Disclaimer: I own ideas and situations only, not characters or plots. Sad, but I do what I can with what I have.

A/N: Well, here we are, one chapter from the end! We're going to do this. Thanks for sticking with me. If this chapter seems ridiculous to you, or if you like it, either way please let me know. I'm having mixed feelings about it. On the plus side, I'm putting up the epilogue potentially tomorrow, if not later tonight. How's that for closure?

Chapter Thirteen:

Pieces Left Behind

My best friend took a week's vacation to forget her,

His girl took a week's worth of Valium and slept

And now he's guilt-stricken, sobbing with his head on the floor

Thinks about her now and how he never really wept, he'd say it.

Can't be held responsible. She was touching her face.

I won't be held responsible. She fell in love in the first place.

For the life of me, I cannot remember

What made us think that we were wise and we'd never compromise.

For the life of me, I could not believe we'd ever die for these sins

We were merely freshmen.

The Verve Pipe, The Freshmen

The part he remembered most vividly about the day was the emptiness, but he could never exactly find the words to express that feeling to anybody. After all, it was a joint funeral, and St. Mary's chapel had been reduced to standing-room only in the space of seconds. Amid the bilingual service and excess of flowers that rendered the air as choking and heavy as the perfume counter in a department store, there had been people who stood up and spoke: a social worker with a badly disguised agenda, some of Tony's relatives, Bernardo's neighbor. Plenty more had turned up with nothing to say, nothing much to add to the atmosphere except for the occasional muffled sob or somber look. It was a beautiful service, there was no denying that. But something about it made Chino uncomfortable. He felt like he had been caught in a lie but had to persist with it, had to see it through.

The Spanish-speaking priest led half the congregation in prayer, the English-speaking priest the other half, and as the people around him bowed their heads, Chino looked up, catching the light from the stained-glass window on the planes of his face. He saw the tears streaming down the faces of the mourners, the Sharks, the Jets, Tony's family, Bernardo's parents. He watched this and wondered, instead of praying, why his eyes were still dry. His best friend was dead. Why was he so empty? Why did he feel nothing? What did that mean about him? About all of this?

Guided by some unknown impulse, Chino turned to the other half of the church across the aisle. The mourners were still largely, mildly ironically, separated by cultural barriers along the center aisle of the church, which meant that Chino didn't know most of the people not seated immediately around him. That was not to say that he didn't know any. A haunted-eyed boy sat in the back row, green-grey eyes looking at something above the head of the priest, eyes drawing an invisible sight line to something marginally involved with the service. Chino followed the line and fell upon a panel of the stained-glass, a rich dreamy-blue pane surrounded by a violent red on one side and a yellow-gold on the other The melee of colors pouring through he window from the sun outside fell in shafts up on the alter, on the hands of the priest, on Riff and Chino's upturned faces. The longer he looked at it, the more Chino started to think the blue pane was in the shape of a giant cosmic eye, watching him and staring through him to the heart, condemning him for not feeling what he was supposed to be feeling, and when, and surrounded by whom.

Unable to met the eye for more than a the space of seconds, Chino turned away, only to see that Riff was now looking at him as intently and unintentionally as he was looking at Riff. With a jerk of his head, he extended the unspoken invitation: let's beat it, Chino, my man. Let's blow this joint. Grasping at the chance, he stood up and walked without a word out the door of the church, Riff moments behind.

Nobody looked up to see them go. Prayer had consumed their infinite attention, and even the sound of the door closing behind the two boys did not disturb them.

Outside, the sky was painted a cold granite grey, clouds biding their time before an upcoming rainstorm. There could be no question that today was the first day of September; there had been an unmistakable shift in the air, and the glowing, stagnant warmth of summer had been replaced with this dull, cold, clean slate. Riff let out a small groan and arched his back in a stretch, though the expression in his eyes did not change. He looked profoundly uncomfortable in his jacket and tie, Chino saw. He didn't know they were the same ones Riff had worn to the dance at the gym nine days before, but Riff knew it and knew it well.

"You wanna take a walk or something, Chino?" he asked, his voice horse from disuse. Apparently he hadn't been partaking in the excess of hymn-singing any more than Chino had. "I can't go back in that church. It don't feel right."

"I know what you mean," Chino said softly. "Are you going to be all right?" It was the right question, and he knew it. Obviously he wasn't all right now, it would have been blind to the point of foolishness, asking that. But someday?

"Hell yeah," Riff waved a hand dismissively. "It's just a limp. I'm tougher than that. Think after sitting through an hour of people crying and talking about... well, after that, I can put some weight on a bum leg." That wasn't quite what Chino meant. But then, in a sense, Riff had sort of answered the question. Plus, there was the fact to consider that the farther away they got from the sin against nature that was taking place in St. Mary's church right then, the better they both would be.

Chino and Riff walked slowly behind the church, hands in their pockets and Riff obviously favoring his left leg, both looking off at the treeline in the distance, hazy and indistinct beyond the dots of gravestones in the fading grass. They walked in silence for several minutes, not from awkwardness but because there was simply nothing to be said. It was over. It was done. No group songs or Hail Marys were going to change anything. It was nice, in a way, to find someone who saw that. Maybe "nice" wasn't the right word, but it would take someone with a more superficial understanding of the situation to find what word was right. It wasn't a feeling that could be properly expressed in words.

"I'm glad they decided to do this outta the city," Riff said after a while, fishing a cigarette out of his pocket and lighting it. He offered one to Chino, who wordlessly shook his head in polite declination. The smoke escaped from his mouth in a wispy cloud, like it was the middle of January and he could see his breath hanging before him in the grey sky. "Tony woulda loved this, all this space. He hated being fenced in. Wanted to stretch out and see the sky. Me, I didn't mind it. The closeness and all the people, it let me, I don't know, reinvent myself. Made me feel safe," he finished, bitterly taking a long drag on the cigarette with closed eyes.

"We are always safe when we can hide," Chino said, thinking aloud just as Riff was. "That is why I could not stay inside any more. All they are doing in there is hiding, trying to make the truth look better by covering it in flowers and burying it in sad songs. It is all for our safety now. Still, we are making it about us. Bernardo would hate all that dishonesty. Nobody who speaks about him or cries over him has any idea who he was, who he could have been. He is a name to them. An idea. Not a man. All the false tears, they disgust me. It is..."

Neither Chino nor Riff knew the word for "sacrilege" in English, but they both felt the connotation in every overblown, insincere movement and word of the funeral. Both felt like outsiders, watching a ritual designed to give the rest of the world closure and comfort.

"I still do not feel anything," Chino blurted, completely unsure of why he did so.

"I don't think I'm doing this funeral shit right," said Riff in unison.

They looked at each other, and Chino smiled as Riff laughed once.

"It's like, my best friend is dead. Tony was like a brother to me. Why..." he began.

"Why am I not crying? Why am I not feeling what I am supposed to feel?" Chino finished for him. Riff nodded. "I have not felt anything since I watched Bernardo die," Chino went on. "Yes, in the moment, I felt like I was the one stabbed, but ever since? My heart has been only... empty. I do not think I have accepted it yet."

They stopped walking at a tombstone with the marble sculpture of an angel resting atop it. Her face had been weathered away by wind and rain until only a featureless orb with flowing hair remained to give blind testament to the deceased. Her feathery wings spread to catch the wind, her knees were molded into the gravestone as one seamless piece, anchored to the marker of a man whose name had faded away with the passage of time. Riff traced the angel's wing with two fingers and a sigh.

"I don't know if I can," he said softly. "Because that mean's he's never coming back, and then that means I have to come to terms with how much of this is my fault."

His voice broke and Chino laid one hand on his shoulder. "None of this was ever supposed to happen," he said, unsure of who he was supposed to be convincing, himself, Riff, or God. "I do not know why we were the ones chosen to be the damned. The ones to remain and remember and live on. But we do have to live on. There are people who need us. In a few months I will be a father to my first son. We have to think of who remains."

Riff nodded quietly. "I wish someone warned me years ago what was gonna happen to me," he said in a voice that was too old for him. "And I wish I'da listened. Because for the love of God, I don't understand what was going on in our heads two weeks ago. I hope he'd forgive me. I never got the chance to ask him. I like to think he'd understand, but that's just because thinking he'd blame me and hate me forever is still kinda hard to take at this stage in the game." This didn't make sense to Chino, but then guilt rarely ever did to outsiders.

"Do you believe in religion, Riff?" he asked, his arms folded across his chest for warmth as he looked out across the barren field of the churchyard.

"I got a confession for you," Riff answered with a wry smile. "I think all those Burning Bush, Eaten By A Whale stories are a load of bullshit."

Chino laughed. "You know, so do I," he admitted. "But I do believe that when people die, they do not simply disappear. What would be the good in that? So much pain in life, so much feeling and passion and good, how can that all be blown out like a candle and go out with a wisp of smoke? Such a waste. No," he went on, turning his gaze toward the direction they had come, back toward the church, "I am sure they are there. Gone, yes, but do we not all wish to be gone from here? I believe Bernardo is still with his Anita, waiting for her, and for Maria and for me. I can feel him still sometimes, to the extent that I can feel. And if he is there, then I am sure Tony is too, waiting for Maria, and for his mother. For you, too, Riff. We all have to go somewhere in the end."

Riff looked out across the dusky field to the barely visible dreamy blue eye in the window of the church, winking and gleaming as it reflected some beam of light neither of them could see as it danced through the clouds. "I'm leaving tomorrow, you know," Riff said suddenly. "They sent me to some social worker who said I could either get arrested or find a family member to take me in and show me the error of my fucked-up ways. You know, like I needed that lesson. So I'm off to a farm upstate with my third cousin or something. I keep seeing the birds moving outta here for the winter," he went on in an uncharacteristic voice. "Moving on out, looking for someplace new. Makes me wonder, yeah, the place they're leaving is frozen over and shitty, but do you think they ever miss it? Just because it's home?"

Chino's dark eyes turned thoughtful. "I do not think so," he said slowly. "No matter what happens, they always go back."

"Going back," Riff repeated bitterly. "Man, now wouldn't that be something."

The stray sunbeam faded behind a cloud, and the glittering of the stained glass died out into the dull coldness of the surface of a frozen pond. People began to file out of the church, and a mash of voices drifted over the field. Both boys mentally registered that the funeral must be over, but neither of them felt any inclination at all to go back and rejoin their friends, their families, their worlds that would never really be the same. Even when the indistinguishable buzzing of voices shifted to individual inquiries, to "Hey, Action, you seen Riff today? Think he split," or "Maria, where is Chino? I need to see him," neither of them moved. Sitting by mutual agreement in the rapidly drying grass, they did not answer the questions tossed at them from afar. It was over. Tony and Bernardo were dead. What was the good in talking?

Sitting side by side and saying nothing, Riff and Chino waited quietly for the two hidden sunbeams through the clouds which they knew would never come back again. They watched the midday shadows pass across the arching wings of the anchored, faceless angel, painting her with deepening grays as they transitioned subtly into early evening.