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Simon enjoys reading to Kieren – it is something he likes to do in quiet moments, in stressful moments, when a now ex-follower shoots him a hateful glare or when the presence of Amy's ghost at the bungalow becomes too much. He reads to him at the same place every time; the graveyard ("Our final resting place,") is always quiet and peaceful, and neither of them can feel the cold anyway, so the soft breath of the wind between the graves only serves to rustle yellowing, well-loved pages and pull at the rise and fall of Simon's voice.
In a way, this is Simon's art. Where Kieren used paint and charcoal to pin down drifting thoughts Simon prefers his own voice, be it accompanied by his guitar or on its own, giving old words new life, and isn't that funny? That an undead man with arms bedecked by trackmarks can coil life into soft syllables, letting the pitch and cadence and tempo of his voice coax the phrases (those glorious phrases) to twist and paint the sky above them. He knows Kieren liked the sound of his voice – that was something he had told him before, and it helps to calm him, to soothe fretful thoughts with the knowledge that The First Risen appreciated it, appreciated the reading aloud in a quiet cemetery on an open hill.
The marble is solid against his back when he speaks today, and between the stanzas he likes to let his hand just lie between them, letting the feeling of that tiny 'what could be' fill the air between the two of them. Occasionally he will lift it, reposition himself even though his dead muscles no longer complain and move his hand to the gold lettering carved into the black stone; K – I – E – R… The motions relax him further still, because even if the fine nerves aren't working, aren't dusting his mind with the sensation of skin on the rough break of stone, the pressure alone is enough to distract his thoughts to kinder places when they start wandering again. The stone and the gold take him back to the paper, so that he can speak again.
Yeats was (would've been) one of Kieren's favourites, much as it was Simons. Those poems always took longer to read, simply because the taste of the words across his mind was something to be savoured. They were a treat, the book opened only on the worst and best of days, when memories skipped and mingled into a strange smoke that covered bad times with good – never masking them, never hiding them, but letting them be and exist and reminding him of times that were better. Reminding him that those times exist, even now.
But those times come further and further apart, and when Simon wakes to find his hand shaking, the moment of the bullet thudding into Kieren's head playing over and over in his mind, he knows it is time to join him in the ground.