His father would have fucking hated him for wearing a suit, but Draven does anyway, his dad in his head laughing at him with a bottle in his hand saying who do you think I am kid, the fuckin’ queen? You’re gonna dress up to watch a piece of shit alcoholic get put in the dirt? And he does anyway, because there's no one in his life that Draven has ever respected more than his father. Didn’t have the appetite to eat, didn’t sleep well the night before. Eyes red and hair matted and he cleans himself up, tries to make himself look halfway presentable. The funeral is always the hardest, that’s what his dad had told him the first time someone in his task force died. You think you can handle yourself and you never can.
James is in a suit too, and when he sees him he pulls a thin smile.
“…’hould wear a suit more often, Bond,” he mumbles, but his heart isn’t into flirting this morning.
James smiles back at him for the effort anyways.
“You don’t look too bad yourself.”
Draven shakes his head slowly from where he’s sitting on the side of the bed. “James, I look like shit and you know it,” he sighs.
His boyfriend rubs his shoulder sympathetically. “Fine. You don’t look too bad considering the circumstances, how about that?”
Draven nods. “…Yeah. Okay.”
“…You ready to go?” James asks, and Draven looks over and sees his partner with his car keys in hand and feels a hole open deep in his stomach, like an encroaching numbness. He doesn’t want to go. He wants to stay here and sleep and wake up and have his father still be there and still be fixable. Draven hasn’t interacted with anyone outside James and his mother and Iris since it happened, and it feels so fast, like he was expecting the world to stop turning if his father ever died. He thinks about seeing other people, about people asking him things and saying that they’re sorry, and it feels so damn unreal.
He swallows.
“…Yeah. I think so.”
When he’s in the car, he feels a deeper kind of hollowness creep over him. He lets James drive because he’s in no shape to, because he feels drunk, unavailable, disconnected. When they get there he’s prepared himself for what he sees, which is his father’s body cremated in typical Foundation fashion in a sealed metal box that glimmers blankly on the church altar. James stays close to him. He lets him to the talking, even when people ask him things, even when people ask how he’s feeling, because he can barely get words out of his mouth and James can and he holds his hand and handles it because nothing Draven will do in his entire life will make him worthy of James.
His father was raised Jewish, but was agnostic through most of his adult life; they give him a Jewish service because it wasn’t like his father would care one way or another, anyway. The Rabbi takes him aside at one point and sits him down and talks to him about god, or about faith, or about his father’s faith, and they pray just like his father had taught him how to in passing when he was young, and he can’t remember what he says to him or what they pray for at all, exactly, because he doesn’t register anything that he’s saying, just nods and thanks him at the end. Praying for…his father? Could his father be prayed to? Would his father hear him if he prayed, and if he did, would he listen or just laugh? Why would god care about his father, anyway? Why didn’t god save him?
Draven carries his father’s body in the cold box, and they’ve dug a hole already for him in the ground in the graveyard outside, and James is there with him still, and his mom is crying and Draven isn’t, and James is crying and Draven isn’t, and a lot of people are crying and Draven doesn’t because he feels too numb to cry any more than he already has. They put his dad in the hole. They bury his dad. The Rabbi reads a passage from the Torah that Draven doesn’t hear, and his dad doesn’t hear it, either. He sees James crying while they’re standing there and Draven feels himself robotically switching into your boyfriend is crying, James is crying, you need to help James now, but there’s no emotion left in him and he just curls his fingers in between his and squeezes them tightly. Draven has never been more tired in his entire life then he is in this moment.
And then because James is crying, now, Draven sits behind the wheel of his boyfriend’s Saturn and tries to comfort him but his movements are unfeeling, strange, alien. They drive home in silence. It’s only 1pm. When they get to James’ house they sit in the car in the garage and turn off the ignition. James is whimpering still and they sit, reeling. After five minutes or so of hearing his partner’s muffled sobs and seeing his own blank expression in the windshield, Draven’s head pounds, and he opens the door, calmly walks inside, and vomits into the sink until he’s heaving up bile.
