Work Text:
“Thanks,” Ben spoke into the phone with his usual, deep voice, “I’ll be in touch.”
After hanging up the call, he put on a pair of glasses and picked up a pen. Then he ticked off one of many bullet points on his long to-do list that never seemed to get any shorter.
Making arrangements for a funeral was a lot of work. There were many things to take care of and plan for to make sure everything would work out smoothly and respectfully. Sadly, this wasn’t the first interment he was in charge of, granting him with the experience that made it a little more manageable for him to stay level-headed and on top of things. But no matter how many burials you organized, the pain was always the same.
“Never gets easier…” he uttered to himself.
Julius Little had no living relatives left, so all of the duties and responsibilities fell to King, whom the former had entrusted with in his last will. Benjamin had been in a similar boat. None of his relatives were around anymore. The life he had been living had made sure of that.
He still regretted what happened to his late sister. For a while, Angela had been all the family he had left, and when she died, a part of him died along with her. In hindsight, he could pinpoint the moment when things took a turn for the worst to the time of her murder. He blamed himself for what happened, and he knew Julius had felt the same.
Shaking these thoughts from his head, the accomplished author checked his list of things he had yet to take care of. For obvious reasons,
this would be a closed casket funeral. King had been offered to see Julius’ body, an offer that he had declined. The police told him that his friend had been lethally shot in the head. It was a sight that the former gang leader had seen a million times, and he told himself he wouldn’t add to that count unless he had to. And with his best and closest friend, he preferred to remember him as how he had looked when they last shook hands.
He didn’t want to spoil that bittersweet memory with such a grizzly sight.
The cops couldn’t tell him any details other than the cause of death and where his body had been found. Apparently the murder had taken place at the new amphitheatre up north in the expanded Museums District. Ben cared less for the ‘why’, but the ‘who’. The former question was obvious, Julius hadn’t exactly lived a life free of sin. Just like himself, his friend had made a lot of enemies in his time, so the list of suspects was long.
A corrupt police officer, remnants of an old gang trying to get revenge, an ex with a grudge, some random fool trying to make a name for themselves. It was impossible to tell without doing some investigating.
Him and Jules hadn’t been in contact after he left Stilwater, except for the time his friend congratulated him on the success of his book.
All Benjamin knew was that Julius had apparently disbanded the Saints once he had achieved his goal of cleaning up the city and ridding it of the gangs that had held it hostage and plagued its citizens for far too long. But he did wonder what had happened to his crew afterwards.
Gat was on trial for his crimes, and currently on the run, that much he knew from watching the news, it was impossible to miss, but he hadn’t been keeping up with anyone else.
Whatever happened to his right hand man or that young girl with the face tattoo, he had no idea. He wished he could get in contact with one of them, but there was no telling if they were still in the city, or even alive at this point. Like Julius, all of them had made powerful enemies in the past.