Chapter Text
ROXY: hay everybody its jakes turn!
ROXY: hes got a few words hed like to say about our dear departed buddy
He swallows. It’s horribly audible in the near-silent churchhouse. He’s never had cause to visit one of these damned things before, and frankly, this event hasn’t constituted a ringing endorsement of this sort of space. He pauses to convince himself that no one can register his discomfort, that the whisper-click of shutters closing from the accumulation of photographers in the background has camouflaged the sound of his pure trepidation.
Luckily, John takes the moment to make, he thinks, perhaps a slightly greater ass of himself than he has, muttering something rather dismissive-sounding from the front row, standing abruptly, and more or less storming out. He clears his throat in the aftermath, a far more appropriate noise to make. Contemplative. Gentlemanly! Of course he can do this. As Roxy said, Dirk was his best bro.
Cripes. Alright. He stands, relaxing what he now realizes was something of a death grip on Jane’s forearm. She massages her wrist, wincing slightly, and he wonders if he ought to apologize, but by gum, he’ll lose his nerve if he hesitates a second longer.
The flask in the pocket of his trousers is empty, a situation that was fast becoming dire as the last speech dragged on so achingly. He’s gotten quite subtle with the thing. This situation is freshly dire in quite a different way.
ROXY: cmon up you go!
JAKE: Of course of course merely getting my bearings after that er striking and contemplative peregrination of a sermon!
JAKE: Ive nothing prepared myself but i dont suppose ill be able to come up with quite so much on the fly. That said i shall give it my best. Rather the least i could do for a chap who figured so decidedly in basically every aspect of my life!
He wouldn’t want this. He wouldn’t want any of this. Except, perhaps, the whole swords in the coffin bit. In fact, that’s his worry about this whole business, the doubt lingering in the base of Jake’s skull, wormed deep in his occipital, that he’s… watching, somehow, that he’s about to deliver one of those impassively disapproving shakes of his head at all the pointless hullabaloo going on.
The swords, the paparazzi, he’d appreciate that. The clown, not so terribly much. He shudders slightly, and hopes that no one can tell. They can all tell.
Here’s the thing.
If he were lingering in the ether, he’d have done something, made himself known, about twenty friggin’ seconds into that godawful eulogy. He could say a lot of things about Dirk Strider, a whole hell of a lot of things, now that he doesn’t have to fret so goddamned much about what his dear terrifyingly inscrutable bro might, y’know, think, about his thoughts, he could say anything right now! But the man would never let himself be upstaged by a common juggalo. Not on an occasion like this. A man’s death is a special time in his - er. Well. Better to leave that train of thought at the station. Dirk is dead and gone. Really gone. To make a fool of himself now, well, he might as well spit on the corpse.
Hffff. Deep breath. He takes his pocket square from his jacket and dabs a bit at his eyes. Probably too much of a flourish to the gesture to be believable. He’s just stalling, now. Why in the blue blazes is he stalling?
JAKE: As im sure youre all aware ol dirk had a bit of a penchant for monologuing himself. The man is rather a tough act to follow in that regard. He could really just summon these sorts of speeches up from nowhere and theyd always be chock full of all kinds of great references and entendres and somesuch from animes or classical western philosophy.
JAKE: He actually wrote a great many speeches for my dear…
Oh there’s a right dilemma. The second he says it aloud, everyone will know. Maybe they already do. Janey wouldn’t just go around saying things left and right, she’s a woman of great discretion and greater honor and he loves her so so so very much and that is all well and good, but he probably shouldn’t make a thing of that! Yet another distraction from Dirk’s big day of being dead by his own hand, bled out on the grass, slick and red in sharp contrast with his ashen complexion, his face, still in death.
And to think he had thought him expressionless in life. Without the tension of animation, though, he looked so terribly peaceful. It makes him wonder some things. Whether he had always been like that, and he had just missed the ‘relief in death’ the first time he held his best friend’s severed head in his hands. Just what had him knit so tight these days. Where he is now, if not here.
Somewhere better? Heaven? Isn’t that the whole idea of this churchy business?
Fuck, he’s been thinking for too long.
JAKE: Ahem.
JAKE: I… Im very sorry. Of course i miss him. Like id miss my own right leg were it slung violently off a bell tower and exsanguinated on the lawn.
JAKE: Hahaha that is certainly an image that will be lingering in the good ol noggin isnt it. He had a real flair for theatric whosiewhatsits. Memorable indeed just how hed like it! I think we can all take a little comfort in that fact right? That its how he wanted it or he wouldnt have done it!
JAKE: But er as to my point. Its moments like these where i think of just how much we all depended on him and his somewhat bizarre and unaccountable array of talents and proclivities.
JAKE: Its funny when i think of how brilliantly he could write as though in my voice. So eerily in keeping with my every idiosyncrasy while somehow elevating it to his prodigious standards. As a writer the man was truly just about unparalleled. And janey can definitely attest he was prolific as all getout! Regularly filled up her desk with that stuff. If i can say anything for dirk strider i can say that he fiercely cared for his pals and truly believed he knew exactly what was best for us. To the letter. Heh.
JAKE: Speaking of letters er so how about that one he left?
JAKE: That was sure a humdinger and a half to read! Funny how the man who could channel my gobbledygook into something half-coherent as if he could read my damn mind couldnt get a legible thought out in his own words for the task of saying goodbye!
JAKE: Not ever to speak ill of the recently deceased of course.
JAKE: He certainly had his demons. Though who doesnt? I mean ive got my share of regrets and anxieties and utterly debilitating traumas that really seem to repeat themselves an awful lot and wow did you know this isnt even the first time ive seen him dead and in this very specific way? But you dont see me blowing my brains out over it do you!
JAKE: It doesnt even make a bit of sense. It doesnt really. When you think about it. Because he was always the strongest of us just the most utterly equanimous in the most dire of circumstances. The fellow that one would turn to in their darkest hour and find he had a plan and a sharp rejoinder to any talk of giving up.
JAKE: But what else can you call it but giving up?
JAKE: I suppose there are arguments to be made for certain appellations ranging from particularly sanguinary performance art to - to - to… solicitations for attention. Which we are currently honoring for all the fucking good it will do him like this.
JAKE: Oh bother im sorry i didnt mean to go off on such a tear youll have to excuse me im just so terribly befogged by all this. It just doesnt stop from getting less... oh now ive mixed myself up. Its just like breathing without a piece of your lungs. Like trying to tell what time it is with the damned sun ripped out of the sky. Whats even the fucking point?
Hell’s mcfucking bells, at least he didn’t have a difficult act to follow, did he. At least everyone seems modestly grateful that the proceedings are no longer punctuated with honks and profanities. Well, a few profanities, but proportionately fewer, and he’s confident that the quotient would be far lower if he’d managed to leave his flask unopened.
And there’s a part of him that thinks that perhaps this is what he was going for. That it would be a great disservice to give some staid, mild, appropriate speech over Dirk’s bloodless corpse. That he would never be satisfied with anything less than fire and passion and tears shed, and he's dangerously close to at least one of those, somehow, for some reason he can’t fully put his finger on.
(His dead best friend.)
Well he certainly won’t be putting a finger or anything else near that - ah. Poor taste. Doesn’t make him feel any better. Kind of makes him feel so fucking awful that he wonders very seriously whether the pain of it, the fear, the falling, whether that was worth it for the peace. How he’d go about figuring it out without doing something he can’t wish undone.
He’ll wonder for the rest of his life, he’s pretty sure.
JAKE: Er sorry again. Of course theres a point theres always a point. Hope is kind of my entire deal and what a shame it would be to abandon that now!
JAKE: The point is... the point...
JAKE: Of course it must be to treasure what we have. With the knowledge that it can be taken away arbitrarily at any time ever with no warning at all and absolutely nothing you can do about it.
JAKE: Yes that must be it.
JAKE: To endeavor not to let our friends and loved ones down. As he always did so fervently. Even with his back against the ropes he never once failed to pick up the phone or the plot or the responsibility when it came down to it. He never shirked that ol yoke of accountability-for-his-actions. We musnt either.
JAKE: No matter how terrifying it may be we dont have anything if we dont have each other and now we have one less each other. All of us here have one less person. So we really must take this as an opportunity to look at our relationships and say: are our petty quibbles and squabbles and all manner of -bbles really that bad? Not in the grand scheme of things! Because the people you love could all be dead tomorrow!
JAKE: Relationships may be very difficult and confusing and uncomfortable sometimes but it could always be much much worse. And someday we will all be dead anyway probably and that will be okay.
JAKE: As long as we lived a life we dont regret what is the matter with death anyway? Just a big no take backsies. A way to have the last word with the universe.
JAKE: There now. That makes sense.
JAKE: He probably just wanted to quit while he was ahead.
JAKE: A head.
JAKE: That sounded funnier before i said it my apologies yet again. I dont think hed want us to be a bunch of big gloomy gusses about the whole thing but what the fuck do i know. Maybe hed hate it. Maybe he was stewing in his own agony ‘oh just one more shitty joke from that jake english fellow and ill orchestrate one last theatrical comeuppance for the man and indulge in a little autodecapitation’ and thats what did it in the end. I dont fucking know why he did it and i never will.
JAKE: Maybe he was just tired.
JAKE: Or maybe there was some tremendous cosmic significance not only to his death but to the way he did it. Maybe he saved us all from some terrible dark fate and steered the engine of inevitability he was always going on about away from the precipice of disaster.
JAKE: Either way. Any way.
JAKE: I will miss him every day for the rest of my life.
JAKE: I loved dirk.
JAKE: I was in love with dirk.
JAKE: And i can forgive a whole hell of a lot from the people i love. Basically anything really. Its kind of a whole thing with me haha he used to really rib me about it. But i dont know if i will ever forgive him for this. And all that can be true at the same time.
JAKE: All i can do i guess is try not to let it ever happen again.
JAKE: Which is a damnably daunting task in light of the fact that i have no fucking clue what was going through his head before he tore the thing bodily off his shoulders.
JAKE: I sure do hope this is the last funeral we all attend for a good long while. No offense roxy it is splendid and all.
JAKE: Uh.
JAKE: He would end it with a real potent philosophical observation. Just like a doozy of an insight. Thats why im pausing here just to think of a good one.
JAKE:
JAKE:
JAKE:
JAKE: I am really drawing an utter blank.
JAKE:
JAKE: Every time someone dies it feels like the end of the world all over again. But we did okay with that last time and well probably make it through this too i guess. Haha realistically we have all been through much much worse than a pals horrific suicide.
JAKE: So it will probably be okay.
He makes some kind of gesture between a bow and a nod and steps off the stage again, trying not to wring his hands too much or take up too much space or look anyone in the eye, though it’s impossible to avoid Jane, now, as he sits back down beside her.
The fabric of her blazer brushes against his shoulder, and he finally glances up properly to gauge her reaction.
Predictably, she is not smiling.
Oh well.
He really can’t ever do this again. Never ever again. And the fact that she is alive and present in the pew to his right, her makeup vibrant and her suit vividly red and the warmth of her body radiating through, another living human beside him, the very essence of life itself, he thinks that he really ought to be grateful for his lot.
In time, he will definitely learn to be grateful for it. Or he will be the next in the casket. And he knows, already, that he is nowhere near that brave or that cowardly. Whatever Dirk is, or was, he is not.
He puts his arm around Jane’s shoulders, and for now, that seems to placate her, and he summons up a smile and lets his vision blur comfortably as Rose finally stands to give her speech. At least nothing, nothing, can ever be worse than this. It will all be uphill from here. He’s going to fix everything. It’s all going to be okay.