Funeral Pyre
Hey all!!!! love you tots and to anyone who’s still around and interested here’s Raph’s final selfpara. I wrote this a long time ago and was waiting for a good moment in his overarching plot to post it but I guess now is as good a time as any!!! I just want to say thank you all for being so lovely all these months, especially you Jess. You are a wonderful mod!! This was a great experience and I had so much fun. Please feel free to keep in touch via discord #3021 of my blog gloopyboop. TW are below the cut
TW abuse, unhealthy relationship with an abuser, burning, referenced self-harm, death, murder
The day arrives as all do. The sun rises. People wake up and slowly fill the world with their noise. Raph does not wake up. He hasn’t slept. He simply rises.
There is practice and class and homework. He should attend to all of these things. Their team is caught in the middle of the championships season. He should train, but he does not. For the first time since his arrival at Palmetto, Raph willingly misses morning practice. He feeds the cat and spends more time than necessary running his hand over the soft fur of her back until she’s a warm purring ball beneath his hand. When that is over he leaves the dorm. He walks off campus and into the city.
He stops only to buy a pack of cigarettes at the nearest corner store. He only needs one but he cannot bring himself to ask for one from one of his teammates. He doesn’t want to steal one either. Not for this.
“You’ll end up in an early grave,” the clerk warns him as he slides a cardboard box full of Marlboros across the counter.
He doubts that cigarettes will be the thing to kill him young. He does not express that sentiment to the beady-eyed man behind the counter. He takes the pack and drops the money on the counter. He leaves without a word.
Palmetto is too much. The sun beats down too hot here, there are too many people, too much of their static. There’s nowhere to be well and truly alone in this place. Raph heads towards the woods.
He picks the flowers along the way. Spring has hit the world full force and there are plenty of garden boxes in the city and even more flowers scattered across campus. He wrenches them up from the dirt as he walks, fistfuls of yellow and white and orange blossoms. It’s not a pretty arrangement but Raph doubts the aesthetics of it will be of consequence. She will not care. She can’t. The walk is without a real destination. The goal is simply to put as much space as possible between himself and other people. He needs to be alone for this. He walks and he walks until the path disappears and the trees grow so tightly together that he’s got to squeeze his way through the underbrush to make any forward progress.
Finally, he comes upon a clearing and he decides it is as good a place as any. He can no longer tell what direction Palmetto is in. The sun sits high in the sky and provides him no help. It’s quiet in a way that is almost oppressive. It’s the silence of being well and truly alone.
It is so green here. Raph’s so used to cities and their and dirt and grime. She probably was as well. That idea doesn’t merit further thought. He will never find out and it will never matter. She might have found it beautiful here, in the warmth and the shade, the canopy above cutting the sunlight apart until it falls like shards of gold on the ground, but that too is something that does not matter. It might have once but now it never will. There is nothing left of her in this world but the burned remains of a body that she used to live in.
Because of him.
He lights the cigarette and props it up between two smooth grey stones. He shakes the last of the dirt off the of the flowers and places them in front of it and then he sits, staring at the tiny, spartan alter he’s created. This is what he does, every year, without fail. He is not sure why. It’s a pointless ceremony with no significance to her. A family member or a lover would have performed this ritual with more fanfare, incense or better flowers or a real grave. Raph is not her family. He did not know her and he did love her and he does not know what she would have wanted to be done on the anniversary of her death. He only knows that someone has to mourn her. Her life had to have held some sort of significance that lasts beyond that night on the docks, his knife flying into her throat without hesitation or remorse.
He does not regret killing her. It is more than likely that she would have killed him and Frank if given the opportunity. Only one of them could have survived their encounter, him or her but not both. He doubts she would have wasted time regretting his death if she’d been the victor that night. But she is still dead, because of him. He still killed her. He owes her something for all the years she will not have. “My apologies,” Raph says to the trail of smoke that is crawling slowly skyward from the lit end of the cigarette. She cannot hear him but it should be said anyway, to the empty air and the smoke and Raph himself. “I did not know what I was taking from you when I killed you...or maybe I knew but I did not fully appreciate it.” He pulls his legs up to his chest in a rare and private display of vulnerability. “I’ve had the chance to experience things I never would have if I had not survived that night.” Palmetto. Michael Cheng. Exy. Companionship. Warmth. Lucas Ervine. The Foxes and the Vixens and all of the light. “For that, I suppose I should be grateful. I am grateful. I doubt it was your intention, or that you’d even be happy to know this, but I did receive all of this because of you.” He sighs, moving to readjust the flowers, picking away few of the more bruised and crumpled blossoms and tossing them to the side until a smaller, but more pristine bouquet remains.
“This apology means nothing. It is worth nothing. I doubt you or anyone who loved you would find any value or comfort in it but-” He looks again at the cigarette, the lit orange tip of it. He works his mouth for a moment. They’d been mirror images of each other on that day, two hollow people ready to kill to get what they wanted.
But he isn’t hollow anymore. He’d been allowed that chance because of her. And she- “The man who raised me used to use these when he wanted me to remember something,” he says, picking up the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger. He looks into it, into the orange flame until white spots dance across the black of his eyelids whenever he blinks. “He liked to make scars. He said that I could feel every scar I ever had and I’d remember every lesson I’d ever learned. My skin would be a chronology of my own mistakes.”
He turns his free arm over to look at the soft skin of his inner forearm. The space just above the fold of his elbow is populated by a series of burns. They’re the only ones on his body that someone bothered to keep in order. Three neat rows, 14 in all. The final row is slightly shorter than the two below it, one burn shy of completion. “Sometimes he’d tell me to do it to myself.” Raph squints at his arm, at the empty space that sits at the end of the third row, waiting. “I never told him this but I cannot remember what most of them are for. The lessons he was trying to teach me with them.” He sets the cigarette back down in its place, tucked between two stones across a mound of flowers. “I only remember the burning.” He swallows and for only a moment his throat feels tight and his eyes sting. It passes him by in the space of a breath. He does not cry. “I’m not sorry that I killed you,” He says after a moment. Smoke trickles slowly upward from the lit end of the cigarette. Nothing moves. Nothing makes a sound. “But I am sorry that you never had a chance to stop burning.” She was burning. He knows this with a bone-deep kind of certainty. She must have been to have reached them on that dock, her eyes just as empty as his. “Thank you. For giving me mine.” He’s finished talking. He sits in silence until the cigarette burns down to ash. He waits until even the very last ember winks slowly out. He leaves the rest of the pack on top of the flowers when he leaves. He walks away and he does not look back.
