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There is a grave.
It is an unremarkable grave. A simple gray headstone, with a simple name, among a field of similar graves. Perhaps the most notable thing about this grave is that the dirt covering it is a bit fresher than most, the grass still growing in and the earth still loose in that way that will eventually settle in the days, months, years to come.
It is a well-loved grave, at least, in the way that newly dug graves tend to be. There are flowers, a whole bouquet, laid softly in the fresh earth. White lilies. Fresh, not yet wilted by the sun and time, newer than even the grave itself.
There are no notes, no memorabilia, no epitaph on the headstone. Just a name, two tragically close dates, and some flowers. Loved, yes, but there is nothing here to tell Avery who it was who died for him.
There is a grave, and Avery does not know what he is doing here.
He’d thought he knew, back when he got in his shitty beat up hand me down car and drove here. He’d thought he knew what to do, back when he’d finally, finally, stared at that cursed laptop screen and the address on the obituary page. He’d thought he knew what he’d say.
He’d curse, and scream, and cry, and beg for the body lying in that grave to be fake. For this to be some sick prank of an incomprehensible god, or another enemy to be defeated, a puzzle he could brute force until the answer he seeks becomes reality. At the very least he’d thought he’d find proof, proof that Derek existed and was real and that everything he suffered was not a cruel joke played by an uncaring universe. That there was purpose, reason, that together, their struggle had meant something.
Instead there is simply a grave.
Proof, of a kind. Proof that Avery, as always, was too late. Not strong enough, not smart enough, not special enough. Simply not enough to save the one person he’d found worth dying for. Or with, he hadn’t exactly been picky at the end.
He could still do it. He thinks about it, sometimes, late at night, when he can’t distract himself. If maybe he just didn’t wake up in the morning, or if the amount of pills required to numb his mind ended up past the point of no return, or fuck, if he just took a gun to his head. But he’s not that brave. He doesn’t even own a gun.
Those are the nights he doesn’t talk about with the therapist his mom forced him to start seeing after she found him sobbing uncontrollably on the floor in front of his desk. He’d just been visiting home for the weekend and he’d forgotten that he still had Minecraft installed when he’d needed to use his old laptop. His mom had been distraught, convinced she’d missed the signs of severe depression, and all but forced him into the nearest clinic.
He doesn’t know how to tell her that this isn’t something she could’ve noticed. That before New Year’s he was a perfectly average college student, with normal worries and problems. Maybe he stayed up too late playing video games and missed an assignment here or there, or spent too little time outside of his little apartment, or occasionally burnt his sad attempts at cooking. He didn’t have panic attacks at the sight of the color yellow, or break into fits of crying when a show about medieval knights came on tv, or spend his evenings laying in bed staring at the ceiling, wondering what it must be like to feel your very mind shatter into infinite pieces. They’d called it a brain aneurysm. Avery knows better than to hope it was that quick.
He tells the therapist that he’s worried about his college classes, throws in a bit of truth when he says he doesn’t feel like he’s good enough, and she buys it. Sends him to a psychiatrist who prescribes him pills that do absolutely nothing to fill the void that was forcibly ripped into him. He takes them anyways, compliant through numb complacency.
What could he tell them? That this is because of a Minecraft world, a few creepy glitches, and a person he’d known of for a few days and only spoken to through chat messages?
That this was because of a cosmic entity beyond comprehension, a thwarted plot against the very fabric of their world, a sacrifice that Avery is the only one who will ever understand?
He’d end up on a psych hold at the nearest hospital at best, or at worst, at the mercy of whatever that stupid organization was that had erased Derek’s files.
No, this is a secret that is his to keep.
His and this grave’s.
Derek wouldn’t want him to die. Avery knows this, is painfully aware of the fact that he is alive right now because of just how much Derek wanted him to be. God knows he couldn’t have saved himself.
It doesn’t make it any easier to go forward. That’s what Avery ends up saying, voice rough and awkward in the silence.
That he got Derek’s last message. That he wants to go forwards at the crossroads, but he still doesn’t know how. That he doesn’t know where his life is supposed to lead anymore, that some days he opens his laptop and stares at a world that he can no longer connect to. That sometimes that world feels more real than the one where his body requires things like food and rest. That he can’t forget, doesn’t want to forget, and he’s afraid that going forward means not looking back.
He tells the grave that he knows Derek saw something in him that he only wishes he could see in himself, and that he knows he is only human and stood no chance against an omnipotent existence.
Derek had been human too. Was he still human, at the end, cursed with infinite knowledge forced into a mind not equipped to handle it, or had he become something more?
This is not the grave of a god.
He’d picked a flower, on his walk to the bus stop by his apartment. The first ones he’d seen had been blue, tiny forget-me-nots sprouting in the untended grass by the sidewalk. He’d physically recoiled so hard he’d nearly sent himself backwards into the busy street.
No, the flower he holds now is red. Like his Minecraft skin, Avery thinks. Was red Derek’s favorite color? He doesn’t know. Will never know. Will never know so many things about Derek, like his favorite food or favorite movie or favorite animal. He doesn’t even know what Derek looked like. Doesn’t know what his voice sounded like, how his face would contort in laughter or sorrow, or whether he might have agreed to meet up outside of the game one day.
He knows that Derek was smart, intelligent, and good at puzzles. That he was brave, curious, and strong. That he was kind, a hero, a savior. Everything that Avery was not, is not, and could never be.
Avery places the poppy gently on the ground, next to the lilies. It looks out of place, disjointed, a single bloom amongst a proper bouquet, stem ripped from the ground rather than carefully cut, the color of pooling blood next to that of unshattered innocence.
For some reason, Avery finds that he can no longer quite see the flowers laying in front of him. He brings a hand to his eyes and it comes away damp. Tears, he notes with the detached demeanor of someone who’s spent far too much of the past month crying. God he wishes he could still feel sad. He had, for the first week or so. Then came the anger, when he’d punched a hole through the thin drywall of his apartment and threw that cursed laptop at the floor as hard as he could. Of course, it had somehow survived, and all Avery had been left with was bloodied hands and a hefty bill from his landlord.
Then finally came the terrible emptiness. This fugue state, where he moves through the world as some sort of specter, only half alive. Present enough to smile when he’s supposed to even if it doesn’t reach his eyes, to make conversation even if he loses track of the topic partway through, to go to class and make himself meals and brush his teeth as if it all actually means something.
He says all of this to the grave and more, rambles until the words will no longer come and his voice falters and fails and his body has nothing left to give.
The grave does not reply.
It never will. There are no answers to find here, just the cruel simplicity of a life cut short. Everything Derek knew, everything he felt, gone the moment he typed those cursed words in Avery’s place.
That’s what death is, Avery knows. A book half written, a story half told, an author’s pen snapped violently in half.
Finality. That’s what Derek had wanted after all. A stop, a period, an end, for both him and the thing he had trapped within him. A mortal man against something beyond comprehension, and he’d won.
Is that what victory is?
Perhaps he’d been in enough pain by the end to welcome it.
Is that what sacrifice is?
Remember me, Derek had asked, as if Avery could possibly forget. As if his world hadn’t fallen apart as the rest of the earth celebrated a new year that they had no idea how close they were to never seeing. As if they were just two people playing a game together, not bound together by fate and cosmic forces and something that Avery can’t bear to name while one of them lives and the other does not.
The bright yellow sun burns, an oppressive eye staring down from the sky. Avery takes the long way home, driving until that painful light fades into a gorgeous sunset of pink and orange and bleeding red.
There is a grave, and it lies in the heart of the one left behind.