Chapter Text
His phone was ringing. At first he turned it off, expecting it to be his mother calling at 5am like she usually did but they called again. Groggy, he squinted at the screen in the dark. It was a number he didn’t have saved. Local area code, though. Normally, he’d just shut it off again, passing it off to be a telemarketer but after everything that had happened, he picked up.
Someone was crying on the other side. “Alex?”
“Hello?” he asked.
“It’s Elliot,” he sniffed. There was a choked sob and then, very shakily, he said, “Ryan—he’s… Alex, Ryan’s gone.”
“Gone?” He sat up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “Gone? He left?”
“N-no,” Elliot said. In the background, he heard another voice trying to calm him down. “Alex, Ryan’s dead. He was—he was stabbed in his bed.”
It felt like someone had pushed him over the edge of a cliff. Like he was falling into a misty canyon and he couldn’t see the bottom.
“Stabbed?” Alex managed to get out, swallowing the nausea. “That… are you there? Did you call the police?”
“Yeah, I just—can you come?” he asked. “They’re here. And so is Austin but he didn’t know Ryan like we did. I just—I need you to come here.”
“Okay,” he said, standing up. He snagged his jacket off of the floor. “Okay, I’m—I’m on my way.”
“Okay,” Elliot said and hung up.
Alex took a deep breath. His heart was beating a million times a second as he hastily threw on his jacket and slipped on a pair of shoes. He didn’t care if he was in sweatpants and a ratty old t-shirt. He needed to be there. It was a miracle he didn’t hit anyone on the road. Dawn was leaking over the hills and Alex’s vision blurred with tears even though he couldn’t even feel himself crying. They just flowed down his face.
He pulled into visitor parking and stood outside. There were three police cars. And an ambulance. He stared up the stairs to Ryan’s apartment door and saw Elliot on the landing. He started towards him but a cop slowed him down.
“Hey, you can’t—“
“Elliot called me,” he said. “The roommate.”
He looked up to the apartment and back to Alex, letting him go with a solemn nod. Maybe it was worse than he thought. He ran toward Elliot and as soon as he was a couple steps away, he hugged Alex. Elliot and him had never been close; they just were casual friends because of Ryan. But he hugged him back all the same.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I just needed someone here who would understand.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “Should…?”
“Yeah. Austin is inside making hot chocolate for the police officers.” He chuckled and it quickly turned into a sob. He covered his mouth, pulling away. “It’s so bad, Alex.”
“Is he still in there?” he asked.
He nodded. “They’re taking pictures for the—the investigation.”
They walked into the apartment together, stepping around the forensics team moving about the house. Alex didn’t want to look. He shouldn’t. And he didn’t. But there were drops of blood on the floor leading out of the front door. He was nauseous. He shouldn’t be there.
He sat on the couch with Elliot and Austin as the cops spoke to them. They’d been the ones that found him. Alex just clutched his mug of hot chocolate and stared at the black TV screen across from him. At one point, a handful of people came in and took Ryan away, the stark white sheet pulled over his face. He shot his head back down to his lap and took a sip of the hot chocolate, burning his tongue.
“Alex?”
He looked up.
“Were you here when he was initially found?”
“Officer Shelly,” he said.
Her face changed in a way that Alex didn’t like. She looked at her partner to her left and stared at Alex sadly.
“I’m sorry that I have to see you again this way,” she said. Her eyes were rimmed red like she’d been crying. “But were you here initially when Ryan was found?”
…
The sound of forks scraping against ceramic plates set Alex’s teeth on edge. He felt his eye twitch.
“If I hear you utter that name one more time, I’m going to make it yours and everyone else in this diner’s problem, do I make myself clear?” He said as calmly as he could manage.
Ryan’s parents froze in place, deer in Alex’s headlights. He leaned back with a sigh. Four hours of sleep in two days. He stared down at the burnt cup of coffee in front of him. It wasn’t quite real to him yet. It would be tomorrow, though.
“Well, it’s just—” His mother started. “That was all we knew Ryan as. It’s bad enough we legally couldn’t put it on the gravestone.”
“I told you that I’d kill you if you did, too,” Alex said.
“Yes, we got that message pretty clear,” Ryan’s dad said.
“Good.” He took a sip of his coffee with shaking hands. He couldn’t tell if it was from anger or lack of sleep. “And tomorrow, you know that you’re his only family. You will be surrounded by his friends. You will be the odd ones out. If you even so much as call him ‘she,’ about 50 people are going to rain hellfire.”
They exchanged a look.
“Got it,” his father said.
“Makes me wonder what kind of friends sh—uh… he had if you have to give us all these warnings about violence.” His mother gave her husband a look.
“Most of us would take a bullet for Ryan. Even now.” He clenched his jaw. “Makes me wonder what kind of parents you are based on how your son was murdered and all you care about is his gender identity.”
Alex took pride in the looks on their faces. He’d met them once before when he visited Ryan during summer break. He’d stayed two days and the entire time, Ryan told him to keep his mouth shut when they disrespected him. He stood up to everyone else in his life but these two were particularly malicious about it. Their own flesh and blood. Their child— dead child who had a funeral at 10am tomorrow. If Alex had had anything to eat since he’d been murdered, he would’ve thrown up.
“All I ask out of you for one day for just a few hours is that you call your son your son and refer to him as Ryan. This is your last chance to make it up to him.” Alex nearly begged them, staring down at the table.
“Okay,” his mother said. “I—we can do that much.”
“Thank you,” Alex said. He stood up and threw a couple dollars on the table. “That should cover my coffee. If you don’t mind, I have a funeral to finalize plans for.”
In his car, he pulled at his hair. How can they still be that way? How can they—after years of not seeing or speaking to Ryan—still be as terrible as they always were? This shouldn’t even have to be a conversation he should even have to have! With a huff, he started the car and headed back home. He had a few loose pieces floating around for tomorrow. He had to call Elliot to see if him and Austin were practiced and ready for their song. Then there was his girlfriend Kelcie who promised to bake Ryan’s favorite cookies for the wake. And he still needed to pick up those flowers from the shop downtown—it was a lot to think about all at once. It kept him busy, though. He didn’t know what would happen if he wasn’t busy. He didn't want to know.
“Okay so… it says to put yogurt in the frosting? Is that right?” Kelcie asked. “Alex?”
“What?” he snapped out of his daze, locking eyes with her.
She gave him a soft smile. “Yogurt?”
“In the frosting, yeah,” he said. “Sorry, I’m a little tired.”
She huffed out a laugh, flicking black hair over her shoulder. “I can tell. It’s been a rough week. How have you been sleeping?”
“Haven’t been,” Alex sighed. “Guess I’m not much help with cookies right now.”
“Oh, fuck off, Alex. You’ve been helping me just fine. You reached that bowl off the top shelf and told me that it was chocolate chips and raisins, not ‘or.’” Kelcie leaned against the counter. “Which I told you that you didn’t even have to do. You just called me and then showed up at my door.”
“I just wanted to make sure they were perfect.” He crossed his arms.
“And to not be alone, I’m guessing?” Kelcie smiled and Alex knew she could see through him. She had always been able to. “How was the meeting with Mariah and Jacob?”
Alex felt his eye twitch at the mention of them but took in a deep breath. Kelcie hadn’t been there, she didn’t know. That’s why she was asking. He sighed and gripped the countertop.
“They’re so fucking awful, Kels. So terrible. They care more about the fact that he’s trans than the fact that he was murdered and no one knows who did it,” he said calmly. “If I’m not in jail for aggravated assault by the end of tomorrow, I will truly be surprised.”
“This isn’t about them. Remember that. This is about Ryan.” She kissed his forehead. “I can finish these on my own, okay? Take something and try to get some sleep.”
He sighed. “Yeah. Okay. See you tomorrow?”
“Yeah, I’ll pick you up at 8,” Kelcie said and Alex hugged her tightly for so long he didn’t know if he could let go.
The cookies would be done and ready for tomorrow. Elliot and Austin had their song prepared. Alex had his speech printed out. And the flowers were going to be delivered to the funeral home. Tomorrow was going to happen one way or another.
When he got home, there was a statue on the doorstep. He couldn’t make it out in the dim light, turning on his phone’s flashlight. It was a cat. It was Ryan’s cat statue. He’d seen it before only once. Had Elliot dropped it off? From what he gathered, it meant a lot to Ryan. Alex did a quick 360, trying to see if whoever had dropped it off was lurking nearby but the parking lot was empty.
Inside, he made himself a cup of sleepytime tea and sat down at the dining table, the statue sat across from him. It looked almost like an animatronic and sort of like Ryan with the glasses and a spot on its cheek where Ryan’s beauty mark was.
“Huh,” he said out loud. “Wonder who dropped you off.”
It didn’t say anything back.
He sat back in his chair and took his speech out of his pocket. It was worn from how much Alex folded it and unfolded it and revised it with a red pen. He looked up at the cat and back to the paper.
“Tell me if this sucks,” he said before reading off of the paper. “I met Ryan in college and I would like to say we started off immediately as friends but realistically we were rivals. We’d fight and fight and fight in the commons over the stupidest things until we bonded over a mutual hatred for a shared professor. Ryan was unnaturally smart. This kid could blast through the math problems that I’d been struggling with for months all while working hard on his English degree of all things. He would listen to me ramble on and on about urban legends and humored me when I asked him to be my robotics man when we opened Fazbear’s Fright together. I admired him to no end, he was—is my best friend. And I was never brave enough to tell him how much I looked up to him because I knew he’d say some dumb shit like “I’m the one who’s supposed to be gay here, Alex.’”
He glanced up at the cat and continued. Tough crowd.
“Till the very end, he was stubborn and funny and a hard worker. He was everything I didn’t see in myself. I will always remember him as the one who’d show up at 3am if I asked him to, no questions asked. He was a tough nut to crack but once we got past that, he was a sweetheart. He saw humanity in things I never could. I’m sure that a lot of you can say the same when I say that he changed me for the better in so many ways.” He flipped the page over. “I should inform you that they are taking the matters of his death very seriously and are doing a very thorough investigation, which is why this funeral is taking place a lot later than normal. I ask on behalf of Ryan now that you don’t remember him as a murder victim but as a friend. At the same time, though, do not let this get swept under the rug. Keep his name on your tongue until they find out who did this. Until then, I’m convinced he won’t rest easy.”
Alex put the paper down and sighed, smiling sadly at the cat statue. “Yeah. It sucks. I was thinking of winging it at the funeral and just kinda letting the heart say what it wants.”
The cat seemed to agree.