Ours poetica

"We are the sons of flint and pitch."

TWs: funerals, loss of parent, panic attacks, going non-verbal (and some internalized ableism about that), suicidal ideation, mentions of medication and alcohol, reckless driving, implied physical abuse/child abuse, implied self harm, fireworks, and a whole lot of self loathing. 

His first funeral had been his mothers. Well, that wasn't quite right—the first funeral he remembered had been his mothers. There must have been some long-estranged uncle on his father's side, or maybe the neighbor down the street, but the first funeral that Techno had ever really seen was his mothers. The memory was hazy: had been eight-or-so, fitted in a too-tight bowtie and dress shoes that bit into the skin beneath his ankle, and there had been a solemn, elderly pastor with a solemn, gravely voice and flowers on a wooden casket. It had started in a church (this, he remembered because of the uncomfortable wooden pews he had sat in for hours, back rigid and aching), and the procession had followed the white-gilded hearse to a graveyard with countless acres of polished stone, each one just as gleaming and forgettable as the next.

It had not rained—he thought that it was supposed to rain at funerals.

Techno hated funerals, not that anyone particularly enjoyed them, but he hated them with a particular passion. It might have been the way his shoes were rubbing into the back of his heel, how the suit was too warm and how he couldn't get his hair to lay flat despite the copious amounts of gel his father had slathered in it, but he despised that day. He hated how his twin brother had stood next to him, big eyes watering an bottom lip wobbling, hands twitching as if he wanted to reach forward and pull their mom out from the earth or maybe hold Techno's hand; he hated how his father sobbed as he threw a handful of dirt on his mother's lowered casket.

He hated the flowers the most, maybe. How the wind puffed its timid breath on the roses' petals, the morning mist swaddling the fresh-cut lilies—he hated it. It doesn't fit her, he couldn't help but think, watching as the gentle sun laid rays of light to rest upon the gleaming casket, it doesn't feel like Mom. Too clean, too simple. His mom's favorite flower had been morning glories; she had liked how fickle they were, how they bloomed only to shrivel once the moon rose. When Techno had pointed this out to his father on the ride back to the house, Phil just broke into tears.

(His father had cried again that night, and almost every night after. It had terrified Techno, more than he'd like to admit. At night he laid with his face pressed into the crook of his twin's neck, hands loosely gripping the comforter Wilbur had swaddled them both in, shivering alongside his father's sobs that shook the walls' bones. Now, he understood his father's grief to be too large for the frame of their little two-story house; his father was no flood, was no thunder crashing upon the landscape and washing things ruined. He was just a man who had lost too much too soon. He was a husband without a wife; he was a father, lonely)

It had been years since Techno had last attended a funeral or gotten an invite—he had not yet entered that stage of adulthood that was waiting for grief to come in the mail—and for that he was grateful. He was grateful to put away the pointy-toed shoes and hair gel, to hide away black slacks and pretend that everything was alright. That his voice-box wasn't a thing moments from shattering, that his brother wasn't a plane-ride-or-two away and didn't take three prescriptions each morning; he could pretend that his father slept through the night, that his little brother wasn't a boy dragged down by the ghost of a woman he had never met.

And God, did Techno pretend.

Middle school, high school, college—all of it was nothing more than the flitting scenery of a play, and he the sole traveler of the globe's stage, disentangling himself from the minuscule lives of characters acting out their scripts. He had few acquaintances and kept even fewer friends. His professors welcomed him warmly and showered him with praise, but attention to anything other than his coursework was superfluous and unwanted: Technoblade did not care for affection, not really. He had his father and his twin and his little brother, and that was enough.