacks and a nod.

Noah was shoveling away on the grounds the churchyard had now extended to. She didn't need a proper burial for him, she'd just damn well do it herself. She was damn sure he wouldn't have minded. She'd finally found his corpse, which was a small favor in itself. She'd almost lost hope.

It was a grim task, digging a grave, all the more so with his body wrapped up in a bedsheet right beside it. It stank, but that was the least of her concerns. She hadn't lost it yet, hands only gaining a faint tremble as she kept digging, tears falling silently down her cheeks as she determinedly went on.

She didn't hear the footsteps until the last minute, and was fairly certain that had been done on purpose. She didn't stop digging, earth in a pretty big pile beside the grave already, and didn't turn around either. "What do you want?"