Spencer
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111.
Once, a long time ago, Spencer had thought that his mind was something special. Quick-fire fast with perfect retention. He'd gloried in the ease of learning, in the rapid acquisition of any knowledge he'd wanted. As time had passed, he'd began to doubt these beliefs. With his mom gone, the loudest voice validating his intelligence, he'd guessed that maybe she'd just been, well, crazy. That was it, wasn't it? She was crazy, and that's why she was gone. As crazy as her tufty-furred cheetah-dæmon with the staring eyes and soft paws. As crazy as a lost hare, just a mouse on the inside.
His mom had thought them special; they'd proven that they weren't. She'd believed them to be hares. They'd proven that wrong too. The allure of knowledge dulled as boredom blunted it. School offered nothing new, nothing challenging, so what good was it? But, seeing Aaron — who wasn't stupid, not even a little — struggle with his own learning made them rethink this.
"It's not hard," Spencer said one day, frustrated with Aaron's slow understanding. "I learned it when I was five."
Aaron just looked at him, his expression hurt.
"We're not all you," Emily said after, sitting on the balcony and splitting a smoke with him. He didn't cough as much as the nicotine bit down, not anymore, but he was never going to be a fan of the taste. "We don't have big-ass brains taking up all the space in our heads."
"The size of the brain doesn't really affect cognition," he argued for the sake of arguing. "The sulci and gyri mean that the actual surface area of your brain is far greater than the available surface area within your skull, allowing for—"
"Brain wrinkles," Emily teased, poking his forehead. "You mean the brain wrinkles make us smarter."
"Yes, I guess so. Simplistically…"
"Well, my brain isn't as wrinkly as yours then, and neither is Aaron's. We're smooth-brained, kiddo, be nice to us."
Spencer spent a lot of time thinking about that.
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112.
Exam-revision was going well, for Aaron at least. Emily hadn't cracked a book in weeks and Spencer had already finished the coursework and was just bumping around doing his own thing until the next school year rolled around and he could finish the next lot and get credit for it.
It was a Friday night. The window was open. Aaron was back from dropping his dad home, lying on the rug with his sweater rolled up behind his head as a pillow and books spilling around him. Aureilo was curled up on Hal's side; she was a German Shepherd today, and Spencer dearly wanted to touch her beautiful, velvety ears, despite the abhorrence of that desire. He was, without revealing this to the others, fighting a gnawing kind of exhaustion that dragged his mood down and his hope with it and suggested that he was heading for a wall.
"Do you ever wonder what we're going to do after this?" Aaron asked, his voice sleepy. Spencer shifted, his knees aching and wondering if he could lie down as well. As though sensing his wish, somehow, Aaron dragged a couch cushion down and swapped his head to that with room next to him where Spencer could, and did, lay his head. They watched the roof, Emily pausing the music to look at them.
"After tonight?" she asked.
"After all of this. School. Ashworth. It's a reform school. We're there because we fucked up, somehow, what college is going to take us, no matter how well we do?"
Spencer turned his head and watched Aaron lower his book, his expression falling. Some deep insecurity rising.
"You're brilliant," Spencer said loyally. "You'll get into any college you want, do anything you want."
"Damn right," Emily agreed. "Me, I don't know. I don't think college is for me. I should be a groupie."
Aaron snorted and, beside them, Hal stood and ambled after Sergio, leaving Aureilo to run up the hand Spencer laid down for him. The two dæmons who could still change did, both chasing each other in lazy circles around the armchair before becoming geckos and scampering up the walls, giggling and flicking their tongues at each other. Spencer watched them.
"You'd be a shit groupie," Aaron was saying. "Too much bite. They don't like their girls using teeth."
"Shows what you know, you're such a virgin. There's always a place for teeth. What kind of job you going to go for that will utilize the stick up your ass?"
"Probably a lawyer. I hear they actually measure to find the biggest stick in every courtroom."
Emily and Aaron began to laugh, their dæmons looking down on them from where their toes suckered them to the ceiling, so close in size and colour that Spencer struggled to tell them apart. His chest panged again, Aureilo slinking closer.
"Come on!" Hal peeped down. "Aureilo, come up. Look at Aaron's silly face from up here!"
"Chase Hal with me," Sergio added, wiggling his toes.
"I can't," whispered Aureilo.
Spencer swallowed, too loud. Eyes turned to him. "I can't," he said out loud to a question he hadn't registered hearing, Aaron asking: "What college are you thinking of, Spencer?"
"What?" Emily inched closer, looking down at him, and Aaron had risen up to his elbow. "Bullshit. You've got the wrinkliest brain I know—" Aaron's face twisted, looking simultaneously confused and grossed out: "—if you think you can't do college, what the fuck hope do you think we have?"
Spencer watched the gecko-dæmons on the roof and simply said, "I don't think I have a future," before getting up and walking away. He took with him his stupid, small, trapped dæmon and everything he represented about their wasted potential.
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113.
Aaron found him in his room, curled on his bed with his knees to his chest. Aureilo was back in the closet, sulking. Without saying a word, Spencer shifted across to let Aaron lie down too, comfortable with the boy's weight beside him.
"My dad is real rough," Aaron said after the longest moment of nothing, tilting his head in the gloom of Spencer's bedroom. The door creaked, Emily slipping in and taking her place beside the bed, chin on her arm and eyes wide on the face that seemed so childlike without her hair surrounding it. "Real mean…"
"I bit him once," Hal whispered, invisible in the dark. Silence followed those words, the unsaid horrors of that story. "I'm scared of him."
"You're not scared of anything," Aureilo argued. His claws were audible on the carpet as he emerged from his hiding place.
"I am. I'm scared of him."
"But we're not defined by our parents," Aaron said. "Or how mean or distant they are."
"Or our dæmons' forms," Emily added. "Shit, Spence, if you knew…"
"Your dæmons aren't settled." Spencer rolled to face the wall, not wanting the thin light in the room to illuminate his worry. "You can still be someone else, if you want to be."
"Aureilo isn't settled?" Aaron said, his voice confused. Spencer shuddered. False hope. False, lying, stupid hope— "He doesn't feel settled."
"He doesn't," both Hal and Sergio said as one.
"You don't know," Aureilo cried. "You don't know!"
His voice broke something in Spencer, some thin thread of sanity he'd been clinging wearily to while it was eroded under his grasping fingers. In the culmination of that inevitable downswing, he gave in and began to cry.
"I'm trapped," he dimly remembered saying, arms wrapping around him — Emily, he realised, slipping between him and Aaron on the bed. "I'm trapped and I'm nothing and I'm not who she thought I was. We're just so small and that's never going to change."
Down down down he went with Emily holding him the whole time, until he fell asleep with the damp sheets pressed against his cheek, knees to his aching chest and Aaron's fingers brushing his. Not alone, but still small; the people around him only served as reminders that he was going to let every one of them down in the end.
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114.
"Sorry," he said the next day. He was only picking at his toast. Aaron wasn't touching his either, his hair wiry and eyes bruised. "I have bad days."
"S'ok," Emily mumbled sleepily, nursing a mug of coffee. "I get that. I have bad days too. Mine are usually more inflammatory."
Aaron said nothing. He had to leave, Spencer walking him downstairs with the night before lingering between them. Upstairs, Spencer knew, there was a pill bottle with a neat prescription filled out to him stuck to the front waiting for downswings just like this, but he didn't want to take them. Not now. Not when things had been so good, not when he was finally remembering feeling something. Maybe that was the cost — there was no feeling good without feeling bad too, and he had to learn to balance the two. But the thought of the lithium lingered, a promise of less, and he knew he'd probably be back on them before the end of the week.
He decided to make the most of this clarity.
"Come back tonight?" he asked Aaron as they stepped outside into the clear day waiting.
"I have church tomorrow morning," Aaron warned. "I'll have to leave sometime early."
Spencer paused. Clarity, he thought, and next he thought about giving back. "Would…" He breathed, structuring his thoughts: "Would you like me to come? I mean, I don't believe and I doubt I ever will, but, I don't know. If it's important to you, I could … come."
Aaron looked at him, something startled and sweet passing over his firm features. Spencer ducked his gaze under the pretence of adjusting his glasses, just to avoid the emotions he'd evoked with that simple gesture.
"I would really like that," Aaron said finally, thin mouth turning up into a shy smile. "It is important to me, very. I'd love to share it with you. Just us?"
Spencer thought of Emily in a church and winced. "Just us," he agreed. "I don't think Emily does organised religion."
At the time, he didn't know just how accurate that was.
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115.
He returned upstairs to find Emily picking through her tapes. And, with a newfound realisation for how effective thinking like others could be, he sat next to her, looked down at them, and asked, "Can you show me your tapes?"
Startled, she looked at him. "Sure," she said finally, shuffling through — Spencer's eyes picked up every label, no matter how fast she shuffled them, spotting the scrawled Aaron with hawk-like accuracy as it vanished into the pile — before picking one and sliding it in. "This, you're going to love this."
He did. It was good, and new, to realise that the people around him were, well, more.
.
116.
He'd realise later how obvious it had been, and how oblivious he'd been despite this. Once realised, it was impossible to ignore; he rather thought that they might be falling in love with Aaron Hotchner. It was such a stupid, stupid moment to realise it too, walking into the yawning, white-washed space of the United Methodist Church with Aaron at his side and at the forefront of a stream of people who seemed to know their place and their position within it. Perched on his shoulder, Aureilo watched everything and everyone and took in something that was so impossibly alien to anything they'd experienced so far, this collective act of faith.
The Reverend greeted them, one by one, name by name, and it seemed so impossible, Spencer thought, to remember so many people so flawlessly, there had to be some element of love to it. When he came to Aaron, with Spencer at his side, the realisation happened. He reached to take Spencer's hand, greeting him, a handshake, the usual; Aaron grinned politely and said something so simple: "Sorry, Father, but he doesn't like to be touched."
It was so simple. Such a short phrase. The man let them pass without comment to find their seats in the lines of polished pews. Seated among the families and the loners and the lady behind them who tapped Aaron on his shoulder and offered him hard candy in a crackly wrapper, Aaron wincing at every pop as Spencer wrestled with it. The moment might have passed unnoticed, as the hymns began and Aaron showed Spencer where to follow along, if they hadn't had a long, silent minute to lower their heads in prayer. Spencer, eyes open, studying the floor politely and the picture of piousness from the front, thought once more of that phrase. He thought of the notice Aaron took of him.
Spencer and Aureilo, in all their lives, had never really been all that noticed.
He looked at Hal, who stood not by Aaron but steadfast at their side, a wolf with her head held high. Her gaze, throughout it all, was locked on Spencer as she watched to make sure he was okay. Aureilo scampered down his arm to settle on her ruff, his chest thrust out proud and his whiskers perked; they felt immeasurably protected with the wolf-dæmon beside them. The rest of the service passed in a rush of giddy heat, following Aaron mutely from hymn to sermon, his mind vividly aware of the irony of realising he was possibly falling for a boy while standing in a church.
"What were you thinking about?" Aaron asked after as they walked from there with Aaron looking relaxed, happy, resolute. Spencer looked at him, and then back at the church where, unlike Spencer who knew he was an outsider no matter how outwardly welcomed, Aaron felt at home. Thinking of others meant putting his own feelings aside; he was under no illusions about how welcome this new realisation was within the boundaries of religion.
He answered, "Nothing important, really," letting the illusion of disregard chase away the shadows biting at the edges of his excitement.
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117.
Aaron drove the long way home. They had an afternoon that was one of the ones Spencer knew he'd always remember — just like the first they'd had together — and all because of, not only the giddy whirl of his heart in his chest every time Aaron looked at him, but also because of Emily.
In Spencer's pocket, as they parked the car by a wooded common and sat doing nothing but talking and fiddling with the radio, was one of Emily's tapes: the one labelled Aaron. Once Spencer had gotten over the looking and the new way Aaron was laughing — had he always looked so much at them? Or laughed quite so much? Was this new, or had they never noticed before? — he pulled the tape out and pressed it into the deck in the car.
"What's that?" Aaron asked curiously, Hal a duck on the centre console between them going wak wakas she nibbled at the tufty bits of fur on Aureilo's back.
Spencer shivered at the touch of their dæmons playing, Aureilo rolling onto his belly to get a proper scratch by the soft bill poking him, and managed to croak out, "One of Emily's tapes."
Had his voice always been this shrill? Had Aaron's eyes always caught the light — Aureilo sneezed, the words, stopit, audible in the sneeze, and Spencer felt his cheeks flush hot.
"You okay?" asked Aaron.
"Fine," Spencer squeaked. "Look." He held out the case, fingers trembling on the card where Emily had written the names of the songs within, index finger sitting just below the Aaron.
"That's … what?" Aaron asked, eyes stunned and incredibly dark, gaze switching to the deck as though he could see Emily's intentions within the whirl of the cassette within. He reached out and turned the volume up, letting his hand hover over the play button as though unsure. "Did she make this for me?"
"I don't think so," Spencer said. His heart panged as he thought of their guarded, reticent friend and all the things her cold eyes had seen and refused to talk about. "I think … I think she made it about you."
Aaron pressed play.
Spencer watched him listen to the whole tape through and without a word the entire time. A vivid, excruciating fifty minutes of Aaron being spooled out in the drift of the music between them, as though Emily had taken every observation she'd ever had and turned it into a single double-sided tape designed to open Aaron up and expose him to the world, if it cared to look. But the world wasn't here. Spencer was, and Aureilo, and so Aaron allowed the vulnerability, even as the music pulled apart his ruin and his heart and his future and his past. Emily knew more about Aaron than Spencer did, he realised here, more intimately than Spencer thought even he wanted to know him.
That was a lie. Spencer watched him listen, the lost look of a boy who had been hurt and continued to be hurt as the song pleaded for a merciful rest, and he knew that he wanted to know the whirling thoughts behind that lost look. To be able to peer into Aaron as clearly as Emily had, to see the boy she saw and the hurts she knew and to understand everything that was being revealed at this moment. But he couldn't, not yet. He simply let the music play and waited until Aaron's breathing turned rough before reaching across and, in that hot, still car sitting on the side of the road under a browning acacia tree, took his hand.
Their palms were sweaty but neither let go, and their dæmons sat between them.
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118.
Spencer confronted Emily because Aaron was shaken and he didn't think he'd do it, Aureilo quiet and watchful on his shoulder.
"You didn't have to listen to it," she grumbled. Her gaze was lowered and she refused to look at either of them. Aaron lingered back, Hal a German Shepherd again with her ears folded back and Aaron's hand resting on her skull. "It's my business, not yours."
"Why'd you pick them?" Spencer asked, hovering and trying to peer over her shoulder at the tapes she was hoarding protectively. "The songs, I mean. How'd you pick songs for him?"
Emily looked right past him, straight at Aaron, and her expression was a challenge. "I don't know, they felt right," she snapped, Sergio winding around her legs as an angry snake that revealed her panic. "Just … they felt right."
"You've read my file," Aaron said quietly. "You know everything about everyone and that's how. You read their files."
"What makes you think that?" Emily's fists were balled. Sergio twisted and spat, a cobra now with a flaring hood; a cornered snake. Spencer eased away, the mouse on his shoulder sorely aware of their vulnerability to the fangs of a snake should they be turned in their direction. "There isn't anything in there that says that. Look at those songs, they're fucking obvious. The Killing Moon is angry, you're angry, always angry — Banned in DC, what you don't think you have a fucking temper? You're pissed right now. I don't need a file to tell me that."
"Don't fight," Spencer whispered.
"You know about my dad," Aaron said. "I didn't tell you that much."
Emily deflated, smiling crookedly, possibly sadly, and replied, "Ever consider that maybe you're not as hard to read as you think? Everything you do screams, 'I'm damaged, look at me!'"
"I didn't even think you'd thought that much about me." Aaron looked to Spencer now, tight-lipped, and Spencer wondered what he felt such a burning need to hide. "I still don't know why you'd fucking make it."
Emily shocked them all. She didn't bite back or snap or snarl. She simply said, "I figured someone should show you that they're …" She faltered, looked away, shy for this one moment: "…listening."
Sergio calmed, curling into a loop and watching silently until Aaron murmured, "Thanks," and, as Spencer watched, pocketed the tape with his hand curled protectively around it. "I guess."
"You got a tape for Spencer in there?" Aureilo asked in an attempt to bring the cheer of the day back. Spencer could have told him that was a mistake; they were still on uneven ground, teetering on the edge of misunderstanding each other with too many parts open and vulnerable.
"No," Emily said shortly. "There was nothing I could think of that wasn't shit-fucking depressing."
Spencer looked at her, the feeling from the church earlier, that happy feeling of possibilities within reach, the easy tip of falling in love, beginning to trickle away faster; he didn't know Aaron, not as Emily did, and he likely never would. He didn't understand the anger between them. He didn't understand Aaron's hurt or Emily's defensiveness. He just didn't understand.
Aaron moved forward, uncannily fast, picking forth a tape that only had one song written on the front, crossed out twice with pen over thick black marker: the title was still visible, lined underneath the neat Spencer?
The Gambler, K. Rogers
"Doesn't the guy die in that song?" Aaron asked after a pause. Emily was chalk white, watching Spencer for his reaction.
"Best that he could hope for," Spencer said numbly. "I think you guys should go."
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119.
They waited for the numbing effects of the pills, together but apart. Aureilo was messing around under the bed as Spencer lay limp across the covers, tired of the hurting ache of thinking too much and with his thoughts whirling in giddying, painful circles. What was the good of falling in love, what was the good of having friends if he couldn't, if he wouldn't, if he wasn't — what was the good of it, of any of it, of anything at all; there was nothing ahead but the—
"Stop it," Aureilo whispered, sliding out from under the bed on a wave of magazines he'd kicked loose from where they'd been shoved in his haste to skitter out. "She didn't mean it like that. It wasn't a prediction, it's a reaction. She's worried about you."
"She doesn't know me," Spencer hissed back, rolling to stare down at his tiny self. "You saw that — she knows Aaron, not me. They've got the connection. What do I have? Nothing. Not a thing either of them needs. They're better off without—"
"You're being so stupid right now." Aureilo's claws bit at the magazine he was on as he leapt off, making for the closet. "I hate you when you're like this."
"I hate you for what you've done to us," Spencer snarled after him, refusing to watch the mouse-dæmon hide like the coward he was. Instead, looking down at what he'd been standing on, his mood pausing as he noticed. "What's this?"
Aureilo didn't answer.
Spencer picked it up, recognising one of the magazines Emily had stolen but not the one he'd palmed through the other day, the one with the women in various splayed open positions in every kind of garishly contorted detail. This one was men. Various men, some clothed, some not, some watching the person holding the camera, some looking at the partner they were with, one … one with dark dark hair and dark eyes, his expression soft as he looked at the man he kneeled over. Spencer stared at that for a while, feeling a confused twist of something deep in his gut that was good and hurting all at once and made him want to either hit something or press close to it.
"Are we gay?" he whispered, not really expecting an answer.
"Speak for yourself," Aureilo's voice hissed bitterly from the closet. "Hal's a girl. There's nothing wrong with me."
Spencer threw the magazine back under the bed, too numb to feel anything even approaching a flicker of muted desire for the soulless men staring out at him from the glossy pages, just that tortured, confused feeling. Instead, he burrowed under his covers and steadfastly tried to shove away every thought that, earlier that day, had felt sweet and full of potential. Aaron was out of reach. Aaron was normal. Aaron's brain wasn't filled with malfunctioning brain chemicals that made a mockery of the human imperative to persist. Most damning of all, Aaron was straight.
Nothing was down that path but misery.