This is dedicated to Charles. A kinder, gentler man I have never known. You will be sorely missed, but you will be remembered.

grief

"It's a memorial. For my father. I want you to come. All of you can come. I...I would like it very much if you came."

The red eyed Christopher smiled slightly and turned away. His voice had been raw and thick, nasal from the tears he had cried. Keith watched the young man go, unsure if the vaguely empty, hollow feeling was normal. It wasn't that he didn't like Christopher--in fact, he counted the youth as relatively close friend. Not close like Sven was close or Lance was close (which was an entirely different type of closeness, but he wasn't quite sure what that was, exactly, but he thought he liked it, if he could ever figure out what that closeness was, precisely) but close enough, because there were very few people who could be close like Sven and no one would ever be close like Lance (or so he hoped). And Keith was certainly saddened by the loss of Chester, Christopher's father, because he had been one of the kindest, gentlest men that Keith had ever known. A surrogate father, since he rarely saw his, and a much nicer father than his own, one that always took time to say 'Hi' and buy him breakfast and listen to him.

It was just that, well, he was sort of numb. He didn't feel anything right now. Not love, not hate, not lust or pain or sadness or happiness. Well, maybe a little sadness, a little depression, a little loneliness when he was surrounded by his friends. But nothing really deep, just flitting, empty images of feeling. The illusion of feeling that emptied him and numbed him all at once, made him depressed but in a cold, distant, indifferent way, like a bystander looking in on someone else's world, a television world of sound and image that signified nothing. He should have been sad, but instead he was hungry and he wondered at that.

Wondered if any of it was real.

* * *

"You're going to go to the memorial service." Hunk's voice was a command and it rankled Keith.

"I guess so." Keith shrugged and slouched down in the car seat, not really wanting to talk about this. He turned slightly so that he could glare at Hunk, who didn't notice because he was watching the road except for when he was glancing at Keith to make sure that the younger boy understood that the command was not negotiable.

"There's no guessing. You're going. Christopher has always been a friend to you, and Chester has helped you out more than once." Hunk's eyes flickered to Keith, holding the younger's gaze for a second before returning once more to the road. "What day is it?"

"Thursday." Keith squirmed a little lower, hoping idly that if he did so Hunk would forget about him. It was entirely too quiet in the back of the car, Lance and Sven awkwardly silent. Keith wished they'd say something. Anything. "At six."

"You're going."

"I'll go with you," Lance said, quietly, leaning up and just barely touching his chin to Keith's shoulder. "If you want me to."

"Yeah. Sure. Whatever." Keith turned away and looked out the window and the car was quiet until they reached the school and Hunk dropped Lance and him off and Keith mumbled a hollow "good-bye."

"Hey, wait a sec." Hunk rolled the window down and Keith reluctantly came over and Hunk leaned out and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, just like he had done every day since he had first started taking Keith to school after their parents had gotten divorced--as if Hunk's kiss could ever replace his mother's. Except today, it wasn't the embarrassing, awkward peck of a nosy, kind of annoying, older brother, but was suddenly motherly and warm and...comforting. "Have a good day, okay? Have some fun."

"Yeah. Okay." Keith waved them off and turned and trudged away, and thought about all the reasons why he didn't want to go to the memorial service, and ranking high among those reasons was because it was during the week after graduation and he had a party to go to, and he had never even been to one of these things before, even though both his grandfathers had died that year and he hadn't even gone to their funerals.

He had escaped being confronted with death before. Why couldn't he do it again?

* * *

He started crying the minute he walked into the chapel and saw the "Mr. Fix-it-cart" that Chester had driven around their school for as long as he could remember. He stopped crying a couple of minutes after that, lips trembling as he pressed them together, eyes stinging with salt and hair still wet and tamed from the quick shower he had taken before rushing back to the school in his crappiest clothes and quick-changed in the back of his car while Lance pretended not to look. He slid into a seat near the back, Lance a warm presence at his shoulder and he kept his eyes down for the rest of the service, preferring to look at his clamped hands than at the flowers heaped on the alter and the picture of Chester and the family in the front. It was better to try and analyze where all this grief, this pain, came from because, really, Chester hadn't been that close of a friend.

At first, Keith had thought that it was just misplaced grief from the death of his grandfathers, who had been as old and grey looking as Chester but not nearly as nice. But the tears hurt a little too much to be just that, and he sniffled and teared up a little too much when he looked at the flower bedecked alter for just misplaced grief.

He kept his head bowed after the opening prayer, and during the old military men who spoke about Chester's dedication and then through Chester's supervisor and his coworkers and Chad, the eldest son, and he tried to figure out why he was crying and the snot was making his nose thick and painful and he hurt somewhere deep within his soul. He thought about death a lot, and about life, and even after the family had left he sat there and thought, head bowed, eyes weeping, nose dripping and hands sort of sticky and slimy all at once because he had forgotten to bring a handkerchief and had to wipe his nose on his hands. He thought about his grandfathers for a bit, remembering them not just as they were when they were dying of the only incurable disease, senile and cranky and frail and tiny in the big hospital bed, but as they had been when he had been a child, tall and strong and fun. He thought about Lance and Sven and Hunk and wondered if someday they would be speaking at his memorial service. Or if he would have to speak at theirs.

The thought scared him and he almost hoped that he would be the first person to die, that he wouldn't have to sit in a hard wooden pew and listen to people say things about a friend, that he wouldn't have to live on without those he loved--really and truly loved.

He sort of hoped that he would die before Lance, selfish though that might have been. He didn't want to think about how much it would hurt to see Lance laid out in a coffin, or burned and placed in an urn, life and spirit reduced to ashes that were to be scattered and never reunited.

The tears came a little faster, dripping down his cheeks to splash and splatter and leave small, round stains on his pants and jacket, and he thought that he knew why he cried now. He cried for his grandfathers, and for Chester, for the people whom he had known and loved and had died. More, though, he cried for the funerals that were to come, for the memorial services and all the shiny, hard, wooden pews he would sit in and all the unknown friends who would stand and speak and for the prayers and the songs that were yet to be sung. He cried because he knew that this was just the beginning, that this was just the first confrontation with the aftermath of death in a long, as yet to be experienced, line of emptiness and loss. He cried because he was suddenly so lost, suddenly so sad and so desperate and depressed that he thought that maybe it would all be better if he died right now, when all the comfortable familiarity was gone and he was about to reach something new and untested and unknown and horribly mysterious. It would be better to die with all the happy memories of carefree days still fresh in his mind, to die while he was young and strong and free of the crippling pain that captured the limbs of the old and the loss of sense and reason that he knew would come. He cried because he thought that soon, he too would be dead, because he was scared and couldn't even begin to think of living one more day, let alone a lifetime, with the knowledge that death would be always in it, always constant, always present and whispering voicelessly, silently, I am here. I am here.

Then Lance was kneeling in the aisle and looking up at him with huge, worried eyes, and he was warm and alive and slightly damp because it was drizzling outside and asking "are you all right?" and bumping his shoulder clumsily against Keith's knee, and putting his hand on Keith's leg in a heavy, awkward, masculine, adolescent fashion of comfort. And Keith could smell Lance's shampoo and feel, vaguely, the rough scratch of his pants as Lance's warm, long fingered hand rubbed his leg gently. And even though he wasn't all right--wasn't anywhere near being 'all right,' would probably never be 'all right' ever again--he managed to smile, and stop the tears and say "yes."

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