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Colonel Warren James Kepler had been dead to the world for a long time, both legally and logistically. Now he was actually dead. Burned up with the explosion of the Hephaestus, ashes floating somewhere in deep, deep space. He didn’t lie at rest. Daniel knew this because he was currently arguing with him as he dug his grave.
“You haven’t made it wide enough.”
“It’ll be fine, Colonel. The box isn’t that big.”
Kepler sighed. “I can see that. You need to make it wider so that you can fit in it when you need to go deeper than your shovel can reach.”
Daniel glared at him where he lounged on the damp grass. His uniform was unbuttoned at the collar and thin strands of pale blond hair had escaped Kepler’s gel and were falling over his face. He looked up at Daniel with the neutral expression but deeply self-satisfied eyes that always made him grind his molars together.
Bastard.
“If you insist on being here, why don’t you help out, sir.”
“I’m not here, Mr Jacobi. I’m dead.”
“I know that,” Daniel forced out through gritted teeth. “But you’re still managing to piss me off.”
“And what, you think that burying me will get me to go away?” Daniel could hear the smirk in his voice. “If I stuck around while you were blackout drunk, I don’t think putting me six feet under is going to do anything. It’s not even my body.”
Daniel chose to jump down into the hole he’d made in the ground instead of responding. In all honesty, he had no idea if this was going to work, hadn’t even wanted to try for fear of disappointment for so long, but desperation was one hell of a motivator. He guessed that it had been nearing midnight when he left the house but he knew fuck-all about what time it was now. The dirt under his fingernails felt like it'd been there for years but the blisters on his palms were fresh and raw and they stung. He ignored them and started to dig again.
Kepler leant forward over the open grave, hands braced at the edge. “Tight fit?”
“Fuck you, Colonel.”
Kepler laughed. Daniel kept on digging.
Daniel did his best not to dwell on the past. It had worked on his childhood. Hell, it had worked on Ohio to an extent. It hadn’t worked on Kepler.
On some days, Daniel wondered if it was because his existence had become so inextricably tied to Kepler’s since that dingy night in San Francisco. He didn’t remember the name that had been written in flickering neons over the door but he could still feel Kepler’s fingers gripping his hand when he’d shook it. He didn’t remember his father’s face but he knew every single ridiculous story Kepler ever told him word for word. As his shovel bit into the cold earth, Daniel let himself briefly wonder if they could ever have become anything.
“Anything?” Daniel’s head snapped up to see Kepler’s face hanging over him, twisted into something complicated. “That implies that I’d have stayed by your side, Mr Jacobi.”
“You think we wouldn’t keep working together?”
“I think we’d grow apart,” he told him matter-of-factly.
“Well apparently even saying ‘goodbye’ doesn’t mean you’ll leave me the fuck alone,” Daniel muttered, “so I don’t know what you’re insinuating.”
Kepler sighed and his eyes flicked away from Daniel’s face. “I wish I’d come with you.”
Daniel paused. Kepler wouldn’t say that.
“No I wouldn’t,” Kepler agreed. “I’d probably say something like ‘Did you really think my relationship with you outweighed my loyalty to Goddard?’ Or maybe I’d get one of those rare looks where you think you can actually read some emotion on my face before I change the subject.”
He paused, cocking his head to one side. “But then again, Mr Jacobi, I’m in your head. What do you want me to do?”
Kepler being in his head didn’t make him any less real to him. It didn’t make him any more real to the people who saw a crazy man arguing with the empty air holding two bottles of wine at 3am in a Walmart either.
“What do you want me to do?” Kepler asked him again, slower this time.
“Apologise, maybe?” Daniel snapped, stabbing his shovel into the ground and glowering up at him.
Kepler raised an eyebrow and huffed out half a laugh.
“I don’t think that would mean very much, coming from you.”
“I know that!” Daniel yelled. Kepler’s eyes widened slightly at the outburst. He clenched his fists and the pressure made his blisters sting. “You don’t think I fucking know that? I want nothing more-” His voice cracked. “-than to hear you say the words ‘I’m sorry’ for every goddamn thing you did. But I’m never going to get that,” he muttered bitterly, “so I guess this will have to do.”
Silence. Kepler just stared at him, face just barely impassive but Daniel could see the thin cracks of emotion in the façade. Couldn’t read them perfectly, but shock seemed like a good guess. Would it really have been shock? Maybe sadness- He looked back up at his face and shook his head. He couldn’t remember Kepler looking sad, couldn’t imagine what it would look like. Shock worked.
He turned away, chest heaving, yanked his shovel out of the ground and was about to start digging again when Kepler finally spoke.
“I’m sorry that you cared so much,” he said evenly.
“You were dead to me from the moment you got Alana killed,” Daniel replied quickly.
“Mr Jacobi, I think we both know that that’s not quite true.”
Ah, shit. He was right, of course. Partially because he was from Daniel’s own mind, partially because Daniel knew that Kepler had known.
“Maybe.” He sighed and looked back up at him. “But I did stop trusting you.”
“I know,” Kepler said, very quietly.
He finished digging in silence.
Daniel pulled himself out of the grave and wandered over to where he’d left his coat. He knelt down and nudged it to the side, revealing the cracked wooden box underneath, and opened the box, checking over the contents for the last time, everything he’d snatched up from the Hephaestus before it had exploded into a fiery mess: a second generation Glock 17 that Kepler had given him, Kepler’s spare neatly-pressed SI-5 uniform shirt, a battered copy of ‘The Little Prince’ and a glass bottle with the dregs of Balvenie scotch still barely coating the bottom of it.
“Not going to drink it?” Kepler leaned over his head, inspecting the box.
“Only you would think that it’s worth drinking,” Daniel huffed, fighting the fondness creeping into his tone. He’d never had a taste of Kepler’s precious whiskey and part of him was glad of it Another part of him craved it. He was equal parts terrified of and desperate for what it could mean if Kepler took down two glasses instead of one.
“You know, Mr Jacobi,” a voice purred in his ear, “if you wanted a taste of my whiskey you could have just asked.”
“Ah!” Daniel scrambled back, arm swinging out and catching nothing. Kepler stood behind him, mouth twisted into a violent caricature of a smile and it made Daniel’s blood recoil at the sight of it.
“What the fuck was that?” he yelled.
Kepler’s eyes narrowed and the smile dropped from his face. “I don’t know,” he said slowly, “what do you suppose it was, Mr Jacobi?”
“Do you really think I subconsciously willed you to do that?”
“How well do you know your own mind?” he countered, raising his eyebrows in feigned nonchalance.
“Why do you keep on asking me questions?” Daniel snapped and Kepler’s eyes lit up.
“Why do you-”
“Absolutely not, Colonel,” he interrupted with a growl.
Kepler pouted. “We’d barely even gotten started,” he muttered, disappointed.
Daniel turned away with an angry sigh.
Fuck. He hated how unpredictable Kepler got when he began to lose his grip on his emotions. He got crueller in a way that contorted Daniel’s heart with cold, sharp hands. He’d tried to get answers only once. Kepler hadn’t let him, of course, had made him spiral and doubt himself until suddenly it was Questions Only and he was seven years younger, injured and confused and trying to play a game he didn’t know while Kepler watched him with a shark’s smile.
He carefully latched the box shut and walked over to the edge of the hole. The darkness around him made it seem a lot deeper than it was and, as Daniel peered into it, it felt like he could stumble into it and fall forever. He threw the box into it. It slammed against the sides as it fell, its contents clattering loudly in the silence. Beside him, Kepler flinched and Daniel very pointedly didn’t look at him. He wondered if the book still had the receipt with the unflattering doodle of Rachel on the back tucked between the pages. Kepler had laughed when he’d seen it and some bleeding part of him still flushed at the memory. He remembered it falling out when he’d picked it up on the journey out on the Urania, flimsy paper pressed thin and letters faded to illegibility, but the ink on the back was as blue as it had been. He’d smiled and put it back behind the front cover, never asking about it.
“Do you really want me gone?” Kepler asked softly and Daniel realised that he didn't know.
“Yes,” he told him instead and Kepler laughed.
“I’m in your head,” he reminded him. “I know when you’re lying.”
“Shut up,” he snarled, swinging his shovel and knocking a pile of dirt into the grave. It landed with a satisfying patter and he kept on going, kept on smothering the box, what remained of Colonel Warren James fucking Kepler, until it was buried under eight feet of earth. Always eight, the dead should stay buried, Mister Jacobi, don’t ever forget the last two feet-
“I suppose it’s true what they say about old habits then.” Kepler stood on the other side of his grave, hands clasped behind his back as he inspected the line where the loose soil spilled onto the grass.
“It’s hard to forget orders, sir,” Daniel replied sharply, throat scratchy from exertion.
Kepler’s eyes flicked up to him and Daniel saw them flash beneath the shadows shrouding his face. His hair was neatly gelled again and his uniform was pristine enough that he could see the creases in his trousers even in the darkness. “As your commanding officer,” he began and Daniel thought he heard him waver, “I did do my best to look after you.”
His breath snagged on the inside of his throat, lungs suddenly ragged. “Don’t… don’t try to pretend that you cared.”
“I did thank you, Jacobi,” Kepler murmured.
“And was that supposed to be enough?” he asked, grief bubbling up through his words and he dug his nails into the blisters on his palms to stop himself from crying. “Everything I did, everything you did, all of it solved with a ‘thank you’?”
“There was nothing else left to say, Daniel,” he said simply. Daniel felt his emotions burst in his chest and pour down over his heart.
“That’s not true, Colonel,” he rasped.
“I’m afraid it is.”
“You can’t just-”
“There is nothing left to say,” Kepler repeated. And then, quieter: “Is there anything you want to say to me?”
“No,” he snarled.
“Liar.”
“I hate you!”
“Liar,” Kepler said again and Daniel screamed, anger tearing through his vision. He smashed his shovel down onto the loose earth again and again, until well after the ground had been flattened and all he could hear was the pounding of his heart in his ears and the sweat and blood on his palms slipped the shovel from his grasp.
When he looked up, Kepler was gone. The night was empty and the grass around him stretched for miles and miles. Beneath his feet was a man and above his head were the stars that he had taken him to. Daniel shivered as the sweat cooled on his skin and shuffled over to his coat, folded it over his arm, and began to walk home, shovel dragging behind him.