Chapter Text
It is painful to watch Neil at the lectern. He pulls at the cuffs of his suit jacket, fraying the cufflinks that Kevin bought for him, and when he speaks into the small microphone, it is first too loud and then, after he clears his throat, too soft. “He was a legend,” he says. “Everyone will remember him. But-- not like we’ll remember him.”
He looks down at his notecards like they’ll give him something to say. Then he looks at Andrew, and Andrew sees the gray tinge to his skin and the dead look in his eyes and decides that it is enough. No more. Andrew stands up.
He was already sitting in the front row, and that was the most anyone expected of him. He’s a monster has softened over the years to He’s a private person , but making a speech at the funeral of the man he and Neil loved is still beyond the expected. All anyone really needs to know is that Andrew loved him.
Andrew reaches the lectern.
“I’m sorry,” Neil says.
“Sit down,” Andrew says.
Neil opens his mouth, and closes it, and walks down the steps.
This is how it happens, isn’t it? Allison said something about it in her ending. Bee did too, probably. Fate makes that same old croak, because there is no universe in which Andrew will allow Neil to stand up there and suffer.
Andrew speaks. “The first time I saw Kevin was decades ago, but the first time I spoke to him was minutes before he died. We were playing ping-pong in our house when he realized who he was speaking to, and he led me away, pretending I was only there for a visit. After that, I was a teenager and he was trying to recruit me to the Ravens. It did not go well.”
Some nervous laughter. Lots of sideways glances. And Neil, still gray in the face, still with all of his tears run dry.
Most of the Foxes are in the front row with Neil. Robin Cross is sobbing her eyes out into Nicky’s shoulder, but that means she’s letting herself feel at all, which is good. Wymack, Andrew’s father-in-law, is holding Abby’s hand.
“There is not a word for this. If there is one, it is something like playing cat’s cradle with the string of fate.” There is a red loop of string in his pocket, because fate said that he would make this explanation at this funeral, and who is he to argue. He takes this string out and loops it through his fingers, tying that old off-putting noose out of muscle memory before smoothly transitioning into the Cat’s Cradle. He holds it up, in front of his face, and lets it go slack again. “You try to define it and then: No damn cat, and no damn cradle.
“Put it this way: I can see endings. I saw them when we spoke for the first time, and I remember them now, and no I will not tell you what they are. I think you will believe me. If you do not, I advise you to read the myth of Cassandra.
“I have seen people die. I have seen them leave. But more often than that, things just end, and it is peaceful. Kevin made a choice, when he realized it was his own end: he decided that he would rather die alone than make a younger me witness. There is not a word for that.”
Andrew tells himself that the Tralfamadoreans knew something about grief. There is only so much a person can be, only so long that they can exist, and then the book closes. Why mourn? He’d had the first and last pages all this time, and his memory collected the rest. He has every scrap of Kevin there will ever be, and he will never lose them. Scrapbook memory. Alien mind.
Andrew is not a Tralfamadorean. All that reasoning does nothing to explain the fact that Kevin died young.
“I don’t see how you end. I don’t know my own surely-gruesome fate. I see how we end.”
And there is some conclusion to be had there. Something about the friends along the way. Something about the fingers in the Cat’s Cradle holding it all together and the copper loops like wire in Allison's painting, smudged through with champagne. But Andrew is only thinking about Kevin, who lived a thousand different ways, none of them easy and all of them somehow loved, but died kindly.
Andrew drapes the red string over the lectern like a rosary and returns to his place beside Neil.