CHAPTER 29
A citywide day of mourning was declared when the news broke.
A gleaming chrome coffin lay in state in the atrium of city hall for two days, and the line of people coming to pay respects to the city's fallen hero never ebbed. A heavy police presence around the wake deterred the Sins from exacting any kind of retribution or counterattack.
The coffin was closed, naturally.
Alex never found out how much of Johannes the crews sent to sift through the wreckage had found, or if they could identify any of his remains at all. From the sound of things, when Johannes had brought down the Hive, he had brought most of the Sins' vanguard down with him. That, coupled with the losses that Clarus City's less scrupulous heroes had inflicted on their ranks and the damage the rest of them had done, the remaining Sin operatives had gone deep underground. A hasty note from Stocks left in one of his dead drops confirmed that the rest of the Sin leadership had survived, though they had all taken injuries and were content to lick their wounds for now.
The heroes had agreed amongst themselves that it would be safest for them to avoid Johannes's funeral, except for those of their number who were notable public figures whose absence would draw more attention than otherwise. Alex joined the crowds that thronged around city hall to pay respects to the Hammer during the state viewing, and only had a few seconds in front of the shining coffin before the press of the crowd behind him forced him along. As he emerged from city hall blinking tears from his eyes, he saw Ingrid wandering listlessly around the plaza. Their eyes met for a moment, but they both turned away without saying anything. They couldn't know who was watching, and they wanted to be alone with their grief anyway.
When the funeral rolled around two days later, Alex and Hierro watched the live stream on Alex's laptop from the roof of their apartment building. The early autumn sun was bright, and the cheery weather only darkened Alex's mood. Ever since he became Hawlucha Man, Alex had eschewed alcohol, but as he watched the mourners file into St. Dunstan's cathedral, he broke the seal on a bottle of the cheapest vodka he could find and took a long pull, coughing and gasping as it burned his throat on the way down.
Hierro had curled up, his shoulders hunched and his feathered crest limp. Alex reached out a hand and slowly ran it through his partner's plumage, losing himself in the repetitive motion of smoothing Hierro's feathers. The Hawlucha leaned into the touch, and the two of them sat in silence as the funeral service began. The camera panned across the crowd, and Alex got occasional glimpses of Isabelle, Edgar, Lakshmi and Jiro. Edgar kept his face carefully impassive, but there was a haunted look about his features, a new darkness in his eyes, a kind of defeat that was in stark contrast to the avenging fire that took hold of him whenever he talked about the loss of his parents. Lakshmi sat several rows back from the front, nearly anonymous in her black gown and veil that was such a drastic departure from her usual vibrant outfits. Isabelle stared resolutely ahead, and though Alex could see that the makeup around her eyes had smudged, her hands gripped the bench of her pew with white-knuckled intensity.
After the president of the Avenbrooke Institute of Technology gave a speech praising Johannes for his achievements in aerospace engineering and his contributions to the space elevator, Jiro limped up to the pulpit to deliver his eulogy. His features were drawn and sunken, and he seemed to be struggling under a gigantic weight. Though his beard was neatly trimmed as usual, there was an unkempt quality about it, and his eyes looked haunted. Alex took a pull from his bottle at the thought of Clarus City's heroes being reduced to this, and once he caught his breath and got the burn to subside a bit, he took a second swig for good measure.
Jiro struggled through the eulogy, extolling Johannes's virtues as a man and as a hero in fits and starts, trailing off frequently as he was overcome with emotion. Finally, in mid-sentence, Jiro finally broke. "I'm sorry. I can't do this." He crossed the altar and laid the palm of his hand on Johannes's coffin. "I'm so sorry, my friend. You deserved better than me."
The image of Jiro Sasaki weeping over the coffin would be on the front page of every newspaper in the city the next morning.
When the pallbearers took up the coffin and the mourners began to file out, Alex closed his laptop and tried to get to his feet. Hierro had to jump up and help him regain his balance as he staggered drunkenly towards the stairs. Alex glanced down at the bottle in his right hand and realized half of it was gone. Together, he and Hierro made their way down to his apartment, and Alex sagged onto the couch, while Hierro took up his usual perch on the back of the armchair. Alex set the bottle of vodka on the table for a moment before picking it back up again. There wasn't much else to do now but finish it.
Alex and Hierro sat there for the rest of the day, watching as the shadows in the apartment lengthened. Finally, when the streetlight outside flickered on, Alex tried to stir himself, but his head was so fogged with drink that he just let himself sink back further into the couch.
The city could look after itself tonight. Its heroes had done enough.
A few days after the funeral, when the crowds had thinned out, Alex and Hierro made their way up to Origin Gate cemetery way uptown. It took three subway transfers and most of the morning, but the time passed like a blur to Alex. He was still in a state of mild shock, but after Johannes's funeral, he had managed to keep himself out of his cups again.
The plot wasn't hard to find; it was covered in a mound of flowers, wreathes, and written prayers. The name, dates, and epitaph were completely covered by the pile, and loose petals littered the ground nearby. A small brass bowl atop the headstone was full of smoldering incense sticks, and the fragrances mingled with the scent of the flowers into something cloyingly sweet. Alex tugged up the hood of his sweatshirt and produced two candles from his backpack, one black and one white. Johannes hadn't been a Unovan, but Alex figured he would appreciate the gesture.
He set the two candles on either side of the incense dish and lit them with a cheap lighter from the bodega near his apartment. Hierro reached out and took his hand, and the two of them stood before the stone with their heads bowed for a time.
The hood of his sweatshirt was deep and cut off his peripheral vision, but when he felt Hierro squeeze his hand, he glanced to the side. Isabelle stood beside them, with the collar of her thin black coat turned up to cover the lower half of her face. The slight breeze whipped her hair around her head, and her eyes were distant.
When she finally noticed Alex looking at her, she jerked her head to the side. "Mom and Dad are buried over there."
"Oh."
"Yeah."
They stood in silence for a while longer, and finally Isabelle sighed. "The first time I came here, after the funeral, he was with me. I probably couldn't have faced their graves again if he hadn't been there." Though her mouth was hidden, lines around Isabelle's eyes shifted as she smiled. Tears sparkled in her eyes. "He bought me a lemonade afterwards. Something sweet to balance the bitter, he said." She sniffed. "If it hadn't been for him, I probably would have turned out like Eddie."
"Vengeful and angry?"
"I was going to say a fucking moron, but sure."
They shared a smile at that, and Alex let go of Hierro's hand to stroke his partner's crest. "He was the best out of all of us," Alex said. "The strongest, the bravest, the most… heroic. What are we going to do without him?"
"Our best," Isabelle replied. "He told us to make him proud, so I'm gonna do it." She dashed the tears from her eyes. "I'm gonna punch Dominion's goddamn teeth in, that's what I'm gonna do."
Alex cringed. "Iz, she's something else. When I went up against her I… I couldn't do anything. All she had to do was look my way and I was out of the fight. If Johannes and the others hadn't shown up when they did, I—"
"I'm the heir to a trillion dollar company, birdbrain. I've been trained to resist an esper getting in my head since I could talk. Jiro might not have been able to hack it, but I'm way better at it than he is." Her hands curled into fists. "He should have brought me along. Things might have been different if I was there. If I just could have…" Isabelle sighed and scuffed her designer shoes in the graveyard soil. "That's the problem we have, isn't it? To do the kind of stuff we do, to be the kind of person we are, you kind of have to be an arrogant asshole, don't you? To look at every problem you see and say, 'Yeah, it's my job to fix that,' and every time something goes wrong to say, 'That was all my fault.' Don't you ever feel that way?"
Alex thought it over for a minute. "I guess?"
"Jiro's got it the worst of us, I think. Being the first one, he feels like he's responsible for the rest of us, that he has to be this paragon. If something happens to us, it's his fault for not protecting us. That's why he needed to fight Dominion alone, even after he made a big deal about us all coming together." She jammed her hands into her coat pockets. "No one's seen him since the funeral. Complete and total isolation. He's not seeing me, or Lakshmi, or even the Takedas. He thinks it's all on him, even though Johannes chose this." Isabelle sighed. "I've never seen him like this before."
"We've all been hit pretty hard. Maybe he just needs some time?"
"This is the first time Jiro's lost." At Alex's puzzled look, Isabelle clarified. "Jiro's never lost. Every fight he's been in, every bad guy he's gone up against, he's won in the end. So first Dominion had him dead to rights, and then he loses Johannes? He doesn't know how to process it, let alone how to cope." She shrugged. "Have you seen any of the others?"
"Just Ingrid, and only for a few seconds at the wake."
"Eddie says she's taking it really hard. I'll let him try and take care of her before I step in. Greenpoint sticks together, or whatever. Eddie bought the fallen Hives, by the way. When the contractors and developers started hemming and hawing about the damage, Harcourt Limited scooped up the property and took it off their hands. He mentioned cleaning it up and putting up some affordable housing or whatever. Opportunities for local business too."
"That's surprisingly noble."
"You're tellin' me. He's going to lose a bunch of money on it. Archangel's gone into seclusion, but he'll be okay. Just has to even out his psychic vibrations or whatever. Lakshmi's doing some hardcore gardening to process this stuff, but she'll pull through. I've got no idea how the Ridgewood guys or the Ronin are holding up, though."
"The Ronin's handling things like he usually does," Alex replied. "The Eleventh found the bodies of six Sin operatives in the last three days. I hear Captain Unova's been pulling double patrols." When Isabelle rolled her eyes, Alex shrugged. "He's really not a bad guy when you get to know him." Hierro chirped in agreement. "What about you? You seem to be doing suspiciously well."
"I'm compartmentalizing," Isabelle said. "I compartmentalize like a fucking champ. I got the initial shock out of my system at the funeral, and I'm probably going to have a nervous breakdown and throw a fit in a couple weeks when I can't bottle this up anymore. I'll, I don't know, smash some priceless fucking pottery my great-great-grandfather bought and get it out of my system." She ignored Alex's concerned look and squared her shoulders. "But until then? I'm stepping up to do what Johannes would have done. He and Jiro trained me to be the best, the hope of Clarus City, so that's what I'm going to be."
"You can talk to us, you know. Hierro and I." Hierro crossed behind Alex and took Isabelle's hand. "We can go find a billboard to sit on and chat, maybe beat up some bad guys if it makes you feel better. Johannes trained Ingrid and I to help take some of the burden off of you."
Isabelle smoothed Hierro's feathers before reaching over the Hawlucha's head to sock Alex's arm. "Played you like a fiddle, huh?"
"What?"
She grinned. "It wasn't even hard! I figured you'd be all mopey and down on yourself, but the second you heard that I was taking it harder than you, you'd put your funk aside and help pick me up. It's a win-win; I get to vent for a few minutes and you get your do-gooder mojo back."
"How did you know I was going to be here?"
"I gave the guy at the bodega on your corner two hundred bucks to send me a message if you went into the subway. I figured you'd come here before anything else."
"You're really something, Iz."
"A freakin' masterpiece, I know." When Alex gave her a wan smile and rolled his eyes she socked his arm again. "See, that's what Johannes would have wanted. I'm sure if we dug him up right now, he'd be rolling in his grave from all of this moaning and groaning we're doing over him." She sighed. "He'd say some clichéd crap about how we've gotta keep moving forward and never give in to despair, and as corny as it would sound, it would work."
"Figures that the one hero we can't afford to lose is the first one to fall." Alex watched the two flickering flames atop Johannes's tombstone. "The last thing he said to me was that he was proud of me, that I was a great hero and that I had his respect. He couldn't have known, but that was exactly what I needed to hear right then."
"Of course he knew. He was Johannes."
"Are you sure you're ready to be the hope of Clarus City?"
"No, but who is when it comes to stuff like this?" Isabelle stared off into the middle distance, but some of her color was coming back. "With Johannes gone and Jiro out of the equation, someone needs to step up. Once Dominion dusts herself off, she's going to be spitting mad, and Archangel thinks if we don't do something about it, she's going to have a hissy fit and do her best to level the city. We need someone who's going to carry on the torch and lead from the front, and I'm the best we've got. I'm not like Jiro, and I know I can't do this all on my own. I'll be counting on the rest of you all to back me up." She raised an eyebrow. "Speaking of which, this weekend you're going to come to mansion and spar with me. We can't have you getting rusty. I need a strong number two to back me up."
"I'm nobody's sidekick, Iz."
"I think Hierro might beg to differ." She crouched down next to the Hawlucha. "You're the one doing all the heavy lifting around here, aren't you?" Hierro puffed out his feathers and preened. Isabelle straightened with a grunt. "But I'm not talking about a sidekick, birdbrain. I mean I need someone I can count on watching my back when this all boils over. Johannes was right, at the end of the day, you're a damn fine hero. You're no Volcarona Mask, but…"
"You know, Jiro was a lot better at this sort of thing."
"Well, he had years of practice. Just one more thing I have to catch up on."
Alex took his hand out of the pocket of his hoodie and held out his fist to Isabelle. "You're a pain in my ass, but I'll always have your back."
"Hell yeah!" They went through the motions of the elaborate handshake she had designed for them, culminating in a fist bump. "We're going to kick so many asses, birdbrain, you have no idea."
Alex blew out the candles on Johannes grave and laid his hand on the headstone for one final goodbye. When he looked up, he managed to crack a smile. "Thanks, Iz."
"Anytime, dude. You want to grab a lemonade?"