After years spent in North Africa, Koenraad Akermann had to confess his defeat and a grave stain on his Belgian pride: he didn’t have an appropriate wardrobe for Whitby’s autumn, let alone winter. Since his life has almost exclusively taken place in a Mediterranean climate for the last three years or so and his body had been getting through a lot of changes at the same time, Koerd had just discarded whatever was no longer of use, preferring to travel light.

There was also a more obscure reason for it: since he had contracted malaria, his body had changed a lot and the few survivors of his cleanse just didn’t fit that well anymore. He had known for a long time he was coming to Whitby, of course, and that should have informed his decisions, but somehow the intermittent sickness had eaten away not only the energy he would have needed to actually get a tailor to make him the right clothes but also to even remember that had been the plan all along. It was amazing, really, how many things unplanned illness could do to a person.

However, Koerd desperately wanted to take a walk on his own today, so he had resigned himself to wearing the only thing fit for a September day in Whitby: a black mourning suit. 

That was how it came that Koenraad Akermann found himself looking like a melancholic man in mourning clothes close to the site of a funeral that had been disrupted by the absence of one of the participants, a young man with rather bad health and notable stature that was currently strongly sought by half of his family, distant or otherwise. A good chunck of them had also never seen the man as a fully grown man, so the risk of confusion proportionally increased.

"There you are, sir!" A thin figure in a long black cassock approached Koerd.

Gabriel had offered himself for the search party, eager to get away from the portion of the family who didn't seem to care about the young man's disappearance. He had felt the tension during the ceremony - seen the hostile glances, the icy handshakes, heard the occasional whispering, and even the church had seemed a few degrees colder than on a usual September day during the Mass - and he knew there was conflict about the inheritance. The poor fresh widow herself was not even dead yet. He couldn't blame her great-nephew for leaving as soon as he could, but all the same he had promised her he'd look for the man.

Those guests who had cared to go looking - Gabriel hoped they were in the will and the others were not - had spread out: some had gone back to the graveyard, some had gone in the direction of the station, and Gabriel and others had spread out in random directions. He hadn't expected to be the one to find the young man, but he was glad he was.

"Your great-aunt is very concerned about you. Surely you wouldn't leave without a goodbye?" He stretched his arm in the direction of man's shoulder as if to wrap it around him consolingly, to beckon him to walk with him.