Fic: In Human Hands (12/24?)
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: “Starting to make a habit of this,” he says after that shower, seeing her awake on his couch, and then immediately wishes he hadn’t.
AN: Happy Birthday, In Human Hands.
The Tourist
The Girl
The Runaway
The Puzzle
The Passenger
The Victim
The Absent
The Found
The Determined
The Unaware
The Celebrant
The Nurse
There’s grit in his sheets and he knows it’s long past eight, but he’s still not getting up. He remembers, quite distantly at this point, that when he was young - young as in young, he could never understand why people liked lie-ins and lazing about.
He closes his eyes, and drifts, and almost dreams, feeling hot and cold, and his body forgets to remember him for just a little while longer. And then it recalls.
His body knows him, before he knows his body. It aches and burns, tight and small, stretched and fleshed and it feels like fire and thoughts of phoenixes, of death causing disaster causing birth, and he thinks and that’s strange. It’s strange to know a dream.
He pulls his body up - or it might be his body rising, pulling his mind - and he goes to the door, the closedunlocked door, a semi-permeable membrane in a cell reforming. Bare feet always bare step onto grating and she lies on the sofa in the center of it all, this great, tan, lumpy sofa in the middle of it all.
To sit is to be conscious in the unconscious and so he sits, dares himself stillness, dares himself to still and watch her fade. He watches them all fade.
He seldom means to.
“I’ve often wondered,” Fred says from behind the couch, “what it is that you do mean to do.”
He’s moved from cushion to coffee table without movement, turned from looking away to looking towards, and the girl hugs his pillow as the woman studies his ring. He can’t recall giving either to either, but he doesn’t have the heart to take either away; he lost it somewhere, had that taken away first.
“You know me and plans,” he replies, brushing a curly lock out of his eyes.
“I know you and plans,” she agrees, leaning forward to brush it back in place, back out of place.
The girl sleeps on, her head in Fred’s lap, the pillow a twisted loop in her arms, around her arms in a cloth shackle.
“Never do seem to work out,” he says, the wood of the table unpleasant and soft beneath him. “You and me and plans.” He looks down at the floor, through the floor and into wiring, between his folded, mismatched hands and down into something that knows nothing of down or through or between. It steadies him, releases him from the spin.
He lifts his head, lighter from the lack of hair, and says, and hopes: “I’ve always been more of an improviser.”
They smile, one in death, one in sleep.
He wakes, still waiting for a reply.
.-.-.-.-.-.-.
He rolls over and it hurts. His legs sorely object to this - pun intended - but for the life of him, he can’t remember why they would. His legs don’t do this. His body doesn’t do this, didn’t.
He thinks to get some water.
Sitting up takes a little while and moving makes his head hurt too. He tries to rub at his eyes and then even his cheeks hurt. He muffles a groan as he pulls his legs to hang off the side of the bed, reaches for his mobile to check the time even though he knows perfectly well it’s already after noon. Noon’s passed, he’s sure of it, his head hurting just a little too much for him to wonder why.
This is the point where he thinks he’s hung over.
This is followed by the point where he goes through a mental checklist. First off, clothing. Check. Fully dressed and full of sand. Anything obviously missing? A pocket check makes that a no. Last recollection of his girl...?
Taking the first shower, his brain finally prompts. They’d wandered around a bit more last night - this morning, he supposed - with that group of friends of hers until exhaustion and clothing full of sand had driven them back to their respective homes. His girl had tagged along with him, his shower the closest. He’d let her go first and must’ve dozed off waiting for his turn.
His bed’s full of sand. His jeans smell like salt and his t-shirt feels like grit. He feels like fire and ice, like his body’s having issues when it comes to homeostasis. He’s uncomfortable in more ways than he can mention. Searching for the good part of this situation, he manages to come up with the fact that today is Saturday and there is no work until Monday.
That, and he’s getting his shower now.
He forgets the issue of his aching legs until he has to walk and maybe, just maybe, running halfway across the city in one go yesterday was not the brightest idea he’s ever had. And the world’s spinning again, spinning out of sync with him; he likes this world, but he doesn’t quite seem to fit its patterns. By the time he gets a change of clothes and manoeuvres to the door, he feels as old and weak and out-of-shape as that tourist of his keeps treating him. Stiff, gritty denim doesn’t do much to help either.
But then he opens the door and hobbles through the living room, and she’s lying there. Lying there on his couch, her now-dry hair half-wrapped in one of his towels that has since become her pillow. There’s enough sun coming in through the window in the kitchenette that the lack of the ceiling light doesn’t matter. If this much hasn’t woken her up yet, a little more won’t either. Anyway, he’s got more pressing matters to deal with at the moment.
There’s only so long any man can go with his pants full of sand.
.-.-.-.-.-.
“Starting to make a habit of this,” he says after that shower, seeing her awake on his couch, and then immediately wishes he hadn’t.
She looks up abruptly, hand halfway through finger-combing her hair, her towel from last night across her lap, one corner halfway to the floor. “Sorry?”
“Freeloading,” he answers, purposefully missing her expression by toweling his hair dry. It’s taking a little longer than it used to, isn’t instantaneous. Extra length will do that. The towel brushes roughly against his cheek and he winces.
“Something up?”
He shrugs, tossing the towel back into the bathroom - it’s starting to look like a laundry day - and gets himself to the couch, sits himself down with no small relief. Hot water and clean clothes give him something of a boost, but he’s still uncomfortable in his own skin, or his skin’s uncomfortable on him.
“...Are you okay?” she asks and when he looks straight at her, her eyebrows rise. There’s a small pause before she tells him, in no uncertain terms: “We’re having paella for lunch today.”
“Any particular reason why?” he asks right back, confused up until she touches her own cheek.
“S’posed to cure cancer, right?”
Headache or no, he can’t help but roll his eyes. “I’m not burnt that badly.” He expects her to smile at that, to continue to tease. Expects it, smiles in that expectation, smiles back at her in advance.
Except it’s not smiling back when he’s not being smiled at.
“You haven’t gotten burned before,” she says, and it’s like she’s puzzling out some great and potentially dire mystery.
He shrugs, getting the feeling that something’s coming and it’s already too late to avoid it. “Didn’t much keep to the shade yesterday.” Not to mention that they’re starting to get into real summer now. June’s just been a warm up - look at that, two puns in half an hour. He can’t be that out of it.
She stares at him for a little while longer all the same, an unnerving sort of inspection. And then, just to be the most random person the world has ever seen, she reaches up to his forehead, touches where his hair beginning to curl over skin.
Cold at the warm touch, he shivers.
“Yep,” she says, apparently expecting as much, “you’re sun sick.”
It’s his turn to stare, albeit in a different way. He makes a point of fighting down a yawn; it would ruin the effect.
She shrugs. “Overexposure to sunlight - used to happen a lot to me, actually. Lotta traveling, little hydrating. Sorta adjusted to it, though.”
“Rose,” he says, and she knows him well enough to know to interrupt his protest before it can start.
“You’re hot, cold and achy?” she asks.
“A bit,” he admits.
“Tired with a headache?”
He shrugs, arm over the back of the couch. It’s a motion that usually distracts her, at least for the length of time it takes for her to fit herself against his side. It doesn’t work this time.
“I’m gettin’ you water,” she decides, getting up, and at that point, he realizes there’s no use protesting. Besides, lumps notwithstanding, this couch is more comfortable than he’s been giving it credit for. He watches her back as she moves to the kitchenette, as she opens the right cabinet for the cups on the first try.
“You trying to be a doctor or something?” he asks her, not sure whether to be annoyed or amused at the amount of fuss he’s getting.
She looks over her shoulder and says to him, traces of humour failing to appear, “Someone’s gotta be.”
.-.-.-.-.-.-.
He’ll never know how she managed to get take-away on San Juan, but he’s not about to be ungrateful. A little confused as to when he fell asleep on the couch, but maybe it’s just that sort of couch. Maybe that’s why she keeps spending the night.
“Heat exhaustion,” he says, between chewing, plastic fork and styrofoam container in hand.
“What?”
“It’s called heat exhaustion, not sun sickness,” he corrects, explains.
She chews thoughtfully, a careful distance between them, a caution on her part that he’s finding difficult to take. It’s annoying, her efforts not to touch, even if made for his sake. “That so?” she asks, swallowing only after speaking, her cheek momentarily bulging as she spoke.
He nods and his head hurts from it, and it amazes him on one level even as it annoys him on another. He slept past noon; he can’t still be this tired. “With a bit of sunburn.”
It takes a moment of chewing, but he realizes that he’s the only one still eating. He stares into the white little container of rice and fish and flavour and he feels her eyes on his cheeks, tracing the burn. Feels the gaze move, wander up. He feels her hand want to touch his hair and then he thinks that the feeling might be just a touch backwards.
He looks to her.
She’s looking back.
Of course she’s looking back. She’s always looking back. That’s what she does, part of who she....
A part of who they are.
And this time she smiles. “So you know everything, then?”
He shrugs a little, grinning a bit, and she laughs at his agreement. Of course, that makes it time to get indignant. “What?” he asks, false irritability just managing to pull down the corners of his mouth. “Don’t believe me?”
“’Course I do,” she answers, and her tone is so playful that offense isn’t half so hard to feign.
“Then what’re you laughing at?”
She blushes, the tinge of colour in her cheeks matching the faint pain in his. “S’nothing.”
He can’t leave that alone. That’s a sort of impossible he’s not interested in. “Oh, I’m nothing now?”
She elbows him.
In what feels like a major piece of exertion, he elbows back, getting his arm against her side, one layer of cotton cloth to defend her.
She sticks her fork into her mouth and swats him with her free hand, smiling around plastic tines, and he holds still, not willing to risk choking her for mere play. That retribution achieved, she wedges herself against his side as if that could settle all arguments - that it does is a fact he steadfastly ignores. It makes eating a little awkward, but he’s all right with that.
It’s a little while longer before she explains herself, long enough for him to finish his paella and set container and fork both on the coffee table. She fits under his arm, after that, and he starts to feel like her head would fit on his shoulder, her cheek to his shoulder, the crown of her head against his neck, he her pillow and she his. He likes the thought of it. When his head is drooping, at least, he likes the thought of it.
He knows it’s bad for digestion, lying down right after, but that’s what he wants to do here. Fit her back against his chest and doze off in the first real nap of all their siestas. It’s a thought that feels strange in his head, as if it weren’t fully made to fit there, as if his head wasn’t made to let it fit. Or maybe he’s just tired. Far less of a headache, though; that’s something.
Finished with lunch, she settles against him, her cheek on his shoulder. She breathes in beneath his arm, a content little sigh. His free hand finds hers, is found by both of hers; they rest on his thigh. “You’re just so... you, sometimes,” she says, her jaw moving against cotton moving against skin.
“And that’s a good thing?” He’s not sure if that’s sarcasm, or self-depreciation, or some strange version of defensiveness. Whatever it is, it leads him to ask this, a question he doesn’t entirely want the answer to, an answer in either direction.
“Yeah,” she says, lifting her head a little to look into his eyes. “Best thing in the world.”
He doesn’t know what to say to that. Not at first.
And even when he thinks of it, he can’t say it.
“’Bout time you figured that out,” he replies instead, the pause longer in his head than in reality. Must have been longer in his head, must have been time stretching as his slow heart sped.
She elbows him a bit lighter this time. Only fair that it’s lighter, what with her being in prime elbowing territory.
“Rose,” he says, because it’s a question he wants to warn her of before he asks it.
“Yeah?” she says and her hands squeeze around his.
“Couch treat you well enough?”
It’s not the question he meant to ask. Never is. But really, no point in asking. Just a little piece of local superstition, jumping over bonfires to find destiny in dreams. But they’d jumped. His hand in hers, they’d jumped.
And it feels like that should change things. As if one little bit of stupidity should somehow rearrange the world, should twist its spin. Really, it’s too stupid to ask after, no matter the impulse to do so, to look her close in the eyes and ask the question: Did you dream about me?
“Yeah,” she says and he blinks, his mind snapping back to the subject at hand, the one he’d picked instead of the other. She smiles at his confusion, the way it’s not fair to smile at a man when he’s got a headache. “I sleep better here, actually.”
“Do you now?” he asks, voice soft in a way he won’t claim to understand, won’t let be called intentional because it’s not. It’s the tiredness and the aches and wouldn’t it be fantastic - strangely, quietly fantastic - if they just feel asleep, right here?
“Yeah,” she says again, and she’s leaning in, shifting against him to get even closer. “I do.”
And he could do, right here. In another mood, in a different time, he could do. Because she’s leaning in. Because she keeps saying these things. Because he’s only half a fool and not at all blind.
But right here, right now, what he wants is to hold her. That’s what he can do. That’s what he does do. She sighs a little, and he can’t tell if that’s the sound of a girl content or a girl disappointed.
Can’t tell which he’d prefer.
“Better than the hotel?” he asks into her ear, brushing her hair away from his face with the hand not held by hers, the hand of the arm around her shoulders.
Settling against his chest, she nods, undoing his work, making him do it again. “More comfortable here,” she explains, and she turns her head as much as she can, looking up at him out of one eye, the angle awkward. If she’d pull back, she could see, but she keeps on leaning in, keeps on leaning against.
“That so?” He gets her hair in his mouth, has to interfere with his hand once more. It’s such long hair, insists on getting in the way.
“Your fridge has a better hum,” she explains and while he’s pretty sure those are some lines to read between, he knows that’s not a lie.
“I like it too.”
“Hm?” Again, shifting to look up.
He brushes her hair back. “The hum.”
“Yeah. S’like....”
“A little.”
“A little of a bit?”
“A little of a bit of an ish,” he agrees.
She looks up at him, all twisted up against his side in the apparent hope of fitting there. “That enough?”
“It’s enough,” he says, and it’s only then that he wonders what they’re talking about.
Slow about it, she turns her head once more, her ear pressed to his shoulder. Her head moving, ear pressed to his chest. His arm around her shoulder shifts and it’s impossible to say what position they would have ended up in if she hadn’t pulled back then.
There’s a look on her face, then. This little piece of consideration and worry and he wants to do something about it, do something against it.
“What?” he asks, rather failing at his goal.
“Last night,” she says, those two words taking an age apiece to be said, “I was thinking.”
“That makes a change,” he quips automatically, expecting to receive a physical swat in return to the verbal prodding. Expecting, and then waiting. “Rose?”
Her head falls back onto his shoulder and it’s like she doesn’t want to say, only started to say because she needs to say. Because he’ll make her say.
He keeps his hands still as he asks her, doesn’t dare prod her off balance any more than she already is. “You were thinking about what?”
“Going into the ocean, yeah?” she says, jaw moving against his shoulder. “Supposed to be about washing away sins or somethin’ like that, right?”
And it occurs to him then that her head on his shoulder, that’s not her being close. That’s her avoiding looking at him. “S’pose so,” he agrees, voice quieter than he meant it to be as he shifts beneath her, shifts to make her face him. He stops being tired right there, can feel the adrenaline in the foreign flow of his bloodstream.
She does, not half nervous about it. “So I was wondering. I mean....” She touches her hair, fiddles with it, and she looks so young. Tragically, irrevocably young for all he can see the woman she’ll be, the woman still half-hidden behind the girl.
He pulls one foot off the coffee table, bends knee with the bottom of his foot against the cushion of the couch. Elbow on top of raised knee, he looks at her eyes as he waits for her voice.
It gives her trouble, him looking, but it’s not a gaze he can drop. She’ll explain to him what this is, tell him outright if he simply waits.
That’s something he tells himself often.
In this case, he’s right.
“D’you, er. Sorry.” She shifts, focusing on him instead of some shadow beyond his face. “I mean, if you were-”
He takes her hand.
She pauses, tongue flicking out to moisten her bottom lip before she bites it. Her hair tries to fall over her shoulders, manages it with one small cascade at a time as her head lowers, as she closes her eyes, as she decides.
“If you were the doctor,” she says, and it sounds like a metaphor, “would you forgive me?”
“Yeah,” he says.
However she intends the question, there’s still only one answer. Only one answer with her looking like that, he’d like to think, like to tell himself, would love to believe. But that’s the lie, the one lie too many from a man to himself. It’s one answer for her, unconditional.
This, he knows rather than realizes, feels it rather than thinks it.
But she doesn’t.
“No, I mean it,” she insists. “Would you? If you were him.”
And she shifts as she says it, looks so guilty.
Holds onto his hand, her touch so sorry.
He shrugs, the motion moving something around inside of him, something too close to pain for him to look at. “If I were anyone,” he says.
Something in his voice makes her shy, and it’s not because she’s misunderstood. Her hand is tense in his and her face gives no indication as to whether he ought to hold on, whether he ought to let go.
“I wish...” she starts to say, says and stops, and his reply is one already known.
Your wish is my command. Just.... “Careful what you wish for.”
It’s a nervous sound when she laughs a little. Just a little. A little nervous, a little laugh. “Yeah, I’ve learned about that.” Her free hand tucks her hair back and his rises to join it, the movement done before the thought’s begun. Her eyes close as his fingertips move, smoothing hair and stroking scalp, and her cheek is warm against his palm. Her hand holds loosely to his, loosely at first, her fingers less light as her breath wavers through already parted lips. He tilts his head, leans in closer still.
Heat exhaustion or no, he thinks he’s making himself very clear.
He has to give her a moment more, though, has to offer the choice. In this, as in all things, he has to offer a choice. “Yeah?” he asks, able to say that much. It’s a breath rather than a word. A breath she must be able to feel, this close. This close and closer still.
She turns her face from his.
Turns her face, turns it into his hand, kisses his palm or presses her lips there or makes contact all on accident; his mind won’t let him tell. “’s a monkey’s paw wish,” she says, her sound against his skin, and he thinks he’s upset her.
It’s a long moment before he can think of anything to say to that, before he thinks to ask, “What wish?” What went wrong? What’s off here, between them, when he was so very, very sure that-
She looks at him. Squeezes the hand in hers and presses a little more into the hand against her face. Closes her eyes again like she’s said something, like she’s made her point when it’s clear she hasn’t. Maybe it’s only in the timing - he never could get that right.
“Rose,” he says, failing to remember how to let go, “what wish?”
Her thumb tries to stroke against the back of his held hand, his hand on his thigh, their hands on his thigh. She tries to calm him without being calm, and that’s how he knows he’s not the only one lost here. “Y’know how, in the story,” she says, talking about that monkey’s paw, “you wish for something good, and then something horrible happens, and that’s how you get the something good? They wish for money, the son dies, they get it because of his death. Like that.”
“That’s how you get what you wished for,” he corrects, the difference clear, the correction automatic. “Doesn’t have to be something good, what you end up getting.” A revived child, the tattered remains pounding at the door; he’s had nightmares like that story.
“What if it is something good, though,” she says, a statement instead of a question. “And you get it and- and you still want it, but it’s all twisted up in, in everything.”
Twisted up. With dead captains and missing doctors and stolen watches, he supposes. With one month left until there’s nothing left at all.
“That’s just a story,” he says, because there’s a point beyond the one she’s trying to make.
She shakes her head against his hand and he lets go. “But what if-”
“No.”
It comes out a very hard no, that word. But maybe it should do, then. Because he means it.
She stalls at the sound, for just a moment. “Would you listen? I’m tryin’ t’ explain-”
“No,” he says, and if it were rock before, it’s made of steel now. “’Cause you’re explaining it wrong.”
“Just ‘cause you don’t understand doesn’t-”
“It’s not your fault.”
It brings her up short.
It brings her up very short.
It turns her shy again, more than shy, and she pulls back, shifts back. Lets go. Uncertainty makes her young and youth makes her small; far too small to carry what she’s put upon her shoulders.
“You wishin’ for something to happen won’t make it- didn’t make it happen,” he amends. “Life doesn’t work that way. If you get something good out of disaster, that’s your silver lining - that’s blind luck right there.” His face feels stern, but that’s all he can define. He hasn’t a clue as to what’s in his voice, not by sound or feel. It’s indignation and sadness and care for the stupid and mockery for the stupidity. It’s all different and distinct and far too much to fit into just one heart. “You don’t have to feel guilty over blind luck.”
“Who says I feel guilty?” she says and she shifts and he rolls his eyes.
“Who just asked me to forgive her?”
“That’s not what I-”
“Yeah it is.”
Pushed back to where she can only be defensive, she glares at him, but he knows he’s right. He’s right and she’s mad, but when she calms down, she’ll understand that.
He reaches for her hand again, but she does more than pull away. She gets up, stands. Moves. He opens his mouth to protest, but it’s not the door she’s moving to. She sets her back against the counter separating kitchenette from living room, stands just there, still close enough to kick the end of the couch. Her bare arms cross over her top and he can’t help but think of her in his jacket, can’t help but think she needs something around her, to help keep the world out.
Just the world, though. Not him.
He shifts to face her and does no more, knows better than to reach again. He’s already gambled enough today, more than can be blamed on head exhaustion or dehydration. He’s already gambled enough, but he needs the last word, never mind that he already has it. “Wishing’s got nothing to do with it,” he tells her again. “Just a coincidence. That doesn’t make it your fault.”
“No,” she says, and he hears rather than sees her start to cry. “It bein’ my fault makes it my fault.”
No time passes as he moves. They’re apart and then they’re together; he’s on the couch and then he’s standing.
She’s crying, and then she’s in his arms.
“Rose,” he says.
“I can’t explain.”
“That’s all right,” he tells her, reassurances mumbled into her hair. “Look, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t’ve-”
She sobs. One sob, her back moving beneath his hands, the damp of her tears slipping through his t-shirt to accuse his very skin, to accuse the man inside it. After that, she shakes, trying to keep quiet.
He doesn’t know what to do, besides let her cry.
There’s only so long he can do that for.
“Rose, I didn’t mean to-”
“Don’t apologize.” She shakes her head against his shoulder and her hands grip at him where they can, hold to him. “Oh god, you- you don’t apologize.”
“I do when I’m sorry,” he offers up, a protest more light than weak. He’s a bit hopeless and not half lost.
But maybe he did right. She sounds a bit better when she says, “Don’t be.”
“That not allowed?”
“Completely banned.”
“I’ll go off and be an unapologetic bastard, how’s that?”
She sniffles a little, moves her arms around him as she moves her head. She hugs rather than clings, and she’s moved her cheek to a dry spot of his t-shirt. “Fantastic,” she says, like she’s just trying to set herself off again.
He says her name again, a bit of a warning, and she hushes.
“’m sorry,” she mumbles quietly, and he knows better than to make her take it back.
“You gonna say what for?” he asks, his voice as soft as the hair against the side of his jaw.
She shrugs a little in his arms and they readjust around one another, into each other. “For bein’ crazy.”
“You’re not crazy,” he tells her, certain about that. He knows what madness looks like and her brand of it isn’t a kind he’ll worry about, so long as she’s here with him. “Just human.”
She makes a noise that’s half-sniffle, half-laugh. “Same thing, isn’t it?”
“Can’t say it’s as bad as I thought it would be.”
She pulls back with a jerk, reddened eyes wide with confusion and hope. “...What was that?”
“It’s not as bad as it could be,” he repeats, not sure what she thought he’d said.
She stares at him, not breathing, and then she squeezes her eyes shut, gives her head a little shake to clear it. “Right,” she says. “Right, sorry.”
“No harm done,” he answers, not much sure why he has to say it. And then he’s tired again. Just like that, tired again, sudden and strong and that would be the adrenaline wearing out, wouldn’t it?
And of course, she notices. She’s on mauve alert, today. “You okay? ‘s it just the heat exhaustion or...?” She asks it like there’s an or. She makes him wonder, sometimes.
Make that most of the time, come to think of it.
“Only a spot of sunburn,” he informs her, rolling his eyes. If there’s an or, that’s what she’s talking about. “Rose, even the human body can regenerate skin cells. Regrow, repair. That.” He’s not sure why he just flustered himself. Whatever he’s going on about, he’s not much reassuring his girl.
Even without reassurance, she hasn’t got a bad head on her. “You’re tired,” she says, tells him, and he’ll do more than trust her opinion on that. “You should go back to bed. Or drink something. You had any water today? I know you didn’t last night.”
She shoos him a little, gets him back on the couch. He goes, giving her a little more time to wipe at her eyes. And he wonders. Her fault? That her captain died? That he was shot. He was shot, that’s what she’d said.
His eyes unfocus, the room blurring from thought, and he swallows, swallows and thinks hostage, just a thought, just that, but it rings like ice against glass, rings like a chilled chime and he shivers.
“You okay?” she asks, standing over him, cup of water in her offered hand.
He takes it, gives her a nod. “Yeah,” he says in the way that means he’s not. And he doesn’t know why. How far can a bit of sun and heat throw a man off? Is he dehydrated again?
But maybe that’s not it. Maybe he’s just too awake to know.
He downs the glass, wipes at his mouth after with the bare skin of his forearm. Gives her a look when he catches her watching. Staring, more like.
“What?”
“You still don’t drink like a... a normal person, I s’pose,” she says, changing her mind halfway through by the sound of it. Still. That’s already more than he gets out of her sometimes.
He shrugs, the cup set onto the table and maybe it’ll leave another ring on the wood. Maybe it’ll leave something, just a little, tiny something in this flat that still doesn’t much feel like his, not when he’s alone in it. “You gonna stick around?”
“Yeah,” she says, like it would never have occurred to her to leave. And then, shy: “If you want.”
“If you want,” he counters, already having decided that he’s taking a nap. Not for the rest, though he’s tired again - why is he always so tired nowadays? No, this is for the sake of a thought, for a bit of wondering best done without the brain going. Not that it ever stops, mind. “I don’t know about you, but I’m sleeping,” he tells her, adds that.
“Oh,” she says, and she watches as he stretches out on the couch like he’s something strange, like he’s half-alien.
He stretches out on his side, and closes his eyes, and she’ll put a hand on his side, does lay her hand on his side below his arm, her fingers fitting against his ribs through cotton. He thinks the touch and feels the touch and rolls his eyes once he opens them. He lifts his arm.
She sneaks herself under it, settles against his chest, spooned against him. Uses his arm on the cushion for a pillow the way he’s using the hand of the same arm. He tries to think of something to complain about.
“Your hair’s in my face,” he says, punctuating the statement with a puff of breath.
She giggles.
He does it again.
She reaches back, nearly pokes him in the eye as she gathers her hair to pull it over her shoulder. “Better?”
“Yeah,” he says. “You?”
“...Yeah,” she answers, and it’s such a slight hitch, slight enough to ignore.
He closes his eyes again and falls asleep to the sound of his name still on her lips, unsaid.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Velvet moss serves for a cradle beneath a glass sky. Purple moss, not red grass, and that’s all to tell him he’s not home, not tucked away, not
“...design’s cool.”
“You think?”
not home
“...much you got for...”
“...look at it first? Don’t see why...”
home with her instead of
“...that much.”
“...display piece.”
instead of you.
“...design’s really cool. Think Granddad would...”
Grand...father?
Susan?
So maybe-
what?
who are
let go
let. go.
He hisses out through his teeth, an elbow in his side. “Rose,” he says, he snaps. It hurts. It hurts so much more than it should.
She rolls over, blinking open her eyes. Somehow in the space of the couch, in the time of a breath, she rolls over. Her hair gets in his face again, in his mouth. He spits it out and she pulls it back, her gaze intent on him, intent and close.
“What is it?” she asks, no place for her arms but between them, no place for his but around her. “Are you-”
“You were elbowing me,” he says, says just that. He feels like there’s something he should tell her, something important and urgent, and it bothers him, not being able to put his finger down on it, not being able to see what’s happening inside his own head.
Her palm’s back against his chest, pressed against his chest, so very hot and so very small, and the speed of the beat seems to calm her even as she asks, “You sure?”
He’s not.
But he doesn’t know what he’d say if he had anything to say. Knows that putting thought into words accomplishes nothing, will do nothing but end this now, turn the present into the past as he moves into the future and he’s not willing to do that, not just yet.
“It’s okay, Rose,” he says, trying to give her an attempt at a smile. Trying that much.
She closes her eyes, tucking herself back against him, shifting until his hand is against the small of her back, until his thumb has a spine to stroke.
“I’m in good hands,” he adds softly, quietly, and for the life of him, he doesn’t know why it feels a lie.
.-.-.-.-.-.
<-- | -->
Author: rallalon | Rall
Beta: vyctori
Rating: PG13, AU towards the end of Season One; 9!Smith.
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summary: “Starting to make a habit of this,” he says after that shower, seeing her awake on his couch, and then immediately wishes he hadn’t.
AN: Happy Birthday, In Human Hands.
The Tourist
The Girl
The Runaway
The Puzzle
The Passenger
The Victim
The Absent
The Found
The Determined
The Unaware
The Celebrant
The Nurse
There’s grit in his sheets and he knows it’s long past eight, but he’s still not getting up. He remembers, quite distantly at this point, that when he was young - young as in young, he could never understand why people liked lie-ins and lazing about.
He closes his eyes, and drifts, and almost dreams, feeling hot and cold, and his body forgets to remember him for just a little while longer. And then it recalls.
His body knows him, before he knows his body. It aches and burns, tight and small, stretched and fleshed and it feels like fire and thoughts of phoenixes, of death causing disaster causing birth, and he thinks and that’s strange. It’s strange to know a dream.
He pulls his body up - or it might be his body rising, pulling his mind - and he goes to the door, the closedunlocked door, a semi-permeable membrane in a cell reforming. Bare feet always bare step onto grating and she lies on the sofa in the center of it all, this great, tan, lumpy sofa in the middle of it all.
To sit is to be conscious in the unconscious and so he sits, dares himself stillness, dares himself to still and watch her fade. He watches them all fade.
He seldom means to.
“I’ve often wondered,” Fred says from behind the couch, “what it is that you do mean to do.”
He’s moved from cushion to coffee table without movement, turned from looking away to looking towards, and the girl hugs his pillow as the woman studies his ring. He can’t recall giving either to either, but he doesn’t have the heart to take either away; he lost it somewhere, had that taken away first.
“You know me and plans,” he replies, brushing a curly lock out of his eyes.
“I know you and plans,” she agrees, leaning forward to brush it back in place, back out of place.
The girl sleeps on, her head in Fred’s lap, the pillow a twisted loop in her arms, around her arms in a cloth shackle.
“Never do seem to work out,” he says, the wood of the table unpleasant and soft beneath him. “You and me and plans.” He looks down at the floor, through the floor and into wiring, between his folded, mismatched hands and down into something that knows nothing of down or through or between. It steadies him, releases him from the spin.
He lifts his head, lighter from the lack of hair, and says, and hopes: “I’ve always been more of an improviser.”
They smile, one in death, one in sleep.
He wakes, still waiting for a reply.
.-.-.-.-.-.-.
He rolls over and it hurts. His legs sorely object to this - pun intended - but for the life of him, he can’t remember why they would. His legs don’t do this. His body doesn’t do this, didn’t.
He thinks to get some water.
Sitting up takes a little while and moving makes his head hurt too. He tries to rub at his eyes and then even his cheeks hurt. He muffles a groan as he pulls his legs to hang off the side of the bed, reaches for his mobile to check the time even though he knows perfectly well it’s already after noon. Noon’s passed, he’s sure of it, his head hurting just a little too much for him to wonder why.
This is the point where he thinks he’s hung over.
This is followed by the point where he goes through a mental checklist. First off, clothing. Check. Fully dressed and full of sand. Anything obviously missing? A pocket check makes that a no. Last recollection of his girl...?
Taking the first shower, his brain finally prompts. They’d wandered around a bit more last night - this morning, he supposed - with that group of friends of hers until exhaustion and clothing full of sand had driven them back to their respective homes. His girl had tagged along with him, his shower the closest. He’d let her go first and must’ve dozed off waiting for his turn.
His bed’s full of sand. His jeans smell like salt and his t-shirt feels like grit. He feels like fire and ice, like his body’s having issues when it comes to homeostasis. He’s uncomfortable in more ways than he can mention. Searching for the good part of this situation, he manages to come up with the fact that today is Saturday and there is no work until Monday.
That, and he’s getting his shower now.
He forgets the issue of his aching legs until he has to walk and maybe, just maybe, running halfway across the city in one go yesterday was not the brightest idea he’s ever had. And the world’s spinning again, spinning out of sync with him; he likes this world, but he doesn’t quite seem to fit its patterns. By the time he gets a change of clothes and manoeuvres to the door, he feels as old and weak and out-of-shape as that tourist of his keeps treating him. Stiff, gritty denim doesn’t do much to help either.
But then he opens the door and hobbles through the living room, and she’s lying there. Lying there on his couch, her now-dry hair half-wrapped in one of his towels that has since become her pillow. There’s enough sun coming in through the window in the kitchenette that the lack of the ceiling light doesn’t matter. If this much hasn’t woken her up yet, a little more won’t either. Anyway, he’s got more pressing matters to deal with at the moment.
There’s only so long any man can go with his pants full of sand.
.-.-.-.-.-.
“Starting to make a habit of this,” he says after that shower, seeing her awake on his couch, and then immediately wishes he hadn’t.
She looks up abruptly, hand halfway through finger-combing her hair, her towel from last night across her lap, one corner halfway to the floor. “Sorry?”
“Freeloading,” he answers, purposefully missing her expression by toweling his hair dry. It’s taking a little longer than it used to, isn’t instantaneous. Extra length will do that. The towel brushes roughly against his cheek and he winces.
“Something up?”
He shrugs, tossing the towel back into the bathroom - it’s starting to look like a laundry day - and gets himself to the couch, sits himself down with no small relief. Hot water and clean clothes give him something of a boost, but he’s still uncomfortable in his own skin, or his skin’s uncomfortable on him.
“...Are you okay?” she asks and when he looks straight at her, her eyebrows rise. There’s a small pause before she tells him, in no uncertain terms: “We’re having paella for lunch today.”
“Any particular reason why?” he asks right back, confused up until she touches her own cheek.
“S’posed to cure cancer, right?”
Headache or no, he can’t help but roll his eyes. “I’m not burnt that badly.” He expects her to smile at that, to continue to tease. Expects it, smiles in that expectation, smiles back at her in advance.
Except it’s not smiling back when he’s not being smiled at.
“You haven’t gotten burned before,” she says, and it’s like she’s puzzling out some great and potentially dire mystery.
He shrugs, getting the feeling that something’s coming and it’s already too late to avoid it. “Didn’t much keep to the shade yesterday.” Not to mention that they’re starting to get into real summer now. June’s just been a warm up - look at that, two puns in half an hour. He can’t be that out of it.
She stares at him for a little while longer all the same, an unnerving sort of inspection. And then, just to be the most random person the world has ever seen, she reaches up to his forehead, touches where his hair beginning to curl over skin.
Cold at the warm touch, he shivers.
“Yep,” she says, apparently expecting as much, “you’re sun sick.”
It’s his turn to stare, albeit in a different way. He makes a point of fighting down a yawn; it would ruin the effect.
She shrugs. “Overexposure to sunlight - used to happen a lot to me, actually. Lotta traveling, little hydrating. Sorta adjusted to it, though.”
“Rose,” he says, and she knows him well enough to know to interrupt his protest before it can start.
“You’re hot, cold and achy?” she asks.
“A bit,” he admits.
“Tired with a headache?”
He shrugs, arm over the back of the couch. It’s a motion that usually distracts her, at least for the length of time it takes for her to fit herself against his side. It doesn’t work this time.
“I’m gettin’ you water,” she decides, getting up, and at that point, he realizes there’s no use protesting. Besides, lumps notwithstanding, this couch is more comfortable than he’s been giving it credit for. He watches her back as she moves to the kitchenette, as she opens the right cabinet for the cups on the first try.
“You trying to be a doctor or something?” he asks her, not sure whether to be annoyed or amused at the amount of fuss he’s getting.
She looks over her shoulder and says to him, traces of humour failing to appear, “Someone’s gotta be.”
.-.-.-.-.-.-.
He’ll never know how she managed to get take-away on San Juan, but he’s not about to be ungrateful. A little confused as to when he fell asleep on the couch, but maybe it’s just that sort of couch. Maybe that’s why she keeps spending the night.
“Heat exhaustion,” he says, between chewing, plastic fork and styrofoam container in hand.
“What?”
“It’s called heat exhaustion, not sun sickness,” he corrects, explains.
She chews thoughtfully, a careful distance between them, a caution on her part that he’s finding difficult to take. It’s annoying, her efforts not to touch, even if made for his sake. “That so?” she asks, swallowing only after speaking, her cheek momentarily bulging as she spoke.
He nods and his head hurts from it, and it amazes him on one level even as it annoys him on another. He slept past noon; he can’t still be this tired. “With a bit of sunburn.”
It takes a moment of chewing, but he realizes that he’s the only one still eating. He stares into the white little container of rice and fish and flavour and he feels her eyes on his cheeks, tracing the burn. Feels the gaze move, wander up. He feels her hand want to touch his hair and then he thinks that the feeling might be just a touch backwards.
He looks to her.
She’s looking back.
Of course she’s looking back. She’s always looking back. That’s what she does, part of who she....
A part of who they are.
And this time she smiles. “So you know everything, then?”
He shrugs a little, grinning a bit, and she laughs at his agreement. Of course, that makes it time to get indignant. “What?” he asks, false irritability just managing to pull down the corners of his mouth. “Don’t believe me?”
“’Course I do,” she answers, and her tone is so playful that offense isn’t half so hard to feign.
“Then what’re you laughing at?”
She blushes, the tinge of colour in her cheeks matching the faint pain in his. “S’nothing.”
He can’t leave that alone. That’s a sort of impossible he’s not interested in. “Oh, I’m nothing now?”
She elbows him.
In what feels like a major piece of exertion, he elbows back, getting his arm against her side, one layer of cotton cloth to defend her.
She sticks her fork into her mouth and swats him with her free hand, smiling around plastic tines, and he holds still, not willing to risk choking her for mere play. That retribution achieved, she wedges herself against his side as if that could settle all arguments - that it does is a fact he steadfastly ignores. It makes eating a little awkward, but he’s all right with that.
It’s a little while longer before she explains herself, long enough for him to finish his paella and set container and fork both on the coffee table. She fits under his arm, after that, and he starts to feel like her head would fit on his shoulder, her cheek to his shoulder, the crown of her head against his neck, he her pillow and she his. He likes the thought of it. When his head is drooping, at least, he likes the thought of it.
He knows it’s bad for digestion, lying down right after, but that’s what he wants to do here. Fit her back against his chest and doze off in the first real nap of all their siestas. It’s a thought that feels strange in his head, as if it weren’t fully made to fit there, as if his head wasn’t made to let it fit. Or maybe he’s just tired. Far less of a headache, though; that’s something.
Finished with lunch, she settles against him, her cheek on his shoulder. She breathes in beneath his arm, a content little sigh. His free hand finds hers, is found by both of hers; they rest on his thigh. “You’re just so... you, sometimes,” she says, her jaw moving against cotton moving against skin.
“And that’s a good thing?” He’s not sure if that’s sarcasm, or self-depreciation, or some strange version of defensiveness. Whatever it is, it leads him to ask this, a question he doesn’t entirely want the answer to, an answer in either direction.
“Yeah,” she says, lifting her head a little to look into his eyes. “Best thing in the world.”
He doesn’t know what to say to that. Not at first.
And even when he thinks of it, he can’t say it.
“’Bout time you figured that out,” he replies instead, the pause longer in his head than in reality. Must have been longer in his head, must have been time stretching as his slow heart sped.
She elbows him a bit lighter this time. Only fair that it’s lighter, what with her being in prime elbowing territory.
“Rose,” he says, because it’s a question he wants to warn her of before he asks it.
“Yeah?” she says and her hands squeeze around his.
“Couch treat you well enough?”
It’s not the question he meant to ask. Never is. But really, no point in asking. Just a little piece of local superstition, jumping over bonfires to find destiny in dreams. But they’d jumped. His hand in hers, they’d jumped.
And it feels like that should change things. As if one little bit of stupidity should somehow rearrange the world, should twist its spin. Really, it’s too stupid to ask after, no matter the impulse to do so, to look her close in the eyes and ask the question: Did you dream about me?
“Yeah,” she says and he blinks, his mind snapping back to the subject at hand, the one he’d picked instead of the other. She smiles at his confusion, the way it’s not fair to smile at a man when he’s got a headache. “I sleep better here, actually.”
“Do you now?” he asks, voice soft in a way he won’t claim to understand, won’t let be called intentional because it’s not. It’s the tiredness and the aches and wouldn’t it be fantastic - strangely, quietly fantastic - if they just feel asleep, right here?
“Yeah,” she says again, and she’s leaning in, shifting against him to get even closer. “I do.”
And he could do, right here. In another mood, in a different time, he could do. Because she’s leaning in. Because she keeps saying these things. Because he’s only half a fool and not at all blind.
But right here, right now, what he wants is to hold her. That’s what he can do. That’s what he does do. She sighs a little, and he can’t tell if that’s the sound of a girl content or a girl disappointed.
Can’t tell which he’d prefer.
“Better than the hotel?” he asks into her ear, brushing her hair away from his face with the hand not held by hers, the hand of the arm around her shoulders.
Settling against his chest, she nods, undoing his work, making him do it again. “More comfortable here,” she explains, and she turns her head as much as she can, looking up at him out of one eye, the angle awkward. If she’d pull back, she could see, but she keeps on leaning in, keeps on leaning against.
“That so?” He gets her hair in his mouth, has to interfere with his hand once more. It’s such long hair, insists on getting in the way.
“Your fridge has a better hum,” she explains and while he’s pretty sure those are some lines to read between, he knows that’s not a lie.
“I like it too.”
“Hm?” Again, shifting to look up.
He brushes her hair back. “The hum.”
“Yeah. S’like....”
“A little.”
“A little of a bit?”
“A little of a bit of an ish,” he agrees.
She looks up at him, all twisted up against his side in the apparent hope of fitting there. “That enough?”
“It’s enough,” he says, and it’s only then that he wonders what they’re talking about.
Slow about it, she turns her head once more, her ear pressed to his shoulder. Her head moving, ear pressed to his chest. His arm around her shoulder shifts and it’s impossible to say what position they would have ended up in if she hadn’t pulled back then.
There’s a look on her face, then. This little piece of consideration and worry and he wants to do something about it, do something against it.
“What?” he asks, rather failing at his goal.
“Last night,” she says, those two words taking an age apiece to be said, “I was thinking.”
“That makes a change,” he quips automatically, expecting to receive a physical swat in return to the verbal prodding. Expecting, and then waiting. “Rose?”
Her head falls back onto his shoulder and it’s like she doesn’t want to say, only started to say because she needs to say. Because he’ll make her say.
He keeps his hands still as he asks her, doesn’t dare prod her off balance any more than she already is. “You were thinking about what?”
“Going into the ocean, yeah?” she says, jaw moving against his shoulder. “Supposed to be about washing away sins or somethin’ like that, right?”
And it occurs to him then that her head on his shoulder, that’s not her being close. That’s her avoiding looking at him. “S’pose so,” he agrees, voice quieter than he meant it to be as he shifts beneath her, shifts to make her face him. He stops being tired right there, can feel the adrenaline in the foreign flow of his bloodstream.
She does, not half nervous about it. “So I was wondering. I mean....” She touches her hair, fiddles with it, and she looks so young. Tragically, irrevocably young for all he can see the woman she’ll be, the woman still half-hidden behind the girl.
He pulls one foot off the coffee table, bends knee with the bottom of his foot against the cushion of the couch. Elbow on top of raised knee, he looks at her eyes as he waits for her voice.
It gives her trouble, him looking, but it’s not a gaze he can drop. She’ll explain to him what this is, tell him outright if he simply waits.
That’s something he tells himself often.
In this case, he’s right.
“D’you, er. Sorry.” She shifts, focusing on him instead of some shadow beyond his face. “I mean, if you were-”
He takes her hand.
She pauses, tongue flicking out to moisten her bottom lip before she bites it. Her hair tries to fall over her shoulders, manages it with one small cascade at a time as her head lowers, as she closes her eyes, as she decides.
“If you were the doctor,” she says, and it sounds like a metaphor, “would you forgive me?”
“Yeah,” he says.
However she intends the question, there’s still only one answer. Only one answer with her looking like that, he’d like to think, like to tell himself, would love to believe. But that’s the lie, the one lie too many from a man to himself. It’s one answer for her, unconditional.
This, he knows rather than realizes, feels it rather than thinks it.
But she doesn’t.
“No, I mean it,” she insists. “Would you? If you were him.”
And she shifts as she says it, looks so guilty.
Holds onto his hand, her touch so sorry.
He shrugs, the motion moving something around inside of him, something too close to pain for him to look at. “If I were anyone,” he says.
Something in his voice makes her shy, and it’s not because she’s misunderstood. Her hand is tense in his and her face gives no indication as to whether he ought to hold on, whether he ought to let go.
“I wish...” she starts to say, says and stops, and his reply is one already known.
Your wish is my command. Just.... “Careful what you wish for.”
It’s a nervous sound when she laughs a little. Just a little. A little nervous, a little laugh. “Yeah, I’ve learned about that.” Her free hand tucks her hair back and his rises to join it, the movement done before the thought’s begun. Her eyes close as his fingertips move, smoothing hair and stroking scalp, and her cheek is warm against his palm. Her hand holds loosely to his, loosely at first, her fingers less light as her breath wavers through already parted lips. He tilts his head, leans in closer still.
Heat exhaustion or no, he thinks he’s making himself very clear.
He has to give her a moment more, though, has to offer the choice. In this, as in all things, he has to offer a choice. “Yeah?” he asks, able to say that much. It’s a breath rather than a word. A breath she must be able to feel, this close. This close and closer still.
She turns her face from his.
Turns her face, turns it into his hand, kisses his palm or presses her lips there or makes contact all on accident; his mind won’t let him tell. “’s a monkey’s paw wish,” she says, her sound against his skin, and he thinks he’s upset her.
It’s a long moment before he can think of anything to say to that, before he thinks to ask, “What wish?” What went wrong? What’s off here, between them, when he was so very, very sure that-
She looks at him. Squeezes the hand in hers and presses a little more into the hand against her face. Closes her eyes again like she’s said something, like she’s made her point when it’s clear she hasn’t. Maybe it’s only in the timing - he never could get that right.
“Rose,” he says, failing to remember how to let go, “what wish?”
Her thumb tries to stroke against the back of his held hand, his hand on his thigh, their hands on his thigh. She tries to calm him without being calm, and that’s how he knows he’s not the only one lost here. “Y’know how, in the story,” she says, talking about that monkey’s paw, “you wish for something good, and then something horrible happens, and that’s how you get the something good? They wish for money, the son dies, they get it because of his death. Like that.”
“That’s how you get what you wished for,” he corrects, the difference clear, the correction automatic. “Doesn’t have to be something good, what you end up getting.” A revived child, the tattered remains pounding at the door; he’s had nightmares like that story.
“What if it is something good, though,” she says, a statement instead of a question. “And you get it and- and you still want it, but it’s all twisted up in, in everything.”
Twisted up. With dead captains and missing doctors and stolen watches, he supposes. With one month left until there’s nothing left at all.
“That’s just a story,” he says, because there’s a point beyond the one she’s trying to make.
She shakes her head against his hand and he lets go. “But what if-”
“No.”
It comes out a very hard no, that word. But maybe it should do, then. Because he means it.
She stalls at the sound, for just a moment. “Would you listen? I’m tryin’ t’ explain-”
“No,” he says, and if it were rock before, it’s made of steel now. “’Cause you’re explaining it wrong.”
“Just ‘cause you don’t understand doesn’t-”
“It’s not your fault.”
It brings her up short.
It brings her up very short.
It turns her shy again, more than shy, and she pulls back, shifts back. Lets go. Uncertainty makes her young and youth makes her small; far too small to carry what she’s put upon her shoulders.
“You wishin’ for something to happen won’t make it- didn’t make it happen,” he amends. “Life doesn’t work that way. If you get something good out of disaster, that’s your silver lining - that’s blind luck right there.” His face feels stern, but that’s all he can define. He hasn’t a clue as to what’s in his voice, not by sound or feel. It’s indignation and sadness and care for the stupid and mockery for the stupidity. It’s all different and distinct and far too much to fit into just one heart. “You don’t have to feel guilty over blind luck.”
“Who says I feel guilty?” she says and she shifts and he rolls his eyes.
“Who just asked me to forgive her?”
“That’s not what I-”
“Yeah it is.”
Pushed back to where she can only be defensive, she glares at him, but he knows he’s right. He’s right and she’s mad, but when she calms down, she’ll understand that.
He reaches for her hand again, but she does more than pull away. She gets up, stands. Moves. He opens his mouth to protest, but it’s not the door she’s moving to. She sets her back against the counter separating kitchenette from living room, stands just there, still close enough to kick the end of the couch. Her bare arms cross over her top and he can’t help but think of her in his jacket, can’t help but think she needs something around her, to help keep the world out.
Just the world, though. Not him.
He shifts to face her and does no more, knows better than to reach again. He’s already gambled enough today, more than can be blamed on head exhaustion or dehydration. He’s already gambled enough, but he needs the last word, never mind that he already has it. “Wishing’s got nothing to do with it,” he tells her again. “Just a coincidence. That doesn’t make it your fault.”
“No,” she says, and he hears rather than sees her start to cry. “It bein’ my fault makes it my fault.”
No time passes as he moves. They’re apart and then they’re together; he’s on the couch and then he’s standing.
She’s crying, and then she’s in his arms.
“Rose,” he says.
“I can’t explain.”
“That’s all right,” he tells her, reassurances mumbled into her hair. “Look, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t’ve-”
She sobs. One sob, her back moving beneath his hands, the damp of her tears slipping through his t-shirt to accuse his very skin, to accuse the man inside it. After that, she shakes, trying to keep quiet.
He doesn’t know what to do, besides let her cry.
There’s only so long he can do that for.
“Rose, I didn’t mean to-”
“Don’t apologize.” She shakes her head against his shoulder and her hands grip at him where they can, hold to him. “Oh god, you- you don’t apologize.”
“I do when I’m sorry,” he offers up, a protest more light than weak. He’s a bit hopeless and not half lost.
But maybe he did right. She sounds a bit better when she says, “Don’t be.”
“That not allowed?”
“Completely banned.”
“I’ll go off and be an unapologetic bastard, how’s that?”
She sniffles a little, moves her arms around him as she moves her head. She hugs rather than clings, and she’s moved her cheek to a dry spot of his t-shirt. “Fantastic,” she says, like she’s just trying to set herself off again.
He says her name again, a bit of a warning, and she hushes.
“’m sorry,” she mumbles quietly, and he knows better than to make her take it back.
“You gonna say what for?” he asks, his voice as soft as the hair against the side of his jaw.
She shrugs a little in his arms and they readjust around one another, into each other. “For bein’ crazy.”
“You’re not crazy,” he tells her, certain about that. He knows what madness looks like and her brand of it isn’t a kind he’ll worry about, so long as she’s here with him. “Just human.”
She makes a noise that’s half-sniffle, half-laugh. “Same thing, isn’t it?”
“Can’t say it’s as bad as I thought it would be.”
She pulls back with a jerk, reddened eyes wide with confusion and hope. “...What was that?”
“It’s not as bad as it could be,” he repeats, not sure what she thought he’d said.
She stares at him, not breathing, and then she squeezes her eyes shut, gives her head a little shake to clear it. “Right,” she says. “Right, sorry.”
“No harm done,” he answers, not much sure why he has to say it. And then he’s tired again. Just like that, tired again, sudden and strong and that would be the adrenaline wearing out, wouldn’t it?
And of course, she notices. She’s on mauve alert, today. “You okay? ‘s it just the heat exhaustion or...?” She asks it like there’s an or. She makes him wonder, sometimes.
Make that most of the time, come to think of it.
“Only a spot of sunburn,” he informs her, rolling his eyes. If there’s an or, that’s what she’s talking about. “Rose, even the human body can regenerate skin cells. Regrow, repair. That.” He’s not sure why he just flustered himself. Whatever he’s going on about, he’s not much reassuring his girl.
Even without reassurance, she hasn’t got a bad head on her. “You’re tired,” she says, tells him, and he’ll do more than trust her opinion on that. “You should go back to bed. Or drink something. You had any water today? I know you didn’t last night.”
She shoos him a little, gets him back on the couch. He goes, giving her a little more time to wipe at her eyes. And he wonders. Her fault? That her captain died? That he was shot. He was shot, that’s what she’d said.
His eyes unfocus, the room blurring from thought, and he swallows, swallows and thinks hostage, just a thought, just that, but it rings like ice against glass, rings like a chilled chime and he shivers.
“You okay?” she asks, standing over him, cup of water in her offered hand.
He takes it, gives her a nod. “Yeah,” he says in the way that means he’s not. And he doesn’t know why. How far can a bit of sun and heat throw a man off? Is he dehydrated again?
But maybe that’s not it. Maybe he’s just too awake to know.
He downs the glass, wipes at his mouth after with the bare skin of his forearm. Gives her a look when he catches her watching. Staring, more like.
“What?”
“You still don’t drink like a... a normal person, I s’pose,” she says, changing her mind halfway through by the sound of it. Still. That’s already more than he gets out of her sometimes.
He shrugs, the cup set onto the table and maybe it’ll leave another ring on the wood. Maybe it’ll leave something, just a little, tiny something in this flat that still doesn’t much feel like his, not when he’s alone in it. “You gonna stick around?”
“Yeah,” she says, like it would never have occurred to her to leave. And then, shy: “If you want.”
“If you want,” he counters, already having decided that he’s taking a nap. Not for the rest, though he’s tired again - why is he always so tired nowadays? No, this is for the sake of a thought, for a bit of wondering best done without the brain going. Not that it ever stops, mind. “I don’t know about you, but I’m sleeping,” he tells her, adds that.
“Oh,” she says, and she watches as he stretches out on the couch like he’s something strange, like he’s half-alien.
He stretches out on his side, and closes his eyes, and she’ll put a hand on his side, does lay her hand on his side below his arm, her fingers fitting against his ribs through cotton. He thinks the touch and feels the touch and rolls his eyes once he opens them. He lifts his arm.
She sneaks herself under it, settles against his chest, spooned against him. Uses his arm on the cushion for a pillow the way he’s using the hand of the same arm. He tries to think of something to complain about.
“Your hair’s in my face,” he says, punctuating the statement with a puff of breath.
She giggles.
He does it again.
She reaches back, nearly pokes him in the eye as she gathers her hair to pull it over her shoulder. “Better?”
“Yeah,” he says. “You?”
“...Yeah,” she answers, and it’s such a slight hitch, slight enough to ignore.
He closes his eyes again and falls asleep to the sound of his name still on her lips, unsaid.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Velvet moss serves for a cradle beneath a glass sky. Purple moss, not red grass, and that’s all to tell him he’s not home, not tucked away, not
“...design’s cool.”
“You think?”
not home
“...much you got for...”
“...look at it first? Don’t see why...”
home with her instead of
“...that much.”
“...display piece.”
instead of you.
“...design’s really cool. Think Granddad would...”
Grand...father?
Susan?
So maybe-
what?
who are
let go
let. go.
He hisses out through his teeth, an elbow in his side. “Rose,” he says, he snaps. It hurts. It hurts so much more than it should.
She rolls over, blinking open her eyes. Somehow in the space of the couch, in the time of a breath, she rolls over. Her hair gets in his face again, in his mouth. He spits it out and she pulls it back, her gaze intent on him, intent and close.
“What is it?” she asks, no place for her arms but between them, no place for his but around her. “Are you-”
“You were elbowing me,” he says, says just that. He feels like there’s something he should tell her, something important and urgent, and it bothers him, not being able to put his finger down on it, not being able to see what’s happening inside his own head.
Her palm’s back against his chest, pressed against his chest, so very hot and so very small, and the speed of the beat seems to calm her even as she asks, “You sure?”
He’s not.
But he doesn’t know what he’d say if he had anything to say. Knows that putting thought into words accomplishes nothing, will do nothing but end this now, turn the present into the past as he moves into the future and he’s not willing to do that, not just yet.
“It’s okay, Rose,” he says, trying to give her an attempt at a smile. Trying that much.
She closes her eyes, tucking herself back against him, shifting until his hand is against the small of her back, until his thumb has a spine to stroke.
“I’m in good hands,” he adds softly, quietly, and for the life of him, he doesn’t know why it feels a lie.
.-.-.-.-.-.
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