Author's Note: I love this. I hope you will, too.
Disclaimer: SM owns the characters. I own the rest.
He always did say that death was beautiful. And he was always right.
The blood red roses cascaded over the top of the black polished coffin, wild and untrimmed vines that had once climbed the fence outside his home.
And inside, surrounded by walls of soft, velvet burgundy, was his cold, dead body.
Beautiful.
In his last days, he spoke of pain and of pleasure, of joy and of sorrow. In his last days, he'd gone mad.
It's hard to say for certain whether or not he was ever sane. Many liked to believe he was, like his parents, Edward Sr. and Elizabeth. They'd always been optimistic with their son, believing that the odd things about him were just misguided creativity.
They weren't the only ones.
His younger sister, Alice, worshipped her brother and the ground upon which he walked. She was constantly astounded by his brilliance- the way his fingers danced upon white and black as if they were royalty at a ball, the way his voice could pierce through any silence and any noise, the way he shaped words and phrases into beauty and elegance.
And as his casket was lowered and the first shovel of dirt was tossed onto those crimson roses, black tears flowed down his little sister's cheeks, tainted by the makeup she wore.
Beautiful.
Everywhere, there was weeping. From the few silent tears of Edward Sr. to the loud, high-pitched whimpers of Elizabeth, from the former teacher so proud to the lifelong physician so helpless, from the acquaintance who would never get to know him...
To the woman he left with a shattered heart.
Beautiful.
There was no rain. In a town so often clouded over, the sunlight seemed mocking and sarcastic. If he would've been there, he would have laughed, a hollow chuckle escaping from a sideways smile.
But he was there, and he wasn't laughing.
Because he was dead, locked away in that grey dirt hole for the rest of eternity.
That's what he would have said. He believed in heaven, and he believed in Hell. He just assumed neither would particularly want him.
Heaven wouldn't appreciate his sense of humor, too close to that of God's, he had said. Hell wouldn't like him for that same reason.
As the people faded, one by one retreating from the morbid scene and back into their lives so full of something else, something brighter, I stepped closer.
Kneeling down before the freshly placed tombstone, the name Edward Anthony Masen etched across in his own script, his signature, I kissed him goodbye.
And whispered, "Beautiful."
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