Fic: In Human Hands (19/26)
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: There’s a small pause as he hears her not say his name, as she doesn’t fill the word with amusement and exasperation. It happens with her sometimes, one of those UNIT side effects he doesn’t ask about. It makes him think about all those crime movies where the thieves make a big fuss over not calling each other by name during the heist.
Notes: This chapter spent a short while in a great deal of danger at the end of my winter break. Halfway through getting back to campus, my laptop up and died. I managed to pull most of my stuff off my computer through the magic that is external hard drives and it came out just fine in the end. Immediately following that, though, my beta vyctori had her laptop go crazy. It's not been a good time for computers, basically, so I hope all of you guys are doing all right.
Also, just as a headsup, I seem to have buried myself in almost exclusively reading-heavy, essay-filled classes this semester, so though I'll still keep trying to update at the end of each month, madness may occur. Whatever happens, you should be able to expect another chapter come April 2nd, when IHH turns two.
The Tourist
The Girl
The Runaway
The Puzzle
The Passenger
The Victim
The Absent
The Found
The Determined
The Unaware
The Celebrant
The Nurse
The Visitor
The Illusion
The Distraction
The Guest
The Companion
The Confidante
The Defenseless
It takes considerably more time than four hours for them to drive back to Barcelona from Broto.
It’s time very well spent.
.-.-.-.-.-.
As things go on, a surprising amount of their time is very well spent.
Which is good, because as time goes on - as time is wont to do - they’re getting closer to the day she moves out. It’s amazing he’d forgotten it. Well. He’d like it to be. He’s good at blocking things out when he doesn’t want to see them.
They have Sunday night and all of Monday and then on Tuesday morning, she wakes up on his couch for the last time. The last time she has to, he reminds himself. Things could still go back to the way they were before. It’s not the option he’d pick, but then, that’s not up to him. It seldom is.
Some things have changed and stayed changed, though. They fit against each other with a growing tension that one of them snaps with a kiss, with a touch, with a gaze as soft and dark as a mattress beneath the sheets. She twines into him and he reaches for her and whenever they think of their own idiocy, they each swallow up the other’s forced laughter.
It’s just snogging, that’s all. Just a bit of a snog here and there and it means only whatever they want it to mean, except it always seems to mean more than that. They’ve done so little but it feels like so much and they stop speaking of even literal sleep and of the bedroom behind his door. That door stays closed.
He’s started to shave with the bathroom door open, though, has no idea when that started. She likes to watch him shave, loves to laugh when he swears. She doesn’t seem to mind being woken up by it, even.
Her mornings consistently start later than his, he’s pleased to note. Her nights do go later, but that’s not the important part. Sometimes he outlasts her that way too. Like last night, when he read to her of a mad knight errant in search of impossible justice. It’s a strange sort of thing to be pleased about, but with her about to go, he’d rather make himself be pleased than let himself brood.
She leans against the doorframe to watch him this morning and when he glances at her, her posture is familiar. Arms and ankles crossed. Who does she think she’s trying to be? Him? With her in mostly pink jimjams, it’s not going to happen.
He lets his eyes smile but keeps his expression smooth until he’s done shaving. No swearing required this time, thankfully.
“What’s the address?” he asks, putting his razor away. It makes her stop leaning, start paying a different sort of attention.
She tells him, gives him numbers and words that he memorizes. “Just for a couple days there,” she says. “After that, I switch over to this one a couple blocks away.”
“Seems a bit complicated, all that switchin’.”
“Believe me, I got help for it. Friend of my mum owed her a favour and his wife works at a travel agency.”
“What, not UNIT?”
For a second, she looks caught out. Then she asks, trying for a joke or a flirt almost, “Who says I’m not talking in code?”
“Me. ‘Cause I know what you sound like when you are.”
“And what do I sound like?”
He shrugs. “Not like you.”
She grins a little, clearly making herself do it. She asks again, “And what do I sound like?”
“Like someone who’s going to make me late for work,” he says rather than answer. He edges past her, relinquishing the small bathroom. She always seems to take up so much space in the bathroom, even when she’s not actually in there. It’s all the little bottles around the tub, must be, all of them smelling like her. It’ll be better with those bottles gone. More space.
“Oh.” And she lets him go.
He pauses at the front door, holding it half open. “Do you need to check in before lunch or-”
“Before,” she says. “Same as always, really. I’ll be fine by myself.”
“Right.”
“Meet you for lunch still?” That she has to ask is at once absurd and absurdly hurtful.
“Same as before, yeah,” he agrees, not afraid to sound bitter. “See you then.”
It’s a petty and cowardly way of doing things, ducking out like that with her yet to get dressed. Still, it matches his mood.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Any second now, Sanchez is going to ask him about it. It’ll be something like “A lover’s quarrel?” or “Another spat?” Something that assumes they’re already more than they’re ever going to be. Something like that. And the only reply he’ll have is to tell the man to shut up. To tell him to shut up and stow it, because, yes, he is a petulant five-year-old, thank you for noticing.
Sanchez never comments on his mood that morning.
Never mentions how they tense at each other, he and that girl who’s always on the border of being his.
For all he acts like a gossip, Sanchez doesn’t mention a lot of things.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Over lunch, she startles as if recalling something, as if remembering. She touches the chain around her neck, looks at him like she’s done something wrong. It’s a restaurant day, one with a tiny outdoor table that places them across from one another. Sitting like that, it’s impossible not to be looking at her, not to notice.
He chews to a finish, swallows despite the way he just stopped being even remotely hungry. With the fuss people make over spitting, it’s really the only option. “What?”
She takes a bite after he asks. They stare at each other, he waiting for an answer, she deciding between truth and fabrication. If he’d known things would take a turn like this after, he never would have kissed her.
That is, of course, a complete lie, but that’s not important. Really, he’s just tired of the way things keep shifting between them. Yes, he shifted it in the first place, but she’s been pushing it back and forth bit by bit. Sort of like what she’s doing to her rice with her fork.
“I’ve still got your key,” she says. Sets down the fork and pulls up that chain around her neck to show him the two keys on it.
“So you do,” he agrees. Maybe if he says it lightly enough, she won’t notice the look on his face, the look he knows has to be on his face.
She looks down at her two keys. Tucks them back down her top and they chime together like ice in a glass.
He puts his hand down on the table. Leaves it there with his palm up and his fingers curled, loose around air.
She takes it, keeps it, and, ultimately, learns how to eat left-handed.
.-.-.-.-.-.
When he gets back to the garage, Sanchez claps him on the back before introducing him to a dying Honda.
Half an hour later - less - the engine purrs out a guttural rhythm before finding its growl. “There,” he says, shooting a grin at Pedro when the other mechanic looks annoyed at his speed. Not his fault the problem was so simply fixed.
“All better?” Sanchez asks.
“Yeah,” he says.
“Good,” Sanchez says and then, of all things, he winks. “I like having stories to tell my wife.”
.-.-.-.-.-.
She goes out with her friends that night.
“They had you last week,” he protests over the phone - pretends to protest, rather.
“They had me a week and a half ago,” she corrects. “And Tonya’s been trying to help track down the watch and all, so-”
“I was joking.”
There’s a moment of silence across the line, the sounds of the street loud against his ears and pressing in against her mobile.
“Go on,” he says and, no, he’s not daring her. That would be stupid and petty and he really is fine with her gone. He gets his pillow back, for one. “About time I had a night on my own.”
“You’ve got plans?” She sounds incredulous and rightly so.
“Nope!” Because who would he be if he did? “Don’t need ‘em, me. You, though. Got anyone to walk you back to the hotel? Metro closes at midnight.”
“Dunno how, but I’d completely forgotten about that,” she answers and, really, the sarcasm should be left to him. He’s better at it. “Yeah, I’ve got company.”
And then they both sort of look at that statement, somehow staring at words filling up the space between them. He’s standing at a crosswalk, waiting for the light, and she’s somewhere else entirely, but that doesn’t much matter.
“To walk me back,” she says, amends. “Tonya and her novio or amigovio or whatever she’s calling him now.”
“Bit of a difference there.” Spanish vocabulary is always safe ground between them, almost always. It’s a small patch of ground to stand on, but he does his best.
She says something or asks something, but he’s crossing the street now and things aren’t half loud. Once he’s over in the relative quiet of beside the street rather than in it, he replies, “Sorry, missed that.”
“I said: How much of one? A difference, I mean.”
“Anywhere between a little and a lot,” he explains, speaking over a sudden burst of radio from the street. “Both mean ‘boyfriend,’ more or less, but when you get engaged, you get engaged to your novio.”
“But not your amigovio?”
“Not unless it’s a shotgun wedding.”
“Right. I think they’re amigovios, then. Thanks.” Even amid the sounds of gridlocked cars, walking feet and conflicting voices, he can still hear her smile. Half a city away, he can hear that smile.
Half a city away, he rolls his eyes in response. “Glad to have solved the pressing dilemma.”
“Did you just roll your eyes at me?”
“No,” he lies. “That it?”
She makes a noise and this one, he can’t quite catch.
“What was that?” He presses the mobile harder against his ear.
“Tonight,” she says. “What do I say?”
“‘Hello’ and ‘goodbye’ generally work,” he answers, “but you’re going to have to fill in the parts in between by yourself.”
There’s a small pause as he hears her not say his name, as she doesn’t fill the word with amusement and exasperation. It happens with her sometimes, one of those UNIT side effects he doesn’t ask about. It makes him think about all those crime movies where the thieves make a big fuss over not calling each other by name during the heist. After the pause, she says, “Not what I meant.”
“There’s ‘please’ and ‘thanks’ too, but I’ve always found them overrated.”
She’s shaking her head at him now. He knows she is when she finally says it, says it outright. “What do I say when people ask if I’m single?”
“You tell ‘em you’re singular instead,” he tells her. She doesn’t laugh - not that he expected her to - so he adds, “Pun like that’ll frighten anyone away.”
“What if it doesn’t?”
Another crosswalk, another wait. Bad timing today. “Would you want a bloke who stuck around after that?”
“Says the one making the pun in the first place.”
“You asked for my advice,” he says and that’s the wrong word, entirely the wrong word, but it’s not something he cares to amend.
The nuance of her reply is lost along with most of the words. Around him, there’s some honking, some shouting, and more than a few languages involved when it comes to swearing at it all.
“Missed that. What’d you say?” he asks.
“I said ‘thanks’,” she answers and it’s a far shorter response than it was last time she said it. “I’ll see you tomorrow, I guess-”
“Rose,” he says, tries to interrupt.
Waits, unsure if she’s already hung up.
“Yeah?” she asks.
“When someone asks you if you’re single,” he says. “What you say is: Tengo un amigo. Prefiero hablar con él que bailar contigo.”
He knows her lips are moving, can almost hear her trying to repeat the words to herself, almost hear her attempts at translation. She’s memorized bits of it, he thinks, before she asks, “Say that again?”
He does. He says it slowly, keeps saying it until she can repeat it back to him. She’d rather talk with him than dance with some other bloke. She says it, says it right.
“Good,” he says when he’s sure she has it. He likes the way it sounds coming from her mouth.
Though he knows she has to know what those sentences mean, she pries for an outright translation. “What do I say if the bloke only speaks English?” It’s oddly endearing, how she thinks she’s being subtle.
He scoffs at the attempt as much as he scoffs at the offered scenario. “If he can’t learn a second language, he can’t be clever enough for you.”
And once again, he can hear her smile.
“What?” he asks.
“Nothing,” she says and the sound of her smile deepens. “Soy feliz.”
He’s not sure what part of that he likes best, her poor accent or the way she means it. “Good,” he says.
The conversation’s over, but it still takes them some time before they hang up. And they do hang up. They do. Eventually.
It just happens to take awhile.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Her being out doesn’t mean he’s staying in.
Barcelona hits him with light and sound and he tells the same bad joke to eight different people before he makes someone laugh from it. The world is loud and dim and bright and crunched into a murmur and when that eighth person laughs, he laughs too.
There are so many lives out here, all of them wandering around in little circles they mistake for straight lines, all of them so conditioned by the planet’s spin that they spin themselves, spin each other. It’s dizzying and it’s quick and it’s like being a child on the grass, hurtling yourself around an imaginary point until you stagger with it, until your arms open to the sky or the grass, blue or green, orange or red, any colour at all as gravity hugs you home.
It almost feels like that.
“How drunk are you?” the eighth person asks, all shaggy hair and expressive face. The ninth person, they still hold between them, some idiot who needed a bin to vomit in.
“It’s not alcohol,” he answers. And then he laughs, and then he says that phrase, that once-horrible phrase that has since become fantastic. “It’s better than that.”
“Can I have some?” the ninth person slurs, still slumped in their grip, and they laugh. They laugh, but he keeps laughing, keeps laughing so hard.
“I think I just realized something,” he tells persons eight and nine, the shaggy-haired and the wobbling drunk. Together, they help the wobbling drunk to some steps, get him sitting down. “I don’t know what, but I just realized it.”
“Tio, I don’t think that counts,” the eighth person insists.
“Realized, remembered-” He waves his hand to show how little it matters. “-it’s not important. It’s something fantastic.”
“Whatever you’re on, I want some,” the drunk bloke keeps saying, laughing on his shoulder like a silly thing. His breath reeks of alcohol and vomit and he laughs even more when he’s pushed back onto his friend.
“I’m on Earth,” he says, and he’s starting to sound drunk to himself and all he’s had was that one beer at dinner. It’s not an external influence doing this to him. It’s something else, something bigger and smaller and better. “I’m on Earth,” he says again and then laughs even louder than the drunk bloke.
“Me too, tio, me too.” The shaggy one gives him this look, that humouring look between fools.
“I love this place,” he adds and the three of them laugh, all quick and nameless friends on someone else’s steps. “I forgot that for so long. Don’t always like it, but I love it.”
“Como familía,” the drunk one suggests, far more helpful than he could possibly realize.
“Just like family,” he agrees. “You lot. You stupid, fantastic people.” And he grins so wide, blocking out the insult through the haphazard shield of his teeth. “You’re so alive.”
The other two laugh, shove at him a little and then he’s laughing with them, a trio laughing together and it feels right. The situation is right. It’s the play without the proper cast, but it’s still the play.
“Living is so....” It’s not the way he meant the sentence to start and so he tries to drop it.
The drunk one picks it up for him. “It’s so everything,” he concludes, then belches.
It’s oddly perfect, complete in only the way a finished moment can be complete. “In vino veritas,” he declares and the expression works well enough, even here. He stands as, behind them, up the steps, a door opens and the lot of them are yelled at to move.
He helps haul the unsteady one back to the trash bin, leaves the men only slightly improved from his acquaintanceship with them. He waves goodbye and they wave back, more or less, and he’d forgotten life could be like this. Life can fit like this, all little meetings and swapped insanity. It ought to sound incredible, that he could have forgotten this, but the more incredible thing is that he could have discovered it and then rediscovered it.
He could say anything, do anything, go anywhere. All it would take is time and he has that. How has he never realized that before? In all his stupid little human life, how did he never realize how much time he has?
One night is a lifetime, manic and beautiful.
His brain keeps trying to tell him that no, this is too much, too extreme, too insane, but it’s not. It’s just human, human at human’s best. People can feel this way, people can have these moments and they can even make them last. Not long, not for forever, but for more time than the moment should ever hold. He’s going to look back on this tomorrow - look back on this later today, tomorrow is already today - he’s going to look back on it and remember his awe of this moment without knowing where it came from or what it meant and that doesn’t matter. He knows it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t need to explain this moment, only remember it.
Because somehow, six and a half years later, six and a half years after gunfire pulled down his family in a fight that was never meant to happen, somehow, he’s alive again. He died on that night and he’s alive again even with his girls still gone. Gunfire out of an alley and he should have been there, he always should have been there beneath that red-tinged fog, he should have been there but he wasn’t.
He’ll always ought to have been there and he’ll always have failed them; these are fixed, solid points of his life. The rest of it batters itself back and forth, caught in flux, but maybe that’s the part he doesn’t need to mind. That part will be all right. That part is happening, right now, right this instant. With each breath of sea air and car exhaust and someone else’s lost sigh, with each and every breath, that part is happening. It’s happening and will keep on happening and that is so impossibly good.
He can feel so much. Why now, why this way, he doesn’t know. He’ll never know and that’s not important. Maybe he’s run out of numbness or maybe he’s run out of fear or maybe things happen. He sees the possibilities and he delights in them from a distance rather than study them closely.
There is so much left to happen.
To happen and have happened and to keep on happening, and as he conjugates in his head, he laughs and laughter feels like running. It feels like the tilt of the ground beneath his feet and the way life hurtles up to press against his steps. It feels like everything and he has, not for the first time, the vague thought that he might have somehow picked up a contact high from something, from somewhere. How else could he feel like this?
It’s taken so long to see it again and the more he thinks of it, the harder the feeling is to hold. Maybe that’s the sanity returning or perhaps his brain is a little too small to take it or maybe it’s something else entirely, something so else he’d never think of it.
It’s such a brilliant, half-alien feeling. It’s such a feeling.
.-.-.-.-.-.
When he gets back to the flat, he tries to call Grace. There’s a strange sort of logic to it: doctors like to know when their patients have recovered. Even if it was his girls on the table instead of him, he still counts, in a way.
Besides, he did shag her at the end of December. Now that July - and other things - are beginning, maybe some closure wouldn’t go amiss. It’s not what he usually does, not remotely. Never having closure with Fred was what meant they could continue as long as they had, leaving and coming back to each other. But that’s just it.
He doesn’t want another Fred.
He had her and lost her and now, it’s time for someone else.
It’s been a scab for so long that he’s not sure when it became a scar. It was something not to pick at and now it’s something he can safely touch. Almost safely. He’s not going to test that out too thoroughly just yet, but it’s definitely an improvement over bleeding on the floor.
With all of this hovering around inside his not inconsiderable head, he tries to call Grace.
After his lengthy mental preparation for it, discovering he has the wrong number is jarringly anti-climactic.
“Really?” he says to the woman who answers instead of Grace, her accent far different from the San Franciscan woman’s. As is her greeting.
“Brandy Ho's Hunan Food, how may I help you...?” the woman repeats. “Reservation or take out?”
“Take out? Where are you?” It’s the only thing he can think to ask. He was sure that number was right.
“Two-seventeen Columbus Avenue,” the woman says. “Do you need directions?”
“Not quite. Where are you, more generally?”
“North Beach.”
“In San Francisco?”
“Yes, North Beach,” she says, sounding either busy or impatient. “Reservation or take out?”
“Neither,” he says. Good to know he’s got the area code right, at least. “Don’t suppose you know a Grace Holloway? Surgeon, last time I checked.”
“No,” the woman says in the voice of someone who is about to hang up right this minute.
He hangs up first.
So much for that.
.-.-.-.-.-.
When he wakes in his sleep, his head is on her lap, his ear pressed uncomfortably against her thigh. He knows it’s her in the way things are known in dreams. They simply are, more than they ever are waking.
He knows the denim beneath his cheek, knows the knee before his eyes. He knows her. He knows the hand pressing against his head where his mind came out.
He tries to roll onto his back, tries to look up at her, but she holds him there with a soft hand. “Stay down,” she whispers. “Stay hidden.”
“Why?” he whispers right back.
“I want you safe.” And the brush of her hand over his hair is enough to give the words a double meaning.
“Is your mum going to see?” He doesn’t fancy another slap, knows there’s been another slap in the dreaming narrative of his unconscious mind. “Don’t suppose she’d buy that line again.” Not when this really is a sexual relationship now.
“Don’t look up.” She says this, but she removes her hand, stops holding him down.
And of course he looks. Of course he looks up to where there are breasts, where there is her hair, her face, where there are her wide eyes and the barrel of a gun pressed against her head.
“It’s not real until you look,” she says and then a crack splits his world, splits her skull and their bodies fall from his couch with the momentum of the shot, at the point-blank shot of a tilted murderer.
Pinned on the floor between couch and coffee table, the body impossibly heavy, the body that is not her and could never have been her, the body is impossibly heavy. And he swears and curses and clings to the warm, wet weight of a newly made corpse because if these aren’t her remains, then she never was.
He hears footsteps and he knows not to look now, knows never to look again, but his eyes are open and his back is against the sodden grass and he can’t move, not even his eyelids. The body he’s in doesn’t belong to him, protests his control of it by looking up, by looking at blue-gray wool and gray-blue eyes and the green death hovering behind like a plague yet to be named.
And then, like a scene from some horror film, a horror film with a budget and nothing but real blood, someone blows the dead captain’s head off from behind, killing eyes and smile anew, splattering long-congealed blood across the body atop him, across his unwillingly upturned face. He closes his eyes as the broken body falls, closes his eyes not against the late captain but against the figure still behind him. Nothing’s real until you look.
He lies helpless on the forest floor, trapped between couch and coffee table, between dead companion and damaged corpse.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He wakes trembling. He’s twitching with adrenaline and shivering from a chilled heart and shaking from a pounding heart and he’ll never understand why people are supposed to sit bolt upright after a nightmare, never understand how they could when this is the amount of control he has left over his body.
“Fine,” he grits out into his pillow, speaking to something, to some part of the universe that he has to have a reciprocal grudge against. “I’m not all right.”
It’s a muted, hateful admission and he tries to forget it before morning comes.
.-.-.-.-.-.
“You’re quiet today.” She nudges him with her elbow as she says it.
He shrugs her off, tries to.
They walk a bit more through the park, him with his hands in his pockets, her with her lunch still in her hands. He hadn’t been hungry.
“Want some?” she tries to offer, holding up the wrap contained in foil. “S’ good.”
He shakes his head, pretends to watch the kids playing football by the fountain.
“You sure?”
“Rose.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.” And he doesn’t care if he’s being testy when she’s being annoying.
He waits until she’s finished her lunch and chucked the foil wrappings in a trash bin, but that’s as long as he can wait. He takes her hand, claims it roughly and holds too tightly and even if she doesn’t understand the reasons behind the need, she still understands the need itself. His grip is tight around her hand and her hand is strong in his, strong enough that he really can hold on like this without her breaking between his fingers.
She hugs his arm, her other hand holding the crook of his elbow. They’ve stopped walking by this point, at some point where the transition hadn’t been clear enough for him to notice. They stand there, holding each other in such small ways, side by side, and when the boys playing their game kick the ball into the fountain, they both laugh a little.
“Didn’t see that coming,” he remarks.
“You being sarcastic there? Because that,” she says, “I didn’t see coming.”
And he looks at her and he tries to smile and she tries to smile too and it should be all right, looking down into her eyes instead of up at them, but his fear finds its way out of him all the same:
“Has anyone ever held a gun to your head?”
Brown and deep and somehow unknowable, her eyes don’t blink. The palms against his skin grow wary. “Why’re you askin’?” she replies. She tucks her hair back behind her ear, her left ear, even though it was already tucked there. After, she hugs his arm again, her low top against his arm like a stray, distracting thought waiting to happen.
“Has anyone ever held a gun to your head?” he repeats, his focus not remotely compromised.
And she looks away, looks out at the boys with their now wet ball and drenched shoes.
“No one’s ever pulled the trigger,” she says at last, still not looking at him. “I think that’s the important part.”
The question he meant to ask next is “What were you doing?” but what comes out of his mouth is a hard and angry question. “Who?” he snaps out. Who would dare do that to his girl?
“No one you know,” she says and there’s steel in her, but there’s always been steel in her.
“Someone put a gun to your head. Someone-” and his hand rises, his hand not in hers rises and touches the side of her head, his fingers just touching there, touching where it had happened.
“I’m fine.” She catches his hand, forces it away. “Look: alive, happy....”
“If you weren’t,” he says and he doesn’t know how to finish that sentence.
“Which?”
“Either.”
The words jump out between them and they pause in shock or regret or whatever emotion best describes the wish to have not just said that. They drop their gazes, but not each other’s hands.
“I mean it,” he swears, even though he shouldn’t. Shouldn’t swear it, despite meaning it. It’s all too intense, so bizarre when set against a city park on a summer day. He looks at her, this beautiful young thing who shouldn’t need to defend herself, let alone be defended. And he means it.
She pulls at his hand, taking a step, and they walk again. Walk through the park until they’re almost out, almost back into the city. It’s a quick, half-hurried pace she sets. His long legs help him match it but all the same, it gives him the feeling of almost being the younger one, younger and somehow in the wrong. The little boy who just called himself a man.
At the edge of the park, she pulls at his hand again, stops them by pulling her hand free. Gives him a grin that doesn’t quite reach her eyes, not until she speaks.
“Race ya to the fountain!”
And she runs. Laughing at the idiotic look on his face, she runs.
After the half a heartbeat it takes to understand, he darts after her. The grass rises to meet his boots as he leans into his run, his strides picking up. Ahead of him, his girl runs on, darting around young families and older couples with a grace his rough movements can’t quite match. She’s faster than she looks.
Her hair bounces as she runs, hitting against her back and then streaming out, false gold and real temptation. She makes the mistake of looking over her shoulder as she runs, makes the mistake of grinning at him. His willing Daphne, still running to the water’s edge.
He pushes his legs harder, avoids the flying football from the pack of boys, and catches her around the waist.
“Cheater!” she yells, laughing, struggling with her back against his chest. They stagger together, only a few steps away from the goal.
“I win,” he contradicts. “Not my fault you’re slow.”
She twists, turns, and there’s no man in the world who wouldn’t have kissed her then. Except it was her hands on him first, her hands behind his head and her face angled upward. Her hair is so warm in the sunlight. So are her lips. Everything about her is warm and bright and alive and he tries to hold her, can’t help it with what he now knows. Her hands fall to his chest, stroke down to rest over his heartbeats as their prepubescent audience mocks them.
Without warning, she shoves herself back, takes two steps and smacks her hand down on the side of the fountain.
“I win,” she says and her tongue comes out to play with her grin.
“Sorry, but who did you say was cheating?” he asks, closing in. He hears the boys make the very wise choice to ignore the weird adults.
“You cheated first,” she argues, her hands rising easily to his sides as he traps her there, pinned between him and the water. “Besides,” she adds, “not my fault I’m a good kisser.” She pauses on purpose and then, somehow, manages to grin even wider. “Oh wait.”
He shifts closer and her arms slip further around his waist. He shifts closer still. “You’re just asking for a snog, aren’t you?”
“If I was, I’d say ‘please’. Can’t forget those manners.”
“No?”
“Nope.” And her face tilts up.
He runs his hands down her bare, bare arms, strokes down the skin until she gives him her hands and then he strokes back up. “Rose,” he says. “Would you please....”
“Yeah...?” Her eyes flutter shut. Her breath brushes his chin.
“...race me to that tree?”
And, even before her eyes blink open, he bolts.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Best form of cheating he’s ever used.
Hands down.
.-.-.-.-.-.
It’s only later that night, with her back at her hotel and him not wanting to sleep, that he realizes how thoroughly she managed to distract him.
Cheer him up, says the benefit of his doubt.
No, says the doubt by itself. Just distract him.
Someone’s held a gun to her head. No one’s ever pulled the trigger, she said, but-
No one means more than one. If it was just the one, she would’ve said he didn’t pull the trigger. Or she, or whoever the hell thought threatening Rose Tyler’s life would be a good idea. The thought of anyone trying to hurt his girl in any way - the knowledge that multiple someones have very much tried - it doesn’t just drive him up the wall. It drives him over the roof and a good deal farther.
He has this sudden image, this unwanted imagined scenario in his head and he closes his eyes against it. The picture of her on the ground, the idea of pressing his body over hers, trying to cover her in the grass and not breathing, barely breathing, their air a small, hot supply just above the damp dirt. Gunfire spurts, the crack of the shot so less real than the sting of the bullet. It’s so clear in his mind. It’s nothing more than a piece of worrying, but that by itself is enough.
He tries not to sleep that night.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Let him shelter here.
“Get away.”
Please. Let him shelter here.
“Get away.”
He cries out through a boy’s mouth, a scared little boy, always too young and always too alone. He tries to escape, tries to move and he rolls through lucidity and tangled sheets and a pillow that smells of a woman, rolls over and into the woods where the gunfire rings out.
He crushes Susan to the blood-damp ground, shushes her into silent tears. “Hush, child,” he whispers with an old man’s voice and she shakes beneath his chest, between his arms, just a scared little girl. “Stay down.”
She quivers and shakes and pulls his hand to her chest where the blood keeps coming out. He presses, tries to press but her lung is collapsing and he’s crushing her and neither of them can get up, neither of them can risk rising.
“Don’t die. Susan. Child. Please don’t die.” The words stick to dust and dirt and as Susan stills for the last time, he tries to catch her last breath with his hands, to trap it inside her. It slips away, falls between fingers slick with a child’s blood. He keeps reaching for it, keeps reaching, grabs and there’s nothing beside the bed to reach for.
He throws himself over onto his other side, his eyes wide and wild and shut and he can see the alleyway behind the operating table. He can hear operatic butterflies in the air and this is how he died.
This is how he dies.
“This is the way the world ends,” Fred murmurs, leaning against the brick wall, her hand on the metal table. “With a bang and a whimper.”
“Please,” he says, he begs, and there’s nothing to be given, nothing to be done but he has to beg. He has to beg and keep on begging because it’s all there is now, that’s all that’s left. Nothing to fight and nothing to love and everything to run away from and so he begs.
“Please,” he says again.
“Where is that daughter of mine?” Fred asks, her faces blurring across her paled features. “Wherever did you leave her?”
He turns to reach for the little girl, rolls onto his other side. The sheet is a manacle around his legs and he thrashes free. He reaches down, pulls it up, covers himself with the shroud as he wanders through the hospital, a nameless figure carelessly labeled. Curls unshorn, chestnut unburnt, he searches across broken mirror and a wall of clocks, searches and keeps searching.
There’s a figure he can see, a thing half formed like a white watcher, the ghost of more than just Christmas Future. “Get away!” he yells, running towards it, bare feet sticking to linoleum as his IV pulls at his arm.
The figure in the hospital slides away, ducks beneath its own sheet.
“You’re a doctor!” he yells at it. “Aren’t you supposed to help?”
He rips the sheet away and an Edwardian gentleman stares back at him in a broken mirror, a disgusting murderous coward.
He recoils, never quite waking.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Somehow, the night passes.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He goes on to withstand one more tired day. One more night. After that, he’s thinking of doing something, maybe.
Probably sleeping pills, but he’s not sure yet.
Somewhere in all that withstanding, there’s a blond girl and a mechanic’s work and the ongoing fight between them for more information on UNIT. There’s talk and banter, some food and laughter, even a quick snog or two, or three, but then night begins to come back and he can’t quite take it.
It’s two in the morning after a Friday night and he’s walking her back to her hotel - a different hotel, yet again, except this is one she’s already been in through all her hopping about. It means the walk back is familiar and almost comfortable and he feels like he’s going to fall asleep on her. Possibly literally fall asleep on her, but only because she’s trying to prop him up by hugging his arm. She thinks she’s being subtle about it, but he knows better.
“You know what you should do?” he asks and he feels like his words are slurring together from tiredness. Mostly, right now, he’s focusing simply on walking.
“If the answer to that is ‘spill the beans on UNIT,’ I gotta say no,” she answers.
“Not what I was going to say,” he says, though he’s not entirely sure about it.
They twist together oddly, making room for a passing group and avoiding a streetlamp in the same motion, all without her letting go of him. “Then what?” she asks.
“You should come back,” he says and maybe that would even work. Maybe if he knows she’s there and safe and not quite so far away, maybe then his subconscious will stop doing whatever it is that it’s doing. “It’d be cheaper than sleeping pills.”
She gives him this odd look. “Sorry, what is?”
“What’s what?” He feels the world wobble a little, but that’s just because he’s lost his balance for the moment. It’ll pass once he gets sleep. He hates needing sleep.
“What’s cheaper than sleeping pills?”
“Living expenses.” If she moves back in, that is. He’ll say that’s what he meant.
“Yeah, you’ve lost me now.” She stops them on the street, pushes him lightly back to the side of a building. It’s the side of her hotel. He grins down at her and she rolls her eyes in nigh-perfect mimicry, an immensely sweet mockery. “What’re you talking about?”
“You should come back to the flat,” he tells her. “You could have your own pillow this time.”
“I had my own pillow,” she tells him right back. “Every time I slept over, I had a pillow.”
“Yes, but it was my pillow, Rose,” he explains. That’s the important part, after all. “We can get another one, though.”
“You mean that whole time, you were sleeping without one?” The look on her face is something special, something two parts incredulous, one part amused and another part something wonderful.
“Yeah,” he says and shrugs. He’d meant to buy another, but he kept forgetting. That, and he’s no idea where to buy one in this city. Or most anywhere else, for that matter. “Not the important part,” he reminds her.
“What’s that, then?”
“You should come back to the flat,” he says again and he knows he’ll regret talking like this once he has a functioning brain again. “It makes more sense than all this hopping about from hotel to hotel. Safer, too.” He gives a dismissive look around at the not actually that bad of a street.
“And better company?” Her tongue flicks out to her flicker of a grin, but she doesn’t try to wind him up for long. “Are you serious?”
He shrugs, trying not to look at her. It doesn’t help that at some point, his arms have gone around her waist.
She looks up at him with curious eyes, her front pressed against his, pressing him back against the wall. “You’re serious.”
He shrugs again, forces himself to sound as logical as he can. “As long as you’re staying in the city, you might as well. It makes sense.”
“Me living with you.”
“Yeah,” he says. Officially. For real. Not domestic, nothing like that, but real.
“Yeah,” she agrees. “That does make sense.”
“Good.”
“Yeah.”
Like happy idiots, they grin at each other. And then, like idiots who know they’re idiots, they duck their heads almost shyly. He kisses her forehead and then she kisses his lips.
“We should get a taxi,” he says, because for some reason, that would make this perfect. It would make it like an impossible life that he could somehow finally have. The simple idea of it is fantastic.
“I’ve got a better idea,” she replies even though there ought to be no such thing.
“What?” he asks as she disentangles herself from him, as she takes those few more steps towards the hotel doors.
She grins so wide, so bright, an entire side of her illuminated by the lights of the hotel, the other half of her almost lost in appealing shadow. “I’m going to go steal a pillow.”
“Rose Tyler,” he says, because he can’t not. “I love the way you think.”
She bites her lip and takes a step back, takes a step closer to the doors. She looks like she should go but can’t entirely manage it. “I love the way I think, too.” Her hand touches her empty jeans pocket, taps there for just a second. “Wait here for a sec, okay?”
He nods and off she goes. “Hurry back,” he urges, calling after her.
She does.
.-.-.-.-.-.
<-- | -->
Author: rallalon | Rall
Beta: vyctori
Rating: PG13, AU towards the end of Season One; 9!Smith.
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summary: There’s a small pause as he hears her not say his name, as she doesn’t fill the word with amusement and exasperation. It happens with her sometimes, one of those UNIT side effects he doesn’t ask about. It makes him think about all those crime movies where the thieves make a big fuss over not calling each other by name during the heist.
Notes: This chapter spent a short while in a great deal of danger at the end of my winter break. Halfway through getting back to campus, my laptop up and died. I managed to pull most of my stuff off my computer through the magic that is external hard drives and it came out just fine in the end. Immediately following that, though, my beta vyctori had her laptop go crazy. It's not been a good time for computers, basically, so I hope all of you guys are doing all right.
Also, just as a headsup, I seem to have buried myself in almost exclusively reading-heavy, essay-filled classes this semester, so though I'll still keep trying to update at the end of each month, madness may occur. Whatever happens, you should be able to expect another chapter come April 2nd, when IHH turns two.
The Tourist
The Girl
The Runaway
The Puzzle
The Passenger
The Victim
The Absent
The Found
The Determined
The Unaware
The Celebrant
The Nurse
The Visitor
The Illusion
The Distraction
The Guest
The Companion
The Confidante
The Defenseless
It takes considerably more time than four hours for them to drive back to Barcelona from Broto.
It’s time very well spent.
.-.-.-.-.-.
As things go on, a surprising amount of their time is very well spent.
Which is good, because as time goes on - as time is wont to do - they’re getting closer to the day she moves out. It’s amazing he’d forgotten it. Well. He’d like it to be. He’s good at blocking things out when he doesn’t want to see them.
They have Sunday night and all of Monday and then on Tuesday morning, she wakes up on his couch for the last time. The last time she has to, he reminds himself. Things could still go back to the way they were before. It’s not the option he’d pick, but then, that’s not up to him. It seldom is.
Some things have changed and stayed changed, though. They fit against each other with a growing tension that one of them snaps with a kiss, with a touch, with a gaze as soft and dark as a mattress beneath the sheets. She twines into him and he reaches for her and whenever they think of their own idiocy, they each swallow up the other’s forced laughter.
It’s just snogging, that’s all. Just a bit of a snog here and there and it means only whatever they want it to mean, except it always seems to mean more than that. They’ve done so little but it feels like so much and they stop speaking of even literal sleep and of the bedroom behind his door. That door stays closed.
He’s started to shave with the bathroom door open, though, has no idea when that started. She likes to watch him shave, loves to laugh when he swears. She doesn’t seem to mind being woken up by it, even.
Her mornings consistently start later than his, he’s pleased to note. Her nights do go later, but that’s not the important part. Sometimes he outlasts her that way too. Like last night, when he read to her of a mad knight errant in search of impossible justice. It’s a strange sort of thing to be pleased about, but with her about to go, he’d rather make himself be pleased than let himself brood.
She leans against the doorframe to watch him this morning and when he glances at her, her posture is familiar. Arms and ankles crossed. Who does she think she’s trying to be? Him? With her in mostly pink jimjams, it’s not going to happen.
He lets his eyes smile but keeps his expression smooth until he’s done shaving. No swearing required this time, thankfully.
“What’s the address?” he asks, putting his razor away. It makes her stop leaning, start paying a different sort of attention.
She tells him, gives him numbers and words that he memorizes. “Just for a couple days there,” she says. “After that, I switch over to this one a couple blocks away.”
“Seems a bit complicated, all that switchin’.”
“Believe me, I got help for it. Friend of my mum owed her a favour and his wife works at a travel agency.”
“What, not UNIT?”
For a second, she looks caught out. Then she asks, trying for a joke or a flirt almost, “Who says I’m not talking in code?”
“Me. ‘Cause I know what you sound like when you are.”
“And what do I sound like?”
He shrugs. “Not like you.”
She grins a little, clearly making herself do it. She asks again, “And what do I sound like?”
“Like someone who’s going to make me late for work,” he says rather than answer. He edges past her, relinquishing the small bathroom. She always seems to take up so much space in the bathroom, even when she’s not actually in there. It’s all the little bottles around the tub, must be, all of them smelling like her. It’ll be better with those bottles gone. More space.
“Oh.” And she lets him go.
He pauses at the front door, holding it half open. “Do you need to check in before lunch or-”
“Before,” she says. “Same as always, really. I’ll be fine by myself.”
“Right.”
“Meet you for lunch still?” That she has to ask is at once absurd and absurdly hurtful.
“Same as before, yeah,” he agrees, not afraid to sound bitter. “See you then.”
It’s a petty and cowardly way of doing things, ducking out like that with her yet to get dressed. Still, it matches his mood.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Any second now, Sanchez is going to ask him about it. It’ll be something like “A lover’s quarrel?” or “Another spat?” Something that assumes they’re already more than they’re ever going to be. Something like that. And the only reply he’ll have is to tell the man to shut up. To tell him to shut up and stow it, because, yes, he is a petulant five-year-old, thank you for noticing.
Sanchez never comments on his mood that morning.
Never mentions how they tense at each other, he and that girl who’s always on the border of being his.
For all he acts like a gossip, Sanchez doesn’t mention a lot of things.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Over lunch, she startles as if recalling something, as if remembering. She touches the chain around her neck, looks at him like she’s done something wrong. It’s a restaurant day, one with a tiny outdoor table that places them across from one another. Sitting like that, it’s impossible not to be looking at her, not to notice.
He chews to a finish, swallows despite the way he just stopped being even remotely hungry. With the fuss people make over spitting, it’s really the only option. “What?”
She takes a bite after he asks. They stare at each other, he waiting for an answer, she deciding between truth and fabrication. If he’d known things would take a turn like this after, he never would have kissed her.
That is, of course, a complete lie, but that’s not important. Really, he’s just tired of the way things keep shifting between them. Yes, he shifted it in the first place, but she’s been pushing it back and forth bit by bit. Sort of like what she’s doing to her rice with her fork.
“I’ve still got your key,” she says. Sets down the fork and pulls up that chain around her neck to show him the two keys on it.
“So you do,” he agrees. Maybe if he says it lightly enough, she won’t notice the look on his face, the look he knows has to be on his face.
She looks down at her two keys. Tucks them back down her top and they chime together like ice in a glass.
He puts his hand down on the table. Leaves it there with his palm up and his fingers curled, loose around air.
She takes it, keeps it, and, ultimately, learns how to eat left-handed.
.-.-.-.-.-.
When he gets back to the garage, Sanchez claps him on the back before introducing him to a dying Honda.
Half an hour later - less - the engine purrs out a guttural rhythm before finding its growl. “There,” he says, shooting a grin at Pedro when the other mechanic looks annoyed at his speed. Not his fault the problem was so simply fixed.
“All better?” Sanchez asks.
“Yeah,” he says.
“Good,” Sanchez says and then, of all things, he winks. “I like having stories to tell my wife.”
.-.-.-.-.-.
She goes out with her friends that night.
“They had you last week,” he protests over the phone - pretends to protest, rather.
“They had me a week and a half ago,” she corrects. “And Tonya’s been trying to help track down the watch and all, so-”
“I was joking.”
There’s a moment of silence across the line, the sounds of the street loud against his ears and pressing in against her mobile.
“Go on,” he says and, no, he’s not daring her. That would be stupid and petty and he really is fine with her gone. He gets his pillow back, for one. “About time I had a night on my own.”
“You’ve got plans?” She sounds incredulous and rightly so.
“Nope!” Because who would he be if he did? “Don’t need ‘em, me. You, though. Got anyone to walk you back to the hotel? Metro closes at midnight.”
“Dunno how, but I’d completely forgotten about that,” she answers and, really, the sarcasm should be left to him. He’s better at it. “Yeah, I’ve got company.”
And then they both sort of look at that statement, somehow staring at words filling up the space between them. He’s standing at a crosswalk, waiting for the light, and she’s somewhere else entirely, but that doesn’t much matter.
“To walk me back,” she says, amends. “Tonya and her novio or amigovio or whatever she’s calling him now.”
“Bit of a difference there.” Spanish vocabulary is always safe ground between them, almost always. It’s a small patch of ground to stand on, but he does his best.
She says something or asks something, but he’s crossing the street now and things aren’t half loud. Once he’s over in the relative quiet of beside the street rather than in it, he replies, “Sorry, missed that.”
“I said: How much of one? A difference, I mean.”
“Anywhere between a little and a lot,” he explains, speaking over a sudden burst of radio from the street. “Both mean ‘boyfriend,’ more or less, but when you get engaged, you get engaged to your novio.”
“But not your amigovio?”
“Not unless it’s a shotgun wedding.”
“Right. I think they’re amigovios, then. Thanks.” Even amid the sounds of gridlocked cars, walking feet and conflicting voices, he can still hear her smile. Half a city away, he can hear that smile.
Half a city away, he rolls his eyes in response. “Glad to have solved the pressing dilemma.”
“Did you just roll your eyes at me?”
“No,” he lies. “That it?”
She makes a noise and this one, he can’t quite catch.
“What was that?” He presses the mobile harder against his ear.
“Tonight,” she says. “What do I say?”
“‘Hello’ and ‘goodbye’ generally work,” he answers, “but you’re going to have to fill in the parts in between by yourself.”
There’s a small pause as he hears her not say his name, as she doesn’t fill the word with amusement and exasperation. It happens with her sometimes, one of those UNIT side effects he doesn’t ask about. It makes him think about all those crime movies where the thieves make a big fuss over not calling each other by name during the heist. After the pause, she says, “Not what I meant.”
“There’s ‘please’ and ‘thanks’ too, but I’ve always found them overrated.”
She’s shaking her head at him now. He knows she is when she finally says it, says it outright. “What do I say when people ask if I’m single?”
“You tell ‘em you’re singular instead,” he tells her. She doesn’t laugh - not that he expected her to - so he adds, “Pun like that’ll frighten anyone away.”
“What if it doesn’t?”
Another crosswalk, another wait. Bad timing today. “Would you want a bloke who stuck around after that?”
“Says the one making the pun in the first place.”
“You asked for my advice,” he says and that’s the wrong word, entirely the wrong word, but it’s not something he cares to amend.
The nuance of her reply is lost along with most of the words. Around him, there’s some honking, some shouting, and more than a few languages involved when it comes to swearing at it all.
“Missed that. What’d you say?” he asks.
“I said ‘thanks’,” she answers and it’s a far shorter response than it was last time she said it. “I’ll see you tomorrow, I guess-”
“Rose,” he says, tries to interrupt.
Waits, unsure if she’s already hung up.
“Yeah?” she asks.
“When someone asks you if you’re single,” he says. “What you say is: Tengo un amigo. Prefiero hablar con él que bailar contigo.”
He knows her lips are moving, can almost hear her trying to repeat the words to herself, almost hear her attempts at translation. She’s memorized bits of it, he thinks, before she asks, “Say that again?”
He does. He says it slowly, keeps saying it until she can repeat it back to him. She’d rather talk with him than dance with some other bloke. She says it, says it right.
“Good,” he says when he’s sure she has it. He likes the way it sounds coming from her mouth.
Though he knows she has to know what those sentences mean, she pries for an outright translation. “What do I say if the bloke only speaks English?” It’s oddly endearing, how she thinks she’s being subtle.
He scoffs at the attempt as much as he scoffs at the offered scenario. “If he can’t learn a second language, he can’t be clever enough for you.”
And once again, he can hear her smile.
“What?” he asks.
“Nothing,” she says and the sound of her smile deepens. “Soy feliz.”
He’s not sure what part of that he likes best, her poor accent or the way she means it. “Good,” he says.
The conversation’s over, but it still takes them some time before they hang up. And they do hang up. They do. Eventually.
It just happens to take awhile.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Her being out doesn’t mean he’s staying in.
Barcelona hits him with light and sound and he tells the same bad joke to eight different people before he makes someone laugh from it. The world is loud and dim and bright and crunched into a murmur and when that eighth person laughs, he laughs too.
There are so many lives out here, all of them wandering around in little circles they mistake for straight lines, all of them so conditioned by the planet’s spin that they spin themselves, spin each other. It’s dizzying and it’s quick and it’s like being a child on the grass, hurtling yourself around an imaginary point until you stagger with it, until your arms open to the sky or the grass, blue or green, orange or red, any colour at all as gravity hugs you home.
It almost feels like that.
“How drunk are you?” the eighth person asks, all shaggy hair and expressive face. The ninth person, they still hold between them, some idiot who needed a bin to vomit in.
“It’s not alcohol,” he answers. And then he laughs, and then he says that phrase, that once-horrible phrase that has since become fantastic. “It’s better than that.”
“Can I have some?” the ninth person slurs, still slumped in their grip, and they laugh. They laugh, but he keeps laughing, keeps laughing so hard.
“I think I just realized something,” he tells persons eight and nine, the shaggy-haired and the wobbling drunk. Together, they help the wobbling drunk to some steps, get him sitting down. “I don’t know what, but I just realized it.”
“Tio, I don’t think that counts,” the eighth person insists.
“Realized, remembered-” He waves his hand to show how little it matters. “-it’s not important. It’s something fantastic.”
“Whatever you’re on, I want some,” the drunk bloke keeps saying, laughing on his shoulder like a silly thing. His breath reeks of alcohol and vomit and he laughs even more when he’s pushed back onto his friend.
“I’m on Earth,” he says, and he’s starting to sound drunk to himself and all he’s had was that one beer at dinner. It’s not an external influence doing this to him. It’s something else, something bigger and smaller and better. “I’m on Earth,” he says again and then laughs even louder than the drunk bloke.
“Me too, tio, me too.” The shaggy one gives him this look, that humouring look between fools.
“I love this place,” he adds and the three of them laugh, all quick and nameless friends on someone else’s steps. “I forgot that for so long. Don’t always like it, but I love it.”
“Como familía,” the drunk one suggests, far more helpful than he could possibly realize.
“Just like family,” he agrees. “You lot. You stupid, fantastic people.” And he grins so wide, blocking out the insult through the haphazard shield of his teeth. “You’re so alive.”
The other two laugh, shove at him a little and then he’s laughing with them, a trio laughing together and it feels right. The situation is right. It’s the play without the proper cast, but it’s still the play.
“Living is so....” It’s not the way he meant the sentence to start and so he tries to drop it.
The drunk one picks it up for him. “It’s so everything,” he concludes, then belches.
It’s oddly perfect, complete in only the way a finished moment can be complete. “In vino veritas,” he declares and the expression works well enough, even here. He stands as, behind them, up the steps, a door opens and the lot of them are yelled at to move.
He helps haul the unsteady one back to the trash bin, leaves the men only slightly improved from his acquaintanceship with them. He waves goodbye and they wave back, more or less, and he’d forgotten life could be like this. Life can fit like this, all little meetings and swapped insanity. It ought to sound incredible, that he could have forgotten this, but the more incredible thing is that he could have discovered it and then rediscovered it.
He could say anything, do anything, go anywhere. All it would take is time and he has that. How has he never realized that before? In all his stupid little human life, how did he never realize how much time he has?
One night is a lifetime, manic and beautiful.
His brain keeps trying to tell him that no, this is too much, too extreme, too insane, but it’s not. It’s just human, human at human’s best. People can feel this way, people can have these moments and they can even make them last. Not long, not for forever, but for more time than the moment should ever hold. He’s going to look back on this tomorrow - look back on this later today, tomorrow is already today - he’s going to look back on it and remember his awe of this moment without knowing where it came from or what it meant and that doesn’t matter. He knows it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t need to explain this moment, only remember it.
Because somehow, six and a half years later, six and a half years after gunfire pulled down his family in a fight that was never meant to happen, somehow, he’s alive again. He died on that night and he’s alive again even with his girls still gone. Gunfire out of an alley and he should have been there, he always should have been there beneath that red-tinged fog, he should have been there but he wasn’t.
He’ll always ought to have been there and he’ll always have failed them; these are fixed, solid points of his life. The rest of it batters itself back and forth, caught in flux, but maybe that’s the part he doesn’t need to mind. That part will be all right. That part is happening, right now, right this instant. With each breath of sea air and car exhaust and someone else’s lost sigh, with each and every breath, that part is happening. It’s happening and will keep on happening and that is so impossibly good.
He can feel so much. Why now, why this way, he doesn’t know. He’ll never know and that’s not important. Maybe he’s run out of numbness or maybe he’s run out of fear or maybe things happen. He sees the possibilities and he delights in them from a distance rather than study them closely.
There is so much left to happen.
To happen and have happened and to keep on happening, and as he conjugates in his head, he laughs and laughter feels like running. It feels like the tilt of the ground beneath his feet and the way life hurtles up to press against his steps. It feels like everything and he has, not for the first time, the vague thought that he might have somehow picked up a contact high from something, from somewhere. How else could he feel like this?
It’s taken so long to see it again and the more he thinks of it, the harder the feeling is to hold. Maybe that’s the sanity returning or perhaps his brain is a little too small to take it or maybe it’s something else entirely, something so else he’d never think of it.
It’s such a brilliant, half-alien feeling. It’s such a feeling.
.-.-.-.-.-.
When he gets back to the flat, he tries to call Grace. There’s a strange sort of logic to it: doctors like to know when their patients have recovered. Even if it was his girls on the table instead of him, he still counts, in a way.
Besides, he did shag her at the end of December. Now that July - and other things - are beginning, maybe some closure wouldn’t go amiss. It’s not what he usually does, not remotely. Never having closure with Fred was what meant they could continue as long as they had, leaving and coming back to each other. But that’s just it.
He doesn’t want another Fred.
He had her and lost her and now, it’s time for someone else.
It’s been a scab for so long that he’s not sure when it became a scar. It was something not to pick at and now it’s something he can safely touch. Almost safely. He’s not going to test that out too thoroughly just yet, but it’s definitely an improvement over bleeding on the floor.
With all of this hovering around inside his not inconsiderable head, he tries to call Grace.
After his lengthy mental preparation for it, discovering he has the wrong number is jarringly anti-climactic.
“Really?” he says to the woman who answers instead of Grace, her accent far different from the San Franciscan woman’s. As is her greeting.
“Brandy Ho's Hunan Food, how may I help you...?” the woman repeats. “Reservation or take out?”
“Take out? Where are you?” It’s the only thing he can think to ask. He was sure that number was right.
“Two-seventeen Columbus Avenue,” the woman says. “Do you need directions?”
“Not quite. Where are you, more generally?”
“North Beach.”
“In San Francisco?”
“Yes, North Beach,” she says, sounding either busy or impatient. “Reservation or take out?”
“Neither,” he says. Good to know he’s got the area code right, at least. “Don’t suppose you know a Grace Holloway? Surgeon, last time I checked.”
“No,” the woman says in the voice of someone who is about to hang up right this minute.
He hangs up first.
So much for that.
.-.-.-.-.-.
When he wakes in his sleep, his head is on her lap, his ear pressed uncomfortably against her thigh. He knows it’s her in the way things are known in dreams. They simply are, more than they ever are waking.
He knows the denim beneath his cheek, knows the knee before his eyes. He knows her. He knows the hand pressing against his head where his mind came out.
He tries to roll onto his back, tries to look up at her, but she holds him there with a soft hand. “Stay down,” she whispers. “Stay hidden.”
“Why?” he whispers right back.
“I want you safe.” And the brush of her hand over his hair is enough to give the words a double meaning.
“Is your mum going to see?” He doesn’t fancy another slap, knows there’s been another slap in the dreaming narrative of his unconscious mind. “Don’t suppose she’d buy that line again.” Not when this really is a sexual relationship now.
“Don’t look up.” She says this, but she removes her hand, stops holding him down.
And of course he looks. Of course he looks up to where there are breasts, where there is her hair, her face, where there are her wide eyes and the barrel of a gun pressed against her head.
“It’s not real until you look,” she says and then a crack splits his world, splits her skull and their bodies fall from his couch with the momentum of the shot, at the point-blank shot of a tilted murderer.
Pinned on the floor between couch and coffee table, the body impossibly heavy, the body that is not her and could never have been her, the body is impossibly heavy. And he swears and curses and clings to the warm, wet weight of a newly made corpse because if these aren’t her remains, then she never was.
He hears footsteps and he knows not to look now, knows never to look again, but his eyes are open and his back is against the sodden grass and he can’t move, not even his eyelids. The body he’s in doesn’t belong to him, protests his control of it by looking up, by looking at blue-gray wool and gray-blue eyes and the green death hovering behind like a plague yet to be named.
And then, like a scene from some horror film, a horror film with a budget and nothing but real blood, someone blows the dead captain’s head off from behind, killing eyes and smile anew, splattering long-congealed blood across the body atop him, across his unwillingly upturned face. He closes his eyes as the broken body falls, closes his eyes not against the late captain but against the figure still behind him. Nothing’s real until you look.
He lies helpless on the forest floor, trapped between couch and coffee table, between dead companion and damaged corpse.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He wakes trembling. He’s twitching with adrenaline and shivering from a chilled heart and shaking from a pounding heart and he’ll never understand why people are supposed to sit bolt upright after a nightmare, never understand how they could when this is the amount of control he has left over his body.
“Fine,” he grits out into his pillow, speaking to something, to some part of the universe that he has to have a reciprocal grudge against. “I’m not all right.”
It’s a muted, hateful admission and he tries to forget it before morning comes.
.-.-.-.-.-.
“You’re quiet today.” She nudges him with her elbow as she says it.
He shrugs her off, tries to.
They walk a bit more through the park, him with his hands in his pockets, her with her lunch still in her hands. He hadn’t been hungry.
“Want some?” she tries to offer, holding up the wrap contained in foil. “S’ good.”
He shakes his head, pretends to watch the kids playing football by the fountain.
“You sure?”
“Rose.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.” And he doesn’t care if he’s being testy when she’s being annoying.
He waits until she’s finished her lunch and chucked the foil wrappings in a trash bin, but that’s as long as he can wait. He takes her hand, claims it roughly and holds too tightly and even if she doesn’t understand the reasons behind the need, she still understands the need itself. His grip is tight around her hand and her hand is strong in his, strong enough that he really can hold on like this without her breaking between his fingers.
She hugs his arm, her other hand holding the crook of his elbow. They’ve stopped walking by this point, at some point where the transition hadn’t been clear enough for him to notice. They stand there, holding each other in such small ways, side by side, and when the boys playing their game kick the ball into the fountain, they both laugh a little.
“Didn’t see that coming,” he remarks.
“You being sarcastic there? Because that,” she says, “I didn’t see coming.”
And he looks at her and he tries to smile and she tries to smile too and it should be all right, looking down into her eyes instead of up at them, but his fear finds its way out of him all the same:
“Has anyone ever held a gun to your head?”
Brown and deep and somehow unknowable, her eyes don’t blink. The palms against his skin grow wary. “Why’re you askin’?” she replies. She tucks her hair back behind her ear, her left ear, even though it was already tucked there. After, she hugs his arm again, her low top against his arm like a stray, distracting thought waiting to happen.
“Has anyone ever held a gun to your head?” he repeats, his focus not remotely compromised.
And she looks away, looks out at the boys with their now wet ball and drenched shoes.
“No one’s ever pulled the trigger,” she says at last, still not looking at him. “I think that’s the important part.”
The question he meant to ask next is “What were you doing?” but what comes out of his mouth is a hard and angry question. “Who?” he snaps out. Who would dare do that to his girl?
“No one you know,” she says and there’s steel in her, but there’s always been steel in her.
“Someone put a gun to your head. Someone-” and his hand rises, his hand not in hers rises and touches the side of her head, his fingers just touching there, touching where it had happened.
“I’m fine.” She catches his hand, forces it away. “Look: alive, happy....”
“If you weren’t,” he says and he doesn’t know how to finish that sentence.
“Which?”
“Either.”
The words jump out between them and they pause in shock or regret or whatever emotion best describes the wish to have not just said that. They drop their gazes, but not each other’s hands.
“I mean it,” he swears, even though he shouldn’t. Shouldn’t swear it, despite meaning it. It’s all too intense, so bizarre when set against a city park on a summer day. He looks at her, this beautiful young thing who shouldn’t need to defend herself, let alone be defended. And he means it.
She pulls at his hand, taking a step, and they walk again. Walk through the park until they’re almost out, almost back into the city. It’s a quick, half-hurried pace she sets. His long legs help him match it but all the same, it gives him the feeling of almost being the younger one, younger and somehow in the wrong. The little boy who just called himself a man.
At the edge of the park, she pulls at his hand again, stops them by pulling her hand free. Gives him a grin that doesn’t quite reach her eyes, not until she speaks.
“Race ya to the fountain!”
And she runs. Laughing at the idiotic look on his face, she runs.
After the half a heartbeat it takes to understand, he darts after her. The grass rises to meet his boots as he leans into his run, his strides picking up. Ahead of him, his girl runs on, darting around young families and older couples with a grace his rough movements can’t quite match. She’s faster than she looks.
Her hair bounces as she runs, hitting against her back and then streaming out, false gold and real temptation. She makes the mistake of looking over her shoulder as she runs, makes the mistake of grinning at him. His willing Daphne, still running to the water’s edge.
He pushes his legs harder, avoids the flying football from the pack of boys, and catches her around the waist.
“Cheater!” she yells, laughing, struggling with her back against his chest. They stagger together, only a few steps away from the goal.
“I win,” he contradicts. “Not my fault you’re slow.”
She twists, turns, and there’s no man in the world who wouldn’t have kissed her then. Except it was her hands on him first, her hands behind his head and her face angled upward. Her hair is so warm in the sunlight. So are her lips. Everything about her is warm and bright and alive and he tries to hold her, can’t help it with what he now knows. Her hands fall to his chest, stroke down to rest over his heartbeats as their prepubescent audience mocks them.
Without warning, she shoves herself back, takes two steps and smacks her hand down on the side of the fountain.
“I win,” she says and her tongue comes out to play with her grin.
“Sorry, but who did you say was cheating?” he asks, closing in. He hears the boys make the very wise choice to ignore the weird adults.
“You cheated first,” she argues, her hands rising easily to his sides as he traps her there, pinned between him and the water. “Besides,” she adds, “not my fault I’m a good kisser.” She pauses on purpose and then, somehow, manages to grin even wider. “Oh wait.”
He shifts closer and her arms slip further around his waist. He shifts closer still. “You’re just asking for a snog, aren’t you?”
“If I was, I’d say ‘please’. Can’t forget those manners.”
“No?”
“Nope.” And her face tilts up.
He runs his hands down her bare, bare arms, strokes down the skin until she gives him her hands and then he strokes back up. “Rose,” he says. “Would you please....”
“Yeah...?” Her eyes flutter shut. Her breath brushes his chin.
“...race me to that tree?”
And, even before her eyes blink open, he bolts.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Best form of cheating he’s ever used.
Hands down.
.-.-.-.-.-.
It’s only later that night, with her back at her hotel and him not wanting to sleep, that he realizes how thoroughly she managed to distract him.
Cheer him up, says the benefit of his doubt.
No, says the doubt by itself. Just distract him.
Someone’s held a gun to her head. No one’s ever pulled the trigger, she said, but-
No one means more than one. If it was just the one, she would’ve said he didn’t pull the trigger. Or she, or whoever the hell thought threatening Rose Tyler’s life would be a good idea. The thought of anyone trying to hurt his girl in any way - the knowledge that multiple someones have very much tried - it doesn’t just drive him up the wall. It drives him over the roof and a good deal farther.
He has this sudden image, this unwanted imagined scenario in his head and he closes his eyes against it. The picture of her on the ground, the idea of pressing his body over hers, trying to cover her in the grass and not breathing, barely breathing, their air a small, hot supply just above the damp dirt. Gunfire spurts, the crack of the shot so less real than the sting of the bullet. It’s so clear in his mind. It’s nothing more than a piece of worrying, but that by itself is enough.
He tries not to sleep that night.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Let him shelter here.
“Get away.”
Please. Let him shelter here.
“Get away.”
He cries out through a boy’s mouth, a scared little boy, always too young and always too alone. He tries to escape, tries to move and he rolls through lucidity and tangled sheets and a pillow that smells of a woman, rolls over and into the woods where the gunfire rings out.
He crushes Susan to the blood-damp ground, shushes her into silent tears. “Hush, child,” he whispers with an old man’s voice and she shakes beneath his chest, between his arms, just a scared little girl. “Stay down.”
She quivers and shakes and pulls his hand to her chest where the blood keeps coming out. He presses, tries to press but her lung is collapsing and he’s crushing her and neither of them can get up, neither of them can risk rising.
“Don’t die. Susan. Child. Please don’t die.” The words stick to dust and dirt and as Susan stills for the last time, he tries to catch her last breath with his hands, to trap it inside her. It slips away, falls between fingers slick with a child’s blood. He keeps reaching for it, keeps reaching, grabs and there’s nothing beside the bed to reach for.
He throws himself over onto his other side, his eyes wide and wild and shut and he can see the alleyway behind the operating table. He can hear operatic butterflies in the air and this is how he died.
This is how he dies.
“This is the way the world ends,” Fred murmurs, leaning against the brick wall, her hand on the metal table. “With a bang and a whimper.”
“Please,” he says, he begs, and there’s nothing to be given, nothing to be done but he has to beg. He has to beg and keep on begging because it’s all there is now, that’s all that’s left. Nothing to fight and nothing to love and everything to run away from and so he begs.
“Please,” he says again.
“Where is that daughter of mine?” Fred asks, her faces blurring across her paled features. “Wherever did you leave her?”
He turns to reach for the little girl, rolls onto his other side. The sheet is a manacle around his legs and he thrashes free. He reaches down, pulls it up, covers himself with the shroud as he wanders through the hospital, a nameless figure carelessly labeled. Curls unshorn, chestnut unburnt, he searches across broken mirror and a wall of clocks, searches and keeps searching.
There’s a figure he can see, a thing half formed like a white watcher, the ghost of more than just Christmas Future. “Get away!” he yells, running towards it, bare feet sticking to linoleum as his IV pulls at his arm.
The figure in the hospital slides away, ducks beneath its own sheet.
“You’re a doctor!” he yells at it. “Aren’t you supposed to help?”
He rips the sheet away and an Edwardian gentleman stares back at him in a broken mirror, a disgusting murderous coward.
He recoils, never quite waking.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Somehow, the night passes.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He goes on to withstand one more tired day. One more night. After that, he’s thinking of doing something, maybe.
Probably sleeping pills, but he’s not sure yet.
Somewhere in all that withstanding, there’s a blond girl and a mechanic’s work and the ongoing fight between them for more information on UNIT. There’s talk and banter, some food and laughter, even a quick snog or two, or three, but then night begins to come back and he can’t quite take it.
It’s two in the morning after a Friday night and he’s walking her back to her hotel - a different hotel, yet again, except this is one she’s already been in through all her hopping about. It means the walk back is familiar and almost comfortable and he feels like he’s going to fall asleep on her. Possibly literally fall asleep on her, but only because she’s trying to prop him up by hugging his arm. She thinks she’s being subtle about it, but he knows better.
“You know what you should do?” he asks and he feels like his words are slurring together from tiredness. Mostly, right now, he’s focusing simply on walking.
“If the answer to that is ‘spill the beans on UNIT,’ I gotta say no,” she answers.
“Not what I was going to say,” he says, though he’s not entirely sure about it.
They twist together oddly, making room for a passing group and avoiding a streetlamp in the same motion, all without her letting go of him. “Then what?” she asks.
“You should come back,” he says and maybe that would even work. Maybe if he knows she’s there and safe and not quite so far away, maybe then his subconscious will stop doing whatever it is that it’s doing. “It’d be cheaper than sleeping pills.”
She gives him this odd look. “Sorry, what is?”
“What’s what?” He feels the world wobble a little, but that’s just because he’s lost his balance for the moment. It’ll pass once he gets sleep. He hates needing sleep.
“What’s cheaper than sleeping pills?”
“Living expenses.” If she moves back in, that is. He’ll say that’s what he meant.
“Yeah, you’ve lost me now.” She stops them on the street, pushes him lightly back to the side of a building. It’s the side of her hotel. He grins down at her and she rolls her eyes in nigh-perfect mimicry, an immensely sweet mockery. “What’re you talking about?”
“You should come back to the flat,” he tells her. “You could have your own pillow this time.”
“I had my own pillow,” she tells him right back. “Every time I slept over, I had a pillow.”
“Yes, but it was my pillow, Rose,” he explains. That’s the important part, after all. “We can get another one, though.”
“You mean that whole time, you were sleeping without one?” The look on her face is something special, something two parts incredulous, one part amused and another part something wonderful.
“Yeah,” he says and shrugs. He’d meant to buy another, but he kept forgetting. That, and he’s no idea where to buy one in this city. Or most anywhere else, for that matter. “Not the important part,” he reminds her.
“What’s that, then?”
“You should come back to the flat,” he says again and he knows he’ll regret talking like this once he has a functioning brain again. “It makes more sense than all this hopping about from hotel to hotel. Safer, too.” He gives a dismissive look around at the not actually that bad of a street.
“And better company?” Her tongue flicks out to her flicker of a grin, but she doesn’t try to wind him up for long. “Are you serious?”
He shrugs, trying not to look at her. It doesn’t help that at some point, his arms have gone around her waist.
She looks up at him with curious eyes, her front pressed against his, pressing him back against the wall. “You’re serious.”
He shrugs again, forces himself to sound as logical as he can. “As long as you’re staying in the city, you might as well. It makes sense.”
“Me living with you.”
“Yeah,” he says. Officially. For real. Not domestic, nothing like that, but real.
“Yeah,” she agrees. “That does make sense.”
“Good.”
“Yeah.”
Like happy idiots, they grin at each other. And then, like idiots who know they’re idiots, they duck their heads almost shyly. He kisses her forehead and then she kisses his lips.
“We should get a taxi,” he says, because for some reason, that would make this perfect. It would make it like an impossible life that he could somehow finally have. The simple idea of it is fantastic.
“I’ve got a better idea,” she replies even though there ought to be no such thing.
“What?” he asks as she disentangles herself from him, as she takes those few more steps towards the hotel doors.
She grins so wide, so bright, an entire side of her illuminated by the lights of the hotel, the other half of her almost lost in appealing shadow. “I’m going to go steal a pillow.”
“Rose Tyler,” he says, because he can’t not. “I love the way you think.”
She bites her lip and takes a step back, takes a step closer to the doors. She looks like she should go but can’t entirely manage it. “I love the way I think, too.” Her hand touches her empty jeans pocket, taps there for just a second. “Wait here for a sec, okay?”
He nods and off she goes. “Hurry back,” he urges, calling after her.
She does.
.-.-.-.-.-.
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