The Bird They Buried

Depicts a character crawling out of their grave, memory loss and lightly touches on the concept of "scared they came back wrong"

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He shouldn’t be alive right now, he didn’t know how he knew it - but he did. That was the way it was supposed to go. If death and dirt covered coffins marked with carved stone meant anything it mean that, it was the one thing he was sure of as he blinked his eyes in the dark desperate for something to come into his vision as he banged on the wood above him desperately even as he struggled to fish out even his own name from the swimming fog in his mind.

At first there was nothing but that knowledge. That he shouldn’t be here. No breath. No pain. Just dark. Then all at once he realized his chest burned and his head throbbed and it was like he could feel the crushing, smothering weight of the dirt above him despite the barrier between him and it.

Buried.

The word surfaced before his name did, before any memory did, before he could even remember why he was so sure he shouldn’t be alive. Then something clicked, like some survival instinct or training that had been drilled into him had activated even though he couldn’t remember it.

Panic rose in him so sharp it nearly erased the pain in his lungs . He didn’t know where he was, not really. He didn’t know why everything hurt, he didn’t know his own name - but some part of him knew one thing for sure. He was not meant to be here.

His hands slammed upward. Wood cracked. Dirt shifted down around his face and he clawed at the dirt, fingernails splitting as something in his wrist twisted badly enough that he should have stopped. He didn’t. There was only one thought, shoved through his head by pure instinct.

Up. He had to get up. He had to get out.

He could feel the pressure of the dirt collapsing around him, splinters bit into his hands as he tore at the wood. His shoulders scraped against the edges of the whole as he pulled himself up. The end had already happened once, hadn’t it? Why was he still fighting?

Somewhere in the back of his head there was the shape of a memory.

A scream. A twinge of pain at the back of his skull that had nothing to do with the current circumstance. An explosion too close and too strong and too bright.

Then nothing.

He didn’t understand it, but his body remembered what his mind didn’t. It remembered pain. It remembered fear. It remembered learning how to survive no matter the odds.

He dug until his fingers hit cold wet air. Rain had started sometime while he was under there, and both hands shoved up through the mud and rain hit his face in sharp little needles. Something about it felt familiar. The world around him was all storm, black sky, wet stone and dead flowers.

He rolled sideways onto the ground and coughed up dirt until his throat felt raw as rain slid down his face. Breathing hurt. Everything hurt. He lay there a long time, staring up at the sky with empty eyes while thunder roared in the distance. Strangely he felt nothing, only the instinct to keep moving.

He pushed himself up on shaking arms. His fingers were torn and bleeding. Dirt clung to his skin in thick, wet layers. His clothes were ruined, or what was left of them was. He looked like someone dragged out of…well a grave. The cemetery felt quieter around him than it actually was, sound fading into a dull ringing in his ears.

His head turned toward a stone near him that gleamed under the rain. There were words on it, a name he couldn’t make out in the dark. He knew the stone belonged to him even if he didn’t know why, even if he couldn’t remember what had led him to this moment. Someone had buried him here. Someone had cared enough to make sure he had a resting place.

He turned away from it and started walking without really deciding to, his body understood movement. It knew that standing still in a graveyard could get you killed here, even if he wasn’t sure where here was. So he walked.

He stumbled out of the cemetery and into the looming city as the storm thickened overhead. No one seemed to pay attention to him, some part of him wasn’t surprised. This was a city that had swallowed enough tragedy that a dirty stranger didn’t register, a boy who looked like he’d crawled out of a grave was just something else to looked past.

As he moved through streets he trusted his body to lead him. Every passing car made him flinch, and rain soaking through the ruined suit he wore made him shiver. The cold barely registered compared to the ache inside him though. He was hungry. Some distant part of him recognized the hunger, but his body didn’t feel used to it anymore.

He could remember little things, not facts or words or clear memories at all really, but pieces. A smell like damp rock and old furniture. A laugh, low and sharp, that might have been his own. Someone talking to him with words he couldn’t make out but in a way that felt warm. A hand on the back of his neck.

Then it would all vanish again, like he was trying to grab fog. He hated that more than the pain. How close the memories felt and how impossible they were to hold onto. He hated that he knew there was something missing and couldn’t tell whether the missing thing was a person or a part of himself that he’d never get back.

Had he come back wrong? Had he not been meant to come back at all?

On the second day he slept in a half-collapsed storage building behind a row of shops near the edge of the city. He woke up when somebody came close enough to make the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He left before anyone could find him. He stole a loaf of bread from a market stall and hated himself for half a second before he tore into it with both hands. He drank water from a public fountain with his face hidden in his sleeve and looked over his shoulder the entire time.

Over the next few days he survived. Then some men in an alley thought they had found easy prey. They were wrong.

He didn’t remember choosing to fight, only that he moved on instinct when they came at him. A hand caught at his wrist, a shove into brick and someone’s head hitting the wall hard enough to go limp before he flipped over top of the other man and drove his knees right into his back. His body moved with a kind of graceful violence that his mind remembered even though he didn’t.

Afterward one of the men was groaning on the pavement and another had blood on his face and the third was gone. He stood over them breathing hard, his hands clenched so tightly they hurt. He didn’t remember deciding to leave before the police arrived. He just did.

Later there was a woman who tried to pick his pocket and nearly lost two fingers when he caught her wrist. He stared at her and she stared back, shocked. Then she jerked her hand free and ran.

He did not know who he was, but he knew that he wasn’t someone who was going to hurt someone just trying to survive. That didn’t mean he wasn’t angry about it.

Far away from the cemetery and the rain and the ruined boy wandering through the city on an island that no one who wasn’t supposed to knew existed, a woman listened to a report with her face entirely still. A man was kneeling in front of her, telling her the rumors he had heard from the city he had been stationed in. Most people would have laughed and called it fear and exaggeration and set the report aside. She did not, because the boy he described matched a description it shouldn’t have.

She sat very quietly while he spoke, her fingers resting against the arm of the chair in a way that looked calm and was not. When he finished, he waited for her response or dismissal. She gave him neither.

She thought of the man who had once held that boy like the world itself had cracked open in his hands. Thought of the way he had gone quiet and angry after the funeral, the way the city had felt the shape of that death even if it didn’t know that’s what it was. Thought of the grief that had settled in him like a second skin, rigid and permanent and impossible to remove.

She didn’t know that kind of pain, but she knew enough to know she would never be the same if she did. It was the kind of anger and grief that consumed everything in its path. That followed you everywhere you went and made every silence and every moment feel like too much and not enough at the same time.

He had buried a son and kept walking, and the people around him hadn’t been spared by that. She had no doubt that he had done it the way he did everything else. Badly. Stubbornly. With too much guilt and too little mercy for himself.

She also knew that if she had lost her own son like that, if the world had taken him from her and left her with only memory and grief and an empty place where a living person had once been, she would not have survived it as she was. She would have wanted the world to burn for daring to leave her with that kind of hole inside her, and she would have made it happen. Nothing save for death itself would have been able to stop her.

So hearing that he might be alive, she understood the loss in a way she would never say out loud. She understood his father’s pain because she understood what it had done to him and what it would do to her if she ever felt it.

She couldn’t sit by and do nothing while a man she loved grieved in a way that made him a shadow of his former self. Not when it seemed that somehow the boy had come back, and if death had failed and the boy had returned then something had gone wrong.

If he was moving on instinct alone, then he would either break himself apart on his own or be broken by someone else. She had no intention of allowing either of those things to happen.

It took very little time to find him, but then everything he had learned from his father had been learned from her own. As she watched him before approaching she could tell that he was hurt and hungry and afraid, even if he didn’t know that was what the feeling was.

She found him on the edge of the city in an industrial stretch where the buildings leaned too close together and the streetlights seemed more decoration than function. He was sitting on the curb outside an abandoned warehouse with his head bent forward and his arms hanging loose between his knees.

He looked younger from a distance, and some maternal part of her made her want to help him more than she already did seeing the state he was in. But there was something wrong in the way he held himself. Not just hurt or exhausted, but something between confusion and clarity, like he had been taken apart and put back together in the wrong order.

When she finally approached, she stopped a few feet away, and he looked up slowly. His eyes were flat at first, then they sharpened, not in recognition of her but in recognition that she was dangerous.

He was on his feet in an instant, unsteady but ready, shoulders squaring and muscles coiling as if defending himself came naturally. He had met her before, when she had visited his father. He should know her. He obviously didn’t. He knew enough to be wary of her.

“Hello,” she said.

His gaze swept over her. The clothes she wore were distinct, tailored to let her move through any place without drawing the wrong sort of attention. Her stance was sure and straight, posture impeccable but relaxed, as if she cared how she presented herself but wasn’t worried about the idea of him attacking. Her hands were clasped loosely behind her back, and she kept her distance.

He said nothing. He had found his voice in the almost two weeks he’d been wandering the edges of the city, but something about her was both familiar and deeply unsettling. Like seeing her wasn’t surprising, but she shouldn’t be here and he didn’t know why.

She could see the distrust in him, could see the defensiveness and confusion buried under his expression. He had always worn anger as well as he did joy, even now with no memory.

“You were more difficult to locate than I would have expected,” she told him.

That earned her a sharp look of suspicion. For a second it almost looked like recognition. Not of her, but of her tone.

He was more aware than she expected. Less aware than he used to be, but the instinct of who he was was there even if he didn’t seem to fully remember. A dangerous combination for someone with his training.

“Who are you?” He asked at last, his voice rough from disuse after whatever had dragged him back through death and into the world again.

She let the question sit between them for a moment as her eyes scanned over him, the truth might send him running if he had enough of himself left within him to run - so she gave him the simplest version. “Someone who knows who you are.”

She could see the calculation happening behind his face, his body remembered the lessons he had been taught even if his mind hadn’t yet recalled the memories. He was still in there fighting. “You should come with me.”

He laughed, it wasn’t a real laugh - more like disbelief at the fact that she had said the words at all. “No.” The response was short, flat, absolute.

She had expected as much, her beloved raised fighters as stubborn as he. “You’re injured.”

He shrugged one shoulder like it didn’t matter, she could tell he was in pain just by the way he moved. “I can handle myself.”

She believed it, he could survive. But he couldn’t move forward, not in this state. She took in the dirt on his hands, the torn knuckles, the bruising on the side of his face, the way his eyes watched his peripheral vision without looking away from her.

He had been through hell already, and he still looked like he was waiting for the next fight. That was the moment she decided. Not that she would help him. She had already decided that, he was hers now as much as he was his father’s. She would help him find himself, and she would keep him from being lost again.

“You can, but that doesn’t mean you have to.”

He blinked at her, thrown off balance by the response. Most adults argued and tried to convince him to go with them somewhere that people could help him. He watched her silently before asking what should have been a simple question. “Have we met?”

Something warm flickered in her face, sharp and protective in a way that was both uneasy and comforting. “Yes.” His brow furrowed and he searched her face with new intensity, trying to find whatever piece of memory should have attached itself to her.

It didn’t come, and the frustration from that sharpened into anger quickly. “Then why don’t I know you?”

She stopped herself from answering with the full truth. ‘Because you are not whole. Because whatever pulled you back did not do it cleanly.’ Instead she said. “Because coming back from the dead isn’t always a clean process.”

He stared at her and the silence between them stretched. Wind moved trash across the street and somewhere nearby a siren wailed and faded. He looked worse after that, like the answer had confirmed something was wrong with him. Then his knees buckled.

It was sudden, one moment he was standing there glaring at her like he might bite and the next he swayed and caught himself too late. She moved before he hit the ground. The last of his resistance had drained out of him in a way that was both alarming and deeply familiar to her.

His father always ran himself to exhaustion, she wasn’t surprised that he naturally did too. She adjusted her grip and looked down at him for a long moment. There was dirt in his hair and his face was still too pale under the grime. There were bruises that could be explained with fighting to survive. After a moment she lifted him fully into her arms and turned away from the street.

For all his stubbornness he didn’t wake. Not when she carried him to the waiting vehicle, not when the doors shut, not when the road carried them further and further from the city where he had dragged himself out of a grave.

Only once, as the vehicle came to a stop and she lifted him into her arms to carry to the waiting boat did his head twitch against her shoulder. A tiny movement that was barely there, her expression didn’t change - but her grip tightened just slightly.