Clutching || Bucky Barnes

1

Phillip's funeral was an affair full of emotions. The sky was overcast yet no rain had dampened the cremation hall's steps. The hall itself was small and the people who turned up just about fit onto the six rows of wooden pews on either side. It was a slight squish but they managed it. Friends and family all in dark shades in an effort to merge with the somber atmosphere a funeral often set. And it was sad, there were tears and choked up throats but there was also laughter and jokes. The grief lightening for moments as eyes crinkled and laughs echoed off the white stone of the hall and the flowers set in stained glass above. 

Basil and Henry sat at the front of the hall. The eve of which was occupied by the plinth where the coffin had been laid for all too see and eventually be lowered down into the furnace below. Both men were in dark suits, Basil with a collarless white shirt on under his blazer and a pair of deep varnished red doc marten boots on his feet. His curls were cut shorter again, short and smart for the occasion. Henry was at his side. The ginger locks having grown out enough to curve round his forehead and brush his eyebrows. It made him look younger and emphasised  the cut of his old fashioned suit. Phillip would have had a comment about it. The man had always treated Henry like a nephew.

 It was just them. The two of them surrounded and yet almost alone. Basil stuck out as the youngest person attending, even though he knew that he was the oldest. Steve was off somewhere and Bucky was still frozen. He was alone and it ached.  

The two of them watched and listened as a woman stood on the stand in the corner and spoke out about how she met Phillip back in the fifties, a different time when she was a different gender. Basil tried to remember her name but the grief and the ache on his bones hung heavy and clouded his mind. Saffie, he finally recalled. 

Saffie was speaking, her wild afro long since grey and brown eyes wise, tears in the corners. "I recalled asking how a man like him came to be in a place like that. A straight, rich and well educated man with a fiancé, what he was doing in a steady bar full of transvestites in soho. At first I thought he was closeted, like I bet many of you thought". A scattering of laughs and agreeing nods from the rest of the guests. Men and women, most old and in their eighties and above. But a few were younger. Basil recognised a few of the nurses from the nursing home. There were a few people who were from the charities Phillip had worked with over the years. 

Saffie continued. "Well, he was unfortunately straight and completely devoted to his fiancé. I was quite surprised, so I asked him What's a man like you doing in a place like this? He just turned to me and smiled and replied. Because this bar serves the best cocktails he's tasted in the whole of London and that he was awaiting a chess friend who won't play unless drunk. Why that was probably one of the strangest meetings I'd ever had working that bar. His friend turned up, I served them cocktails all evening and watched them play chess until they were both to drunk to stand. He vomited on my shoes then complimented my dress. We were friends from that moment onwards". 

Basil let out a chuckle even as his chest ached. He never got to see Phillip drunk. He had missed that, just as he missed everything else in his brother's life. The guilt and the sorrow of all the time he had never had was a physical ache. It squeezed his throat even as he laughed with the rest of the hall. Then Saffie looked up over the rows and her gaze met his. She gave him a warm smile. "It was later that I asked him why he did so much for us. His money funded half of the LGBT charities in London and he had paid to keep many safe spaces open. Just the week before I asked this question, him and Lydia had cooked a bunch of food for the homeless shelter in the south of London. I sat up with him after he helped me clean up after a drag show, and I asked 'why do you do this? what inspired you to look after people that mostly go ignored?' He didn't respond right away. But when he did, he said Because everyone knows someone who is different. A friend, a family member, a distant cousin. What my brother taught me was that those differences don't make you any less human ,and humans shouldn't be ignored."