Rainbow, Benny, Carson, and Tayline were in a little half-moon at my back, not talking or touching, just standing in a bracket of support that made my heart ache a little less fiercely.
The brothers made a tight circle around the gaping hole in the ground where King’s empty casket would be laid to rest, as if guarding it from the eyes of people there not privileged enough to see it. As if that wound in the earth stood for a wound at the center of all of us. And the brothers were animals in that way, in the way of not wanting their vulnerabilities exposed least someone think it stood for weakness.
They stood with mere inches between them, silent and dry-eyed, but they were mere echoes of their normal selves; their bodies wan and aching with stillness, their features smaller and more refined when separated from their usual grins and glowers. It wasn’t raining, but they all seemed waterlogged with grief, bloated with the tears they’d never shed in front of others.
These were men who were not unused to suffering, and they bore the way soldiers did, stiff lipped and tightly coiled around the emotions that threatened to overtake them.
I loved them acutely as I looked on them, wishing King was there to take their emotional baggage on the way he had a knack for doing. Wishing he would climb out of that hollow casket and sling an arm around Bat as he teased Nova about his latest conquest. How those bleak expressions on their faces would break open like sunlight after a storm.
But King’s magic was dead, gone with him to the grave, and I had no sunlight to offer them in his stead.
Zeus did his level best to break through the heavy crush of silence and morbidity hanging over our heads when he took the podium. I tried to listen to his speech through the rush of blood in my ears, to focus on his beloved face and not that horrible wound in the ground where King’s casket lay, and finally his words sank in.
“King would’a wanted it sunny,” Zeus started, smiling with his mouth and not his eyes. “He wouldn’a wanted it like this because he was a man who saw everything good in the world. Born with rose-tinted glasses, that kid, lovin’ life and everyone he met till they proved ’im wrong, and then if they did, he just cut ’em out and went on his merry fuckin’ way. He…” He paused and looked down at his empty hands, trying to find words there for the enormity of the emotions in his big heart. “He was just the best’a us. Can’t even take the credit really; kid basically raised ’imself and his sister, grew to be a man ’fore he could even grow facial hair.” Everyone laughed, but the sound was bruised, misshapen.
“Grateful to everyone for comin’, for sharin’ in this with us, ’cause we got a metric fuck ton of grief, and it needs help carryin’. That said, I’m glad to carry the weight’a it for the rest of my life ’cause King was so fuckin’ worth lovin’ and knowin’. Feels like anyone who didn’t know ’im was robbed, so good a man he was, so fuckin’ beautiful, I gotta say, to have in your life.
Not gonna stand ’ere and lie to ya. The death of a son? Not somethin’ I’ll ever recover from. Death’a two sons? I’ll be walkin’ half-dead till the reaper comes callin’ for me one day. I got my Lou and my babies, my Harleigh Rose, and my brothers and the rest of our family to get me through, but I also got this, and I wanna share it with you so maybe you can breathe a little easier…”
Zeus looked up and directly into my eyes, his silver gaze pinning me like stakes to the ground. I couldn’t move or speak for the power of emotion shining in his rugged face.
“Whole life, King only wanted one fuckin’ thing, kid you not, an eight-year-old with intent, he was. He wanted one thing, and that one thing was the love of a good fuckin’ woman. Well, we can breathe easier knowin’ King found that in his wife, Cressida.” His voice cracked and rumbled like the ground about to break open during a quake. A sob bubbled up in my throat and lodged behind my voice box as he thumped his chest over his heart. “He found what he loved, and I gotta believe, he’d go easier knowin’ he’d had near on five fuckin’ wonderful years livin’ out that dream with her. And I’m ’ere to say to ’im, if he can hear me in heaven or wherever the fuck only the very best’a people go, that all’a us are gonna take care of that woman, of his life purpose, until the day we all join him in the afterlife.”