March 14:
She can only sleep in the daytime.
The first night home after it was all over, she'd startled awake from nightmares three times. The last time ended with knocking over and smashing the little bedside lamp with her frantic, flailing groping for some, any, light source now. She'd sat up in the living room till dawn, then opened the curtains on every window in the apartment, so sunlight could filter in, diffused through cheap Venetian blinds. Only then was she able to sleep again, dreamlessly this time.
Her sleep cycle has gradually migrated ahead a phase or two, into a vampire-like routine of heavy, almost drugged slumber from dawn till mid-afternoon. Daylight in the room: probably messing up her levels of melatonin and God-only-knows-what-else, and pulling the blankets over her head for dimness doesn't help much.
Being able to see exactly where and when she is, and that she's really alone, immediately upon swimming up out of unconsciousness does.
Familiar brown walls, furniture put back exactly where it belongs, open closet door (she can't bear it closed) showing the neat and precise row of clothes hanging inside, clock on the bedside table showing date and time in bland red numbers. Everything ordered and locating her in space and time, and you couldn't see all that waking up in the dark, right?
She still hasn't returned Spencer's spare clothes. She'd stayed in them for almost three days afterward, while she ran all her clothes and every other washable item in the place through the laundry and cleaned everything. Irrational, ridiculous, and she knew it and still carried on purging every possible invisible trace of Diane's presence from her home.
Sometimes she sleeps with his sweatshirt, curling it against her face.
She hopes he doesn't ask for it back any time soon.
Even with every window uncovered, the apartment is still too small and too close and she knows every crack in the plaster and pattern in the tile by now. Her email inbox is empty, no acknowledgement from the jobs she's applied to or any of the friends she's written. Out of everyone she knew before this all started, only two people have contacted her back so far, her old supervisor (kind tone, offering references) and Stephanie from the lab (a friendly but slightly bewildered note with a distinct flavor of I really don't know what to say).
She supposes the story got around among friends and colleagues.
She wishes her name hadn't been mentioned in the newspaper reports. Google's probably killing her job search right now. Not for the first time, she wishes her parents had named her something slightly less unusual.
The fridge is empty too, so she goes grocery shopping, timing it for an hour before the buses and streets and stores crowd with people on their way home from work. More people in this store right now than she's seen in person for the entire last year, people and echoey noise and the visual gabble of rows and rows, boxes and cans, aisle after aisle...
She's gripping the cart handle with white-knuckled hands and reminding herself to breathe slowly and deeply by the time she gets to the checkout line. At least the snotty cashier from last time, the one who gave her a dirty look upon seeing she was paying with EBT, isn't here today.
She manages to wrestle everything home on the bus, sitting next to the window and putting the bags on the seat beside her so no one will take it.
The temperature drops sharply by the time she leaves for Spencer's. She puts on the heaviest coat she owns and heads for the Metro station. The last remnants of red-gold light are fading out of the sky, and streetlights are starting to come on, unreal yellow sodium glow diffusing down. Dark coming. She focuses on the small cloud of her breath, appearing and dissipating in front of her.
The train car is blessedly empty, except for an elderly bearded man dozing in the back row. Only three stops before hers, but it still takes too long.
The train pulls into the station at her stop in a hiss of brakes. She gets up and catches a glimpse of herself reflected in the darkened windows opposite. For a fraction of a moment she sees, really sees, a faceless smudge of a figure reaching for her. Scent, too, Diane's cloying gardenia perfume -
Nothing. There's nothing there, calm yourself, Donovan, will you?
Spencer answers the door, and she goggles at him. First because he looks really good in all black, then because of the design on his shirt - a large pi symbol with a background of pi's numbers, strung out in rows - then because of his left eye, plum-purple and slightly swollen.
"Happy Pi Day!" he says, and then she remembers: of course, it's March 14th, that old science joke. "Your timing is perfect. The pizza guy just left about five minutes ago."
"And a scintillating pi-related annual event to you, too. What happened to you?" she asks, as he closes the door behind them. "Did something else happen on that case you didn't tell me about?" The team had gotten back from a case in North Carolina yesterday; on the phone he'd just said I don't want to talk about details, it involved child trafficking and that's all I'm gonna say and jeez, she didn't want any details either but being punched might've been worth a mention -
"The eye is actually courtesy of Morgan." He looks a little sheepish. "We were going up stairs at a crime scene, and he turned around all of a sudden. I was just enough steps behind and to his right that he elbowed me right in the face."
"Ow."
"Oh, he apologized profusely." Spencer's smile turns just slightly diabolical. "I plan to exploit it a bit. Maybe give him back a big pile of the extra paperwork he keeps sneaking onto my desk."
She laughs, balancing on one foot, then the other as she pulls off her boots.
They head for the couch. There's a pizza box on the living room coffee table, and a giant bottle of Mountain Dew and plates and two mugs: the Starfleet Academy one and the Miskatonic University one. There's already soda in Starfleet, so she fills Miskatonic and leans back against the pillows. Spencer levers a couple slices of pepperoni-and-mushroom out of the box, and passes her one.
"Do you even own a single plain mug?" she asks.
"One. It's black. I keep it at work. Someday I'll bring in the TARDIS-shaped one, just to make everyone get That Look on their faces."
He puts his feet up on the table. She follows suit and they talk, innocuous subjects far from his work or her lack of it: the approaching comet and how visible it might be from D.C. considering the light pollution, details of some magazine article he's read lately on camera obscura and early photographic techniques.
She drops mushrooms on herself halfway through a slice. They laugh about that and she thinks: this is all so peaceful and normal, in the very best sense of that word. Well, normal is the absolute last adjective anyone would ever use to describe Spencer, with his mismatched socks and odd loping speech prosody and the way his hands curl and spike and flap as he waxes happily enthusiastic on some favorite topic. She likes that.
She wants to tell him You're the best thing in my life, you have been for a long time now, but it makes her shy and there's no natural conversational opening for it anyway, so she just carries on listening to what he says about what qualifies as the world's oldest daguerrotype.
After they finish the pizza, he starts fiddling with the remote, firing up the DVD player. She makes a quick trip to the bathroom, to check for lingering mushroom stains and whether there's anything in her teeth. In the yellow light, the circles under her eyes are disquietingly obvious. She hopes they don't look that bad in the living room's light.
She emerges into deep blue shadows: lamp off and the menu for Star Trek III flickering gently on the TV screen. Her eyes go automatically to the window - curtains drawn, good - and then she tells herself: It's been two months. Stop.
She goes back to the couch and they start the movie, captions on for Spencer's wonky auditory processing and so they can keep the volume a bit lower. At first she just sits close to him, feet next to his on the table. By the time the Enterprise crew discovers McCoy's carrying Spock's katra, she's curled up on her half of the couch instead.
She lets her head slide down onto Spencer's shoulder - no startle there, he's come to expect this on these nights. He puts an arm around her, hand resting lightly on her waist. Warmth and low voices from the TV and the slow, steady drumbeat of his heart under her ear.
She lets her eyes close and her consciousness slip away, down into the quiet restful depths.