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ninety6tears[See Master Post]
After a few weeks I went back to the Patio just at closing time hoping to catch Joan the waitress so that I could apologize for the fraudulent flirting. She remembered me right off the bat and didn't seem particularly wounded, or at least was caught up in the entertainment value of a person claiming to be an undercover cop and then, once I'd shown her my badge, of realizing I really wasn't bullshitting. It took her a couple minutes, but the point when she really believed me was when she realized, "Something's kinda different about you this time...You're giving me the creeps, copper."
I walked her to where she had her bike chained up at the end of the block, and then I said I really would give it a go if she wanted to go out some time. She looked like she really almost said yes, but then she didn't. It wasn't so awkward; she passed up the moment with some joke about preserving a pleasant rapport with frequent customers, which I said was fair, and we laughed.
"Tell you what. You come in during my shift tomorrow and I'll bum you a free slice of pie."
"I can't tomorrow. I have to go in and testify against somebody."
In the middle of undoing her bike lock, she cocked an eyebrow "Is it somebody bad?"
"Very bad."
The next day at the courthouse set me on edge more than I was used to. I'm usually pretty good with testimony; I have to worry about not looking bored more than anything else most of the time, but at Rigen's trial everything was different. I walked up to the stand and kept my eyes blankly fixed only several feet forward, but I felt this buzzing stick of eyes looking at me far more closely than I liked. The prosecution lawyer started off the whole circus with a showy "You may or may not have noticed that there is some resemblance between Detective Kirk and the victim..." Immediately this stirred up some of the crowd into cowlicks of noise and motion and made the judge go banging the mallet in record time.
While I was being questioned, a figure sitting in the audience flickered into the corner of my eye: a cap of dark hair and a red scarf somewhere up in one of the balcony boxes. I wasn't able to do a double take. By the time I was done and had the chance to look again, Danek—assuming I hadn't only imagined it was him—had already quietly slipped out.
Transferring to Domestic Violence hadn't put an end to my weekly visit to my favorite library that happened to be in the same vicinity of a lot of police buildings. The actual traditional stacks weren't very dense, but the first floor had a wide open feel, complete with a greenhouse that spanned along two floors and an echoey courtyard where people could rollerblade with their pets.
I was there on a less than busy day with a tall cup of coffee when I unexpectedly got a comm from Uhura. It had been a couple weeks since the cat had been let out of the bag to all of the sources. I'd heard Hikaru Sulu was very difficult to get a hold of, and when he'd heard about the whole crime ("person laundering" was the phrase IS had prissily come up with) he had mostly been fascinated by it but overall too busy to be more than a little interested in the details. I got the impression he was the type to be strangely enthusiastic about his indirect involvement with something so anomalous; Uhura was comming me with the other kind of reaction.
"They're saying that apparently the apartment I was living in while I was doing undercover hasn't been lived in since I left, so that was probably where they found a genetic sample?" She let out a vague grumble; it sounded like she was sitting in traffic somewhere. "It blows my mind. And they don't even know what they would have been used for, but it couldn't have been anything good...It just makes me sick, like I had something to do with it somehow."
There was a tapering in the tone at the end, like she wanted to laugh at herself but needed some form of reassurance that she wasn't being unreasonable. It felt really good to hear that from someone else. "Yeah, I know. I know what you mean."
"You're probably expecting me to ask you what she was like...I almost don't want to know. They were asking if it would be okay with me to give her my information, if she ever wanted to contact me, and I said it was fine. But there's just something about this whole thing that scares me half to death. It took them forever to even talk me into believing it."
One time while Uhura and I were working together, I was there to see one of our bosses say to her face that he was starting to think there was something fishy about her. Without flinching she'd told him in her in-character hints of Dominican accent and unflappable good humor that she'd strip down to prove she wasn't tapping him but that she thought that was no way to treat a lady, until the drunk boss was laughing at himself over the whole thing and ended up paying her round. It isn't easy to give Uhura a scare. If it was the more precise, quiet cruelties that gave her the chills, I hadn't realized we had that in common.
"Do you think you'd ever want to meet her?" I asked, hoping she wasn't going to get into asking me anything about Will.
"I don't know. It seems crazy not to, in a way, especially since I may be moving there anyhow."
"Woah, woah. Say again?"
"Yeah," she said, laughing shyly. "I'm thinking about transferring to the NDPD."
"Oh, no. No, don't do that." I was only half kidding.
"It's not the nicest place, I know, it's just that...I'm getting really bored here."
I let out a long sigh.
"Anyway, if I'm there soon, we should go get another beer together, right?"
My attention was caught by my realization that a young woman who was at the end of the aisle seemed to be patiently waiting for me to hang up, as if she had something to ask me; this stacked right into recognizing who she was.
"Jimmy," Uhura mildly snapped. "Still there?"
"Uh...hey, I gotta call you back."
I hung up and walked down to the end of the aisle. Lora March turned her glance up at me, tucked her hair behind her ear and gave me a tired but friendly expression. "Detective. It's been a while."
"Lora, hi." After a half-stunned hesitation, I clutched her hand into a shake.
"I hope you don't mind...I didn't have your number or anything and I went over to the office, but they said you'd transferred. This lady named Janice told me you might be here."
I was still taking her in. She would have been nineteen by now and I couldn't really gauge if she looked older in any way. But she looked better. She had a hell of a pair of eyes peering out between a head of black hair that firecrackered out in dark waves; I'd never noticed before that she was pretty, but that comes with the job. We tend to meet people when they're feeling and looking their worst. Now, Lora was wearing heavily frayed jeans and a top in a very complicated print, the kind of lively multi-cultural thrift store get-up that reminded me of what Gaila would wear, and she had a leash thrown around her neck that must have belonged to a dog she'd dropped off somewhere. It was good to see her out and living.
"Is anything wrong?" I asked.
"Oh no, um. It's this..." She was reaching into the back pocket of her jeans. "They're finally releasing some of the stuff that was being kept in evidence, so they commed me to ask if I wanted any of what was on the bodies. And this, I know it was Madri's, but...I figured your partner would want to have it."
The charm necklace had a small but heavy silver medallion that had been engraved with Vulcan symbols like numbers on a clock face. Holding it in my hand again, I pictured Madri and Colin March lying in the twigs next to each other, hands almost touching. I'd barely noticed the pendant sitting against the pulseless neck until I'd become increasingly aware of something like a shudder just next to me and saw Spock looking straight at it like he couldn't see anything else. This one thing. This harmless little object that Madri had picked up because she thought it was just something pretty, had cost us big time.
Lora still gave me the slightest bit of heebee-jeebies when I looked at her, because of how much she looked like Sarah. Take the way so many friends of the family had shorthanded the two as "the girls" and how eerily alike they looked, and it was initially assumed that they were sisters rather than cousins.
When I was a kid I had a game that took you to this logic puzzle with two identically blinking faces of little girls: One of us always tells the truth and one of us always lies. I think of that whenever I bring up the image of Lora and Sarah March in their sitting room and the entire badly handled ordeal of the necklace. Lora had said she'd seen it on Madri a couple times. Sarah, mildly putting through her natural emotional frustrations, protested that all jewelry looked pretty much the same to Lora and that Madri's own daughter would have a better idea. She insisted that she'd never seen the necklace before.
Of course we'd both believed Sarah from the start. I'd like to say it was because anyone might assume the two cases had to be connected, and we had our own vendettas against buried enigmas that made us want it to be, but we still could have taken Lora more seriously. It wasn't that we sympathized less with her, but there was something about Sarah which I've realized by now was carefully constructed to twist us her way. Putting aside the daughter-versus-niece complication, a lot of detectives might have seen Sarah barely moving on the couch, and Lora reduced to animated sobs while the cigarette I'd given her hung forgotten from her fingers, and been more inclined to unconsciously side with the latter. Sarah, though, it was like she sized us up somehow and then put on her more contained version of grief.
Spock had told them why we were asking about the pendant in the first place, only vaguely explaining some things about the necklace "matching the description" of one that was worn by a woman who disappeared many years previously and that we were handling the possibility of a rather procrastinating serial killer leaving us a calling card. We're hardly in the habit of treating surviving family members as suspects when the bodies show up outside of the home and definitely not when they're so young, so it wasn't something I thought twice about, but I remember that for whatever reason I caught Spock's glance across the corner of their tea table as I leaned over and tapped the ashes off of my cigarette in the rhythm of our code: Be careful.
Even with that hunch, it went further than I could have seen, much earlier than I could have seen. I hadn't known that when young and fragile Sarah March arrived on the case, clutching to her own composure and looking like one slightest additional disaster could wrench her out of that brave calm, it was over. Spock had seen himself in her.
"So you can get it to him?" Lora was asking.
I finally half-stupidly stammered, "Thanks," before tucking the pendant into my jacket pocket.
Lora kept giving me a look like there was something she wanted to ask but she wasn't sure if she should.
"You understand he shouldn't have been on that case, right?" I asked.
She let out a sigh.
"We both made that mistake, and I'm so sorry. I know I said it before, but..." I shrugged.
"I have to wonder how else you would have ever figured out it was Sarah. It took you bringing up that other case to catch her in a lie in the first place."
"We still made a pretty big mess of it, though."
She winced and shrugged at what she was about to say. "You know, the craziest part of it is that I'm not even sure why she did it. I guess it was about the money, and not wanting them to try to tell her what to do with her life. I always got this idea that everyone else in the house were just these annoying...creatures to her, that just got in her way. You can have a pretty simple idea of how to be free when you don't care about anybody else, I guess."
"...Did you always know?" I asked. "That she was like that?"
"Oh. Oh, yeah." She nodded. "It's hard to imagine Madri and Colin never thought there was anything strange, but it's hard to make yourself look at your own kid like that."
"How did you know?"
"It was the lying," she said certainly, with a shrug. "Lying about things, where I couldn't really understand why anyone would lie about them, except to sort of control me. Just complicated, weird little lies. I'm sure you did enough research to know I've got a nice little string of delinquency on my record. Suspensions from school and everything, and I know I did a lot of things I shouldn't have done, but...She had me backed into the scapegoat corner so fast, practically the minute I moved in."
Lora adjusted her bag on her shoulder as someone went by, and then she didn't look at me as she kept talking.
"It didn't take me too long to just accept it. I made the mistake of thinking it made much of a difference to her whether I tried to call her out or not. I think I kinda thought...if I could love Sarah. If it was like we were sisters and I pretended everything was okay, that Madri and Colin would love me like I was their daughter. I was thirteen...I was really insecure, I was angry, I didn't know any better."
"None of it's your fault," I said very slowly. "You know that, right?"
"Yeah, I know," she said, in a way that seemed too easy. "Even all that time, it's not like I thought she'd ever do anything like that. At least, it wasn't something I could really let cross my mind. And the worst part is...when it came to trying to love her, sometimes it wasn't so hard...I knew her better than anyone else did, anyway."
I had my back rested against the shelf behind me, and we stood there slouching until the coldness finally abated a bit.
"Are you really not a murder detective now?" she asked.
"It's behind me, yeah," I said, furrowing my brows. When she gave me a thoughtful look, I scoffed. "Why, do you think I should be?"
She pouted. "Yeah. I mean, I guess so. Anyway. Take care of yourself."
It wasn't until she hesitantly shook my hand again, with a bit more of a squeeze to it this time, that I really thought about the fact that she'd sought me out instead of looking for Spock at the office or passing the necklace to him through somebody else. It made me wonder, even with how fucked up things had gotten, if it was possible she remembered me as a source of comfort more than as anything else. I know I have a weak spot for Lora that is based as much on compassion as a twisting guilt that I get even now when I think about her. I think it's the fact that if I'd really been looking harder for it, I could have felt for her in much the way Spock empathized with Sarah.
It was a snowy morning when I got a hold of an acquaintance of the Marches who offhandedly told me that Madri had bought the necklace when they were out shopping together at a craft market just a week before she and Colin had gone missing. She was able to describe the charm pretty well before I even showed her the image, and I was forced to conclude that the damn thing had just been thrown back up by the New Dublin tide, probably found years ago by some hikers who pawned it somewhere.
I sat in the car for a long time just wondering how in the hell I was going to tell this to Spock. And when I was still lost about dealing with that idea, I realized with a new cold objectivity that a couple inconsistencies in the answers we'd gotten from Sarah were possibly no longer so harmless. Sarah had been too insistent, I realized. She was a liar.
I spent the rest of that day feeling guilty for being grateful that Spock wasn't picking up his comm, and then much later I drove to the Marches. I dialed up Lora's personal number and told her I needed her to come talk to me in private. It was just before bed and she came out in a nightshirt under her sweater and sat in the passenger seat, hugging her arms over her chest. Within a minute I was asking her if she could think of any reason why her cousin would want to have her parents killed, and she immediately burst into tears.
Of all the bad news I've delivered to families, the times that get under your skin almost more than the reactions to deaths of loved ones is when you have to tell somebody that their brother or sister or child is somebody we think could be a murderer. Lora's was the kind of breakdown that fell into a different category entirely, because somewhere deep down she had known this about Sarah for a long time. She had just been waiting for somebody to want to believe her.
After that our actual hitman fell into place pretty quickly: She had ideas already about whose arm Sarah could have twisted into offing somebody if she needed it. She even gave me warning with cool certainty that Sarah might have told some people that her father was a molester and her mother didn't give a damn enough to stop it, making me promise I wouldn't believe it. Like clockwork, this ended up being the excuse we got from the murderer. Lora had been my goldmine of information all along. She just needed to be handed the right amount of trust, but we'd sat there and let Sarah nudge her into looking at her shoes and backing down about how sure she was; we'd been too narrow about it to even consider interviewing the girls separately.
If some things had happened differently, I could have gone on punishing myself for all of this, maybe for the rest of my life. I had to forgive myself and Spock, or else forgive neither of us; in that way alone, we were still together.
I meant to tell Bones about running into Lora quite a while before I actually did. I'd gone back to work by then and he was too tied up to do more than talk to me via comms up until we made it out to the Patio one weekend.
Bones cocked his eyebrow once I'd finished, then asked, "And you've still got it?"
I set down my fork, reaching into my jacket pocket to show it to him. When I'm in possession of something irreplaceable I like to keep it on me, and the pendant was living in my leather getting cozy with the chip from Danek, which I still had yet to watch.
Bones let out a nervous note of a laugh. "You know you can't keep it."
I gave him an equally half-sarcastic smile. "I know." I started jabbing at my food again.
He was fully aware this wasn't something I'd be comfortable just sending to Spock, and that I also would feel irritatingly cowardly about sneaking up to leave it in his mailbox. I don't hang around doorsteps unless I've got something to say. He gave a weirdly sadistic tisk-tisking noise and said, "Well, this is quite a predicament."
"Yes," I said, not looking at him.
"Jim," he said, and I cringed inwardly at the mere tone of it. "How long are you fixing to go on like this?"
"I don't know what you're asking."
"The hell you don't."
My attention wandered over to give the eye to a teenager who seemed to be thinking too much about a tip left on an opposite table. I got back to my food, and as if by way of answering Bones I said, "I'll just get it to him through Rand, I guess."
"Well, you know he's not at homicide now, right?"
That made me look up.
"He's transferring. I would've figured you heard."
"I heard, yeah, but that's just a rumor," I said in automatic dismissal.
"No, it's not. He's put in for a position at Illegal Sciences."
Fork down again. "How do you know?"
"Chapel's involved with IS, remember? She mentioned it to me last time I ran into her."
"...Oh."
"Are you surprised he's got the rep?"
"No." I gave a little huff, almost amused. "Spock working Black Math?...I don't know, it's a pretty good match for him."
"It's also a little more prestigious, isn't it?"
"Yeah, but they're also more desperate, and he's probably the smartest person who's ever applied. And putting aside Op 86, his record's spotless enough that people are eager to call it a fluke." I shook my head. "One big fucking fluke."
Bones' brow was in a low thoughtful line. After a moment, it came out in a decided little rip: "What did he do, exactly?"
I looked at him intently, like I was sure he had to be joking. "...You're telling me you don't know."
"Well, you never told me."
"Yeah, but anyone on Murder only had to take a smoke break to get the whole story, and you're telling me you've never heard anything?"
"Sure, here and there, but you think I'm the type of guy to take that rumor mill shit as the whole story? I mean, hell, one of the things I did hear was..."
He was almost shyly avoiding wording it, so I couldn't help sitting back and teasing it out of him with a look.
"I mean, I know he didn't sleep with her," Bones muttered.
"...No," I said calmly. "He didn't."
"So what was it?"
"Think of the one thing that would be just as bad," I hinted slowly. After a moment, I added, "Something only a Vulcan could do."
It took him a second, and then he leaned back, something awestruck and confused written all over him. "Oh, no."
I just had my lips pressed together.
"Why?...And it was with...?"
"He performed a mind meld on Sarah March during the investigation, which effectively meant that any testimony against her from him and possibly also me—because on paper he was the primary on that case—would be very likely regarded as inadmissible." I let that sink in. "And even if that wasn't a problem, letting Spock get anywhere near that trial would have been a disaster. Any lawyer who's worth a shit could have spun it like it would be unimaginable for a guilty suspect to consent to doing a mild meld with a detective, and been all over the potential unreliability of an officer who would do that in the first place, the fact that it feels like coercive behavior...If you'd ever met Sarah you'd know she could have had a jury eating out of her hands, and I know I don't need to spell out for you the ignorance of an average ND resident when it comes to the technicalities of Vulcan mind melds, and—honestly? If Spock was just some detective I'd never met and I hadn't known him to be so straight-laced that he refuses tea from citizens because we're not supposed to accept gifts, I'd think the whole thing was disturbing. I'd be dismayed that he's still a member of the squad after doing something like that with somebody involved with him through a case."
"You do know Spock, though," Bones said slowly and pointlessly, but he was staring off in the next second, all of it still sinking in. He demanded, "What did he think he was doing anyway?"
"Well, of course it went on way before either of us could have possibly imagined she'd be a suspect. And I don't even know, I never asked, but it was probably just..." I let out a defeated noise. "Trying to show her a couple things so that she'd feel like he knew what she was going through, like if she made it look like she was hesitant to confide in him at that point. Even when I'm sure he promised he wouldn't go poking around in her brain, you have to admire the nerve. She must have known she'd be able to use it, even then. I knew that there were times she came by the office to talk to him, but he never mentioned that. She had him around her finger so fast, and I never got the chance to notice."
For a long moment Bones just gave me a straight look, stern but consoling. "...Jim, his mother went missing when he was ten. Of course she was able to get to him."
"I know. I know, but at that point...finding that out made me feel like I didn't know who the hell he was anymore. I couldn't believe he'd done it, but it was also that he hadn't told me anything about it. I spent half an hour trying to tell Junior that there was no way in hell she wasn't lying until Spock showed up at the office and dropped the bomb that it was true."
The look was more shrewd now. "Why wouldn't he have even mentioned it by then? When he knew you were bringing her in for interrogation?"
I let out a long breath, shook my head. "I wanted to put off telling him, I guess. I was handling Sarah, he was off handling himself. He probably didn't even know until that morning."
"So the two of you weren't really communicating by then," Bones concluded. It didn't sound like this came as a surprise to him. "There was something else."
I hadn't exactly been deliberately hiding anything, but that didn't stop me from wishing I could get a thousand miles away from the conversation as soon as Bones started tapping harder at it. I was staring down and stiffening all over, probably looking oddly childish almost huddling into my off-day sweatshirt under my jacket.
"Jim, come on." Bones was more softly encouraging now, his most non-judgmental manners put into gear. He rarely did that with me; it was the knowledge that he was considering it that serious that broke me down.
"...There was one night," I finally said. "The case was getting to be hell, I wasn't thinking much straighter than he was by then and on top of that it seemed like things had started to really get to him literally overnight and I had no idea what I could do about it. And then...he wouldn't talk to me. Not like he would before. Not like we'd been friends for over two years. Suddenly I was a colleague."
I was speaking at a normal speed and volume but it felt like I was venting my guts out, like I had to pause for air. I couldn't look at Bones.
"And yeah, in some fucked up way that made some kind of sense in his head, I guess he was doing it to protect himself. But I thought maybe he'd calm down after a while, the case would get wrapped up for better or worse, things would settle back to how they were before. And then Sarah March sits down in our interview room and basically lets me know he's been blatantly ignoring my advice since the first week of the case...At that point I figured, maybe he doesn't need anything from me at all. I left...because he did that with her, he made that mistake, seemingly without thinking twice about it; and because...," I stammered, "because he did something good with me, and he could only act like it had been wrong."
Finally I checked in with Bones, who looked like he had a hell of a stomachache or like there was something he couldn't figure out. I scoffed in a tiny little frantic need to shake myself out of things.
"And even then, I still thought he'd at least try to stop me when I walked out." I moved to give the ice in my glass an idle shake, making a face at it, suddenly embittered with the realization: "The first time I heard a fucking peep out of him was when he thought I'd gotten killed. And I'm supposed to think that that's enough?"
Bones shifted into a wary, loaded expression. He said, "Jim...I saw him that night."
"...What?"
"The night they found Will's body."
"You..." I stammered, "You said that he was gone by the time you got there."
"Yeah well, I lied, genius." He shook his head at me. "Dammit, I don't even know how to tell you what he looked like. I had to talk to him because even when I got there they were having a hard time getting him to talk to anyone and everybody pretty much agreed he needed to go home and let somebody else take this one. He'd just gotten the grand fucking scare of his life. And you were right, I was so pissed at the guy all those months just because I knew he'd cut you up pretty bad, I'd figured I'd want to sock him one the next time I ran into him, but I just couldn't hold a grudge after that. He found out you were on your way over and was making to beat it, and I asked him...I said, 'At least stick around long enough to tell him how sorry you are.' But he was just so sure nothing he did could change anything. It was then that I knew how bad it had to be, because...well, 'cause it happened to both of you."
"I don't need to be told it's not a picnic for him, Bones," I grumbled defensively. "That's just the way it is. Only if he was always going to freak out all over the first good thing that came along in his life in years, I wish I'd never met him."
"Oh," Bones said, with a sudden grimness, "don't you say that. I know that isn't true."
"And how exactly would you know that?"
"I'm not gonna play show-me-your-heartbreak-I'll-show-you-mine over this, I'm not gonna try to tell you what you should do. If you can't forgive him that's fair enough, but at least make sure you know what it is you're not forgiving." Bones shook his head a little incredulously. "That poor bastard learned some things nobody should ever have to learn, and he learned them early. And I know it's just as much his mistake as yours, but obviously your timing was just about splendid. You might as well have been asking for all that shit he would have been dwelling on to rebound right onto you."
Bones rarely pulled this out, but he was doing aged wisdom on me, which he only did when he knew I couldn't argue that I knew better than he did. And I didn't. What I'd been through for the last several months was pretty complicated, but my personal life really couldn't compete with Bones. He'd been in the middle of an ugly divorce when we first met, but long before that there was something involving a teenage sweetheart with a dad who hated his guts; I'm not sure which one messed him up more or if it all got braided into his head in a string of each thing worsening the other, but I see the tells whenever I mention a woman he should try to get a date with. Bones knew he couldn't come close to understanding Spock any better than I did, but he knew something about worth and risk and quite a few things about regret.
"Shit," he said suddenly, checking a message on his comm. "I gotta go."
He was in a rush and looking apologetic, but I managed an excusing gesture and he patted me hard on the shoulder as he walked by. After a while I finished up and took a walk around the block a couple times, hunched over in the wind.
It was only when I was left alone that it hit me full-force, the fact that Spock was really transferring. In a very complicated corner of my mind this realization hurt like hell. It meant I could no longer unreasonably take for granted that he'd been nursing some hope that I would come back to Murder and that maybe somehow we'd be partners again.
I was reminded of my last month I'd spent before transferring, working on my own while Spock was on suspension. I worked until I found somebody who was willing to stick Sarah March with some serious charges after realizing half of what he thought about her was a lie and that she'd been conning him out of money for almost a year. Everyone knew and drew their own conclusions about my declaration that I was out as soon as I found a way to smear up Sarah's record. But all the times I'd stopped into the office, even with how I'd changed the entry code to my apartment and deleted his contact from my communicator, I was hoping every day he'd walk through the door just to come looking for me, and I wanted to bang my head against a wall for even thinking it. It wasn't just petty hope but petty bitterness that made me want him to stay in that office where he'd be forced to remember me forever.
On the surface of it, though, I knew that he may have actually been leaving because he had figured out before I even did that I would inevitably want to return. It gave me a grudging sense of irritation that after all that time, there could still be ways in which he knew me better than I knew myself. He would have known that I would hear he'd left, and he only wanted to nobly ensure that when I did come back, I wouldn't have to worry about him being there.
And still, there had to be something else to it that I was missing. It had always been a fundamental fact about Spock that he became a police officer in order to become a homicide detective; I'd never heard of him having any other aspiration.
Spock was no longer living on Vulcan by the time he was sixteen; it had a lot to do with his at best badly tended relationship with his father. I never knew much about the years he spent living on Terra until that strange migration instinct brought him inevitably to New Dublin, and I don't think he himself really understood that the reason he became a cop had anything to do with his mother.
My understanding of all that was more coherent: I knew from the start that nothing I did as a murder detective was ever going to undo what happened to my father, take back the sickening pain that happened to my mom or scorch the gloom out of the pages of the photo albums. With Spock, things must have been more muddled. You can hope like hell for something that makes no sense without realizing it's what you're doing, and I think Spock had truly believed that the past was in the past until he had a reason to start poking at it.
Maybe I should have taken it as a good thing that he was transferring. At first there was the unpleasant kick, that moment when you're reminded in the roughest way that people won't always move in the direction you'd expect. But it melted slowly into a genuine, tired relief. I told myself that the hardest thing that had made it so that I couldn't bear to think about Spock as anything other than a memory was how worried I was all that time that he would never, ever change.
After a few weeks I went back to the Patio just at closing time hoping to catch Joan the waitress so that I could apologize for the fraudulent flirting. She remembered me right off the bat and didn't seem particularly wounded, or at least was caught up in the entertainment value of a person claiming to be an undercover cop and then, once I'd shown her my badge, of realizing I really wasn't bullshitting. It took her a couple minutes, but the point when she really believed me was when she realized, "Something's kinda different about you this time...You're giving me the creeps, copper."
I walked her to where she had her bike chained up at the end of the block, and then I said I really would give it a go if she wanted to go out some time. She looked like she really almost said yes, but then she didn't. It wasn't so awkward; she passed up the moment with some joke about preserving a pleasant rapport with frequent customers, which I said was fair, and we laughed.
"Tell you what. You come in during my shift tomorrow and I'll bum you a free slice of pie."
"I can't tomorrow. I have to go in and testify against somebody."
In the middle of undoing her bike lock, she cocked an eyebrow "Is it somebody bad?"
"Very bad."
The next day at the courthouse set me on edge more than I was used to. I'm usually pretty good with testimony; I have to worry about not looking bored more than anything else most of the time, but at Rigen's trial everything was different. I walked up to the stand and kept my eyes blankly fixed only several feet forward, but I felt this buzzing stick of eyes looking at me far more closely than I liked. The prosecution lawyer started off the whole circus with a showy "You may or may not have noticed that there is some resemblance between Detective Kirk and the victim..." Immediately this stirred up some of the crowd into cowlicks of noise and motion and made the judge go banging the mallet in record time.
While I was being questioned, a figure sitting in the audience flickered into the corner of my eye: a cap of dark hair and a red scarf somewhere up in one of the balcony boxes. I wasn't able to do a double take. By the time I was done and had the chance to look again, Danek—assuming I hadn't only imagined it was him—had already quietly slipped out.
Transferring to Domestic Violence hadn't put an end to my weekly visit to my favorite library that happened to be in the same vicinity of a lot of police buildings. The actual traditional stacks weren't very dense, but the first floor had a wide open feel, complete with a greenhouse that spanned along two floors and an echoey courtyard where people could rollerblade with their pets.
I was there on a less than busy day with a tall cup of coffee when I unexpectedly got a comm from Uhura. It had been a couple weeks since the cat had been let out of the bag to all of the sources. I'd heard Hikaru Sulu was very difficult to get a hold of, and when he'd heard about the whole crime ("person laundering" was the phrase IS had prissily come up with) he had mostly been fascinated by it but overall too busy to be more than a little interested in the details. I got the impression he was the type to be strangely enthusiastic about his indirect involvement with something so anomalous; Uhura was comming me with the other kind of reaction.
"They're saying that apparently the apartment I was living in while I was doing undercover hasn't been lived in since I left, so that was probably where they found a genetic sample?" She let out a vague grumble; it sounded like she was sitting in traffic somewhere. "It blows my mind. And they don't even know what they would have been used for, but it couldn't have been anything good...It just makes me sick, like I had something to do with it somehow."
There was a tapering in the tone at the end, like she wanted to laugh at herself but needed some form of reassurance that she wasn't being unreasonable. It felt really good to hear that from someone else. "Yeah, I know. I know what you mean."
"You're probably expecting me to ask you what she was like...I almost don't want to know. They were asking if it would be okay with me to give her my information, if she ever wanted to contact me, and I said it was fine. But there's just something about this whole thing that scares me half to death. It took them forever to even talk me into believing it."
One time while Uhura and I were working together, I was there to see one of our bosses say to her face that he was starting to think there was something fishy about her. Without flinching she'd told him in her in-character hints of Dominican accent and unflappable good humor that she'd strip down to prove she wasn't tapping him but that she thought that was no way to treat a lady, until the drunk boss was laughing at himself over the whole thing and ended up paying her round. It isn't easy to give Uhura a scare. If it was the more precise, quiet cruelties that gave her the chills, I hadn't realized we had that in common.
"Do you think you'd ever want to meet her?" I asked, hoping she wasn't going to get into asking me anything about Will.
"I don't know. It seems crazy not to, in a way, especially since I may be moving there anyhow."
"Woah, woah. Say again?"
"Yeah," she said, laughing shyly. "I'm thinking about transferring to the NDPD."
"Oh, no. No, don't do that." I was only half kidding.
"It's not the nicest place, I know, it's just that...I'm getting really bored here."
I let out a long sigh.
"Anyway, if I'm there soon, we should go get another beer together, right?"
My attention was caught by my realization that a young woman who was at the end of the aisle seemed to be patiently waiting for me to hang up, as if she had something to ask me; this stacked right into recognizing who she was.
"Jimmy," Uhura mildly snapped. "Still there?"
"Uh...hey, I gotta call you back."
I hung up and walked down to the end of the aisle. Lora March turned her glance up at me, tucked her hair behind her ear and gave me a tired but friendly expression. "Detective. It's been a while."
"Lora, hi." After a half-stunned hesitation, I clutched her hand into a shake.
"I hope you don't mind...I didn't have your number or anything and I went over to the office, but they said you'd transferred. This lady named Janice told me you might be here."
I was still taking her in. She would have been nineteen by now and I couldn't really gauge if she looked older in any way. But she looked better. She had a hell of a pair of eyes peering out between a head of black hair that firecrackered out in dark waves; I'd never noticed before that she was pretty, but that comes with the job. We tend to meet people when they're feeling and looking their worst. Now, Lora was wearing heavily frayed jeans and a top in a very complicated print, the kind of lively multi-cultural thrift store get-up that reminded me of what Gaila would wear, and she had a leash thrown around her neck that must have belonged to a dog she'd dropped off somewhere. It was good to see her out and living.
"Is anything wrong?" I asked.
"Oh no, um. It's this..." She was reaching into the back pocket of her jeans. "They're finally releasing some of the stuff that was being kept in evidence, so they commed me to ask if I wanted any of what was on the bodies. And this, I know it was Madri's, but...I figured your partner would want to have it."
The charm necklace had a small but heavy silver medallion that had been engraved with Vulcan symbols like numbers on a clock face. Holding it in my hand again, I pictured Madri and Colin March lying in the twigs next to each other, hands almost touching. I'd barely noticed the pendant sitting against the pulseless neck until I'd become increasingly aware of something like a shudder just next to me and saw Spock looking straight at it like he couldn't see anything else. This one thing. This harmless little object that Madri had picked up because she thought it was just something pretty, had cost us big time.
Lora still gave me the slightest bit of heebee-jeebies when I looked at her, because of how much she looked like Sarah. Take the way so many friends of the family had shorthanded the two as "the girls" and how eerily alike they looked, and it was initially assumed that they were sisters rather than cousins.
When I was a kid I had a game that took you to this logic puzzle with two identically blinking faces of little girls: One of us always tells the truth and one of us always lies. I think of that whenever I bring up the image of Lora and Sarah March in their sitting room and the entire badly handled ordeal of the necklace. Lora had said she'd seen it on Madri a couple times. Sarah, mildly putting through her natural emotional frustrations, protested that all jewelry looked pretty much the same to Lora and that Madri's own daughter would have a better idea. She insisted that she'd never seen the necklace before.
Of course we'd both believed Sarah from the start. I'd like to say it was because anyone might assume the two cases had to be connected, and we had our own vendettas against buried enigmas that made us want it to be, but we still could have taken Lora more seriously. It wasn't that we sympathized less with her, but there was something about Sarah which I've realized by now was carefully constructed to twist us her way. Putting aside the daughter-versus-niece complication, a lot of detectives might have seen Sarah barely moving on the couch, and Lora reduced to animated sobs while the cigarette I'd given her hung forgotten from her fingers, and been more inclined to unconsciously side with the latter. Sarah, though, it was like she sized us up somehow and then put on her more contained version of grief.
Spock had told them why we were asking about the pendant in the first place, only vaguely explaining some things about the necklace "matching the description" of one that was worn by a woman who disappeared many years previously and that we were handling the possibility of a rather procrastinating serial killer leaving us a calling card. We're hardly in the habit of treating surviving family members as suspects when the bodies show up outside of the home and definitely not when they're so young, so it wasn't something I thought twice about, but I remember that for whatever reason I caught Spock's glance across the corner of their tea table as I leaned over and tapped the ashes off of my cigarette in the rhythm of our code: Be careful.
Even with that hunch, it went further than I could have seen, much earlier than I could have seen. I hadn't known that when young and fragile Sarah March arrived on the case, clutching to her own composure and looking like one slightest additional disaster could wrench her out of that brave calm, it was over. Spock had seen himself in her.
"So you can get it to him?" Lora was asking.
I finally half-stupidly stammered, "Thanks," before tucking the pendant into my jacket pocket.
Lora kept giving me a look like there was something she wanted to ask but she wasn't sure if she should.
"You understand he shouldn't have been on that case, right?" I asked.
She let out a sigh.
"We both made that mistake, and I'm so sorry. I know I said it before, but..." I shrugged.
"I have to wonder how else you would have ever figured out it was Sarah. It took you bringing up that other case to catch her in a lie in the first place."
"We still made a pretty big mess of it, though."
She winced and shrugged at what she was about to say. "You know, the craziest part of it is that I'm not even sure why she did it. I guess it was about the money, and not wanting them to try to tell her what to do with her life. I always got this idea that everyone else in the house were just these annoying...creatures to her, that just got in her way. You can have a pretty simple idea of how to be free when you don't care about anybody else, I guess."
"...Did you always know?" I asked. "That she was like that?"
"Oh. Oh, yeah." She nodded. "It's hard to imagine Madri and Colin never thought there was anything strange, but it's hard to make yourself look at your own kid like that."
"How did you know?"
"It was the lying," she said certainly, with a shrug. "Lying about things, where I couldn't really understand why anyone would lie about them, except to sort of control me. Just complicated, weird little lies. I'm sure you did enough research to know I've got a nice little string of delinquency on my record. Suspensions from school and everything, and I know I did a lot of things I shouldn't have done, but...She had me backed into the scapegoat corner so fast, practically the minute I moved in."
Lora adjusted her bag on her shoulder as someone went by, and then she didn't look at me as she kept talking.
"It didn't take me too long to just accept it. I made the mistake of thinking it made much of a difference to her whether I tried to call her out or not. I think I kinda thought...if I could love Sarah. If it was like we were sisters and I pretended everything was okay, that Madri and Colin would love me like I was their daughter. I was thirteen...I was really insecure, I was angry, I didn't know any better."
"None of it's your fault," I said very slowly. "You know that, right?"
"Yeah, I know," she said, in a way that seemed too easy. "Even all that time, it's not like I thought she'd ever do anything like that. At least, it wasn't something I could really let cross my mind. And the worst part is...when it came to trying to love her, sometimes it wasn't so hard...I knew her better than anyone else did, anyway."
I had my back rested against the shelf behind me, and we stood there slouching until the coldness finally abated a bit.
"Are you really not a murder detective now?" she asked.
"It's behind me, yeah," I said, furrowing my brows. When she gave me a thoughtful look, I scoffed. "Why, do you think I should be?"
She pouted. "Yeah. I mean, I guess so. Anyway. Take care of yourself."
It wasn't until she hesitantly shook my hand again, with a bit more of a squeeze to it this time, that I really thought about the fact that she'd sought me out instead of looking for Spock at the office or passing the necklace to him through somebody else. It made me wonder, even with how fucked up things had gotten, if it was possible she remembered me as a source of comfort more than as anything else. I know I have a weak spot for Lora that is based as much on compassion as a twisting guilt that I get even now when I think about her. I think it's the fact that if I'd really been looking harder for it, I could have felt for her in much the way Spock empathized with Sarah.
It was a snowy morning when I got a hold of an acquaintance of the Marches who offhandedly told me that Madri had bought the necklace when they were out shopping together at a craft market just a week before she and Colin had gone missing. She was able to describe the charm pretty well before I even showed her the image, and I was forced to conclude that the damn thing had just been thrown back up by the New Dublin tide, probably found years ago by some hikers who pawned it somewhere.
I sat in the car for a long time just wondering how in the hell I was going to tell this to Spock. And when I was still lost about dealing with that idea, I realized with a new cold objectivity that a couple inconsistencies in the answers we'd gotten from Sarah were possibly no longer so harmless. Sarah had been too insistent, I realized. She was a liar.
I spent the rest of that day feeling guilty for being grateful that Spock wasn't picking up his comm, and then much later I drove to the Marches. I dialed up Lora's personal number and told her I needed her to come talk to me in private. It was just before bed and she came out in a nightshirt under her sweater and sat in the passenger seat, hugging her arms over her chest. Within a minute I was asking her if she could think of any reason why her cousin would want to have her parents killed, and she immediately burst into tears.
Of all the bad news I've delivered to families, the times that get under your skin almost more than the reactions to deaths of loved ones is when you have to tell somebody that their brother or sister or child is somebody we think could be a murderer. Lora's was the kind of breakdown that fell into a different category entirely, because somewhere deep down she had known this about Sarah for a long time. She had just been waiting for somebody to want to believe her.
After that our actual hitman fell into place pretty quickly: She had ideas already about whose arm Sarah could have twisted into offing somebody if she needed it. She even gave me warning with cool certainty that Sarah might have told some people that her father was a molester and her mother didn't give a damn enough to stop it, making me promise I wouldn't believe it. Like clockwork, this ended up being the excuse we got from the murderer. Lora had been my goldmine of information all along. She just needed to be handed the right amount of trust, but we'd sat there and let Sarah nudge her into looking at her shoes and backing down about how sure she was; we'd been too narrow about it to even consider interviewing the girls separately.
If some things had happened differently, I could have gone on punishing myself for all of this, maybe for the rest of my life. I had to forgive myself and Spock, or else forgive neither of us; in that way alone, we were still together.
I meant to tell Bones about running into Lora quite a while before I actually did. I'd gone back to work by then and he was too tied up to do more than talk to me via comms up until we made it out to the Patio one weekend.
Bones cocked his eyebrow once I'd finished, then asked, "And you've still got it?"
I set down my fork, reaching into my jacket pocket to show it to him. When I'm in possession of something irreplaceable I like to keep it on me, and the pendant was living in my leather getting cozy with the chip from Danek, which I still had yet to watch.
Bones let out a nervous note of a laugh. "You know you can't keep it."
I gave him an equally half-sarcastic smile. "I know." I started jabbing at my food again.
He was fully aware this wasn't something I'd be comfortable just sending to Spock, and that I also would feel irritatingly cowardly about sneaking up to leave it in his mailbox. I don't hang around doorsteps unless I've got something to say. He gave a weirdly sadistic tisk-tisking noise and said, "Well, this is quite a predicament."
"Yes," I said, not looking at him.
"Jim," he said, and I cringed inwardly at the mere tone of it. "How long are you fixing to go on like this?"
"I don't know what you're asking."
"The hell you don't."
My attention wandered over to give the eye to a teenager who seemed to be thinking too much about a tip left on an opposite table. I got back to my food, and as if by way of answering Bones I said, "I'll just get it to him through Rand, I guess."
"Well, you know he's not at homicide now, right?"
That made me look up.
"He's transferring. I would've figured you heard."
"I heard, yeah, but that's just a rumor," I said in automatic dismissal.
"No, it's not. He's put in for a position at Illegal Sciences."
Fork down again. "How do you know?"
"Chapel's involved with IS, remember? She mentioned it to me last time I ran into her."
"...Oh."
"Are you surprised he's got the rep?"
"No." I gave a little huff, almost amused. "Spock working Black Math?...I don't know, it's a pretty good match for him."
"It's also a little more prestigious, isn't it?"
"Yeah, but they're also more desperate, and he's probably the smartest person who's ever applied. And putting aside Op 86, his record's spotless enough that people are eager to call it a fluke." I shook my head. "One big fucking fluke."
Bones' brow was in a low thoughtful line. After a moment, it came out in a decided little rip: "What did he do, exactly?"
I looked at him intently, like I was sure he had to be joking. "...You're telling me you don't know."
"Well, you never told me."
"Yeah, but anyone on Murder only had to take a smoke break to get the whole story, and you're telling me you've never heard anything?"
"Sure, here and there, but you think I'm the type of guy to take that rumor mill shit as the whole story? I mean, hell, one of the things I did hear was..."
He was almost shyly avoiding wording it, so I couldn't help sitting back and teasing it out of him with a look.
"I mean, I know he didn't sleep with her," Bones muttered.
"...No," I said calmly. "He didn't."
"So what was it?"
"Think of the one thing that would be just as bad," I hinted slowly. After a moment, I added, "Something only a Vulcan could do."
It took him a second, and then he leaned back, something awestruck and confused written all over him. "Oh, no."
I just had my lips pressed together.
"Why?...And it was with...?"
"He performed a mind meld on Sarah March during the investigation, which effectively meant that any testimony against her from him and possibly also me—because on paper he was the primary on that case—would be very likely regarded as inadmissible." I let that sink in. "And even if that wasn't a problem, letting Spock get anywhere near that trial would have been a disaster. Any lawyer who's worth a shit could have spun it like it would be unimaginable for a guilty suspect to consent to doing a mild meld with a detective, and been all over the potential unreliability of an officer who would do that in the first place, the fact that it feels like coercive behavior...If you'd ever met Sarah you'd know she could have had a jury eating out of her hands, and I know I don't need to spell out for you the ignorance of an average ND resident when it comes to the technicalities of Vulcan mind melds, and—honestly? If Spock was just some detective I'd never met and I hadn't known him to be so straight-laced that he refuses tea from citizens because we're not supposed to accept gifts, I'd think the whole thing was disturbing. I'd be dismayed that he's still a member of the squad after doing something like that with somebody involved with him through a case."
"You do know Spock, though," Bones said slowly and pointlessly, but he was staring off in the next second, all of it still sinking in. He demanded, "What did he think he was doing anyway?"
"Well, of course it went on way before either of us could have possibly imagined she'd be a suspect. And I don't even know, I never asked, but it was probably just..." I let out a defeated noise. "Trying to show her a couple things so that she'd feel like he knew what she was going through, like if she made it look like she was hesitant to confide in him at that point. Even when I'm sure he promised he wouldn't go poking around in her brain, you have to admire the nerve. She must have known she'd be able to use it, even then. I knew that there were times she came by the office to talk to him, but he never mentioned that. She had him around her finger so fast, and I never got the chance to notice."
For a long moment Bones just gave me a straight look, stern but consoling. "...Jim, his mother went missing when he was ten. Of course she was able to get to him."
"I know. I know, but at that point...finding that out made me feel like I didn't know who the hell he was anymore. I couldn't believe he'd done it, but it was also that he hadn't told me anything about it. I spent half an hour trying to tell Junior that there was no way in hell she wasn't lying until Spock showed up at the office and dropped the bomb that it was true."
The look was more shrewd now. "Why wouldn't he have even mentioned it by then? When he knew you were bringing her in for interrogation?"
I let out a long breath, shook my head. "I wanted to put off telling him, I guess. I was handling Sarah, he was off handling himself. He probably didn't even know until that morning."
"So the two of you weren't really communicating by then," Bones concluded. It didn't sound like this came as a surprise to him. "There was something else."
I hadn't exactly been deliberately hiding anything, but that didn't stop me from wishing I could get a thousand miles away from the conversation as soon as Bones started tapping harder at it. I was staring down and stiffening all over, probably looking oddly childish almost huddling into my off-day sweatshirt under my jacket.
"Jim, come on." Bones was more softly encouraging now, his most non-judgmental manners put into gear. He rarely did that with me; it was the knowledge that he was considering it that serious that broke me down.
"...There was one night," I finally said. "The case was getting to be hell, I wasn't thinking much straighter than he was by then and on top of that it seemed like things had started to really get to him literally overnight and I had no idea what I could do about it. And then...he wouldn't talk to me. Not like he would before. Not like we'd been friends for over two years. Suddenly I was a colleague."
I was speaking at a normal speed and volume but it felt like I was venting my guts out, like I had to pause for air. I couldn't look at Bones.
"And yeah, in some fucked up way that made some kind of sense in his head, I guess he was doing it to protect himself. But I thought maybe he'd calm down after a while, the case would get wrapped up for better or worse, things would settle back to how they were before. And then Sarah March sits down in our interview room and basically lets me know he's been blatantly ignoring my advice since the first week of the case...At that point I figured, maybe he doesn't need anything from me at all. I left...because he did that with her, he made that mistake, seemingly without thinking twice about it; and because...," I stammered, "because he did something good with me, and he could only act like it had been wrong."
Finally I checked in with Bones, who looked like he had a hell of a stomachache or like there was something he couldn't figure out. I scoffed in a tiny little frantic need to shake myself out of things.
"And even then, I still thought he'd at least try to stop me when I walked out." I moved to give the ice in my glass an idle shake, making a face at it, suddenly embittered with the realization: "The first time I heard a fucking peep out of him was when he thought I'd gotten killed. And I'm supposed to think that that's enough?"
Bones shifted into a wary, loaded expression. He said, "Jim...I saw him that night."
"...What?"
"The night they found Will's body."
"You..." I stammered, "You said that he was gone by the time you got there."
"Yeah well, I lied, genius." He shook his head at me. "Dammit, I don't even know how to tell you what he looked like. I had to talk to him because even when I got there they were having a hard time getting him to talk to anyone and everybody pretty much agreed he needed to go home and let somebody else take this one. He'd just gotten the grand fucking scare of his life. And you were right, I was so pissed at the guy all those months just because I knew he'd cut you up pretty bad, I'd figured I'd want to sock him one the next time I ran into him, but I just couldn't hold a grudge after that. He found out you were on your way over and was making to beat it, and I asked him...I said, 'At least stick around long enough to tell him how sorry you are.' But he was just so sure nothing he did could change anything. It was then that I knew how bad it had to be, because...well, 'cause it happened to both of you."
"I don't need to be told it's not a picnic for him, Bones," I grumbled defensively. "That's just the way it is. Only if he was always going to freak out all over the first good thing that came along in his life in years, I wish I'd never met him."
"Oh," Bones said, with a sudden grimness, "don't you say that. I know that isn't true."
"And how exactly would you know that?"
"I'm not gonna play show-me-your-heartbreak-I'll-show-you-mine over this, I'm not gonna try to tell you what you should do. If you can't forgive him that's fair enough, but at least make sure you know what it is you're not forgiving." Bones shook his head a little incredulously. "That poor bastard learned some things nobody should ever have to learn, and he learned them early. And I know it's just as much his mistake as yours, but obviously your timing was just about splendid. You might as well have been asking for all that shit he would have been dwelling on to rebound right onto you."
Bones rarely pulled this out, but he was doing aged wisdom on me, which he only did when he knew I couldn't argue that I knew better than he did. And I didn't. What I'd been through for the last several months was pretty complicated, but my personal life really couldn't compete with Bones. He'd been in the middle of an ugly divorce when we first met, but long before that there was something involving a teenage sweetheart with a dad who hated his guts; I'm not sure which one messed him up more or if it all got braided into his head in a string of each thing worsening the other, but I see the tells whenever I mention a woman he should try to get a date with. Bones knew he couldn't come close to understanding Spock any better than I did, but he knew something about worth and risk and quite a few things about regret.
"Shit," he said suddenly, checking a message on his comm. "I gotta go."
He was in a rush and looking apologetic, but I managed an excusing gesture and he patted me hard on the shoulder as he walked by. After a while I finished up and took a walk around the block a couple times, hunched over in the wind.
It was only when I was left alone that it hit me full-force, the fact that Spock was really transferring. In a very complicated corner of my mind this realization hurt like hell. It meant I could no longer unreasonably take for granted that he'd been nursing some hope that I would come back to Murder and that maybe somehow we'd be partners again.
I was reminded of my last month I'd spent before transferring, working on my own while Spock was on suspension. I worked until I found somebody who was willing to stick Sarah March with some serious charges after realizing half of what he thought about her was a lie and that she'd been conning him out of money for almost a year. Everyone knew and drew their own conclusions about my declaration that I was out as soon as I found a way to smear up Sarah's record. But all the times I'd stopped into the office, even with how I'd changed the entry code to my apartment and deleted his contact from my communicator, I was hoping every day he'd walk through the door just to come looking for me, and I wanted to bang my head against a wall for even thinking it. It wasn't just petty hope but petty bitterness that made me want him to stay in that office where he'd be forced to remember me forever.
On the surface of it, though, I knew that he may have actually been leaving because he had figured out before I even did that I would inevitably want to return. It gave me a grudging sense of irritation that after all that time, there could still be ways in which he knew me better than I knew myself. He would have known that I would hear he'd left, and he only wanted to nobly ensure that when I did come back, I wouldn't have to worry about him being there.
And still, there had to be something else to it that I was missing. It had always been a fundamental fact about Spock that he became a police officer in order to become a homicide detective; I'd never heard of him having any other aspiration.
Spock was no longer living on Vulcan by the time he was sixteen; it had a lot to do with his at best badly tended relationship with his father. I never knew much about the years he spent living on Terra until that strange migration instinct brought him inevitably to New Dublin, and I don't think he himself really understood that the reason he became a cop had anything to do with his mother.
My understanding of all that was more coherent: I knew from the start that nothing I did as a murder detective was ever going to undo what happened to my father, take back the sickening pain that happened to my mom or scorch the gloom out of the pages of the photo albums. With Spock, things must have been more muddled. You can hope like hell for something that makes no sense without realizing it's what you're doing, and I think Spock had truly believed that the past was in the past until he had a reason to start poking at it.
Maybe I should have taken it as a good thing that he was transferring. At first there was the unpleasant kick, that moment when you're reminded in the roughest way that people won't always move in the direction you'd expect. But it melted slowly into a genuine, tired relief. I told myself that the hardest thing that had made it so that I couldn't bear to think about Spock as anything other than a memory was how worried I was all that time that he would never, ever change.
