Lingering Grave Dirt

Rating: T

Summery: Post Isla Yura party. They thought Liam was dead. They buried him. He wasn't. Now no one wants to deal with the consequences.

Characters: Liam, Sharon, Break

Comments: This idea popped into my head when I read calliope-love's 'Aftershock' right after working on my fic 'Fine'. It was just such a… creepy idea I couldn't help write it.

1- Now

Liam woke screaming.

It was the kind of scream that means the waker has been screaming for a long time in his dream and it has only just broken through to reality. He clawed the air above him, desperately trying to push away the dark, close ceiling of cloth which had ripped away to reveal smooth and solid wood.

It took him a full minute to realize that he was awake and all his fingers were actually clawing at was thin air, there was no wood, no cloth, only empty space. He was no longer in the coffin.

Sitting up he threw the covers off, swinging his legs off the bed and letting his feet find the boots that had been left on the floor. The room him was in, perfectly fine when he had gone to sleep, was suddenly far too small, far too close, and he felt like he could barely breathe with the weight of those walls pressing in on him.

He was completely unsurprised to find that he had fallen asleep in his clothes, his sleep had been so erratic and broken lately that he hardly bothered changing out of the day's clothes when he fell into bed. Having slipped his feet into his boots he staggered to upright, reaching over to snag his coat off the back of the desk chair.

It wasn't the Pandora uniform coat, he had been put on leave for the next month, overly so his wounds from the Isla Yura mission could heal, but he occasionally suspected the higher ups of Pandora had doubts as to his sanity after-

-the darkness seemed to swallow his screams as he clawed at the wood above him, his skin cracked and bleed but he didn't -couldn't- stop. They would burry him al-

-he shivered and pulled his coat on but the movement didn't help with the sense of closeness, the feeling of suffocating. The walls were suddenly so close he could have sworn if he stretched his arms out he would be able to touch both at the same time. There wasn't enough room; he was going to be crushed-

Liam bolted for the balcony that was connected to his room, throwing himself out into the cold air with relief. He rested his forehead against the chilly stone of the railing, breath puffing out in white clouds.

Outside. Safe.

No longer buried. He was fine.

It would be nice if he could get his dreams to believe that.

He clutched the rail as if it was only thing keeping him from drowning and tried to anchor himself back in the real world with the feel of the cold marble under his forehead and the now familiar ache in his healing shoulder. That dream came every night, without fail, and he knew from experience that if he tried to go back to sleep it would only come again. The second round of that dream was always harder to break free from than the first and tonight Liam really didn't feel up to the fight.

All he wanted was sleep, he felt like he hadn't had an interrupted night of sleep since-

- "I have to… help…Xerx…"-

-he clutched the railing until his knuckles creaked and tired to force the feeling that he was trapped in a small space away. This was ridiculous, he had resigned himself to the possibility of this conclusion the moment he had called on the March Hare. He'd known that it was all too likely he'd wake up (if he woke up at all) in a coffin, buried under six feet down in the earth and left to rot.

He'd known the risks and called on March Hare anyway. Now he was going have to live with the consequences-

-drowning darkness, the space was too small, and he was trapped, no matter how much he tore at the wood of the low ceiling there was no way he could escape-

-Liam clenched his teeth, focusing on the cold marble so hard the shadows of the dream were almost forced from his mind.

Almost.

Living with the consequences. As much as he could.

2- Then

-consciousness had come back so slowly he didn't even wonder about the darkness at first, it was only after a moment's blinking into it that he realized that it hadn't been pitch black in the room where'd he'd called on March Hare's power. Why was it suddenly so dark?

He went to put a hand in front of his face to see if he could see it and was surprised to find he was in a narrow space. Where was he?

A few moment's work got both his hands up, they found the top of the space he was in far too quickly, it was a very low ceiling. It felt like cloth under his hands, when he pressed on it he could feel, under the thin layer of padding the cloth covered he could feel wood. For some reason the shape felt like it was familiar, as if he had seen something with this kind of flat top and straight walls before.

Now that he was focusing on his surroundings he realized he was lying on what felt like something padded, it felt like the same texture of cloth under his fingers.

A coffin.

He was in a coffin.

Slamming his hands against the ceiling -lid- proved that it wouldn't rise, even when he put all the strength behind the shove. He was trapped.

That was when he really started panicking and-

3- Now

Sharon was suffering from insomnia. She couldn't fall asleep for the life of her, so she had wrapped her dressing gown around herself, shoved her feet into slippers, and gone for a walk, hoping that she would make herself tired by a stroll. The Rainsworth mansion was chilly at night and empty too, everyone was fast asleep long ago.

This wasn't a completely unfamiliar situation, back in the old days, back before a certain Xerxes-nii had dropped from the Abyss, when she had a nightmare she would immediately go find out if Liam was staying at the mansion; if he was she would only have to say nightmare and he would be out of bed.

They'd spent many a night walking though the empty halls of the mansion, until she started knuckling her eyes tiredly and he guided her back to her rooms. Break had taken up these duties when Liam had started his work at Pandora and she'd made herself grow out of needing someone's comfort after a nightmare quickly. She never liked Break thinking she was being childish.

Besides that she wouldn't have gone to him with her sleeplessness for two other more pressing reasons, the first being that Break needed all the sleep he could get to recover from being wounded and the second that her servant had been in a strange mood every since the Isla Yura disaster.

She was fairly sure she knew the reason. It was Liam, of course. Something about the way their little group of three worked made Break extremely moody every time something happened to one of them; though when it was Liam Break was always doubly as grumpy, especially around the person in question. Which was unfortunate because Liam was really much better at getting Break out of a fowl mood than she had ever been.

And when there was the whole problem of Liam himself, he was almost as bad as Break, perhaps worse because he put a lot of effort into convincing everyone that he was fine. But Sharon had known him for even longer than Break and she could tell that what had happened had left it's mark on her friend in more than just shadowed eyes.

She had never seen him so quiet and jumpy, just being in a room with too many people in it seemed to set him on edge. And he was so pale… Sharon was starting to wonder if he slept at all the dark circles under his eyes were so deep.

Still, considering what he had gone through it would have been downright eerie for him to be back to normal as if nothing had happened. But this… she didn't know what to do. Which was another issue that led back into the first one because the person she would go to for advice on how to best help Liam was Break, except that bringing up Liam to Break was very much not a good idea at the moment.

She sighed. When had life gotten so difficult and why were all the people closest to her so stubborn?

Drawing her nightgown around herself she pushed to door to the balcony open on a sudden whim, maybe a bit of night air would clear her head. She rested her hands on the balcony rail and took a deep breath of the cold air, which smelled sharp, like it was going to snow.

It was out of the corner of her eyes that she saw someone was on the adjacent balcony. She had missed them at first because they weren't standing, but a slight movement made her glance over and recognize who it was.

She ran to the edge of her own balcony and hiked up her skirts.

4- Then

Liam Lunettes' body had lain in state for a week and a half before Rufus Barma finally made the call. He was dead.

Probably.

But that was the trouble, wasn't it? After the party Barma had meet those who had the right to know -a select group who started with Break, but also included Sharon, Gilbert, Oz, and Alice by proxy because she refused to be separated from Oz- and carefully explained to them the power of Liam's chain.

There had been a whole range of reactions, from contemplative- Sharon, to surprised- Gilbert, to murderously angry- Break. Barma had been lain the issue out before then with no indication as to his feelings on the matter, he could have been discussing last week's weather for all the expression his face had shown.

It was a problem though, no one could be sure if Liam was dead or alive and the uncertainty was especially hard on Break, who would sit for long periods of time staring at Liam's body in the Pandora morgue before storming away to brood in obscure parts of the Rainsworth estate.

Even obvious cues, like that complete absence of any kind of rot or decay around the 'body', couldn't be trusted in this case. It was a well documented fact that sometimes contractor's bodies didn't show any sign of death for some time (even as long as months, it had been said) because there was so much residual power of the Abyss in their bodies. This only made a complicated issue even worse since now there was no definite way to tell if Liam was really dead or merely looked dead.

And so the 'body' had been cleaned of blood and grime, its wounds tended to, and was left lying on a slab in the morgue.

It had continued that way for a week and a half, a stalemate, an impasse, and no one knew what to do. Finally Rufus Barma made the decision. He ordered a funeral prepared.

But he also ordered that none of the… things usually done to further preserve a body before it was buried be done this time. Just in case.

Because even though he had made the call and pronounced his servant dead even he couldn't be completely sure.

5- Now

A gentle hand touched the back of his neck. "Liam?" a voice asked.

He looked up into a slightly blurred face -he'd forgotten to grab his glasses when he left his room- but he knew who it was in any case. "Miss Sharon?"

"Are you alright?" She asked. "You don't look well."

"I…" what should he say? What was safe to say? And where had she even come from? Glancing sideways he answered the last question. There was another balcony next to this one, the climb over wouldn't be too difficult, especially for Sharon, who had terrified the life out of him by climbing many a balcony when they were younger.

Still looking for his answer Liam finally convinced his fingers to let go of the railing, and he sat back on his knees, dropping his hands into his lap.

Sharon drew up her skirts and sat, cross-legged, next to him. "Can't sleep either?" she asked when the silence between them made it clear he couldn't find an answer to her question.

"No. Rather the opposite."

"Oh." She gave him a little smile, "Well, I wouldn't want to wish my sleeplessness on anyone else so that's a good thing. Is it…" she glanced over her shoulder at the room behind them, "I know that small rooms… I noticed you don't like them very much."

That was not something he would have expected, he had thought he had done a not too bad job of keeping things together around others, then again, Sharon had known him for a long time. "Small rooms are fine." Liam said, then added when she gave him a look that told him she wasn't buying it, "Most of the time."

"And now they're not?" she asked, her voice leading.

"Nighttime." he explained shortly. "It's fine during the day, but once it gets dark…" The shadows threatened to encroach again and he shook his head, trying to force them back.

Her hand was very warm when she placed it over his, or maybe it was just that he was very cold. "Is it dreams too?"

He started a little at that, he had thought he had done such a good job of fooling everyone, how on earth could she put her finger right on the problem? "H-how?"

"There are shadows under your eyes. And you always look tired, even though you're constantly turning in for the night early. Are they that bad?"

"Yes." Liam resolutely refused to elaborate on that, Sharon did not need to know exactly how bad they were.

Her hand squeezed his in a silent comfort. "I'm sorry." was all she said.

6- Then

It had been a somber funeral, not that there was such a thing as cheerful burial, with grief hanging heavy in the air. The holy man's words had been thankfully brief, then speeches were made by Sharon and Rufus Barma, which had been sad and heartfelt and not too long. Notably Xerxes Break didn't speak; he was standing near the open grave, next to the coffin, looking as if it would take wild horses to drag him away from that spot. His face was angry and he glared at Barma the entire time the Duke spoke.

Finally the ceremony was over and the coffin was lowered into the grave. With nothing else holding them there the guests began to drift away, murmuring in low voices about the ceremony, the deceased, and how much he would be missed. The grave diggers were just starting to shovel dirt into the grave when Break cocked his head to the side and said, "Does anyone else hear that?"

Sharon internally groaned. It had been going so well, she had just started guiding him away from the graveside and he had actually been moving with her. "Hear what?" she said, more to humor him than anything else.

Break turned back to the grave, frowning. "It sounds like-"

"I hear it too!" Gilbert received a glare from Sharon for that, he wasn't helping. "Really," he told her, "Listen!"

With a sigh she dropped Break's hands and listened. They were telling the truth, there was a sound, from down in the grave. "It sounds like… like thudding. And… and like there's someone… screaming…"

Even the gravediggers were pausing, shovels piled high with earth frozen in midair.

"That's not possible." The voice came from Rufus Barma, who was standing not too far away, but even he too was frowning, a hand going to his ear. "There's no way…"

And that was when the chain appeared over the grave, squeaking angrily at them.

"The March Hare." Barma breathed. "That's not-"

Break reached over and grabbed him by his coat. "Has anyone else made a contact with March Hare?"

"No…" Barma said, his voice vague and shocky as he stared at the angry chain. "Not even an illegal contractor."

"Then that," Break pointed at the March Hare, somehow knowing (or perhaps sensing) exactly where it was, "Is impossible too."

"You mean-" Gilbert began and the cut himself off by dashing to the grave. He pushed one of the gravediggers out of the way and jumped down into the hole, landing heavily on the coffin.

For a moment all was quiet under his feet, then there was the definite sound of someone slamming their palms against the inside of the coffin. Gilbert looked up at the ring of faces around the opening of the grave. "He's alive." he said, eyes wide. "He's actually alive.

He went on this knees, digging at the dirt to one side of the coffin.

"What are you doing?" Oz demanded from ground level. "Get him out!"

One of the gravediggers respectfully pulled him out of the way and passed his shovel down to Gilbert, "He can't open what he's standing on, sir. William," he snapped to the other gravedigger, "Go get the earth basket from the shed. Hurry!"

Accepting the shovel from the gravedigger Gilbert hastily hacked out a space for him to stand to the side of the coffin, shoveling the excess dirt into the basket the other gravedigger breathlessly lowered down to him. Only a few minutes work had him a enough space. He tossed the shovel back up to gravedigger and crammed himself into the hole, mentally cursing the fact that there was so much of him to cram.

Once he at last managed to get himself turned around Gilbert reached down and worked his fingers under the lid. With a grunt of effort he pried it up a foot and then two, balancing the wooden lid on his shoulder as he reached into the coffin. Desperate, bloody hands latched onto his and Gil dragged a shaking, very obviously alive form out of the darkness.

The grip on his arms was so tight it made Gilbert wince, but since he had just pulled the gripper out of a coffin that made sense. "…Liam?" he asked cautiously.

The figure he was pretty much holding upright went suddenly still.

"Mister Liam?" he asked again in the midst of the thick silence that his dragging the live man from the coffin had produced in the people watching from above.

Very, very slowly the figure he was holding looked up at Gil, revealing… eyes gone so wide the white was visible all around. Gilbert had never, not even in the Mad Hatter chain, seen eyes so lacking in sanity as the two that were staring up at him.

"I'm alive," Liam whispered and even though he was looking straight at him, something about the way his eyes weren't actually focused on him that made Gil think he wasn't actually looking at him. The fingers that were clutching at his were bleeding, the fingernails torn away and skin worn right off. "Please… don't bury me."

And then, mercifully, he passed out.

7- Now

Sitting next to Liam, watching the way his expression went vague and noticing how he very firmly shook his head, seeming to come back to reality, Sharon felt the worm of worry niggle a little deeper into her mind. She didn't know how to deal with this, or even if it was something she could deal with.

Ever since the… funeral she felt like there was a vast distance between her and Liam, and it was only growing wider. They had once been very close, but that had been a long time ago, before things had gotten so very complicated. Now Break knew Liam much better than she could claim to, so while she could tell he was suffering, she wasn't sure what to do about it.

As soon as she was sure Liam wouldn't go insane from the enclosed space she was going to lock Break and him together in a room and let Break magically fix the problem. She was fairly sure Xerxes Break was capable of fixing just about anything, even the fine tremor that was running through the hands under hers.

And even if he couldn't Liam would at least talk to him, which he clearly wouldn't with her. It rather felt like no one told her things anymore, but that could just be her being bitter about the rather obvious fact that Liam had known about Break's blindness before her.

She just had to hope… that by being here for him, like this, would be enough for now.

8- Then

There had actually been scratches on the inside of the coffin, Gil had seen them after he'd handed the unconscious body up to the eager hands above. He'd cautiously lifted the lid of the coffin and seen how the cloth of the coffin lid had been torn away, the wood laid bare. The scratches were deep, he winced when he ran his hand over them and felt how far down they went. And they were bloody too.

"What did we do?" he whispered.

"We've buried him alive, that's what we've done." snapped a voice from ground level.

Gilbert looked up to see that it was Break, who was looking in the direction the group that was taking Liam away had went. His face was drawn into a snarl.

"It was an accident."

"No." Break snapped. "And now we've made a horrible thing worse."

Remembering those senseless eyes, the pure insanity, Gilbert shivered. "You're right. We have."

Who could have blamed Liam Lunettes for being stark raving mad when he woke? No one. But the man woke alarmingly sane despite the exact way he had woken. When someone wakes in a blind panic and almost claws off the face of the doctor that tried to hold him down so he wouldn't reopen his shoulder wound it is not usual for them to snap out of it as soon as they are no longer held down.

He might have fallen out of the bed and torn open three stitches in his shoulder but once on the floor his wits seemed to return to him. He actually responded to questions and managed to ask his several of his own, he didn't try to hurt anyone else either, proving that the slightly clawed doctor had been a mistake, a pure moment of panic.

Who could have guessed Liam Lunettes would have been strong enough to shake off an encounter like that? Pandora was already reeling from the news that he was alive at all, the further news that he seemed to have survived the trauma with his wits intact was not only shocking but unexpected.

A stream of visitors soon descended on the sickroom, namely Sharon, Oz, Gil, Lord Barma, and several other Pandora members. Break was very noticeably missing from the list of visitors.

Liam's visitors found him perhaps a bit somber and rather pale but other than that he seemed quite normal. Though he never asked for it most of the visitors mentioned Break and his continued absence from Liam, as if the fact was something they could barely believe. No one overtly said that they had tried to get Break to visit and been refused but Sharon's distinct look of guilt when the subject came up spoke volumes.

Still, Liam did not seem all that upset at Break's shunning, he would just use the excuse that Break much be very busy at the moment and change the subject as soon as it was polite.

He seemed to get better in bits and pieces, loosing most of that haunted air he had carried and healing in body if not completely in mind. Duke Barma gave him leave to spend the remainder of the leave he had been given at the Rainsworth estate, probably hoping distance would make it more likely that he would forgive himself for what he'd unknowingly ordered done to his servant.

At the Rainsworth mansion Liam kept to himself often, though he didn't seem to be actively avoiding others, he just tried not to be crowded.

There was the notable night that Sharon had insisted he take tea with her in her study-an attempt to get Break and Liam near each other again, which failed when Break took the seat farthest from Liam- luckily she had invited several others in attempt to make her ploy look less obvious.

And so the room filled up with laughing, talking people and became quite hot, it was not a large room to begin with and there were a little more than half a dozen people in it. If anyone had been walking Liam closely -which Break was, even though all he could see were the barest of outlines and thus missed this detail- they would have noticed him get paler and paler as the level of noise in the room increased with the rising conversation.

Finally, when the temperature in the room had risen to just above stifling and the conversation was in full flow Liam carefully put down his teacup. His hand was shaking. Then, quietly, with very little fuss, he passed out, falling sideways out of his chair. Only Oz jumping out his chair and reaching out kept him from cracking his head open on the floor.

Break's chair scraped loudly in the silence of the room as he rose. Without a word he walked from the room.

After that Sharon gave up her attempts to get them to reconcile and just left them alone.

Most left Liam completely alone too, he was on leave and, to the casual eye, seemed to be recovering. Maybe he was best left to his own devices for a while, he seemed to do better when not confronted by to many people at once.

And never mind the dark bruises under his eyes.

9- Now

Break ached.

Well, that was to be expected, his body might now show its age but it certainly knew it. And it really did like to remind him exactly how old he was getting at night, namely when he would rather sleep. Even a long, blisteringly hot, bath didn't lesson the aches enough to let him sleep so he decided to try to walk them off, which had never worked before but he wasn't about to let something like precedence keep him from trying.

He made it all the way to the other end of the mansion and back before he gave in to the urge to follow were his feet very much wanted to take him and headed down a side hallway. He opened a closet and followed the secret passage in it, moving mostly by touch and memory until he found the exit that led right into Liam's wardrobe.

All the better to check on him without being seen.

That had been his own little secret these past couple of weeks, since things were still too… complicated for him to talk to Liam during daylight hours. There were things that had to be said between them that he had no will to get into yet, but while Liam was asleep it was perfectly fine to sneak in to lurk in his closet every once and a while. He kept the visits short since he was tempting fate as it was, but he just couldn't seem to keep himself from coming back.

But tonight was different, tonight there were no sounds at all from the other side of the door, even though it was far past midnight. He opened the wardrobe a crack, but still heard no sign that Liam was in his room. That was enough to make him worry that the man might have wandered off somewhere, and it wasn't until he'd crept out into the room that he heard the low murmur of conversation out on the balcony. For a second Break froze, caught between the wardrobe and the door with nowhere to escape. Mentally he winced, torn over whether he should bolt back into the wardrobe or stay.

However Sharon's voice called from the balcony, "Who's that?" and the rustle of skirts announced that she had walked back into the room. "Break," her voice was low, as if she didn't want whoever else was out on the balcony overhearing her, "When did you…" she trailed off, probably noticing the open wardrobe door. "You've been checking on him."

"Not exactly." He said, not willing to admit that she had hit the mark.

She ignored his protest and took his hand, pulling him toward the door to the balcony. "Come talk to him."

He tried to remove his arm but she wouldn't let him go. "I don't think that's a good idea right now."

"Then when were you planning to talk to him?" Sharon demanded. "Or were you planning to avoid him forever?"

"It's not that I just… I can't face him. Not yet."

The anger was clear in her whisper and in the way her hand tightened around his. "He needs someone right now and it's not me, it's you. I'm not someone he can talk to, not about this… it needs to be you."

"But I-" Break cut himself off when he realized how close the end of that sentence would have been to flat out wining. 'I don't want to' or 'I don't feel like it' just wouldn't do. "Fine." he muttered and let her tow him to the door to the balcony.

There he paused, not quite able to force himself over the threshold.

"… Break?" Liam's voice was small, hesitant.

Break put a smile on his face, stepping over the threshold as he said, "And whoever else would it be?"

10- Later

Liam woke with a gasp, scream stifled behind his teeth.

He bolted up out of bed, not bothering with coat or boots, catching his toe on the edge of the door to the balcony and stumbling out into the night air. Letting his back fall against the railing he breathed deeply of the mercifully fresh air and slid down to the ground. At last he'd gotten the knack of getting out before the walls started to close in on them.

Though, to tell the truth, they were doing so only at night now.

One of the primary reasons for that was sitting on the railing, balancing a tin of candies on the very tips of pale fingers. "So," Xerxes Break said, "Would you like to talk about it?"

Liam sighed and ran his hands back through his hair, making it stand up in sweat slicked spikes. Finally he said, "… yes."

End.