2019-12-09 - A Heart That's Been Broke Is A Heart That's Been Loved
August and Eleanor attend James Joseph Carmichael's funeral and pay their respects to his widow.
IC Date: 2019-12-09
OOC Date: 2019-08-21
Location: A Funeral Home in Gray Harbor
Related Scenes: 2019-12-08 - Don't Do Anything I Would Do 2019-12-11 - Tis The Season
Plot: None
Scene Number: 3147
The world today is wet, and awash in gray.
Chilly rain falls from the sky and cuts into skin like icy daggers, but thankfully the funeral for James Joseph Carmichael is being held indoors in a quiet, but peaceful funeral home somewhere in Gray Harbor. Members of the Carmichael and Cartejena families are all in attendance; the young man was well-loved by the community, an affable sort with bright blue eyes who was generous with both his time and aid. He lies in silent repose in his casket, skin pallid and discolored by whatever embalming techniques were used on his body. Whoever the mortician was had done excellent work - the grievous head injury that ultimately took his life is nowhere to be seen unless one makes a very close examination of the body.
It is a funeral so close to Christmas; red and green decorations illuminated by candlelight is marred by all the black dress in the room, the quiet punctuated intermittently by whispered conversations and scattered sobbing amidst all the flowers - so many have sent their condolences in the form of winter blooms; white and blue roses and stargazers fill the room with their gentle, subtle scents. The eulogy was delivered by the decedent's father, Joseph Carmichael, whose soft baritone manages to carry, delivering the memories he had of his son with a determined, but red-eyed look. His son's widow, Maria Cartajena-Carmichael, remains somewhere in the front row to the left, wearing a hat indoors with a small veil that is pulled over her face, obscuring her features. Her hand rests protectively over her belly - she is only two months pregnant, but she is starting to show.
It won't be long now until August has to speak and once his turn arrives, an expectant silence falls over the crowd.
Eleanor is in a black dress with a white collar, black shoes, with white tights. Her long hair is down and loose, but her expression is somber. She holds tightly to August's hand, her black wool coat beside her. She has a handkerchief in her free hand, already having had to dab at her eyes. She wisely chose waterproof mascara and no eyeliner. This just isn't right. Grey Harbor, with all it's hellish horrors, has no right to visit them on people like James and Maria. They did nothing to deserve this pain. (Outfit https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/570699822663860224/613609005885030400/image0.jpg)
August is dry-eyed, if grim-faced and quiet. This isn't the first funeral of a close friend or loved one he's been to, which is both armor against the grief and a dull ache that it goes on and on. Unlike Gohl's 'funeral', where he'd explicitly worn his plum suit as a subtle fuck you, he's dressed in black: a smart, black three piece, with a dark blue and purple tie and matching pocket square. He gives Eleanor's hand a squeeze and steps out of the aisle and up to the podium.
"James was...an excellent man, and a good friend. And since I'm not really that great at, this kind of thing, I figured I'd let someone who is do the talking for me." No sheet of paper; he's recited this one before. (Three times.)
It takes him a second to start. Finally, "You would know the secret of death. But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life? The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light. If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life." He looks out over the convened mourners a moment, not really seeing any of them (except Eleanor and Maria by turns).
"For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one. In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond; and like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.
"Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity. Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour. Is the shepherd not joyful beneath his trembling, that he shall wear the mark of the king? Yet is he not more mindful of his trembling?"
Here August pauses, looks over his shoulder at the casket. "For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
"Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing. And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb. And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance."
He sighs, rubs at his eyes. Then he kisses his hand, touches the casket, and takes his seat.
<FS3> Eleanor rolls Mental: Success (8 6 3 2 2 1) (Rolled by: Portal)
More sniffling commences. Underneath her veil, Maria quietly dabs at her eyes and while not completely visible, the smile she directs towards August is a sincere one; the fact that she can do so at all is miraculous under the circumstances.
As the funeral continues, there seems to be a late-arrived tribute somewhere at the back. A uniformed man from one of the courier services in town delivers a stand as well as an elaborate garland of golden flowers tucked under his arm. He doesn't whistle, and indeed tries to remain as invisible and unobtrusive as possible, attempting to hide a grimace underneath his cap, because he is late. Late for a funeral in a season where people ought to be celebrating instead of mourning. The rains have been heavy, and the air has been cold to the point of freezing - inclement weather tends to damage vehicles and that is precisely what happened.
So he quietly sets up the garland closer to the flowers at the back, and once he places the wreath on the stand, he slinks off.
The funeral proceeds without incident and it follows the standard format that many are familiar with; other tributes that generate, at the very least, scattered chuckles, slideshows from different points of J.J.'s life. But when the funeral/memorial service ends, with a reception of a sort promised at the residence, people are starting to rise to file out. The burial is sometime tomorrow, but for now, James remains here.
Maria is reluctant to go - to leave the love of her life and the father of her unborn child in this place. She lingers on the casket, looking down with hidden eyes of the one she has lost. She is a calmer creature, now, compared to the hysterical, grieving bundle that August had visited in Addington Memorial a couple of days ago.
Eleanor watches August with her too shiny eyes, the green made brighter by the tears welling in them. She reaches out, in the way only they can, to touch his mind, and to let him feel her comfort, her presence, her love for him, and her sorrow at this loss. The thread-like connections of her Mental presence twine about him like a safety net. He is not alone.
When it's over, she dabs at her eyes once more, and watches Maria with concern. She can't even fathom what she is going through. Well she can, to an extent, from what happened to her as a child. But losing your best friend isn't equal to losing your new husband while newly pregnant. "Is she going to be all right?" she whispers to August.
August gathers Eleanor's mind around his like a blanket of sorts, laces his fingers with hers. It's a relief, to feel her here with him, a stabilizing strength he badly needs at the moment. He glances back at the late-arriving flowers, but his focus remains on the service proper. Mostly. He's lost in thought.
As everyone starts to file out, he murmurs to Eleanor, "Not sure. I'm gonna go check on her real quick." He gives her a sideways glance to see if she wants to come with.
Ellie nods to him, she'll go with him to check on Maria, if only as back up if he needs it.
August eases out of the pew, letting go of Eleanor's hand once they're closer. (No need to rub it in, as it were.) He steps up next to Maria, a polite few feet from her. "Hey," he says, voice low. "You want to stay here with him a bit?"
Eleanor hangs back a few feet, looking around the place to make sure the pair aren't disturbed.
Maria keeps looking onto the body as if she hadn't heard August, but clearly she has because she turns towards him eventually. "August," she murmurs. "Ellie. Thank you for coming." Her slight accent is made all the more prominent by the hoarseness in her voice. "The poem was beautiful."
There's another glance at the corpse, her hand coming up to rest gently on the dead hands folded on his center. "...I want to stay here with him forever," she tells him quietly, but honestly. "But that isn't possible now. I would like to think that God is telling me that he will continue to live on through our daughter. They say Love is fleeting, but I think..." She pauses. "...I think it finds a way to endure even when you think it's gone."
She gradually pulls her eyes away from the corpse to look over at August and Ellie. "Thank you for what you did in the hospital. I'm grateful that...whatever friendship you had with James, you extended to me."
"You're welcome," August says, voice a little rough. "Kahlil Gibran knew what he was on about."
He makes a low voice at her answer. "Through your baby, and...through you too." He raises his eyebrows. "Love's not fleeting, not really. I think people just want it to be, because it hurts when the things we love are gone." He looks down at her hands resting on James'. "But that's just another way you know you love them."
He clears his throat and nods. "I couldn't say I was his friend and not do that." He hesitates, having no idea how to go about what Alexander suggested. Makes his best attempt. "After the burial...you thinking about staying here, in town? Or getting away for a little bit."
Ellie remains quiet, a simple solid presence, her Mental link with August there to steady him and support him.
Maria glances down at her belly, stroking it absently. "I don't know," she confesses quietly. "For all of his strangeness, Jay loved this city. It's where all of his family grew up and I feel as if I ought to stay here, and be there for his mama and papa. At the same time..."
Tears start to well up in her eyes from behind the veil. "Oh, August," she says, her voice breaking at the intonation of his name. "It's so hard. I don't know what I'm going to do."
August reaches out, not quite touching Maria's arm. "You're gonna get through this. I won't lie to you and say it's going to be okay, because in a lot of ways, it won't. But you've got your family and his, and us," he glances back at Eleanor, to Maria again, "and we can be there for one another. And, eventually...it might get, I won't say 'easier'. But it won't hurt so much." He manages a small, sad smile. "You might be able to talk them into coming with you," he suggests. "That way the three of you can be there for one another, get a second to breathe somewhere. Olympic, maybe, or down on the Oregon Coast. Somewhere James liked, even." He shrugs, leaving it as a suggestion.
Eleanor nods emphatically with August's words. "Sometimes it's easier to heal, if you leave a place and bring the good memories with you. Where things can't bring up the bad ones. And I think you all need some time away from here." Don't they all? If only they could run away too, someplace safe.
He means to be comforting, but the grief remains as sharp as a blade. She's clearly appreciative though, with how she is looking at both of them.
The widow seems to take this suggestion to heart, but she seems willing to walk with August and Eleanor, at least, nodding towards the double doors that lead to the viewing room. Maria starts moving there - she has another gathering to get to, after all, though she's moving slowly. Her sister is somewhere outside of the funeral home, talking to guests - her ride, probably, to where she needs to be.
"Maybe the coast. It's why I could never convince Jay to leave for somewhere warmer. He said the coast here is unlike any other." She stops, though, when she gets to the garland of yellow flowers on its stand, eyes flickering slightly - confusion that gradually clears up. "Beautiful color," she murmurs. It seems she doesn't recognize the type. "I didn't think you could get them in the winter." She reaches out in an attempt to touch one.
"It's not a warm water kind of coast, but it's beautiful," August says as they walk. "Thor's Well is particularly amazing, if you feel like heading down that way." He casts a grateful look at Eleanor for the back up.
When his eyes land on the flowers, Eleanor feels a spike of reaction from August: fear, anger, revulsion; a crushed piano, windows shattering. It takes everything in him not to knock Maria's hand away from the blooms; instead, he sets a hand on her wrist to stop her.
"Wait," he says. Then, realizing how that has to sound, adds, "These might be something else--don't want to find out the hard way they wilt when we touch them." God it's a lame excuse, but it's what he's got.
Her wrist taken gently, Maria blinks over a little bit at August, but considering how she knows the arenas in which his expertise lies, she doesn't resist. Everyone in her line of work knows that when it comes to wood and plants, he knows what he's doing, so she doesn't even question it. "Of course," she tells him quietly and gratefully, completely oblivious to what else he could mean.
She steps to the front of the funeral home, thankfully without touching the flowers, and turns to the couple. "I'll keep all of that in mind, August, Ellie. Thank you for coming." Her smile turns faintly watery. "Take care of each other."
With that, she'll join her sister, who takes her arm gently and starts leading to the car.
The flowers remain, untouched, their delicate scent perfuming the air and standing out from the more neutral and cooler colors of the other arrangements in the funeral, their vibrant golden-yellow shade easily attracting the eye.
<FS3> August rolls Mental (8 8 7 6 5 4 1 1) vs The Flowers Are So Beautifully Yellow (a NPC)'s 4 (8 7 5 5 3 2)
<FS3> Victory for August. (Rolled by: Portal)
<FS3> August rolls Mental (8 7 6 6 6 6 6 1) vs The Flowers Are So Beautifully Yellow (a NPC)'s 6 (6 6 5 5 5 5 2 2)
<FS3> Crushing Victory for August. (Rolled by: Portal)
Ellie's eyes grow to the size of saucers at the sight of the flowers from the wedding. She tenses up, her own mental threads going rigid, then relaxing slightly when August keeps Maria from touching them. She narrows her eyes and begins to look for a card amid the arrangement. "Do you think he sent them?" she whispers.
August watches Maria go. If not for Eleanor in the link with him he'd have wilted the flowers on sight, darkened the threads of life with a thought. Even now the smell of them is nauseating, bringing back memories of groomsmen attacking her and James (James now lying in a coffin at the other end of the room) and Maria trying to kill one another--
He grips a fist, cuts those memories off. No. He focuses on Eleanor in the link, on her voice. He looks askance at her. "One way to find out," he murmurs. There's a thunderstorm roiling over the landscape of his mind, wind sending up flurries of dust over the blasted out side of the volcano crater and making the aspen grove shudder. But maybe they're nothing. Maybe someone at the wedding saw them and thought Maria would like them. Maybe.
He waits for Maria to be well and truly out of sight, then reaches up to carefully run his fingers along one flower, tracing the shape of the petals, down to the stem, feeling along where it's been, what it's seen, what it's felt and heard.
August rolls Composure (8 8 6 3 3 2 1 1) vs Scream For Me Combat Botanist (a NPC)'s 8 (8 8 7 7 6 4 3 3 3 1) Victory for Scream For Me Combat Botanist. (Rolled by: Isabella)
The good news is that August Roen's abilities as a Mentalist are no joke - despite being less practiced than other people he knows, or can claim to know, he is able to dive deep into the emotional maelstrom the funeral garland carries in spite of its mundane nature and as a result, obtain clear pictures and memories from it.
The bad news is that they come too clearly, too intensely, too viciously, a flood that drowns his psychic senses in an uncontrollable tide, poisoning him from within.
He would find it familiar because he's felt similar before - often close to hospitals, bastions of hope, illness, pain and death that they are, and they rush through him, amplified and unforgiving. Perhaps it's not the flowers themselves, but where they were grown - nothing special to an ordinary human being. In the terrifying haze he finds himself drowning in, he'd catch a glimpse of an old hospital building in a place he would not recognize, though it seems to come from an entirely different time - and certainly not anywhere around Gray Harbor, itself. He would be able to catch the fleeting glimpses of bodies moving out of the double doors; patients in crutches, wheelchairs, wheeled in antiquated gurneys, suffering from some kind of injury or malady. Unfortunately, he would not be able to find a sign, because these flowers were grown somewhere at the back and side of the property, wherever it is, so he can only view the tableau at an angle, if he can even concentrate on the images because the emotional input emanating from the petals he is touching are so intense that it threatens to cave his skull in, or cleave it in two.
Pain, yes - indescribable, immutable - and scores of heavy, relentless grief. Hope and hopelessness clashing in a titanic battle as they dance an infernal jig in his psyche, his innards. Like someone has split through his ribcage, reached in and started pulling out his organs. One, by one, by one...
It feels so real he might...
...even....
...scream.
<FS3> Eleanor rolls Mental: Success (7 6 5 3 3 2) (Rolled by: Portal)
<FS3> August rolls Spirit: Amazing Success (8 8 8 7 7 6 6 6 5 5 2) (Rolled by: Portal)
Eleanor can see it in August's face, that same look he had in the church before he up and destroyed windows and the organ. She reaches out mentally to try and soothe him, before physically bolstering the things he is lashing out at, except the flowers, with his glimmer.
The first sign something is wrong, for Eleanor, is that the flower August was touching wilts, shrinking under his hand and desiccating in realtime. He's gone perfectly rigid, hazel eyes wide open and staring, caught by the flower. The link starts to reverberate dangerously as he scrambles for purchase against all of that pain, against the hospital, against these flowers, growing in that necessary hell and soaking it up and bioaccumulating it. The rest of the golden flower arrangement dies on the spot, small cracks start to form in the plaster and drywall around them, spreading like lightning. Other flower arrangements in the funeral home begin to droop and fade.
August loses his grip. He sucks in a breath and doubles over, tears streaming down his face. He sets his jaw, trying desperately not to scream. Then Eleanor clamps down on him.
The cracking slows, stops. Some of it even recedes, just a fraction. But the flowers in their immediate vicinity are all dead. Every last one of them.
August covers his face with his hands.
Eleanor draws him into her arms and holds him tight. "It was him, wasn't it?" she whispers. "I'm so sorry. We need to find that asshole and introduce his insides to his outsides." Her teeth are gritted in anger, but she shoves it down, working on calming and soothing August best she can. "Breathe, love. Breathe. Let's go for a walk before the Bereavement repass. Work through this, ok?"
The entire garland shrivels up and dies on the pedestal, crumbling into nothing. Plaster chips as the walls shake, cracks spiderwebbing in haphazard patterns over that side of the funeral home, spilling over the floor and playing with the biological detritus the funeral garland has left behind after August's distress.
It's only Eleanor's mental interference that saves the entire funeral parlor from collapsing in itself; just as quickly as the disturbance occurs, it stops, leaving the entire building silent and still once more.
Before the dregs of memory wash away, as August Roen buries his face in his hands, he'll hear that last inquiry through the maelstrom he introduced inside of his mind, the voice smooth, polished, cultured and matter-of-fact, but not without some measure of curiosity and sympathy:
Does it hurt?
<FS3> August rolls Spirit: Great Success (8 7 7 7 7 4 4 3 3 3 1) (Rolled by: Portal)
August spends several seconds just breathing. He leans into Eleanor, awkwardly pulls his handkerchief out of his pocket and scrubs at his face. "Yeah," he says, voice rough. In the link his mind looks storm-ravaged, trees blown over in the wind, river cloudy with dirt. He's too shaky to respond to her desire to see Peregrine dealt with, just clings to her in mind and body for several seconds. He hears the sounds in other rooms of people wondering if there was an earthquake.
No, just him. Just him, and the occasional inability to keep his goddamned self under control.
He hears that silky smooth voice and its question, and that stirs him further from the shock. His response isn't in words. Eleanor feels it, though, and sees it too: the way he straightens and gathers his power up around him, and repairs the walls, shoring up the worst of the damage that got past Eleanor's stabilizing efforts, bringing back what flowers he can. Some are too far gone, but a few will stay blooming for James and Maria. Not the golden ones, though. Those he pushes clear into brittle dust.
He takes Eleanor's hand firmly in his. "Yeah," he repeats, voice steadier now. He looks down at Eleanor, kisses her forehead. "Thanks. For...sitting on me."
Eleanor squeezes his hand and gives him a tight smile. She doesn't need to say you're welcome. It's what they do for each other, balance the highs and lows. "Maybe we can try one of those bath bombs from the parade tonight." They walk out.
"Bath bomb?" August sighs, because wow, he sure could go for a nice hot bath right now. He's aching all over. He can smell cordite and antiseptic. This is his life now.
He gives Eleanor another kiss, this one to the cheek, as they head out. "Sounds perfect."
Tags: august eleanor social