A/N: So I'm not entirely sure what it was, but my English class loved the character of Owl Eyes. Like, loved him. "They're real! The books are real!" Haha…
Anyway, wanted to write some kind of drabble for him. He deserves it. :3
So this is how I thought it should have happened at the funeral. Meh, but who'm I to say what's right? :P
Lonely
The rain poured from the sky, each drop a tear that wasn't shed for the loss of Gatsby. Poetic, the man thought, turning his face to the sky. The water had already saturated his coat, and his hair was plastered to his head. Getting wet was no longer an issue.
He closed his eyes against the downpour. His glasses just barely blocked the drops from irritating his eyes, but he could still feel the occasional drip. Maybe he should have been crying. Maybe the excess water in his eyes should have been there. Someone, anyone, needed to cry for the loss.
With a sigh, he shoved his hands in his pockets and turned to his right. A cast iron fence separated him from the graveyard beyond, and he thought it best to keep it that way. He was not any sort of personal friend of Jay Gatsby's, and attending his funeral wouldn't be …right.
But only allowing a few people stand over his grave didn't seem right either, he mused. For all the people that must have been to the man's parties and all the people Gatsby must have touched… letting – he tried to count the figures through the haze of rain – three people bear witness to Jay Gatsby's final appearance didn't seem right.
Then what was right? Whatever happened to the man known as Gatsby couldn't have been right to allow him to die so suddenly in the midst of his popularity and spritely youth. Nothing about the entire situation was right. So who was he, a simple scholar, to question whether or not attending this funeral was right?
He took a step forward. No. No, there was nothing to say, he realized. There was nothing he could say to Gatsby that would change anything. There was nothing he could say to anyone that would change anything.
He turned his face to the sky again, and let the water pour down his cheeks.
Finally, he heard footsteps sloshing through the mud, approaching the cars on the street. He straightened, clearing his throat. He was here, so he would say something, at least to the Carraway fellow. He knew Gatsby best.
But what was there to say? "I'm sorry"? "Too bad"? "How very sad"? Nothing quite summed up the grief that Nick must have been feeling. He could see now, as Nick turned to him, that there were bags beneath the man's slightly reddened eyes. The young man was stressed, and they both knew that Gatsby's death was only a part of the reason why.
To have now four people see Gatsby off, there was something distinctly wrong in the situation. No one else would visit his grave, the man knew. Maybe Nick would stop by once again. But no one new.
Thinking of nothing more than the truth of the situation, the man slipped off his glasses to dry them on his soaked jacket and turned to glance at the fresh grave some fifty yards away. "Poor bastard."
For a moment, confusion colored Nick's expression. But he understood, and nodded at the man with the glasses. Nick turned to get into the car.
Owl Eyes was right. The great Gatsby deserved more than what could be offered by the hurried and distracted inhabitants of New York.