Connor cleans up

It had been two months since his friend's disappearance, and while they didn’t want to see it, his family knew the chances in the first forty-eight.

They loved their son, him not being there wasn’t gonna change that, but grief made everything harder.

Especially without a body.

The search was still on for it, but it was a cold comfort in a world that had already taken him.

Connor wasn’t impressed with the investigation, but without any leads there wasn’t much to be done.

Their grief was palpable, enough so that Edwin’s sister had put him to the task of clearing his living space.

Connor, being what seemed like the closest person to Edwin, was obliged to.

Everyone grieves differently, but Edwin’s family as a whole doesn’t touch theirs.

They don’t talk about death, they wallowed in it, and while there was no body, it was no use keeping the lights on.

If you don’t visit thoughts of death they will chase you, and they were already caught.

So Connor, as loyal as they thought he was, cleaned his once best friend’s room.

He would ask for things, garbage bags for trash of course, and boxes for everything else.

He cleared the path for their recovery in that room.

The room bereft of most everything that could remind someone of Edwin was stark, with only the sheetless bed, a thoroughly cleaned desk, and a bedside table.

Everything left of his friend was in another room.

The last thing was the closet, his clothes were too familiar to simply parse out, so it had been saved for last.

Connor could’ve been held up by any of his other things, the bed in its frame, or being asked in the first place, but now, with the rest of Edwin’s life hidden away in a storage unit, this was where death caught up with him.

His friend was gone, and however close they’d been before, he had no clue how to look at things that actually mattered to him.

Because they were close and they had lost touch, and Edwin left him behind, for people who his family didn’t trust.

He was gone. And Connor needed to deal with the last of his things.

The closet door slid open.

Connor took as much in one arm as he could before dropping the mass on Edwin’s bed, one-thousand shades of nonsense he’d never so much as imagined on anyone but Edwin.

He couldn’t look too long before finding Edwin’s Shoes, organized in a way that seemed alien when compared to almost everything in his room.

Connor went about packing the shoes away as well, which was when he found the book.

It was a library book, and given how long it’d been since Edwin disappeared, he knew that it was likely overdue.

You weren’t supposed to just keep library books, this was a plainly understood facet of a standard public library. 

You borrowed, you didn’t take, and to do otherwise was to prove yourself to be an arse. 

His friend was an arse.

It wasn’t as if this was an unusual discovery, he knew the constraints of his friend’s ethics to be rather loose, and while he couldn’t ascertain whether or not he ever read the thing, he knew his friend.

Instead of letting his family make an heirloom out of it, Connor took it.

This if anything was the point where he should’ve rectified his mistake, as he didn’t give it back either.

It would be a while before he thought of it again, the book, or the experience thrust upon him by his likely dead friend’s family.

He didn’t end up bringing it back as the title “Of Hounds And Fortune” was apparently unknown and the year of publication had worn away.

Every location he called was a bust, no one had it, or had lost it, Connor was running out of leads.

To the point that even looking at the thing bothered him, as it blurred from his thoughts.

Life went on as normal, those who knew them both sharing often abrupt condolences, before scurrying off.

Those who didn’t, managed to avoid the subject which he preferred, he and Edwin weren’t close.

He disappeared; he can’t exactly be close anymore, let alone before.

Connor had to let go of that, no one wanted to hear misgivings of the dead.

Edwin was young, his death, his disappearance would always be tragic, no one needs to know how much a stranger Connor had been by then.

A dangerous life was a liability, no one cared about misused bodie’s or delinquents, and no matter the terms Edwin could never deserve that.

Simply never.

So Connor tried to pass for someone who was only handling the appropriate amount of pain.

He didn’t want to speculate on how his friend would see it, he did so anyway, Connor might’ve been a coward but that wasn’t new.

Edwin had dubbed him that for having a sense of fashion opposed to paisley.

He missed Edwin.

There were moments when he wanted to leave the caveat of ‘long before his disappearance’ behind, but Connor knew as sure as anything that to let that go was to invite worse things in.

How long had it been since they lost Edwin? they weren’t even looking for his body anymore.

His room is clean of everything that was his, his family is grieving quietly now, it was the normal pattern.

His case had gone cold.

Could he let go now?

Could grief take hold of a once loyal friend, and give him some peace?

When could he look up from the fractured memory of his friend and care for himself?

That was when he saw the book again.

He was certain the book had changed from “Of Hounds And Fortune” to “A Much Desired Friend”

Connor was rather disturbed by this, as books didn’t usually do that.

Connor had gotten the sense that this was the nature of the book, you take it, you forget it, it takes you.

Was this what solace was to him? he thought, as he finally flipped the pages.