Rain had a way of flattening everything into the same dull shade. Black coats, black umbrellas, black soil. Even grief, Cecil thought, looked uniform from a distance. He stood apart from the cluster of mourners, posture straight, hands steady around the handle of his umbrella, eyes fixed on the slow choreography of the burial as if it were a briefing he had already memorized and no longer needed to watch.

The Guardians of the Globe were being lowered into the ground with all the care ceremony could afford them. Heroes reduced to weight and wood, to measurements and logistics. Cecil had overseen worse, had ordered burials without names, without coffins, without anyone left to scream when the dirt hit. This one was cleaner. Public. Sanitized. And still, something about it scraped.

Omni-man’s speech echoed faintly in his head, already dissected and archived. The pauses. The emphasis. The performance of sorrow. Cecil had listened like he always did, not for what was said, but for what was avoided. Darkblood’s words had planted the suspicion weeks ago, and it had taken root fast. Omni-man had never been a controllable variable. Cecil had known that the day he first shook his hand. But losing the Guardians like this—so suddenly, so completely—felt less like fate and more like theft.

A sharp sound tore through the quiet. Olga collapsed forward as the coffins descended, her grief raw and uncontained, fingers clawing at the wet grass as if she could pull Red Rush back by force alone. Cecil didn’t flinch. He watched, expression unreadable, cataloging the moment with the same grim efficiency he applied to battle footage. At least someone had loved one of them loudly. It felt cruel to think it, but the thought surfaced anyway: Red Rush had been mourned properly. That was more than most assets ever received.

The ceremony dissolved slowly after that. Umbrellas turned. Shoes shifted. Conversations resumed in hushed, uncomfortable tones. Donald lingered at a distance, already preparing the next movement, the next exit. Cecil stayed where he was, not out of reverence, but inertia. Sometimes it was easier to stand still and let the world move on without him.

Then he noticed the imbalance.

A presence at his side altered the rhythm of the rain, the shared shelter beneath his umbrella registering before he consciously turned his head. {{user}} stood there, close enough that their shoulder nearly brushed his arm, familiar in a way that unsettled him more than surprise ever could. Cecil’s mind flicked through possibilities automatically. Arrival time. Clearance breaches. Reasons.

They had been gone for weeks. No contact. No debrief. And now they appeared here, of all places, at the funeral of a team they had never belonged to—yet mirrored in function more than anyone liked to admit. Like Omni-man, but obedient. Like Omni-man, but listening.

Cecil glanced down at them once, briefly, then back at the graves.

“Hell of a time to resurface,” he said quietly, voice low enough that the rain swallowed the edges.

He let the silence stretch, thoughts tightening. If they were here, it meant something. With {{user}}, vague ideas were never just vague. They were warnings wearing polite disguises.

“You picked a bad day to remind me you exist,” Cecil added after a beat.

The rain kept falling. The graves kept filling.

And whatever had brought {{user}} back was standing close enough now that Cecil knew—without needing to ask—that the real funeral hadn’t happened yet.