@razziecat Vincent comforting Veld
Veld stood where the petrol station had been built. He stared at the asphalt, the black hastily poured, already cracked, already pulling away from where it had been dumped to cover what once had been. An old graveyard, unofficial, never labeled, that was just where the slums used to store their dead.
Where once he had buried his mother.
Vincent stood beside him, his suit torn and rumpled, bloodstained. The mission had gone all wrong. And they had ended up here, when it all died down, standing where they had once buried his mother, left a tiny stone. Said a few words and stood over the stone and tried to remember his mother.
The graveyard was gone. Just a petrol station, cracked and broken, half the lights fizzled out and Vincent Valentine beside him, silent and bloodstained. Veld knew he was a mess, just like Vincent, just as bloodstained and wrecked, just as much as Vincent was, but this.
This was something else.
This was the graveyard where so many of the slums had taken their dead, paid their respects, paved over and forgotten.
"Veld?" Vincent still had something of a sharp accent to his words, raised in Wutai.
"Hm?"
"This was something, once."
"I don't understand." His words were clipped, small. "It was something?"
"When I lived here, this was where we used to bury our dead."
Vincent's hand closed around Veld's, squeezed. A small gesture, simple. A tiny comfort. He rubbed his thumb over Veld's knuckles, silently letting him process the station, the neon bleeding and dirt and grass in the pavement, nothing left of the tiny grave stones, the flowers people would leave around where they had buried their loved ones.
Veld leaned into him, let himself take comfort in the silent gesture, tried to remember where he had placed his mother's stone.
