Fic: In Human Hands (5/?)
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 laughs like he’s forgotten that tomorrow is Sunday, like tomorrow isn’t a void he’ll never fill. She laughs with him, laughs like he’s the man she wants to be with.
A/N: PLEASE READ THIS BECAUSE OTHERWISE, YOU MAY MAKE ME VERY, VERY SAD. VERY! Okay, capslock off. As an American who has yet to watch Midnight and who is striving very, very, very hard to remain as spoiler-free as possible, I will ask you to kindly not use any spoiler-related icons should you choose to comment on this fic. I've been spoiled simply from scrolling down the community and glancing at icons - hence not posting for a while. Out of fear. I would like to be able to read your wonderful feedback with confidence and so I will ask you once again: please do not use spoiler-related icons to comment.
The Tourist
The Girl
The Runaway
The Puzzle
The Passenger
He takes her to dinner again, grins through dessert, and after that, they wander.
Her hand in his, he sets them to meandering through the streets, across plazas and through the market stalls that have yet to pack up. He watches her eyes instead of watching where they’re going, instead of looking at what it is she sees. It’s all there, painted across her face, better than any mural.
They keep to the lit areas and he keeps clear of crowds as best he can. They move and they keep moving, pausing only to turn, to laugh, to gaze into a window. He doesn’t go much into shops, him, and she seems to understand that, seems to take note of where she’d like to come back to without ever tugging him inside, without ever giving him a hopeful glance.
Her looks aren’t hopeful, not so much. Not so far as he can tell. “What?” he asks, almost believing he won’t mind the answer.
She takes him by surprise and shrugs, turning away from the window display and pulling at his hand. “I used to work in a shop,” she tells him when he follows. “’S weird, sometimes, looking back like that.”
“UNIT recruits shop girls?” he wonders aloud.
“When they react well after their shop gets blown up, yeah,” she replies. “Got excellent emergency reflexes, apparently.”
“Your job blew up?” he asks to be certain, rolls his eyes when she nods. “Anyone else an’ I think I might be surprised.”
“It’s how I met him,” she continues and he doesn’t need any clarification on that. Their walking slows, footsteps pausing, hesitating. Before they can stop completely, he pulls her out of the foot traffic, pulls her to the wall of the closest building.
Her hand holds onto his, a meager substitution for the contact she craves, and she looks up at him as if he could somehow fix her lack, could somehow fill her up with whatever it is she’s searching for.
It’s enough to terrify him, almost, the amount he wishes he could.
He brushes her hair back from her face, a motion completed before he thinks of it. Unconscious gesture or not, his hand is steady, fingers careful of the girl’s sunburned cheeks as he touches those damp strands. “People were injured?” he asks.
Her eyes, half-closed, flutter open. “W-what?”
He lets go of her hand, stops touching her. But he doesn’t step back, doesn’t waste movement. “I’d think that’s how you’d meet a doctor.”
“Wha- Yeah,” she agrees and looks down. “Wilson, the chief electrician, he... Yeah. Just sort of... happened. He was nice,” she adds in that guilty way of a mourner who’s never mourned. “Not really friendly or anything, but.... He was nice.”
“I’m sorry,” he tells her, his manners resurfacing after quite the hibernation.
“Not your fault,” she says, tells him this as if she thinks she might have to convince him of his innocence.
He hates moments like these: he knows he has to be reading her wrong, but he can’t think of any other way to interpret the look in her eyes, the tone of her voice.
He nods a bit, looks out into the street, and thinks of San Francisco.
She takes his hand.
“C’mon,” one of them says softly and they walk into the night.
.-.-.-.-.-.
They walk until she’s tired, until she’s hanging on his arm as well as his every word. Chuckling, he tells her she’s acting like she’s drunk.
She smiles at him and fakes a hiccup.
He laughs like he’s forgotten that tomorrow is Sunday, like tomorrow isn’t a void he’ll never fill. She laughs with him, laughs like he’s the man she wants to be with.
“‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’” he quotes to himself, mulls over a bit of Hemmingway in his mind instead of thinking about where his feet are leading him. He’s been moving on automatic for some time now, taking street after street to stretch this all out.
His feet stop and he doesn’t realize it until their arms are stretched out, until she’s pulling at just his fingers instead of his whole hand. “What’s wrong?” she asks.
“Didn’t think it’d be this hot of a night,” he explains, condescends a bit at her reaction. “Just putting away my jacket before I get heat stroke.”
Her eyes move from his face to the building and back in the warm lamplight. “You live here?” she asks, sounding like it’s such a surprise.
“My flat for now, yeah,” he agrees lightly enough.
Her fingers catch at a heavy leather sleeve before he can so much as turn away. “Can I-” She pauses, bites her lip. Looks up at the building.
He rolls his eyes at her. “Oh, right, like I was planning on leaving you on a street corner at two in the morning.” He takes her hand even as he thinks better of it. “C’mon.”
“I was only gonna ask if I could use your loo,” she tells him and he rolls his eyes again as they head inside. She was scared he’d leave her; he’s sure of it, just as he’s certain that the girl is a talented liar when she needs to be. “What floor are you?” she asks.
“Third,” he says and her hand slips from his.
“Race ya!” she yells and before he can protest at the immaturity, she’s off like a flash, dashing up the stairs.
His heart thumps and suddenly, there’s blood in his veins and adrenaline in the blood. There’s a grin across his face, unfamiliar from lack of use, as he takes off after her, long legs swallowing up the steps three at a time. She only manages to take them in pairs and he’s nearly caught up before they hit the landing.
She grabs hold of the railing and spins herself around the corner, vaulting herself on up as he nearly stumbles headfirst into a wall. She laughs and he grins wider and they’re rumbling up the stairs, sure to disturb the neighbors. She gains on the landings and he makes up for it on the stairs and by the time they’ve reached his floor, it’s an easy matter to lunge forward that extra step, to leap up onto that landing and grab her around her waist.
She’s facing him: she’d turned the moment she’d reached the top. He takes another step forward, away from the stairs, and swings her off her feet, swings her up into the air and against his chest. Her laugh next to his ear is delighted; her arms around his neck are strong.
His heart thumps and he sets her down before they can fall down the stairwell to their deaths. Her hair sticks to flushed cheeks; her tongue touches her parted lips for only a second. Her chest rises and falls with each deep breath, each breath so close to laughter. Her eyes are bright and so very alive in a face so very young. Half his age, he thinks and his hands jerk away from the girl barely twenty.
“C’mon, then,” he says briskly, means to say briskly. He comes off as abrupt instead. He ignores the question in her eyes, misinterprets it on purpose. “Far be it from me to keep you from the loo.”
He strides down the hall, pulls out his key. He’s got the door open before she reaches him, is inside before she can reach for him.
What the hell is he doing?
Maneuvering around the couch, he points to the door of the bathroom without looking at either it or her. “There you are. I’ll only be a mo’.”
It hits him, keeps hitting him, keeps making him ask himself: what the hell is he doing?
After shucking his jacket and leaving it on the couch, he takes cover in his room, hides in the small, cramped space. Doesn’t matter that she’s in the loo, doesn’t matter that nothing’s going to happen - that nothing was ever going to happen. Doesn’t matter, he’s still shaken, still shaking.
He shakes his head, breathes out slowly. Just the night, he knows. Food and drink and talk and running, that’s all it was.
For a reason he won’t name, he thinks of Grace for the first time in months. Wonders if he should call her before coming to the same conclusion he always does. His phone stays in his pocket.
He shakes his head again, tries to get his mind sorted. Focuses on what’s actually happening.
His t-shirt is damp from sweat, from the heat of his jacket and the sudden exertion up the stairs in said heat. He whips it off, pulls one of his lighter jumpers out of the half-open dresser drawer. Why he has so many jumpers when he’s in Barcelona, when he’s in Barcelona for the summer, he’ll never know. Not sure what he was thinking when he packed.
Probably that he only owned jumpers. It’s not out of the question.
He takes a moment to try to get the broken drawer shut, gives up. Pulling the jumper over his head, he thinks to fetch a beer from the fridge, but then he’d have to offer one and then she might stay. Sitting on the couch instead, he rummages through his jacket pocket, pulls out his keys and transfers them to the pockets of his jeans.
There’s a flush and the sound of the tap as he opens the small closet by the door. He’s hanging up his jacket when the girl steps out into the living room with the attached kitchenette. He turns only enough to look at her, to watch her taking in her surroundings.
The small kitchenette is on the other side of a counter that doubles as a table. It’s unused, looks as if not even the fridge is touched. Beyond the hum of the appliance and the sight of bananas ripening on the counter, one might think he doesn’t eat, doesn’t go back there at all.
The lumps of the couch can’t be detected until it’s sat on, until someone tries to get comfortable on it. Beyond the shelf with his helmets and radio on it, the only thing in the room that’s visibly well-used is the coffee table, the wood surface bedecked with ring marks from the previous owner. There are black scuff marks on it as well, his own contribution to the table’s appearance. It’s cheaper than getting a footrest, at the very least.
He sees her glance towards his bedroom and he’s suddenly glad he closed that door. She’s awkward, standing defensively, as if she expects some sort of attack - but not from him. She relaxes, almost, when she looks at him. It’s strange and he can’t put his finger on it, on any of the reasons she might have for behaving the way she does.
It’s almost not worth the attempt anymore, figuring her out, but he can’t seem to help himself. “Ready to go?”
She hesitates even as she nods. “Could you walk me back to the hotel?” she asks, addressing his maroon jumper. “Getting tired, I guess.”
“All right,” he agrees lightly, almost easily. Almost.
Her smile is tentative, her gaze avoiding his and going to his shelf. She blinks. “Why’ve you got motorcycle helmets?”
“To go with the motorcycle, I suppose,” he replies and opens the front door pointedly. “C’mon, you. Past your bedtime.”
She only stares at him, not moving. Not moving her feet, he should say. Her hand goes to her pocket, presses against the round shape easily visible there. Tight jeans, she’s got. He’s not looking.
“You’ve got a motorcycle,” she says, clearly incredulous.
He rolls his eyes. “What, you think the leather’s a fashion statement? That’s a practical jacket, that is.”
She takes a breath, nearly says a thought aloud. For better or worse, she leaves it unsaid and they head out into the night.
As they walk together, she has one hand in his and the other in her pocket and - if he believed in that stuff - he’d almost swear he could feel a touch on his soul. He shivers and wishes he’d not left his jacket behind, wishes he’d not taken her to the place he can’t call his home.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Where are they going? She wants to know, won’t ask, will only smile and adore him and it hurts, it hurts already because they’re always going to be going, always going to be moving, but they won’t always be going together.
She smiles with a mouth that isn’t hers and he thinks nothing of it. After all, his hands aren’t his hands, at once too callused and too soft; his ears aren’t his ears, at once too large and too small. Sunlight from her shoulders, her shoulders of shape and skin and structure, the sunlight from them melts upon his tongue, reflected spicy sweet, a pepper peach of photon.
The taste burns with the pain of growing, of regrowing, of pointless repetitive rejuvenation. It hurts less and he hears more and the question rings in his ears before she utters it, before the sounds drop from her mouth and spill into the air, spill and flee into the insubstantial air.
He thinks to answer and reaches on his plywood nightstand for his mobile before he’s fully woken. How he dials the correct number, he’ll never know.
“Rose?” he asks, speaks to her before he’s so much as sat up this morning. “Have you got plans for today?”
There’s a sort of noise from the other end, a muffled sort of mumble followed by “I need sleep, you git. It’s this thing, yeah, that humans do?”
“It’s seven thirty,” he counters, rubbing at his own eyes, picking up his watch to peer at it. Feeling a short moment of thankfulness that it’s not five a.m. after all, he blearily glances towards the windows. He does a quick calculation, realizes he’s had four or so hours of sleep. She might have about five, if she’s lucky.
“Seven thirty in the morning,” she agrees. “Git,” she adds after a pause, yawning as she says it. There’s no force behind it, no feeling besides affection.
He shakes his sheet loose from his leg, sprawls a bit across the bed, sprawls only a bit because that’s all there’s room for. “Is that a yes or a no?”
There’s another pause, a sort of sleepy, groggy pause that makes him smile indulgently. “What was the question?”
“Do you have plans,” he states.
“Dunno,” she replies with a small groan, sounding like she’s stretching a bit. Stretching out on a hotel bed, one arm above her head, her back arching until her top rides up past her navel. “Do I?”
“You might do, yeah,” he says, rubbing at his eyes.
She stifles a yawn. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
She keeps having these little pauses, but there’s never any hesitancy in them, only sleepiness. “What time?”
Give her a while longer to sleep, he decides, a while after that to get ready. “Eleven-ish?” he offers, staring up at the ceiling in what feels oddly like defiance. His chest hurts vaguely and then it passes.
“’mkay.”
“I’ll drop by,” he promises. “Bring a jacket. A practical one, mind you, thickest one you have.”
She makes a noise, possibly agreement. “Can I sleep now?” she asks, sounds more groggy than petulant.
“Yeah.”
“’night,” she mumbles and hangs up.
He holds the mobile in his hand, lies still until the sunlight shines too brightly through the blinds. “Morning,” he whispers quietly.
.-.-.-.-.-.
The R75 rumbles to a stop not too far from where she’s standing. She doesn’t give him more than a cursory glance, only brushes her hair back from her face. There’s a jacket folded over her arm, a light blue thing he hasn’t seen before.
“Oi!” he yells, not too muffled to be heard. He gets her attention and only then does he take off his helmet.
Her reaction is, as expected, one to remember.
Her mouth falls open and her eyes widen. She seems about to laugh, about to tell him he can’t possibly be doing what he’s doing. She’s more surprised than she should be. “You’ve got a bike,” she says, more than a little incredulous even with it directly in front of her. “How’d you get a bike?”
He keeps his face straight. “Built it.”
“Yeah?”
“No.”
She smiles, looks like she’d hit him if she were closer.
He grins back. Unbuckles the second helmet from where he has it fastened. Of the pair, it’s the one that smells the best and he went through the effort of adjusting the padding for a smaller head. Should fit. He holds it in a not-quite-offer. “Come with me?”
“And have you always run around taking candy from strangers?” he’d asked her nearly a week ago.
“Nah, just lifts,” she’d replied and now he can’t help but wonder.
She steps forward, reaches for the helmet. He doesn’t move to offer it further, to take it back, but she pauses. Some measure of common sense resurfaces within this girl’s skull and she thinks better.
Good, he thinks. Wants to think. She’s not enough of an idiot to run off with him.
Or maybe she is. “Where’re we going?” she asks, pulling her jacket on, pulling her hair into a loose ponytail.
“Tarragona,” he answers simply. “About forty-five minutes out.”
She takes the helmet from his hand, holds it with the ease of familiarity. “Can you actually drive this thing?”
He rolls his eyes. “Does she look dinged up? Or, for that matter, do I?”
She bites her lip, damming up a smile that spills out through her eyes. “The bike doesn’t,” the girl replies.
“Oi!”
Helmet on, she mounts up behind him without much trouble, scoots forward. Her arms wrap around his waist without a shred of awkwardness, wrap around and hold firm. She presses up against his back and he takes a hand from the handlebars to touch her hand in a question. Her arms squeeze yes.
He maneuvers out into traffic, leaving behind the sidewalk where they’ve ambled these past few nights, and she holds onto him without fear.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He loves the rumble and tug of the wind, the slight rattle of acceleration and the cacophony of his own creation, the noise shaking into his skull to shatter silence.
Her arms are tight around his waist, a hold trusting for all that it is secure. He’s ridden with others, with people who weren’t ready to hop on and fly through the open air above the open road. This girl, though, she’s stupid and brave.
They flit through what traffic there is, the rush dying the further out from the city they ride. The R75 purrs like a chainsaw, roars like thunder. She winces once, a motion he can feel against his back. In questioning response, he flexes his shoulders in a reverse shrug, pulling them down in a way she must feel, if not understand.
Her hand slips below his jacket, presses for a moment against his stomach. Those fingers rise in a jerky motion he can’t call a glide, rise and rest over his heart. Her palm presses and then her fingers tap, all together, a repetitive reproduction of a pounding heartbeat.
He laughs, sound muffled by his helmet and then ripped away by wind. Revving the motor, he laughs again as that tapping hand fists in his t-shirt in surprise. She loosens her grip enough to give him a slightly harder tap than before.
And he laughs, laughs again. He never laughs like this, hasn’t in years. His face hurts from grinning and oh, it’s the fault of this stupid, stupid girl. This madwoman.
“Insanity isn’t catching,” Fred had told him once, more than once. “So long as you don’t listen to it, of course.”
“You got yours from me, then,” he’d concluded and, smiling, she had rolled her eyes at him. Only Fred would do both at once, only her. Unique smiles have always been a weakness of his, grabbing his curiosity until he can’t help but provoke them.
The movement of her hand brings his mind back to the present and for once, it doesn’t hurt to leave the past, to think of it. The arms around his waist don’t so much hold as hug, soften and embrace him from behind. He’s tempted for a moment to pull off to a rest stop, to get off the road the soonest he can, and he’s not entirely sure why. To stop this; to see more of this; to interact face-to-face. There’s no telling.
He accelerates to keep himself from stalling, to keep the silence at bay, to keep those arms around him. The R75 rumbles and they fly. His roving mind moves to mythology, thinks of Zeus upon a thundercloud, a god upon an oncoming storm with Athena riding behind him. The woman fully grown, he muses once again, the embodiment of wisdom without ever the learning of it. Sprung from the skull of a god, delivering justice to an avenger and matricide, redeeming the damned man and freeing him of the wrath of the Furies.
It’s a stupid thought, really. He’d made a lousy god - there wouldn’t be a day off, for starters; he hates Sundays - and she’s certainly no Athena. Not in the wisdom department, at least. And it’s hardly as if they’re related, even if she does give him a splitting headache, pun intended.
She doesn’t have a father and he doesn’t have a daughter and that does not make them a fit for each other. That doesn’t make them match.
Something else does.
.-.-.-.-.-.
“’S beautiful,” the girl breathes and he takes her hand as if to touch the awe shining through her skin.
Red-tiled roofs tilt only enough to display their colours, a contrast at once vivid and dull as seen from the crumbling amphitheatre they stand upon. His jacket is draped over the metal railing around the perimeter, a modern addition, a modern precaution he can accept without liking.
“It’s not bad,” he agrees, picking his jacket back up. “C’mon.”
She looks askance at him but follows anyway, doesn’t seem to realize that she could pull her hand away. She never does seem to realize that. “Where to?”
“Everywhere.”
“Bit vague,” she comments, but it’s not a complaint. “You mean everywhere-everywhere or Tarragona-everywhere?”
“Tarragona-everywhere, for starters,” he replies, just to see her smile.
“More ruins, then?” she asks and he scoffs.
“Just a few, yeah,” he replies and, because she doesn’t seem to know, he explains a few things. “Tarragona used to have one of the biggest Roman Circuses in the Empire, for one thing. This city is built on ruins, around ‘em, beside ‘em, all that. ”
She’s stopped looking at the buildings they pass, is instead watching his face. “You really like ruins,” she says, asking him why without asking.
“’S like touching time,” he answers, shrugs. He’s not sure why he told her that, more than half expects one of her quick teases in reply. His expectations are proven wrong when he glances at her, finds her expression open, finds her vulnerable and lost.
“Or like time touchin’ you,” she says, voice soft.
“Sor’ of, yeah,” he says, trying to brush off whatever cloud of melancholy he’s put over her, but his words only make it worse. He’s hitting buttons blindly, resting his hand on the console only to have the entire thing spark and jerk into unexpected motion. It’s an accident he can’t seem to prevent.
She glances down, frees her hand from his for the sake of tucking her hair behind her ear. “So where’re we going?” she asks again, asks briskly, her voice wavering.
“Lunch?” Give her some time to get over whatever it is he’s done now. That’s a plan.
“’Kay,” she says.
Her hands are in her pockets and, annoyed, he leads the way.
.-.-.-.-.-.
The ice in her glass rings like chimes as she prods the cubes with her straw. Up and down for a while, then swirling in circles; he listens to it as she watches the crowd instead of him. There’s more than simple avoidance in this, more than your run-of-the-mill awkwardness.
They’ve never been awkward before, he realizes. Furious, irate, pissed off: yes. They’ve done all that and with energy to spare, but this is different. This is quiet and pulling away instead of loud and shoving forward.
It’s not like her to withdraw. She’s not that sort.
“Rose,” he says and she startles like she’s never heard him use her name before. But that can’t be right. He’s called her by name plenty of... at least once. Anyway, that’s hardly important. It’s not as if she calls him by name either.
“Y-yeah?” She bites her lip, blushes at her own hesitancy.
He pulls her back to the topic at hand, asks her with no small sense of repeating himself: “What d’you want to see?”
“Anything but the church. Cathedral, whatever.” She stops playing with the straw for a moment, sips through it, cheeks hollowing slightly, her eyes glancing away from him yet again.
“Didn’t peg you as being against religion,” he comments dryly.
“’M not,” she says, nearly protests.
He feels his eyebrows rise.
She bites her lip again, turns on her chair a little, facing out towards the plaza. “I don’t want to go to a church with you, okay? ‘S not important - we can go look at something else. Said something about an aqueduct, yeah?”
“Why not a church?” he asks.
Naturally, she balks. “Why d’you want to?”
“It’s not a bad building to look at,” he says with a shrug. “I’m hardly dragging you to Mass - don’t go for that sort of thing, me. Never said I wanted to, though, just that it was an option. Why’re you so set against it?”
“Leave it,” she tells him, crossing her arms defensively. “I just- I’ve got this friend, yeah? Had a bad experience at a wedding with ‘em and I’m not much for churches anymore.”
He shrugs in nonverbal acceptance, stays silent to let her talk.
She doesn’t talk, though; that’s the catch. She goes quiet, goes sad and quiet and there’s nothing he can do about it that won’t make her close up tighter.
They sit there for a time, not looking at each other, waiting for the food to arrive. It does and they eat, he wondering, she avoiding. Surprisingly, it’s the girl who breaks the silence.
Unsurprisingly, it’s with the world’s largest non sequitur.
“D’you believe in... dunno, anything?”
He blinks at her, his mind trying to track down what her thoughts could be, trying to trace her line of thinking. Church issues, here they come. Just what he needs.
Still, he mulls it over. “I believe that things happen,” he says after a moment. “And that because those things happened, more things will happen and will keep on happening. Everything has a cause. It’s a progression, sort of.”
“So you believe in what, logic?”
“Don’t call me Spock,” he tells her and she chokes on her drink, loudly and somewhat violently. “What?”
“Went down the wrong pipe,” she tells him once she’s done coughing. “’M fine. You were sayin’?”
He shrugs at her. “Cause and effect,” he says. “No such thing as a miracle, just an event with causes nobody’s thought to connect to it.”
She looks at him, asks him one of the big questions as if it’s a normal matter. “What about death?”
“What about it?” A friend, he thinks. A friend in a church at a wedding. And now death. He wonders. Was it really a wedding, or a funeral?
“What d’you think happens after we die?” she clarifies, playing soft, clinking music with her ice and the stir of her straw. It really does sound like chimes.
He shrugs again. “We rot.”
She blinks. “That’s it? You’ve got a two-word outlook?”
“Influence lives longer than the influencer,” he replies simply. “That’s all we get.”
That lip is bitten once more, chewed on for a moment. Another non sequitur follows. “What d’you think about the mind?”
“You asking me if I believe in telepathy again?” he asks.
It’s her turn to shrug. “Not like you answered the first time. But no, not really. Just a general sort of askin’.”
“About what I think the mind is?” he asks, just to be certain. She’s like Fred sometimes, this girl, except that she isn’t, never is. Spontaneous psychology is something he’ll always have to live with, it seems.
“Yeah,” she says, nods. “D’you think the mind and the brain are the same thing?”
“What do you think?” he asks. He should be asking what’s brought this on, but she’s engaged again, focusing on him.
“Asked you first,” she counters.
Rolling his eyes, he gives himself a second to eat by popping a piece of grilled veg into his mouth, by studying the slightly crooked tines of the fork. “I think,” he says, “that you can have a brain without a mind. So no, not the same thing.”
She leans forward, props herself up on the table with her elbows. “D’you think it could work the other way?”
“Mind without a brain?”
“Yeah.”
He chews.
She waits.
“Not naturally,” he says, swallowing. “And not with today’s tech.”
“So you’re not saying no, then?”
“Suppose I’m not.”
“Why’s that?” she asks, hair spilling over her shoulder, chin settled on her palm. Her fingertips touch sunburned cheek and she adjusts.
“The brain’s full of bits, neurons making connections and firing across synapses and growing dendrites and all that. You’ve got chemicals and electricity - just need to put it all together the right way and you could make a mind to go with a brain. Brain-substitute, maybe.” He shrugs. “Theoretically. Suppose there’s the issue of life, though.”
“Y’know,” she says almost tentatively, “I’ve a friend who said- says that life is just nature’s way of keeping meat fresh.”
If he weren’t busy noting her tense issues, he might have grinned at that. “Yeah,” he answers, “nature’s way, maybe, but humans still need the fridge.”
“Suppose,” she starts. Glances away and keeps on glancing.
“Suppose?” he prompts, trying to make those eyes meet his.
“Suppose,” she says, looking at him strangely, almost guiltily, “the brain-substitute is organic or whatever. Say you could imprint all the connections the same way as on the first brain. Would that be the same mind?”
He thinks about it. “If it was the exact same way?”
“Closest you could possibly get, yeah,” she agrees.
He thinks about it some more. “It’d be a copy. Same as the original - a mental identical twin, if you will, just born years later.”
She bites her lip, seems to have trouble looking him in the eye. “Would that make them the same person?” she asks.
He goes back to eating his veg, chews for a time. In the end, he has to turn it around. “D’you believe in souls?” he asks, knows he might be prodding at her church issues.
“I... I dunno.” She mulls it over, swirls her straw around noiselessly, the ice cubes having long ago melted. “There’s something that makes a person a person,” she concludes. “Dunno what that is, but if I’m going t’ point at anything and call it a soul, I’ll point at that.”
Not entirely what he was expecting as an answer, but with her, that’s a given. “Is it part of the mind? Part of what’s copied over?”
“If it is,” she says, hedging on that particular question, “then the mental twins really would be the same person.”
“Until they both start to live,” he agrees, gesturing with his fork. It surprises him, the amount he’s missed this sort of conversation. “They’d develop in different ways, after that. No way they couldn’t.”
“Then,” she says, frowning, “they wouldn’t be the same person.”
“Would’ve once been the same person,” he replies. “That sort of thing is only natural, though. Change.”
“Yeah, but,” she starts to say. Pauses. Finishes weakly: “Don’t like it, s’all.”
“I’m the same man I was last year,” he informs her. “And the year before that. I’m the same person I was when I was a kid and wanted to drive a train. I’m nothing like that child, but we’re still the same person.”
“You mean you still want to drive trains?” she asks in a somewhat blank way.
He rolls his eyes. “For your information: yes. But back to the point, I don’t think you can tell the mind not to change so long as it’s got an organic brain to be a part of. Anyway, if nothing ever changed, there’d be no point in living.”
She pokes at her rice with her fork, moving the yellow grains across her plate, back and forth. “Hurts, though,” she mumbles.
“Yeah,” he says, not quite as callous as his words might imply: “Growth has a tendency to do that.”
She sighs, tucks her hair back behind her ear. “Yeah,” she agrees. “Guess it does.” She says the words and she looks so small, so tiny and unprotected against all the growing he knows she’ll have to do. He wants to shield her, somehow, wants it to not already be too late.
But he can’t and it is. He can only do what he can do and no more.
The check comes and the waiter takes his card and they sit together in silence once more, the girl suddenly tense in a way that is somehow unrelated to awkwardness. He looks at her, raises his eyebrows in question.
She has something to say, something more to ask, perhaps. It’s strange, how this girl can ask him for his views on the afterlife and then balk at the most normal of questions, at the easiest of questions.
“I missed this,” she tells him, speaking as if she absolutely has to tell him now, before the waiter comes back and they leave. As if the moment they stand up and start to walk, all their conversation will shatter into pieces she’ll never be able to gather back up, let alone reassemble.
“Missed what?” he asks and is sure to ask gently.
“Talking,” she says and he thinks he knows what she means.
He nods a little, to her, to himself. “Me too.”
Her eyes grow wide and then the moment breaks, shattered by the waiter’s return. He slips his card back into his wallet, slips his wallet back into his pocket and by the time he’s done, whatever thought she’d had is long gone.
“C’mon,” she says, standing and reaching for his hand. “You were going t’ show me stuff.”
Pushing his chair in with one foot, he grabs his jacket, curls his fingers around hers. “Your wish is my command,” he tells her. “Just be careful what you wish for.”
.-.-.-.-.-.
Twenty minutes later, she’s still crying.
.-.-.-.-.-.
There’s a small alleyway he’s found, a small, almost secluded area where she just might be able to pull herself together in private. He led her here by the hand, pulled her and murmured to her words of ignorant comfort and impossible hope. People walk by only occasionally and, once they catch sight of the pair, they move quickly.
Her shoulders shake beneath his hands and his t-shirt is damp with more than sweat. He’s found the position that makes her cry the least, has spent some time floundering amid the multitude of emotional triggers this girl keeps locked down so tightly.
Pulling away makes it worse. Talking to her makes it worse. Hell, when she’d only glanced up at his face, that had made it worse. Every time she starts to calm down, something sets her off again, something small and tiny, something he can’t pin down or make sense of or prevent.
He has no idea what to do, has never had any idea what to do in this situation. He’s not a comforter, not a caretaker.
But that’s a lie, isn’t it?
He tries to think back, pulls his mind into the past when a young Susan, feeling abandoned by her divorcing parents, had come to him instead. When she’d come to him and cried and asked him to make it better, to fix it, to interfere. And so he’d tried.
This girl, though. For all the strange behavior and the threadbare explanations, she’s no weeping child, begging for him to lift what little weight she carries from her thin shoulders. No, she is much, much more than that.
She sniffles, her efforts for silence so very clear, so very futile. Her shoulders shake and she gasps and then she breathes, finally breathes in those deep, deep breaths that mean she might be done soon. This time, she might be. Those small hands unfist from his t-shirt, slip around to his back, and she keeps on breathing, cheek against his shoulder.
He drops a kiss onto her hair and, at last, she relaxes into him.
“’m sorry,” she whispers, her voice rough from crying, and he tightens his arms around her, rocks her so very gently in a way that once felt natural. “Didn’t mean t’...”
“Who died?” he wants to ask. “Your friend from the wedding or the funeral or whatever it was, how did he die?” and “Do I remind you of him that much?”
But he knows that once he starts, the other questions will follow. What does she think she’s doing with him? Is she paying attention to reality or trusting him because of a memory? Did she know before she came that there’s a train from Barcelona to Tarragona and back, that she wouldn’t be completely stranded if he turned out to be untrustworthy? Or did she not think at all, throw herself to the wind?
What is she running from?
She’s not yours, he reminds himself. She’s a stray you’ve picked up, and you can’t keep her, and if you can’t keep her, you can hardly take care of her.
He realizes she’s waiting for something, for a reply or a touch. Shushing her, he cradles the back of her head in his hand. “Just don’t go making a habit of this.”
She sobs a laugh. “Wasn’t plannin’ on it.”
“All right?” he asks as she eases back, as she glances to his face and proves herself unable to look at him.
She lets him go, steps back, and the sudden lack of her pressing heat gives him a shiver before his body readjusts. “Bit embarrassed, but yeah, ‘m fine.” She rubs at her face, looks at her hand and makes a noise of distaste. Her make-up is messed up and he stops himself from glancing down at his t-shirt. “Sorry,” she says again. “I don’t usually.... I’m not a crier, most of the time.”
“Didn’t think you were,” he replies simply. “Hold on a mo’.” He picks up his jacket to rummage through the pockets, only vaguely remembers what he’s stuck in there. It’s a small surprise when he finds the packet of tissues in there; he’s not sure when he picked those up or why he pocketed them. This sort of thing happens a lot for him, though, so he doesn’t pay it much mind.
The tissue offered and accepted, she cleans herself up while he pretends to not notice. He doesn’t hear her blow her nose and he certainly doesn’t see the way she almost reaches for him.
“I’ll take you back,” he decides. “Bit of a ride, but-”
“No,” she says and it’s the most forceful thing he’s heard out of her all day. “No, ‘m okay. I want to see. We were gonna do all sorts of stuff and I’m just- ‘m not sleeping well, s’all. I’m all right. We can stay.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I am.” She nods a lot, as if she can make up for a lack of certainly through movement.
He folds his jacket over his arm, leans against the wall. Watches her and knows there’s concern in his gaze. “What was that about?”
She’s instantly defensive and it’s to an unhealthy degree: he’s an expert on this sort of thing. Personal experience will tell a man volumes, when he uses it. “If I tell you, are you going to call my mum again?”
“Does she already know?” he asks, says it lightly, keeps it to simple curiosity.
The girl nods. “Yeah.”
“Then no,” he answers. Knows that if she’s lied, then he’ll have lied too.
She bites her lip, looks to the mouth of the alleyway. “Can I tell you tomorrow?” she asks, looks up at him like she’s got an ache in her head large enough to match the one she must have in her chest. “I just... We were gonna have fun. Can we do that?”
The promise of tomorrow is a lie. He can see that plainly but he agrees anyway, knows she needs this respite. Whatever this is, she’s been holding it inside for as long as he’s known her, almost three weeks now, probably longer. It’s amazing she’s kept it bottled up this long, whatever it is.
“Sure,” he says instead of warning her over what she wishes for. He’s learned that much.
She smiles at him weakly, weak in the way an exhausted marathon runner is weak. “C’mon, then,” she says almost brightly, moving away from his side, and already they’re moving, always moving. She’s happiest in motion, he’s found. They’re alike that way.
“D’you want chips?” he asks her suddenly, the question out of his mouth before it touches his brain.
She turns back to blink at him, but her expression isn’t entirely one of confusion. “We, uh, we just ate.”
“I know,” he says, brushing the stupidity off onto her instead of accepting it as his own. “But d’you want chips?”
There’s a moment as she looks at him, something soft and sad and lonely in her eyes, something like that joined by something else. The soft and sad and lonely meets familiarity and her entire face lights up. “Yeah,” she says, beaming at him. “Yeah, that sounds good.”
“Fantastic,” he says, a word that’s almost a sigh of relief.
“So where’re we going, then?” she asks with only a slight pause, letting him catch up before falling into step with him.
“No idea,” he answers honestly, grinning only to see her grinning back.
Smiling at him with the sudden joy he loves so much, the sudden joy he fears has never been real, she takes his hand.
.-.-.-.-.-.
<-- | -->
Author: rallalon | Rall
Beta: vyctori
Rating: PG, AU towards the end of Season One; 9!Smith.
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summary: He laughs like he’s forgotten that tomorrow is Sunday, like tomorrow isn’t a void he’ll never fill. She laughs with him, laughs like he’s the man she wants to be with.
A/N: PLEASE READ THIS BECAUSE OTHERWISE, YOU MAY MAKE ME VERY, VERY SAD. VERY! Okay, capslock off. As an American who has yet to watch Midnight and who is striving very, very, very hard to remain as spoiler-free as possible, I will ask you to kindly not use any spoiler-related icons should you choose to comment on this fic. I've been spoiled simply from scrolling down the community and glancing at icons - hence not posting for a while. Out of fear. I would like to be able to read your wonderful feedback with confidence and so I will ask you once again: please do not use spoiler-related icons to comment.
The Tourist
The Girl
The Runaway
The Puzzle
The Passenger
He takes her to dinner again, grins through dessert, and after that, they wander.
Her hand in his, he sets them to meandering through the streets, across plazas and through the market stalls that have yet to pack up. He watches her eyes instead of watching where they’re going, instead of looking at what it is she sees. It’s all there, painted across her face, better than any mural.
They keep to the lit areas and he keeps clear of crowds as best he can. They move and they keep moving, pausing only to turn, to laugh, to gaze into a window. He doesn’t go much into shops, him, and she seems to understand that, seems to take note of where she’d like to come back to without ever tugging him inside, without ever giving him a hopeful glance.
Her looks aren’t hopeful, not so much. Not so far as he can tell. “What?” he asks, almost believing he won’t mind the answer.
She takes him by surprise and shrugs, turning away from the window display and pulling at his hand. “I used to work in a shop,” she tells him when he follows. “’S weird, sometimes, looking back like that.”
“UNIT recruits shop girls?” he wonders aloud.
“When they react well after their shop gets blown up, yeah,” she replies. “Got excellent emergency reflexes, apparently.”
“Your job blew up?” he asks to be certain, rolls his eyes when she nods. “Anyone else an’ I think I might be surprised.”
“It’s how I met him,” she continues and he doesn’t need any clarification on that. Their walking slows, footsteps pausing, hesitating. Before they can stop completely, he pulls her out of the foot traffic, pulls her to the wall of the closest building.
Her hand holds onto his, a meager substitution for the contact she craves, and she looks up at him as if he could somehow fix her lack, could somehow fill her up with whatever it is she’s searching for.
It’s enough to terrify him, almost, the amount he wishes he could.
He brushes her hair back from her face, a motion completed before he thinks of it. Unconscious gesture or not, his hand is steady, fingers careful of the girl’s sunburned cheeks as he touches those damp strands. “People were injured?” he asks.
Her eyes, half-closed, flutter open. “W-what?”
He lets go of her hand, stops touching her. But he doesn’t step back, doesn’t waste movement. “I’d think that’s how you’d meet a doctor.”
“Wha- Yeah,” she agrees and looks down. “Wilson, the chief electrician, he... Yeah. Just sort of... happened. He was nice,” she adds in that guilty way of a mourner who’s never mourned. “Not really friendly or anything, but.... He was nice.”
“I’m sorry,” he tells her, his manners resurfacing after quite the hibernation.
“Not your fault,” she says, tells him this as if she thinks she might have to convince him of his innocence.
He hates moments like these: he knows he has to be reading her wrong, but he can’t think of any other way to interpret the look in her eyes, the tone of her voice.
He nods a bit, looks out into the street, and thinks of San Francisco.
She takes his hand.
“C’mon,” one of them says softly and they walk into the night.
.-.-.-.-.-.
They walk until she’s tired, until she’s hanging on his arm as well as his every word. Chuckling, he tells her she’s acting like she’s drunk.
She smiles at him and fakes a hiccup.
He laughs like he’s forgotten that tomorrow is Sunday, like tomorrow isn’t a void he’ll never fill. She laughs with him, laughs like he’s the man she wants to be with.
“‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’” he quotes to himself, mulls over a bit of Hemmingway in his mind instead of thinking about where his feet are leading him. He’s been moving on automatic for some time now, taking street after street to stretch this all out.
His feet stop and he doesn’t realize it until their arms are stretched out, until she’s pulling at just his fingers instead of his whole hand. “What’s wrong?” she asks.
“Didn’t think it’d be this hot of a night,” he explains, condescends a bit at her reaction. “Just putting away my jacket before I get heat stroke.”
Her eyes move from his face to the building and back in the warm lamplight. “You live here?” she asks, sounding like it’s such a surprise.
“My flat for now, yeah,” he agrees lightly enough.
Her fingers catch at a heavy leather sleeve before he can so much as turn away. “Can I-” She pauses, bites her lip. Looks up at the building.
He rolls his eyes at her. “Oh, right, like I was planning on leaving you on a street corner at two in the morning.” He takes her hand even as he thinks better of it. “C’mon.”
“I was only gonna ask if I could use your loo,” she tells him and he rolls his eyes again as they head inside. She was scared he’d leave her; he’s sure of it, just as he’s certain that the girl is a talented liar when she needs to be. “What floor are you?” she asks.
“Third,” he says and her hand slips from his.
“Race ya!” she yells and before he can protest at the immaturity, she’s off like a flash, dashing up the stairs.
His heart thumps and suddenly, there’s blood in his veins and adrenaline in the blood. There’s a grin across his face, unfamiliar from lack of use, as he takes off after her, long legs swallowing up the steps three at a time. She only manages to take them in pairs and he’s nearly caught up before they hit the landing.
She grabs hold of the railing and spins herself around the corner, vaulting herself on up as he nearly stumbles headfirst into a wall. She laughs and he grins wider and they’re rumbling up the stairs, sure to disturb the neighbors. She gains on the landings and he makes up for it on the stairs and by the time they’ve reached his floor, it’s an easy matter to lunge forward that extra step, to leap up onto that landing and grab her around her waist.
She’s facing him: she’d turned the moment she’d reached the top. He takes another step forward, away from the stairs, and swings her off her feet, swings her up into the air and against his chest. Her laugh next to his ear is delighted; her arms around his neck are strong.
His heart thumps and he sets her down before they can fall down the stairwell to their deaths. Her hair sticks to flushed cheeks; her tongue touches her parted lips for only a second. Her chest rises and falls with each deep breath, each breath so close to laughter. Her eyes are bright and so very alive in a face so very young. Half his age, he thinks and his hands jerk away from the girl barely twenty.
“C’mon, then,” he says briskly, means to say briskly. He comes off as abrupt instead. He ignores the question in her eyes, misinterprets it on purpose. “Far be it from me to keep you from the loo.”
He strides down the hall, pulls out his key. He’s got the door open before she reaches him, is inside before she can reach for him.
What the hell is he doing?
Maneuvering around the couch, he points to the door of the bathroom without looking at either it or her. “There you are. I’ll only be a mo’.”
It hits him, keeps hitting him, keeps making him ask himself: what the hell is he doing?
After shucking his jacket and leaving it on the couch, he takes cover in his room, hides in the small, cramped space. Doesn’t matter that she’s in the loo, doesn’t matter that nothing’s going to happen - that nothing was ever going to happen. Doesn’t matter, he’s still shaken, still shaking.
He shakes his head, breathes out slowly. Just the night, he knows. Food and drink and talk and running, that’s all it was.
For a reason he won’t name, he thinks of Grace for the first time in months. Wonders if he should call her before coming to the same conclusion he always does. His phone stays in his pocket.
He shakes his head again, tries to get his mind sorted. Focuses on what’s actually happening.
His t-shirt is damp from sweat, from the heat of his jacket and the sudden exertion up the stairs in said heat. He whips it off, pulls one of his lighter jumpers out of the half-open dresser drawer. Why he has so many jumpers when he’s in Barcelona, when he’s in Barcelona for the summer, he’ll never know. Not sure what he was thinking when he packed.
Probably that he only owned jumpers. It’s not out of the question.
He takes a moment to try to get the broken drawer shut, gives up. Pulling the jumper over his head, he thinks to fetch a beer from the fridge, but then he’d have to offer one and then she might stay. Sitting on the couch instead, he rummages through his jacket pocket, pulls out his keys and transfers them to the pockets of his jeans.
There’s a flush and the sound of the tap as he opens the small closet by the door. He’s hanging up his jacket when the girl steps out into the living room with the attached kitchenette. He turns only enough to look at her, to watch her taking in her surroundings.
The small kitchenette is on the other side of a counter that doubles as a table. It’s unused, looks as if not even the fridge is touched. Beyond the hum of the appliance and the sight of bananas ripening on the counter, one might think he doesn’t eat, doesn’t go back there at all.
The lumps of the couch can’t be detected until it’s sat on, until someone tries to get comfortable on it. Beyond the shelf with his helmets and radio on it, the only thing in the room that’s visibly well-used is the coffee table, the wood surface bedecked with ring marks from the previous owner. There are black scuff marks on it as well, his own contribution to the table’s appearance. It’s cheaper than getting a footrest, at the very least.
He sees her glance towards his bedroom and he’s suddenly glad he closed that door. She’s awkward, standing defensively, as if she expects some sort of attack - but not from him. She relaxes, almost, when she looks at him. It’s strange and he can’t put his finger on it, on any of the reasons she might have for behaving the way she does.
It’s almost not worth the attempt anymore, figuring her out, but he can’t seem to help himself. “Ready to go?”
She hesitates even as she nods. “Could you walk me back to the hotel?” she asks, addressing his maroon jumper. “Getting tired, I guess.”
“All right,” he agrees lightly, almost easily. Almost.
Her smile is tentative, her gaze avoiding his and going to his shelf. She blinks. “Why’ve you got motorcycle helmets?”
“To go with the motorcycle, I suppose,” he replies and opens the front door pointedly. “C’mon, you. Past your bedtime.”
She only stares at him, not moving. Not moving her feet, he should say. Her hand goes to her pocket, presses against the round shape easily visible there. Tight jeans, she’s got. He’s not looking.
“You’ve got a motorcycle,” she says, clearly incredulous.
He rolls his eyes. “What, you think the leather’s a fashion statement? That’s a practical jacket, that is.”
She takes a breath, nearly says a thought aloud. For better or worse, she leaves it unsaid and they head out into the night.
As they walk together, she has one hand in his and the other in her pocket and - if he believed in that stuff - he’d almost swear he could feel a touch on his soul. He shivers and wishes he’d not left his jacket behind, wishes he’d not taken her to the place he can’t call his home.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Where are they going? She wants to know, won’t ask, will only smile and adore him and it hurts, it hurts already because they’re always going to be going, always going to be moving, but they won’t always be going together.
She smiles with a mouth that isn’t hers and he thinks nothing of it. After all, his hands aren’t his hands, at once too callused and too soft; his ears aren’t his ears, at once too large and too small. Sunlight from her shoulders, her shoulders of shape and skin and structure, the sunlight from them melts upon his tongue, reflected spicy sweet, a pepper peach of photon.
The taste burns with the pain of growing, of regrowing, of pointless repetitive rejuvenation. It hurts less and he hears more and the question rings in his ears before she utters it, before the sounds drop from her mouth and spill into the air, spill and flee into the insubstantial air.
He thinks to answer and reaches on his plywood nightstand for his mobile before he’s fully woken. How he dials the correct number, he’ll never know.
“Rose?” he asks, speaks to her before he’s so much as sat up this morning. “Have you got plans for today?”
There’s a sort of noise from the other end, a muffled sort of mumble followed by “I need sleep, you git. It’s this thing, yeah, that humans do?”
“It’s seven thirty,” he counters, rubbing at his own eyes, picking up his watch to peer at it. Feeling a short moment of thankfulness that it’s not five a.m. after all, he blearily glances towards the windows. He does a quick calculation, realizes he’s had four or so hours of sleep. She might have about five, if she’s lucky.
“Seven thirty in the morning,” she agrees. “Git,” she adds after a pause, yawning as she says it. There’s no force behind it, no feeling besides affection.
He shakes his sheet loose from his leg, sprawls a bit across the bed, sprawls only a bit because that’s all there’s room for. “Is that a yes or a no?”
There’s another pause, a sort of sleepy, groggy pause that makes him smile indulgently. “What was the question?”
“Do you have plans,” he states.
“Dunno,” she replies with a small groan, sounding like she’s stretching a bit. Stretching out on a hotel bed, one arm above her head, her back arching until her top rides up past her navel. “Do I?”
“You might do, yeah,” he says, rubbing at his eyes.
She stifles a yawn. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
She keeps having these little pauses, but there’s never any hesitancy in them, only sleepiness. “What time?”
Give her a while longer to sleep, he decides, a while after that to get ready. “Eleven-ish?” he offers, staring up at the ceiling in what feels oddly like defiance. His chest hurts vaguely and then it passes.
“’mkay.”
“I’ll drop by,” he promises. “Bring a jacket. A practical one, mind you, thickest one you have.”
She makes a noise, possibly agreement. “Can I sleep now?” she asks, sounds more groggy than petulant.
“Yeah.”
“’night,” she mumbles and hangs up.
He holds the mobile in his hand, lies still until the sunlight shines too brightly through the blinds. “Morning,” he whispers quietly.
.-.-.-.-.-.
The R75 rumbles to a stop not too far from where she’s standing. She doesn’t give him more than a cursory glance, only brushes her hair back from her face. There’s a jacket folded over her arm, a light blue thing he hasn’t seen before.
“Oi!” he yells, not too muffled to be heard. He gets her attention and only then does he take off his helmet.
Her reaction is, as expected, one to remember.
Her mouth falls open and her eyes widen. She seems about to laugh, about to tell him he can’t possibly be doing what he’s doing. She’s more surprised than she should be. “You’ve got a bike,” she says, more than a little incredulous even with it directly in front of her. “How’d you get a bike?”
He keeps his face straight. “Built it.”
“Yeah?”
“No.”
She smiles, looks like she’d hit him if she were closer.
He grins back. Unbuckles the second helmet from where he has it fastened. Of the pair, it’s the one that smells the best and he went through the effort of adjusting the padding for a smaller head. Should fit. He holds it in a not-quite-offer. “Come with me?”
“And have you always run around taking candy from strangers?” he’d asked her nearly a week ago.
“Nah, just lifts,” she’d replied and now he can’t help but wonder.
She steps forward, reaches for the helmet. He doesn’t move to offer it further, to take it back, but she pauses. Some measure of common sense resurfaces within this girl’s skull and she thinks better.
Good, he thinks. Wants to think. She’s not enough of an idiot to run off with him.
Or maybe she is. “Where’re we going?” she asks, pulling her jacket on, pulling her hair into a loose ponytail.
“Tarragona,” he answers simply. “About forty-five minutes out.”
She takes the helmet from his hand, holds it with the ease of familiarity. “Can you actually drive this thing?”
He rolls his eyes. “Does she look dinged up? Or, for that matter, do I?”
She bites her lip, damming up a smile that spills out through her eyes. “The bike doesn’t,” the girl replies.
“Oi!”
Helmet on, she mounts up behind him without much trouble, scoots forward. Her arms wrap around his waist without a shred of awkwardness, wrap around and hold firm. She presses up against his back and he takes a hand from the handlebars to touch her hand in a question. Her arms squeeze yes.
He maneuvers out into traffic, leaving behind the sidewalk where they’ve ambled these past few nights, and she holds onto him without fear.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He loves the rumble and tug of the wind, the slight rattle of acceleration and the cacophony of his own creation, the noise shaking into his skull to shatter silence.
Her arms are tight around his waist, a hold trusting for all that it is secure. He’s ridden with others, with people who weren’t ready to hop on and fly through the open air above the open road. This girl, though, she’s stupid and brave.
They flit through what traffic there is, the rush dying the further out from the city they ride. The R75 purrs like a chainsaw, roars like thunder. She winces once, a motion he can feel against his back. In questioning response, he flexes his shoulders in a reverse shrug, pulling them down in a way she must feel, if not understand.
Her hand slips below his jacket, presses for a moment against his stomach. Those fingers rise in a jerky motion he can’t call a glide, rise and rest over his heart. Her palm presses and then her fingers tap, all together, a repetitive reproduction of a pounding heartbeat.
He laughs, sound muffled by his helmet and then ripped away by wind. Revving the motor, he laughs again as that tapping hand fists in his t-shirt in surprise. She loosens her grip enough to give him a slightly harder tap than before.
And he laughs, laughs again. He never laughs like this, hasn’t in years. His face hurts from grinning and oh, it’s the fault of this stupid, stupid girl. This madwoman.
“Insanity isn’t catching,” Fred had told him once, more than once. “So long as you don’t listen to it, of course.”
“You got yours from me, then,” he’d concluded and, smiling, she had rolled her eyes at him. Only Fred would do both at once, only her. Unique smiles have always been a weakness of his, grabbing his curiosity until he can’t help but provoke them.
The movement of her hand brings his mind back to the present and for once, it doesn’t hurt to leave the past, to think of it. The arms around his waist don’t so much hold as hug, soften and embrace him from behind. He’s tempted for a moment to pull off to a rest stop, to get off the road the soonest he can, and he’s not entirely sure why. To stop this; to see more of this; to interact face-to-face. There’s no telling.
He accelerates to keep himself from stalling, to keep the silence at bay, to keep those arms around him. The R75 rumbles and they fly. His roving mind moves to mythology, thinks of Zeus upon a thundercloud, a god upon an oncoming storm with Athena riding behind him. The woman fully grown, he muses once again, the embodiment of wisdom without ever the learning of it. Sprung from the skull of a god, delivering justice to an avenger and matricide, redeeming the damned man and freeing him of the wrath of the Furies.
It’s a stupid thought, really. He’d made a lousy god - there wouldn’t be a day off, for starters; he hates Sundays - and she’s certainly no Athena. Not in the wisdom department, at least. And it’s hardly as if they’re related, even if she does give him a splitting headache, pun intended.
She doesn’t have a father and he doesn’t have a daughter and that does not make them a fit for each other. That doesn’t make them match.
Something else does.
.-.-.-.-.-.
“’S beautiful,” the girl breathes and he takes her hand as if to touch the awe shining through her skin.
Red-tiled roofs tilt only enough to display their colours, a contrast at once vivid and dull as seen from the crumbling amphitheatre they stand upon. His jacket is draped over the metal railing around the perimeter, a modern addition, a modern precaution he can accept without liking.
“It’s not bad,” he agrees, picking his jacket back up. “C’mon.”
She looks askance at him but follows anyway, doesn’t seem to realize that she could pull her hand away. She never does seem to realize that. “Where to?”
“Everywhere.”
“Bit vague,” she comments, but it’s not a complaint. “You mean everywhere-everywhere or Tarragona-everywhere?”
“Tarragona-everywhere, for starters,” he replies, just to see her smile.
“More ruins, then?” she asks and he scoffs.
“Just a few, yeah,” he replies and, because she doesn’t seem to know, he explains a few things. “Tarragona used to have one of the biggest Roman Circuses in the Empire, for one thing. This city is built on ruins, around ‘em, beside ‘em, all that. ”
She’s stopped looking at the buildings they pass, is instead watching his face. “You really like ruins,” she says, asking him why without asking.
“’S like touching time,” he answers, shrugs. He’s not sure why he told her that, more than half expects one of her quick teases in reply. His expectations are proven wrong when he glances at her, finds her expression open, finds her vulnerable and lost.
“Or like time touchin’ you,” she says, voice soft.
“Sor’ of, yeah,” he says, trying to brush off whatever cloud of melancholy he’s put over her, but his words only make it worse. He’s hitting buttons blindly, resting his hand on the console only to have the entire thing spark and jerk into unexpected motion. It’s an accident he can’t seem to prevent.
She glances down, frees her hand from his for the sake of tucking her hair behind her ear. “So where’re we going?” she asks again, asks briskly, her voice wavering.
“Lunch?” Give her some time to get over whatever it is he’s done now. That’s a plan.
“’Kay,” she says.
Her hands are in her pockets and, annoyed, he leads the way.
.-.-.-.-.-.
The ice in her glass rings like chimes as she prods the cubes with her straw. Up and down for a while, then swirling in circles; he listens to it as she watches the crowd instead of him. There’s more than simple avoidance in this, more than your run-of-the-mill awkwardness.
They’ve never been awkward before, he realizes. Furious, irate, pissed off: yes. They’ve done all that and with energy to spare, but this is different. This is quiet and pulling away instead of loud and shoving forward.
It’s not like her to withdraw. She’s not that sort.
“Rose,” he says and she startles like she’s never heard him use her name before. But that can’t be right. He’s called her by name plenty of... at least once. Anyway, that’s hardly important. It’s not as if she calls him by name either.
“Y-yeah?” She bites her lip, blushes at her own hesitancy.
He pulls her back to the topic at hand, asks her with no small sense of repeating himself: “What d’you want to see?”
“Anything but the church. Cathedral, whatever.” She stops playing with the straw for a moment, sips through it, cheeks hollowing slightly, her eyes glancing away from him yet again.
“Didn’t peg you as being against religion,” he comments dryly.
“’M not,” she says, nearly protests.
He feels his eyebrows rise.
She bites her lip again, turns on her chair a little, facing out towards the plaza. “I don’t want to go to a church with you, okay? ‘S not important - we can go look at something else. Said something about an aqueduct, yeah?”
“Why not a church?” he asks.
Naturally, she balks. “Why d’you want to?”
“It’s not a bad building to look at,” he says with a shrug. “I’m hardly dragging you to Mass - don’t go for that sort of thing, me. Never said I wanted to, though, just that it was an option. Why’re you so set against it?”
“Leave it,” she tells him, crossing her arms defensively. “I just- I’ve got this friend, yeah? Had a bad experience at a wedding with ‘em and I’m not much for churches anymore.”
He shrugs in nonverbal acceptance, stays silent to let her talk.
She doesn’t talk, though; that’s the catch. She goes quiet, goes sad and quiet and there’s nothing he can do about it that won’t make her close up tighter.
They sit there for a time, not looking at each other, waiting for the food to arrive. It does and they eat, he wondering, she avoiding. Surprisingly, it’s the girl who breaks the silence.
Unsurprisingly, it’s with the world’s largest non sequitur.
“D’you believe in... dunno, anything?”
He blinks at her, his mind trying to track down what her thoughts could be, trying to trace her line of thinking. Church issues, here they come. Just what he needs.
Still, he mulls it over. “I believe that things happen,” he says after a moment. “And that because those things happened, more things will happen and will keep on happening. Everything has a cause. It’s a progression, sort of.”
“So you believe in what, logic?”
“Don’t call me Spock,” he tells her and she chokes on her drink, loudly and somewhat violently. “What?”
“Went down the wrong pipe,” she tells him once she’s done coughing. “’M fine. You were sayin’?”
He shrugs at her. “Cause and effect,” he says. “No such thing as a miracle, just an event with causes nobody’s thought to connect to it.”
She looks at him, asks him one of the big questions as if it’s a normal matter. “What about death?”
“What about it?” A friend, he thinks. A friend in a church at a wedding. And now death. He wonders. Was it really a wedding, or a funeral?
“What d’you think happens after we die?” she clarifies, playing soft, clinking music with her ice and the stir of her straw. It really does sound like chimes.
He shrugs again. “We rot.”
She blinks. “That’s it? You’ve got a two-word outlook?”
“Influence lives longer than the influencer,” he replies simply. “That’s all we get.”
That lip is bitten once more, chewed on for a moment. Another non sequitur follows. “What d’you think about the mind?”
“You asking me if I believe in telepathy again?” he asks.
It’s her turn to shrug. “Not like you answered the first time. But no, not really. Just a general sort of askin’.”
“About what I think the mind is?” he asks, just to be certain. She’s like Fred sometimes, this girl, except that she isn’t, never is. Spontaneous psychology is something he’ll always have to live with, it seems.
“Yeah,” she says, nods. “D’you think the mind and the brain are the same thing?”
“What do you think?” he asks. He should be asking what’s brought this on, but she’s engaged again, focusing on him.
“Asked you first,” she counters.
Rolling his eyes, he gives himself a second to eat by popping a piece of grilled veg into his mouth, by studying the slightly crooked tines of the fork. “I think,” he says, “that you can have a brain without a mind. So no, not the same thing.”
She leans forward, props herself up on the table with her elbows. “D’you think it could work the other way?”
“Mind without a brain?”
“Yeah.”
He chews.
She waits.
“Not naturally,” he says, swallowing. “And not with today’s tech.”
“So you’re not saying no, then?”
“Suppose I’m not.”
“Why’s that?” she asks, hair spilling over her shoulder, chin settled on her palm. Her fingertips touch sunburned cheek and she adjusts.
“The brain’s full of bits, neurons making connections and firing across synapses and growing dendrites and all that. You’ve got chemicals and electricity - just need to put it all together the right way and you could make a mind to go with a brain. Brain-substitute, maybe.” He shrugs. “Theoretically. Suppose there’s the issue of life, though.”
“Y’know,” she says almost tentatively, “I’ve a friend who said- says that life is just nature’s way of keeping meat fresh.”
If he weren’t busy noting her tense issues, he might have grinned at that. “Yeah,” he answers, “nature’s way, maybe, but humans still need the fridge.”
“Suppose,” she starts. Glances away and keeps on glancing.
“Suppose?” he prompts, trying to make those eyes meet his.
“Suppose,” she says, looking at him strangely, almost guiltily, “the brain-substitute is organic or whatever. Say you could imprint all the connections the same way as on the first brain. Would that be the same mind?”
He thinks about it. “If it was the exact same way?”
“Closest you could possibly get, yeah,” she agrees.
He thinks about it some more. “It’d be a copy. Same as the original - a mental identical twin, if you will, just born years later.”
She bites her lip, seems to have trouble looking him in the eye. “Would that make them the same person?” she asks.
He goes back to eating his veg, chews for a time. In the end, he has to turn it around. “D’you believe in souls?” he asks, knows he might be prodding at her church issues.
“I... I dunno.” She mulls it over, swirls her straw around noiselessly, the ice cubes having long ago melted. “There’s something that makes a person a person,” she concludes. “Dunno what that is, but if I’m going t’ point at anything and call it a soul, I’ll point at that.”
Not entirely what he was expecting as an answer, but with her, that’s a given. “Is it part of the mind? Part of what’s copied over?”
“If it is,” she says, hedging on that particular question, “then the mental twins really would be the same person.”
“Until they both start to live,” he agrees, gesturing with his fork. It surprises him, the amount he’s missed this sort of conversation. “They’d develop in different ways, after that. No way they couldn’t.”
“Then,” she says, frowning, “they wouldn’t be the same person.”
“Would’ve once been the same person,” he replies. “That sort of thing is only natural, though. Change.”
“Yeah, but,” she starts to say. Pauses. Finishes weakly: “Don’t like it, s’all.”
“I’m the same man I was last year,” he informs her. “And the year before that. I’m the same person I was when I was a kid and wanted to drive a train. I’m nothing like that child, but we’re still the same person.”
“You mean you still want to drive trains?” she asks in a somewhat blank way.
He rolls his eyes. “For your information: yes. But back to the point, I don’t think you can tell the mind not to change so long as it’s got an organic brain to be a part of. Anyway, if nothing ever changed, there’d be no point in living.”
She pokes at her rice with her fork, moving the yellow grains across her plate, back and forth. “Hurts, though,” she mumbles.
“Yeah,” he says, not quite as callous as his words might imply: “Growth has a tendency to do that.”
She sighs, tucks her hair back behind her ear. “Yeah,” she agrees. “Guess it does.” She says the words and she looks so small, so tiny and unprotected against all the growing he knows she’ll have to do. He wants to shield her, somehow, wants it to not already be too late.
But he can’t and it is. He can only do what he can do and no more.
The check comes and the waiter takes his card and they sit together in silence once more, the girl suddenly tense in a way that is somehow unrelated to awkwardness. He looks at her, raises his eyebrows in question.
She has something to say, something more to ask, perhaps. It’s strange, how this girl can ask him for his views on the afterlife and then balk at the most normal of questions, at the easiest of questions.
“I missed this,” she tells him, speaking as if she absolutely has to tell him now, before the waiter comes back and they leave. As if the moment they stand up and start to walk, all their conversation will shatter into pieces she’ll never be able to gather back up, let alone reassemble.
“Missed what?” he asks and is sure to ask gently.
“Talking,” she says and he thinks he knows what she means.
He nods a little, to her, to himself. “Me too.”
Her eyes grow wide and then the moment breaks, shattered by the waiter’s return. He slips his card back into his wallet, slips his wallet back into his pocket and by the time he’s done, whatever thought she’d had is long gone.
“C’mon,” she says, standing and reaching for his hand. “You were going t’ show me stuff.”
Pushing his chair in with one foot, he grabs his jacket, curls his fingers around hers. “Your wish is my command,” he tells her. “Just be careful what you wish for.”
.-.-.-.-.-.
Twenty minutes later, she’s still crying.
.-.-.-.-.-.
There’s a small alleyway he’s found, a small, almost secluded area where she just might be able to pull herself together in private. He led her here by the hand, pulled her and murmured to her words of ignorant comfort and impossible hope. People walk by only occasionally and, once they catch sight of the pair, they move quickly.
Her shoulders shake beneath his hands and his t-shirt is damp with more than sweat. He’s found the position that makes her cry the least, has spent some time floundering amid the multitude of emotional triggers this girl keeps locked down so tightly.
Pulling away makes it worse. Talking to her makes it worse. Hell, when she’d only glanced up at his face, that had made it worse. Every time she starts to calm down, something sets her off again, something small and tiny, something he can’t pin down or make sense of or prevent.
He has no idea what to do, has never had any idea what to do in this situation. He’s not a comforter, not a caretaker.
But that’s a lie, isn’t it?
He tries to think back, pulls his mind into the past when a young Susan, feeling abandoned by her divorcing parents, had come to him instead. When she’d come to him and cried and asked him to make it better, to fix it, to interfere. And so he’d tried.
This girl, though. For all the strange behavior and the threadbare explanations, she’s no weeping child, begging for him to lift what little weight she carries from her thin shoulders. No, she is much, much more than that.
She sniffles, her efforts for silence so very clear, so very futile. Her shoulders shake and she gasps and then she breathes, finally breathes in those deep, deep breaths that mean she might be done soon. This time, she might be. Those small hands unfist from his t-shirt, slip around to his back, and she keeps on breathing, cheek against his shoulder.
He drops a kiss onto her hair and, at last, she relaxes into him.
“’m sorry,” she whispers, her voice rough from crying, and he tightens his arms around her, rocks her so very gently in a way that once felt natural. “Didn’t mean t’...”
“Who died?” he wants to ask. “Your friend from the wedding or the funeral or whatever it was, how did he die?” and “Do I remind you of him that much?”
But he knows that once he starts, the other questions will follow. What does she think she’s doing with him? Is she paying attention to reality or trusting him because of a memory? Did she know before she came that there’s a train from Barcelona to Tarragona and back, that she wouldn’t be completely stranded if he turned out to be untrustworthy? Or did she not think at all, throw herself to the wind?
What is she running from?
She’s not yours, he reminds himself. She’s a stray you’ve picked up, and you can’t keep her, and if you can’t keep her, you can hardly take care of her.
He realizes she’s waiting for something, for a reply or a touch. Shushing her, he cradles the back of her head in his hand. “Just don’t go making a habit of this.”
She sobs a laugh. “Wasn’t plannin’ on it.”
“All right?” he asks as she eases back, as she glances to his face and proves herself unable to look at him.
She lets him go, steps back, and the sudden lack of her pressing heat gives him a shiver before his body readjusts. “Bit embarrassed, but yeah, ‘m fine.” She rubs at her face, looks at her hand and makes a noise of distaste. Her make-up is messed up and he stops himself from glancing down at his t-shirt. “Sorry,” she says again. “I don’t usually.... I’m not a crier, most of the time.”
“Didn’t think you were,” he replies simply. “Hold on a mo’.” He picks up his jacket to rummage through the pockets, only vaguely remembers what he’s stuck in there. It’s a small surprise when he finds the packet of tissues in there; he’s not sure when he picked those up or why he pocketed them. This sort of thing happens a lot for him, though, so he doesn’t pay it much mind.
The tissue offered and accepted, she cleans herself up while he pretends to not notice. He doesn’t hear her blow her nose and he certainly doesn’t see the way she almost reaches for him.
“I’ll take you back,” he decides. “Bit of a ride, but-”
“No,” she says and it’s the most forceful thing he’s heard out of her all day. “No, ‘m okay. I want to see. We were gonna do all sorts of stuff and I’m just- ‘m not sleeping well, s’all. I’m all right. We can stay.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I am.” She nods a lot, as if she can make up for a lack of certainly through movement.
He folds his jacket over his arm, leans against the wall. Watches her and knows there’s concern in his gaze. “What was that about?”
She’s instantly defensive and it’s to an unhealthy degree: he’s an expert on this sort of thing. Personal experience will tell a man volumes, when he uses it. “If I tell you, are you going to call my mum again?”
“Does she already know?” he asks, says it lightly, keeps it to simple curiosity.
The girl nods. “Yeah.”
“Then no,” he answers. Knows that if she’s lied, then he’ll have lied too.
She bites her lip, looks to the mouth of the alleyway. “Can I tell you tomorrow?” she asks, looks up at him like she’s got an ache in her head large enough to match the one she must have in her chest. “I just... We were gonna have fun. Can we do that?”
The promise of tomorrow is a lie. He can see that plainly but he agrees anyway, knows she needs this respite. Whatever this is, she’s been holding it inside for as long as he’s known her, almost three weeks now, probably longer. It’s amazing she’s kept it bottled up this long, whatever it is.
“Sure,” he says instead of warning her over what she wishes for. He’s learned that much.
She smiles at him weakly, weak in the way an exhausted marathon runner is weak. “C’mon, then,” she says almost brightly, moving away from his side, and already they’re moving, always moving. She’s happiest in motion, he’s found. They’re alike that way.
“D’you want chips?” he asks her suddenly, the question out of his mouth before it touches his brain.
She turns back to blink at him, but her expression isn’t entirely one of confusion. “We, uh, we just ate.”
“I know,” he says, brushing the stupidity off onto her instead of accepting it as his own. “But d’you want chips?”
There’s a moment as she looks at him, something soft and sad and lonely in her eyes, something like that joined by something else. The soft and sad and lonely meets familiarity and her entire face lights up. “Yeah,” she says, beaming at him. “Yeah, that sounds good.”
“Fantastic,” he says, a word that’s almost a sigh of relief.
“So where’re we going, then?” she asks with only a slight pause, letting him catch up before falling into step with him.
“No idea,” he answers honestly, grinning only to see her grinning back.
Smiling at him with the sudden joy he loves so much, the sudden joy he fears has never been real, she takes his hand.
.-.-.-.-.-.
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