The funeral didn't feel right.
"I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord…"
The family had never been really religious. Kind of Christian by default — that's how my parents had been raised, that's how they'd married, and if we didn't go in every Sunday, there were still the big occasions. Christmas, Easter, weddings. The occasional christening.
Funerals.
There were times it didn't feel real at all.
There were times it felt like the only real thing in the world.
I wondered inanely if this was how Dad had felt at Mom's funeral.
The priest finished, and we began walking toward the grave site.
Next to Mom's.
We weren't the only group conducting a funeral in the cemetery today, and in the distance I could hear singing. It only made the near silence in which we walked more oppressive.
The day's sun felt weak and watery, but I didn't really feel cold.
I didn't feel much of anything.
The sky was blue, the clouds were white, and spring was coming — perhaps it really was a nice day. I wondered about that for a while as we walked: could a day be objectively nice? Or only subjectively?
Distractions.
In time, we came to a hole in the ground, a pile of dirt to the side, a simple stone at its head.
The priest began speaking again.
"… For I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were…"
My mind seized on a single sentence in the half-chanted, half-recited flow. Had Dad been a stranger in life? A rootless wanderer, coming home now at last?
I was suddenly angry.
And just as quickly cold, an almost physically freezing wave sweeping over me as if I'd fallen through ice into the water beneath.
I could feel the insects throughout the cemetery we were in, and beyond, feel the ways in which they rippled under my control and gathered, seeking out vantages and chokepoints, preparing to war upon whatever frightened me. Whatever pained me.
Not that this was a problem that could be solved by fighting.
Having so many swarms in so many places did give me an unparalleled multi-angle view of the ceremony, which didn't help with making it seem real.
It was a little like an out of body experience, seeing the crowd of mourners with an empty casket from every angle, and seeing myself among them. Black dress, black shawl, black everything, dull blacks all — not the eye-drinking black of a cocktail dress, or the shiny black of polished leather. It brought on the same disturbing sense of the surreal that comes from looking into a mirror unexpectedly, the same uncertain and dizzying displacement of self.
"… I will lift up mine eyes to the hills; from whence cometh my help?"
I blinked.
That was a good question.
Who had come to help Dad?
Who would come to help me?
There were some who had come through for me in my hour of need, heroes and villains both. I resolved again to thank them, as I could. To pay those debts.
No one had come for my father. Or for Bakuda's other victims.
There could be no way of making such deaths right.
Of making such debts right.
Where did that leave me, debtor that I was?
"O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law."
Funny how much of the funeral rites were about the Resurrection.
Tomorrow would be the first Easter without him.
His death stung.
It stung sharply, a raw and painful hole where one of the foundations of my life had stood.
We hadn't talked about a lot of things.
Not about the little things like boys or classes, nor about the big things like bullying or my powers.
Or my mother.
Or the way the Dockworkers' Union was slowly withering, and how the money didn't stretch far enough as it was.
But every day, I could feel the strength of his need to protect me, the way he ached when he fell short, the way nothing in his life mattered more than getting this right. I didn't have answers either, and when I didn't talk to him it was mostly because I didn't want to see him hurt when he reached for an answer in a world without them. The same reason he didn't talk to me about a lot of things, I think. He hadn't been perfect, but he'd been my father: loving and beloved, slowly breaking himself against the world in the hope that I wouldn't have to.
I would have done anything rather than add to his load. I had kept silent. I'd lied, mostly by omission, but a few times outright. I'd let a chasm grow between us, of all the truths unspoken. I would do it all again, and I would have done worse at need, rather than cause him pain.
His last memory of me was my leaving the house with a smile. My last memory of him was him waving me off to what he thought would be school, a fragile joy in his eyes at my rare but real smile, praying that this day might be the beginning of something better. That belief was the gift I had so desperately wanted to give him, and I only wished I'd managed it more often.
There was so much I'd wanted to say, to hear. Things I'd not dared to raise, with each of us on the ragged edge, about the life we had. Things I'd not dared to hope for, when every day was misery itself, about the life I hoped to lead someday. Heroism. Marriage. Children, eventually. So many dreams, left for the future, now never to be shared.
Oh yes, his loss stung.
This sure felt like a victory for the grave.
And, I supposed, therefore the law.
What did that passage even mean?
Someone handed me a shovel, and I grasped it blindly.
A pause, and I felt the weight of the crowd's expectation, their gazes upon me. It hadn't been a bad turnout, really. The Dockworkers had come out in force for the funeral of one of their own, and if I knew hardly anyone here beyond a few faces or names, well. There wasn't really anyone I did know that I'd want to have here. No friends from school. No one on the cape side of things I knew well enough to have invited.
Besides, that was just asking for trouble. A gathering of capes at a funeral could easily have ended in a fight, and if someone had started a fight here and now I would have killed them all.
With a start, I realized that they were waiting on me still.
I set the shovel into the pile of dirt by the grave, and the priest began to speak.
"Unto Almighty God we commend the soul of our brother departed, and we commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope…"
Levering the dirt up wasn't hard. Dropping the shovelful in wasn't hard.
Hearing the hollow noise as it rattled against the empty coffin… was.
I paused again. Someone came up behind me, took the shovel, and added his own spadeful.
I stayed where I was, looking on but not really seeing, as people came through and shoveled. With enough gathered, it went surprisingly quickly.
Not much time at all, to definitively mark the end of his life.
Not that things ended there. They couldn't. Next came the conversations.
It was probably good that I was feeling numb. A better chance of making it through the rest of this without causing a scene. I really didn't want to see anyone right now.
A parade of people came through, shaking my hand, sharing brief memories of my father. He'd been a good man. He'd been kind. He'd had a temper, in righteous causes. He'd helped them out once, when they really needed it. He'd been a good friend. He'd be missed.
He was still gone.
Others asked if I was all right.
I always responded the same way, saying that I'd be fine.
They took it as the lie it was, politely pretending to accept it.
One man, enormous at the shoulders and with a beard to match, told me in his basso rumble there'd be a wake tonight at a Dockside bar, and that I'd be welcome, drinking age or no.
I thanked him.
He meant well, I thought. Either way, it was real, and so very little of what was around me right then felt real in any way whatsoever.
I'd have called it nightmarish, but my dreams were never this bad.
Before.
There would be a lot of things that might change now, though it would take a very long time before I stopped feeling the aftershocks. I wasn't really sure I'd come to terms with the death of Mom yet, and that was almost four years ago.
Kurt and Lacey were near the end, some of the very few that I recognized. They'd been frequent guests to our home, or we at theirs. The parents used to go out to dinner with them pretty frequently… before Mom died.
A lot of things had changed when she died.
They asked the same question, got the same lie.
They took it with good grace, and a reminder that if I needed anything…
I nodded.
It wasn't likely that I'd ever take them up on it, not when it could put them in the crossfire… but I appreciated the fact they meant it.
Too many of the others had said the same, but as a polite lie.
Maybe that was too cynical.
Hard to tell.
At last I stood there alone, feeling the light breeze on my cheeks, watching the branches sway and the clouds go by.
Watching everything but the graves I stood before.
I'd always expected to bury my parents.
Someday.
And I couldn't help but wonder how much of the fault for their early deaths was mine. Sophia's taunt wouldn't have cut so deep if I didn't wonder whether my mother had been trying to reach me when she crashed. No way to know, really. On the other hand, there was no doubt at all but that my father would be alive today, if I hadn't had that fight with Lung the first time out. I'd just have to live with that.
And there were other funerals in the cemetery today. How many of them for victims of Bakuda? I couldn't know, but I could guess.
Too many.
I'd have to live with that, too.
And I still had no answers about whether that agonizing price was justified. Whether it even could be justified. What I could hope to accomplish to balance out so much loss. I had reasons enough to hate the gangs. Reasons enough to believe they made the city worse.
But I had no idea if it were even possible to drive the gangs out of the city.
More concretely, I had no idea what Coil's power was, or how to deal with him. No idea what Empire Eighty Eight was doing with Kaiser dead. No idea what Lung was up to. No idea about what other groups might be active. No idea about the Merchants either, but I'd worry about them later.
I didn't even know if my efforts were making things better… or worse.
That would be a particularly bitter irony.
For how long I stood there, eyes open but unseeing, I do not know. The sun rode low on the horizon when I wiped my eyes and looked at what lay before me at last.
An empty grave, with a stone marking the place where my father was not:
Daniel Michael Hebert
1966-2011
He never gave up.
No.
No, he hadn't.
For all he'd lost, for all he'd feared, for all he'd failed, he'd never once given up.
Well, neither would I.
I turned and left, leaning into the wind, my stride long and swinging.