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snug-as-bugalugs-in-rugalugs · 7 months

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Rating: General Audiences Fandom: Murdoch Mysteries Relationship(s): Clarissa Watts & Llewellyn Watts Characters: Llewellyn Watts, Clarissa Watts, Augustus Jackson (mentioned), Word Length: 3,331 Summary: The night after Detective Llewellyn Watts watches his sister ride off in that carriage, out of his life forever for the second time, he is exhausted-- both emotionally and physically. Emotionally, from trying to sort out his giant mess of emotions on what had happened with his sister, and physically from spending the entire day holding back tears.

Once he returns to his apartment, though, before he can collapse on to his bed and fall asleep, he feels the sudden urge to pull out a box he hadn't looked at in months now.

Issy was the name carved on the top.

And suddenly, he can hold in his tears no longer. OR: I was rewatching S10E15 and thought to myself "Wow, this isn't nearly heartbreaking enough!" so here we go.

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“The truth is absolute, unyielding, and eternal, Jackson,” Llewellyn had said just three hours earlier.

Back then, when he was still fighting the tears building up in the corners of his eyes and winning, that was all he could manage to say– all he could fathom, or dare to fathom. But now that he was laying on his bed in his lonely little flat, drenched in his own tears, he’d realized he’d forgotten a word.

Awful.

The truth was absolute, unyielding, eternal, and awful.

He squinted at the blurry mess of a world around him and clutched the edge of his blanket. It was trapped underneath him, and as a small gust of cold air blew its way in through the cracks around his window, he wished it weren’t. He wished his body felt less heavy. He wished he had the energy to pull himself up off this bed of misery and do something –anything at all– even if that something was simply throwing a blanket over his freezing body.

He wished he still had the energy of hope.

Alas, he could search the ends of the earth for the sister he’d lost, but he’d never find her. Because the truth, which he’d longed for –lived for– so deeply was that his sister’s very body was possessed by someone else, someone he did not know and could not love, for she would never love him in return. Clarrissa Watts no longer existed– only Athena, as cold towards him as tonight’s windy air.

“More accurately,” he muttered to himself, “The truth is absolute ly, unyielding ly, and eternal ly awful.”

Llewellyn shut his eyes as tightly as he could and slowly rolled on to his side. He pressed one ear of his into the pillow and threw his forearm against the other one. Perhaps if he could only shut out the world around him, or at least his perception of it, all those horrible little pieces of “truth” could drift out into the depths of outer space and disappear forever. Perhaps he would drift out into the depths of outer space and disappear forever. As long as those horrid truths were somewhere he was not, he couldn’t find it in himself to truly care.

But even with his eyelids squeezed to the maximum and both ears covered, he could still hear it. He could still hear her.

“Goodbye, Llewellyn,”

He’d heard her say those exact words three hours ago, before she left his life forever for the second time, but it was not three hours ago he was remembering. Her voice sounded younger– almost squeaky in comparison to her current tones. It was the voice of an adolescent. A 16-year-old, to be specific.

Most days, she didn’t say anything before she went to her job. Llewellyn knew what her schedule was, and if anything had changed in her schedule for that day, she could tell him the evening prior. Even if she wanted to say goodbye, he tended to be barely awake at that time; he would still be sitting on his bed, throwing his arms upwards in groggy stretches. By all accounts, he should’ve been fully awake at that time, seeing as the school day started less than an hour later, but Llewellyn had flatly refused to push his schedule a minute earlier. If he had to go to school with his hair disheveled and his shirt half-buttoned to get that extra bit of sleep, he would. So Clarrissa always just went straight to work.

Only, that day was different. She had said goodbye. She’d gone out of her way to peek into his room and whisper a soft “Goodbye, Llewellyn.”

Llewellyn tightened his fingers into a fist. He should’ve noticed that. He should’ve known that it was of her own accord, that she was perfectly aware she was never going to see him again when she left that day. He should’ve known there was no point searching for her when she didn’t wish to be found. He should’ve known she wouldn’t have cared enough to take care of him. He should’ve known she just didn’t want him as her little brother, that fool of a child who went to school barely on time and offended his peers by telling them their faces were symmetrical. He should’ve known.

A few more sobs choked out his shaky lungs. There it was again. The truth.

He opened his eyes again and wiped his tears on the back of his hand, clearing his vision. On the side of his bed, sitting directly in front of his wet eyes, was a small wooden box. As soon as he had retired to his room for the day, he had yanked the bottom drawer of his dresser open and pulled out that box; it was as if some kind of instinct, a force deeper than himself, had made him do so. Perhaps the truth had made him do so.

But whatever it was that had caused his quick reaction had stopped there. Though it laid on his bed right in front of him, half an arms-reach away, he still hadn’t opened it.

In fact, he wasn’t sure he could open it. The first time he’d looked at it, after so easily grabbing it out of the drawer, all that happened was sobbing, and tears streaking down his face, and barely-muffled screaming into his pillow. The extremity of the reaction when looking at it had dulled now, but the sight still sent his stomach into a jumble of knots.

“Issy…”

That name, sounding so stupid as it came from his mouth, was what the top of the box read. The letters were carved in deeply and jaggedly, with the y barely legible at this point from 15 years of tracing over it again and again. He reached one single finger over and traced the I one last time. It felt surprisingly cold despite being insulated in the drawer– chilly and splintery to the touch.

Suddenly, as if that unnameable force had taken over him once again, he shoved the box towards himself and cradled it beneath his arms. Tears blocked his vision once again, but he had read off the box all he needed to.

Issy.

The top of the box was wedged up against his chest, and that word in particular against his heart. He heard it pumping in his ears, loud and fast, but it was not normal beating that he heard. Every one seemed to morph itself into his memories and his daydreams, all of which repeated the same thing.

Issy. Issy. Issy.

The box still on his chest, he rolled onto his back. He felt a half-eaten pretzel squish in the pocket of his jacket– the one Jackson had given him over three hours earlier, as he was watching his sister ride away forever in that creaky carriage. It was the first time it had taken him more than 20 minutes to finish a pretzel after starting; after the first few bites, it was as if his ever growing appetite had been ripped out and stolen from him.

The truth stole my appetite, he thought bitterly.

He considered twisting his face towards the pillow and screaming into it about that. He considered screaming about everything he hated about the truth, and about how he hated the very way hated the truth, the one thing that kept the universe from falling apart, and about how much he hated the universe for needing the truth in it. How much he hated himself for needing the truth, whether he admitted or not. He considered not even muffling it with the pillow anymore and just screaming all that into the universe, not caring what the neighbors thought anymore.

But instead, he sat there silently and hugged that stupid little wooden box.

It had just been his “case file” at one point. The evidence regarding her disappearance. Even at 12 years old, he had considered himself somewhat of a detective for her disappearance, searching for her every moment he got as if it really was his job. He searched not just around town but inside everything he still had left of her, as if old photos would somehow reveal her location to him as clear as day.

Some detective I was, Detective Watts thought.

The most obvious answer, the one that the truth held and dangled right in front of his blindly hopeful 12-year-old face, had never once occurred to him. And if it had occurred to him, Llewellyn admitted he would’ve just slapped the possibility away. He would’ve so easily slapped away the truth he was supposedly searching so hard for. Even at 27 years old, like he was when Jackson brought the concept up at the bar, he had rejected it without hesitation.

He was foolish. Stupid, even. Everything to do with his reaction to his sister’s disappearance had been so incredibly, painfully stupid.

The top of the box, or his case evidence file, read Issy for a reason that he still didn’t quite understand. Clarissa, he should’ve carved into it. Clarissa Watts if he was really being a professional and objective detective.

Athena, if he had known the truth.

But at the time, when he was still crying out of worry instead of grief or, as it was now, overwhelming anger, Issy had seemed exactly right. It had already been years since he’d used that nickname for her, yet, as he carved it into the box for the very first time, it was all he could seem to think of her as. The same went for right now, as he was laying on his squished pretzel and letting the splinters of the box rub against his thin undershirt.

Issy. Issy. Issy.

Snippets of memories flashed through his mind. He was 12 years old one moment, carving the nickname over her box of belongings, and then he was merely three. His stubby legs stumbled about their parents’ apartment, the details of which were blurred from 20 years of forgetfulness, and he clutched a little wooden block in his left hand.

“Issy!” he called to his presently 7-year-old sister.

He ran over, placing the block into her palm with a smile. Clarissa rolled her eyes half-heartedly and put it back into his hand. She ruffled his messy curls.

“It’s Clarrisa,” she corrected him. “And I don’t want your toy.”

She always pretended like she objected to his constant referring to her as “Issy” instead of her proper name, but he saw the way a small smile peeked at the corner of her lips whenever he said it. Whether she admitted it or not, Llewellyn had known Clarissa found it quite sweet. Or at least, he had let himself believe as much. Considering he also spent the last 15 years allowing himself to believe she hadn’t abandoned him, he wasn’t sure if he could really say he knew anything at all anymore.

Either way, he’d stopped calling her Issy around the time she had turned 12. She’d hit a phase of slightly more sassiness, and it seemed had gotten more serious about her objections to the nickname. Besides, he’d already taken to calling her Clarissa most of the time at this age, since the whole affair had only started in the first place because he’d struggled to say such a long name as a baby. By the time he was 8, he was capable of pronouncing words far more complex than Clarissa.

“Who’s that guy, Issy?” he had said teasingly one afternoon, as they played on the street outside their boarding house.

As soon as he spoke those words, especially alongside the adoring little nickname, Clarissa’s face had turned as bright as a tomato. The ‘guy’ he referred to was a boy only slightly older than her, perhaps 13 or 14 years of age, and in retrospect, likely a crush. She quickly shushed Llewellyn.

“He’s nobody,” she insisted. “And seriously, don’t call me that.”

So that had been the end of “Issy” until four years later, when he carved it into the box of her memories.

Even then, it was far more than a simple case file, he knew. It was a coping mechanism, something to desperately replace the sound of her voice with, and in some ways almost a shrine. Just something to keep her memory alive inside him, and to kill the fear and doubt beginning to creep into the corners of his mind. It was, at its barest bones, everything.

Everything except the truth.

He returned from the world of these memories back to his eternally awful, truthful reality.

Goodbye, Llewellyn, his thoughts echoed again. Except this time it was her older voice saying it, just as she had only three hours ago, because even now that they were both capable adults with no requirements of taking care of the other one, she still wanted nothing to do with him.

He couldn’t take it anymore. With the last bit of energy he had in him, he thrusted himself up from his bed into a sitting position and threw the box of everything but the truth open. A couple old photos flew out. He carefully observed each one, from her smile as she wrapped an arm around him teasingly to the shadows cast upon the edges of her face.

All he could see was one thing– happiness. Everything seemed absolutely, unyieldingly, and eternally fine .

To that, he smiled.

They looked like the kind of siblings that would die for each other. Still smiling bittersweetly, he returned the photos to the box and searched through the other items in it. A messy drawing of her. A pencil she’d chewed on. A pocket-sized book she liked to read. A book that he’d probably stolen from the library, since it still had a stamp on the inner cover, but one which he felt he was more than justified in doing so. A bracelet.

Not just any bracelet of hers, he remembered. That bracelet.

He’d given it to her for her 14th birthday, with the same sweet smile plastered on his face as when he’d placed the wooden block into her hand at 3. He’d been so proud of it; he’d woven the threads together to make it himself, with his own two hands.

“This for you,” he’d said.

“It’s very pretty,” she had said as she wrapped it around her wrist. “Thank you, Llewellyn.”

Yet when he searched her room late in the night after she left, right after he’d realized she wasn’t going to come home, he’d found it still there, on her dresser. He hadn’t thought anything of it at the time– it had simply gone into his little box along with everything else that reminded him of her, safely tucked on the bottom. But now that he knew she’d left of her own accord, of her own very planning, it all seemed so different.

Llewellyn felt that unyielding truth stab him in the gut.

“She didn’t want it,” he stated out loud.

The sound of those words, truthful and real words, started his sobbing all over again. She’d chosen not to take that bracelet with her. She’d chosen to leave it behind. Just as she’d chosen to leave him . That one little bracelet wouldn’t have taken hardly any room in a suitcase, tucked in it somewhere like the way it was now tucked into his box, and yet she had made the decision to instead forsake that little token of their siblinghood forever.

His lips quivered; even the deepest breaths he could manage felt excruciatingly shallow. He slammed the box shut and turned his body away from it. Even his pupils kept strictly to the other side of his vision in fear of having to look at that ridiculous little bracelet again. Fear of having to look at what his possession of that ridiculous little bracelet meant .

“She didn’t want–”

But he couldn’t finish that sentence. Not now. Perhaps not ever.

Keeping his eyes turned the opposite way, Llewellyn reached his hands back to creak the box open just a little, barely enough to reach in and pull the photographs back out. He pulled them over to the front of his eyes and stared at them again.

I left because I didn’t want you.

He’d tried so hard to be a good brother. At least, that’s what he told himself after she left. Truthfully, he wasn’t sure how good of a brother he’d really tried to be, because at the time he didn’t ever really need to consider it. Only afterwards did he fret over it –cry over it– wishing he’d cherished the time he’d had with her. He’d cared about her so much. Surely, even if he teased her at times, she had to have known that.

Yet it wasn’t enough. She still left.

Abruptly, he turned around, grabbed the box, and chucked it onto the floor. Bam! the old floorboards cried in agony. He didn’t even flinch. Still too angry to care what he was doing, he crumpled the photos in his hands and threw them on to the floor with it.

“Damnit!” he yelled. “You weren’t supposed to have the truth!”

Yet he knew such an idea was impossible, because everything in this absolutely, unyieldingly, and eternally awful universe had the truth in it. And that only made him more angry.

He sat on his bed motionlessly with his arms crossed and his fingers curled into fists. He pouted like a child– a 12-year-old child, to be specific, waiting for his older sister to finally return home.

“Issy…” he cried.

He reached over the edge of the bed, to where he’d thrown the box and the two crumpled-up photos. Seeing them on the floor in utter disrepair, he quickly regretted his actions. The floor underneath it was badly scratched, but more importantly, the box now had a gash on the front and one of its hinges was cracked in two. The photos both had tears on the edges of them.

This image, the product of his own infuriated actions, made tears coat his cheeks once more.

He finally found the strength to roll out of bed and walk over to his sister’s belongings, picking them up one by one. The two photographs, he tucked into his pocket. The box, however, he kept out; he pushed the broken lid back on to it as he returned to his bed.

Iss…

He attempted to trace his finger over the carving on the top, only to quickly discover the final letter to be utterly destroyed. The gash dipped into it, making a chaotic mess of a shape instead of the Y.

He hugged the box, gash and all, and yearned.

As foolish as it was, he yearned for her. Issy. Not Clarissa Watts, and certainly not “Athena” or whatever it was that woman chose to refer to herself as, but Issy. His Issy. The one who cared about him as much as he cared about her and more. The one who told everyone who called Llewellyn a weirdo to get lost, even when he told her he didn’t really mind it. The one who let him cry into her arms after their parents died. The one who was there. The one who he believed so firmly –no, knew – would only fail to be there if she was forced to. The one who, when he inevitably found her, would hug him instead of shutting him out. The one who had spent the last 15 years rotting in his childish imagination.

But the truth is eternal, and childish imagination is not.

So instead of rejoicing with a sister who wanted something –anything at all– to do with him, and hugging her and showing each other everything they’d discovered in the last 15 years apart, he was flopping down onto his lumpy mattress and crying himself to sleep, entirely alone.

“Issy,” he whispered as he drifted out of consciousness.

Issy…

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