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"I don't know how much more loss I have in me."
It tasted insufficient rolling off his tongue, eyes locked onto the unsettled soil. No gravestone yet; apparently, the supply chain on granite was backed up. Eddie wasn't sure how that was possible. He almost offered for them to slice him open and use the rocks which had made permanent residence in the pit of his stomach, but somehow that felt inadequate.
"I'm sorry," Buck said back, because he was insufficient too.
Eddie didn't blame him. He wasn't searching for the answers to the universe in Buck. He had long since learned the way words fall flat.
The unsettled ground was anticlimactic for the type of woman his abuela was. He could hear the birds chirp above his head, the faint and distant sound of LA traffic as soundtrack. The sky was blue, bluer than it had any right to be in the middle of November.
The world should have ended. The priest should have run out of words to say, the mahogany framing her body as a prison should have marked the final trees to collapse on earth, the cushion under her head from the last sprig of cotton to be picked. Eddie would have gladly bled out, allowed them to use his blood to stain the wood, his bones to fortify the metal locks, his skin to make the leather adornments.
But no one asked that of him. The coffin had been pre-fabricated, the priest's speech routine, the grave pre-dug. And so the grass grew around the disturbance, and so it would continue growing, until no one could even tell that Isabel Diaz had been more than a fable, until the tangled roots of the grass and weeds locked her in as a final toll of the bell.
Eddie could almost see the grass itching to take her. An illusion of the wind, surely, but he felt the vitriol all the same.
Buck's hand landed heavy on his shoulder. Eddie was sure it wasn't, could feel the gentleness with which his thumb traced circles into the muscle, yet it still weighed like the world against him.
"Do I get to keep anything?" Eddie mused. It wasn't really a question so much as a rebuttal against whatever demon had dug its fingers into the string of his fate to play a funeral dirge. "Nothing's permanent. Barely temporary."
"That's not true."
"Isn't it, though?" Eddie said it without heat, simple defeat laced solid through his words. "You go through life, and the people you love die, and there isn't anything you can do about it. And every year, I lose more and more people, until all I have left are memories. And for what? Joy?" Eddie scoffed. "Nothing is permanent."
"That's dark."
Eddie simply hummed. Already, the process of unwinding Isabel was beginning. Assets divided up and redistributed, prized possessions going to this relative and that relative. Each delicate strand of her life unwound like the tendrils on a vine, until there was no evidence left that anything had made that climb at all. Eddie wondered which brick he was on her climb. Maybe if he had held on strong enough, he could have supported the vine. He could have.
"It's getting cold," Buck told him gently. "We should consider heading back. The burial finished an hour ago."
"No," Eddie said stubbornly. "She has to stay out in the cold. If she can handle it, I can too."
"Eddie."
"You can go if you're cold," Eddie said. "I'm not ready yet."
"Okay," Buck sighed. "Okay."
Buck didn't move from where he was, except to drop his hand down the sleeve of Eddie's jacket to grab his hand and squeeze it tightly.
Eddie hated wearing black. He always had. He never felt more dead than when he was in twilight wool. It drained the life from his face, made him look pale and somber in a way that never felt right. He was sure he looked dead now, the chill in the air taking whatever coloration could have been left. The world could have it. He didn't need it.
Eddie squeezed Buck's hand back. It was the only warmth in his body, where Buck's hand encompassed his. He could feel the light sheen of sweat building between their skin, every divot and callous that hardened Buck's palm, every minute clench of his knuckles as his hand held him tighter. It felt, for a moment, like being human.
"You know when you're little, and your grandparents seem invincible?" Eddie asked him. "Infallible. I don't... I don't think I ever grew up, in that way. Abuela just always seemed like she would live forever."
"She had that energy about her," Buck remarked.
Eddie sniffed. He wasn't going to cry. "I still feel like that kid, most days. Just trapped in a grown-up body, with a lot more trauma. She made it feel like things could be okay, like no matter what happened to me, she would be right around the corner with some sage advice."
"She did know everything," Buck agreed. "She had a way of looking right through you."
"She did," Eddie agreed, agreement choked out like it had clawed its way up his throat. "I just don't know what to do. I can't keep losing people. I can't keep—keep loving and knowing that it's always going to end up like this, until I'm the one that's in the ground."
"Eddie." Buck's arm wrapped around his shoulders, pulled him in close. "Grief is a part of love. You don't want to grieve sooner than you have to. If you cut out love, then what do you have left?"
"I don't know." Eddie was being petulant. He knew that intrinsically, but it wasn't enough of a deterrent. "I just want the pain to stop. It hurts, so badly, all the time. Sometimes I think I'm just made of grief."
Buck didn't say anything and just opted to grip Eddie tighter into himself. Eddie allowed himself to be pulled, slumped into Buck's body as though he couldn't help it. He probably couldn't.
He was sure at this point Buck was the only thing keeping him upright, keeping him from falling to his knees, becoming that much closer to his abuela.
And maybe that was what his grief needed: something to support it, to hold it eye-level so Eddie could grapple with it, to hold him up to keep him from succumbing to it. It was still his grief and his fight to bear, but Buck could keep him upright. When his legs felt like they would give, when his heart had almost stopped, Buck could help him find the strength to stand on his own, to restart his own heart.
His abuela wouldn't want him to bury himself, to give in to the dirt and the grass and the weeds. He could still feel her palm, pressed steadily over his heart as a promise. It had felt as firm as Buck's hand felt now against his shoulder.
So Eddie allowed himself to get pulled into Buck, then went further, turning to bury his own face into the clothed skin above his heart, and finally, with Buck's arms around him, the sunshine above him, and the chirping of birds in his ears, Eddie began to cry.