Fic: In Human Hands (4/?)
Title: In Human Hands
Author: rallalon | Rall
Beta: vyctori
Rating: PG, AU towards the end of Season One; 9!Smith.
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summary: He walks her to the metro station before walking back to work, his cold hand thrust into the empty pocket of his jeans.
The Tourist
The Girl
The Runaway
The Puzzle
“I’ve got plans for tomorrow,” she tells him like she’s nervous.
He raises his eyebrows at her as they walk, wondering at her tone. “That so?”
“Yeah,” she says and yes, she’s definitely nervous. About what? What’s she planning?
“Have fun,” he tells her absently, seemingly absent, knowing exactly that he’s doing. She looks at him, really looks at him when he says it, looks like she doesn’t quite understand him. Ironic, that, when she’s the one who’s crazy.
“I’m not going to be here,” she says, tells him like she’s explaining some crucial point he’s missing. “It’s not like I planned it that way - just sort of agreed without thinking. So, y’know, we’re not going to be able to do this tomorrow.”
He shrugs as they find their way through the stalls of the small market, small for this part of the city. “Yeah, I sort of figured that out, what with the advance notice and all.”
“What?” she asks, turning back towards him as a couple next to them start arguing loudly in Catalan.
He rolls his eyes at human stupidity before repeating, “I said, I’d figured that out.”
“Oh,” she says, sounds unreasonably disappointed.
“I’m hardly thick,” he tells her dryly and she laughs.
“Nah, didn’t expect you to be,” she says and it’s a comment that comes out sounding just a touch different from how she must intend it to sound. Because the way she says it, it sounds as if she’s known all along that she’d be with him out here, as if she’d plotted it out in advance. It’s that oddness, that continued little bit of strange that makes him ask.
“What’re you doing?”
Her eyes go to his and her face brightens just a little and once he sees that, it’s damned obvious that this girl is desperate for someone to care about her. More obvious. It’s always been obvious and he’s always been an idiot about it.
“Goin’ to the beach,” she says like she wants him to know where she is, like he’s somehow in charge of not letting her wander off. “The family across the hall at the hotel, they invited me along.”
She makes friends easily, this girl. Maybe that’s why a group like UNIT would want her, if that’s really true. All the same . . .
“Don’t worry,” she adds, laughing a little. “They’re not serial killers or anything. I’ve got excellent taste in strangers.”
She doesn’t, not really, but he smiles back and for a second, it feels as if she might hug him then and there. He’s not sure he’d mind, not exactly, but she doesn’t and because he’s not sure, he’s not disappointed, not in the slightest.
“Don’t get cancer,” he tells her and she laughs again, swinging their arms between them and when did they start holding hands?
He walks her to the metro station before walking back to work, his cold hand thrust into the empty pocket of his jeans.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He wastes five minutes waiting for her before remembering that she won’t be coming today. The time he wastes is closer to six minutes, actually, in the way that fifteen hundred is closer to nine hundred than it is to eight hundred.
He’s not entirely sure where that comparison came from, knows he’s prone to hyperbole when annoyed. He’s been told so.
He thinks about personality complexes and amateur psychoanalyzing and Fred being a know-it-all about them both. Shaking his head, he wanders off, footsteps leading him to the sea. It’s not a direction he recognizes at first and once he does, it’s hardly an important choice.
For all of a second, he looks out upon the horde of tourists spread across the sand, all of them running or laughing or griping or trying to chatter in a feeble attempt at the Spanish language. There are squalling children and teenagers on cell phones and it’s so damned ordinary and so incredibly cliché.
They’re missing the point, he wants to yell. They’re sitting around and ignoring the mountains of culture behind them, sitting oblivious to the world around them. There’s no way he can know for certain that they are, and yet he feels it, feels the drudgery in these lives even when on holiday.
It annoys him in ways he doesn’t understand and it makes him want to do things he doesn’t understand. Shake them up a little, see how they react. See if they’re intelligent or just sitting there. There’s so much life, such an incredible, fantastic amount and it seems a strange piece of angst, angst on a cosmic scale to find fault with this, to rail against the stable order and the inconvenience and, really, he doesn’t know what he’s thinking about any longer.
He’s pissed off and he doesn’t know why. He’s looking at all the people with their lives and their jobs and their wives and their little girls and their homes waiting for their return. He’s looking and he catches a glimpse of blond hair that belongs to no one he knows.
It takes him some time, but he stops looking, turns back the way he came. He goes back to his life and his job and that’s going to have to be enough.
Even if she’s out there, one of the many, he wouldn’t want to find her here.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He’s locking up the garage, pulling his keys out of his jacket pocket when his sleeve pulls something else out with it. The object clatters to the sidewalk and he drops to one knee to catch it in mid-bounce, the unpredictable ricochet not a problem in the least.
A surprised laugh reaches his ears, replaces the ping of metal on concrete, and he looks up, looks forward; he looks forward and sees a pair of legs, bare and long and shapely with the musculature of an athlete. He looks up past the tiny skirt and the wet blouse sticking to wet skin, looks up and the girl looks back at him, eyes wide.
“Your jacket,” she says, somehow stunned instead of offended.
Not what he expected, but he’s hardly asking for a slap. “What?”
“You carry a screwdriver in your jacket pocket,” she says, a statement that’s almost a question, almost on the happy side of surprise.
“I might do, yeah,” he replies, standing, holding said object in his hand. He might do, but he doesn’t. When had he put that in his jacket?
His confusion must be visible on his face as she sobers once more. “Your jacket,” she tries to say again, but he interrupts.
“Give me a mo’.”
He ducks back inside the garage, drops the screwdriver back where it belongs and checks his pockets for any more surprises before returning outside. Wouldn’t do, petty theft with Sanchez leaving him in charge of the locking up. “What about my jacket?” he asks her once he’s out, pulling the doors shut and securing them.
“It’s,” she starts to say, starts but stops to shrug. “Just seems kinda hot out for that.”
He shrugs back at her, and the molding weight of leather presses down, envelops him hot and thick and reassuring in the way that advance warning of heat stroke is reassuring. There might not be much of a difference. “Depends on what you’re used to,” he says when it’s clear she wants more than a motion of reply. “Adaptable things, humans.”
“Yeah,” she says and there’s something on her mind. The more he sees her, the more obvious it is and that’s not a good thing, not in the slightest. The more he sees it, the more he wants to act and he knows, he truly knows that there comes a point where interfering does more harm than good, he knows that.
What he doesn’t know is where that point is and that’s what makes it a problem, for him as well as her.
“Thought I told you not to get cancer,” he remarks as a change of subject, cups her cheek and softly brushes his thumb across her sun-reddened face, tracing lightly below cheekbones.
She startles and when he hastily lowers his hand - daft thing to do, that; he needs to learn how to think - when he lets her go, she catches his hand, holds it, grips it as a child dying of thirst might clutch at a canteen, even an empty one. He knows what she’s asking for and quite possibly even knows what she needs, but a starving man has enough trouble feeding himself; he hasn’t any affection to give.
What he has is his hand and his palm and his fingers and what he can do is take hers against his and try for a smile he might even feel, if he wears it long enough.
“C’mon,” he says, because he’ll get paid soon and the rent is already paid for the next two months. “I know a good place for paella.”
Still squeezing his hand tight, she nearly grins at him, nearly but doesn’t force it. All the same, that joyful look is almost back in her eyes and it’s a look he likes to see there, needs to see there. Her lips quirk as she asks, “Does paella cure cancer?”
“Not until the twenty-eighth century,” he replies and rolls his eyes when she stares at him as if she thinks he’s serious.
She relaxes slightly, saddens slightly and he adds, “Something in the seafood, really, but the paella’s better than having it plain.”
She stares at him, confused, enchanted, and then she hugs his arm, hugs his arm and laughs, her head against his shoulder, sunburned cheek against leather. “You’re completely mad,” she tells him and it’s his turn to laugh.
“Speak for yourself,” he tells her but he pulls her along with him anyway.
“I do,” she tells him. “Yo . . . Yo trato,” she adds with a barely passable accent.
She does try, he’ll agree with that much. It’s what she tries at - not to mention the why behind it - that leaves him confused.
He tugs her along and she holds tight, keeping to his side as if afraid to stray even for an instant. A motion unprompted, almost unimagined in his mind, he stoops as they walk to kiss the part of her hair. She steps as he stoops, her head hitting his chin or his chin her head and it doesn’t matter which because, in a moment, they’ll both blame the other.
Besides, they’re laughing too hard to really care.
.-.-.-.-.
“This is weird,” she remarks, sitting down.
He makes a mental note to pull out her chair for her next time, to see the look on her face. If a sit-down meal has her this off-balance, he can’t be blamed for a little bit of fun. “Don’t be rude,” he chastises and grins as she rolls her eyes at him in a pointed mimicry.
“Not what I meant,” she says needlessly. “Just don’t think we’ve done this here. Sat down inside to eat or whatever.”
He thinks about it and nods. “Never done this anywhere,” he corrects and she looks confused enough for him to add, “with you.”
“But,” she says and stops and shakes her head. “Yeah. Yeah, right, sorry.”
He starts to reply despite having no idea what to say and is interrupted before he can begin by the waitress. An awkward English statement morphs fluidly into a Spanish flirt. He’s nervous, he realizes halfway through his comment, and this confirms it. He only ever flirts when he’s nervous. One causes the other and the other causes the one.
Much to his surprise, the waitress actually laughs and they chat a bit before he places his order, before he quirks an eyebrow at Rose and starts to translate for her. He starts and the waitress laughs again and replies in English.
He’s not sure why, but he feels as if this is wrong, as if he’s somehow in the wrong time period. As if he was meant to live in a world before . . . before . . . something.
It’s an idle thought and he loses it quickly.
“Pretty and clever,” he says and she smiles and tells him that flattery isn’t about to get him out of leaving a tip. He sighs, saying that she’s seen through his dastardly plot. She smiles and walks away, and he’s getting the feeling that there might be a free dessert tonight if he plays his cards right. It’s not often his nerves come in handy and he turns back to the girl feeling vaguely pleased with himself.
Wide brown eyes stare at him, their owner sporting an expression one part disbelief, two parts . . . something else.
He raises his eyebrows. “You were saying?”
“Nothing,” she says quickly.
He shrugs and she shrugs back in almost-mockery and perhaps they smile a bit, smile without comfort. “So,” he says, “not serial killers, then?”
It takes her a second, but she rebounds quickly. “Nope,” she replies, “perfectly normal family.”
He wonders for a moment, another moment, how many strangers this girl has gone off with in her life. “That so?” he prompts, finds making her talk easier than talking himself.
“Yup,” she says. “Two parents, two kids. Even said they had a dog back home. Tammy - that’s the little sister - she was fussing over it.”
There’s a pause as he really tries to look interested.
“Cute though,” she adds weakly and he knows he’s failed.
He fumbles for a question, tries to work out something intelligent to ask. Tries to work out what he’s doing here, what he’s doing this for. Concern, that’s it. “The parents invite you along?”
The girl nods, trying to pull out a smile for him. “Sheryl and . . . that’s horrible: I can't remember what his name is. Mr. Brooks,” she says. “But yeah, they’re nice. Sheryl got all worried about me being here on my own,” she adds and the look she gives him speaks volumes.
He refuses to be apologetic. “Best not tell her you spend your days stalking men twice your age,” he advises her dryly.
“Best not,” she agrees and there’s a part of him that grows irritated at this response. It’s unreasonable, being annoyed.
Man, she was supposed to say. Not “men,” just “man.”
There’s a moment that lasts longer than it should, an awkward, frozen moment of him trapped inside this restaurant, trapped with no way out, no escape route from a story of domestics. And he doesn’t like it. Shouldn’t need to be said, that he doesn’t like it.
Still, he makes a point of smiling at the waitress as she returns with their drinks. The silence can be swallowed up by a silence more natural, by the pause either of respect or the need for privacy, that pause which occurs within the presence of a member of the wait staff. He’s almost relieved to see the woman, thinks it must be obvious, what with the girl glaring at him like that.
“What?” he asks her when they’re alone again, as alone as two people can be in a crowded restaurant.
“Nothing,” she says and it’s the second time that night.
“You’re a bit boring,” he tells her bluntly, just to get a reaction.
Her look is as startled as it is offended, he wants to say. He’s not entirely sure. He never seems to be, not with this girl.
“You’re not exactly packed with stories either, y’know,” she points out and he nearly disagrees, nearly tells her no, no that’s not it at all. He has stories, but dead men tell no tales, as the saying goes. Dead men tell no tales and he died in San Francisco, was killed in the street and died on the table.
But he does have stories, has a lifetime of them he doesn’t speak of. Architecture and aggravation, mobile phones and mistakes, engineering and then existing; he had Fred and lost her and had her and lost her; he had Susan and life and brilliance and no more; he had so much and now he only has stories; oh, he has stories.
And so, he knows, must she.
“In the same boat, us,” he says. They might be, despite the way she shakes her head at him. They just might be.
People don’t just spring into the world fully formed. She’s no Athena, climbing forth as an adult from her father’s aching skull - though, now that he thinks of it, he wouldn’t be surprised if her father has one hell of a headache with this girl. No, there’s an actual past to her, something more than missing posters and his guesswork. A person isn’t a person without a past.
“So,” he says, starts again. “What about you?”
She looks surprised that he’s asked, surprised and . . . hurt? “What about me?”
“Anything,” he replies, shrugging. “That family you were talking about - siblings, a pet, all that. What’ve you got?”
There’s a pause as she processes this, a quick one he might only imagine. “Just me and my mum,” she tells him, says it lightly enough that it must still hurt her. “Used to have a cat,” she adds when he continues to watch her. “Used to. Wandered out one day and never wandered back. ‘Cause of the cat flap.” Her voice dwindles away awkwardly and she avoids his gaze for a moment.
He doesn’t say anything, simply continues to watch her as she slowly realizes how little they know about each other.
She looks up, her glance at his face almost furtive. “What about you?”
“Had a dog,” he answers, leaves it at that.
She doesn’t press. It’s almost like she’s afraid to, the way she doesn’t press. She looks awkward and uncomfortable, determined and desperate. Why she doesn’t find someone else - someone more easily dealt with - he’ll never know.
“Not anymore, though,” he adds and she looks so relieved to hear him speak. “Had the worst arthritis I’ve ever seen in a dog: poor thing couldn’t handle a curb, let alone a staircase.”
“Had him a long time, then?” she asks, strangely tentative. It confuses him, that tone, but when he thinks about it, it’s pretty obvious. He’s been shoving her away and holding her close on and off, off and on; small wonder the girl doesn’t know if she can ask him a simple question.
He nods. “Second owner, though. One of my engineering friends gave him to me. Got tired of a dog beating him at chess, I’d imagine.”
She blinks at him. “Smart dog.”
“Bad chess player,” he replies.
She laughs at that and he laughs with her; she grins at him and he lets his eyes smile. They savor the moment the most they can, the best they can, and it’s soon to end.
Tucking the long strands of her hair behind one ear, the girl looks at the couple to her left, his right. He glances as well, sees a pair of people chatting comfortably, amiably. It’s a sharp contrast, even to the almost relaxed moment of their laughter.
Things are awkward between them, have been awkward since he stuck his foot into that metaphorical door and pried into her life the way she’s been prying into his. Bit of a double-standard, all things considered.
“It’s weird,” she says suddenly.
“So you’ve said,” he comments. She’s repeating herself tonight.
“No, not-” She cuts herself off, shakes her head. “I’m not talking about the restaurant. It’s just- I’ve been here a while but I’m still not used to hearing it.”
There she goes again, being odd. “Spanish or Catalan?”
She shakes her head once more. “I don’t mean hearing the languages - I mean hearing people talk and not... y’know, understanding them.”
“You seemed to do fine with Sanchez,” he points out.
“Yeah, but he was speaking slow and mostly in English anyway,” she explains. “He’s nice,” she adds, says it in the sort of tone people use to compliment a house or a new car or some additional little bit to another person’s life.
“Not a bad boss,” he agrees. Doesn’t say anything about the work, the mind-numbing drudgery that still doesn’t put his mind all the way to sleep, that leaves it half-numb but half-awake, leaves it writhing from mental pins-and-needles.
She pauses, her glass halfway to her lips. “He’s your boss,” she says slowly, sounds confused over the idea. “You’ve got a boss.”
“That’s the way most jobs go,” he reminds her. He knows he’s looking at her like she’s stupid, but he can’t stop, isn’t about to try stopping. If she’s going to act stupid, he’ll look at her like she is. “Boss or bossed.”
“Yeah, I know,” she replies. “There’s just- I dunno. You don’t seem like the sort of person who’d have a boss, ‘s all.”
He raises his eyebrows at her.
“Anyway,” she says pointedly after a pause. “I was trying to talk about language.”
“And?” he prompts.
“It’s like,” she says, struggling to find the words, “it’s like you can go around understanding everything people say and then one day, out of the blue, you can’t. Suppose- suppose that happens. The words are different and the inflection and tone and all that: that changes.”
He nods, wondering vaguely why she’s explaining reality to him.
“But the thoughts,” she continues, “all the stuff behind the words and the inflection and tone, all that’s still the same. Thoughts and feelings, yeah? That’s constant, should be. Feels like, if you can understand what’s behind the words, you should be able to understand the words.”
“Or,” he says, “if you understand the words, you know the meaning already.”
“But what if you don’t understand the words?” she asks. “What about hearing with your mind and not just your ears. ‘S like... D’you believe in telepathy?”
Any second now, his eyebrows will rise right off his head. “Don’t see what that’s got to do with anything.”
She bites her lip, glances down at the silverware. “’M sayin’ that if you know what someone’s thinking or feeling, the language shouldn’t matter. Just different ways of expressing yourself. ‘S like... Looking at a painting or a statue or whatever - doesn’t matter what form it takes, it’s still saying something and you can still understand.” She’s looking at the couple on her left again as she finishes: “Seem unfair that it doesn’t work the same for languages.”
“You’re a bit off in the head, aren’t you?” he asks her, expression dry.
“If you’re not gonna take me seriously-”
“You’ll what?” he asks, purposefully condescending. “Quit bothering me? Make another scene? What?”
She glares at him. “Fine. Forget it.”
“I will do, then.”
Arms crossed, posture defensive, she doesn’t make any move to leave or argue further. “Fine.”
He leans back in his chair and waits.
She continues to glare. “What?”
“That’s it?” he asks, tone honestly reasonable, voice falsely pleasant. “Someone shuts you down and you go along with it? A huff and a look and you’re done?”
The glare falters with a blink. “What?” she asks again.
“You’re used to putting up with a lot,” he says. “Not difficult to figure out.”
“Sorry, but would you mind picking one direction to wind me up in? Or is that part of the lesson plan, too?”
“Might be,” he says lightly, possibly lies. He’s not entirely sure what he’s doing here.
“Right,” she says. “So you invite me out to dinner, crack a couple jokes and then decide that’s boring and you’d rather be a git?”
“I’m curious,” he tells her, “as to what goes on in that head of yours. Namely, why you don’t get fed up and leave.”
She blinks, her frown changing from one of anger to one of confusion. “You want me to go?” she asks and he’s never heard the girl sound half so hurt, half so lost.
He sidesteps the question rather than answer it, even to himself. “I’m not a nice person. I’m rude and sarcastic. I’m the man who, quite frankly, does not give a damn. And,” he finishes, “if that’s what you’re looking for in a person, then you really are off in the head.”
“You’re lonely,” she says, as if the argument will carry itself.
“Yeah,” he replies, “and so are you. I’ve got the advantage of being used to it.”
She surprises him by countering instead of rolling over, and he’s nearly as pleased with her spine as he’s annoyed with her argument. “Doesn’t sound like it to me.”
“How’s that, then?”
“Sanchez told me,” she says. “Apparently, you’re irritable and impatient with anything not made of metal. He said he’d never seen you smile before this week and you’ve been in town for, what, three-ish weeks now?”
Just his luck, getting a chatterbox for an employer. “And this is important how?”
“Saw you smile the day I met you.” She shrugs. “Sort of thing that usually counts for something.”
Something, but not much. “So all it takes for you to latch onto someone is a quick grin? ‘If they don’t do it often, it must mean they like me’? That where you’re heading with this?”
“No,” she says simply, having found her calm. “You asked me to dinner. Bit more than a smile, you doing that. Not my fault if you change your mind every three seconds about whether or not you like me.”
He hates to admit it, but she’s got him there. “This is who I am. This is the person you keep following around, the one you don’t know. I’m not consistent and I don’t much care.”
She shakes her head, like she knows better and he’s simply mistaken. “And you’re a liar. Bet you care a lot more than most people do, as a matter of fact,” she tells him, such trust in her eyes. He can’t stand to see it there, wants to break it and soon. Better it be intentionally painful than accidentally devastating; this girl’s been through enough.
“That so?”
“Yeah,” she says, his bluff immediately called. “‘Cause you called my mum. Okay, yeah, I don’t know you. Don’t know a thing about you, ‘cept that you called my mum ‘cause you thought I might be in danger. And you talk to me every day, and most of the time, we end up laughing. And ‘m sorry if I’m coming off as a bit of a stalker, but you’re coming off as a bit of a lunatic - figure we’re even.”
“Doesn’t even have to be an issue,” he says, arms folded, leaning back in his chair. “None of it.”
“Yeah?”
“We walk away from each other,” he tells the girl, the tourist. “That simple.”
She looks at him. For a moment, that’s all she does. Her eyes are brown or maybe hazel and he can’t tell from across the table. Her maybe-brown-maybe-hazel eyes watch him and for the first time, he’ll believe that this girl is a woman.
She folds her arms on the table, looks him straight in the eyes. “Do you want to?”
He can’t answer that, can barely hold her gaze.
His arms uncross and his hand falls to the table, lays halfway between them, palm upturned. He looks at it instead of her face and so the touch of her hand in his doesn’t take him by surprise. If asked, though, he’ll say that it did.
There’s no other reason for him to flinch than surprise.
“No point in you wandering off now,” he makes himself say, forces his tone to be joking. “I’ll wind up paying for your food either way - you might as well eat it.”
There’s a slight pause before she goes along with it, before she follows him in this. “Might die of cancer if I don’t, yeah.”
“Can’t have that,” he replies. “Your mother knows who I am now. Might be held responsible.”
There’s a twitch at the corner of her mouth and it takes him by surprise, how much he wants to make her smile. Stupid, stupid, stupid, getting attached to a tourist. Give her a week more, maybe, and then she’ll be gone.
“About that language thing,” he says without knowing why, says it abruptly before she can reply. “Understanding thoughts and such with paintings and statues.”
“Yeah?”
“If you’re tired of paintings, I do know something about statues,” he offers.
It’s almost worth it to see her look confused. “Are you saying you’ll teach me Spanish?”
He shrugs, but he shrugs yes.
She stares at him and then, impossibly, she laughs. Like there’s no one around, she laughs. And it’s strange, because they’ve just fought in a crowded restaurant; because when they were fighting, he didn’t remotely care whether people looked at them.
But she’s laughing now and that seems to be his fault, just as her frustration and annoyance seem to be his fault. He knows, though, is almost certain that she’s annoyed and frustrated at more than him, whereas the laughter has only one cause. This is his alone and he doesn’t want anyone else to see.
There is something severely, severely wrong inside his head.
“Yeah, you’re the most inconsistent man I’ve ever met,” she tells him with something like glee, beaming at him. “You’re a bloody lunatic, you are.”
He smiles like he wasn’t just thinking the same thing. About himself. About her.
The conversation turns easy, turns to Spanish verbs and the history of the region after that, the pair chatting away. It’s only when the food arrives that he realizes he’s still holding the girl’s hand. He lets go awkwardly, ignores the waitress’s speculative look at him.
They eat and they chat some more. By the end of the meal, he’s reasonably confident she knows the name for each piece of silverware, for most of the ingredients in her dinner. She’s a quick study, keeps asking after the most difficult words to say.
He’s pulling out his wallet to pay for the bill when she stops him, tells him she’ll handle it. When he looks askance, she shows him a small plastic card, one he doesn’t quite believe.
“’S my friend’s,” she explains. “His card for his account with UNIT, yeah?”
He’d tell her not to be stupid, to let him pay for it, but he knows she’s doing more than picking up the tab. If the card works, her story holds water. A couple drops of it, at the very least. Though... “If it’s his, how come you’re using it?”
“Gave me access,” she replies with a shrug. “Apparently, he’s been on payroll since the seventies and hasn’t ever touched the account. I didn’t even know he had it until he... Yeah. Basically, I’ve been paying for chips every single time we go - for an entire year - and it turns out he’s not actually broke.” She gives him a look like this is somehow his fault, but she forgives him anyway.
Instead of commenting on that, he let the conversation take its course as they waited for the card to clear, he skeptical, she unconcerned. He wasn’t sure how that was going to work, considering she hadn’t even signed a name on the receipt, only two Greek letters.
The card is accepted and returned without a hitch.
They leave the restaurant and head out into the night, her hand finding his or his finding hers. Doesn’t really matter which. He’s got enough to think about without worrying over handholding.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He sits down on his bed to think and his mobile rings, buzzes and rings and he holds it to his ear with one hand on the table.
“Is she safe?” Jackie Tyler demands. “Will she always be safe?”
“Why didn’t you call me back?” he tries to ask but there’s something in his throat, something pounding through his chest. “Why-”
“Tell me. Promise me you’ll keep her safe.”
“I’m trying,” he says, pulls the mobile away from Susan, pouting Susan, pouting and smiling again Susan bleeding on the floor. “Tried,” he corrects.
“You promised me,” Fred reminds him with a kiss to the edge of his mind, her hair pulled up beneath his hat. “I didn’t ask - you promised - thank you-”
“You’re breaking up,” he tells the mobile as Fred dissolves, burns away in light which can only foreshadow darkness. “You’re breaking up, I can’t hear you.”
“You’re broken up,” the girl corrects and Susan’s blood bleeds from the scrape across her cheek. “Thanks for the Superphone,” she adds, plucking the mobile out of his hand.
“No warning,” says a man with his voice. “No choice.”
“I gave it to you,” Fred argues, tugs at his lapels to straighten them into disarray, takes his hat off her head to stick it on his, her hair shining beneath her crown. “Both all any none, but you never wanted any of it, did you? Suppose not. I didn’t either, you know,” she confides, her mouth against his ear, her hand against something else.
“I’m sorry,” she continues, says it for him, and he eases the girl back, blond and brown-hazel.
“Yes,” he says, “you’ll always be safe.”
She holds his hand and cries for more than she understands, cries against his shoulder and when he wakes, his face is wet with tears that don’t feel like his.
.-.-.-.-.-.
<-- | -->
Author: rallalon | Rall
Beta: vyctori
Rating: PG, AU towards the end of Season One; 9!Smith.
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summary: He walks her to the metro station before walking back to work, his cold hand thrust into the empty pocket of his jeans.
The Tourist
The Girl
The Runaway
The Puzzle
“I’ve got plans for tomorrow,” she tells him like she’s nervous.
He raises his eyebrows at her as they walk, wondering at her tone. “That so?”
“Yeah,” she says and yes, she’s definitely nervous. About what? What’s she planning?
“Have fun,” he tells her absently, seemingly absent, knowing exactly that he’s doing. She looks at him, really looks at him when he says it, looks like she doesn’t quite understand him. Ironic, that, when she’s the one who’s crazy.
“I’m not going to be here,” she says, tells him like she’s explaining some crucial point he’s missing. “It’s not like I planned it that way - just sort of agreed without thinking. So, y’know, we’re not going to be able to do this tomorrow.”
He shrugs as they find their way through the stalls of the small market, small for this part of the city. “Yeah, I sort of figured that out, what with the advance notice and all.”
“What?” she asks, turning back towards him as a couple next to them start arguing loudly in Catalan.
He rolls his eyes at human stupidity before repeating, “I said, I’d figured that out.”
“Oh,” she says, sounds unreasonably disappointed.
“I’m hardly thick,” he tells her dryly and she laughs.
“Nah, didn’t expect you to be,” she says and it’s a comment that comes out sounding just a touch different from how she must intend it to sound. Because the way she says it, it sounds as if she’s known all along that she’d be with him out here, as if she’d plotted it out in advance. It’s that oddness, that continued little bit of strange that makes him ask.
“What’re you doing?”
Her eyes go to his and her face brightens just a little and once he sees that, it’s damned obvious that this girl is desperate for someone to care about her. More obvious. It’s always been obvious and he’s always been an idiot about it.
“Goin’ to the beach,” she says like she wants him to know where she is, like he’s somehow in charge of not letting her wander off. “The family across the hall at the hotel, they invited me along.”
She makes friends easily, this girl. Maybe that’s why a group like UNIT would want her, if that’s really true. All the same . . .
“Don’t worry,” she adds, laughing a little. “They’re not serial killers or anything. I’ve got excellent taste in strangers.”
She doesn’t, not really, but he smiles back and for a second, it feels as if she might hug him then and there. He’s not sure he’d mind, not exactly, but she doesn’t and because he’s not sure, he’s not disappointed, not in the slightest.
“Don’t get cancer,” he tells her and she laughs again, swinging their arms between them and when did they start holding hands?
He walks her to the metro station before walking back to work, his cold hand thrust into the empty pocket of his jeans.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He wastes five minutes waiting for her before remembering that she won’t be coming today. The time he wastes is closer to six minutes, actually, in the way that fifteen hundred is closer to nine hundred than it is to eight hundred.
He’s not entirely sure where that comparison came from, knows he’s prone to hyperbole when annoyed. He’s been told so.
He thinks about personality complexes and amateur psychoanalyzing and Fred being a know-it-all about them both. Shaking his head, he wanders off, footsteps leading him to the sea. It’s not a direction he recognizes at first and once he does, it’s hardly an important choice.
For all of a second, he looks out upon the horde of tourists spread across the sand, all of them running or laughing or griping or trying to chatter in a feeble attempt at the Spanish language. There are squalling children and teenagers on cell phones and it’s so damned ordinary and so incredibly cliché.
They’re missing the point, he wants to yell. They’re sitting around and ignoring the mountains of culture behind them, sitting oblivious to the world around them. There’s no way he can know for certain that they are, and yet he feels it, feels the drudgery in these lives even when on holiday.
It annoys him in ways he doesn’t understand and it makes him want to do things he doesn’t understand. Shake them up a little, see how they react. See if they’re intelligent or just sitting there. There’s so much life, such an incredible, fantastic amount and it seems a strange piece of angst, angst on a cosmic scale to find fault with this, to rail against the stable order and the inconvenience and, really, he doesn’t know what he’s thinking about any longer.
He’s pissed off and he doesn’t know why. He’s looking at all the people with their lives and their jobs and their wives and their little girls and their homes waiting for their return. He’s looking and he catches a glimpse of blond hair that belongs to no one he knows.
It takes him some time, but he stops looking, turns back the way he came. He goes back to his life and his job and that’s going to have to be enough.
Even if she’s out there, one of the many, he wouldn’t want to find her here.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He’s locking up the garage, pulling his keys out of his jacket pocket when his sleeve pulls something else out with it. The object clatters to the sidewalk and he drops to one knee to catch it in mid-bounce, the unpredictable ricochet not a problem in the least.
A surprised laugh reaches his ears, replaces the ping of metal on concrete, and he looks up, looks forward; he looks forward and sees a pair of legs, bare and long and shapely with the musculature of an athlete. He looks up past the tiny skirt and the wet blouse sticking to wet skin, looks up and the girl looks back at him, eyes wide.
“Your jacket,” she says, somehow stunned instead of offended.
Not what he expected, but he’s hardly asking for a slap. “What?”
“You carry a screwdriver in your jacket pocket,” she says, a statement that’s almost a question, almost on the happy side of surprise.
“I might do, yeah,” he replies, standing, holding said object in his hand. He might do, but he doesn’t. When had he put that in his jacket?
His confusion must be visible on his face as she sobers once more. “Your jacket,” she tries to say again, but he interrupts.
“Give me a mo’.”
He ducks back inside the garage, drops the screwdriver back where it belongs and checks his pockets for any more surprises before returning outside. Wouldn’t do, petty theft with Sanchez leaving him in charge of the locking up. “What about my jacket?” he asks her once he’s out, pulling the doors shut and securing them.
“It’s,” she starts to say, starts but stops to shrug. “Just seems kinda hot out for that.”
He shrugs back at her, and the molding weight of leather presses down, envelops him hot and thick and reassuring in the way that advance warning of heat stroke is reassuring. There might not be much of a difference. “Depends on what you’re used to,” he says when it’s clear she wants more than a motion of reply. “Adaptable things, humans.”
“Yeah,” she says and there’s something on her mind. The more he sees her, the more obvious it is and that’s not a good thing, not in the slightest. The more he sees it, the more he wants to act and he knows, he truly knows that there comes a point where interfering does more harm than good, he knows that.
What he doesn’t know is where that point is and that’s what makes it a problem, for him as well as her.
“Thought I told you not to get cancer,” he remarks as a change of subject, cups her cheek and softly brushes his thumb across her sun-reddened face, tracing lightly below cheekbones.
She startles and when he hastily lowers his hand - daft thing to do, that; he needs to learn how to think - when he lets her go, she catches his hand, holds it, grips it as a child dying of thirst might clutch at a canteen, even an empty one. He knows what she’s asking for and quite possibly even knows what she needs, but a starving man has enough trouble feeding himself; he hasn’t any affection to give.
What he has is his hand and his palm and his fingers and what he can do is take hers against his and try for a smile he might even feel, if he wears it long enough.
“C’mon,” he says, because he’ll get paid soon and the rent is already paid for the next two months. “I know a good place for paella.”
Still squeezing his hand tight, she nearly grins at him, nearly but doesn’t force it. All the same, that joyful look is almost back in her eyes and it’s a look he likes to see there, needs to see there. Her lips quirk as she asks, “Does paella cure cancer?”
“Not until the twenty-eighth century,” he replies and rolls his eyes when she stares at him as if she thinks he’s serious.
She relaxes slightly, saddens slightly and he adds, “Something in the seafood, really, but the paella’s better than having it plain.”
She stares at him, confused, enchanted, and then she hugs his arm, hugs his arm and laughs, her head against his shoulder, sunburned cheek against leather. “You’re completely mad,” she tells him and it’s his turn to laugh.
“Speak for yourself,” he tells her but he pulls her along with him anyway.
“I do,” she tells him. “Yo . . . Yo trato,” she adds with a barely passable accent.
She does try, he’ll agree with that much. It’s what she tries at - not to mention the why behind it - that leaves him confused.
He tugs her along and she holds tight, keeping to his side as if afraid to stray even for an instant. A motion unprompted, almost unimagined in his mind, he stoops as they walk to kiss the part of her hair. She steps as he stoops, her head hitting his chin or his chin her head and it doesn’t matter which because, in a moment, they’ll both blame the other.
Besides, they’re laughing too hard to really care.
.-.-.-.-.
“This is weird,” she remarks, sitting down.
He makes a mental note to pull out her chair for her next time, to see the look on her face. If a sit-down meal has her this off-balance, he can’t be blamed for a little bit of fun. “Don’t be rude,” he chastises and grins as she rolls her eyes at him in a pointed mimicry.
“Not what I meant,” she says needlessly. “Just don’t think we’ve done this here. Sat down inside to eat or whatever.”
He thinks about it and nods. “Never done this anywhere,” he corrects and she looks confused enough for him to add, “with you.”
“But,” she says and stops and shakes her head. “Yeah. Yeah, right, sorry.”
He starts to reply despite having no idea what to say and is interrupted before he can begin by the waitress. An awkward English statement morphs fluidly into a Spanish flirt. He’s nervous, he realizes halfway through his comment, and this confirms it. He only ever flirts when he’s nervous. One causes the other and the other causes the one.
Much to his surprise, the waitress actually laughs and they chat a bit before he places his order, before he quirks an eyebrow at Rose and starts to translate for her. He starts and the waitress laughs again and replies in English.
He’s not sure why, but he feels as if this is wrong, as if he’s somehow in the wrong time period. As if he was meant to live in a world before . . . before . . . something.
It’s an idle thought and he loses it quickly.
“Pretty and clever,” he says and she smiles and tells him that flattery isn’t about to get him out of leaving a tip. He sighs, saying that she’s seen through his dastardly plot. She smiles and walks away, and he’s getting the feeling that there might be a free dessert tonight if he plays his cards right. It’s not often his nerves come in handy and he turns back to the girl feeling vaguely pleased with himself.
Wide brown eyes stare at him, their owner sporting an expression one part disbelief, two parts . . . something else.
He raises his eyebrows. “You were saying?”
“Nothing,” she says quickly.
He shrugs and she shrugs back in almost-mockery and perhaps they smile a bit, smile without comfort. “So,” he says, “not serial killers, then?”
It takes her a second, but she rebounds quickly. “Nope,” she replies, “perfectly normal family.”
He wonders for a moment, another moment, how many strangers this girl has gone off with in her life. “That so?” he prompts, finds making her talk easier than talking himself.
“Yup,” she says. “Two parents, two kids. Even said they had a dog back home. Tammy - that’s the little sister - she was fussing over it.”
There’s a pause as he really tries to look interested.
“Cute though,” she adds weakly and he knows he’s failed.
He fumbles for a question, tries to work out something intelligent to ask. Tries to work out what he’s doing here, what he’s doing this for. Concern, that’s it. “The parents invite you along?”
The girl nods, trying to pull out a smile for him. “Sheryl and . . . that’s horrible: I can't remember what his name is. Mr. Brooks,” she says. “But yeah, they’re nice. Sheryl got all worried about me being here on my own,” she adds and the look she gives him speaks volumes.
He refuses to be apologetic. “Best not tell her you spend your days stalking men twice your age,” he advises her dryly.
“Best not,” she agrees and there’s a part of him that grows irritated at this response. It’s unreasonable, being annoyed.
Man, she was supposed to say. Not “men,” just “man.”
There’s a moment that lasts longer than it should, an awkward, frozen moment of him trapped inside this restaurant, trapped with no way out, no escape route from a story of domestics. And he doesn’t like it. Shouldn’t need to be said, that he doesn’t like it.
Still, he makes a point of smiling at the waitress as she returns with their drinks. The silence can be swallowed up by a silence more natural, by the pause either of respect or the need for privacy, that pause which occurs within the presence of a member of the wait staff. He’s almost relieved to see the woman, thinks it must be obvious, what with the girl glaring at him like that.
“What?” he asks her when they’re alone again, as alone as two people can be in a crowded restaurant.
“Nothing,” she says and it’s the second time that night.
“You’re a bit boring,” he tells her bluntly, just to get a reaction.
Her look is as startled as it is offended, he wants to say. He’s not entirely sure. He never seems to be, not with this girl.
“You’re not exactly packed with stories either, y’know,” she points out and he nearly disagrees, nearly tells her no, no that’s not it at all. He has stories, but dead men tell no tales, as the saying goes. Dead men tell no tales and he died in San Francisco, was killed in the street and died on the table.
But he does have stories, has a lifetime of them he doesn’t speak of. Architecture and aggravation, mobile phones and mistakes, engineering and then existing; he had Fred and lost her and had her and lost her; he had Susan and life and brilliance and no more; he had so much and now he only has stories; oh, he has stories.
And so, he knows, must she.
“In the same boat, us,” he says. They might be, despite the way she shakes her head at him. They just might be.
People don’t just spring into the world fully formed. She’s no Athena, climbing forth as an adult from her father’s aching skull - though, now that he thinks of it, he wouldn’t be surprised if her father has one hell of a headache with this girl. No, there’s an actual past to her, something more than missing posters and his guesswork. A person isn’t a person without a past.
“So,” he says, starts again. “What about you?”
She looks surprised that he’s asked, surprised and . . . hurt? “What about me?”
“Anything,” he replies, shrugging. “That family you were talking about - siblings, a pet, all that. What’ve you got?”
There’s a pause as she processes this, a quick one he might only imagine. “Just me and my mum,” she tells him, says it lightly enough that it must still hurt her. “Used to have a cat,” she adds when he continues to watch her. “Used to. Wandered out one day and never wandered back. ‘Cause of the cat flap.” Her voice dwindles away awkwardly and she avoids his gaze for a moment.
He doesn’t say anything, simply continues to watch her as she slowly realizes how little they know about each other.
She looks up, her glance at his face almost furtive. “What about you?”
“Had a dog,” he answers, leaves it at that.
She doesn’t press. It’s almost like she’s afraid to, the way she doesn’t press. She looks awkward and uncomfortable, determined and desperate. Why she doesn’t find someone else - someone more easily dealt with - he’ll never know.
“Not anymore, though,” he adds and she looks so relieved to hear him speak. “Had the worst arthritis I’ve ever seen in a dog: poor thing couldn’t handle a curb, let alone a staircase.”
“Had him a long time, then?” she asks, strangely tentative. It confuses him, that tone, but when he thinks about it, it’s pretty obvious. He’s been shoving her away and holding her close on and off, off and on; small wonder the girl doesn’t know if she can ask him a simple question.
He nods. “Second owner, though. One of my engineering friends gave him to me. Got tired of a dog beating him at chess, I’d imagine.”
She blinks at him. “Smart dog.”
“Bad chess player,” he replies.
She laughs at that and he laughs with her; she grins at him and he lets his eyes smile. They savor the moment the most they can, the best they can, and it’s soon to end.
Tucking the long strands of her hair behind one ear, the girl looks at the couple to her left, his right. He glances as well, sees a pair of people chatting comfortably, amiably. It’s a sharp contrast, even to the almost relaxed moment of their laughter.
Things are awkward between them, have been awkward since he stuck his foot into that metaphorical door and pried into her life the way she’s been prying into his. Bit of a double-standard, all things considered.
“It’s weird,” she says suddenly.
“So you’ve said,” he comments. She’s repeating herself tonight.
“No, not-” She cuts herself off, shakes her head. “I’m not talking about the restaurant. It’s just- I’ve been here a while but I’m still not used to hearing it.”
There she goes again, being odd. “Spanish or Catalan?”
She shakes her head once more. “I don’t mean hearing the languages - I mean hearing people talk and not... y’know, understanding them.”
“You seemed to do fine with Sanchez,” he points out.
“Yeah, but he was speaking slow and mostly in English anyway,” she explains. “He’s nice,” she adds, says it in the sort of tone people use to compliment a house or a new car or some additional little bit to another person’s life.
“Not a bad boss,” he agrees. Doesn’t say anything about the work, the mind-numbing drudgery that still doesn’t put his mind all the way to sleep, that leaves it half-numb but half-awake, leaves it writhing from mental pins-and-needles.
She pauses, her glass halfway to her lips. “He’s your boss,” she says slowly, sounds confused over the idea. “You’ve got a boss.”
“That’s the way most jobs go,” he reminds her. He knows he’s looking at her like she’s stupid, but he can’t stop, isn’t about to try stopping. If she’s going to act stupid, he’ll look at her like she is. “Boss or bossed.”
“Yeah, I know,” she replies. “There’s just- I dunno. You don’t seem like the sort of person who’d have a boss, ‘s all.”
He raises his eyebrows at her.
“Anyway,” she says pointedly after a pause. “I was trying to talk about language.”
“And?” he prompts.
“It’s like,” she says, struggling to find the words, “it’s like you can go around understanding everything people say and then one day, out of the blue, you can’t. Suppose- suppose that happens. The words are different and the inflection and tone and all that: that changes.”
He nods, wondering vaguely why she’s explaining reality to him.
“But the thoughts,” she continues, “all the stuff behind the words and the inflection and tone, all that’s still the same. Thoughts and feelings, yeah? That’s constant, should be. Feels like, if you can understand what’s behind the words, you should be able to understand the words.”
“Or,” he says, “if you understand the words, you know the meaning already.”
“But what if you don’t understand the words?” she asks. “What about hearing with your mind and not just your ears. ‘S like... D’you believe in telepathy?”
Any second now, his eyebrows will rise right off his head. “Don’t see what that’s got to do with anything.”
She bites her lip, glances down at the silverware. “’M sayin’ that if you know what someone’s thinking or feeling, the language shouldn’t matter. Just different ways of expressing yourself. ‘S like... Looking at a painting or a statue or whatever - doesn’t matter what form it takes, it’s still saying something and you can still understand.” She’s looking at the couple on her left again as she finishes: “Seem unfair that it doesn’t work the same for languages.”
“You’re a bit off in the head, aren’t you?” he asks her, expression dry.
“If you’re not gonna take me seriously-”
“You’ll what?” he asks, purposefully condescending. “Quit bothering me? Make another scene? What?”
She glares at him. “Fine. Forget it.”
“I will do, then.”
Arms crossed, posture defensive, she doesn’t make any move to leave or argue further. “Fine.”
He leans back in his chair and waits.
She continues to glare. “What?”
“That’s it?” he asks, tone honestly reasonable, voice falsely pleasant. “Someone shuts you down and you go along with it? A huff and a look and you’re done?”
The glare falters with a blink. “What?” she asks again.
“You’re used to putting up with a lot,” he says. “Not difficult to figure out.”
“Sorry, but would you mind picking one direction to wind me up in? Or is that part of the lesson plan, too?”
“Might be,” he says lightly, possibly lies. He’s not entirely sure what he’s doing here.
“Right,” she says. “So you invite me out to dinner, crack a couple jokes and then decide that’s boring and you’d rather be a git?”
“I’m curious,” he tells her, “as to what goes on in that head of yours. Namely, why you don’t get fed up and leave.”
She blinks, her frown changing from one of anger to one of confusion. “You want me to go?” she asks and he’s never heard the girl sound half so hurt, half so lost.
He sidesteps the question rather than answer it, even to himself. “I’m not a nice person. I’m rude and sarcastic. I’m the man who, quite frankly, does not give a damn. And,” he finishes, “if that’s what you’re looking for in a person, then you really are off in the head.”
“You’re lonely,” she says, as if the argument will carry itself.
“Yeah,” he replies, “and so are you. I’ve got the advantage of being used to it.”
She surprises him by countering instead of rolling over, and he’s nearly as pleased with her spine as he’s annoyed with her argument. “Doesn’t sound like it to me.”
“How’s that, then?”
“Sanchez told me,” she says. “Apparently, you’re irritable and impatient with anything not made of metal. He said he’d never seen you smile before this week and you’ve been in town for, what, three-ish weeks now?”
Just his luck, getting a chatterbox for an employer. “And this is important how?”
“Saw you smile the day I met you.” She shrugs. “Sort of thing that usually counts for something.”
Something, but not much. “So all it takes for you to latch onto someone is a quick grin? ‘If they don’t do it often, it must mean they like me’? That where you’re heading with this?”
“No,” she says simply, having found her calm. “You asked me to dinner. Bit more than a smile, you doing that. Not my fault if you change your mind every three seconds about whether or not you like me.”
He hates to admit it, but she’s got him there. “This is who I am. This is the person you keep following around, the one you don’t know. I’m not consistent and I don’t much care.”
She shakes her head, like she knows better and he’s simply mistaken. “And you’re a liar. Bet you care a lot more than most people do, as a matter of fact,” she tells him, such trust in her eyes. He can’t stand to see it there, wants to break it and soon. Better it be intentionally painful than accidentally devastating; this girl’s been through enough.
“That so?”
“Yeah,” she says, his bluff immediately called. “‘Cause you called my mum. Okay, yeah, I don’t know you. Don’t know a thing about you, ‘cept that you called my mum ‘cause you thought I might be in danger. And you talk to me every day, and most of the time, we end up laughing. And ‘m sorry if I’m coming off as a bit of a stalker, but you’re coming off as a bit of a lunatic - figure we’re even.”
“Doesn’t even have to be an issue,” he says, arms folded, leaning back in his chair. “None of it.”
“Yeah?”
“We walk away from each other,” he tells the girl, the tourist. “That simple.”
She looks at him. For a moment, that’s all she does. Her eyes are brown or maybe hazel and he can’t tell from across the table. Her maybe-brown-maybe-hazel eyes watch him and for the first time, he’ll believe that this girl is a woman.
She folds her arms on the table, looks him straight in the eyes. “Do you want to?”
He can’t answer that, can barely hold her gaze.
His arms uncross and his hand falls to the table, lays halfway between them, palm upturned. He looks at it instead of her face and so the touch of her hand in his doesn’t take him by surprise. If asked, though, he’ll say that it did.
There’s no other reason for him to flinch than surprise.
“No point in you wandering off now,” he makes himself say, forces his tone to be joking. “I’ll wind up paying for your food either way - you might as well eat it.”
There’s a slight pause before she goes along with it, before she follows him in this. “Might die of cancer if I don’t, yeah.”
“Can’t have that,” he replies. “Your mother knows who I am now. Might be held responsible.”
There’s a twitch at the corner of her mouth and it takes him by surprise, how much he wants to make her smile. Stupid, stupid, stupid, getting attached to a tourist. Give her a week more, maybe, and then she’ll be gone.
“About that language thing,” he says without knowing why, says it abruptly before she can reply. “Understanding thoughts and such with paintings and statues.”
“Yeah?”
“If you’re tired of paintings, I do know something about statues,” he offers.
It’s almost worth it to see her look confused. “Are you saying you’ll teach me Spanish?”
He shrugs, but he shrugs yes.
She stares at him and then, impossibly, she laughs. Like there’s no one around, she laughs. And it’s strange, because they’ve just fought in a crowded restaurant; because when they were fighting, he didn’t remotely care whether people looked at them.
But she’s laughing now and that seems to be his fault, just as her frustration and annoyance seem to be his fault. He knows, though, is almost certain that she’s annoyed and frustrated at more than him, whereas the laughter has only one cause. This is his alone and he doesn’t want anyone else to see.
There is something severely, severely wrong inside his head.
“Yeah, you’re the most inconsistent man I’ve ever met,” she tells him with something like glee, beaming at him. “You’re a bloody lunatic, you are.”
He smiles like he wasn’t just thinking the same thing. About himself. About her.
The conversation turns easy, turns to Spanish verbs and the history of the region after that, the pair chatting away. It’s only when the food arrives that he realizes he’s still holding the girl’s hand. He lets go awkwardly, ignores the waitress’s speculative look at him.
They eat and they chat some more. By the end of the meal, he’s reasonably confident she knows the name for each piece of silverware, for most of the ingredients in her dinner. She’s a quick study, keeps asking after the most difficult words to say.
He’s pulling out his wallet to pay for the bill when she stops him, tells him she’ll handle it. When he looks askance, she shows him a small plastic card, one he doesn’t quite believe.
“’S my friend’s,” she explains. “His card for his account with UNIT, yeah?”
He’d tell her not to be stupid, to let him pay for it, but he knows she’s doing more than picking up the tab. If the card works, her story holds water. A couple drops of it, at the very least. Though... “If it’s his, how come you’re using it?”
“Gave me access,” she replies with a shrug. “Apparently, he’s been on payroll since the seventies and hasn’t ever touched the account. I didn’t even know he had it until he... Yeah. Basically, I’ve been paying for chips every single time we go - for an entire year - and it turns out he’s not actually broke.” She gives him a look like this is somehow his fault, but she forgives him anyway.
Instead of commenting on that, he let the conversation take its course as they waited for the card to clear, he skeptical, she unconcerned. He wasn’t sure how that was going to work, considering she hadn’t even signed a name on the receipt, only two Greek letters.
The card is accepted and returned without a hitch.
They leave the restaurant and head out into the night, her hand finding his or his finding hers. Doesn’t really matter which. He’s got enough to think about without worrying over handholding.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He sits down on his bed to think and his mobile rings, buzzes and rings and he holds it to his ear with one hand on the table.
“Is she safe?” Jackie Tyler demands. “Will she always be safe?”
“Why didn’t you call me back?” he tries to ask but there’s something in his throat, something pounding through his chest. “Why-”
“Tell me. Promise me you’ll keep her safe.”
“I’m trying,” he says, pulls the mobile away from Susan, pouting Susan, pouting and smiling again Susan bleeding on the floor. “Tried,” he corrects.
“You promised me,” Fred reminds him with a kiss to the edge of his mind, her hair pulled up beneath his hat. “I didn’t ask - you promised - thank you-”
“You’re breaking up,” he tells the mobile as Fred dissolves, burns away in light which can only foreshadow darkness. “You’re breaking up, I can’t hear you.”
“You’re broken up,” the girl corrects and Susan’s blood bleeds from the scrape across her cheek. “Thanks for the Superphone,” she adds, plucking the mobile out of his hand.
“No warning,” says a man with his voice. “No choice.”
“I gave it to you,” Fred argues, tugs at his lapels to straighten them into disarray, takes his hat off her head to stick it on his, her hair shining beneath her crown. “Both all any none, but you never wanted any of it, did you? Suppose not. I didn’t either, you know,” she confides, her mouth against his ear, her hand against something else.
“I’m sorry,” she continues, says it for him, and he eases the girl back, blond and brown-hazel.
“Yes,” he says, “you’ll always be safe.”
She holds his hand and cries for more than she understands, cries against his shoulder and when he wakes, his face is wet with tears that don’t feel like his.
.-.-.-.-.-.
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