Chapter Text
This time of year, the sun set earlier by the day as the brown and red leaves fell, dry and crinkled, onto the ground. The warm hint of marigolds was frequently in the air, and day by day, as the end of the month approached, Clementine Olson begged her husband, Henry- or more affectionately, Hank, to come with her to do rubbings at the nearby cemetery.
“Get in the spirit, why don’t you?” She had urged him more than once. “Think of it as a birthday present to me, please?”
Clementine had been born on October 30th, which in her own opinion, put her one day away from having a perfect Halloween birthday. As a result, she was enthusiastic about the entire season of fall but in particular, she loved the last two weeks of her birth month the most. Hank was happy to celebrate with her to an extent. He enjoyed taking her out to different cafes to try pumpkin and apple seasonal offerings and he’d be lying if he said he didn’t have fun on the occasional midnight showing of a classic horror movie at their local drive in.
That being said though,going to the cemetery was one of Hank’s least favorite ways to ring in his wife’s birthday. It wasn’t that he was scared, it was just that going to a place for dead people to celebrate the day one came into the world almost felt like…bragging? Maybe that was just another one of his own, personal superstitions, but it felt like fucking tempting fate or some shit.
Like a bad omen.
But even so, part of him couldn’t help but to be tempted. He and Clem didn’t do much together the rest of the year. Aside from birthdays and their anniversary, their lives had seemed to grow out of the trunk of a singular tree, but in two very separate directions. Hank often told himself it was a consequence of their getting married so young; that being by one another’s side for the past ten years had made it so they didn’t necessarily need to do everything together all the time, but in the same line of thought, he knew that it was more than that. It wasn’t merely that they didn’t do everything together, it was that they often purposefully excluded their company from one another. Not out of malice, but rather a sort of preemptive assumption that the other wouldn’t want to spend time together; so as not to be a bother.
But special occasions were different. They were supposed to go out of their way to be together on days like that. It was like a rule of being a boring old married couple.
So, he wound up saying yes, bad feeling or no.
The two of them had walked up and down the different plots of land, specifically looking for the oldest ones all the way in the back. As they walked, they held hands, but didn’t make much more than their usual small talk. It had only been the second time that week that they’d been in the same place at the same time. Mostly, they passed back and forth a rehash of :
“So, how’s your week been so far?”
“It was fine, I guess. What about you?”
“It was okay. Work’s about as pleasant as ever, but a job’s a fuckin’ job, you know?”
“Oh trust me, I know.”
“What about you, sweets? How’re the kids?”
“I’ve got five hitting all their milestones, so they’ll be moving up to the three year old class next week.”
“Oh, that’s great.”
“Yeah, it is. I’ll miss them though.”
The words petered out after that, even as they kept their fingers intertwined and continued walking. Hank watched the ground they covered and told himself that it was to avoid the low standing headstones from tripping him up. As for the truth of his aversion, well even he wasn’t quite able to look that in the eye as much as he would have liked to. He kept his vision low, and so he was the first to spot the rabbit hopping along in the grass.
It was a curious, skittish little creature. Its fur was a spotless snowy color, which seemed uncommon for something wild. Could it have been someone’s lost pet? But then, how did it get this far? It was a far walk from any house, with plenty of treacherous roads along the way. There would have been plenty of opportunities for it to have gotten hit by a car, gutted by a cat or scooped up by a bird of prey on the way here and yet it looked completely unharmed.
“Woah Clem, look over there.” He said, pointing to the direction he’d seen it go into.
Clementine looked up, “What? What is it?”
She had followed his direction with her eyes, and the rabbit had been in plain sight for both of them for a fraction of a second before it went behind a gravestone and disappeared seemingly right into thin air. Hank expected it to reappear at any moment, even slowed his gait slightly in order to watch, but it never came back into his line of vision.
“What the fuck?” Hank wondered aloud, “Where the fuck did it go?”
“Maybe it’s hiding.” Clementine suggested, “Or maybe it was a ghost.”
At the word ‘ghost’, She waved her free hand in a twirling motion at the air in front of her and made a wooshing kind of noise, then she shrugged.
“I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised, since the veil’s, like, all thin this time of year and stuff.”
Hank shook his head, half amused. “Another one of your folktales, Clemmie? More urban legends?” he asked, “Is there one about invisible graveyard rabbits?”
Clementine gave him a half hearted smile in return. They might not have spent as much time together as they could have, and maybe their bond had waned over the years, but neither could claim that they had quite as close a relationship with anyone else, for better or worse.
Hank knew that if Clementine collected anything, it was scary stories. They were kind of a passion of hers, ghosts and the world unseen. Hank wasn’t sure if it was a result of her being born when she was, or if the interest had always been in place and her birthdate just happened to water the seed already planted.
He could have asked, fuck, he should have asked. He himself was no stranger to certain tales and stories on his own end. That was part of the reason he considered himself a rather superstitious motherfucker. It could have been a possible point of connection for them if he had, something he participated in with her instead of merely listening to when it came up.
“There’s a section for pets around here somewhere, did you know that?” Clementine asked him. “If it was a ghost, it could have come from there.”
“Shit.” Hank said, “Does it get more depressing than a fucking pet cemetery?”
“I know, it’s fucked up, isn’t it?” Clementine responded as she pointed with her chin to indicate its location. “You wanna go see it?”
“We can go wherever you wanna go.” Hank said. “It’s your birthday, doll.”
Her expression flickered a little at that. Not a crack in her veneer, necessarily, but a flash of something he understood at once he wasn’t meant to see. A quirk of an eyebrow, a downward turn of the corners of her mouth. In that instant, he could guess what it was that had brought it on.
Did or didn’t he actually care what they did out here?
It went beyond being indulgent for the celebration of a loved one, Hank and Clementine were both more often than not, just letting their union happen. They moved through it with little fuss or festival. It was neither joyful, nor miserable, there wasn’t enough sway in either direction due to the fact that neither felt the need to push or pull all that often. It simply was.
They simply were.
There was little else to say on the matter. They were pleasant enough to one another. Civil, in all its rigid formality, was probably a better word. They could hold conversations, compliment each other, use nicknames and pet names but none of it truly grounded them the way they hoped it would.
But all this being said, neither of them knew what to do about it. Separation seemed even harder to conceive of than being married for ten years. At least, that was the way it felt to Hank. He had no fucking clue who he was outside of being Clementine’s husband, which was a hard pill to fucking swallow, since he it felt like he couldn’t tell of he was even doing that right half the time.
They didn’t end up going to the pet cemetery. They made their way there, but Clem got distracted by a pair of headstones she said were absolutely prime for charcoal rubbings. As she knelt down to get out her supplies, a monarch butterfly came down from the branch of a nearby tree and landed in her dark, thickly curled hair. For a moment, both she and it seemed to be in a state of near perfect contentment. Hank let himself take the moment in as well, even if only as an observer. The way the wings on the monarch matched her oversized cable knit sweater, the delicate movements of her hands which looked to him so very much like little brown birds flitting from piece to piece of her project, and the way she bit her plush lower lip when she was concentrating on something.
He loved the look of her like that.
He called it to mind often, after she was gone.
At first, it had been as a kind of balm, something to soothe him long enough to try to sleep or otherwise continue going through the motions of his life which for some reason persisted even with no real reason to do so anymore.
Then, as the days withered away and blurred together, the thought of her like that warped little by little from balm, to crutch. He wished he’d taken a picture of her there, he wished there was a way to trust that it had really happened; that he hadn’t just fucking made it up for the sake of trying to convince himself that their marriage was happier than it was. But with no proof to speak of, all he could do was fixate on the thought of her just like that.
About four fucking hours before everything went to hell.
Perhaps it's for that reason, and that reason alone that he found himself at the gate of that very same cemetery exactly a year later.
It could have just been one more way to attempt to cope, or it could have been nothing but spooky bullshit, but regardless, there he was. It was midnight and he’d packed a backpack of essentials before setting out in order to achieve his goal.
The veil was thin this time of year and all that shit, right?
Maybe if she saw fit to come through it, if he could just see her one more time then he could…?
Could what, exactly?
It wasn’t like he could bring her back, or apologize to any real effect. There wasn’t even a guarantee that any of this would work in the first place. There was just a need, a driving, insatiable need to see her even just one more time. Maybe, if he was lucky, even the way he remembered her.
The gates were locked, but the chains were so old and loose that he squeezed past it without very much effort. The wind howled and threatened to rip away the thin jacket he wore even though it was zipped up as much as it would go. He should have gone with his gut and worn more fucking layers.
There was another thought in the back of his mind that reminded him, perhaps he shouldn’t have come out in the first fucking place. He ignored it, though. If there was one thing he knew about himself for certain, it was that once he set his sights on something, once he really committed, there was rarely ever any turning back. He was, if nothing else, a deeply determined son of a bitch. He’d been like that for as long as he could remember and probably would be until the day he died.
All the better, honestly.
This wasn’t some casual fucking thing. He was going big, not going home. He had to really be fucking raring to rip here.
And fuck him, if nothing else, he was raring to rip.