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Clint used to roll his eyes when people talked about ghosts and their unfinished business.
That was, until he became one of those ghosts.
But he’s not haunting the ones who wronged him, a vengeful spirit waiting to wreak it’s revenge. He’s just eternally longing to mend the bridges he burnt unable to do anything about it.
Present — once Scrooge, now Roberto — got to live his happily ever after with Kimberly, experiencing all of the wonders of the modern day and not being a semi corporal being with the sole purpose of teaching the magic of Christmas and being a better person to assholes who shouldn’t deserve redemption but get it anyways (like Clint).
Clint doesn’t feel like he’s a better person. Sure, he had his moment of redemption, but to be worthy of the title of Present, you need to have an optimism that isn’t innate to Clint. He’s nothing if not a pessimist.
His pessimism is deeply rooted from a lifetime of disappointment, crushed hope, and losing the only things that matter, that he dared to love. He’s a pessimist because he was too blind to see the good in the world. (He was too scared to. Carrie was the one who would pull his head out of his ass and make him see that it was his self imposed hurdles that kept him from doing, getting, being what he really wanted to be. But even she couldn’t get it through his thick skull to see what he really needed. Clint was best at self sabotage because he would never let himself believe that he deserved anything better, so he pushed away anything that tried to prove otherwise.)
Being reunited with Carrie in the afterlife has made him realize how far he pushed, how much he lost from pushing, and how irreparable the damage was.
And so he sits with Carrie over the crystal snowglobe that watches over the living world and sees the life he left behind move on without him.
He sees Wren be eaten up with guilt, confused over how to feel, conflicted in her grief while she still held her resentment for the uncle who could never be enough that she lost too soon to mend fences.
He sees his brother be the last of their family, looking over the daughter that Clint should have taken in but didn’t, struggling over the loss and knowing he has to stay strong when he was never meant to be the strong one.
He sees all of the employees who hated him rejoice in his absence, all of the people who detested him thrive after his death, and he does what he can to do the good he didn’t do while he was alive.
There’s so much he regrets. So much that he thought he had time to fix. So much that he pushed and pushed away and pushed too far.
And though his unfinished business will forever stay unfinished, he can do what he can to keep someone like him from going down the same fate.
Because Wren will learn to move on. She will be good in the way Clint never was that was innate to her like her mother. Owen will learn how to find the strength and how to ask for help when he can’t be.
Life will move on without him and he has to learn how to move on with it.