Sigma - "Welcome to the Family"

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Disclaimer:
_This story is purely fictitious and not at all suitable for minors. All characters involved in the story are either the age of eighteen or older, and belong to myself. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.

Reader discretion is advised._

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“Are you ready to begin, Blake?” The priest asked in a whisper as he placed his large and gentle hand on the young man’s shoulder. His haggard voice was a welcome sound among the deafening silence of the church’s main hall.

The tall man with a complexion as dark as the long and abyssal vestment draped around his sturdy body wasn’t impatient, nor was his question. The funeral was supposed to have begun half an hour ago, but the young man supposed Father Wexon already knew that no one else would be arriving. So did he, on some level, but you know what they say about hope: It’s wasted on the hopeless.

“Yeah.” Blake mumbled, nodded, and looked up at the priest from where he sat on the far-right side of the front center pew. It turns out that the young man was the only one who cared enough to show up and say goodbye to his father, aside from Father Wexon, who apparently had known the man many decades ago in their own youths.

“Thank you, Father.” The young man mumbled as he looked back down towards the ground with unbelievable pressure behind his bloodshot eyes. “I can’t thank you enough…”

Wexon only nodded in response, then turned away from the young man and began towards the elevated podium several yards away.

Blake couldn’t help but glance up and examine this strange “Man of God” as he made his way up the wide steps of the altar. He was certainly taller than Blake by at least a foot-and-a-half, but that wasn’t saying too much given that he was a measly five-foot-tall despite being twenty-five years of age. Still, Wexon was a tall individual with short golden-blonde hair and a five-o’-clock shadow that was just on the border of being a short beard. He also always appeared to have a slouch and an odd disposition about the way he spoke and carried himself in the brief time he had to study the old man.

He didn’t move like a devout priest would, his motions were careless and undisciplined, although his attitude and expressions weren’t any less solemn and sincere than Blake’s own. Whoever this strange, stumbling man really was, Blake knew that he was the only other person in the world that had any care left to give for his quiet, reserved father. According to him, the Father owed it to Blake’s own that he would be the one to escort him to his final resting place, right beside the young man’s mother.

Blake had never known her, being only two-years-old when she passed away, so the lack of memories kept him from feeling as cut by her loss as the fresh emotional gash that had been opened three nights ago, when the sound of his father’s heart-monitor flatlined in that hospital bedroom. Ever since that moment, he’d been carrying around a chest wound that showed no signs of healing, always bleeding out whenever he had even the slightest amount of energy to continue onward with his life. That brings things back to Father Wexon, the awkward priest who had bothered to go through the trouble of arranging everything.

It was maybe an hour after the doctor called the time of when Blake answered a call from a hidden phone number, every inch of himself almost completely numb from the ordeal at the time. Wexon was on the other end, telling Blake not to worry about a thing and just arrive at the church at a designated time, and that he would handle the rest. The man was true to his word, it seemed. Blake’s father was below the priest’s podium in a lengthy, sleek, black casket, the half containing his upper-body closed upon the young man’s request. Blake had said his goodbyes already; this funeral was for anyone else but him.

But there he sat, the only one there aside from the drunk priest who stumbled and had to brace himself against the edges of the church’s podium to stay upright.

“Thank you all for coming.” He said, his voice as tired and weary as his expression, looking right at Blake with cold dead eyes and a half-hearted smile. “We’ve gathered here today to mourn the loss of Joe Andersson, one of the most… humble men I’ve ever met.” The Father chuckled at that, then looked up towards the high ceiling thoughtfully. “I can see that miserable prick up there already, trying to talk to God himself as an equal…”

Father Wexon had a few interesting yet painfully accurate depictions of Blake’s dad that the young man had heard from stories that Miss Roth, an old acquaintance of his father’s, would agree with if she was there to hear the priest’s eulogy. Apparently, he used to be a lady’s man and womanizer, going after every young piece of ass that caught his eye, and was a smooth enough talker to hardly ever fail at the task. The versions of Blake’s father that he knew, the one before and the one after he left to join the Marine Corps, hardly had any trace of that man left within himself. He was broken and yet always still breaking for as long as the young man could remember, and he returned to a shell of what his father once was after four years of absence, finding him trapped in a hospital bed without an ounce of muscle or fat on his gigantic boney body…Blake had to stifle a bit of spite towards Father Wexon for not being there to help out back then, wherever he was at the time, just as the young man did for everyone else that was absent that day of the funeral, and every other day prior.

Blake was the only one who was ever there for his dad.

Although, he was a rational enough person, and Blake knew his own father better than anyone else. The bitter old man simply didn’t know how to have or keep friends, and always did what he pleased, or rather, what he was able to do, in his later years. The man was cold, but he had a big heart. Joe Andersson just didn’t know how to properly show that to people. His favorite way to express himself was through a crude joke or snide and cocky remark, even when he was dead wrong in a situation or conversation. Despite the fact that his abrasive, overbearing personality pushed everyone else in his life away, Blake didn’t see it as a reason to abandon the only person in the world willing to stick by him, no matter what.

“I shouldn’t have left him alone,” the young man whispered to himself. The time he spent away in the military certainly wasn’t worth it, and now sitting there, spacing out through the priest’s long-winded eulogy, he couldn’t help but break down into tears as the mistakes and regrets that’ve been piling up over time. Blake felt as though his mind was collapsing in on itself at that moment.

He couldn’t move; He couldn’t breathe; he couldn’t feel anything but anguish and sorrow. Leaning over with his elbows dug into his knees and his sobbing head in his hands, all he wanted at that moment was to be with his asshole of a dad who never said ‘thank you’, ‘you’re welcome’, or ‘I love you’, just because he was a proud, overly-sensitive douchebag that was afraid to let anyone get close to him. He just wanted one more moment of arguing with him because of something stupid that either of us said or did; one more moment of them laughing and making fun of something that’s happening on one of his favorite black-and-white television shows; just one more moment of something that had to do with them spending time together.

But it wasn’t going to happen, not ever again.

His dad was dead, and it wouldn’t be long before his body was put into the ground next to a woman who’d left them both behind, long ago.

The priest eventually finished his speech, and requested a brief moment of silence. By then, Blake’s tears had run dry once more for the day. He would have loved to say a prayer for his father during that time, but he was too exhausted, too shattered, and he hadn't had a good night's sleep for quite some time.

A small semblance of peace came when a thought crossed his mind, though. That still air, the church itself, and the large graveyard surrounding it, was without a single sound to be heard during the priest’s moment of silence. It felt as if the world itself had halted entirely to respect his father’s passing.

And then, Blake’s favorite part of that awful day happened.

If he was being honest, that next awkward and disruptive moment may have been the greatest thing that ever happened to him, when some bumbling young girl burst through the tall double-doors of the church’s main hall and strolled in as if she were the center of its absent patrons’ worship.

Blake was stunned, in complete disbelief, even. The jarring sound of those old rickety doors creaking open, the brisk air that rushed in from the winter winds outside, the hasty clicking of high-heels against a worn and stony surface, the absolute beauty that filled the young man’s vision once he found enough strength through curiosity to straighten his body and turn his head.

And there she was, in all of her splendor.

The love of his life.