Chapter Text
Planning funerals, in any circumstance, was never fun, but this one was especially awful. They had Anathema’s earlier, since there had been something to bury. Bel’s though, Ricardo had insisted they wait a little longer—and was surprised when Wei backed him up on it. But they had never found anything, and the higher echelons required some kind of closure. Apparently it was supposed to help him, too.
He wanted to be involved, especially since Bel had no reputable family anywhere, but he just wasn’t…there. Everything was going over his head. Going through this was a reminder of all his failures that day, and he kept seeing what had happened again and again in his mind.
Isabelle!
Stop, please, what are you doing?
The flash of green. Bel slipping out of his grasp and running towards the window. The sound of his footsteps following them, the fabric of their suit against his fingers as they dodged him and threw themself against the glass.
No time, nothing he could have done, just like Themmy, or so everyone said. Still, he hadn’t needed Heartbreak’s influence to want to throw himself down, too.
“A simple civil service, then?” the lady working for the funeral home asked; the first thing Ricardo had registered since the meeting started.
He was seeing Isabelle’s smile as they fell.
“They uh—Bel—Isabelle was Catholic,” he said, his voice dangerously close to betraying his emotions.
“What? Since when?” Wei asked. Ricardo’s lips quirked in a quick, small smile. Bel had always been too evasive to his liking.
“I don’t think they were especially devout,” he added. “But…we talked about it, together. It seemed somewhat important.”
The funeral lady gave him a compassionate look and he hated it.
“We can arrange for a religious service, then. We have representatives for most major religions.”
“Thanks. Just the main prayer, at least.”
The meeting went on without much of his interventions after that. Due to the nature of the…incident and the worry of contaminants of any kind, there was no choice between burial or cremation—not that he would even have to worry about that, since no body had been found. Thinking about making that choice in the first place made him want to throw up anyway. That the choice would be up to him. That Isabelle had gone ahead of him. So he acquiesced to most things, made small suggestions (“No songs with lyrics. Anything too sentimental would make their eyes roll” and quickly made a small list of what he thought they would like, or, “Preferably no flowers with intense smells like lilies. Something smaller, like forget-me-nots” because Bel had often been saddled with severe migraines), and eventually stumbled his way back to his office. Wei hovered until he made it there, a steadying hand at his elbow.
Without expectations of having to respond to anything, he let himself get lost in remembering. Bel didn’t let him come to their apartment very often, so he cherished every time he was invited over, tucking every memory like pressing a flower in a book to preserve it. He opened the pages now, finding one of them in the catalogue of his mind. Most of the décor was nondescript, standard cheap furniture, very little interior design, but his eyes were quick to find a pearlescent rosary on top of the dresser in their room—or at least the part of their studio that served as a bedroom. He’d picked it up carefully, not having held one in so many years, his mother would have been disappointed. Bel was staring at him, frozen in place.
“I didn’t know you—”
The fear had gone from their eyes. Sometimes, he wished they had let themself be more vulnerable instead of relying on teasing and bravado. They had shrugged.
“It’s comforting.” A little pause. “Familiar.”
Maybe vulnerability was still on the table.
“Yeah. I get that.”
There weren’t many churches around, let alone Catholic, in Los Diablos—or really anywhere. It was hard to find the same quiet peace of sitting alone in a pew, the light of votive candles flickering in the corner of his eye, and the overbearing smell of frankincense.
“You too?”
Bel had slipped closer to him, almost touching. He threaded bead after bead through his fingers, without the prayers. If he reached far back enough in his minds, he would remember all of the words.
He had just nodded as an answer.
“Oh,” they had said. And slid the rest of the way to him to press their body against his. “I don’t know why I still keep it, or pray at all. With everything we see, everything that happened—”
“I don’t think you should stop,” he said, painfully aware of his earnestness he knew had a good chance of scaring Bel away. “If it helps.”
But they had stayed. They had found his gaze, and replied, “I think it does.”
They hadn’t spoken more of it, then, but Ricardo never forgot. Clearly, since now there would be a priest or someone with the right qualifications to say some prayers at their funeral.
Fuck. He let his head fall on his desk and tried not to cry, but did it anyway.