Clarabelle has had the weekend from Hell and coming home to finding her life empty really does not help.
The Sanctuary is unhelpful in the extreme. Says Lenka's an adult, is capable. Says there's no sign of a struggle. Sends a detective, an acne-ridden boy with long hair to check for signs of magic. He finds none, but then Clarabelle doubts that he could find his own arse with two hands, and that's her being charitable. He misgenders her on his way out from the apartment, and in a way she's glad to see him go.
She walks through the empty house and looks for any indication she can find that Lenka's still alive and the best she can get is that there's nothing much to say that Lenka's dead. Everything's clean, untouched, but no more so than usual. There was no last-minute cleaning frenzy, though if Lenka wanted to disappear then of course there wouldn't have been, she was cleverer than that. Nothing is missing, not even the things she treasured the most.
Clarabelle checks the cupboards and there are no clothes missing. None at all. Rubbish disposal – the normal kind of thing. The kitchen, and here she breaks down.
Hunches over the table in the middle of the room, feels the cold of the marble slab and thinks about Lenka and the smell of baking bread and she feels so completely utterly drained because everything in the fridge is stocked except for the milk, but then the milk was never really stocked, and it just hits her that this is how the house would be if Lenka planned to leave without any trace at all and that Lenka is gone.
And Clarabelle has had the weekend from Hell, because she'd gone up to Ireland to see her cousins and found them in a morgue, not there to work, but to have their bodies rot because they are dead and she hadn't gotten the courtesy of the news because emergencies never are conducive to informing the next-of-kin, not that she was that for them because of course their mother still loved them, didn't disown them for daring to be human, and that realization wasn't a fun one. Their funeral wasn't either, rested instead forever as one of the interminable niceties of life that didn't feel at all like a nicety, not when it was sliding off her skin like burning oil.
And she'd gotten a job couched as a job offer except it really wasn't because it takes someone with no will to live to pass up an opportunity like that and Clarabelle is a lot of things but one thing she isn't is capable of lying to herself and she knows that a chance like this is what she's been working for her whole life or damned near close to it but of course that didn't stop the feeling of hollowness that assaulted her on the way home because uprooting herself from Lenka wasn't a nice idea. Being home and finding it gone, though, was quite possibly even worse.
Clarabelle has a list in her mind, now. Not even one formulating, but a complete, tabulated list of indisputable fact. She's going to need to cut her hair again, cut it so short that it can't disturb. She's going to have to reinvent herself because if there's one thing Kenspeckle Grouse is, it's traditional. She's going to have to clear the fridge and cancel Lenka's subscriptions because there's nothing worse than a life not tidied away.
She's going to have to move on and that hurts like anything and she thinks she knows the message Lenka would have tried to imprint on the floors of the apartment at the moment she left and Clarabelle kicks off her shoes and rests her feet on the ground and thinks, for one blinding moment, the words I loved you.
She doesn't get a response. She wasn't expecting to.
A/N: For some weird reason I don't actually think I dislike Kenspeckle, as in I wouldn't ever list him in characters I disliked if asked or anything, but I keep portraying him as this complete and utter arsehole in my fic. Which is, you know. Odd.
~Mademise Morte, October 2, 2012.