Re: log: cemetery - revenant and misha
David, or the Revenant as he was now, by night, wasn't alabaster, never had been. He was different than he'd been when he counted himself among the living, and he had maybe thought of himself as good, when he thought of such things. But not alabaster - only things that weren't human could create a feeling of bright white like whatever was present in the graveyard now.
He watched Misha sit on the edge of a gravestone. "Oh, Ghost," he said. Misha struck him as one, perched and looking ethereal with no shoes on, with dirt on the soles of his feet, peering down at the Revenant and telling truths from memorial. He stepped toward him. "You're the ghost of Christmas past."
He didn't know that Misha had his hands out of the grave, or that he had made promises. "We do." He was cold, though he wasn't clear, like the other presence in the night around them. He carried the cold of the earth with him, the cold that evaded summer, that exuded pine and winter.
His eyes found the gravestone under Misha's swinging feet as Misha talked - Our brother Nathaniel, in reverence, gone to God this year - His deathly form looked a little more worn than it had the last time he and Misha had crossed paths. His death-pale was the same, but there was a dun color under his eyes, and those claws climbed higher up his fingers. "I have had no deaths since I saw you last, but the same call to attend them," he said, to the gravestone. "I have seen the bitterness of unjust, unjustifiable ends, and only done what I could."
He had left a man without his teeth. He had left another without his eyes. They had both lived - what kind of life? But still living, after all. Still an opportunity to make a fresh start.
He listened to what Misha had to say, and something shuddered with familiarity. "Human minds are capable of terrors," he agreed, to a sentiment Misha wasn't really expressing. His shoulder jerked up as a thread connected in his mind, then was forcibly severed - no. "Death can create horrors that no human mind could conjure."
The Revenant was close enough to touch Misha. Swathed in his black clothes, dimmed and matte-feathered, unplucked, like a starveling raven, unfed with death. He offered Misha a clawed hand. "Your friend," he said, "Told me you were not the antichrist." He unfolded sharp fingers, an open palm. "What would I see, were you to take my hand?"