"It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates.
Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love..."
– Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Jenny didn't know why she did it, and Zurial couldn't offer her an explanation either, even though it was usually his place to either provide or discredit reasoning. Maybe it was for herself, if she saw this bizarre half-being at the same time she saw the gravestone of Nick Cutter, she might be able to separate them, in her mind and in her heart. Maybe she did it for the clone itself, so it could see that it was not the professor no matter what Helen and her evil little marmoset dæmon told it.
She unbuckled her seatbelt and got out of the Hilux. "Let's go," she said quietly, unable to quite look the clone in the face. It had been acting very…peculiar lately, and Palmer wanted it out of her medical as soon as possible. Lester was at a loss with what to do with it, as was everybody else. Jenny had briefly considered throwing it in the Thames with cement shoes, but then Zurial reproached her for such thoughts which she would admit were thought more in anger than anything else. She walked through the rows of headstones and statues, not bothering to look and see if the clone followed—she knew that it was. Zurial trotted alongside her feet, near enough that she felt his fur brush her ankle a little; if they had come alone, she might've carried him.
Cutter's grave was right next to Stephen's. He didn't have any family, no next of kin, and that morbid responsibility fell to those that remained of the ARC team—his surrogate family, those that loved him most, and they could think of no better place.
Jenny stood at the foot of the grave, hands shoved in her pockets, Zurial sitting between her feet. There were fresh flowers laid next to the headstones of professor and tracker both, saying another team member had been by lately.
The clone stood beside her, just outside her personal comfort zone. Its clothes were all ill-fitting, taken from secondhand bins because she couldn't stand to have it wear anything of Cutter's. She had found a hooded jacket for it to wear, just in case anybody saw it and wondered how it was a dead man stood over his own grave. For a moment, the only sound was the soft sigh of the wind, the stir of dead, dry leaves across the grass, and their own breathing. It was the silence that unnerved her most, she thought. Cutter was incapable of keeping his mouth shut, so was Laiguline, no matter what the situation; the clone would remain utterly silent until spoken to directly. "You're not Nick Cutter," she said softly, unable to stand the quiet anymore, staring down at the new grass that was beginning to grow over the disturbed soil. "You aren't him. And you never will be."
"I know that."
Jenny's eyes whipped around to the clone in shock. As far as she recalled, it had never spoken without prompting before, without first being asked a direct question. It was gazing at the engraved headstone, an unreadable look in its eyes, perfectly replicated features partially shadowed by its hood. "What'd you say?" she whispered, Zurial pressing closer against her ankles.
"I am not Nick Cutter. I know that." The clone's brow furrowed slightly, a look of helpless puzzlement flittering across its expression. "The Mistress…the one who created me…She told me that I was Professor Nick Cutter. But I am not. We are not the same. I do not have his soul creature."
Jenny shivered slightly, leaning away from the clone slightly. It didn't have a dæmon at all, none of the clones did. And seeing any version of Cutter without Laiguline was like seeing the stars with no moon. She resisted the urge to scoop up Zurial into her arms, squeeze him to her breast, reassure herself he was still real. She hated that it disturbed her so much, but the lack of a dæmon was not something she could simply get used to, or overlook. And it was Zurial who feared the clone the most, seeing only an abyss where his own presence should be mirrored; perhaps he was afraid of the abyss gazing back.
"We are the same, though."
She stared at it in surprise. "What do you mean? How are we—?" Jenny's mouth snapped shut as the clone reached in the pocket of its oversized jacket and took out a small slip of paper. It was a photo, the one that she had found days ago in the ruins of Cutter's office—the photo of him and Claudia Brown, her mirror image and personal ghost, with a sleek mink dæmon curled on one arm, Laiguline on Cutter's shoulder. She had left it in the boxes of singed papers and research; how the clone had gotten hold of it was entirely beyond her. Now she did give into the impulse and swept Zurial up in one arm, pressing him to her breast so she could feel his heartbeat on hers.
"We are both…echoes," the clone said, its voice lower and rougher. Usually, when it spoke, there was an utter lack of all inflection in its voice, like the automated voice on an answering machine. But now there was a slightly hoarse quality to it, as if there was some deep-running emotion just below the surface. "We are echoes of people that we are not, people are not here anymore, people that we cannot be. We are alike. Are we not?"
Never – never she would have imagined that she would ever have anything in common with this clone, this strange not-quite-human being. However, looking up at its face, seeing the scar beneath its eye, that flickering shadow of emotion moving behind its eyes, Jenny wondered if she was wrong to be calling the clone an 'it' the way she had. "I – I don't know," she whispered at last, voice breaking softly.
The clone looked down at the photo again, still grasped in its large, inelegant hand. "You are not Claudia Brown. You are Jenny Lewis. I am not Nick Cutter. But…I do not know who I am," it said, voice just as low and quiet as hers.
Jenny lowered her eyes to the photo as well. She had been contemplating her own future so much recently, feeling like she had been losing touch with herself, getting lost inside the insanity of the ARC, dinosaurs and holes in time and death and chaos. "To be honest with you…I'm not entirely sure that I know who I am anymore, either," she murmured in reply. Pressing her nose between Zurial's fluffy ears, Jenny felt her indecision solidify into surety, and taking a deep breath, she said quietly, "I…I'm leaving the ARC for a while." She wasn't sure if she was speaking for the clone's benefit or her own, but the words kept coming. "I have to get away from here, at least for a while. I have to know that I'm still the same person I thought I was before." Before the ARC. Before Nick Cutter. Before Claudia Brown.
She lifted her eyes to the clone, still standing there beside her, unmoving and quiet as Cutter could never be. "I need to know that I'm still Jenny Lewis, without Claudia Brown. And you need to know who you are, without Nick Cutter."
It wasn't a question, but she got answer from the other man anyways. "I do. But I cannot leave, and I do not think I can do it by myself. I do not know how."
A faint smile pulled at her lips even as moisture gathered on her lashes. Jenny pressed her face into Zurial's fur to hide it, then glanced over. "Then I'll help you," she said softly.
The clone stared at her for a long moment, thoughts unreadable behind that blank, expressionless mask she now realised was purposeful, at least somewhat. "I would like that," he said at last.
Jenny set Zurial down, then took the photo from the clone's fingers, stepping forward to lay it against the headstone beside the flowers, then straightened up to look at him– him, not it. "Shall we, then?" she asked, holding a hand out.
He stared at her hand for a heartbeat, then reached out and curled his fingers around hers. And if Jenny or Zurial noticed the miniscule, unobtrusive little lizard, small enough to fit on a euro, creeping across the clone's shirt collar, blinking in the light of day, neither of them said anything about it.