Work Text:
Every child has coming of age rituals, male children especially. Spencer graduated from high school at 12. He watched children twice his age go through puberty with a clinical and dispassionate eye, learning quickly to keep his mouth shut and his head down. It didn’t usually work, but his mother told him that he couldn’t control others behavior, only his own.
He didn’t like to drive - he could have passed the knowledge test as early as twelve, but he wasn’t tall enough to see over the dashboard, and the state refused to issue him a license until he was sixteen regardless. With two degrees behind him on his birthday, Spencer went with his mother to take the test in their old sedan.
Well prepared (at least in theory), Spencer got a perfect on the written exam and then made to get behind the wheel of the car. He knew the mechanics front to back and how to perform each task to the DMV’s supposedly exacting standards.
Twenty minutes later, he was refused his license and told he could come back in seven days to try again.
He didn’t return until he was twenty-one. He had been banned from seven casinos by the time he applied for the Bureau and moved east, away from the specter of his mother and absent father. The guilt of leaving gave him terrible insomnia, and he called Gideon a lot that first year. He grew close to the older man, and Gideon become a father figure.
Neglectful, which was worse than an absent father, when Spencer compared them afterwards.
His first sexual experience happened in a discreet location in Nevada, by an experienced woman, and then an experienced man. Spencer believed he should try each option offered.
It cost him two thousand dollars, and left him no closer to understanding why teenagers seemed driven to the sex act than before.
Perhaps coming of age rituals were simply antiquated and no longer needed or desired in the modern era. Despite disliking technology, Spencer tended to think that outdated customs should not be preserved and thought, when Henry was born, that he would force such idiocies on his godson.
END