“…Holy fuck, Draven, What did you do?”
It’s still early dark out when Draven walks in the door calling loudly for James and hauls the steel box onto the table, scattering mud and soil. He was grinning from ear to ear. James looks at him from behind the kitchen counter with a look of abstract horror.
“Draven,” he warns. “Please don’t tell me that’s what I think it is.”
“It’s dad.”
“Fuck,” says James, with all his heart and soul. Draven knew he wouldn’t be behind robbing his dad’s grave, which is why he did it his own damn self.
“No no no! Not fuck. Like, hear me out here.” He knows that James loves him more than anything because he doesn’t immediately take out his phone and dial for Site Psychiatric and that means more than anything to him. He stands and crosses his arms across his chest, looking at the plain urn in front of them.
“Draven,” he starts. “This is literally fucking—”
“My dad hated the Foundation,” Draven says. “As in, he loved his job, but hated the organization, and you know something, they hated him right back. So why the fuck do they get to keep him?”
James stutters half a reply, then falters, then halts. It’s clear by how he looks at him that he doesn’t approve, and a week ago Draven wouldn’t have either. He raises an eyebrow as if to say you can’t think up a reason for me not to dig up my dead father’s urn from the site graveyard.
“…You robbed his grave,” James says, finally.
“Hell right, I did,” Draven smiles. “And I put the dirt right back where they had it and I brought him home. No one saw me. It’s like they’ll never know he’s gone. I left the gravestone.”
“What if they check?”
“Oh, a vital hole in my plan! The annual Foundation grave check to make sure the Directors are still dead. Silly me.”
“You’re testing me, Draven.”
“James, I just dug my dad up and brought him home because of something I read in a Stephen King novel, and you’re still here.”
“I know, right?” James said, a little bite in his voice. “Looks like we’re all surprising ourselves this morning.”
He paused. Draven could tell that James was starting to warm up to the idea; not hot to it, but no longer going to call site security. He smiled across the table, hands covered in mud.
“I’m lucky I’m cute, huh?” Draven finally replies, trying to warm up the silence. He wasn’t quite out of the doghouse yet, and he got a big feeling that James was cutting him some significant slack because of the grieving process already.
James smirked and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Oh, Draven, tonight? This? You are very lucky that you’re cute. Just one thing though.” James brought his hands down from his glasses and gestured broadly to the urn. “…What are your plans here, exactly?”
Draven felt his heart drop and his smile waver, and James must have seen it, because he smiles ruefully and crossed his arms back across his Avengers t-shirt. “Ah. You don’t have one, do you?”
“Well, I didn’t think I would get this far,” smoothed Draven.
“Uh-huh.”
“My general idea was to put him somewhere he would have liked. You know? Scatter the ashes somewhere.” He thinks for a moment and comes up with the first thing that comes to mind, a place his father would drive to on the rare weekends he had free, listening to Johnny Cash and NPR and whatever local Polish stations the battered Jeep could pick up. “…Łeba. On the shore of the Baltic.”
James nodded silently.
“Look,” Draven said. “You’ve…put up with a lot of my shit. And I know you don’t like it when I pull random stunts like this, but in my defense, I don’t do it often, and this one’s really, really important. So I was kind of thinking, since we have the next week off, we could like, take him and get rid of the ashes, and then just…you know.” He thought of his father’s words, whatever makes you happy. “…Go…just…do something, just you and me. Like, just go exploring for a while.” He wrings his hands and looks at the floor. “…I don’t know. I just…need to get out of here for a few days.”
He doesn’t look up, although he knows that James is looking at him, scanning him, trying to decide if this was an easy cop-out or a genuine proposition. For a stretching moment, Draven imagines himself doing this alone. It sounds fucking awful.
He hears James sigh.
“You know what? Fuck it.” James grabs his backpack and car keys. “Fuck it. Let’s go take care of your dad.”
Draven smiles, holding back tears.
