Fic: In Human Hands (10/24?)
Title: In Human Hands
Author: rallalon | Rall
Beta: vyctori
Rating: PG13, AU towards the end of Season One; 9!Smith.
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summary: “He’s not my doctor,” she corrects, tries to.
“You act like he is,” he says and shrugs. “That’s good enough for me.”
The Tourist
The Girl
The Runaway
The Puzzle
The Passenger
The Victim
The Absent
The Found
The Determined
The Unaware
He keeps glancing to the door of the garage. All morning, glance, glance, glance. He thinks of mint tins and nervous tics, lets his mind linger for a moment on mint tins that aren’t mint tins, that aren’t half difficult to find. His mind lingers and easily finds another spot to linger on from there.
And another.
And another.
His hands are moving, eyes following, all automatic. He’s good at his job and except for the bumper he needs to weld back onto a certain unfortunate little hybrid, he doesn’t much need to focus.
Gradually, slowly, eventually, Monday morning approaches Monday afternoon.
He’s on his back when he hears her, beneath a Volkswagen and slowly getting dripped on and oh, there’s the problem just there. Grinning a bit to himself, he reaches up, tinkers to the point of satisfaction. He listens a little to Sanchez as he speaks to their newly returned guest, rolls his eyes once he hears the man actually call her “mi Rosita bonita.”
She giggles. It makes him pause, makes his hands still and his ears strain to listen and really, he’s being ridiculous. All he needs to do is wrap this up.
He stops listening, for a time.
When he feels a light kick on his foot, he pushes himself out, one wheel of the dolly swiveling oddly beneath his back. He looks out and looks up, about to ask a simple question to a fellow tinkerer, about to say, “What is it, big fella?”
The words catch in his throat, twist around oddly into words his tongue knows. The first three words emerge intact, the remaining two fading into confusion. He’s looking up at Pedro, Pedro Martinez who likes his motorcycles with a kick start, who likes black Nortons the best with an anecdote to prove it, who is actually good enough to be considered a coworker. And Pedro’s eyes are brown, his chin round.
He’d been expecting a lantern jaw when he’d looked up, he thinks. He just doesn’t know why. Who here has a lantern jaw? Blue eyes and a lantern jaw?
“Your girlfriend’s pissed off at you,” Pedro tells him helpfully and so he stops thinking about facial shape altogether.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Sanchez gives him an apologetic look over the girl’s shoulder when she turns, apologetic and a bit impatient. It’s a look he barely sees, his focus going to her face, her eyes, trying to read lines and reflection before she can tell him what he has or hasn’t done.
But Pedro was wrong. That’s not anger, not remotely close to anything as petty as outrage. It’s an impossible mistake to make, but it’s been made, by Sanchez and Pedro both if their expressions are anything to go by. She’s not angry.
She’s worried.
Fiercely, protectively worried. It’s the look she gets, talking with her hand over her empty pocket.
Immediately, he tells Sanchez they’ll take this outside. And then his girl nods, and then she’s polite. Crisp and polite and it raises his hackles even as he takes her by the hand.
“Are you all right?” he asks outside and this is the wrong question.
“Am I all right?” she repeats, echoes in disbelief that everyone within a block can understand, accents and languages no more a barrier than an open gate. “You- you git! Am I all right?”
“That’ll be a ‘no,’ then,” he assumes.
“What happened?” She’s demanding instead of asking and she’s almost as good at it as he is.
He has no idea, but knows better than to admit as much. “You tell me.”
“You collapsed,” she tells him and that’s when her voice wavers. “You were in hospital and you didn’t even tell me.”
“Sanchez told you.”
It’s a belated realization, but she sees it as an excuse. “Yeah,” she says, “that only took a week.”
He turns to the side, bites down his temper. It tries to fill up his throat and won’t be swallowed down. After all this, she’s the one who gets to be upset?
And then the demand: “What happened?”
“Domestics. Typical.” He can’t help but roll his eyes.
She shoves his arm, not being gentle with the wounded hospital patient. “D- don’t.” She swallows the word halfway through, starts again. “Don’t. I’m sick of this.”
His hearts stop.
“You can’t just shut me out whenever you want,” she goes on. “That’s not-”
“You’re one to talk.”
Somehow, their patch of sidewalk manages to be silent, bystanders and traffic going unheard.
Her eyes don’t waver from his. “What?” she asks.
“You’re one to talk,” he repeats, hitting that nerve again, striking it because she’s asked him to.
“I’m not the one who keeps shutting me out!” She’s lashing out from more than reflex, reacting with enough awareness to know where to hit. That she can see the target makes her far, far too close, even as she’s pulling back.
And maybe it sounds childish of him, but that’s not fair: “If I’m the one who doesn't give a shit, why’re you the one always walking away?”
“You’re the one always telling me to get lost,” she shoots back, already creating more space between them.
No. Not always. Just before. “I’m not telling you now.”
She turns away, arms crossed over her chest. When she speaks, it’s only her intent that addresses him. “Think I’ll wait the five minutes until the winds change, then.”
And he thinks to grab her arm.
He thinks to grab her arm, like some violent child pulling at its mother, like some idiot he doesn’t want to be. There’s an urge inside him that mixes poorly with humanity, a need that alters with the addition of testosterone and the confusion of self-assigned roles. His steady, empty hands beg to shake from it. It’s a pitiful command that swallows up hearts and head and chokes his throat. It’s small and pathetic and everything he doesn’t want to be.
His jaw clenches from it and he can feel far too many eyes on them, glares back at the bloke who’s bumped into him walking by. “We’re not doing this here,” he says to her, means it.
She matches his gaze, her eyes full of misunderstanding. “There you go again!”
He thrusts both empty hands into his pockets, pulls out one of them once it’s full. He shoves the ring of keys at her, holds it out pointedly. Shakes it at her once, twice, when she fails to get it. “Take - the - keys,” he tells her.
Her hand rises slowly, her eyes narrowing in confusion now as well as anger. Her fingers around metal, she holds his fingertips as much as she holds the keys. “What for?”
“Go back to the flat. I need to change into my civvies first and you need to- Dunno what you need to do, but we’re not having a row across an entire city.” He lets go and she nearly fumbles the keys onto the sidewalk, the metal jingling with an incongruously cheerful sound. For an instant, he thinks of a dream he might have had, a dream of cheerful bells ringing at the entrance of a pawn shop, cheerful bells with a soul lost on the shelves. It’s only for an instant and then he forces himself back to the present, back to the incomprehension in her eyes.
“You want me to meet you there,” she says, slowly piecing together the obvious. “To talk.”
He rolls his eyes. “You’re not half thick, today.”
She ignores his words, his tone, his everything. Her expression softens into unguarded confusion, the keys cradled in her palm. “...You’re letting me in.”
“Yeah,” he says, irritable, already turning back to the garage, and he’ll never understand why it takes her so long to grasp the simplest things, his stupid little ape. “I thought that was the point.”
.-.-.-.-.-.
Opening the unlocked door, he finds her sitting on the couch nursing a cuppa, almost huddled in on herself. She straightens up with a bit of a jump, almost moves like she’s about to stand up. Why’d she’d need to, he’ll never know.
There’s another mug on the coffee table next to his keys, tea bag still in it as the steam floats up. He doesn’t know if this is some sort of peace offering or not, isn’t sure that she doesn’t simply have some sort of nervous tea-making habit. There are stranger things in the universe.
“You cooled off yet?”
She swallows, nods. Speaks to his shoulder. “Yeah.”
He sits down next to her, gives her arm a nudge. She’s sitting in the middle of the couch and while he doesn’t really need to make her scoot over, he does need her to look at him.
She does.
“Good,” he says.
That hovers between them for a small moment. Her expression is one he can’t quite read, can only almost understand, and for some reason, he feels he should have said “fantastic” instead, even though the word really wasn’t called for. Fantastic. It makes her smile.
When he says it, at least. When he only thinks it, she looks down, studies her tea instead of matching his gaze. It takes him a moment to realize she’s got no idea what’s in his head, jars him when he thinks for the first time that no, she’s not able to understand what’s he’s thinking by looking at him.
And it takes him entirely by surprise that he wants her to be able to.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He blinks out of his thoughts, caught off-guard by the sudden return to verbal communication. His mind backtracks as far as it can in its startled state, gets all the way back to saying good instead of fantastic and- Oh wait. Hospital.
“You weren’t exactly around to tell,” he answers with a shrug, picking up the cuppa she’s made him from the table. He takes a sip as if to show that yes, he is aware of the things she does, that he does wonder when it was she learned exactly how sweet he likes it. Besides, a full cup is a good prop. Something for the hands and mouth and eyes.
“You could’ve called me. It’s that thing, yeah, that you do with your phone?”
He wants to grin at how much she’d sounded like him, there. He’s contagious. Still, he forces himself to sober, metabolizing humour like chemical compounds, breaking it down into pieces that can’t so easily affect him. He’s unsmiling as he replies, “I did call you.” There’s an unspoken don’t be stupid in his voice.
“You said you had a couple days off from work, not that you’d collapsed.” She says the word like he’d died or something.
“That would’ve been a fun chat,” he says, hoping she won’t be so dense as to miss his reference as he mimics her London accent. “‘Hi, called to say I’m stupid.’” That wasn’t so long ago, her trying to tell him why she hadn’t asked him for help.
She doesn’t exactly look down, but she doesn’t exactly look at him either. He calls her back to him by name.
“Rose, I was dehydrated. I’m dressed for Lancashire in Barcelona and I wasn’t drinking water. I’m not dying. I called ‘cause I was bored, not ‘cause I needed someone to hold my hand while I was on my deathbed.” It’s as simple as that and that should be the end of it.
Obviously, it’s not.
“Are you sure?” she asks, putting her mug down.
“Am I what?”
“Are you sure you’re not dying?” she clarifies, as if it’s a reasonable thing for her to be wondering at. “That nothing weird is going on with your body.”
He stares at her a bit.
“Well? Are you?” She prods him with words instead of her elbow.
He thinks he prefers the elbow.
“I’m dying at the same rate you are,” he tells her. “Just like everyone else who doesn’t have cancer.” His gaze falls slightly, dips from her eyes to her cheeks, that soft skin bordering on tan instead of simply burnt. “Most people call it living.”
“You’ve got thirty years left,” she says, as if this is the most horrible thing to ever occur to her. As if it is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, throwing someone’s mortality in their face.
“You’re a bright little ray of sunshine, aren’t you?” It’s hard not to snipe at her, after that. “I could be hit by a bus tomorrow - how’s that for a lifespan?”
“Stop it.”
“I’m old,” he tells her flatly. It’s not something he believes, merely something she needs to hear. Forty-three isn’t a bad year, really, not unless it’s seen through a child’s eyes. “I’m seven years - less than that - from fifty. And for your information, that means I’ve got between thirty and forty years left. Maybe even forty-five. Hardly fair, writing me off at seventy-three.”
“Stop it.”
There’s more force in that gaze than he’d thought her capable of, more fear than he can bring himself to acknowledge. He wants to call this overreacting - it is overreacting - but the fear is real in her eyes, real and true and somehow justified.
“You’re the one who brought it up.”
“You don’t need to be cruel about it!”
He’s the one being cruel. “Rose, you’re hardly about to stick around for a decade or three.”
She takes the blow like the attack that it is. “Will you stop talking like that?”
“I’m not dying. And one bout of falling down from being thirsty doesn’t mean I’m a brain-damaged cripple.” He says that and her eyes widen, slightly, subtly, and he could hit himself for giving her something else to get into a panic over. “I’m all right. I’m fine. I’m- I’m fantastic.”
She looks at him like she’s more than half a mind to disagree.
He rolls his eyes, as annoyed at his own failure to make her smile as he is with her idiocy. “What, do you need to check my pulse? Take my temperature? Find some soup and feed me by hand?” He looks at her pointedly over the lip of his mug, takes an overdramatic sip.
She doesn’t waver. “You’re not allowed to die on me.”
“Right, because you’re really hanging around that long,” he snaps, never mind that he’s already gone too far, already shoved her back behind a wall of sarcasm.
Her jaw tightens and her breathing is so slow that it can’t not be controlled. Her eyes are finally looking back into his, really looking, but now that he has them, he doesn’t see what he was looking for. She’s demanding, searching, looking at him as if she’s been waiting for him to look back at her, not the other way around. As if she’s still waiting for him to look back at her, as if he’s yet to match her gaze.
It’s a feeling he knows. It’s a feeling he just had. “I can’t read your mind, Rose. You can tell me what’s wrong, or I can start throwing around words like ‘displacement’ and ‘misdirected anger’ - and no one wants that.” He remembers how Fred used to psychoanalyze him: there’s little more annoying.
She breathes out, mumbles a mumble that’s more of a mutter. “Can’t you just...”
“Let go?” He’s tired of that, sick of watching her break herself apart from the inside.
“Stay safe,” she finishes quietly, and it turns irritation upside-down, turns exasperation on its head.
He places down his mug next to hers, twists on the couch, brings his leg up onto the cushion as he turns to face her more fully. Really, it would be nice if, just the once, the concern was actually about him, instead of merely directed at him. “Your doctor’s sick,” he says, almost says softly. “I get that. Stop taking it out on me and I might even be sympathetic.” There’s some sarcasm in that, but none of it biting. All the same, it fails to make her smile.
“He’s not my doctor,” she corrects, tries to.
“You act like he is,” he says and shrugs. “That’s good enough for me.”
That’s not anger turning her cheeks red. “He’s more of a the,” she mumbles.
He’d have to grin at that, if it weren’t for his question: “Does he have a name?”
“S’pose he does,” she agrees in her patented I’m not going to tell you way. It’s not far off from the response he’d been expecting.
Now for the important questions: “Is he getting worse?”
“He’s still....” She trails off, her gaze wandering away. She takes a breath. “Still- still sick. And the longer he is, the worse his chances are.”
It’s always better when it’s quick, he thinks. Yes or no, life or death, safe or gone; none of this sticking around and waiting forever. He could never stand the wait. As hopeless as the search for that watch of hers is, it must be almost a relief for her. Something to do. An action to take.
Her head turns, her eyes look, and he realizes he’s got a hand on her shoulder. He lifts his fingertips, stops the circling of his thumb, and her hand rises to hold his in place. They nod at one another and he’s uncertain as to what words she’s found in the silence.
Slowly, he brings his thumb to circle over cotton, beneath a human palm, and she lowers her cheek to the back of her hand, her hair falling over his wrist. She starts to speak, her words fading as quickly as he hears them. “But that’s...”
He stills his hand, tries to. “What?”
“I- I want... I need you to tell me. When things go bad. I’m here an’... an’, okay, maybe I won’t be around for the next thirty, forty-five years, maybe I’ll get hit by the bus tomorrow,” she says and the simple acknowledged possibility of it winds him. “But that’s maybe then and I’m definitely here now. So... I’m here.”
She’s shifted as she’s spoken, has turned to sit cross-legged and sideways on the couch, her knees bumping against his shin, resting against his shin, both of them turned sideways to better... to better sit. He releases her shoulder and she holds his hand in her lap, making him realize that he can’t relinquish contact, only control.
She’s leaning forward, his hand between hers, her hands above crossed, bare shins; above crossed, bare skin, the blade of his hand is brought to rest against lightly, so lightly, afraid to press. Her eyes search the length of his arm before snapping back to his face, his girl looking almost flustered.
“Here and now,” he agrees. “I can live with that.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” It’s official. He can’t refuse her.
Her smile falls down onto their hands and he can see it, can see a future where she lifts his hand in both of hers and brings his knuckles to her lips in soft contact, as light as a sigh, savoring the slight touch, taking as much as she dares before she dares to dare for more. It’s a future and he can see it. He can see it.
He’s stopped breathing and when he realizes she has too, he grins hugely, the force of it spilling through him, a flash flood of unspecified emotion that leaves his mouth hurting, that brings her to grin back in delighted confusion.
“Fantastic,” they say in unexpected unison and laugh until it hurts.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Another night at Els Encants.
Her jaw sets and her eyes flash, but her hair is soft beneath his lips, her hand sure when she reaches for his.
He doesn’t know how long this can last.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Her breath is hot as it spills over his fingers. Lips and sound try to press into his cupped palm, her mouth held shut by his thumb beneath her chin.
“You can’t say,” he tells her, not removing his hand from over her lips. “You know that: you can’t say.”
The look she gives him over his hand is one he’s sure he once saw in the mirror. Almost sure, almost, almost a brown he once had but never with that feel. She nods all the same, nods beneath his palm.
You never say, her eyes tell him, accuse him despite this. Brown speaks with the sound of earth, of the Earth. A thousand miles an hour she gives him, only moving away at sixty-seven times that speed. How many words in a mile? Even he can’t read that fast. Her words are so linear, so separate, so sharp and alone instead of round and whole.
“I can’t say,” he corrects. “Neither of us.”
Her lips curve against the swirling lines in his skin. His palm reads the bumps in her sound, fingertips finding the spoken Braille.
Both of us, she says.
“Blind little ape,” he calls her.
Her hands fold around his and she lifts his palm to cover her eyes instead of her soft, lonely mouth. “I don’t mind.”
.-.-.-.-.-.
“You should,” he insists.
She stares at him.
“What?” he asks.
“Why the sudden interest in me callin’ my mum?”
He tries to shrug it off, tries to ignore eyes that should do more than question. Eyes that should speak, but don’t. “’Cause if she gets worried, she’s got my phone number, and I don’t want to hear about it,” he answers and that sounds true enough.
She hears it as true enough.
“I just... don’t like to,” she explains.
“Mum like yours...” he starts to say, plays at being understanding.
She shoves his arm. “That’s not it.”
“Then tell me.” He shifts on the grass, sprawling a bit rather than sitting cross-legged the way she’s wont to do.
The look she gives him is skeptical. “Really?”
“Yeah, really,” he responds, rolling his eyes. “Wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t going to listen.”
“Didn’t ask,” she points out.
“Well, in that case...”
She swats him, has to lean forward to do it.
He grins, glad to get her to relax, crosses his legs at the ankles, feels the unevenness of the ground beneath his hip. Grass presses up into his palm, his palm pressing down into grass, touching and touched. It feels so still, the movement, once the rider is in the car, once the component is within the system. “All right then,” he says once he’s done musing on inertia. “Rose Tyler, will you explain your stereotypical teenaged behavior?”
“I’m twenty,” she says, stressing the number the way he needs her to.
“S’why I’m askin’ you t’ explain it.” It was such a clear shot.
Another swat.
He grins wider.
She holds out, almost. Ducks her head down, stroking her hair behind her ear with one shy hand. She glances up to his eyes, granting the forgiveness of the entertained.
“My mum doesn’t like me traveling,” she says, giving him the light answer. He can tell. “That’s it really.”
But of course it never is. “The traveling or the traveling with UNIT?”
“UNIT.” There’s not so much as a pause to consider. “Makes her nervous.”
Especially after the captain died, he thinks but doesn’t say. He nods along to this, understanding, and - miracle of miracles - she suddenly opens up.
“It didn’t even start with UNIT,” she tells him, leaning forward a little, her eyes needing to hold his. “I mean, that’s big, yeah? But I got a job at a shop - at a Henrick’s - and she thought it was goin’ t’ my head. Makes you tired, y’know? Being told that anything- anything fantastic you want to do has to be out of your reach.”
“Or that it’s ‘against the rules’,” he agrees, stretching out the phrase. “For no sane reason, mind.”
“So sick of that,” she agrees with a conspirator’s smile, her mouth mimicking the grin of a small, trapped boy he’d once seen in the mirror.
Both of them. It’s a thought that occurs to him, strong and hard and jarring, because he never wants to think of her trapped inside a glass cage and clamouring be allowed to fly. He never wants to think of her as the only child left out in the cold. He never wants to think of her being like him, even when she is, even when he’s making her so.
“That why?” he asks, abruptly needing to know.
It brings her up short, his sudden change of mood. “That why what?”
“That why UNIT.”
There’s that pause before she answers, that quiet revision of truth he knows he can’t catch. “I wanted t’ go,” she says. “S’all.”
“But why’d you want t’ go?”
She answers him with her eyes before she does with her mouth. Brown speaks and the grass is still beneath his hand, feels calm and stable despite the flow of photosynthesis and the intake of compounds. The ground is so still beneath his hand and he keeps waiting for it to move, to prove to him its motion.
But it doesn’t. It doesn’t and he feels that lack and her eyes ask him that, ask him what he feels hurtling beneath him and the answer is nothing. Nothing at all.
Sometimes, her eyes tell him, you just need to feel something move.
“I said no, the first time,” she admits. “And it- oh god, watching it disappear. There are days, y’know? When your entire life could be different and you feel it. You just sit there and you think: it doesn’t have to happen this way. And when you finally get the chance... ‘s scary.”
“Do you regret it?” he almost fully asks.
“No,” she says, says it strong, interrupting regret. Her hands cover his, press down on the hand pressing down against the grass. She leans forward, leans into it, and if he looked up, moving only his eyes, he could just see her hairline, brown beneath the blond. But he doesn’t look up, only looks forward. At her eyes, insistent with certainty. At her mouth giving life to the words, “Never will.”
“Okay then,” he says and his light words can’t find a tone to match them, can’t find breath to support them.
Her hands lift from his and he sits up, sits up straight instead of lounging, and there’s distance between them again, sudden and far too large to be called intangible.
“D’you still think I should call my mum?” she asks, already knowing the answer, familial guilt taking hold in the tilt of her head.
“Yeah,” he says and she sighs.
“She’s goin’ t’ ask me t’ come home again,” she tells him, somehow unaware of the way it brings him to wince inside himself.
“Yeah?” he says and she sighs a different sigh.
“I can’t.” Her words are strong for all that she’s resigned. Resigned, not regretful.
She wasn’t lying about that, and strange things happen inside him at the thought.
“Then don’t,” he says, shrugging, because he’s learned that sometimes, it really is that simple.
“Don’t call?”
“Don’t leave,” he corrects. Corrects, not begs. “If you can’t go, don’t. Basic logic.”
Her eyes search his face, wander across his features as if checking against some internal map, some eternal map, and then she nods. “Makes sense.”
“I do that, on occasion.”
“Once or twice, yeah,” she agrees, tongue peeking out between her teeth as she gives the jab, as he takes it, as he feels it, light and playful and meant only for him.
.-.-.-.-.-.
There’s a hand on his shoulder.
Human and large - male - and smells like a bloody sea, smells like salt and mist and death on a shoulder made of snow and ruin. Two of a kind that isn’t kind at all.
“You two are so sweet.”
A pepper peach of photon in the light from her hair, but his chestnut burnt. Was shorn and set ablaze until proteins broke apart, amino acid acting like acetic, like the Alps. Hannibal. Hannibal into the closet.
“Love the paneling, by the way.”
And out of the closet. Never inside, a different three, a different, a different three, a two with a one, not a three. Two plus one equals one plus two. Three equals three. There’s a difference. Two plus one.
Plus one.
Plus one, but better with....
Better with...?
.-.-.-.-.-.
Lantern jaw, he remembers when he wakes. Who does he know with a lantern jaw?
.-.-.-.-.-.
It occurs to him sometime during the day - a Wednesday, another Els Encants day - it occurs to him that he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.
When is she going to give up?
.-.-.-.-.-.
Not going home isn’t the same as not leaving.
.-.-.-.-.-.
“What’re you reading about?” he asks, doing his best not to read over her shoulder.
She turns the page with mismatching fingers and he blinks until he can recall when they are. “Madness,” she replies simply.
“Always so happy,” he replies, but the sarcasm falls down the cracks in his façade. They were. Always so happy.
“Isn’t it pretty to think so,” Fred muses. “Ernest always did have a way with endings.”
“Charlie was better.”
“Complete worlds, but cardboard characters,” she answers, turning the page once more, reading at a speed that makes sense to him. “Dig too deep and they simply have nothing beneath.”
“The Signal Man,” he says, begins to say.
“Yes, you did always like trains.” She smiles. “I remember. We were going to go, before.”
“Before?” he asks, because he should remember. Burnt chestnut and the popping of the shell serve as a barrier to memory.
“Madness,” she says in the tone of one getting back to the point. “I’m reading about porphyria.”
He looks over her shoulder now, peers around the high collar and down into the display. It was so much easier when he was taller, she shorter. “Why?”
“It’s boring,” she says, “being dead.”
And he nods because - when push comes to shove - he can relate.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Thursday is not an Els Encants day.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Thursday is not an Els Encants day, but it is a day that ends with her on his couch, her head on his shoulder.
“Keep reading,” she mumbles against cotton. “’M just closin’ my eyes, s’all.”
She drifts off and he lets her sleep, lets her stay there, warmer than any blanket, human-hot against his side, around his embraced arm. She refuses to relinquish his limb, relaxes into him only after he relaxes into her. He waits a time to wake her, waits until his own sleep attempts to approach and crowd the couch with sleep’s own ghosts. He almost wants to sleep, tonight.
Almost.
He wakes her up at two in the morning and then he calls her a cab.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Bright blue eyes, so bright, blinding and bright, the eye of a storm, his storm but not his eye.
“Grand father,” she calls him. “My grand, grand father.”
“Go to bed, Susan.”
“Pacifist not passive.”
“Go to bed.”
Her feet swing in the air, her hands on the shining table. “Passive-ist.”
“Susan.”
“Everyone was,” she adds, slipping down from metal, slipping down to stand. “But you, I mean.”
“I shall count to ten,” he tells her, his voice old from arguing.
“Let me stay up,” she begs, stubborn begging, toes pressing into cracked pavement as if to crack it further, to take root. To force her way through and grow there.
“I laid you to rest, child.”
“I know,” she says, youthful indulgence in her storm’s eyes: “But you forgot to tuck me in.”
.-.-.-.-.-.-.
“S’ been a week,” his girl tells him, her elbows planted against the tabletop, her chin in her hands. They sit side-by-side at the window seats, two of three stools occupied.
Beyond the glass, the world walks on at 2.5 miles an hour instead of sixty-seven thousand. It’s easier to watch, simpler to understand. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Long week,” he says.
And again: “Yeah.”
The world walks on and he hooks his feet around the legs of his stool, prodding at a napkin with one finger, watching the crumbs bounce slightly as he taps the paper beneath them. The streets are full and moving and filled with a city’s semblance of routine. Give it another week, though, and it’s bonfires and correfocs, he muses. Amazing, what can change in a week.
She’s looking at him, but he’s not looking back.
“What happens,” she says, says and stops.
He doesn’t ask, eyes scanning the crowd. Not for anything in particular. Just to look. To see if there’s anyone... anyone. He frowns absently, drinks his coffee and gains a stronger grimace. Taking it black doesn’t work, for this stuff, but moving to the table with the creamers means moving away, means interrupting her pause.
“What happens,” she says again, and this time he looks to her, his girl with a throat too tight for words. “If he dies too. What happens?”
A man will be dead. That’s what happens when a man dies. He’ll be dead and this girl will mourn him, him and the captain both.
“What happens to you, you mean?” he asks, because that’s the question he can answer. The question he wants to answer.
“To the world,” she replies, says it with all the seriousness of a child.
“Keeps on turnin’, I s’pose.”
He says it, and he can feel her looking at him, can feel her eyes on the side of his face as he folds his napkin shut, traps crumbs inside the mass-produced blue paper. Some have already escaped, bumps of former banana bread dotting plastic marble.
“That’s not-”
“I know,” he says, an interruption without a sideways glance. “The entire world changes,” he says. “I know it does. One man in the world alive yesterday who isn’t today and the entire world changes.”
It’s unexpected, the way he has to blink his eyes clear when he says this, the way something small tries to grow, grow and push its way up his throat like some grotesque mask bent on fusing to his face, bent on changing him into what he isn’t. It’s unexpected, unexpectedly painful.
She takes his hand, he holds on tight, and the world never does stop turning.
“...I miss Jack,” she says at last.
Yeah, he almost says, not knowing why. Me too.
.-.-.-.-.-.
<-- | -->
Author: rallalon | Rall
Beta: vyctori
Rating: PG13, AU towards the end of Season One; 9!Smith.
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summary: “He’s not my doctor,” she corrects, tries to.
“You act like he is,” he says and shrugs. “That’s good enough for me.”
The Tourist
The Girl
The Runaway
The Puzzle
The Passenger
The Victim
The Absent
The Found
The Determined
The Unaware
He keeps glancing to the door of the garage. All morning, glance, glance, glance. He thinks of mint tins and nervous tics, lets his mind linger for a moment on mint tins that aren’t mint tins, that aren’t half difficult to find. His mind lingers and easily finds another spot to linger on from there.
And another.
And another.
His hands are moving, eyes following, all automatic. He’s good at his job and except for the bumper he needs to weld back onto a certain unfortunate little hybrid, he doesn’t much need to focus.
Gradually, slowly, eventually, Monday morning approaches Monday afternoon.
He’s on his back when he hears her, beneath a Volkswagen and slowly getting dripped on and oh, there’s the problem just there. Grinning a bit to himself, he reaches up, tinkers to the point of satisfaction. He listens a little to Sanchez as he speaks to their newly returned guest, rolls his eyes once he hears the man actually call her “mi Rosita bonita.”
She giggles. It makes him pause, makes his hands still and his ears strain to listen and really, he’s being ridiculous. All he needs to do is wrap this up.
He stops listening, for a time.
When he feels a light kick on his foot, he pushes himself out, one wheel of the dolly swiveling oddly beneath his back. He looks out and looks up, about to ask a simple question to a fellow tinkerer, about to say, “What is it, big fella?”
The words catch in his throat, twist around oddly into words his tongue knows. The first three words emerge intact, the remaining two fading into confusion. He’s looking up at Pedro, Pedro Martinez who likes his motorcycles with a kick start, who likes black Nortons the best with an anecdote to prove it, who is actually good enough to be considered a coworker. And Pedro’s eyes are brown, his chin round.
He’d been expecting a lantern jaw when he’d looked up, he thinks. He just doesn’t know why. Who here has a lantern jaw? Blue eyes and a lantern jaw?
“Your girlfriend’s pissed off at you,” Pedro tells him helpfully and so he stops thinking about facial shape altogether.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Sanchez gives him an apologetic look over the girl’s shoulder when she turns, apologetic and a bit impatient. It’s a look he barely sees, his focus going to her face, her eyes, trying to read lines and reflection before she can tell him what he has or hasn’t done.
But Pedro was wrong. That’s not anger, not remotely close to anything as petty as outrage. It’s an impossible mistake to make, but it’s been made, by Sanchez and Pedro both if their expressions are anything to go by. She’s not angry.
She’s worried.
Fiercely, protectively worried. It’s the look she gets, talking with her hand over her empty pocket.
Immediately, he tells Sanchez they’ll take this outside. And then his girl nods, and then she’s polite. Crisp and polite and it raises his hackles even as he takes her by the hand.
“Are you all right?” he asks outside and this is the wrong question.
“Am I all right?” she repeats, echoes in disbelief that everyone within a block can understand, accents and languages no more a barrier than an open gate. “You- you git! Am I all right?”
“That’ll be a ‘no,’ then,” he assumes.
“What happened?” She’s demanding instead of asking and she’s almost as good at it as he is.
He has no idea, but knows better than to admit as much. “You tell me.”
“You collapsed,” she tells him and that’s when her voice wavers. “You were in hospital and you didn’t even tell me.”
“Sanchez told you.”
It’s a belated realization, but she sees it as an excuse. “Yeah,” she says, “that only took a week.”
He turns to the side, bites down his temper. It tries to fill up his throat and won’t be swallowed down. After all this, she’s the one who gets to be upset?
And then the demand: “What happened?”
“Domestics. Typical.” He can’t help but roll his eyes.
She shoves his arm, not being gentle with the wounded hospital patient. “D- don’t.” She swallows the word halfway through, starts again. “Don’t. I’m sick of this.”
His hearts stop.
“You can’t just shut me out whenever you want,” she goes on. “That’s not-”
“You’re one to talk.”
Somehow, their patch of sidewalk manages to be silent, bystanders and traffic going unheard.
Her eyes don’t waver from his. “What?” she asks.
“You’re one to talk,” he repeats, hitting that nerve again, striking it because she’s asked him to.
“I’m not the one who keeps shutting me out!” She’s lashing out from more than reflex, reacting with enough awareness to know where to hit. That she can see the target makes her far, far too close, even as she’s pulling back.
And maybe it sounds childish of him, but that’s not fair: “If I’m the one who doesn't give a shit, why’re you the one always walking away?”
“You’re the one always telling me to get lost,” she shoots back, already creating more space between them.
No. Not always. Just before. “I’m not telling you now.”
She turns away, arms crossed over her chest. When she speaks, it’s only her intent that addresses him. “Think I’ll wait the five minutes until the winds change, then.”
And he thinks to grab her arm.
He thinks to grab her arm, like some violent child pulling at its mother, like some idiot he doesn’t want to be. There’s an urge inside him that mixes poorly with humanity, a need that alters with the addition of testosterone and the confusion of self-assigned roles. His steady, empty hands beg to shake from it. It’s a pitiful command that swallows up hearts and head and chokes his throat. It’s small and pathetic and everything he doesn’t want to be.
His jaw clenches from it and he can feel far too many eyes on them, glares back at the bloke who’s bumped into him walking by. “We’re not doing this here,” he says to her, means it.
She matches his gaze, her eyes full of misunderstanding. “There you go again!”
He thrusts both empty hands into his pockets, pulls out one of them once it’s full. He shoves the ring of keys at her, holds it out pointedly. Shakes it at her once, twice, when she fails to get it. “Take - the - keys,” he tells her.
Her hand rises slowly, her eyes narrowing in confusion now as well as anger. Her fingers around metal, she holds his fingertips as much as she holds the keys. “What for?”
“Go back to the flat. I need to change into my civvies first and you need to- Dunno what you need to do, but we’re not having a row across an entire city.” He lets go and she nearly fumbles the keys onto the sidewalk, the metal jingling with an incongruously cheerful sound. For an instant, he thinks of a dream he might have had, a dream of cheerful bells ringing at the entrance of a pawn shop, cheerful bells with a soul lost on the shelves. It’s only for an instant and then he forces himself back to the present, back to the incomprehension in her eyes.
“You want me to meet you there,” she says, slowly piecing together the obvious. “To talk.”
He rolls his eyes. “You’re not half thick, today.”
She ignores his words, his tone, his everything. Her expression softens into unguarded confusion, the keys cradled in her palm. “...You’re letting me in.”
“Yeah,” he says, irritable, already turning back to the garage, and he’ll never understand why it takes her so long to grasp the simplest things, his stupid little ape. “I thought that was the point.”
.-.-.-.-.-.
Opening the unlocked door, he finds her sitting on the couch nursing a cuppa, almost huddled in on herself. She straightens up with a bit of a jump, almost moves like she’s about to stand up. Why’d she’d need to, he’ll never know.
There’s another mug on the coffee table next to his keys, tea bag still in it as the steam floats up. He doesn’t know if this is some sort of peace offering or not, isn’t sure that she doesn’t simply have some sort of nervous tea-making habit. There are stranger things in the universe.
“You cooled off yet?”
She swallows, nods. Speaks to his shoulder. “Yeah.”
He sits down next to her, gives her arm a nudge. She’s sitting in the middle of the couch and while he doesn’t really need to make her scoot over, he does need her to look at him.
She does.
“Good,” he says.
That hovers between them for a small moment. Her expression is one he can’t quite read, can only almost understand, and for some reason, he feels he should have said “fantastic” instead, even though the word really wasn’t called for. Fantastic. It makes her smile.
When he says it, at least. When he only thinks it, she looks down, studies her tea instead of matching his gaze. It takes him a moment to realize she’s got no idea what’s in his head, jars him when he thinks for the first time that no, she’s not able to understand what’s he’s thinking by looking at him.
And it takes him entirely by surprise that he wants her to be able to.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He blinks out of his thoughts, caught off-guard by the sudden return to verbal communication. His mind backtracks as far as it can in its startled state, gets all the way back to saying good instead of fantastic and- Oh wait. Hospital.
“You weren’t exactly around to tell,” he answers with a shrug, picking up the cuppa she’s made him from the table. He takes a sip as if to show that yes, he is aware of the things she does, that he does wonder when it was she learned exactly how sweet he likes it. Besides, a full cup is a good prop. Something for the hands and mouth and eyes.
“You could’ve called me. It’s that thing, yeah, that you do with your phone?”
He wants to grin at how much she’d sounded like him, there. He’s contagious. Still, he forces himself to sober, metabolizing humour like chemical compounds, breaking it down into pieces that can’t so easily affect him. He’s unsmiling as he replies, “I did call you.” There’s an unspoken don’t be stupid in his voice.
“You said you had a couple days off from work, not that you’d collapsed.” She says the word like he’d died or something.
“That would’ve been a fun chat,” he says, hoping she won’t be so dense as to miss his reference as he mimics her London accent. “‘Hi, called to say I’m stupid.’” That wasn’t so long ago, her trying to tell him why she hadn’t asked him for help.
She doesn’t exactly look down, but she doesn’t exactly look at him either. He calls her back to him by name.
“Rose, I was dehydrated. I’m dressed for Lancashire in Barcelona and I wasn’t drinking water. I’m not dying. I called ‘cause I was bored, not ‘cause I needed someone to hold my hand while I was on my deathbed.” It’s as simple as that and that should be the end of it.
Obviously, it’s not.
“Are you sure?” she asks, putting her mug down.
“Am I what?”
“Are you sure you’re not dying?” she clarifies, as if it’s a reasonable thing for her to be wondering at. “That nothing weird is going on with your body.”
He stares at her a bit.
“Well? Are you?” She prods him with words instead of her elbow.
He thinks he prefers the elbow.
“I’m dying at the same rate you are,” he tells her. “Just like everyone else who doesn’t have cancer.” His gaze falls slightly, dips from her eyes to her cheeks, that soft skin bordering on tan instead of simply burnt. “Most people call it living.”
“You’ve got thirty years left,” she says, as if this is the most horrible thing to ever occur to her. As if it is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, throwing someone’s mortality in their face.
“You’re a bright little ray of sunshine, aren’t you?” It’s hard not to snipe at her, after that. “I could be hit by a bus tomorrow - how’s that for a lifespan?”
“Stop it.”
“I’m old,” he tells her flatly. It’s not something he believes, merely something she needs to hear. Forty-three isn’t a bad year, really, not unless it’s seen through a child’s eyes. “I’m seven years - less than that - from fifty. And for your information, that means I’ve got between thirty and forty years left. Maybe even forty-five. Hardly fair, writing me off at seventy-three.”
“Stop it.”
There’s more force in that gaze than he’d thought her capable of, more fear than he can bring himself to acknowledge. He wants to call this overreacting - it is overreacting - but the fear is real in her eyes, real and true and somehow justified.
“You’re the one who brought it up.”
“You don’t need to be cruel about it!”
He’s the one being cruel. “Rose, you’re hardly about to stick around for a decade or three.”
She takes the blow like the attack that it is. “Will you stop talking like that?”
“I’m not dying. And one bout of falling down from being thirsty doesn’t mean I’m a brain-damaged cripple.” He says that and her eyes widen, slightly, subtly, and he could hit himself for giving her something else to get into a panic over. “I’m all right. I’m fine. I’m- I’m fantastic.”
She looks at him like she’s more than half a mind to disagree.
He rolls his eyes, as annoyed at his own failure to make her smile as he is with her idiocy. “What, do you need to check my pulse? Take my temperature? Find some soup and feed me by hand?” He looks at her pointedly over the lip of his mug, takes an overdramatic sip.
She doesn’t waver. “You’re not allowed to die on me.”
“Right, because you’re really hanging around that long,” he snaps, never mind that he’s already gone too far, already shoved her back behind a wall of sarcasm.
Her jaw tightens and her breathing is so slow that it can’t not be controlled. Her eyes are finally looking back into his, really looking, but now that he has them, he doesn’t see what he was looking for. She’s demanding, searching, looking at him as if she’s been waiting for him to look back at her, not the other way around. As if she’s still waiting for him to look back at her, as if he’s yet to match her gaze.
It’s a feeling he knows. It’s a feeling he just had. “I can’t read your mind, Rose. You can tell me what’s wrong, or I can start throwing around words like ‘displacement’ and ‘misdirected anger’ - and no one wants that.” He remembers how Fred used to psychoanalyze him: there’s little more annoying.
She breathes out, mumbles a mumble that’s more of a mutter. “Can’t you just...”
“Let go?” He’s tired of that, sick of watching her break herself apart from the inside.
“Stay safe,” she finishes quietly, and it turns irritation upside-down, turns exasperation on its head.
He places down his mug next to hers, twists on the couch, brings his leg up onto the cushion as he turns to face her more fully. Really, it would be nice if, just the once, the concern was actually about him, instead of merely directed at him. “Your doctor’s sick,” he says, almost says softly. “I get that. Stop taking it out on me and I might even be sympathetic.” There’s some sarcasm in that, but none of it biting. All the same, it fails to make her smile.
“He’s not my doctor,” she corrects, tries to.
“You act like he is,” he says and shrugs. “That’s good enough for me.”
That’s not anger turning her cheeks red. “He’s more of a the,” she mumbles.
He’d have to grin at that, if it weren’t for his question: “Does he have a name?”
“S’pose he does,” she agrees in her patented I’m not going to tell you way. It’s not far off from the response he’d been expecting.
Now for the important questions: “Is he getting worse?”
“He’s still....” She trails off, her gaze wandering away. She takes a breath. “Still- still sick. And the longer he is, the worse his chances are.”
It’s always better when it’s quick, he thinks. Yes or no, life or death, safe or gone; none of this sticking around and waiting forever. He could never stand the wait. As hopeless as the search for that watch of hers is, it must be almost a relief for her. Something to do. An action to take.
Her head turns, her eyes look, and he realizes he’s got a hand on her shoulder. He lifts his fingertips, stops the circling of his thumb, and her hand rises to hold his in place. They nod at one another and he’s uncertain as to what words she’s found in the silence.
Slowly, he brings his thumb to circle over cotton, beneath a human palm, and she lowers her cheek to the back of her hand, her hair falling over his wrist. She starts to speak, her words fading as quickly as he hears them. “But that’s...”
He stills his hand, tries to. “What?”
“I- I want... I need you to tell me. When things go bad. I’m here an’... an’, okay, maybe I won’t be around for the next thirty, forty-five years, maybe I’ll get hit by the bus tomorrow,” she says and the simple acknowledged possibility of it winds him. “But that’s maybe then and I’m definitely here now. So... I’m here.”
She’s shifted as she’s spoken, has turned to sit cross-legged and sideways on the couch, her knees bumping against his shin, resting against his shin, both of them turned sideways to better... to better sit. He releases her shoulder and she holds his hand in her lap, making him realize that he can’t relinquish contact, only control.
She’s leaning forward, his hand between hers, her hands above crossed, bare shins; above crossed, bare skin, the blade of his hand is brought to rest against lightly, so lightly, afraid to press. Her eyes search the length of his arm before snapping back to his face, his girl looking almost flustered.
“Here and now,” he agrees. “I can live with that.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” It’s official. He can’t refuse her.
Her smile falls down onto their hands and he can see it, can see a future where she lifts his hand in both of hers and brings his knuckles to her lips in soft contact, as light as a sigh, savoring the slight touch, taking as much as she dares before she dares to dare for more. It’s a future and he can see it. He can see it.
He’s stopped breathing and when he realizes she has too, he grins hugely, the force of it spilling through him, a flash flood of unspecified emotion that leaves his mouth hurting, that brings her to grin back in delighted confusion.
“Fantastic,” they say in unexpected unison and laugh until it hurts.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Another night at Els Encants.
Her jaw sets and her eyes flash, but her hair is soft beneath his lips, her hand sure when she reaches for his.
He doesn’t know how long this can last.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Her breath is hot as it spills over his fingers. Lips and sound try to press into his cupped palm, her mouth held shut by his thumb beneath her chin.
“You can’t say,” he tells her, not removing his hand from over her lips. “You know that: you can’t say.”
The look she gives him over his hand is one he’s sure he once saw in the mirror. Almost sure, almost, almost a brown he once had but never with that feel. She nods all the same, nods beneath his palm.
You never say, her eyes tell him, accuse him despite this. Brown speaks with the sound of earth, of the Earth. A thousand miles an hour she gives him, only moving away at sixty-seven times that speed. How many words in a mile? Even he can’t read that fast. Her words are so linear, so separate, so sharp and alone instead of round and whole.
“I can’t say,” he corrects. “Neither of us.”
Her lips curve against the swirling lines in his skin. His palm reads the bumps in her sound, fingertips finding the spoken Braille.
Both of us, she says.
“Blind little ape,” he calls her.
Her hands fold around his and she lifts his palm to cover her eyes instead of her soft, lonely mouth. “I don’t mind.”
.-.-.-.-.-.
“You should,” he insists.
She stares at him.
“What?” he asks.
“Why the sudden interest in me callin’ my mum?”
He tries to shrug it off, tries to ignore eyes that should do more than question. Eyes that should speak, but don’t. “’Cause if she gets worried, she’s got my phone number, and I don’t want to hear about it,” he answers and that sounds true enough.
She hears it as true enough.
“I just... don’t like to,” she explains.
“Mum like yours...” he starts to say, plays at being understanding.
She shoves his arm. “That’s not it.”
“Then tell me.” He shifts on the grass, sprawling a bit rather than sitting cross-legged the way she’s wont to do.
The look she gives him is skeptical. “Really?”
“Yeah, really,” he responds, rolling his eyes. “Wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t going to listen.”
“Didn’t ask,” she points out.
“Well, in that case...”
She swats him, has to lean forward to do it.
He grins, glad to get her to relax, crosses his legs at the ankles, feels the unevenness of the ground beneath his hip. Grass presses up into his palm, his palm pressing down into grass, touching and touched. It feels so still, the movement, once the rider is in the car, once the component is within the system. “All right then,” he says once he’s done musing on inertia. “Rose Tyler, will you explain your stereotypical teenaged behavior?”
“I’m twenty,” she says, stressing the number the way he needs her to.
“S’why I’m askin’ you t’ explain it.” It was such a clear shot.
Another swat.
He grins wider.
She holds out, almost. Ducks her head down, stroking her hair behind her ear with one shy hand. She glances up to his eyes, granting the forgiveness of the entertained.
“My mum doesn’t like me traveling,” she says, giving him the light answer. He can tell. “That’s it really.”
But of course it never is. “The traveling or the traveling with UNIT?”
“UNIT.” There’s not so much as a pause to consider. “Makes her nervous.”
Especially after the captain died, he thinks but doesn’t say. He nods along to this, understanding, and - miracle of miracles - she suddenly opens up.
“It didn’t even start with UNIT,” she tells him, leaning forward a little, her eyes needing to hold his. “I mean, that’s big, yeah? But I got a job at a shop - at a Henrick’s - and she thought it was goin’ t’ my head. Makes you tired, y’know? Being told that anything- anything fantastic you want to do has to be out of your reach.”
“Or that it’s ‘against the rules’,” he agrees, stretching out the phrase. “For no sane reason, mind.”
“So sick of that,” she agrees with a conspirator’s smile, her mouth mimicking the grin of a small, trapped boy he’d once seen in the mirror.
Both of them. It’s a thought that occurs to him, strong and hard and jarring, because he never wants to think of her trapped inside a glass cage and clamouring be allowed to fly. He never wants to think of her as the only child left out in the cold. He never wants to think of her being like him, even when she is, even when he’s making her so.
“That why?” he asks, abruptly needing to know.
It brings her up short, his sudden change of mood. “That why what?”
“That why UNIT.”
There’s that pause before she answers, that quiet revision of truth he knows he can’t catch. “I wanted t’ go,” she says. “S’all.”
“But why’d you want t’ go?”
She answers him with her eyes before she does with her mouth. Brown speaks and the grass is still beneath his hand, feels calm and stable despite the flow of photosynthesis and the intake of compounds. The ground is so still beneath his hand and he keeps waiting for it to move, to prove to him its motion.
But it doesn’t. It doesn’t and he feels that lack and her eyes ask him that, ask him what he feels hurtling beneath him and the answer is nothing. Nothing at all.
Sometimes, her eyes tell him, you just need to feel something move.
“I said no, the first time,” she admits. “And it- oh god, watching it disappear. There are days, y’know? When your entire life could be different and you feel it. You just sit there and you think: it doesn’t have to happen this way. And when you finally get the chance... ‘s scary.”
“Do you regret it?” he almost fully asks.
“No,” she says, says it strong, interrupting regret. Her hands cover his, press down on the hand pressing down against the grass. She leans forward, leans into it, and if he looked up, moving only his eyes, he could just see her hairline, brown beneath the blond. But he doesn’t look up, only looks forward. At her eyes, insistent with certainty. At her mouth giving life to the words, “Never will.”
“Okay then,” he says and his light words can’t find a tone to match them, can’t find breath to support them.
Her hands lift from his and he sits up, sits up straight instead of lounging, and there’s distance between them again, sudden and far too large to be called intangible.
“D’you still think I should call my mum?” she asks, already knowing the answer, familial guilt taking hold in the tilt of her head.
“Yeah,” he says and she sighs.
“She’s goin’ t’ ask me t’ come home again,” she tells him, somehow unaware of the way it brings him to wince inside himself.
“Yeah?” he says and she sighs a different sigh.
“I can’t.” Her words are strong for all that she’s resigned. Resigned, not regretful.
She wasn’t lying about that, and strange things happen inside him at the thought.
“Then don’t,” he says, shrugging, because he’s learned that sometimes, it really is that simple.
“Don’t call?”
“Don’t leave,” he corrects. Corrects, not begs. “If you can’t go, don’t. Basic logic.”
Her eyes search his face, wander across his features as if checking against some internal map, some eternal map, and then she nods. “Makes sense.”
“I do that, on occasion.”
“Once or twice, yeah,” she agrees, tongue peeking out between her teeth as she gives the jab, as he takes it, as he feels it, light and playful and meant only for him.
.-.-.-.-.-.
There’s a hand on his shoulder.
Human and large - male - and smells like a bloody sea, smells like salt and mist and death on a shoulder made of snow and ruin. Two of a kind that isn’t kind at all.
“You two are so sweet.”
A pepper peach of photon in the light from her hair, but his chestnut burnt. Was shorn and set ablaze until proteins broke apart, amino acid acting like acetic, like the Alps. Hannibal. Hannibal into the closet.
“Love the paneling, by the way.”
And out of the closet. Never inside, a different three, a different, a different three, a two with a one, not a three. Two plus one equals one plus two. Three equals three. There’s a difference. Two plus one.
Plus one.
Plus one, but better with....
Better with...?
.-.-.-.-.-.
Lantern jaw, he remembers when he wakes. Who does he know with a lantern jaw?
.-.-.-.-.-.
It occurs to him sometime during the day - a Wednesday, another Els Encants day - it occurs to him that he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop.
When is she going to give up?
.-.-.-.-.-.
Not going home isn’t the same as not leaving.
.-.-.-.-.-.
“What’re you reading about?” he asks, doing his best not to read over her shoulder.
She turns the page with mismatching fingers and he blinks until he can recall when they are. “Madness,” she replies simply.
“Always so happy,” he replies, but the sarcasm falls down the cracks in his façade. They were. Always so happy.
“Isn’t it pretty to think so,” Fred muses. “Ernest always did have a way with endings.”
“Charlie was better.”
“Complete worlds, but cardboard characters,” she answers, turning the page once more, reading at a speed that makes sense to him. “Dig too deep and they simply have nothing beneath.”
“The Signal Man,” he says, begins to say.
“Yes, you did always like trains.” She smiles. “I remember. We were going to go, before.”
“Before?” he asks, because he should remember. Burnt chestnut and the popping of the shell serve as a barrier to memory.
“Madness,” she says in the tone of one getting back to the point. “I’m reading about porphyria.”
He looks over her shoulder now, peers around the high collar and down into the display. It was so much easier when he was taller, she shorter. “Why?”
“It’s boring,” she says, “being dead.”
And he nods because - when push comes to shove - he can relate.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Thursday is not an Els Encants day.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Thursday is not an Els Encants day, but it is a day that ends with her on his couch, her head on his shoulder.
“Keep reading,” she mumbles against cotton. “’M just closin’ my eyes, s’all.”
She drifts off and he lets her sleep, lets her stay there, warmer than any blanket, human-hot against his side, around his embraced arm. She refuses to relinquish his limb, relaxes into him only after he relaxes into her. He waits a time to wake her, waits until his own sleep attempts to approach and crowd the couch with sleep’s own ghosts. He almost wants to sleep, tonight.
Almost.
He wakes her up at two in the morning and then he calls her a cab.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Bright blue eyes, so bright, blinding and bright, the eye of a storm, his storm but not his eye.
“Grand father,” she calls him. “My grand, grand father.”
“Go to bed, Susan.”
“Pacifist not passive.”
“Go to bed.”
Her feet swing in the air, her hands on the shining table. “Passive-ist.”
“Susan.”
“Everyone was,” she adds, slipping down from metal, slipping down to stand. “But you, I mean.”
“I shall count to ten,” he tells her, his voice old from arguing.
“Let me stay up,” she begs, stubborn begging, toes pressing into cracked pavement as if to crack it further, to take root. To force her way through and grow there.
“I laid you to rest, child.”
“I know,” she says, youthful indulgence in her storm’s eyes: “But you forgot to tuck me in.”
.-.-.-.-.-.-.
“S’ been a week,” his girl tells him, her elbows planted against the tabletop, her chin in her hands. They sit side-by-side at the window seats, two of three stools occupied.
Beyond the glass, the world walks on at 2.5 miles an hour instead of sixty-seven thousand. It’s easier to watch, simpler to understand. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Long week,” he says.
And again: “Yeah.”
The world walks on and he hooks his feet around the legs of his stool, prodding at a napkin with one finger, watching the crumbs bounce slightly as he taps the paper beneath them. The streets are full and moving and filled with a city’s semblance of routine. Give it another week, though, and it’s bonfires and correfocs, he muses. Amazing, what can change in a week.
She’s looking at him, but he’s not looking back.
“What happens,” she says, says and stops.
He doesn’t ask, eyes scanning the crowd. Not for anything in particular. Just to look. To see if there’s anyone... anyone. He frowns absently, drinks his coffee and gains a stronger grimace. Taking it black doesn’t work, for this stuff, but moving to the table with the creamers means moving away, means interrupting her pause.
“What happens,” she says again, and this time he looks to her, his girl with a throat too tight for words. “If he dies too. What happens?”
A man will be dead. That’s what happens when a man dies. He’ll be dead and this girl will mourn him, him and the captain both.
“What happens to you, you mean?” he asks, because that’s the question he can answer. The question he wants to answer.
“To the world,” she replies, says it with all the seriousness of a child.
“Keeps on turnin’, I s’pose.”
He says it, and he can feel her looking at him, can feel her eyes on the side of his face as he folds his napkin shut, traps crumbs inside the mass-produced blue paper. Some have already escaped, bumps of former banana bread dotting plastic marble.
“That’s not-”
“I know,” he says, an interruption without a sideways glance. “The entire world changes,” he says. “I know it does. One man in the world alive yesterday who isn’t today and the entire world changes.”
It’s unexpected, the way he has to blink his eyes clear when he says this, the way something small tries to grow, grow and push its way up his throat like some grotesque mask bent on fusing to his face, bent on changing him into what he isn’t. It’s unexpected, unexpectedly painful.
She takes his hand, he holds on tight, and the world never does stop turning.
“...I miss Jack,” she says at last.
Yeah, he almost says, not knowing why. Me too.
.-.-.-.-.-.
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