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Chapter Seven
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The next call was five days later, again just as Rossi had got up to go to bed, and again the voice on the other end was hesitant and flustered, skipping any preliminary greetings or small talk to leap right to the question.
"Do you have brothers and sisters?"
Dave nearly chuckled as he sat back down in his favourite easy chair. "And hello to you too, Spencer."
"Oh. Uh, yes. I'm sorry. Hi… uh, Dave." The younger man sounded so anxious, and even ashamed, that Dave felt contrite at drawing attention to Spencer's forgetting of the social graces. He's nervous, Dave realized. Actually nervous.
"It's all right, Spencer. I'm not going to bite."
"No. No, of course not," Spencer said quickly and Dave heard him take a shuddery breath. "I…I don't know why I'm… Maybe I should call you back some other time."
"No!" Damnit, Dave inwardly cursed himself, A little worked up ourselves, are we? Forcing his voice to calm, he started again. "I mean, no, you don't have to do that, Spencer."
"Okay…" Spencer said. Dave thought he still sounded unsure, but at least he didn't hang up.
"All right, then. Well, concerning your question - I had a brother and a sister."
"Had?" Spencer asked. "Oh," he said quietly. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to bring up something that might be - "
"Painful?" Dave said, interrupting before Spencer tried to back out of the conversation again. "That's all right. It's a very normal thing to want to know if you have aunts and uncles, and since I don't tend to talk about them, of course you'd ask."
"Are you sure you don't mind telling me?"
Dave smiled. "No, not at all, kid. My sister Lydia, she died as a child. I was five or so; she was two years younger. Truthfully, I don't talk about her because I honestly don't remember that much about her. I kind of remember her being a pretty little thing who always smiled, but I don't know if those are true memories or just ones I got from photographs."
"What happened to her?"
Dave sighed. "Leukemia. I think she went quickly, but maybe that's because I have more memories of my parents grieving than I do of her being sick."
"I'm sorry," Spencer said. "About your losing her, I mean," he quickly clarified, "not about you not remembering her being ill."
"I knew what you meant, kid. And I'm sorry too. Losing someone so young is a special sort of grief. There's always this hole where someone was supposed to be part of your life, but wasn't; where you wonder what sort of relationship you would have had, or what sort of person they would have become…" His voice trailed off and he swiped a hand at his eyes.
"You're not just talking about Lydia, are you?" Spencer asked softly.
"Don't worry about it, Spencer. It was never your fault. And it's better now - you're here. I may not have been able to raise you, but at least I've been allowed to see the man you became."
Spencer said nothing so Dave went on. "My brother Frank now, he died just after you -" did, Rossi nearly said, "were born. Stomach cancer."
"Were you close?"
"As kids, yeah."
"Not as adults?"
Rossi hesitated. "We were estranged for quite awhile after I came home from Nam. We really only patched things up just before he got sick. It's a long story."
"You don't have to tell me if you don't want to," Spencer said.
"Like I said, it's a long story, but the short version is that Ma - your grandmother - had a best friend when I was growing up called Eugenia Barber. Well, Mrs. Barber had a daughter, Floria, and Mrs. Barber and your grandmother were determined the two of us would get married. I said no; I wasn't going to be pushed into marriage just to satisfy somebody else's daydreams. So Floria married somebody else and had two daughters. Eventually I joined the Marines and went to Vietnam, but when I came back I found out Floria's husband had died in Cambodia, trying to get to the Vietcong's bases there, and the whole thing just started all over again, but now Floria was pushing for it too, because she didn't want to raise her two girls alone."
"But you still said no."
"My reasons were still the same, only stronger now because I'd met your mother and wanted to be with her. And, well, it didn't help that I was pretty messed up for awhile. It's not an easy thing readjusting to peace again."
"I don't understand where your brother comes in, though."
"Frank was about three years younger than me and a much nicer, gentler person. I guess Ma figured that if I wouldn't marry Floria, especially now when she apparently needed a husband so badly, that Frank would do just as well."
"But why were you angry at Frank?"
Rossi sighed. "I don't know. For giving in, for making me look like the bad son, for making a doormat of himself by loving Floria when she walked all over him - you name it, I said it. But it got worse when I started refusing to come to family get-togethers.
"You gotta understand - I can be a selfish bastard at times," Rossi admitted, worried that he was painting a less than attractive picture of both his family and himself, but unable to stop. "I don't know what exactly I thought would happen, but like an idiot I think I believed that the family would side with me, that Frank would break up with Floria and desert his step-daughters and that Ma would turn against her friend, and, aw hell, who knows? I just know that my anger got worse when none of that happened; it made me feel like the family was siding against me, and after all I'd been through, that seemed incredibly unfair.
"But, later, after your mother and I lost you, the family was there and thankfully I was then able to pull my head out of my ass long enough to patch things up with them before Frank was gone as well."
"Dave, I don't know what to say."
"It's okay, Spencer. You don't have to say anything."
"Dave?"
"Yes?"
"Would you mind if I called you again?"
Dave grinned. "Mind? Are you kidding? I'd love it, Spencer. I truly would."
"All right."
-x-
The calls came two or three times a week after that - unless they were on a case - and while Rossi did wonder if Spencer was using the phone as a way of distancing himself from the larger situation and/or his emotions, Rossi himself began to see the advantages of it as well. It was a way of separating their working selves, and by extension the roles they were used to playing to each other, with this new thing. At work they were Rossi and Reid, but during these calls they slipped into using their first names almost unconsciously, becoming Dave and Spencer with barely a murmur.
For a long time, the questions mostly went one way, but Rossi supposed that was only natural. He knew far more about Spencer's life than Spencer knew about his, and too, Spencer was the hesitant one in this situation. Not long after their first phone call, Rossi had reflected on Hotch's words: he, Dave, was getting something wonderful, something he'd always dreamed of having back, but Spencer was the one whose life had just been ripped apart, and all for an extra parent he might not even have ever thought to ask for. Out in the woods one day with Mudgie, Rossi considered that it was like hunting: he had to be patient and wait for Spencer to approach more closely.
Then what, shoot him? his conscience asked.
Yeah, bad analogy, he told himself as he throw a stick for Mudgie to fetch. Let's not share that one with the kid.
However, even with Reid doing most of the questioning, Rossi began to glean small snippets about his son here and there, things he didn't know. Most times they were inconsequential, but sometimes they were funny, and occasionally meaningful.
Once Spencer worked up the courage and asked him if this was ever "awkward" for him.
"What do you mean 'awkward'?"
"Uh, 'weird' I guess. We've known each other a long time, and it's… not always been easy."
"Oh, I see - didn't think much of me when you first met me, is that it?" Dave joked.
"No, no!" Spencer rushed in to explain, causing Dave to realize he might have just made a huge mistake. "I thought you didn't like me! I know I annoyed you - "
"Spencer, stop! I wasn't being serious."
"Oh."
"But you were, weren't you?"
"I - "
Dave swallowed hard around a sudden lump in his throat. "Please tell me you didn't think that I hated you," he pleaded quietly.
"I wouldn't say hated," Spencer replied after a moment. "But let's be honest, if Hotch had come to you and asked which co-worker you wanted to spend a week with, I would have been last on the list."
Dave closed his eyes, grateful that Spencer couldn't see him. Wasn't it true? Your own son, and he was the one you took the longest to get close to. You brushed him off for months. Out of nowhere Rossi thought of their road trip to Philadelphia. You made no great effort to hide how much you didn't want to go, and yet still, he did his best to reach out to you in that parking lot and reassure you that it wasn't your fault Jill Morris had been abducted. * God, your OWN son… Did you even let him finish talking? He couldn't remember, but he knew it had always been J.J.'s attempt to cheer him up that he had treasured, not Spencer's. He had barely even remembered Spencer's attempt until this moment.
"Dave? Are you still there?"
"Yeah," he said shakily. "Yeah, kid, I'm still here."
"Whether you liked me or not wasn't my question though," Reid said, feeling he should change, or at least re-direct, the subject. "What I was trying to ask was: how is one supposed to take someone they've always looked at a certain way and, well, look at them a completely new way?"
"Kid, don't get ahead of me. I need to deal with the other thing first. Look… you and I, yeah, we're two very different people. For instance, when we first met, I was a complete ass. I was selfish and impatient, and if we didn't get off on the right foot, that's down to me, okay? Not you. I didn't dislike you…" Didn't you, that same pesky damn voice at the back of Dave's head asked. "I found you a bit overwhelming, I admit, but then the whole team idea was overwhelming. And maybe… maybe I doubted you. But I'm not as perceptive as Gideon and I certainly made a mistake there.
"Maybe that does answer your main question," Dave went on. "With time and greater knowledge, I learned to see you differently. Maybe that's what we've got to do here."
"But still, don't you ever find it… weird?" Spencer asked again.
"Yeah, I know what you're talking about. Some days, I want to call you Jimmy and hug the life out of you and buy you presents for every Christmas and birthday that I've missed, other days I feel like I'm Mr. Howell trying to adopt Gilligan."
There was a confused silence on the other end. "I'm sorry, who are these people?" Spencer finally asked.
"You know, Gilligan's Island. The tv show."
There was a pause and then, "Oh! The one about the people stranded on the island?"
"That's the one. Are you telling me you've never seen it? It's been in re-runs for half a century now."
"Well, I've heard of it. Doesn't Gilligan get his hand trapped in a bowling ball at one point? And then turn invisible simply because he's struck by lightning?"
"Uh…"
"And you're comparing me to this person?"
Now it was Dave's turn to backtrack. "No, no, no! It's just that there's this one episode where Mr. Howell and his wife decide to adopt Gilligan because he saved Mrs. Howell's life, but more because a kid suddenly seems like a nice thing to have and well, it kind of makes me feel like the same kind of idiot, forcing a friend to think of me as his father when he's already got one."
"Yeah, I'm not so sure about this explanation. Why do you know so much about a kid's show in any case?"
"I was a kid when it was on.+ Besides, I had a crush on Ginger - the tall, red-headed sexpot movie star."
Reid burst out laughing.
"You know," Dave added slyly, "Your mother was a redhead when she was younger," and was very gratified when that little tidbit shut the kid up.
"Are you telling me my existence was an indirect result of my biological mother's superficial resemblance to an old sitcom character?"
"Hmmm… sure seems like I am."
"You know, it's extremely rare when I come across knowledge that I absolutely do not want to know."
Rossi chuckled, but the small part of him that had been hoping to turn the conversation to Carolyn wondered if this was a deeper request. So, instead of talking about Spencer's mother, he asked Reid if he ever anything normal kids watched, like Scooby-Doo or The Brady Bunch.
"I did watch Scooby-Doo, but I only ever saw once episode of The Brady Bunch. When the youngest girl seemed to have trouble remembering her favourite type of sandwich I changed the channel; these were simply not children I felt I could relate to."
"Understandable," Dave laughed.
They talked for awhile longer. Never did Rossi think he'd spend a night talking to Reid about old tv shows, but it did take his mind off more depressing issues at least until he was in bed. (Reid's favourites had been sci-fi and old late-night re-runs of the Twilight Zone that his father taped on VHS for them, no surprise there, but Dave did learn that a heart-broken three-year-old Spencer had cried all night at the classic episode where Burgess Meredith stumbles onto enough books to read for the post-apocalyptic eternity, only to break his glasses before he could read a single one.) However, once lying there with Mudgie lying next to him and warming up his one side, it was difficult not to dwell on their original conversation.
Everyone always says there's a connection, don't they? All those shows where long-lost children and parents are re-united, the standard cliché always comes out: "Oh, I knew right off the bat! There was an instant connection! I would have recognized him anywhere!"
Stupid jackasses, Dave cursed. You knew because the show told you. Because they introduced you. "Here's your kid! No, this one here, dummy!"
And the love is always instant too. Well, that's because you were looking for each other, isn't it, you morons? And because you get to start off your relationship as parent and child. You don't have seven years of baggage to get in the way first.
…
But I didn't know him, did I? I didn't even want to put up with him. I didn't even want to put up with my very own son.
And even now - some days you can't feel it, can you? he asked himself. Some days it scares you how much your outlook has shifted; you want to never let him out of your sight and you can't even write anymore because now you want to make him the hero of every chapter and it's supposed to be about the victims, but is that because of Jimmy or because of Spencer? Because other days you can't comprehend for a second that Spencer is anything more than the slightly exasperating colleague he's ever been.
Dave rolled over to stare at the ceiling.
What kind of father are you?
And what are you going to do to Spencer if you're pursuing this relationship for the wrong reasons?
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* "Limelight"
+ I'm playing around with Rossi's age here a bit. When he first comes on the show, he hints that he's 52, which at the time would have meant he was born in 1955 (and a wiki page I once looked at put it as 1956), BUT in "The Fallen" he's in Vietnam in 1969, which would put him at 13 or 14 if one of those first two dates are true. Still, I didn't want to make him as old as Joe Mantenga, so for this story he's born in 1952 - still a little young to be in Vietnam when he was, but at 17 he could have lied about his age, therefore it's not quite as implausible.
Author's note: There was supposed to be a lot more happening in this chapter, but it was getting too long, so I decided to break it up. Whether that means you'll see the next part soon, I can't say, but I will try.
Also, thanks again to everyone who took the time to review (or even just read)! Hope you enjoyed!
