inthewildwood | fanfiction: Bear (Reply)

Title: Bear
Fandom: The Killing
Summary: Sarah didn't have a favourite childhood toy.
Rating: T

Sarah remembers every foster home she’s ever been in, each one lingering in her mind like a faded Polaroid. It seems to her like she shouldn’t remember, like there were so many of them that there’s no reason each one should still be taking up space in her brain. What's the point? It's over, it's finished; there's no reason to cling to what she'd rather forget, become one of those people still haunted by their childhoods thirty years later. She wishes the memories would fade, washed away like sidewalk chalk in the Seattle rain, but she can’t seem to shake them. She’s seen more than one of her former peers turn to narcotics to wipe away uncomfortable information, and if the drugs take out more valuable parts of their brains- their ability to focus, to understand, to do their jobs- then they take that as an acceptable sacrifice in exchange for peace of mind. Sarah’s never tried it. Even in her darkest moments, when she thinks she’d give anything to forget, she still can’t unclench her hands and let go. It’s the one thing she values above all else:

Control.

Because if being a child taught her anything- if being buffeted back and forth by the vagaries of the foster care system, always being quick on her feet, learning new names, new neighbourhoods, new houses left no other impression but this- it's that she has one person she can rely on, and that's herself. No meagre comfort is something to cling to when it threatens to unseat her, wrench her ability to know herself from her hands. Self-reliance.

She learned it early.

Sarah is six years old and sitting on a cracked plastic chair, clutching a teddy bear with both hands. The bear means nothing to her; a social worker put it in her hands last week and told her it’s going to be her new best friend. It’s filled with cheap stuffing, like the kind given out as carnival prizes, and the fur is thin and patchy. She’s holding tight to it, not because it means much to her, but because there’s nothing else for her to do with her hands.

She’s been in the children’s home for three weeks. Her birthday was last week; that’s why the social worker gave her the teddy bear. There was no party, just a cupcake for dessert after supper. She doesn’t mind not having a party; she didn’t have them even when her mother was still there, but she wants to go home. She wants her mother to pick her up and for them to take the bus back to their apartment, where the lights will all be on and the heater will be making noise again. She doesn’t want to sit in this chair anymore, and she doesn’t want to sleep in the bed with the sheets that smell like unfamiliar detergent, and she doesn’t want to stay in such close quarters with the other children who scream and cry and push and punch. She doesn’t want to be here anymore.

The social worker (introduced to her as “your social worker;” in actuality, she rotates through the building every time she visits, a tottering pile of clipboards threatening to tumble from her hands) comes down the hall, heels click-clicking against the linoleum. There’s a second set of footsteps behind her, and Sarah raises her head to see who it is. The woman with the social worker is a stranger, short and plump and dressed in a flowery blouse and slacks. She bends down towards Sarah, a toothy smile spreading across her face. Sarah sits stiffly, staring at her. She does not smile.

“Sarah,” the social worker says. She untangles one of Sarah’s from the bear and puts it into the strange woman’s grasp. Her hand is doughy, powdery, like a donut. “This is Mrs. Williams. You’re going to stay with her now.”

Mrs. Williams beams. Sarah continues to stare. Seconds tick by, and Mrs. Williams’ smile begins to twitch, the corners of her mouth doing battle against their owner to turn downwards. Mrs. Williams turns to the social worker, lowers her voice. Sarah can still hear her. “Is she . . . ?”

There are murmured assurances, voices pitched low. Sarah takes the opportunity to pull her hand from Mrs. Williams’ grasp and wipe it off on her jeans. Suddenly, the cheap stuffing and patchy fur don't seem so bad.

The Williamses were her first caretakers, but not her last- not by far. She lasted four months, three days in their house. Sometimes she would creep out of bed in the middle of the night, teddy bear trailing behind her, and creep down the hall to listen at their door. Mostly, all she could hear was quiet breathing. Sometimes, there were grunts. And more than once, when Mr. or Mrs. Williams lifted their head to see a pale face hanging midair in the gloom outside their doorway, there were shouts, curses. One of them would deposit her back in her room, and there would be muttered conversations out in the hall, sometimes rising to a crescendo of frustration. “If the kid weren’t so fucking creepy-”

She leaves the bear behind at that house, abandoned under the bed when Mrs. Williams drives her back to the children’s home, knuckles clenched on the steering wheel. It wasn’t a very good bear, anyway. The social worker’s face falls when she sees Sarah being ushered through the doors, and Sarah’s not sure if it’s because she’s back or because she left her present behind.

“How come you’re back?” asks one of the other children in the dormitory. Sarah only shrugs.

She will come to know that dormitory better than any bedroom of her own.

Years later- after Jack is born- Sarah bows to curiosity and looks up Mr. and Mrs. Williams, wondering what eventually became of them. Most people would be thwarted by the struggle to track down people with such a common last name, but most people don’t have access to the Seattle PD’s records- and by extension, the records of every time someone underwent a police check. She finds them in fifteen minutes, and as it turns out, there’s not much to find. There’s no record of the kids they took in, but there is a note about Mrs. Williams volunteering the for 1995 mayor's campaign (her candidate lost) and Mr. Williams working for a construction company. Now that she thinks of it she can vaguely remember a yellow plastic hat and an orange vest being left in a heap on the coffee table, but nothing beyond that. There are some aspects of her early years that blend together; a dozen foster homes, a dozen careers, a dozen possible answers to the question "what does your mommy do?" at show and tell. Those aren't the aspects that stick. It's the cyclical part, the endless seesawing between her new "home" and the children's home. The rush of excitement turned to sour disappointment, and eventually to abandonment. She doesn't blame any of them. She wouldn't have picked herself out for adoption either.

Around the same time, when Jack is still a baby and Greg is still effusive and affectionate, he showers their son with toys. Trucks and koosh balls and endless stuffed animals. Some of them are even relics from Greg's own childhood, battered sock monkeys that he once toted around with him on various adventures. He's puzzled that she never did the same.

"All kids have favourite toys," he says to her once, exasperated that she doesn't see the generosity in what she's doing, the goodness of it. She only shrugs. "I never did."

She sells most of them off, once Greg leaves and their budget grows tighter. Jack doesn't cry for them, and neither does she.