Work Text:
Most days are numb.
Most days are a blur of minutiae; ballpoint pens scraping against paper, manilla envelopes passed across tables, quiet engine roars over wheels speeding off to someplace insignificant. Someplace unknown to her.
Places where she’s unknown too.
In these towns, Rebecca can take off the suit and replace it with something more casual. She can let her hair, long and almost wavy, hang around her shoulders where his arm used to fall. The weight of “used to” is heavier with each passing day and carrying it is not a choice so much as a sentence.
The load lightens when she gets to be a tourist in Nowhere Town, USA. She wanders through unfamiliar shop-lined streets that look unsettlingly similar to Wayhaven but shifted three feet to the left. She belongs here and doesn’t. She doesn’t know where she is, so who she is can slip away for a moment.
She’s not a bureaucrat playing at field agent tasks. She doesn’t know some of the biggest secrets in the world. She hasn’t just received a pity promotion to handle a team of vampires. She’s not an absent single mother. She’s not a widow.
She can stand to spend more than a weekend with her daughter, whose eyes are perfect replicas of Rook’s.
She’s not numb.
Her husband and child are both alive, happy, and they don’t miss her because she’s not gone. At least not for long.
A shop window, glowing golden and punched through with haphazard strings of holiday lights, catches her attention. Wooden letters covered in shimmering red and green glitter spell out “The Season For Giving” above a cozily manufactured scene of a Christmas tree surrounded by beautifully wrapped gifts.
Is it Christmas already? She barely measures time. Most days are a blur.
“'The season for unnecessary debt,’ more like,” she says aloud and to no one, but he answers anyway.
“Don’t be such a grinch, Becks. Let’s get something for the tree.”
Rebecca nods, to no one again, or maybe to her reflection in the glass.
Inside, she buys the ornament--she doesn’t know how to choose, and Rook was always better at domesticity, so it’s a total guess--and the clerk doesn’t give her that knowing, sad smile everyone else does. They wrap the bauble in brightly-colored tissue and place it into a delicate gift box.
“For someone special?” They ask, and it’s the first small talk anyone’s attempted with Rebecca in months.
She smiles. The tightness of the unused muscles must show on her face from the way the clerk’s brow knits. “Yes, for my daughter. ...And my husband.”
Rebecca makes her way back to the dark, discreet agency car and tucks the package into the trunk. In the driver's seat, she pins her hair into the tidiest bun she can manage with only a rearview mirror.
When she arrives at the next facility, she leaves everything in the car. The ornament, the tears, the part of her that is a tourist in her own life. She can’t take it with her, or she will break.
She reads a bone-dry report. She scratches out a note, rewrites it in meticulous print. She doesn’t talk about the very human way she misses her family.
The days are numb.