Disclaimer: Don't own them.
Warning: A very angst character death. Not a happy fic.
A/N: This fic is completely for Mia, who wanted me to write something based on this poem: .com/poem/funeral-blues-2/
When an event of this magnitude occurs, everything should just stop. It's a degree of sorrow immeasurable in every way except for how late you stay in bed, wondering if you can even get up.
Shawn just wishes everything would stop. Stop the traffic jams, and catchy music playing on the radio, and everyone's stupid little problems that don't mean a thing right now. Please just make it stop.
He even wishes that he could stop the sun from rising, even though it would never hide in the East for something as trivial as a death.
"We are here to mourn the death of Burton Guster."
Is that why he's there? Shawn was wondering. Because he's not crying, and he's too tired to feel anything except this ache in his chest. He just wants to go home, crawl into his bed, and lie there.
After the funeral, Shawn locks himself inside his apartment and traces Gus' name against his bedsheets, trying to wrap his mind around the words we are here to mourn the death.
His phone rings beside his bed, people wondering how he is (words cannot describe), how he's holding up (not well), if he's going to come out soon (no). The ringing is shrill and grating against his ears, and after the phone rings for the seventh time, it ends up smashed to pieces against the wall. Shawn's not exactly sure how that happened. He doesn't really care.
"Shawn, you're an idiot."
Gus' voice is practically there with him, the curse of being able to replay moments of their lives in perfect clarity. It hurts Shawn when he sees those snapshots of a better time flicker in front of his eyes, but he still presses rewind, stop, and replay, as if doing that will make it actually happen.
Gus is right. He's an idiot. But that's okay right now, because the memories dull the pain and the numbness he feels.
Rewind. Stop. Replay. Again, again, again. Memories and clips of sound weave in and out of his vision, but his recollection of Gus is only an ugly shadow of the real thing. Its smile is only a facsimile, incapable of expressing his warmth or exasperation or amusement, not like his did.
Rewind, stop...
What would be so bad about letting himself get lost in these memories, never to come out? He could wrap himself inside them and be happy, and tell himself that it would be enough. It's only a fantasy, even Shawn knows that, but he still wonders. He knows he'll have to go back to reality soon, but for now he sees no problem in simply drowning himself in his false image of his best friend.
Gus was everything. It is never a good thing to have a best friend, to be this close and dependent on someone else for your happiness, because this is all that can come of it, isn't it? The world has stopped spinning, color has been bleached out of the city; and everything feels strange and pointless, because it doesn't matter anymore, not any of it.
We are here to mourn the death.
We are here to mourn, we are here to cry, we are here to feel, and we are here to be alone in a crowd of a hundred others who are feeling the exact same way as we are. We are here to leave behind the one person who ever meant anything, and we are here to die. Not die in the way that Gus did, body giving out and heart ceasing to beat, but die in a way that is perhaps even worse; when your other half dies, and you feel like there is something inside that is undeniably empty.
Shawn is empty.
He lies in bed, and he doesn't come out, because his mourning is the sort that cannot be done over a casket, or over a body which looks waxy and foreign, and is not at all Gus. Shawn will stay in bed until he can find the strength to get out of it again, and then he will pretend to go on, to keep moving with a world which has already stopped turning for him.