Trace Your Name Across The Map
by Sandrine Shaw
Run away with me, Jason never says.
Spencer does it anyway.
She's halfway to Georgetown with a trunk full of her possessions, ready to start a new life far away from Rosewood with all its secrets and lies and ghosts, ready to leave it all behind, when her phone rings. Even now that CeCe's been locked away and A's gone for good, she still flinches every time her phone goes off. At the sound of every text message she gets, she's sixteen again, terrified of shadows.
Jason's name flashes on the screen and she's swamped by relief until she hears his voice, the words barely intelligible and slurred and his tone so broken and defeated that her heart clenches in sympathy.
I don't want to do this anymore, he says, and Spencer isn't sure if by 'this', he means drinking or life. A different kind of fear comes over her, anxiety rising up like bile in her throat.
"Jason, listen to me." Her voice is calm even though she's not. She imagines talking down a scared, wounded animal that's backed against a cliff and could jump at her or down into the abyss at any moment. "I promise I'll help you. We can fix this. Where are you right now?"
There's nothing on the other end of the line except for the sound of Jason's breathing, shaken with quiet sobs. Don't panic, she tells herself, but her knuckles are white against the steering wheel and her eyes are starting to tear up.
"I need you to tell me where you are, Jason, and then I need you to stay there until I come and get you."
Part of her doesn't believe he'll answer, expects him to end the call and do whatever he thinks he has to do, and when he finally speaks again, the relief hits her so hard that she almost crashes the car. He rattles down the name of a bar in Brooklyn, so she hurls the car into a u-turn and takes the I-95 north, back the way she came.
Jason spends the night and much of the morning folded over the toilet bowl in the tiny bathroom of the hotel room Spencer rented them. He was bunking with friends, but couldn't remember the address or perhaps he just pretended not to because he didn't want them to see him like this. Spencer kneels next to him, squeezed in between his body and the wall until her legs start cramping, holding his hair back when he retches and moving her hand in soothing circles up and down his back.
"It'll be okay," she tells him, and a litany of similar empty phrases of comfort she isn't sure she quite believes herself.
The room smells of disinfectant and stale air blowing out of the A/C. Spencer curls around Jason's body on top of the sheets and lets him sob quietly into her shoulder. Eventually, she falls asleep, her hand tangled in his hair and his arms like a vice around her body, clinging to her as if she'd disappear if he didn't hold on tightly enough.
In the days that follow, she makes him show her around Brooklyn. She's been to New York City before, but never this neighborhood. Mostly, though, it's to make Jason feel useful and to distract him. She asks lots of questions she doesn't really need answering, just to keep him talking, and she forces a bounce into her step and a smile to her face when she drags him into small arty stores and coffee shops.
They sit down on a bench in the park and watch a group of girls play catch, and Spencer wonders if her friends ever looked that carefree. Jason's eyes are clouded as he looks at them. It's not hard to guess what he's thinking about.
Spencer tries to think of something to say, but before her mind settles on something, Jason speaks. "I've been thinking of going away." He must notice her worried expression because he instantly adds, "Traveling, I mean."
The only times Spencer went anywhere in the last couple of years, it was either to track down information about A or when A was hot on her tail, like those horrifying days in England back in February after Melissa got her interview for Oxford. The idea of just going somewhere without a purpose, without someone chasing her, is both foreign and appealing.
"Where would you want to go?" They're still talking in the subjunctive, but in Spencer's mind, the certainty that she wants to do this – just take a plane and leave, without telling anyone – is manifesting by the second.
"I don't care. As far away from Rosewood as possible." Jason smiles, but it turns into a frown fast. "Aren't you supposed to be at college? When do your classes start?"
"Two days ago." Spencer stares back defiantly, daring him to say something.
He runs his hands over his face, a gesture of defeat and exhaustion. "Spence, look, I don't want to mess up your future. I don't need a babysitter. You have a chance to get out of –"
"Jason. Jason, stop it, okay? You're not messing up anything. I didn't even want to go to college, but my mother decided that I had to because having your teenage years stolen by an omnipresent stalker with a grudge doesn't count as a reason to question the purpose of academic education when you're a Hastings. I need a break from all this craziness as much as you, so let's not pretend I'm being totally altruistic here."
There are a lot of things she needs to take a break from. Her mother micro-managing her life. Her father's lies. Ali's inability to move on. Her friends' paradoxical need for both change and the comfort of the familiar at once. The quiet, tortuously slow break-up she and Toby had gone through in the weeks after graduation.
She understands him, just like she understands the girls and her parents, but if CeCe's confession has shown her anything it's that you can understand someone and resent them at the same time.
Spencer stands and brushes herself off. "Let's go away. Right now. Anywhere."
They take a flight to Heathrow from JFK, but Spencer doesn't want to stay in London. It's a giant metropolis, millions of people going on about their business, and the chances of running into Melissa are slim to none, but she doesn't want to risk it.
When she mentions it to Jason on the plane while they're discussing what to do after they arrive, his face turns into a grimace.
"What is it?" she asks.
He drops his head back hard against the cushioned back-rest, staring stubbornly ahead. "My family is so messed up."
"Our family," Spencer says firmly.
Jason snorts. "Yeah, but you never dated two of your siblings without knowing you were related to them."
Spencer winces. She wonders if CeCe lied about how far their relationship went, but she doesn't know how to ask. She knows that their parents think they put a stop to Jason's romance with Melissa before it ever got serious, but she also knows Melissa and how good she was at sneaking around with boys while making everyone believe that she was a good girl.
"At least we figured out you were my brother before –" She stops herself, horrified. Why would she say this? Why is she implying that anything would have happened between them if the truth about Jason's parentage hadn't come out?
She shakes her head as if that would help her clear the thought, erase it permanently from her mind. "I'm sorry." The words feel awkward and heavy. "I didn't mean that."
If she could bring herself to look up and meet Jason's eyes, she'd notice the strange look on his face – too intense, too something – but she keeps her gaze averted in a flurried rush of emotions overshadowed by guilt she can't quite explain, and misses it.
On a sunny September Sunday, they rent a car and embark on a drive down the south coast of England, a string of picturesque towns and open roads, blue skies and the rolling landscape of the South Downs.
Spencer rolls down the passenger side window and holds out her arm, the cool air like a caress against her skin, and she feels as if her stretched-out fingers are touching freedom.
It only takes a few hours until Jason stops complaining about driving on the wrong side of the road and falls quiet. He looks more relaxed than Spencer has seen him in forever. Ever since she's known him, there was this storm raging inside of him, more often than not close enough to the surface that it only took very little to make it break free. Now, thousands of miles away from home and from anyone they know, she can see the storm calming.
Part of her wonders if it was a mistake to come with him. As much as she hates to think about it, she's part of all the awful, twisted memories that haunt him, the messed-up family he's trying to escape. What if, for the storm to finally ease, he'd have to leave everyone behind, including her?
In a coffee shop in Chichester, studying the local theater schedule (she wants to go see Antony and Cleopatra, Jason would rather find a pub and watch soccer, even though he admits to having no knowledge of the sport other than it's nothing like football), Spencer finally blurts out what's been on her mind for the past twenty-something hours.
"Would you be happier if I hadn't invited myself along?"
He looks a little confused. "Look, fine, if it's that important to you, we can go see the Shakespeare thing."
"What? No. That's not – I didn't mean because of that." She looks down and picks at the plastic lid of her coffee cup. "I just – You wanted to get away from all that... stuff at home, and it only just occurred to me that I'm actually part of it, and that coming with you might have been kind of counterproductive."
When she looks at him again, Jason's frown has deepened and her fear that this, the whole trip, was a mistake skyrockets.
"No."
He doesn't say anything more – no elaboration or explanation, like it's not meant to be comforting or reassuring, just a cold hard fact with so much certainty in that single word that it leaves no room for her doubts.
The weather holds for a week before it starts to rain and rain and doesn't stop, and the raw beauty of the countryside gets washed away in the gloom and the grey. It's time to move on.
At the airport, they ask for the next available connection to any place in Europe, and the woman at the ticket booth eyes them with confusion.
"Don't you have any preferences at all?" she wants to know. Her name tag reads Daniela. She's about Jason's age, and it's obvious that she can't imagine just turning up at the airport with packed bags and no destination in mind.
Spencer and Jason look at each other, identical smiles making their lips twitch.
"Anywhere's fine," Jason says, and Spencer adds, "What would you recommend?" making Daniela smile and tell them about a beautiful summer she spent in Berlin with her girlfriends.
The next plane to Tegel leaves at 7pm, and Spencer looks out of the window, watching the sea of lights that are London get smaller and smaller beneath her until they're swallowed by clouds and darkness.
Berlin in fall is hit and miss. The sunny days are golden and gorgeous. Strolling across street markets and eating shawarma in parks and watching the streets and people being shrunk to the size of an ant colony from the top platform of the TV tower.
There are other days, though, cold and rainy, turning the city ugly and grey, and they barely leave the hostel room they share. It's worse when they get to Hamburg, where the gloomy atmosphere is joined by a wind so strong it crushes every umbrella Spencer buys.
Jason zaps through peculiar German TV programs and familiar TV shows that hold a strange kind of fascination because of the dubbing.
"They all sound so weird," Spencer declares, watching Damon pledge his undying love for Elena. At least she thinks that's what he's doing. Her German is basically non-existent, and the way CW shows tends to over-dramatize everything, it's impossible to tell from visuals alone what's happening. He might as well be talking about painting his living room.
Jason raises his eyebrow at her. "I didn't know you were into vampires. Doesn't strike me like your kind of thing."
"Shut up." Laughing, Spencer throws her pillow at him. "Hanna used to watch it. She said it was soothing to watch people with more complicated lives than us."
While she's distracted trying to figure out if she's actually seen this episode before, the pillow comes flying back at her, hitting her square in the face. She splutters in indignation, bringing out a wicked sort of glee on Jason's face, and soon they're involved in a full-blown pillow fight that only ends when she throws the pillow a little too hard and it hits the corner of the bedside table, ripping open. There are feathers everywhere, but mostly all over Jason and his bed, and neither of them can stop laughing for a long time.
They get drunk off their heads on their second night in Amsterdam. In hindsight, maybe a city with more bars than canals and where weed is legal might not be the best place for two people with a history of addiction.
Stumbling through the streets and giggling over some joke that isn't really all that funny and which neither of them will remember in the morning, Jason stops when Spencer leans against a brick wall to catch her breath. Suddenly, he's right there, brushing hair off her forehead with a touch so gentle, as if she'd break if he didn't take care. He seems too serious at once, and strangely sober, his attitude stifling Spencer's laughter abruptly.
"I'm in love with you," he whispers into the darkness, and everything grinds to a halt. Even though his tone is hushed and the nightlife is buzzing around them, he might as well have shouted, his words ringing in her ears like thunder.
Spencer doesn't even dare to breathe, rooted to the spot, afraid that something might shatter. Afraid that that something might be her heart, or her sanity.
Jason pulls back violently, face contorting into something ugly and vicious. "What the fuck is wrong with me? I mean, you can explain away Melissa because we didn't fucking know, and Charles, CeCe, whatever. But you– I know who you are, what we are, and I still want you. I thought it would pass but it doesn't, it just gets worse and worse. What kind of monster looks at his sister and thinks about –"
"Jason, stop." She can't let him finish, as if not hearing it makes it any better. "It's not –" Words escape her. What kind of comfort can she offer? It's not so bad? It's not your fault? It's not just you?
It doesn't matter. He stops her before she can make up her mind what to say, holding up his hands in a silent, panicked don't get any closer gesture, eyes wide and scared as he turns and disappears into the night. She calls after him, but he just runs faster.
She spends a sleepless night looking for him everywhere, crying, and imagining all kinds of terrible things he might have done to himself. In the morning, Jason's back in the motel, and both of them act like nothing has happened, like nothing has changed at all.
In Belgium, they mostly ignore each other.
They meet a group of American exchange students in Ghent, five guys and two girls all in their early twenties. When they ask who they are and what brings them here, Spencer links her arm with Jason's and puts on her best WASP attitude. She tells them their names are Megan and Robert, that they're a couple from New York who work in finance and who took a sabbatical to go on a backpacking trip through Europe before their wedding next spring. Their new acquaintances smile and nod along to the lies Spencer is spinning, soaking up every word she says, never once questioning her.
Spencer never felt so free in her life, for once unburdened by her identity and her past, by people's expectations, by everything that's Spencer Hastings.
Jason eyeballs her all night, purposefully sitting down at the far end of the table, a safe distance away. When they get back to their hostel, he slams the door behind him.
"What the hell, Spencer? What did you do that for?"
Spencer shrugs, pretending not to understand why he's angry with her. "I didn't want to fend off Dave's advances all night. It was just a story." Saying that, she suddenly realizes something that wasn't entirely obvious to her before. She turns the thought over in her mind several times, unsure whether it's something she wants Jason to consider, before she dares to voice it. "No one knows us here. We could be anyone at all. No one is going to look at us and see Alison DiLaurentis' deadbeat brother and the girl who couldn't handle getting a few creepy text messages and was locked in an asylum after she overdosed."
No one will have to know we're brother and sister, she doesn't say, but that doesn't mean she's not thinking it.
"Don't you ever get tired of being yourself, Jason? Because God knows I do."
It becomes a game afterwards. She's Claire and Kitty and Lily and Jennifer. A barista from Boston. A paralegal from San Francisco. A high school graduate from a small town in Maine. One time, she decides to practice her British English and pretends she's a student at Oxford spending a weekend in Rouen visiting French relatives.
Jason becomes her husband, her best friend, a random guy she's met on the train, but in all the stories they tell, he's never her brother, not even in the ones he starts. He doesn't, at first. For a while it's always her who comes up with new identities and lives they could have led until one day in Cologne, in the Starbucks at the central station with a view of the cathedral, when the barista asks for his name, he says, "Tommy". He smiles that bright blinding smile of his and he almost looks happy.
Spencer used to think Jason was a creep. Back when he was just her friend's hot but kinda weird older brother who was always snooping around, and later when he returned to Rosewood after Ali was gone, she remembers being afraid of him, watching him watching them and thinking, This boy is dangerous. There was a time when she thought he might well be A. She can't remember when exactly that changed, when she stopped being suspicious about him and starting caring for him. There was an overlap, probably, which says a lot about her life.
She remembers looking at him and wondering if he was a good kisser, a shameful rush of desire and guilt accompanying the thought. She was already with Toby back then, and it wasn't long afterwards that she found out that they shared a father.
So she took the desire and the wanting and the curiosity and buried them deep inside of her, where no one could find them. Forced herself to look at Jason with the eyes of a concerned sister, and never let on that he almost could have been something else to her.
Then he said I'm in love with you and pulled away the web of denial that she was clinging to like a safety blanket, making her take stock: Toby's out of the picture. Jason's still her brother. But does it matter if no one knows? If a tree falls in a forest and no one sees, does it make a sound? If Claire from Boston closes her eyes and dreams of her old childhood friend Michael touching her, if no one at all cares, is it still wrong? If she's not Spencer and he's not Jason, who's to tell them what they can and cannot have?
She kisses him in Paris.
They're standing in line for the Louvre, hundreds of people in a barely moving queue in front of them, and it's rainy and cold. Shivering, Spencer moves her hands up and down her upper arms in a fruitless attempt to warm herself when Jason shrugs off his jacket to drape it around her.
He didn't even want to go to the Louvre – art is more her thing than his – but he came along anyway because she told him she wanted to see the Mona Lisa, and now he's standing in the freezing rain in nothing but a thin cotton shirt, and her heart feels like it wants to burst. They're pushed together by the crowd around them anyway, so all she has to do is step a little further into his space, to lean up and press their lips together.
It doesn't feel wrong. It's the furthest from wrong she's felt since the night Ali disappeared.
"What are you doing?" He sounds breathless and confused, a bit like he wants to be mad but can't tap into the anger inside of him.
Spencer finally admits what's been on her mind and on the tip of her tongue since that awful night in Amsterdam. "It's not just you." She bites her lips and closes her eyes, swaying forward again for another kiss, relieved when he responds, when he doesn't push her away and walks off in disgust like she half-feared he would.
She's kissed a lot of guys since she was fifteen and Alison caught her making out with Ian in the garden. There's nothing spectacular about this kiss now – they're both cold and soaked to the skin, they're barely touching apart from where their lips meet and the kiss remains hesitant and stilted. Still, it unleashes a desire inside of her that feels like liquid heat, burning her up from the inside.
When she breaks away, the elderly British tourist standing with her husband behind them in the queue smiles with a twinkle in her eyes and winks at her. Spencer feels the blush rising up her cheeks.
"We should go back to the hotel," she says quietly.
Jason looks at her in silence for a long moment. "No."
It's like a door slamming shut and the force of it hits her in the throat like a punch that makes her physically recoil, almost stepping into the woman behind. Anxiety descends on her in a rush of frantic thoughts: What have I done? Why did I kiss him? What if he hates me? What if I ruined everything? I need to get away from him. I can't do this. Why do I break everything I touch? What's wrong with me?
She barely notices that Jason has taken her hand and enlaced their fingers until he gives them a soft, reassuring squeeze. Startled, she looks up at him. He doesn't look disgusted or angry, or anything except concerned, really.
His voice is kind, placating. "Spencer. You wanted to see the Mona Lisa so we're going to see the Mona Lisa. And then we'll have dinner, and afterwards, we talk."
Just like that, the panic is back. No one ever said we should talk when they were happy. She shakes her head. "I'm so sorry, I –"
Jason's clammy hand cradles her cheek, thumb brushing softly over her skin, and he leans down to press a soothing, chaste kiss against her lips. "I'm not mad. I'm just giving you time to think about this, okay? Maybe you think you don't need to, and maybe you don't want to, but I really need you to. Alright?"
It's not like she doesn't understand what he means, and she knows it's not rejection, but it still makes her ache.
"Are you sure?" Jason asks. The dim light of the bedside lamp throws strange shadows on his face, but he stands close enough that she can make out his expression, see the fear and the hope and the uncertainty in his eyes. There's barely two inches of space between her lips and his – it would be so easy to lean in and kiss him, but it can't be that simple. Not if she doesn't want him to regret this later.
Spencer's nod is firm, displaying assurance she knows he needs. "Are you?" She doesn't know what it'll do to her if his answer is no.
He laughs quietly, as if the question itself is ridiculous. "I've been sure about this since Amsterdam. Before, maybe."
"You ran away in Amsterdam."
"Wanting something and letting yourself have it are two different things, Spencer."
She knows that, of course she does, and suddenly she's tired of talking. "So stop wasting time," she tells him, and the noise in her head doesn't stop until he crowds her against the wall and kisses her.
It's different from the gentle, almost platonic kisses outside the Louvre. Jason's mouth is hard and insistent and hungry, and both his hands are cradling her head, tilting her chin up to give him better access. She didn't understand just how badly he needed this, how badly he wanted her, until this moment, and her own desire flares up like a firestorm in response.
His tongue is in her mouth and her hands are tearing at his clothes, and when he lifts her up and pulls her over to the bed, she wraps her legs around him and forgets everything outside this room.
"What happens when we get back?" Jason asks in Munich. Neither of them like the place much, and they rarely ever venture outside their hotel room, ordering room service and leaving the do not disturb sign on the door at all times.
His hands are drawing patterns on Spencer's naked skin; she can't decipher them or even figure out whether they have any meaning or if they're just random lines and curves. She's lying with her upper body across his chest, her head cushioned on her folded arms, watching him with hooded eyes. "What if we don't go back?"
"We can't stay gone forever."
It's funny. They should be having this conversation the other way around, Jason arguing to stay and her wanting to go home. Spencer's the one with people in her life she should be reluctant to leave behind, but she thinks maybe she's spent enough time and energy on them already. From their spacious, stylish hotel room in Munich, Rosewood and her parents and the girls seem like remnants from another life, from a dream she can't quite remember, a fading nightmare.
"Why not?"
Jason doesn't seem to have a good answer. His fingers have stopped their restless journey over her body, and Spencer knows he's trying to figure out whether or not she's serious. "What would we do?"
She shrugs. "Anything we want. Rent an apartment, get a job, keep traveling, pretend we're someone new everywhere we go." She doesn't have it all figured out. In fact, she doesn't have anything figured out. Her plans for the future begin and end with a list of things she doesn't want to do, places she doesn't want to return to, people she wants to leave behind, starting with Spencer Hastings.
"That's crazy," Jason says, but it's almost a question, like he's only waiting for her to tell him it's not that crazy after all.
Sitting up, she looks at him, pulling strands of her hair behind her ears just so she has something to do. "Do you want to go back to Rosewood?"
"I don't ever want to set foot in that town again."
Neither does she. "So if you don't want to go back, and I don't want to go back, why should we?"
Just before they leave for Prague, she sends a postcard to The Brew. On the front there's a picture of the Eiffel Tower. On the back, she writes:
Tell them not to look for me. I'm happy. I'm not coming back. I don't want to be found. S.
She hopes that Ezra will pass the message on and that her friends and her family will listen. If they don't, if Aria or Toby get it into their heads to try and track her down or if her parents hire a PI to find her, she thinks the disparity between the photo and the post stamp will be confusing enough to send them on a wild goose chase for a while, and by the time it reaches them, both Paris and Munich will be no more than fond memories and their trail will have gone cold.
A thick layer of snow covers the streets and rooftops of Vienna. Spencer's mitten-clad hand rests in Jason's as they walk through the gate of the Imperial Palace.
She loves Vienna, with its rich cultural life and all the well-clad people spending their afternoons inside cafés that are nothing like the hipster coffee shops she's used to and seem like remnants of an older, much slower moving time, but she's getting a little tired of winter.
"Let's go somewhere warm next," she tells Jason.
One day, she knows, they'll be ready to stay somewhere. Maybe it'll even be Vienna, which the concierge at their hotel assures them is gorgeous in springtime. Maybe it'll be Paris or Annecy or Chichester or Bath. Maybe it'll be somewhere they haven't been to yet.
She's not quite ready to settle down, and neither is Jason. It's obvious from the way he gets restless and moody when they stay at a place for longer than a week, or when they tell the same story to strangers a few too many times.
"Other than back to the hotel, you mean?" He playfully pulls her wool hat down into her forehead and flicks a snowflake away. Warmth is radiating off him, making Spencer burrow closer. "Anywhere in particular?"
She smiles up at the overcast sky and thinks she couldn't care less, as long as there's food and a roof over their heads and Jason at her side. Out loud, she says, "How do you feel about Australia?"
End.