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She is memorialized as a very brave young woman.
That’s what Jack calls her, anyways. When he talks about her in conversation, he usually just refers to her as she, her. Everyone always knows who it is he’s talking about regardless. No point in adding salt to the wound.
Sometimes—rarely, rarely—he calls her Miriam, but her name always comes out sounding strangled. If she were there, she’d insist on being Miriam Lass, because maybe a bit of distance would do him good. (He wouldn’t listen to her anyway; it’s not his way, never been his way, not the kind of man he is.) But of course, Miriam is not there and that’s the problem.
Jack is Jack, though, and he’s got a code and he knew her. The rest of the FBI, however, tends not to be quite so delicate, so he goes on calling her Miriam in a voice that’s much too soft to be his own and they go on avoiding the topic—she’s just a topic now, a goddamned concept—whenever Jack is within hearing distance.
She becomes Jack Crawford’s lost trainee to most of them. Sometimes Lass, Miriam when Will Graham reviews her files with Beverly Katz or Hannibal Lecter or Alana Bloom or—once, just once—Brian Zeller. But she’s just a case file even then, no more a person than most of the dusty manila folders attributed to the Chesapeake Ripper.
Jack doesn’t think about it—it’s a bad idea, he’s trained for this, he never lets himself linger too long on her name—but in the back of this mind there’s a thought that forms: how much she would hate it. Hate not being a person, hate being known for anything but her own intelligence, courage, achievements. She hated it then; but of course, she was still alive then. Miriam Lass can’t feel outrage because she’s dead. And there’s nothing anyone can do to change that.
Still, Jack feels outrage for her in a remote corner of his mind because she deserved better—deserves better, really. Deserves to be the very brave young woman, deserves to be Miriam, deserves to be anything but the trainee Jack Crawford lost two years ago. Because God damn it, she was nothing of Jack Crawford’s.
She was Miriam Lass. She was brave and reckless and intelligent and strong-willed. She hated regulations and turkey sandwiches and coffee and romcoms and the polo student uniform and having to buy paperbacks instead of hardcovers. She biked to the academy most mornings, and the only makeup she ever wore was brown eyeliner, a bit of mascara. She liked cherries and smelled like cucumber soap and loved wearing professional clothes. And, Jack sometimes remembers a bit bitterly, she loved being alive more than most anyone he’d ever met.
She was Miriam Lass; and she never belonged to anyone--least of all Jack Crawford.