Fic for eponine119: A Feast in Our Street, 2/2
Title: A Feast in Our Street, 2/2 ( first part)
Summary: The beginning of Karl’s life after the island. (Gen; Karl/Alex)
Rating: PG-13 Disclaimer: Lost is all ABC’s; no money/ownership here.
Author’s note: Standalone companion to this series, particularly this outtake. This can be read as an independent one-shot, but it is in keeping with a series that was conceived just after, and assumes canon through, the end of season 3.
Dedication: For
eponine119 , who both provides and organizes massive awesomeness.
Comments, feedback, and criticism are always welcome.
Settling into Los Angeles was easier than Karl expected. He spent a week or so staying with the Kwons and talking with people Jin and Desmond know at the dockyards. He took a job offer from one of the smaller ones, with twenty or so people working in it most of the time. Other places offered him better pay and more stable hours, but it wasn’t like Karl really needed either. Once he got into the routine there, it didn’t take him long to realize how much he’d missed being able to work with his mind and his body at the same time. More than that, to be able to work, hard, and have that satisfaction in its own right, instead of just… Well, he can’t remember the last time he finished something and was just glad to know he’d done it well. He’s conscious of that sometimes: if he screwed up as badly as he could here - not that he plans to; he does a good job - the worst they’d be able to do is fire him. They’d just tell him not to come back, and even if he really needed a job, all that would happen would be that he’d have to move in with someone and hoard money until he found another one.
The group people who run and work the place have turned out to be a decent bunch overall - Karl thought they would be from the outset, which was another reason he took the job. Not that there aren’t a few he wouldn’t be sad to see take other work, but it’s really not a big problem. He’s friendly with the rest of them; they get on well at work, and Karl falls into the routine of joining them for a beer after work from time to time. His apartment building in Venice is a little bit trickier to negotiate. It’s only a few train stops away from work, but sometimes it feels like they’re worlds apart. Karl can’t get used to the idea of living in the same house as fifty other people and being something of a stranger to most of them, as they are to each other. Over time he gets to know a few of them and some of the people who live nearby. There are a lot around his age, mostly people who feel alienated in one way or another from what they call mainstream society. They all think of themselves as being too artistic or offbeat or weird to fit in, somehow. Karl thinks they’re overreacting and then some, but apart from a little melodrama they’re a good bunch too.
It’s a good place for the old crowd to visit. Some of his Portland friends to visit when the plane tickets are cheap and they need a few days out of the rain. His aunt Shelly came down to help him get his apartment set up once he’d found a place. Karl doesn’t think he provided much satisfaction for the urges of an interior decorator, but at least the place is a little homier than his old tent. Hurley brings Vincent over for weekend walks along the canals, and the jugglers and street fairs keep Claire’s kids and the Kwons’ amused while their parents look at the architectural novelties and odd shops. And of everywhere else in L.A. County, Venice Beach is has the best access to Santa Catalina Island, to Danielle and Alex.
Alex seems to like the new place well enough - both the new places, really. She’s made herself quite the assistant to Danielle’s official Research Biologist in Residence at the big nature preserve there. When they got on the rescue boat Karl told Alex she had the whole world ahead of her, but now he can see why she didn’t take much comfort. The world is too big for her. The old island was never hers, and the new one is even less so, but she needs some little place that she belongs to. Karl makes good use of his open invitation to visit her and Danielle in it. They come over to his place too. Danielle stops by for a half day’s visit when she’s got something to do on the mainland and, once she and her mom are at peace with the concept, Alex for a little longer. There’s something in the self-conscious strangeness of the people around Karl that seems to make her comfortable. She gets used to walking or rowing around the preposterous canal system with Karl and his friends for an evening’s entertainment, to taking her morning run with them in the over-landscaped parks or running into acquaintances and strangers at the street market where they like to shop for fruits and vegetables and spices they’ve never seen.
They do quieter things sometimes too, spend evenings or smoggy days inside. Danielle teaches Karl what she can about French cooking, and they both try to teach Alex a little about cooking, period. Karl thinks it’s a lost cause: after eighteen and a half years of pre-packaged meals and fishing and gathering, she seems hopeless with anything else that doesn’t involve peanut butter. Alex and Karl spend hours going over the photo albums their aunts have given them, decades-old images that shouldn’t be new to them and chronicles of events they were supposed to attend. Danielle looked exactly like Alex when she was the same age, so much that Karl can almost see a spectre of Alex in her forties, haggard and life-wearied and looking so much older than her years. He tries to focus on the pictures of Danielle and Robert, whose jawline alone Alex seems to have inherited, and imagine the way things might have gone for them, if only… If only. It’s a train of thought he knows better than to follow very far. After a while he always has to turn away from the images of Danielle holding a baby who isn’t Alex - her nephew Sébastien, maybe? - or wandering around a Lyon street fair with her friends that looks a lot like the ones in Venice and wearing the same student-bohemian clothes or looking better fed than he’s ever seen her but with the swelling in her stomach because of what was a few months away from being Alex. It’s easier to look at the later pictures, somehow: weddings and first communions and holidays in the countryside.
The albums his aunts put together for him have copies a lot of the pictures in his old one: Frederick and Cecelia’s wedding, August 15, 1981. Karl’s first Rose Festival with baby Michael. Shelly’s wedding, June 4, 1988. Less than a month before Karl and his parents disappeared without a trace. He thinks he’s only imagining the sadness in aunt’s face in some of the later pictures: Frederick’s christening. Karla’s first day of school. And then some things nobody ever photographed, documents no one wanted to save: Status reports from an investigation by the U.S. Coast Guard. Mettler et al. v. Port Authority of Astoria, Ore.; co-petition for the dissolution of marriage of Shelly and William Paley. Death certificates. Karl could request the documents if he wanted, but he isn’t ready. Not yet. Some of the pictures of his parents, new pictures to him, are enough. His mother cooking dinner with a missionary who’d befriended her, someone who looks younger than he is. Ringing bells and handing out flowers with a bunch of other stoned-looking white people trying to look like they’re from India. Heavily pregnant and standing with his father and Aunt Linda outside the New Thought Living Enrichment Center. His father sitting on a sofa while his mother helps him pour a glass of water for someone the caption identifies as Ralph Metzner. Karl almost threw up the first time he saw that picture, and looking at it still makes him cold. Their guest had longer hair than Karl remembered, but one glance was all it took to know that the man was Richard Alpert, and since the photograph was taken he hadn’t aged a day.
It’s easier to look over university materials with Alex. They do that a fair amount, because Danielle went through a completely different system and doesn’t really remember even that, and Alex has no idea what she’s getting into. Karl doesn’t know what she’s getting into either, but if nothing else he’s become convinced that talking things over at least makes you feel better. They thumb through listings of classes looking for ones that might interest her - Desert Ecology and French Linguistics to start with; maybe Island Geology in spring? Meanwhile, there are some activity groups that might at least bring a little familiarity into her life: archery, basket-making, camping. Alex vetoes the last one: two years living in a tent was more than enough for her.
It’ll all be weird to her, Karl thinks: she hasn’t met a whole lot of people her own age, ever. The books his aunt and uncle kept around the house would probably say that had an adverse impact on her social development, even if she’s dealt with much worse. At one point he told her Tim and Caroline would probably love it if she persuaded him to go along. “They said it’d help me set a good example to make my kids study,” he added, although the concept didn’t seem to have worked too well in Michael’s case. Without thinking he’d told them that they didn’t know yet if Alex would be able to have kids, if anybody would ever work out the island thing or if she was affected.
That whole morass is five or ten years off, but the need for delay itself isn’t what keeps them vigilant. Alex swallows a pill with a kind of deadly serious ritual at the same moment every evening, and Karl’s well aware of how he writes his own shopping lists: Condoms. Bread. Soap. There’s always an underlying layer of fear involved for both of them, and Karl doubts that will change for a very long time, even if Alex will still display the same bravado she had sometimes on the beach, when she kissed him like it was the only way she could breathe and pressed her whole body hard against his when she knew what it would do to him or what she’d feel, as if to show that she wasn’t afraid.
It wasn’t until they started sleeping together that he realized Alex’s slightness. Karl isn’t as tall as most guys, but the four years he’s got on her always seemed to have gone together with the height difference in his mind. He woke up in the middle of one night with Alex snuggled up against him, and as he took in the familiar features and the way the slender figure that seemed natural to her had finally replaced the bony one she’d gotten at the beach camp it occurred to him that she was actually much shorter than most of her age peers, that her whole frame was narrow and stinted on any excess. He supposes a gun in her hand or just the magnitude of her presence usually obscured it for him, but she really is very small. When he thinks about it, they know surprisingly little about each other, physically speaking. At least neither one of them is averse to learning more.
There have been a few times they’ve just spent an entire afternoon or an evening in bed, but for the most part they actually manage to go out. When they’re on Catalina, they’ll go swimming in a little private cove that’s theoretically off limits, although no one ever checks and the won’t get anything worse than fined if they’re caught, or Alex will show him around the new island, pointing out the same kinds of things that interested her on the old one. On the mainland, they do the most normal things either of them can tolerate: the botanical gardens, art galleries, occasionally a restaurant. Or, once Karl's found a few places that don't blast music or arrange lighting as if they're trying to cause seizures, they'll go dancing. Alex was hesitant at first, vague in her memories of what they'd been taught together ten years ago, but Karl promised it didn't matter and whispered in her ear: Zohtite potancevat? Her face was blank for a second, and then she squeezed her eyes shut and nodded. Da. And a minute later, clumsily: Ya tebya lyublyu.
They can’t escape things. Things. Neither of them wants to put it into words. Alex shows him a letter from Sabine’s parents, thanking her for - what did they call it? - providing closure. Formal tone; shaky handwriting. Alex didn’t know how to respond, and Karl couldn’t help her. He didn’t know why he felt compelled to have erected a stone he’ll never see, silent and unvisited in the Voronezh cemetery: Anna Petrovna Platonov, 20 September 1964 - 3 December 2003. He’s never tried to contact the families of his old foster-siblings, and he hopes any disparate great aunts or second cousins will never try to contact him. If there are old gravestones that list them dying twenty years before they did… There are carved crosses on the island, however long they last. Danielle’s sister whispered to him that they’ve kept hers up in France, that it seems right to do so: Danielle Rousseau 1961-1988, fille et sœur bien aimée.
Tuesdays are for dealing with things as much as he can, at least more than any other day of the week. Karl spends two hours in the afternoon pouring out his mess of nightmares and memories to the psychiatrist who’s seeing a lot of the survivors. Alex spends a chunk of the evening at a support group for women who have left cults. Karl supposes that’s more or less what Ben was running, to the point that it got called the Jacob’s Island cult in the newspaper articles he cut out and re-read a thousand times knowing full well that he shouldn’t. Alex didn’t, ostensibly because newspapers didn’t register with her but really because she’s trying to make a clean break from it, or pretending she is.
There are things she needs to say that she can’t say to him. She’s always going to love Ben, part of her, and Karl couldn’t find pity for the man as he gargled his last. She’s always going to hate him, and she can’t tell her mother because there are some things Danielle shouldn’t have to know Alex was drawn into, that she witnessed. Going over it with a group of beleaguered women who are something like peers is the closest Alex is willing to get to counselling, although it isn’t enough on its own; nothing will ever be enough for her. At the end of the day, she’s with a few people grew up in situations something like hers, and in whatever hesitant way she can manage she’s made some of them her friends.
There are grown women who got taken in too. Alex varies in her response to them: She reminds me of Anna, she said once, and another time, She sounds just like Greta. The part of her that’s still seething almost out of control gets directed sometimes at people who sound a lot like Ben - How could they do that? Why are they still alive? - and sometimes at the other women, in tones Karl doubts Alex uses in the meetings: That stupid bitch, how could she believe - and How could she do that to her children? Karl never does anything but shrug. And, once, after a meeting that ran an hour over and sounding like she was failing to make it a joke, And you thought I got messed up about sex. That was a night Karl didn’t so much as kiss her, just drew the covers tight around them and held her until the sky was light.
Tuesdays are strange days, then, days they remember - less than they need to remember, Karl thinks, which is always more than they want to. It’s all either one of them can handle.
The Wednesdays that follow are as resolutely normal as Alex and Karl can manage. If Alex is catching the morning ferry back to Catalina, she wakes up early and fixes him breakfast, usually orange juice and cold cereal. If she’s not going until mid-day, he sets an early alarm and brings her breakfast in bed: blini with jam, yoghurt with berries and honey. He likes having the excuse to put something a little nicer together. Either way, the ferry dock is a ten-minute walk from where he works, and if he doesn’t walk her there on his way in, he schedules his lunch break so that he can go over and kiss her good-bye. They never say those words to each other. It’s always See you soon.
**Image credit: Laoe at Lost Forums.
Summary: The beginning of Karl’s life after the island. (Gen; Karl/Alex)
Rating: PG-13 Disclaimer: Lost is all ABC’s; no money/ownership here.
Author’s note: Standalone companion to this series, particularly this outtake. This can be read as an independent one-shot, but it is in keeping with a series that was conceived just after, and assumes canon through, the end of season 3.
Dedication: For
eponine119 , who both provides and organizes massive awesomeness.
Comments, feedback, and criticism are always welcome.
Settling into Los Angeles was easier than Karl expected. He spent a week or so staying with the Kwons and talking with people Jin and Desmond know at the dockyards. He took a job offer from one of the smaller ones, with twenty or so people working in it most of the time. Other places offered him better pay and more stable hours, but it wasn’t like Karl really needed either. Once he got into the routine there, it didn’t take him long to realize how much he’d missed being able to work with his mind and his body at the same time. More than that, to be able to work, hard, and have that satisfaction in its own right, instead of just… Well, he can’t remember the last time he finished something and was just glad to know he’d done it well. He’s conscious of that sometimes: if he screwed up as badly as he could here - not that he plans to; he does a good job - the worst they’d be able to do is fire him. They’d just tell him not to come back, and even if he really needed a job, all that would happen would be that he’d have to move in with someone and hoard money until he found another one.
The group people who run and work the place have turned out to be a decent bunch overall - Karl thought they would be from the outset, which was another reason he took the job. Not that there aren’t a few he wouldn’t be sad to see take other work, but it’s really not a big problem. He’s friendly with the rest of them; they get on well at work, and Karl falls into the routine of joining them for a beer after work from time to time. His apartment building in Venice is a little bit trickier to negotiate. It’s only a few train stops away from work, but sometimes it feels like they’re worlds apart. Karl can’t get used to the idea of living in the same house as fifty other people and being something of a stranger to most of them, as they are to each other. Over time he gets to know a few of them and some of the people who live nearby. There are a lot around his age, mostly people who feel alienated in one way or another from what they call mainstream society. They all think of themselves as being too artistic or offbeat or weird to fit in, somehow. Karl thinks they’re overreacting and then some, but apart from a little melodrama they’re a good bunch too.
It’s a good place for the old crowd to visit. Some of his Portland friends to visit when the plane tickets are cheap and they need a few days out of the rain. His aunt Shelly came down to help him get his apartment set up once he’d found a place. Karl doesn’t think he provided much satisfaction for the urges of an interior decorator, but at least the place is a little homier than his old tent. Hurley brings Vincent over for weekend walks along the canals, and the jugglers and street fairs keep Claire’s kids and the Kwons’ amused while their parents look at the architectural novelties and odd shops. And of everywhere else in L.A. County, Venice Beach is has the best access to Santa Catalina Island, to Danielle and Alex.
Alex seems to like the new place well enough - both the new places, really. She’s made herself quite the assistant to Danielle’s official Research Biologist in Residence at the big nature preserve there. When they got on the rescue boat Karl told Alex she had the whole world ahead of her, but now he can see why she didn’t take much comfort. The world is too big for her. The old island was never hers, and the new one is even less so, but she needs some little place that she belongs to. Karl makes good use of his open invitation to visit her and Danielle in it. They come over to his place too. Danielle stops by for a half day’s visit when she’s got something to do on the mainland and, once she and her mom are at peace with the concept, Alex for a little longer. There’s something in the self-conscious strangeness of the people around Karl that seems to make her comfortable. She gets used to walking or rowing around the preposterous canal system with Karl and his friends for an evening’s entertainment, to taking her morning run with them in the over-landscaped parks or running into acquaintances and strangers at the street market where they like to shop for fruits and vegetables and spices they’ve never seen.
They do quieter things sometimes too, spend evenings or smoggy days inside. Danielle teaches Karl what she can about French cooking, and they both try to teach Alex a little about cooking, period. Karl thinks it’s a lost cause: after eighteen and a half years of pre-packaged meals and fishing and gathering, she seems hopeless with anything else that doesn’t involve peanut butter. Alex and Karl spend hours going over the photo albums their aunts have given them, decades-old images that shouldn’t be new to them and chronicles of events they were supposed to attend. Danielle looked exactly like Alex when she was the same age, so much that Karl can almost see a spectre of Alex in her forties, haggard and life-wearied and looking so much older than her years. He tries to focus on the pictures of Danielle and Robert, whose jawline alone Alex seems to have inherited, and imagine the way things might have gone for them, if only… If only. It’s a train of thought he knows better than to follow very far. After a while he always has to turn away from the images of Danielle holding a baby who isn’t Alex - her nephew Sébastien, maybe? - or wandering around a Lyon street fair with her friends that looks a lot like the ones in Venice and wearing the same student-bohemian clothes or looking better fed than he’s ever seen her but with the swelling in her stomach because of what was a few months away from being Alex. It’s easier to look at the later pictures, somehow: weddings and first communions and holidays in the countryside.
The albums his aunts put together for him have copies a lot of the pictures in his old one: Frederick and Cecelia’s wedding, August 15, 1981. Karl’s first Rose Festival with baby Michael. Shelly’s wedding, June 4, 1988. Less than a month before Karl and his parents disappeared without a trace. He thinks he’s only imagining the sadness in aunt’s face in some of the later pictures: Frederick’s christening. Karla’s first day of school. And then some things nobody ever photographed, documents no one wanted to save: Status reports from an investigation by the U.S. Coast Guard. Mettler et al. v. Port Authority of Astoria, Ore.; co-petition for the dissolution of marriage of Shelly and William Paley. Death certificates. Karl could request the documents if he wanted, but he isn’t ready. Not yet. Some of the pictures of his parents, new pictures to him, are enough. His mother cooking dinner with a missionary who’d befriended her, someone who looks younger than he is. Ringing bells and handing out flowers with a bunch of other stoned-looking white people trying to look like they’re from India. Heavily pregnant and standing with his father and Aunt Linda outside the New Thought Living Enrichment Center. His father sitting on a sofa while his mother helps him pour a glass of water for someone the caption identifies as Ralph Metzner. Karl almost threw up the first time he saw that picture, and looking at it still makes him cold. Their guest had longer hair than Karl remembered, but one glance was all it took to know that the man was Richard Alpert, and since the photograph was taken he hadn’t aged a day.
It’s easier to look over university materials with Alex. They do that a fair amount, because Danielle went through a completely different system and doesn’t really remember even that, and Alex has no idea what she’s getting into. Karl doesn’t know what she’s getting into either, but if nothing else he’s become convinced that talking things over at least makes you feel better. They thumb through listings of classes looking for ones that might interest her - Desert Ecology and French Linguistics to start with; maybe Island Geology in spring? Meanwhile, there are some activity groups that might at least bring a little familiarity into her life: archery, basket-making, camping. Alex vetoes the last one: two years living in a tent was more than enough for her.
It’ll all be weird to her, Karl thinks: she hasn’t met a whole lot of people her own age, ever. The books his aunt and uncle kept around the house would probably say that had an adverse impact on her social development, even if she’s dealt with much worse. At one point he told her Tim and Caroline would probably love it if she persuaded him to go along. “They said it’d help me set a good example to make my kids study,” he added, although the concept didn’t seem to have worked too well in Michael’s case. Without thinking he’d told them that they didn’t know yet if Alex would be able to have kids, if anybody would ever work out the island thing or if she was affected.
That whole morass is five or ten years off, but the need for delay itself isn’t what keeps them vigilant. Alex swallows a pill with a kind of deadly serious ritual at the same moment every evening, and Karl’s well aware of how he writes his own shopping lists: Condoms. Bread. Soap. There’s always an underlying layer of fear involved for both of them, and Karl doubts that will change for a very long time, even if Alex will still display the same bravado she had sometimes on the beach, when she kissed him like it was the only way she could breathe and pressed her whole body hard against his when she knew what it would do to him or what she’d feel, as if to show that she wasn’t afraid.
It wasn’t until they started sleeping together that he realized Alex’s slightness. Karl isn’t as tall as most guys, but the four years he’s got on her always seemed to have gone together with the height difference in his mind. He woke up in the middle of one night with Alex snuggled up against him, and as he took in the familiar features and the way the slender figure that seemed natural to her had finally replaced the bony one she’d gotten at the beach camp it occurred to him that she was actually much shorter than most of her age peers, that her whole frame was narrow and stinted on any excess. He supposes a gun in her hand or just the magnitude of her presence usually obscured it for him, but she really is very small. When he thinks about it, they know surprisingly little about each other, physically speaking. At least neither one of them is averse to learning more.
There have been a few times they’ve just spent an entire afternoon or an evening in bed, but for the most part they actually manage to go out. When they’re on Catalina, they’ll go swimming in a little private cove that’s theoretically off limits, although no one ever checks and the won’t get anything worse than fined if they’re caught, or Alex will show him around the new island, pointing out the same kinds of things that interested her on the old one. On the mainland, they do the most normal things either of them can tolerate: the botanical gardens, art galleries, occasionally a restaurant. Or, once Karl's found a few places that don't blast music or arrange lighting as if they're trying to cause seizures, they'll go dancing. Alex was hesitant at first, vague in her memories of what they'd been taught together ten years ago, but Karl promised it didn't matter and whispered in her ear: Zohtite potancevat? Her face was blank for a second, and then she squeezed her eyes shut and nodded. Da. And a minute later, clumsily: Ya tebya lyublyu.
They can’t escape things. Things. Neither of them wants to put it into words. Alex shows him a letter from Sabine’s parents, thanking her for - what did they call it? - providing closure. Formal tone; shaky handwriting. Alex didn’t know how to respond, and Karl couldn’t help her. He didn’t know why he felt compelled to have erected a stone he’ll never see, silent and unvisited in the Voronezh cemetery: Anna Petrovna Platonov, 20 September 1964 - 3 December 2003. He’s never tried to contact the families of his old foster-siblings, and he hopes any disparate great aunts or second cousins will never try to contact him. If there are old gravestones that list them dying twenty years before they did… There are carved crosses on the island, however long they last. Danielle’s sister whispered to him that they’ve kept hers up in France, that it seems right to do so: Danielle Rousseau 1961-1988, fille et sœur bien aimée.
Tuesdays are for dealing with things as much as he can, at least more than any other day of the week. Karl spends two hours in the afternoon pouring out his mess of nightmares and memories to the psychiatrist who’s seeing a lot of the survivors. Alex spends a chunk of the evening at a support group for women who have left cults. Karl supposes that’s more or less what Ben was running, to the point that it got called the Jacob’s Island cult in the newspaper articles he cut out and re-read a thousand times knowing full well that he shouldn’t. Alex didn’t, ostensibly because newspapers didn’t register with her but really because she’s trying to make a clean break from it, or pretending she is.
There are things she needs to say that she can’t say to him. She’s always going to love Ben, part of her, and Karl couldn’t find pity for the man as he gargled his last. She’s always going to hate him, and she can’t tell her mother because there are some things Danielle shouldn’t have to know Alex was drawn into, that she witnessed. Going over it with a group of beleaguered women who are something like peers is the closest Alex is willing to get to counselling, although it isn’t enough on its own; nothing will ever be enough for her. At the end of the day, she’s with a few people grew up in situations something like hers, and in whatever hesitant way she can manage she’s made some of them her friends.
There are grown women who got taken in too. Alex varies in her response to them: She reminds me of Anna, she said once, and another time, She sounds just like Greta. The part of her that’s still seething almost out of control gets directed sometimes at people who sound a lot like Ben - How could they do that? Why are they still alive? - and sometimes at the other women, in tones Karl doubts Alex uses in the meetings: That stupid bitch, how could she believe - and How could she do that to her children? Karl never does anything but shrug. And, once, after a meeting that ran an hour over and sounding like she was failing to make it a joke, And you thought I got messed up about sex. That was a night Karl didn’t so much as kiss her, just drew the covers tight around them and held her until the sky was light.
Tuesdays are strange days, then, days they remember - less than they need to remember, Karl thinks, which is always more than they want to. It’s all either one of them can handle.
The Wednesdays that follow are as resolutely normal as Alex and Karl can manage. If Alex is catching the morning ferry back to Catalina, she wakes up early and fixes him breakfast, usually orange juice and cold cereal. If she’s not going until mid-day, he sets an early alarm and brings her breakfast in bed: blini with jam, yoghurt with berries and honey. He likes having the excuse to put something a little nicer together. Either way, the ferry dock is a ten-minute walk from where he works, and if he doesn’t walk her there on his way in, he schedules his lunch break so that he can go over and kiss her good-bye. They never say those words to each other. It’s always See you soon.
**Image credit: Laoe at Lost Forums.