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She handles having her heart blown out with a shotgun with unparalleled grace, Raquel thinks. She had once told her that her father cried through the whole week she lost her mum. Jenny cries over Ben for exactly two days. She'd always been good at compartmentalizing, her mind finely tuned with laser precision toward the more analytical as opposed to the emotional. Their friendship had always been one of contrasts in that regard, the free spirit hippie and her possibly on-the-spectrum best friend.
Said best friend brings Lily Raquel Reilly-Spencer to the world, to the arms of her godmother on 26th the January, 2015. Lily's brown eyes bring a tear to the eye of all who were present in the room who knew her father. Even Tom excuses himself briefly afterwards to be alone, Raquel having to leaving her best friend's side to comfort him.
Jenny moves into her family home and Raquel follows her. She pours herself into helping Jenny, distancing her emotionally from everyone other than her. Even after Tom renovates the house and they move in together, Raquel is over at Jenny's place more often than she is at her own.
Tom takes the breakup well, all things considered, and wishes them both the best before he moves out.
Jenny and Raquel pool together some money and move into another flat in the city, for Jenny to be closer to Alderbeck University and Raquel to the local art scene.
It takes a decade for Jenny to build her heart back up from the shattered pieces, but she does. It takes her even longer for her to try falling in love again. She opens herself up but none of the men are as kind as Ben and none of the women are as beautiful as Raquel. Raquel and Tom see each other on-and-off, with the understanding that things will be casual between them. Raquel doesn't understand why Tom expresses surprise at the first of these propositions, having believed that Raquel and Jenny had finally stopped "dancing around each other." She had asked what he meant by that but he doesn't elaborate, and they never bring it up again. Tom never asks after that either.
It takes Jenny almost two decades to realize she's fallen for her best friend somewhere along the way.
At Lily's 17th birthday, after the party is over and she prepares to wind down and go to bed, she narrowly misses interrupting on Jenny who had decided to be bold.
It takes Raquel almost the same tome to realize her soulmate has always been right beside her.
Raquel answers the kiss with one of her own, and more. She teases her incredibly smart friend about not being smart enough to realize something so simple and obvious, and Jenny fires right back at Raquel because, well, she didn't fare better at it either.
Those who followed Raquel's career closely would later recount the transformation evident in her artstyle of all her non-commercial work post-2033, described as more "bright," "flowery," and "optimistic," compared to her previous work.
They wed in a small ceremony some time after Lily gets into college.
~~~~~
Lily Raquel Benjamin Spencer is settled on by Ben and Jenny when Jenny is on her second trimester. It was decided that her new favorite person in the world would inherit the names of Jenny's previous two favorite people in the world, that of her husband and her best friend. Ben used his one veto on Jenny's hyphenation idea because "it's already too long, darling" and proposed Lily be given Spencer as her last name instead. As much as he loved his parents, the idea of giving her his family name and saddling her with the same sort of "expectations" as had been endowed on him didn't sit well with him. He wanted her to be free and be able to make her own choices, not live someone else's life for them
Despite always fashioning himself a man of science and as uneasy as it made him to see his wife off her medication, a simple fireside chat with Raquel one day makes him believe, at least a little bit, in Jenny's "visions."
It'd been three years into their marriage at that point. Lily's godparents had offered to help Ben take care of her while Jenny was otherwise indisposed, cramming for her masters thesis. Raquel's career as a freelance artist which left her with more free time compared to Tom, a government-employed electrician, meant that she had been the one who stayed over to babysit Lily more.
It had been during one of these days that Raquel and Ben started reminiscing about the old days that a memory struck him out of nowhere. Back when they stayed at Tom's flat he'd had recurring nightmares of the house burning with him in it, at least once per week. At the time it'd been something that he'd chalked up to stress because of his long shifts, but looking back on it now as much as he could try to deny it he had to admit, something felt off about that place back then. Like the sinew that weaved the world together was hanging by a thread, about to snap at the lightest breeze.
Even weirder, it was a far cry from how the place felt now. Almost like Tom's flat had went through a literal baptism of fire that repaired the fabric of reality that night.
In all the discussions they've had about her visions, Ben had dismissed them as hallucinations brought about by Jenny going off of her meds and had even had a fight about it the week after the fire. The physician in him still held steadfast to the idea that she brought the visions upon herself by not following medical advice and skipping her medication.
Things were hectic back then, both of them being forced to find suitable accommodations while also being expected to keep the normal rhythm of their lives going, all while Jenny had been pregnant with their child, Ben's parents pressuring him to come back to the fold, helping Tom renovate the flat, an opportunity to join the MSF he had been told he somehow missed out on because his friend wasn't able to reach him a week ago... However through everything that threatened to tear their relationship apart, he stood unwavering by Jenny and Lily's side and refused to choose anything other than them and to Jenny, this worked better than any apology—though he would formally apologize to her later, even getting his sister Sarah to make a cloak for her that had the bi pride flag's colors on it, and with a date at the London Pride parade to go along with it. The topic of poor compliance to medication fizzled out and was never brought up again despite Ben still subconsciously feeling conflicted about it all these years.
Now though, things had changed. He hadn't put all these particular pieces together until now but he regrets their spat harder than he ever has before.
He doesn't say anything to her about it, not that day at least, god knows she has enough to deal with for school, but when the clock strikes six and Ben delivers her the coffee he knows she'll need for the rest of the day, he hugs her from behind from where she's sitting at her desk, lost in a big tome with letters and symbols he doesn't ever hope to understand inscribed upon the pages—his amazing, brilliant, gorgeous wife—just a little tighter and longer than usual. When a dazed but appreciative Jenny asks about it, he simply kisses the crown of her head and says, "I love you." A silent promise to always believe her no matter what from now on.
When Lily gets into Oxford and Jenny publishes a paper on some niche mathematical field he's only heard about from her describing her day to him that blows up among her peers, Ben and Raquel decide to throw a party for both of the most important women in their lives, together. It is absolutely not a rager like they used to pull—their age had been catching up with them—but it's an event filled with love nonetheless.
In a few years as more and more people build upon the foundation Jenny had laid down with her paper, murmurs about possible applications of said work in quantum physics start to be heard. Decades before the words "time travel" ever enters the public zeitgeist in any way other than as a sci-fi trope rumors start brewing about how Time as a whole could be 'fractured' if humans were to mess with forces they don't fully understand.
Ben doesn't understand it all the same way his wife does but what he does understand is that she has always been right. She had probably seen (and photographed) a time traveler that night at Tom's flat, and that the drugs she got prescribed as a kid may not have entirely been for a mental illness, but rather something that modern science just hasn't been able to explain yet. They have an open discussion about it one night. Jokes are made about protecting each other from X-Files style government agents in suits should any come to take them away, information is traded mainly about how she hasn't had a vision or an encounter like that ever since that day, and love for the other is acknowledged by both.
Ben starts calling her his superhero from that point on. Jenny groans every time he says it but he can tell she secretly loves it a lot. Raquel is the only person in the world outside of the couple who is in on the joke, having been Jenny's silent co-witness to the time traveler encounter for almost twenty years. They continue their peaceful lives unaffected by revolutionary changes happening around them thanks to both their discretion about preternatural abilities one may or may not possess, and the diligent work of two unknown grunts known only as Agent Forty Three and Agent One in repairing the mistake of those who came before by mending the space-time continuum.
Jennifer Spencer becomes the first mathematician to win a Nobel Prize for Physics in the 21st century, sharing it with the two senior authors of the team that adapted her work to quantum mechanics which unlocked the fourth dimension to humanity. Her three favourite people in the world couldn't be more proud.