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Bianca wasn’t sure why she’d gone to the funeral, anyway. It wasn’t like her dad would notice, and she sure as hell didn’t owe anything to her erratic, controlling boss/stepparent (who was actually younger than her).
It was only - when they’d said they were taking time off to go to the funeral, there had been something desperate and yearning behind their eyes. More than usual.
So Bianca was here, standing under the pallid blue sky. Because of course Vic’s family was buried in a tiny graveyard in the forest, with moss swinging from tree branches that probably had chitters living in it and mushrooms peeking up from the mossy, leaf-strewn ground. No matter how slick and Los Angeles Vic tried to be, there was something of the wild to them you couldn’t fail to notice. Like they’d never been domesticated properly.
Bianca shook her head to clear the uncharitable thought and tried to focus on the ceremony. True to their on-air conversation, the body was wrapped in the same colourful getup she’d worn on the show. It had been an open casket event, before they’d come out here to the middle of nowhere. Bianca wasn’t sure the last time she’d seen a dead body, but she must have been young. Her own grandfather’s funeral, maybe.
There was more of a crowd than Bianca had expected, she mused, as the current speaker finally droned to a stop. There was a slight disturbance in the crowd, and then Vic made their way up to the stage.
They looked ruffled, eyes red and hands trembling. But they slipped into a presenter facade, all of that fading away in favor of a too-bright smile.
“Thank you all for coming,” Vic said. Bianca tried not to groan. Undoubtedly, they’d have a whole speech planned. VIP might get a mention.
“Everyone gave such lovely speeches,” Vic said, falteringly. “I think I’ll just say that no one could understand what Nana was to me, including either of us.” A scattering of laughter from the crowd brought a slightly less manic smile to Vic’s face. “And unless she’s about to get up and tackle me, saying ‘psych!’ again…” They waited, for a slightly uncomfortably long moment. The crowd’s chuckles faded away into a somewhat more concerned silence. The coffin didn’t stir. “Then I guess this is really it. Um. That’s all I have. But I did want to sing the song we used to sing, if that’s alright.” They glanced at someone in the crowd and nodded a little to themself.
“Okay.” They laughed, fake and self-deprecating. “Here goes.”
The host had sung on the show before, usually with a thread of self-consciousness woven through it. They had a good voice, but never let themself commit to singing enough to prove it.
Not so now.
Their voice was strong and clear, somehow both higher and lower than Bianca had expected. And it was the ridiculous song from the show, except without the warbling voice of the elderly woman now in the coffin it was… something else. Like Nana had been copying, badly, something she’d heard once and the host was singing the original.
Their voice flickered and darted through the air, sharp and mercurial.
Bianca’s chest tugged at her. Suddenly she was overwhelmed by emotions. No one here understood her. No one anywhere understood her. The cuckoo in the bird’s nest, awkward and ungainly and foreign and wrong.
Bianca felt like there was fire in front of her, a lighter, a cigarette, and she was struggling to hold herself back from grabbing it. She knew it would burn her, burn her badly every time, but there was something to anything warm holding your hand.
The song danced and spiralled up, like a bird, like smoke. Bianca was dizzy with it, dizzy with desperation and need and want all tangled together into the deep and overwhelming need to be chosen, to be found, to be loved.
Her foot stepped forward of its own accord, but it was her heart that was following the song.
Around her, the whole crowd took a step forward, toward the coffin. Then another.
The singing went jagged, broke off abruptly. Bianca cried out at the sudden loss of the connection, the appeal, the driving force. She’d been just about to touch it! Around her, people sobbed openly or fell to their knees.
Bianca risked a glance at the stage. Vic looked tired. There were circles under their eyes, and their hand was now visibly shaking on the microphone.
“But I know you didn’t want me to sing at your funeral,” they murmured, leaning forward to gaze at the coffin.
Bianca blinked. There definitely had not been a ring of mushrooms growing up around the coffin before, had there? Surely she would have noticed the perfect centering of the coffin within.
“Goodbye, Nana,” Vic said, barely a whisper, and then they set the microphone neatly on the podium and stepped off the small raised platform. Bianca hesitated before she could reach a hand out, an instinctive fear dragging at her limbs. By the time she called out, Vic had wandered off into the woods.
The coffin was lowered into the ground, once they got the workers to stop crying. The crowd dispersed.
Eventually, they re-emerged, mud smeared under one eye and small rips in their nice blouse. Drops of blood stained the edges of the shredded fabric, like they’d fallen into a thorn bush. Bianca should ask.
“Are you… alright?” she asked.
“What is the meaning of life?” Vic asked, so soft Bianca had to strain to hear them.
They didn’t answer the question, staring at soft, overturned dirt until Bianca led them away.