Fic: In Human Hands (21/26?)
Title: In Human Hands
Author: rallalon
Beta: vyctori
Rating: PG13, AU towards the end of Season One; 9!Smith.
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summary: Maybe he should talk to her about these dreams. It’s a thought, maybe even a decent one, but one he entertains only for a moment. There’s a limit to how much a person can confide at once. Any more than that, and then you’re just a lunatic.
I know it's late, but ten-ish days late during finals and research papers?
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
The Flatmate
The Mermaid
The man is old and human and that makes him mature, more or less, when it evens out.
The man is old and tired and he sleeps poorly; he’s a familiar figure, this one, a fellow almost after his own hearts - almost.
How he knows this about the man, he’s not sure. What he knows is that he’s standing on a table rather than rattling in a drawer and there is life and light and the sounds of souls caught within metal. He knows about souls in metal, about dogs that are wonderful and people who are dead. Living souls and dead souls and he doesn’t think he used to believe in that sort of thing, not after metal with only monsters inside.
“Do you believe in souls?” he asks the old man who is so much younger than him. He remembers Tarragona, remembers asking a girl who’d rather interrogate him. He remembers so much and so little. He knows everything, he would know everything, if only he could remember.
The old man opens his eyes, this wizened fellow with too many blankets on his bed in the summer. Slowly, he blinks at his guest, his captive.
“Do you?” he asks again. “Hope you don’t mind waking up, but I’m used to talking in dreams by this point.”
Thick eyebrows pull down and a furrowed brow gains yet more creases. “Who are you?” the man asks, his voice a tired rasp.
He shrugs. “No one important.”
“Neither am I,” says the man.
“S’pose that makes us alike,” he muses. He’d sit down, dangle his legs over the side of the table, except he hasn’t got legs. He hasn’t got much of anything. Even as he is, though, he can still smile. He gives it a try, gives the man a grin.
“No.” The old man shakes his head, shakes himself deeper into his sheets.
“No?” But it had been worth a try. Common ground is an uncommon thing, no matter where you set your feet. “How come?”
“Please stop talking to me,” the man says. He is old and upset and his bed is too large for one man, holds only one man despite the ring fit around his finger, grown into his hand. “Whatever this is, I don’t want to be involved.”
“It’s nothing,” he assures the other man, the words without thought. The man is other, is something else. And yet the man is human and old, neither of which should be other. Neither of which should be, but one of them must be. One of them has to be, but which one? Why doesn’t he know? “There’s nothing to get involved in, nothing going on. Just me having a little chat with you.”
Faded eyes search his absent face. Dark brown shines with gathered tears. “I don’t want to die,” the man says. The words sound like a plea, like the explanation offered before a proud man begs. “I’m not ready.”
He tries to sit down, tries to have some bedside manner. “That’s all right,” he replies and he softens his words until they might soothe. “You’ve got time in you yet.”
The man comes close to laughing, makes a few sounds like laboured breath made light. He likes him for that, for the ability to see humour even when tears hover in the way, trying to block the sight of anything better than tragedy. “You have time in you,” the man says.
“Do I now,” he replies, not seeing what the joke is but grinning along anyway. “S’pose I do.”
The man’s smile fades quickly, that strange bit of humour dissolving into cool air. “I don’t want to die,” he says again, the words presented as a reasonable request this time, as if it’s reasonable to ask him this.
It makes him uncomfortable, makes him shift and fidget with a body he doesn’t have. “I can’t help you there.”
“It’s hardly your help I’m worried about.”
“What do you mean?”
The man pulls his blankets tight around him. “I want to sleep now. Will you leave me be?”
“This is a dream,” he explains. “You-”
“Please go.” The man rolls over, a slow and painful looking motion.
After a moment of wondering, he does try to leave. He tries, but he’s stuck. He’s stuck here.
He can’t move.
“Oi!” he yells at the man. “How am I supposed to leave?”
He waits.
He keeps waiting.
Eventually, he remembers how to open his eyes. Awake, or vaguely so, he groggily pats himself down, checking for limbs and sensation. Finding something gone, he tries to remember what he had in the first place. He falls back asleep still wondering.
.-.-.-.-.-.
As time goes on, as the week slowly passes and their remaining time together quickly dwindles, that feeling doesn’t go away. Something’s missing, something’s lost, and he thinks it might be because he’s talking about Fred again. That, and talking about Fred seems to have cut down on the girl’s urges to grab him and snog him. Still, some things are more important, even if they’re not as... compelling.
“Anything else you want to know?” he finds himself asking. It’s something he checks for now and he knows it confuses her, him being willing to share pieces of his past.
Sometimes, though, she’s a bit glib about it.
“Yeah,” she says, pulling down the garage door with him. “What’s so good about bananas? Besides being a fruit full of potassium.”
“Technically, it’s also an herb,” he informs her, tossing her the keys while he goes to pull down the other door.
She pauses to stare at him, nevertheless catching the keys. “It’s a what?”
“A fruit and an herb. The tree it grows on isn’t real wood. No woody stem, no tree.” The door rattles as it lowers, the metal warm in his hand and not yet warmed by the lowering sun. “Grows on an herb, can be called an herb.”
“Huh.” Her half of this done, she lobs the keys back over. “That a technical term, ‘woody’?”
“Yeah, actually.” To let her know he’s serious, he glances over at where she’s leaning, her bare shoulder against the uneven metal of the other door. She fits into the bump of it, just barely. She has a little bag over her shoulder, a cloth thing pulled shut with a thin yellow rope and it sort of sits on her skin just so, next to the strap of her tank top. Together, they’re like the strap of a dress, just waiting to be pulled down in a preview of fabric flowing to the floor. He glances, and then he catches himself staring. He looks down to the keys in his hand.
For once, she goes on like she hasn’t noticed. “So,” she says, “how does that make bananas good?”
He shrugs, finishing up and dropping the keys into the pocket of his jeans. “Makes them a good conversation topic. It’s the tomato fruit-or-vegetable debate all over again, the herb-or-fruit version.”
“Huh,” she says.
“Yeah. Some things just can’t fit all the way into one category. Came from an herb, but still a fruit.” He starts walking, wondering if that’s it then, for today, and she catches up, slips her hand into his. She pulls a little and they turn right instead of going straight. “We going to the beach?” he asks.
He means it as a joke, but she nods. “Why not?” She pulls at the strap to her pack and the soft bulge inside is abruptly explained as towels. “You always wash up after work anyway.”
“Yeah, but I don’t bring swimming trunks to the garage.” He doesn’t think he owns any, as a matter of fact. Or, wait, he might. Where, though, that’s the question.
Or, judging by the look on her face, that’s not a question at all. “Brought ‘em for you,” she answers. “Can’t believe we’ve only been to the beach once here.”
He raises his eyebrow, curiosity piqued enough in this direction that he ignores the mystery of where those trunks came from. “Somewhere else we would’ve gone to the beach?”
She shrugs and he’ll never know if that was a slip before or truly something she meant the way she explains it: “Just sayin’, it’s a city lined with beaches and we never go.”
“Point,” he acknowledges. Given the options of accepting the explanation or sending himself into a fit of paranoia, he’ll have to go with the acceptance. He doesn’t much like it, but then, he seldom does.
They walk along a bit more, run though the streets as lights change, moving away from the sound of engines toward the sound of water. Eventually, they do have to wait, do have to stop at that street corner, and he pulls her to him, kisses her without reason or warning. She helps him defy routine and this is definitely on the list of ways he’d like to do just that. The kissing, not the beach. Though, he muses as he pulls back, grinning at her look of mixed contentment and surprise, he might not mind the beach, depending on her swimsuit.
“Wha...?” she starts to ask, but he only grins the wider and pulls her by the hand, taking advantage of the change of lights. They dart across, his girl still practiced at weaving through foot traffic even when stunned. It’s a bit impressive; when they get to the other side, it’s her tugging at his hand instead of the other way around.
For no good reason, they keep on running.
.-.-.-.-.-.
It’s only extremely obvious that she doesn’t go to the beach very often. For one, the thought of someone needing to stay with the bag and shoes - and, more importantly, their keys and wallets - hadn’t occurred to her. Maybe it’s not so much that she hasn’t gone to the beach often as that she hasn’t gone as part of a pair, and he doesn’t see how he can complain about it.
Well, actually, he can, but he won’t. Mostly because there’s no one to complain to, sitting on the towel and waiting for her to come back from dunking herself in the sea. He’ll have some difficulty complaining when she gets back too, he can already tell. Something about the bikini, her being wet, and him having all the foibles of a hot-blooded human male. It’s strange, the way she affects him. Strange and very thorough.
The sunscreen, though: that had been fun.
She’d giggled.
A lot.
Torn between feeling bored and feeling like a lecherous old man, he lies back on the towel, his legs too long for it. Having refused to find a place to change, he’s still wearing his jeans. His feet are bare and vaguely warmed by the sand. The sun rises over this water, so there’s no bright light to blind him as he lets his eyes wander across the sky and clouds. This isn’t the beach from San Juan, but he can still imagine fireworks in this sky yet to darken.
On something of a whim, he sits up and pulls off his t-shirt. Let her react as she will.
He bundles up his t-shirt and uses it for a pillow for a few moments, and that’s when he hears this little sound. It’s oddly familiar and vaguely annoying, irritating in a way that has less to do with the sound than with the associations with it. How he can have these associations without being able to identify the sound is a mystery, but they’re very much present. He thinks of the girl’s mum for a moment and then he has it.
Rolling over onto his side, he pulls open the bag, pulls out a pair of denim shorts and retrieves a ringing mobile. For all he’s seen her use it, he’s unfamiliar with the model and his attempt to silence the ringing ends up with him answering the phone instead.
“Rose’s mobile, how may I help you?”
Not the best course of action, but better than making whoever this was think Rose had hung up on them. That he cares is a bit pathetic by his old standards.
“Hello?” asks a man down the line. English, not Spanish. International call? “Who is this?”
“Rose’s-” A small moment of indecision. “-flatmate. I can make her call you back later.”
“Oh, no, that’s all right. Just tell her to come tomorrow, five-fifteen. Thanks, mate.”
“Wait, who is this?” Because he cares now. Far more than he did a moment ago. He can only think of two options as to what this could be and either he’s just stumbled into a UNIT thing or - unlikely - he really needs to talk to that girl about monogamy.
“Andy,” says the bloke, and then begins to talk faster, background noise welling up down the line. “Sorry, things are getting busy here - gotta go. Pass that along, won’t you? Thanks. Bye.”
He doesn’t bother replying, hearing the call cut out.
So.
That had been something.
He looks down at the mobile in his hand and, after a moment of madness, makes the conscious decision not to look through her recent calls. There’s being needy and then there’s being a creep; if he refuses to be the first, he’s definitely keeping away from being the second.
He puts her phone down on top of her bag, the paranoid part of him readily acknowledging honesty as a weapon. Had that been UNIT? Had the watch been found and was it being dropped off tomorrow? For no good reason, he thinks of his recent trend of dreams, of that old man trying to sleep. It reminds him of something but he just doesn’t know what.
Still, he readily acknowledges, those dreams are far better than those of death in the woods, even with the sense of frustration that comes with them. His dreams are becoming more orderly, but no less confusing. Whatever his subconscious is trying to tell him, he’s not sure he wants to hear it. Waking up is by far the best part of sleeping.
Lying back on the towel, thinking along these lines with his eyes shut to the sky and the occasional bit of wind and sand, he pretends to ignore the world. Some parts of it, though, are too good to block out; the sunlight on his skin is a physical sensation. He feigns sleep, if only to see if his mind might make the connection like this.
It doesn’t, but that could be a matter of interruption by a certain blond.
“Okay,” she says, sitting down on the towel and dripping over him. “Your turn.”
He opens his eyes, unable to ignore her despite a strong urge to do so. Her hair is a wet tangle fallen into strange shapes over her shoulders; the end of each clump of hair is thick with water that drops to his chest, drip by drip. Blond has turned almost brown with the damp. He wants to, but doesn’t, touch. “Think I just got wet enough already, thanks.”
“You don’t want to swim?” Her head tilts to the side a little, one of her eyebrows slightly raised as to keep on level with its partner.
He shrugs, bare shoulders and back rubbing against the towel. He’d sit up, but she insists on leaning over him; it’s the best sort of water torture.
“And you let me drag you here anyway,” she concludes, looking oddly apologetic there. She stops dripping on him then and he props himself up with his hands, feeling sand shift beneath the cloth beneath his skin.
“You wanted a beach,” he says, not really seeing the issue. He’s done enough living with women in his lifetime to know that sometimes, there are problems that aren’t obvious to the male eye. It has taught him that if, hypothetically, a woman feels guilty over the inconsequential, there is probably something consequential she feels guilty over too. She’s too confident in herself for it to be a simple lack of self-esteem.
Makes him a bit more worried about Andy, come to think of it.
“Yeah, but,” she starts to say.
“You wanted a beach,” he repeats. “Here’s a beach.”
“’S just....” She bites her lip, tries again. “You’re always doing stuff for me.”
He has to laugh at that, at least a little. “Says the soaked woman in the bikini.” He gives her an obvious once-over, making a joke of it, and he’s reminding himself of someone again, reminding himself of someone he can’t place.
It gets a giggle out of her and, as expected, she swats him. He catches her wrist, pulls her closer and, suddenly, has found himself a soggy armful. Their legs stretched out in opposite directions, he can pull her chest against his. Her arms around his back don’t remain still, fingertips trailing traces of saltwater. The amount of skin goes a long way to make up for the recent lack of snogging.
“Okay,” she says against his shoulder, “so you had some incentive.”
“Might’ve had,” he agrees, smelling salt and traces of shampoo and her. “Just a bit.” He nuzzles in a little closer, intending to go after her ear, crowded beach or no, but she mistakes the motion for pure snuggling.
Which is not a word he’d known was in his vocabulary.
Anyway, and more importantly, she presses closer, arms now still and strong around his back, palms on the blades of his shoulders. Her cheek and hair are cool and damp on his collarbone, her breath warm across the base of his throat. He closes his eyes and ignores all other sounds around him, save for that breathing. He lets himself feel it, lets himself know it:
He’s in too deep.
And he doesn’t care. Not right now, at least.
She nuzzles a bit closer, relaxed and soft and solid between his arms, against his chest. She hums a little, lets out a “Mm” of contentment.
“Tired?” he asks, not without a hint of fond amusement.
She shakes her head against him, her hair tickling his skin. “You’re nice and warm,” she says, sounding as if she’s speaking about a long-awaited dessert.
He chuckles, she giggles and then something cuts her giggle short. There’s an instant with her frozen, with her tense and still, just a moment. Then she pulls back, practically snaps herself out of his arms. She looks away from him with such force that he ought to be winded. Maybe he would be, if he weren’t used to the twists and turns of her.
“Rose?”
She shakes her head. “It’s nothing, forget it.”
Right. He plays along, tries to poke something more substantial out of her. “A bug land on you or something? Didn’t think you were that skittish.”
She shakes her head again, reaching over him for the bag, still not looking at him. Trying not to look at him, at least. “Why’s my phone out?”
“Your ringtone was annoying the beach,” he tells her promptly, thinking better of tugging her onto his lap. She wouldn’t appreciate it and he could do without the wet spot on his crotch. “Had to do something about it. Andy says five-fifteen, by the way.”
She looks at him now, slightly alarmed. “Today? It’s already past six.”
“Tomorrow,” he corrects. “Be a bit of an issue today, what with me being without a time machine.”
She just stares at him. Like he’s this incomprehensible thing she can’t make head nor tail of. As if he’s the frustrating member of this pair and, just like that, he’s suddenly become too much for her to put up with.
“That big of an issue, me answering your phone?” he asks. “Should I not be touching the top secret mobile?”
“Let me put it this way,” she replies, recovering herself a bit. “Do you want to answer the phone and find my mum on the other end?”
“Could be a bit awkward,” he acknowledges.
“Just a bit,” she agrees and so the matter gets dropped. For the moment, at least.
She pulls the second towel out of the bag and starts drying herself off properly. While she does, he watches her not look at him. Suddenly shy? Or is this part of the unknown guilt issue? He knows he tries to parse her out to the point where it’s absurd, but she intrigues him in a way he hasn’t been intrigued for such a very long time.
The desire to watch her lessens only slightly as she pulls her jeans and top back on, lessens only in the respect that it becomes slightly less intense but far more focused. He pulls his t-shirt back on, partially to match her state of dress, but mostly for something to do with his hands. He probably won’t be sunburned tomorrow.
“So,” he says. Not really prompting, not really asking. Just indicating that some sort of conversation would be good around now and it’s her turn to pick the topic.
“I’m working at a fish n’ chips shop,” she tells him.
There’s only one possible response to that: “What?”
She shrugs, keeps her shoulders hunched afterwards. “Well, starting tomorrow.”
He’s hearing the words but he’s far from understanding them. “What for?”
“For a bit over minimum wage,” she replies. “Plus tips.”
Trying that again: “Why? Or does UNIT encourage its employees to moonlight as wait staff?”
She shrugs, pulling in on herself a little but now squarely meeting his gaze. “I need to do something besides bother you all the time,” she says, trying to tuck a clump of wet hair behind her ear. “Something, y’know, at least sorta useful.”
“You can do better than waitressing,” he tells her, dismissive. It’s more or less the only way he can be dismissive without being a complete git. Does she realize that her working mealtimes means he’ll never see her? If she wants to work while he does, that’s well and good - he’s got no demands on her time, then. Yes, it’s selfish and no, he doesn’t care.
“It’s what came up,” she says, shrugging a bit more. He may have hit on something there, though, judging by the way she shies away slightly. “Andy’s running an English fish n’ chips shop and he wants it authentic. Opened last week, I stopped by for chips this Monday, and he thought I was there for an interview ‘cause of my accent, yeah? So I just sorta had fun with it. Told him I’d only be here a couple weeks, but looks like he’s understaffed enough that he doesn’t care.”
“And you were going to tell me when?” That comes much more like an accusation than he meant it to. He’s thrown too far off balance to keep his tone in check. There was an equilibrium here, just barely, and now it’s gone again.
“You found out I had the job before I did,” she protests, her glare starting up. “It’s not like I have to-”
“Not what I meant,” he lies, interrupts. Forces a grin out onto his face. “You got dragged into a job interview trying to get a snack. That’s a story worth telling. Two days later and no mention?”
Her mouth curves into an uncertain line, almost a smile and close to a frown. “Never seemed like the time to mention it. Well, y’know.”
“For once,” he says, “pretend I don’t know, me.”
Arms crossed across her chest like a shield of bone and muscle, she shrugs, eyes down. Looks off to the side, off toward the water. “Sort of a difficult topic to bring up after talking about your bloke’s dead fiancée. Seems a bit too silly.”
Pretend he didn’t know? Scratch that. “Rose, I-”
“No, you should be talking about her,” she interrupts, reading him too well. “Them. If you want to. Don’t worry about it, I’m being stupid.”
“They died six years ago,” he tells her. “Six and a half, now.”
She shakes her head at him. “If you can say how long it’s been off the top of your head, you’re not over it yet.”
“Or,” he says, trying to draw her back to him by words alone, “they died December thirtieth, nineteen-ninety-nine. Pretty easy to calculate when you round up by two days.”
“Oh,” she says and then, finally, she makes all of this right. Close enough to being right. She takes his hand and threads her fingers through his in a warm and welcome weave. Her head ducks down for a second, for two and three seconds before she tries to tuck away her wet hair once again. “Okay,” she says, the sound made more to mark her thoughts than to convey agreement. She lifts her brown eyes to his. “This was in San Francisco?” she asks. “With the orange skies and the silver trees.”
That last bit gets a breath out of him almost like a chuckle, a wry piece of breathing. Trust her to remember his nighttime ramblings. He thinks of that rather than the subject at hand. “Yeah,” he says. “It was.”
Her thumb rubs across the back of his hand, so much sad seriousness in her eyes, so much focus on him that he can’t help but ignore the rest of the beach in reply, in an echo of her attention. “How?” she asks.
He wants to look away. He wants to do so much more than look away; he wants to go, to bolt, to run, because suddenly he learns that he didn’t actually want to talk about this, not really.
He forces himself to speak despite it.
“They were shot,” he says. “Got lost and walked into a gang ambush meant for someone else entirely.”
“Were they left there?” She studies his face, watches both of his eyes as if her gaze alone can pull everything left unsaid out of him, pull it out and piece it together.
He shakes his head. “One of the younger ones - just a kid, really, Lee, I think his name was - he called an ambulance. Told them where the girls were and waited with them. Ran off when the EMTs got there, though. Fred made it into surgery, but Susan, she....” He looks away. Takes a breath and lets it go.
Those words don’t need to be said to be understood.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and she looks it.
“There were complications,” he continues, “during the operation. The anesthetic didn’t get along with her. Didn’t forgive the doctor that for a long time.” It’s a difficult thing to admit, that. Whether he’s admitting to the grudge or to the forgiveness, he’s not sure. He knows he’s not telling the girl that he went back and shagged the woman six months ago; even by his standards, that had been weird.
“The, the surgeon, you mean,” she says, brow furrowed. At his look, she adds, “Sorry - just trying to keep track.”
“The surgeon,” he agrees. “Doctor Grace Holloway.”
She mouths the name to herself as if trying to solve some sort of a mystery.
“Something the matter?” he asks.
She shakes her head. “No, I just.... Were you there?” she asks, visibly changing trains of thought. “At the hospital.”
He nods. His throat is thick and strange and though there should be words in his mind to describe what happened that night, the inability of his mouth to utter them seems to banish the ability his brain has for thinking them. It’s hardly a night he likes to think about. For all he was stuck in the past before he’d met this girl, he’d never liked to think about any of it.
“I’m sorry,” she says again. There’s something in her that makes the words full rather than hollow, something greater than mere sympathy.
“Have you ever watched someone you love die?” he asks.
“Yeah,” she says, and it only takes the syllable for her voice to roughen. She clears her throat. “My dad, first. He was, he was hit by a car. And then, after, the doctor, he nearly-” She cuts herself off, shakes her head. “And then there’s Jack.” She pauses long enough to let out a breath, to stare off to the side in the confusion of remembered heartbreak. “Think I’ve got a list now. Hadn’t realized that.”
“I’m sorry.” It’s his turn to say it.
She looks up at him and he gathers her in, both of them twisted at the waist for the hug to work. It’s a long moment before she lets out a mumble he just barely catches: “Don’t wanna lose you.”
“Oh Rose,” he says. Kisses the side of her head. “I don’t want to lose me either.”
But instead of surprising a laugh, that nearly provokes a cry. It’s a similar sort of sound and he can feel it in her body. When she pulls back, her face is dry and her eyes clear, but that doesn’t mean a thing. “Think, ah, I think I’ve had enough beach for today,” she tells him.
“Right then,” he replies, watching her as she shoves her wet towel back into the bag. Wiping sand from his feet before he pulls back on his socks, he adds, giving playfulness one last attempt, “Your wish is my command.”
“I’ll be careful what I wish for,” she finishes for him. Smiles, just a little, but her seriousness fails to fade.
“Good,” he says. Leans over and kisses her on her damp hairline before lacing up one boot and the other. “And now that we’ve gotten ourselves skin cancer, what do you think about getting some paella?”
“I think I’ll be hungry by the time we get it,” she answers, sort of offering up the reply.
He grins a bit because this time, he knows he has her: “You can ask the waitress about trade secrets.”
She rolls her eyes, her mouth already smiling. “Oh, shut up.”
He doesn’t, of course, but now she doesn’t seem to mind.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He doesn’t dream about the old man again that night. He doesn’t think he does, at least. Waking up is enough to leave him exhausted for no reason he can name. Not physically, no, just mentally drained. He thinks for just a second that maybe he should talk to someone about his sleep issues, but he hates psychobabble aimed at him from people he likes; he’s hardly about to go out and find a professional to get annoyed at.
He gets up, gets ready for work. Kisses a groggy blond good-bye.
Maybe he should talk to her about these dreams. It’s a thought, maybe even a decent one, but one he entertains only for a moment. There’s a limit to how much a person can confide at once. Any more than that, and then you’re just a lunatic.
Besides, he reasons as he heads down the stairs, what’s to say she doesn’t have nightmares either? Watched her dad die, her captain too, and even almost that doctor of hers. And all fairly recently, by the sounds of it. No, he can be a thoughtless git, but he’s not that much of a thoughtless git.
What they should do now, what they should do is go somewhere. Somewhere better than just a beach. Maybe even a proper event. Something bigger than a local band night at a restaurant and spicy paella. Not that last night hadn’t been good, but he can do better. Besides, after almost two weeks since their last big trip, he’s itching to get back on his bike. He wants far and fast and fantastic.
Where and when, though, he still gets to pick. Not half bad, that.
.-.-.-.-.-.
She tells him at lunch that she’s not going to pop ‘round the garage later. Though he knows it in his head that this is one evening they’re spending apart, he still finds himself waiting outside the garage and irritably checking his watch out of thwarted habit before that knowledge is forced into application.
For a minute or two, he entertains the thought of showing up at her fish n’ chips place just to annoy her. For a minute longer, he debates whether that would be playful or clingy.
Clingy.
Falling back on old habits, he goes to the library instead after his post-work shower. This time, however, instead of returning to too many books he’s already read or correcting Wikipedia, he goes to the computer to look through local events. For an odd moment, he finds a refreshing sort of joy in typing. It’s something simple his hands know how to do. It’s not quite as good as fixing a car or tinkering his way through an inefficient engine until that adjective no longer applies, no, not as good as that, but it’s still good.
Far better than even those is discovering that, starting today and lasting until Sunday - a good, solid, four-day window of opportunity - they could go flying. Ballooning, make that, but it’s still up in the air. The European Balloon Festival is an hour away in Igualada, just that. Flights in the mornings and evenings and, look at that, he can reserve one.
It’s not terribly often that he wanders away from the meandering path of spontaneity, but something about the idea of being back up in the sky with her, without a mountain under them this time, well. He spends a moment imagining the look on her face, the light in her eyes.
He spends more than a moment imagining that.
All right, he’s reserving a flight. He has no doubts that she’s working tomorrow too, so he skips over Friday and books an evening flight for Saturday - which, as it turns out, is right before the night glow. All the balloons tethered to the ground, inflated like giant paper lanterns against the night sky, and orchestrated fireworks shooting up above them to hit the washed out stars. And that followed by what is bound to be one hell of a party.
He realizes he’s grinning so hard his face is hurting a bit, but oh, for this, he completely deserves to grin as much as he likes. Give the man a medal. He’s brilliant, he is.
Brilliant and a bit impatient, actually, but again, that’s the brilliance of it: he doesn’t have to wait. It’s later, yes, but it’s also now, and just like that, he has plans for tonight. Although he’ll be too late to fly tonight, he won’t be too late to watch, to see.
He waves to a librarian on the way out who isn’t Karmen the librarian and the woman, though surprised, smiles back at him. For no good reason, that just boosts his mood even higher. Tonight, people are wonderful, humanity fantastic.
It’s not so much a walk back to his apartment building as it is a brisk jog, heat or no. He darts up three flights of stairs, grabs his helmet and his jacket and, after a quick check through the pockets for his riding gauntlets, he’s loping back down those stairs. At the bottom, he slings his jacket on over a t-shirt that’s already damp with sweat. The heat is all the more incentive to go now, and quickly.
He’s on his bike and cursing commuters in what feels like just a second later. Getting out of the city, getting out of the congested clump of cars is like getting to breathe again. Acceleration cools him down, the hot desire for movement chilled by the wind that movement brings. It’s so brilliant.
He can’t wait to bring her with him.
Approaching the city, he’s all the more certain she’ll love it when he sees the specks in the sky. They’re coming down now, some of them, or just starting to, and he watches them with as much attention as he can spare, watching them grow with proximity. He has the thought that far is small, near is bigger, so inside is nearest and biggest, and he laughs inside his helmet at the nonsense in his brain.
Driving into Igualada, he tries to track down where the balloons were being launched from or where they might land or really anything of the sort. Half an hour later, he has to admit that he’s only riding around for the fun of it.
He parks. Gets himself a bite to eat.
And always, always watches the sky.
.-.-.-.-.-.
She gets back to the flat six minutes after he does. It’s enough time for him to put his stuff away, take a leak, and sprawl out on the couch with a book, his feet toward the front door.
“Hey,” she says.
“How’d it go?” he asks, not looking up from his page, clearly engrossed and paying only token attention to her. There’s a part of him that’s laughing on the inside, that’s fitting such a huge laugh inside of him: for all she knows, he could have done nothing or anything. He left the city, saw people held aloft by nothing more than fire and ingenuity, and here he is, back before her.
There’s something so intrinsically right about being able to do that. He can’t explain how, but there is.
She toes off her trainers, oblivious to his amusement. “You ever have one of those days when you realize you have amazing reflexes?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m really good at catching things,” she says, sounding proud of herself, looking proud of herself when he glances up to see.
In reply, he lobs his book at her, whipping it with a flick of his wrist.
She snatches it out of the air.
“Yes you are,” he agrees, his face straight.
“Yep,” she says, her expression matching his.
That lasts for almost five seconds and then they promptly crack up.
“You threw a book at me!” she accuses, laughing hard, coming over to thwap him with it.
“Only a paperback!” he protests, pulling her down on top of him to better catch her arms. “Your fault anyway. Some claims you can’t help testing.”
“Yeah?” She giggles through the word even harder, one of his hands at her stomach. With the hand not engaged in the epic struggle over control of the paperback, she retaliates in kind.
To say he’s surprised to learn he’s ticklish is a complete understatement.
To say she takes complete advantage is, however, entirely accurate.
After the giggles have subsided - her giggles, not his, he doesn’t giggle, him, not ever - they lie together on the couch, legs tangled and faces close, the pair of them breathing out their mirth more gradually. He brings up a hand and pets through her hair, needing some sort of reply to her smiling eyes. A brush of his fingers against her cheek turns the moment intimate, quietly so, and she turns her face into the touch. Her eyes fall shut in the movement and she lets a slow breath make its way through her, the picture of a woman loved into contentment.
“I missed you,” he says without remotely meaning to, without ever meaning to, and her eyes snap open.
He doesn’t doubt that she can see how surprised he is at the words, how horrified he is at himself. He has a second of panic as he tries to make sure he used the verb he thinks he did. The longer she stares at him, the more uncertain he grows.
Like their last staring contest, it only lasts five seconds or so, but this one still manages to turn itself into an eternity.
She shifts on top of him a little, leaning in, her hands on his shoulders, her forearms on his chest. As she kisses his cheek, her hair falls across his face.
Making an annoyed noise at her, he brushes the blond mess away. When he can see again, she’s back to smiling.
“You smell like fish,” he tells her. He neglects to mention that the fish in question smells delicious.
She laughs a little, batting his shoulder with a palm. “So? You smell like a sweaty bloke and cars.”
Reaching over to drop his book on the coffee table, he rolls his eyes. His other hand strokes up and down her back, a slow, absent motion. “Why yes, Rose, I am manly. You, on the other hand, are a deep-fried mermaid.”
She laughs outright this time. “Yeah, you’re a smooth talker.” She looks like she wants to kiss him but doesn’t, maybe out of spite.
“The captain would’ve been proud,” he agrees. Though, judging by the way she stiffens at that - not too badly, but still noticeably so beneath his hand and atop his body - the captain probably wouldn’t have been proud at this moment.
She recovers quickly, her grin forced wide before it returns to being true. “The captain would’ve tried to shag you,” she contradicts, says it like those two were somehow mutually exclusive.
“Would you’ve been jealous?” he asks right back, a complete bluff. He’s not, well, all right, there was that once, but it was dark, he was a bit drunk, and a kilt approached from behind can look like a skirt under those conditions. Not to mention how “Jamie” is a gender-neutral name. But with present company on top of him, there’s no real point in looking to the past, is there? Not much incentive with a present like this.
Especially when she gives him that considering look and asks, “Would you’ve let me watch?”
He doesn’t say anything, can’t say anything for a moment, but there’s no way that she can’t figure out his answer to that. She flushes a little, impossibly innocent after that question.
“For someone who’s not going to shag me...” he begins. His hand has stopped stroking her back, just until he’s sure.
“Went a bit far, yeah,” she agrees.
“A bit,” he says.
“A little bit.”
“Touch of a little bit.”
“Sorta speck-ish, yeah?” she asks.
He nods up at her. “A tad bit speck-ish.”
“Well, now that we’ve got that settled.”
“Mm.”
Neither of them moves.
The way she doesn’t move is very obvious. Like she sort of wants to get off him and doesn’t want to disturb him either.
“That’ll go away if you let it,” he tells her bluntly.
“And if it doesn’t in four hours, I’m supposed to call somebody?” she asks, it being her turn to surprise a laugh out of him. The joke is weak in words, solid in delivery, and so unexpected.
“No,” he says, fighting down a wicked grin. “Just get off me.”
She grins enough for the two of them. “I think someone’s got a taste for deep-fried mermaid.”
“S’pose someone might,” he agrees.
They laugh, and they kiss, and surprise for Saturday or no, he never quite manages to change the subject.
.-.-.-.-.-.
That was Thursday. That was wonderful.
And now it’s Friday and he’s bored out of his skull.
There’d been a night in between which had mostly involved him rolling every which way, dreaming and waking and not much knowing the difference. It was all equally pointless, equally confining.
Not to mention that waking up properly had brought him right into one of those mornings. Her tendency towards guilt after intimacy has possibly hit a new high today. He thinks maybe she was stewing over it last night. Come tomorrow, it’ll have been two weeks of snogging and only a little over two weeks of it left, and he’s learned how this works. More or less.
He left that morning without so much as a brush of contact. She held herself apart like she’d decided to stop coming closer, but - as predicted - her hand had slipped into his come time for lunch, her smile an easy piece of reciprocation. They’d wandered around the city a bit, looking at this and that, more snacking than properly eating.
Since then, really, he’s had nothing to do. He stays late at work, fixing this and that and experimenting over here for a while. When he finds himself alone in the garage, he realizes that he let one of his only chances for a social evening walk off. He’s not sure what Pedro does outside of the garage, but the man knows motorcycles and that’s a good enough start to a conversation if you set it somewhere with beer and a telly with a match on. They don’t much talk to each other, as a rule of convenience, but companionable silence can be a rare thing and he wouldn’t have minded some more of that tonight. So much for that.
He turns his mind to the thought of tomorrow night, of flight and wonder. He hopes for wonder. Even if she turns out to have enough intimacy issues to match him, that’ll still go well. He really can’t wait, except for how he knows he can. He could go tonight, for instance, but that would only lessen the real experience tomorrow. That, and three days in a row would be excessive, would feel almost like routine when that’s what he’s most trying to avoid.
Spending another evening alone isn’t bad. He’s had years of it. Years where he didn’t mind it in the least. Years of being fine with it, just fine.
But, supposing he’s not fine with it tonight, only supposing that, he could always go out and find a stranger to talk to. Like those drunk blokes on the street last week. Nothing wrong with talking to people. He likes people, generally. Sometimes. He likes them as often as he dislikes them, he thinks.
Still. Supposing, only supposing again, that he wanted to talk to someone who knew him, then he’d have something of a problem. He moves around too much for that, stays in contact with too few people. When he thinks of people he can call, there are no names that come to mind, none at all.
“Just you and me, Bessy,” he says, patting his yellow patient on her bonnet. He grimaces after he says it; it felt like a better name for a car when it was only in his head. “Shouldn’t be naming you, should I?” he asks.
The car, through its complete lack of reply, informs him that he’s being silly and bored and just a bit strange.
He sighs, agreeing. Leans against the wall for a minute, just letting his mind go blank. Making his mind go blank.
He doesn’t want to be alone again.
With more resolve than intent, he closes up shop for the night, putting his tools back in place, scrubbing his hands almost clean. Only once he’s punched out and locked up does he pull out his mobile, look through the excessively small list of contacts. This is what he gets for not transferring numbers over when he gets a new phone, and knowing it’s his own fault only annoys him.
For the second night in a row, he heads over to the library and the amazing power of the internet. He walks in the heat, feeling the world turning. The world is turning and spinning and flying through space, and that’s how he knows to stop along the way for food and, more importantly, water. There are some bouts of stupidity you only have once.
The stop manages to take up a little more time than he’d thought it would. Not a bad thing, that. At the moment, time is something he has too much of, just a bit.
A touch of a bit, he thinks. A tad. A speck of a tad of a touch of a bit too much time.
He smiles a little, feels better enough to take the library steps two at a time. He blames his earlier mood on low blood sugar, the excuse simple and near to hand. Spotting Karmen the librarian on his way in, he gives her a small wave and she waves back, looking slightly confused while she’s at it. He’s come here less of late, so he can’t much fault her for that.
Going directly to the computers, he finds his usual one taken and moves to another, not terribly pleased. Again, he blames the blood sugar - clearly, he hasn’t digested enough.
He starts his search for phone numbers with the last person he connected with, as odd as it’ll probably prove to be. He’s still a bit annoyed that the number in his phone isn’t for Grace but for a Chinese restaurant. Time to fix that.
He googles the yellow pages, clicks to find a person, and putting in a name and a city gets him a phone number. Easy as pi, he thinks, fully indulging himself the mathematical pun. He copies it down into his phone, finding that he’d not just had the last few digits scrambled but completely wrong.
Checking the computer’s clock and taking the time zones into account tells him that at best, she might be about to have a very, very early lunch, something he doubts a surgeon would be at home for. The home phone number isn’t much help there and the nine hour time difference doesn’t make the entire situation terribly convenient.
Just to be sure it’s the right number, though, he gives it a call. The bloke at his regular computer gives him a dirty look as he dials in the library, something he rather enjoys.
The message on the answering machine is a simple one, a woman’s voice telling him what number he’s called and - she adds with something that could be humour or bizarre coincidence - if that’s the number he meant to dial, he should leave a message.
He doesn’t, of course, being in a library, but that was definitely Grace’s voice.
A while longer is spent trying to track people down and if it weren’t for his immediate success with Grace, he might have gotten annoyed from the process. He tries this and that, depending on the country he’d last known the person to be in, but generally finds little that looks promising. He’s well aware that he knows people with unusual names - Fred was only the closest to him of that batch - and he can’t figure out how those names won’t show up when he searches for them.
He’s always had a problem finding people again once he’s left them, but this is worse than usual. Not that there is a “usual” for this. Generally, he doesn’t bother.
Might’ve been a mistake, that.
By the time he gives up, he only has that one phone number to show for his efforts. He’s not too surprised by it, but it still makes him feel lacking.
He goes back to the flat and rather than risk provoking another guilt attack from waiting up for her, he decides to call it quits and go to bed early. Despite his inability to rest the night before, he goes to bed but not to sleep. Searching without being able to find seems to be the order of the day, one he doesn’t much like, and he closes his eyes to today with the prediction that tomorrow will be better in that regard.
Waiting for sleep, sprawled across his bed in his boxers with the sheet pushed to the side, he hears her come in. Even through his closed door, he can make that out. There’s the lock turning and the front door opening; footsteps tread in and the door is shut and locked once more. He hears her pause, hears confusion in the stillness. Footsteps venture towards the bathroom, stop there. Another pause.
The footsteps draw near his door and he relaxes his body as best he can, keeps his breathing even and his eyes closed. He turns his head though, so he could look at the door if he wanted to.
Very slowly, very carefully, the doorknob turns.
He can’t hear her breathing as she opens the door and, gradually, there’s a thin bar of red splitting the black behind his eyelids. He hears her breathe out that held breath. Or maybe she only sighs. He can’t tell.
The door closes quietly and he can hear her get ready to go to sleep, sounds of the bathroom and muffled movements. He opens his eyes, shifts around a little, and she quiets even further. Thoughtful, but not what he’s sure he wants.
Not that there is anything he’s sure that he wants. He has vague ideas. Mostly, they involve her. Still, it’s about time he started planning for life after her. He’ll call Grace tomorrow afternoon, before the ballooning. He’ll start talking to Karmen when he goes to the library and he’ll try to watch a match with Pedro at some point. Not much as plans go, but his plans generally aren’t. What they are is good enough. And if they’re not, well. Something always comes along, doesn’t it? Better or worse, there’s no telling, but there’s always something more.
Whether you’re ready for it or not.
He closes his eyes once again and does his best not to dream.
.-.-.-.-.
<-- | -->
Author: rallalon
Beta: vyctori
Rating: PG13, AU towards the end of Season One; 9!Smith.
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summary: Maybe he should talk to her about these dreams. It’s a thought, maybe even a decent one, but one he entertains only for a moment. There’s a limit to how much a person can confide at once. Any more than that, and then you’re just a lunatic.
I know it's late, but ten-ish days late during finals and research papers?
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
The Flatmate
The Mermaid
The man is old and human and that makes him mature, more or less, when it evens out.
The man is old and tired and he sleeps poorly; he’s a familiar figure, this one, a fellow almost after his own hearts - almost.
How he knows this about the man, he’s not sure. What he knows is that he’s standing on a table rather than rattling in a drawer and there is life and light and the sounds of souls caught within metal. He knows about souls in metal, about dogs that are wonderful and people who are dead. Living souls and dead souls and he doesn’t think he used to believe in that sort of thing, not after metal with only monsters inside.
“Do you believe in souls?” he asks the old man who is so much younger than him. He remembers Tarragona, remembers asking a girl who’d rather interrogate him. He remembers so much and so little. He knows everything, he would know everything, if only he could remember.
The old man opens his eyes, this wizened fellow with too many blankets on his bed in the summer. Slowly, he blinks at his guest, his captive.
“Do you?” he asks again. “Hope you don’t mind waking up, but I’m used to talking in dreams by this point.”
Thick eyebrows pull down and a furrowed brow gains yet more creases. “Who are you?” the man asks, his voice a tired rasp.
He shrugs. “No one important.”
“Neither am I,” says the man.
“S’pose that makes us alike,” he muses. He’d sit down, dangle his legs over the side of the table, except he hasn’t got legs. He hasn’t got much of anything. Even as he is, though, he can still smile. He gives it a try, gives the man a grin.
“No.” The old man shakes his head, shakes himself deeper into his sheets.
“No?” But it had been worth a try. Common ground is an uncommon thing, no matter where you set your feet. “How come?”
“Please stop talking to me,” the man says. He is old and upset and his bed is too large for one man, holds only one man despite the ring fit around his finger, grown into his hand. “Whatever this is, I don’t want to be involved.”
“It’s nothing,” he assures the other man, the words without thought. The man is other, is something else. And yet the man is human and old, neither of which should be other. Neither of which should be, but one of them must be. One of them has to be, but which one? Why doesn’t he know? “There’s nothing to get involved in, nothing going on. Just me having a little chat with you.”
Faded eyes search his absent face. Dark brown shines with gathered tears. “I don’t want to die,” the man says. The words sound like a plea, like the explanation offered before a proud man begs. “I’m not ready.”
He tries to sit down, tries to have some bedside manner. “That’s all right,” he replies and he softens his words until they might soothe. “You’ve got time in you yet.”
The man comes close to laughing, makes a few sounds like laboured breath made light. He likes him for that, for the ability to see humour even when tears hover in the way, trying to block the sight of anything better than tragedy. “You have time in you,” the man says.
“Do I now,” he replies, not seeing what the joke is but grinning along anyway. “S’pose I do.”
The man’s smile fades quickly, that strange bit of humour dissolving into cool air. “I don’t want to die,” he says again, the words presented as a reasonable request this time, as if it’s reasonable to ask him this.
It makes him uncomfortable, makes him shift and fidget with a body he doesn’t have. “I can’t help you there.”
“It’s hardly your help I’m worried about.”
“What do you mean?”
The man pulls his blankets tight around him. “I want to sleep now. Will you leave me be?”
“This is a dream,” he explains. “You-”
“Please go.” The man rolls over, a slow and painful looking motion.
After a moment of wondering, he does try to leave. He tries, but he’s stuck. He’s stuck here.
He can’t move.
“Oi!” he yells at the man. “How am I supposed to leave?”
He waits.
He keeps waiting.
Eventually, he remembers how to open his eyes. Awake, or vaguely so, he groggily pats himself down, checking for limbs and sensation. Finding something gone, he tries to remember what he had in the first place. He falls back asleep still wondering.
.-.-.-.-.-.
As time goes on, as the week slowly passes and their remaining time together quickly dwindles, that feeling doesn’t go away. Something’s missing, something’s lost, and he thinks it might be because he’s talking about Fred again. That, and talking about Fred seems to have cut down on the girl’s urges to grab him and snog him. Still, some things are more important, even if they’re not as... compelling.
“Anything else you want to know?” he finds himself asking. It’s something he checks for now and he knows it confuses her, him being willing to share pieces of his past.
Sometimes, though, she’s a bit glib about it.
“Yeah,” she says, pulling down the garage door with him. “What’s so good about bananas? Besides being a fruit full of potassium.”
“Technically, it’s also an herb,” he informs her, tossing her the keys while he goes to pull down the other door.
She pauses to stare at him, nevertheless catching the keys. “It’s a what?”
“A fruit and an herb. The tree it grows on isn’t real wood. No woody stem, no tree.” The door rattles as it lowers, the metal warm in his hand and not yet warmed by the lowering sun. “Grows on an herb, can be called an herb.”
“Huh.” Her half of this done, she lobs the keys back over. “That a technical term, ‘woody’?”
“Yeah, actually.” To let her know he’s serious, he glances over at where she’s leaning, her bare shoulder against the uneven metal of the other door. She fits into the bump of it, just barely. She has a little bag over her shoulder, a cloth thing pulled shut with a thin yellow rope and it sort of sits on her skin just so, next to the strap of her tank top. Together, they’re like the strap of a dress, just waiting to be pulled down in a preview of fabric flowing to the floor. He glances, and then he catches himself staring. He looks down to the keys in his hand.
For once, she goes on like she hasn’t noticed. “So,” she says, “how does that make bananas good?”
He shrugs, finishing up and dropping the keys into the pocket of his jeans. “Makes them a good conversation topic. It’s the tomato fruit-or-vegetable debate all over again, the herb-or-fruit version.”
“Huh,” she says.
“Yeah. Some things just can’t fit all the way into one category. Came from an herb, but still a fruit.” He starts walking, wondering if that’s it then, for today, and she catches up, slips her hand into his. She pulls a little and they turn right instead of going straight. “We going to the beach?” he asks.
He means it as a joke, but she nods. “Why not?” She pulls at the strap to her pack and the soft bulge inside is abruptly explained as towels. “You always wash up after work anyway.”
“Yeah, but I don’t bring swimming trunks to the garage.” He doesn’t think he owns any, as a matter of fact. Or, wait, he might. Where, though, that’s the question.
Or, judging by the look on her face, that’s not a question at all. “Brought ‘em for you,” she answers. “Can’t believe we’ve only been to the beach once here.”
He raises his eyebrow, curiosity piqued enough in this direction that he ignores the mystery of where those trunks came from. “Somewhere else we would’ve gone to the beach?”
She shrugs and he’ll never know if that was a slip before or truly something she meant the way she explains it: “Just sayin’, it’s a city lined with beaches and we never go.”
“Point,” he acknowledges. Given the options of accepting the explanation or sending himself into a fit of paranoia, he’ll have to go with the acceptance. He doesn’t much like it, but then, he seldom does.
They walk along a bit more, run though the streets as lights change, moving away from the sound of engines toward the sound of water. Eventually, they do have to wait, do have to stop at that street corner, and he pulls her to him, kisses her without reason or warning. She helps him defy routine and this is definitely on the list of ways he’d like to do just that. The kissing, not the beach. Though, he muses as he pulls back, grinning at her look of mixed contentment and surprise, he might not mind the beach, depending on her swimsuit.
“Wha...?” she starts to ask, but he only grins the wider and pulls her by the hand, taking advantage of the change of lights. They dart across, his girl still practiced at weaving through foot traffic even when stunned. It’s a bit impressive; when they get to the other side, it’s her tugging at his hand instead of the other way around.
For no good reason, they keep on running.
.-.-.-.-.-.
It’s only extremely obvious that she doesn’t go to the beach very often. For one, the thought of someone needing to stay with the bag and shoes - and, more importantly, their keys and wallets - hadn’t occurred to her. Maybe it’s not so much that she hasn’t gone to the beach often as that she hasn’t gone as part of a pair, and he doesn’t see how he can complain about it.
Well, actually, he can, but he won’t. Mostly because there’s no one to complain to, sitting on the towel and waiting for her to come back from dunking herself in the sea. He’ll have some difficulty complaining when she gets back too, he can already tell. Something about the bikini, her being wet, and him having all the foibles of a hot-blooded human male. It’s strange, the way she affects him. Strange and very thorough.
The sunscreen, though: that had been fun.
She’d giggled.
A lot.
Torn between feeling bored and feeling like a lecherous old man, he lies back on the towel, his legs too long for it. Having refused to find a place to change, he’s still wearing his jeans. His feet are bare and vaguely warmed by the sand. The sun rises over this water, so there’s no bright light to blind him as he lets his eyes wander across the sky and clouds. This isn’t the beach from San Juan, but he can still imagine fireworks in this sky yet to darken.
On something of a whim, he sits up and pulls off his t-shirt. Let her react as she will.
He bundles up his t-shirt and uses it for a pillow for a few moments, and that’s when he hears this little sound. It’s oddly familiar and vaguely annoying, irritating in a way that has less to do with the sound than with the associations with it. How he can have these associations without being able to identify the sound is a mystery, but they’re very much present. He thinks of the girl’s mum for a moment and then he has it.
Rolling over onto his side, he pulls open the bag, pulls out a pair of denim shorts and retrieves a ringing mobile. For all he’s seen her use it, he’s unfamiliar with the model and his attempt to silence the ringing ends up with him answering the phone instead.
“Rose’s mobile, how may I help you?”
Not the best course of action, but better than making whoever this was think Rose had hung up on them. That he cares is a bit pathetic by his old standards.
“Hello?” asks a man down the line. English, not Spanish. International call? “Who is this?”
“Rose’s-” A small moment of indecision. “-flatmate. I can make her call you back later.”
“Oh, no, that’s all right. Just tell her to come tomorrow, five-fifteen. Thanks, mate.”
“Wait, who is this?” Because he cares now. Far more than he did a moment ago. He can only think of two options as to what this could be and either he’s just stumbled into a UNIT thing or - unlikely - he really needs to talk to that girl about monogamy.
“Andy,” says the bloke, and then begins to talk faster, background noise welling up down the line. “Sorry, things are getting busy here - gotta go. Pass that along, won’t you? Thanks. Bye.”
He doesn’t bother replying, hearing the call cut out.
So.
That had been something.
He looks down at the mobile in his hand and, after a moment of madness, makes the conscious decision not to look through her recent calls. There’s being needy and then there’s being a creep; if he refuses to be the first, he’s definitely keeping away from being the second.
He puts her phone down on top of her bag, the paranoid part of him readily acknowledging honesty as a weapon. Had that been UNIT? Had the watch been found and was it being dropped off tomorrow? For no good reason, he thinks of his recent trend of dreams, of that old man trying to sleep. It reminds him of something but he just doesn’t know what.
Still, he readily acknowledges, those dreams are far better than those of death in the woods, even with the sense of frustration that comes with them. His dreams are becoming more orderly, but no less confusing. Whatever his subconscious is trying to tell him, he’s not sure he wants to hear it. Waking up is by far the best part of sleeping.
Lying back on the towel, thinking along these lines with his eyes shut to the sky and the occasional bit of wind and sand, he pretends to ignore the world. Some parts of it, though, are too good to block out; the sunlight on his skin is a physical sensation. He feigns sleep, if only to see if his mind might make the connection like this.
It doesn’t, but that could be a matter of interruption by a certain blond.
“Okay,” she says, sitting down on the towel and dripping over him. “Your turn.”
He opens his eyes, unable to ignore her despite a strong urge to do so. Her hair is a wet tangle fallen into strange shapes over her shoulders; the end of each clump of hair is thick with water that drops to his chest, drip by drip. Blond has turned almost brown with the damp. He wants to, but doesn’t, touch. “Think I just got wet enough already, thanks.”
“You don’t want to swim?” Her head tilts to the side a little, one of her eyebrows slightly raised as to keep on level with its partner.
He shrugs, bare shoulders and back rubbing against the towel. He’d sit up, but she insists on leaning over him; it’s the best sort of water torture.
“And you let me drag you here anyway,” she concludes, looking oddly apologetic there. She stops dripping on him then and he props himself up with his hands, feeling sand shift beneath the cloth beneath his skin.
“You wanted a beach,” he says, not really seeing the issue. He’s done enough living with women in his lifetime to know that sometimes, there are problems that aren’t obvious to the male eye. It has taught him that if, hypothetically, a woman feels guilty over the inconsequential, there is probably something consequential she feels guilty over too. She’s too confident in herself for it to be a simple lack of self-esteem.
Makes him a bit more worried about Andy, come to think of it.
“Yeah, but,” she starts to say.
“You wanted a beach,” he repeats. “Here’s a beach.”
“’S just....” She bites her lip, tries again. “You’re always doing stuff for me.”
He has to laugh at that, at least a little. “Says the soaked woman in the bikini.” He gives her an obvious once-over, making a joke of it, and he’s reminding himself of someone again, reminding himself of someone he can’t place.
It gets a giggle out of her and, as expected, she swats him. He catches her wrist, pulls her closer and, suddenly, has found himself a soggy armful. Their legs stretched out in opposite directions, he can pull her chest against his. Her arms around his back don’t remain still, fingertips trailing traces of saltwater. The amount of skin goes a long way to make up for the recent lack of snogging.
“Okay,” she says against his shoulder, “so you had some incentive.”
“Might’ve had,” he agrees, smelling salt and traces of shampoo and her. “Just a bit.” He nuzzles in a little closer, intending to go after her ear, crowded beach or no, but she mistakes the motion for pure snuggling.
Which is not a word he’d known was in his vocabulary.
Anyway, and more importantly, she presses closer, arms now still and strong around his back, palms on the blades of his shoulders. Her cheek and hair are cool and damp on his collarbone, her breath warm across the base of his throat. He closes his eyes and ignores all other sounds around him, save for that breathing. He lets himself feel it, lets himself know it:
He’s in too deep.
And he doesn’t care. Not right now, at least.
She nuzzles a bit closer, relaxed and soft and solid between his arms, against his chest. She hums a little, lets out a “Mm” of contentment.
“Tired?” he asks, not without a hint of fond amusement.
She shakes her head against him, her hair tickling his skin. “You’re nice and warm,” she says, sounding as if she’s speaking about a long-awaited dessert.
He chuckles, she giggles and then something cuts her giggle short. There’s an instant with her frozen, with her tense and still, just a moment. Then she pulls back, practically snaps herself out of his arms. She looks away from him with such force that he ought to be winded. Maybe he would be, if he weren’t used to the twists and turns of her.
“Rose?”
She shakes her head. “It’s nothing, forget it.”
Right. He plays along, tries to poke something more substantial out of her. “A bug land on you or something? Didn’t think you were that skittish.”
She shakes her head again, reaching over him for the bag, still not looking at him. Trying not to look at him, at least. “Why’s my phone out?”
“Your ringtone was annoying the beach,” he tells her promptly, thinking better of tugging her onto his lap. She wouldn’t appreciate it and he could do without the wet spot on his crotch. “Had to do something about it. Andy says five-fifteen, by the way.”
She looks at him now, slightly alarmed. “Today? It’s already past six.”
“Tomorrow,” he corrects. “Be a bit of an issue today, what with me being without a time machine.”
She just stares at him. Like he’s this incomprehensible thing she can’t make head nor tail of. As if he’s the frustrating member of this pair and, just like that, he’s suddenly become too much for her to put up with.
“That big of an issue, me answering your phone?” he asks. “Should I not be touching the top secret mobile?”
“Let me put it this way,” she replies, recovering herself a bit. “Do you want to answer the phone and find my mum on the other end?”
“Could be a bit awkward,” he acknowledges.
“Just a bit,” she agrees and so the matter gets dropped. For the moment, at least.
She pulls the second towel out of the bag and starts drying herself off properly. While she does, he watches her not look at him. Suddenly shy? Or is this part of the unknown guilt issue? He knows he tries to parse her out to the point where it’s absurd, but she intrigues him in a way he hasn’t been intrigued for such a very long time.
The desire to watch her lessens only slightly as she pulls her jeans and top back on, lessens only in the respect that it becomes slightly less intense but far more focused. He pulls his t-shirt back on, partially to match her state of dress, but mostly for something to do with his hands. He probably won’t be sunburned tomorrow.
“So,” he says. Not really prompting, not really asking. Just indicating that some sort of conversation would be good around now and it’s her turn to pick the topic.
“I’m working at a fish n’ chips shop,” she tells him.
There’s only one possible response to that: “What?”
She shrugs, keeps her shoulders hunched afterwards. “Well, starting tomorrow.”
He’s hearing the words but he’s far from understanding them. “What for?”
“For a bit over minimum wage,” she replies. “Plus tips.”
Trying that again: “Why? Or does UNIT encourage its employees to moonlight as wait staff?”
She shrugs, pulling in on herself a little but now squarely meeting his gaze. “I need to do something besides bother you all the time,” she says, trying to tuck a clump of wet hair behind her ear. “Something, y’know, at least sorta useful.”
“You can do better than waitressing,” he tells her, dismissive. It’s more or less the only way he can be dismissive without being a complete git. Does she realize that her working mealtimes means he’ll never see her? If she wants to work while he does, that’s well and good - he’s got no demands on her time, then. Yes, it’s selfish and no, he doesn’t care.
“It’s what came up,” she says, shrugging a bit more. He may have hit on something there, though, judging by the way she shies away slightly. “Andy’s running an English fish n’ chips shop and he wants it authentic. Opened last week, I stopped by for chips this Monday, and he thought I was there for an interview ‘cause of my accent, yeah? So I just sorta had fun with it. Told him I’d only be here a couple weeks, but looks like he’s understaffed enough that he doesn’t care.”
“And you were going to tell me when?” That comes much more like an accusation than he meant it to. He’s thrown too far off balance to keep his tone in check. There was an equilibrium here, just barely, and now it’s gone again.
“You found out I had the job before I did,” she protests, her glare starting up. “It’s not like I have to-”
“Not what I meant,” he lies, interrupts. Forces a grin out onto his face. “You got dragged into a job interview trying to get a snack. That’s a story worth telling. Two days later and no mention?”
Her mouth curves into an uncertain line, almost a smile and close to a frown. “Never seemed like the time to mention it. Well, y’know.”
“For once,” he says, “pretend I don’t know, me.”
Arms crossed across her chest like a shield of bone and muscle, she shrugs, eyes down. Looks off to the side, off toward the water. “Sort of a difficult topic to bring up after talking about your bloke’s dead fiancée. Seems a bit too silly.”
Pretend he didn’t know? Scratch that. “Rose, I-”
“No, you should be talking about her,” she interrupts, reading him too well. “Them. If you want to. Don’t worry about it, I’m being stupid.”
“They died six years ago,” he tells her. “Six and a half, now.”
She shakes her head at him. “If you can say how long it’s been off the top of your head, you’re not over it yet.”
“Or,” he says, trying to draw her back to him by words alone, “they died December thirtieth, nineteen-ninety-nine. Pretty easy to calculate when you round up by two days.”
“Oh,” she says and then, finally, she makes all of this right. Close enough to being right. She takes his hand and threads her fingers through his in a warm and welcome weave. Her head ducks down for a second, for two and three seconds before she tries to tuck away her wet hair once again. “Okay,” she says, the sound made more to mark her thoughts than to convey agreement. She lifts her brown eyes to his. “This was in San Francisco?” she asks. “With the orange skies and the silver trees.”
That last bit gets a breath out of him almost like a chuckle, a wry piece of breathing. Trust her to remember his nighttime ramblings. He thinks of that rather than the subject at hand. “Yeah,” he says. “It was.”
Her thumb rubs across the back of his hand, so much sad seriousness in her eyes, so much focus on him that he can’t help but ignore the rest of the beach in reply, in an echo of her attention. “How?” she asks.
He wants to look away. He wants to do so much more than look away; he wants to go, to bolt, to run, because suddenly he learns that he didn’t actually want to talk about this, not really.
He forces himself to speak despite it.
“They were shot,” he says. “Got lost and walked into a gang ambush meant for someone else entirely.”
“Were they left there?” She studies his face, watches both of his eyes as if her gaze alone can pull everything left unsaid out of him, pull it out and piece it together.
He shakes his head. “One of the younger ones - just a kid, really, Lee, I think his name was - he called an ambulance. Told them where the girls were and waited with them. Ran off when the EMTs got there, though. Fred made it into surgery, but Susan, she....” He looks away. Takes a breath and lets it go.
Those words don’t need to be said to be understood.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and she looks it.
“There were complications,” he continues, “during the operation. The anesthetic didn’t get along with her. Didn’t forgive the doctor that for a long time.” It’s a difficult thing to admit, that. Whether he’s admitting to the grudge or to the forgiveness, he’s not sure. He knows he’s not telling the girl that he went back and shagged the woman six months ago; even by his standards, that had been weird.
“The, the surgeon, you mean,” she says, brow furrowed. At his look, she adds, “Sorry - just trying to keep track.”
“The surgeon,” he agrees. “Doctor Grace Holloway.”
She mouths the name to herself as if trying to solve some sort of a mystery.
“Something the matter?” he asks.
She shakes her head. “No, I just.... Were you there?” she asks, visibly changing trains of thought. “At the hospital.”
He nods. His throat is thick and strange and though there should be words in his mind to describe what happened that night, the inability of his mouth to utter them seems to banish the ability his brain has for thinking them. It’s hardly a night he likes to think about. For all he was stuck in the past before he’d met this girl, he’d never liked to think about any of it.
“I’m sorry,” she says again. There’s something in her that makes the words full rather than hollow, something greater than mere sympathy.
“Have you ever watched someone you love die?” he asks.
“Yeah,” she says, and it only takes the syllable for her voice to roughen. She clears her throat. “My dad, first. He was, he was hit by a car. And then, after, the doctor, he nearly-” She cuts herself off, shakes her head. “And then there’s Jack.” She pauses long enough to let out a breath, to stare off to the side in the confusion of remembered heartbreak. “Think I’ve got a list now. Hadn’t realized that.”
“I’m sorry.” It’s his turn to say it.
She looks up at him and he gathers her in, both of them twisted at the waist for the hug to work. It’s a long moment before she lets out a mumble he just barely catches: “Don’t wanna lose you.”
“Oh Rose,” he says. Kisses the side of her head. “I don’t want to lose me either.”
But instead of surprising a laugh, that nearly provokes a cry. It’s a similar sort of sound and he can feel it in her body. When she pulls back, her face is dry and her eyes clear, but that doesn’t mean a thing. “Think, ah, I think I’ve had enough beach for today,” she tells him.
“Right then,” he replies, watching her as she shoves her wet towel back into the bag. Wiping sand from his feet before he pulls back on his socks, he adds, giving playfulness one last attempt, “Your wish is my command.”
“I’ll be careful what I wish for,” she finishes for him. Smiles, just a little, but her seriousness fails to fade.
“Good,” he says. Leans over and kisses her on her damp hairline before lacing up one boot and the other. “And now that we’ve gotten ourselves skin cancer, what do you think about getting some paella?”
“I think I’ll be hungry by the time we get it,” she answers, sort of offering up the reply.
He grins a bit because this time, he knows he has her: “You can ask the waitress about trade secrets.”
She rolls her eyes, her mouth already smiling. “Oh, shut up.”
He doesn’t, of course, but now she doesn’t seem to mind.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He doesn’t dream about the old man again that night. He doesn’t think he does, at least. Waking up is enough to leave him exhausted for no reason he can name. Not physically, no, just mentally drained. He thinks for just a second that maybe he should talk to someone about his sleep issues, but he hates psychobabble aimed at him from people he likes; he’s hardly about to go out and find a professional to get annoyed at.
He gets up, gets ready for work. Kisses a groggy blond good-bye.
Maybe he should talk to her about these dreams. It’s a thought, maybe even a decent one, but one he entertains only for a moment. There’s a limit to how much a person can confide at once. Any more than that, and then you’re just a lunatic.
Besides, he reasons as he heads down the stairs, what’s to say she doesn’t have nightmares either? Watched her dad die, her captain too, and even almost that doctor of hers. And all fairly recently, by the sounds of it. No, he can be a thoughtless git, but he’s not that much of a thoughtless git.
What they should do now, what they should do is go somewhere. Somewhere better than just a beach. Maybe even a proper event. Something bigger than a local band night at a restaurant and spicy paella. Not that last night hadn’t been good, but he can do better. Besides, after almost two weeks since their last big trip, he’s itching to get back on his bike. He wants far and fast and fantastic.
Where and when, though, he still gets to pick. Not half bad, that.
.-.-.-.-.-.
She tells him at lunch that she’s not going to pop ‘round the garage later. Though he knows it in his head that this is one evening they’re spending apart, he still finds himself waiting outside the garage and irritably checking his watch out of thwarted habit before that knowledge is forced into application.
For a minute or two, he entertains the thought of showing up at her fish n’ chips place just to annoy her. For a minute longer, he debates whether that would be playful or clingy.
Clingy.
Falling back on old habits, he goes to the library instead after his post-work shower. This time, however, instead of returning to too many books he’s already read or correcting Wikipedia, he goes to the computer to look through local events. For an odd moment, he finds a refreshing sort of joy in typing. It’s something simple his hands know how to do. It’s not quite as good as fixing a car or tinkering his way through an inefficient engine until that adjective no longer applies, no, not as good as that, but it’s still good.
Far better than even those is discovering that, starting today and lasting until Sunday - a good, solid, four-day window of opportunity - they could go flying. Ballooning, make that, but it’s still up in the air. The European Balloon Festival is an hour away in Igualada, just that. Flights in the mornings and evenings and, look at that, he can reserve one.
It’s not terribly often that he wanders away from the meandering path of spontaneity, but something about the idea of being back up in the sky with her, without a mountain under them this time, well. He spends a moment imagining the look on her face, the light in her eyes.
He spends more than a moment imagining that.
All right, he’s reserving a flight. He has no doubts that she’s working tomorrow too, so he skips over Friday and books an evening flight for Saturday - which, as it turns out, is right before the night glow. All the balloons tethered to the ground, inflated like giant paper lanterns against the night sky, and orchestrated fireworks shooting up above them to hit the washed out stars. And that followed by what is bound to be one hell of a party.
He realizes he’s grinning so hard his face is hurting a bit, but oh, for this, he completely deserves to grin as much as he likes. Give the man a medal. He’s brilliant, he is.
Brilliant and a bit impatient, actually, but again, that’s the brilliance of it: he doesn’t have to wait. It’s later, yes, but it’s also now, and just like that, he has plans for tonight. Although he’ll be too late to fly tonight, he won’t be too late to watch, to see.
He waves to a librarian on the way out who isn’t Karmen the librarian and the woman, though surprised, smiles back at him. For no good reason, that just boosts his mood even higher. Tonight, people are wonderful, humanity fantastic.
It’s not so much a walk back to his apartment building as it is a brisk jog, heat or no. He darts up three flights of stairs, grabs his helmet and his jacket and, after a quick check through the pockets for his riding gauntlets, he’s loping back down those stairs. At the bottom, he slings his jacket on over a t-shirt that’s already damp with sweat. The heat is all the more incentive to go now, and quickly.
He’s on his bike and cursing commuters in what feels like just a second later. Getting out of the city, getting out of the congested clump of cars is like getting to breathe again. Acceleration cools him down, the hot desire for movement chilled by the wind that movement brings. It’s so brilliant.
He can’t wait to bring her with him.
Approaching the city, he’s all the more certain she’ll love it when he sees the specks in the sky. They’re coming down now, some of them, or just starting to, and he watches them with as much attention as he can spare, watching them grow with proximity. He has the thought that far is small, near is bigger, so inside is nearest and biggest, and he laughs inside his helmet at the nonsense in his brain.
Driving into Igualada, he tries to track down where the balloons were being launched from or where they might land or really anything of the sort. Half an hour later, he has to admit that he’s only riding around for the fun of it.
He parks. Gets himself a bite to eat.
And always, always watches the sky.
.-.-.-.-.-.
She gets back to the flat six minutes after he does. It’s enough time for him to put his stuff away, take a leak, and sprawl out on the couch with a book, his feet toward the front door.
“Hey,” she says.
“How’d it go?” he asks, not looking up from his page, clearly engrossed and paying only token attention to her. There’s a part of him that’s laughing on the inside, that’s fitting such a huge laugh inside of him: for all she knows, he could have done nothing or anything. He left the city, saw people held aloft by nothing more than fire and ingenuity, and here he is, back before her.
There’s something so intrinsically right about being able to do that. He can’t explain how, but there is.
She toes off her trainers, oblivious to his amusement. “You ever have one of those days when you realize you have amazing reflexes?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m really good at catching things,” she says, sounding proud of herself, looking proud of herself when he glances up to see.
In reply, he lobs his book at her, whipping it with a flick of his wrist.
She snatches it out of the air.
“Yes you are,” he agrees, his face straight.
“Yep,” she says, her expression matching his.
That lasts for almost five seconds and then they promptly crack up.
“You threw a book at me!” she accuses, laughing hard, coming over to thwap him with it.
“Only a paperback!” he protests, pulling her down on top of him to better catch her arms. “Your fault anyway. Some claims you can’t help testing.”
“Yeah?” She giggles through the word even harder, one of his hands at her stomach. With the hand not engaged in the epic struggle over control of the paperback, she retaliates in kind.
To say he’s surprised to learn he’s ticklish is a complete understatement.
To say she takes complete advantage is, however, entirely accurate.
After the giggles have subsided - her giggles, not his, he doesn’t giggle, him, not ever - they lie together on the couch, legs tangled and faces close, the pair of them breathing out their mirth more gradually. He brings up a hand and pets through her hair, needing some sort of reply to her smiling eyes. A brush of his fingers against her cheek turns the moment intimate, quietly so, and she turns her face into the touch. Her eyes fall shut in the movement and she lets a slow breath make its way through her, the picture of a woman loved into contentment.
“I missed you,” he says without remotely meaning to, without ever meaning to, and her eyes snap open.
He doesn’t doubt that she can see how surprised he is at the words, how horrified he is at himself. He has a second of panic as he tries to make sure he used the verb he thinks he did. The longer she stares at him, the more uncertain he grows.
Like their last staring contest, it only lasts five seconds or so, but this one still manages to turn itself into an eternity.
She shifts on top of him a little, leaning in, her hands on his shoulders, her forearms on his chest. As she kisses his cheek, her hair falls across his face.
Making an annoyed noise at her, he brushes the blond mess away. When he can see again, she’s back to smiling.
“You smell like fish,” he tells her. He neglects to mention that the fish in question smells delicious.
She laughs a little, batting his shoulder with a palm. “So? You smell like a sweaty bloke and cars.”
Reaching over to drop his book on the coffee table, he rolls his eyes. His other hand strokes up and down her back, a slow, absent motion. “Why yes, Rose, I am manly. You, on the other hand, are a deep-fried mermaid.”
She laughs outright this time. “Yeah, you’re a smooth talker.” She looks like she wants to kiss him but doesn’t, maybe out of spite.
“The captain would’ve been proud,” he agrees. Though, judging by the way she stiffens at that - not too badly, but still noticeably so beneath his hand and atop his body - the captain probably wouldn’t have been proud at this moment.
She recovers quickly, her grin forced wide before it returns to being true. “The captain would’ve tried to shag you,” she contradicts, says it like those two were somehow mutually exclusive.
“Would you’ve been jealous?” he asks right back, a complete bluff. He’s not, well, all right, there was that once, but it was dark, he was a bit drunk, and a kilt approached from behind can look like a skirt under those conditions. Not to mention how “Jamie” is a gender-neutral name. But with present company on top of him, there’s no real point in looking to the past, is there? Not much incentive with a present like this.
Especially when she gives him that considering look and asks, “Would you’ve let me watch?”
He doesn’t say anything, can’t say anything for a moment, but there’s no way that she can’t figure out his answer to that. She flushes a little, impossibly innocent after that question.
“For someone who’s not going to shag me...” he begins. His hand has stopped stroking her back, just until he’s sure.
“Went a bit far, yeah,” she agrees.
“A bit,” he says.
“A little bit.”
“Touch of a little bit.”
“Sorta speck-ish, yeah?” she asks.
He nods up at her. “A tad bit speck-ish.”
“Well, now that we’ve got that settled.”
“Mm.”
Neither of them moves.
The way she doesn’t move is very obvious. Like she sort of wants to get off him and doesn’t want to disturb him either.
“That’ll go away if you let it,” he tells her bluntly.
“And if it doesn’t in four hours, I’m supposed to call somebody?” she asks, it being her turn to surprise a laugh out of him. The joke is weak in words, solid in delivery, and so unexpected.
“No,” he says, fighting down a wicked grin. “Just get off me.”
She grins enough for the two of them. “I think someone’s got a taste for deep-fried mermaid.”
“S’pose someone might,” he agrees.
They laugh, and they kiss, and surprise for Saturday or no, he never quite manages to change the subject.
.-.-.-.-.-.
That was Thursday. That was wonderful.
And now it’s Friday and he’s bored out of his skull.
There’d been a night in between which had mostly involved him rolling every which way, dreaming and waking and not much knowing the difference. It was all equally pointless, equally confining.
Not to mention that waking up properly had brought him right into one of those mornings. Her tendency towards guilt after intimacy has possibly hit a new high today. He thinks maybe she was stewing over it last night. Come tomorrow, it’ll have been two weeks of snogging and only a little over two weeks of it left, and he’s learned how this works. More or less.
He left that morning without so much as a brush of contact. She held herself apart like she’d decided to stop coming closer, but - as predicted - her hand had slipped into his come time for lunch, her smile an easy piece of reciprocation. They’d wandered around the city a bit, looking at this and that, more snacking than properly eating.
Since then, really, he’s had nothing to do. He stays late at work, fixing this and that and experimenting over here for a while. When he finds himself alone in the garage, he realizes that he let one of his only chances for a social evening walk off. He’s not sure what Pedro does outside of the garage, but the man knows motorcycles and that’s a good enough start to a conversation if you set it somewhere with beer and a telly with a match on. They don’t much talk to each other, as a rule of convenience, but companionable silence can be a rare thing and he wouldn’t have minded some more of that tonight. So much for that.
He turns his mind to the thought of tomorrow night, of flight and wonder. He hopes for wonder. Even if she turns out to have enough intimacy issues to match him, that’ll still go well. He really can’t wait, except for how he knows he can. He could go tonight, for instance, but that would only lessen the real experience tomorrow. That, and three days in a row would be excessive, would feel almost like routine when that’s what he’s most trying to avoid.
Spending another evening alone isn’t bad. He’s had years of it. Years where he didn’t mind it in the least. Years of being fine with it, just fine.
But, supposing he’s not fine with it tonight, only supposing that, he could always go out and find a stranger to talk to. Like those drunk blokes on the street last week. Nothing wrong with talking to people. He likes people, generally. Sometimes. He likes them as often as he dislikes them, he thinks.
Still. Supposing, only supposing again, that he wanted to talk to someone who knew him, then he’d have something of a problem. He moves around too much for that, stays in contact with too few people. When he thinks of people he can call, there are no names that come to mind, none at all.
“Just you and me, Bessy,” he says, patting his yellow patient on her bonnet. He grimaces after he says it; it felt like a better name for a car when it was only in his head. “Shouldn’t be naming you, should I?” he asks.
The car, through its complete lack of reply, informs him that he’s being silly and bored and just a bit strange.
He sighs, agreeing. Leans against the wall for a minute, just letting his mind go blank. Making his mind go blank.
He doesn’t want to be alone again.
With more resolve than intent, he closes up shop for the night, putting his tools back in place, scrubbing his hands almost clean. Only once he’s punched out and locked up does he pull out his mobile, look through the excessively small list of contacts. This is what he gets for not transferring numbers over when he gets a new phone, and knowing it’s his own fault only annoys him.
For the second night in a row, he heads over to the library and the amazing power of the internet. He walks in the heat, feeling the world turning. The world is turning and spinning and flying through space, and that’s how he knows to stop along the way for food and, more importantly, water. There are some bouts of stupidity you only have once.
The stop manages to take up a little more time than he’d thought it would. Not a bad thing, that. At the moment, time is something he has too much of, just a bit.
A touch of a bit, he thinks. A tad. A speck of a tad of a touch of a bit too much time.
He smiles a little, feels better enough to take the library steps two at a time. He blames his earlier mood on low blood sugar, the excuse simple and near to hand. Spotting Karmen the librarian on his way in, he gives her a small wave and she waves back, looking slightly confused while she’s at it. He’s come here less of late, so he can’t much fault her for that.
Going directly to the computers, he finds his usual one taken and moves to another, not terribly pleased. Again, he blames the blood sugar - clearly, he hasn’t digested enough.
He starts his search for phone numbers with the last person he connected with, as odd as it’ll probably prove to be. He’s still a bit annoyed that the number in his phone isn’t for Grace but for a Chinese restaurant. Time to fix that.
He googles the yellow pages, clicks to find a person, and putting in a name and a city gets him a phone number. Easy as pi, he thinks, fully indulging himself the mathematical pun. He copies it down into his phone, finding that he’d not just had the last few digits scrambled but completely wrong.
Checking the computer’s clock and taking the time zones into account tells him that at best, she might be about to have a very, very early lunch, something he doubts a surgeon would be at home for. The home phone number isn’t much help there and the nine hour time difference doesn’t make the entire situation terribly convenient.
Just to be sure it’s the right number, though, he gives it a call. The bloke at his regular computer gives him a dirty look as he dials in the library, something he rather enjoys.
The message on the answering machine is a simple one, a woman’s voice telling him what number he’s called and - she adds with something that could be humour or bizarre coincidence - if that’s the number he meant to dial, he should leave a message.
He doesn’t, of course, being in a library, but that was definitely Grace’s voice.
A while longer is spent trying to track people down and if it weren’t for his immediate success with Grace, he might have gotten annoyed from the process. He tries this and that, depending on the country he’d last known the person to be in, but generally finds little that looks promising. He’s well aware that he knows people with unusual names - Fred was only the closest to him of that batch - and he can’t figure out how those names won’t show up when he searches for them.
He’s always had a problem finding people again once he’s left them, but this is worse than usual. Not that there is a “usual” for this. Generally, he doesn’t bother.
Might’ve been a mistake, that.
By the time he gives up, he only has that one phone number to show for his efforts. He’s not too surprised by it, but it still makes him feel lacking.
He goes back to the flat and rather than risk provoking another guilt attack from waiting up for her, he decides to call it quits and go to bed early. Despite his inability to rest the night before, he goes to bed but not to sleep. Searching without being able to find seems to be the order of the day, one he doesn’t much like, and he closes his eyes to today with the prediction that tomorrow will be better in that regard.
Waiting for sleep, sprawled across his bed in his boxers with the sheet pushed to the side, he hears her come in. Even through his closed door, he can make that out. There’s the lock turning and the front door opening; footsteps tread in and the door is shut and locked once more. He hears her pause, hears confusion in the stillness. Footsteps venture towards the bathroom, stop there. Another pause.
The footsteps draw near his door and he relaxes his body as best he can, keeps his breathing even and his eyes closed. He turns his head though, so he could look at the door if he wanted to.
Very slowly, very carefully, the doorknob turns.
He can’t hear her breathing as she opens the door and, gradually, there’s a thin bar of red splitting the black behind his eyelids. He hears her breathe out that held breath. Or maybe she only sighs. He can’t tell.
The door closes quietly and he can hear her get ready to go to sleep, sounds of the bathroom and muffled movements. He opens his eyes, shifts around a little, and she quiets even further. Thoughtful, but not what he’s sure he wants.
Not that there is anything he’s sure that he wants. He has vague ideas. Mostly, they involve her. Still, it’s about time he started planning for life after her. He’ll call Grace tomorrow afternoon, before the ballooning. He’ll start talking to Karmen when he goes to the library and he’ll try to watch a match with Pedro at some point. Not much as plans go, but his plans generally aren’t. What they are is good enough. And if they’re not, well. Something always comes along, doesn’t it? Better or worse, there’s no telling, but there’s always something more.
Whether you’re ready for it or not.
He closes his eyes once again and does his best not to dream.
.-.-.-.-.
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