It Starts Here / 𝗯𝘅𝗯 (✓)

20: Funerals and phone calls

CHAPTER TWENTY
Twenty-seven years old

Eighty-seven days before Ares' twenty-eighth birthday, Cass passes away.

It's another phone call at night, but this time, Felix wakes immediately. It's the sound of Ares' muffled screams that he hears first and for a moment, he lays in the dark with his eyes closed unmoving and has the thought, not again. 

When he turns, this is what he sees: Ares, pressing his face into the pillow beneath him as if he is trying to suffocate himself, still screaming, his curls spread out on the pillow and his fists wrapped around the bedsheets like he is trying to stop himself from slamming them down. Felix doesn't know where it comes from, but he gets the sudden realization that if it was possible, Ares would not have woken Felix up at all.

Blurred by his own tears—because Felix knows what this means, of course, he fucking does—Felix places his fingers in Ares' hair, scratching the bottom of his scalp. He says his name, he repeats it, but Ares just keeps screaming until the screaming turns into wailing and all Felix can do is rest his head on Ares' back, his hands pressed against his body in an attempt to comfort, an attempt to keep him together. 

It's here Felix learns that days go fast when in mourning. 

It's a terrible truth that nothing stops when someone dies. Felix still has to work. Ares still has essays to grade, students to assist. They still have rent and bills to pay and an apartment to keep up, bodies to feed and take care of. They still have so much to do and Felix is so desperate for a break, a moment of peace and silence, so Ares can mourn properly.

Felix has never seen what it means for Ares to be in grief. He remembers vaguely Ares telling him when they were sixteen that his abuela had passed away, but that he didn't really know her and, guiltily, didn't feel much about it. Felix had been relieved. He was not going to see Ares fall apart.

Now, Ares grieves only at night. Only in silence. He doesn't want to talk about Cass or her death. When Felix hears him cry at night in bed, he won't let Felix speak about it. Felix will say, "Ares," and Ares will shake his head. "Don't," he'll say and then a sob. "Don't." 

When Felix realizes this, he feels another loss, one that tells him that he had not wanted to talk about it when she was still alive and now he would never get the chance to.

So, when he finds Ares in bed in pain, Felix doesn't say anything. Instead, he curls up against him, his face buried in the crook of his neck or flat against his chest or back or whatever part of him he can reach. He pecks his skin and tells Ares that he loves him even though he doesn't think he can hear him over the sound of his own sobs. But still, he does. Just in case.

One night—Felix isn't sure how much times has passed, how many nights they've had since—Ares tells Felix that the last thing he said to her was, "Do you remember when you broke my favorite toy?"

And she'd laughed like a menace. "Which one?" And they'd laughed and Ares had left.

When Ares asks Felix what the last thing he said to her was, Felix tries his best to remember, to keep the conversation alive, to keep Ares talking like he always needed, but has to tell him that he doesn't remember. Maybe it was a compliment to her half-finished cat-sweater. Maybe he said goodbye. Maybe he told her he loved her. He hoped it was the last one.

"It was the last one," Ares says in the dark, like he was there, like he knows for sure. "You were good at telling her...that you loved her." And then he cries again and Felix pulls him into his chest.