Chapter Fifty-Three: Clarabelle Hart
January, 2004
The last night before Ethan left was silent. They went for a drive in the January rain, parking down by the Potomac and watching a dog run along the riverbank just out of the city.
"You've come a long way," Ethan said softly, his voice almost hidden by the battering rain. The windshield wipers swished busily across the window, Spencer's eyes ticking from side to side as he patiently watched them work, fingers fiddling with the packet of crisps he was holding and contemplating eating. "You know that, right?"
"I know," Spencer replied, because he did, really. One year sober and the burn of losing Aaron had faded to a dull throb of wanting. He was okay.
"You'll keep going without me," Ethan continued. Spencer looked at him and realized; this wasn't for Spencer's sake. "Yeah, you'll be alright…"
"Elle mad at you?" Spencer asked.
Ethan laughed brokenly. "A little. I guess. She's still coming to see me off tomorrow… we're over."
The rain slowed a little, just a little.
"I'm sorry," Spencer murmured. "It… hurts to say goodbye."
"Yeah."
They stayed until the rain built up again, Ethan fiddling with the radio and singing along softly before asking, "You still in contact with the FBI? That's a big deal. Get a foot in the door there… that's big. A real career, Spence. Finish your doctorate on the side, put everything behind you… yeah, that's real."
Smiling, Spencer nodded, leaning his cheek against the car window and watching the rain fall. He still loved the rain. "I'm terrified. I'm awkward, reticent, physically inept… I don't know if I can do what they're asking of me…" Ethan frowned, looking at him with his hand pausing on the dial, but Spencer wasn't done: "…but I know I'm going to try. Too far now to stop, right?"
"Right." Ethan nodded as well to illustrate his point. "And, well, don't get killed chasing baddies, okay? That'd suck."
Spencer laughed: "I won't, promise."
It seemed like an age as Ethan paused, eyeing him over, but it was really over a minute before he leaned over and brushed his lips across Spencer's forehead, pulling him into a hug that lingered. He didn't speak, but he didn't have to.
"I know," Spencer murmured. "I'll miss you too."
.
July, 2004
July was big. He started at the academy, realized he was absolutely as terrible at anything physical as he'd expected, but didn't lose hope. Too far to stop now; that was his mantra and his driving force.
He wrote letters to his mom daily. So long as he kept that up, he couldn't slip—like the diary from so long ago, but with so much more to lose if he failed. He told her about Gideon, he told her about the academy training, about being terrible with a gun, about his tiny new apartment that he filled with books, about Ethan's weekly phone calls, and he told her about Aaron.
He told her about the final email with Aaron.
It was, he realized, time to move on. Aaron wasn't coming back; Spencer couldn't go back either.
He told her about the dates he'd gone on. One men, mostly women; he didn't have a preference but realized that he held the men to a much higher standard than the women. A bar too high for them to beat, cemented by his burning past. What kind of a man could be better than the one he'd already chased away?
None, and so he declined their offers of a second date with an apology and a smile.
The women he was kinder to, more open, but they still lacked something. None of them could he imagine staying up all night with in a fort made of memories or standing on a pier facing down a storm.
Perhaps alone was what he was meant to be. Penance for his past.
His cell buzzed often. Usually picture messages from Ethan, usually of his cat. He'd taught the animal to sit on his backpack as he walked, paws on Ethan's shoulders and whiskers turned up to the wind. Trash Man and his Trash Cat Elle had always called them, and Spencer couldn't help but laugh when he opened a message to find another picture of them peering up at him and grinning.
Sometimes, the messages were Elle, asking how he was going. He always said fine. She always said the same. They didn't really know how to be around each other, not without Ethan as a buffer.
And life went on. He was alive. He was moving forward.
Nothing could stop him.
Not even loneliness.
.
September, 2004
"Thought you said you were fine," Elle said.
Spitting out mud from his teeth, Spencer staggered up and stared at her, leaning on the fence of the training yard and smirking at his dirt-splattered self. "I am fine," he said hotly, wiping his face. "I'm just—"
"Failing absolutely everything that involves any kind of physical effort?"
He swallowed. "No," he lied.
She didn't seem to believe him. "Hmm," she said, still smiling like that and barely holding back a laugh, and he turned away to hide his frustration. "Aw, kid, don't be like that. Hey. Hey!"
He looked at her, watching her jump the fence and walk over to him, looking her up and down. "What?" His tone was about as filthily grumpy as the rest of him.
Elle didn't seem put off: "What are you struggling with most?"
There was an awkward moment between them, leaden with everything they'd seen of each other. Spencer burned with embarrassment, remembering the darkest parts of him she'd seen, remembering stoned days laying in his living room drawing endless pictures of nothing…
"Spence. Come on. We've all got stuff we're shit at."
He took a breath. "My shooting is abysmal," he gritted out finally, feeling his face burn under his muddy mask.
She touched his arm, her eyebrow up and smile sharp: "I can fix that," she said.
It took them months, but she did.
.
October, 2004
It had become a strange kind of ritual. He spent his day at the academy training; his evenings with Elle either shooting or sparring—he was terrible, absolutely, but less terrible than he had been, and she never cut him a break—and his nights limping around his apartment thinking about all the new bruises she'd given him.
Today was nothing new, except he'd landed funny and his limping was a little more pronounced than usual as he made his way from the changerooms at the academy. She was waiting for him outside, showered and dressed and eyes discerning.
"You're hopeless," she sighed, gaze locked on his knee. "You fuck that up? I showed you how to fall."
"Then you flung me," he whined grumpily. She flicked him with her towel. "It's fine, Elle. I'll just go home and—"
"Keep it still and then yell tomorrow when you find out it's seized up completely," she cut in.
Which, from past experience, was probably true.
So, it was decided. Elle drove him home and they made their way to his apartment where she forced him to have another hot shower and then laid him out with a tube of Mentholatum and a towel wrapped around his waist.
"Stay still," she warned him. He did.
Mostly.
By the end of it, he was a sleepy, achy, quiet puddle of a terrible trainee, dozing on the couch while Elle washed up. In the kitchen, he heard his landline ring, choosing to ignore it.
"Hey," Elle said suddenly, jerking him out of a pleasant, drifting feeling. He looked up at her, blinking and shaking himself awake with a grunt. "You didn't tell me it was your birthday. That was your mom on the answering machine…"
Oh.
"I forgot," he said honestly, sitting up and readjusting the towel. "I guess I didn't really have a reason to remember…" As he spoke, he looked to his cell, sitting silently on the table. Silent, no message from Ethan…
She touched his hand, her touch damp and warm against his skin. "Happy birthday," she said with a cocky half-smile. "You're so old now—"
Whatever she was going to say was lost as his cell buzzed on the table. An unknown number.
"Probably Ethan," Spencer said, not hiding his eagerness as he lunged forward to answer it. "Two secs—hello, this is Dr. Reid—"
It wasn't Ethan.
.
.
Later, he'd wonder why they called him. Really, it wasn't hard to guess. She didn't have anyone else and he understood that. He didn't really have anyone else either.
But that wasn't true.
Elle walked beside him, her fingers brushing his wrist in a companionable gesture. Their feet echoed down the silent halls of the morgue. This was his first time identifying a body. He doubted it would be his last, if Jason Gideon got his way.
He hoped it was his last for someone he knew.
"It might not be her," he said to Elle distantly. She looked at him strangely. "I mean, it's been years… I might not even recognise her. Maybe someone else had her phone. Maybe…"
She held his hand tight and didn't let go.
And it was her.
.
.
He buried Clary because she had no one else to do so for her. He didn't have a lot of money, but enough to give her more than an unmarked grave. When it came to headstones, he was torn. For her to be buried unmarked was horrifying to him, but his funds were tight and getting tighter…
Elle helped.
"Why?" he asked her, as they watched the coffin being lowered into the shady grave. They were alone except for the man lowering Clary into her final resting place. In Spencer's hand, the scrunched-up eulogy he'd written—because someone had to, didn't they understand? —rustled and tore with his shaking grip. "Why did you help me with her? You hated her…"
"I didn't know her," Elle replied, her face an enigma. "And neither did you. What you did know of her… I don't understand. I can't pretend to understand why you're doing any of this. Me? I'm helping a friend. You? You're grieving a stranger."
Spencer looked down at his hand, at the eulogy he'd written but never gotten the nerve to read out, even to his audience of two.
"She's not a stranger to me," he said, more to the speech than to Elle. "She's… me. She's me, if I hadn't found my way. She's me, if Ethan and Aaron hadn't showed me how to live."
Elle was quiet. Spencer remembered: Elle worked with people like Clary, every day. She saw them forgotten, she saw them discarded. She rarely saw them grieved.
"Ethan wouldn't have done this," Elle said finally.
That was easy to answer, the easiest thing yet: "I'm not Ethan," Spencer replied.
.
Clarabelle Hart,
You see, I know your name now. I didn't before. How strange it was that I only learned of it at the moment of your passing.
I told you once that you would die. That the life you were living would be the end of you. Evidently, as I'm standing here at your side as we say goodbye, I was correct. I've never been more grieved to have been right.
I wish it could have been different. I wish I could have shown you that.
I don't believe you were trapped. We all make progress, each of us, every day that we walk upon this earth. Maybe not much. Maybe nothing that another would consider to be progress, were they not walking within our shoes. In the time that I knew you, I saw you make progress as I made progress aside you. And, eventually, ahead of you.
If only I could stand here and talk about the girl you were, the things you loved, the passions you cherished. I know none of them to speak of. The only thing I can speak of with surety is the impact you made upon my life.
I stand alone, grieved that you are dead. This is a cruelty to you, I think, that so few gather to mourn your death. However, a kindness to me. You taught me how to fall, how to forget, how to become nothing. I learned those lessons well. I regret never returning to you once I'd unlearned those lessons in order to return the favour and remind you of what I myself have learned: there's so much more than being nothing for us out there. There's so much more than waiting to die.
There's so much more than chasing that death.
You taught me how to chase that death, but you also taught me that I want to live.
I'm sorry that you're gone. I'm glad that I didn't fall beside you.
Thank you for showing me that.
