If you listen to the 'Dirge' ost from Death Note, you might get into the mood.
Hatori wasn't stupid. Far from it, actually.
He knew how to pay taxes and do his job and all the mundane adult things that adults like him had to do. There were moments, though; moments that left him blind-sided, moments in which he had no idea how to react, how to behave, how to exist, right there in that moment.
This was one of those moments.
He honestly has no idea how to act right now. The sun is shining, birds are chirping, life seems good, but the atmosphere in the cemetery is anything but good. People are crying, the mood is somber, lives are breaking. Just breaking into tiny little bone-white china pieces that he has no idea how to glue back together. His life is breaking, too. Chiaki next to him hiccups; he didn't know the deceased that well, but the times he did meet him were…inconsequential, now that Hatori thought about it. They were inconsequential, they didn't mean anything in the span of an entire lifetime. But somehow, they had to mean something, or his lover wouldn't have been crying over the death of Masamune Takano's body.
He's sitting in one of those uncomfortable white chairs that people bring out for funerals, the ones that hurt your ass and press into your back like someone constantly prodding and poking and bothering you like hell, and why can't you just leave me alone?! His fingers are clenched on his black dress pants so tightly he can't feel the blood in them anymore. He doesn't want to feel anymore.
Most importantly, he doesn't want to feel anymore because that look, that look on Ritsu Onodera's face is so…Hatori can't even explain it. He can't say heart-breaking, no. It's so much more than just that. They were so good with each other, he thinks past all the static and grey scribbles and no, forget about that thought, don't let it take place in this already chaotic mind.
They were so good with each other.
And now Hatori thinks that he can't hold back anymore, so he quietly cries into his hand, quietly, silently, so Chiaki won't see him and nobody else will see him and wonder why Hatori, the one who was most stoic, most stone-faced is crying, is breaking right into those little pieces and he can't stop, can't…can't—
Takano was—is? was?—remarkable. He was. Hatori can't deny it. Takano was like a flash of lightning, like a star that burned too brightly and died out too quickly. He was absolutely…absolutely…
Original. He was so original, so…one-of-a-kind, the kind of man that every man wanted to be and the kind of man that you looked up to and the kind of man that tore everything apart only to build it back up again, better; and you couldn't forget him when he left. Because people like that always left as quickly as they came.
Onodera sits back down, and his eyes are so hollow, so dead, like there's no life in him anymore, like his soul has just been taken out and he's just an empty husk waiting to decompose. Perhaps he really is just that. When Takano left, he must've taken Onodera's life with him. It's just that simple.
Hatori feels a panic attack rising in him. He doesn't get them very often, but quite suddenly he feels his grasp on his life slipping and he can't keep calm, he needs something to anchor him back to this material world or he'll just die right along with Onodera.
What if…
What if…
What if—
There are so many 'what-ifs', so many 'maybes' and 'what if this happened instead?'. With slippery hands, he clutches onto Chiaki's hand next to him. He is so weak. He's supposed to be the strong one, the 'rock' in this relationship, but he finds he can't do that without his boyfriend, without the love of his life, next to him. Chiaki doesn't question his sudden panic, the fear that he can feel through Hatori's hand.
He only squeezes tighter and finally, finally, Hatori lets the tears that he's been bottling up drip down his face, and he suddenly feel like the world has just fallen over.
The sky above them shines blue, the birds are conversing cheerily; but in that small bubble of barely ten people, of the people most important to Masamune Takano, there is only—
Silence.
A/N: I might go back to that traditional Japanese funeral idea, maybe.
-ChemicallyEnhanced