Fic: Destroy All Humans, 1/1
Title: Destroy All Humans
Authors: Kesshin
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Lucy, Harold Saxon
Disclaimer: Not mine. Don't sue.
Summary: Lucy is poised. Lucy is ahead of the game. Lucy is perfectly able to handle herself. Lucy is comfortably secure in these assumptions until a twat who isn't a twat comes along and mucks it all up. His name is Harold. He has an interesting smile.
Author's Notes: Yeah, I know. Everyone and their dog has done a Lucy/Master fic. But I had to, peoples. AH HADZ TO. This fic started out life as a happy-go-lucky drabble. Now it's... not so much. My muse is certifiable, I swear.
Also, I'm getting sappy in my old age.
-
-
“Hey, sexy momma, wanna help me destroy all humans?”
--
-
-
While light-colored, she was not particularly light-hearted, and while vaguely ethereal, failed to evoke the image of a saint. Hence, the name ‘Lucy’ had been a bit of a mistake on the part of her parents.
They wanted a sweet daughter. What they got was one that was dutifully polite.
They wanted a meek little girl. What they got was one that was not so much meek as prone to quiet plotting.
They would have been happy with a decently ambitious offspring, destined, perhaps, to win third place in the local spelling bee.
Lucy didn’t like spelling bees. She liked winning class elections while her opponents had their guards down and then shaking their hands, “Well done,” she would say, allowing her mouth to quirk into the obligatory smile, “Excellent show, and I could not have asked for a worthier opponent. You had my vote.” She watched their faces carefully. A thought ran through their heads, always, ‘But not enough votes to win.’
Sometimes they cried. She preferred it when they did. Such a preference raised feelings of guilt within her heart, but only vaguely. Lucy did many things vaguely.
But always on the surface. Underneath, things were a great deal more intense. Her body and her mind were distinctly separate. She could look one way and act another, never betraying what she didn’t want betrayed. It was a talent that could have made her a fine actress, had she been into that sort of thing.
Lucy wasn’t into that sort of thing.
“So, what are you into?”
She watched his tie with expertly disguised absorption. Her eyes did the staring while her mouth did the answering, “I like opera.”
“Oh, excellent,” his eyes sparkled in a way normally described as ‘merry.’ The tie bobbed up and down as he nodded, barely missing his bowl of soup. It was Christmas-red and baby-eye-blue- the tie, not the soup. The soup was green.
His nodding and rocking motions brought the tie closer to emersion with each passing second. Then, just when it threatened to go under, up it would come at the last moment. The whole affair was hypnotically and amazingly annoying. Much like the man.
“Personally,” he leaned in. His voice had all the zeal of a schoolboy, “And it’s just personally because I, for one,” a schoolboy on the last day of school, “know many people who won’t agree, and you can ask them, I just, I repeat, just” a schoolboy on the last day of school after a shot of speed, “LOVE the opera. Absolutely love it.”
He grinned. It was the kind of grin which some would find attractive. Lucy might have found it attractive too, had it not been attached to a drooling twat.
“So, which is your favorite, Lucy? I like Carmen and that other one, the ‘Figaro’ one. Can’t understand a word, but it’s brilliant.”
Really, when she considered it, his smile clashed with every other feature he had. There was no way that thing belonged on that face.
“Lucy?”
It was too wide, for starters. Made his eyes crinkle in a way that couldn’t be natural.
“Lucy? Hello?”
Once, in secondary school, Lucy lost her focus in the refectory. She didn’t act vague; she was vague. The momentary slip resulted in her acquiring a cheese sandwich in place of a ham one. Shameful. Since then she had taken special care to be vigilant.
But there at that particular moment, sitting across from that grinning man, she lost touch. Her mind and her body merged. All of her feelings came spilling out like ink soaking through blotting paper. She blinked and noticed, not without a sense of irony, that the sandwich on her plate was cheese on rye. Well.
“Sorry,” she mumbled. She was only acting vague now. Hopefully he wouldn’t notice the slip-up. He didn’t seem to.
No, he only nodded understandingly, yammered on about operas, and called for the check.
Then he walked her home.
How Harold Saxon got into her flat was a question that Lucy never got an answer to. Mostly she pinned it on ‘fate’ or ‘serendipity’ or whatever they were calling it these days. While Harold Saxon was actually in her flat, however, she found herself questioning her sanity.
And she was right to.
The reasons for her sensible questioning of sanity were as follows:
1. It was a blind date. A first blind date, set up by friends that she had previously held in high esteem but whose names she was now going to erase from her address book.
2. He was annoying.
3. While she had had gentlemen friends in the past, she hadn’t so much as let them set foot inside her home, though not out of any sense of prudishness. It was a matter of privacy.
4. He was annoying.
5. And finally, and this was the kicker, she had never even considered letting him walk her to the building, much less the foyer. Much less the door, much less inside…
Yet there he was, standing on her Venetian carpet. Eyeing the fading inspirational poster over the door and trying absently to remove his tie.
“Amazing,” his pale fingers struggled with the knot, “Did you make that?”
“Second year.”
He read aloud, ‘Home is where the hearts are.’ The poster featured a cluster of three hearts colored a shade of red unusually dark for a seven year old's palette. The hearts were drawn in the center of a skewered house. It was without a doubt the most sentimental object that Lucy had ever created, and she had been more than a little embarrassed when her mother had framed the ratty old thing as a graduation present.
Harold stared at the poster for a while. Then his tie was off, and he laughed.
Now, the evening had been long enough for Lucy to become familiar with Harold’s laugh. It was soft and irritating and unrefined. More of a lowbrow giggle when you came down to it.
The laugh he laughed just then was different, in the way a dry martini with an olive is different from Charlie Chaplin- in other words, completely.
So different was this new laugh that Lucy whipped her head around to check for burglars or other sorts of intruders. They would have to be particularly sophisticated burglars, she decided. Perhaps the kind that wore Armani and went read Plato on the weekends.
There was only Harold. He was nibbling the end of his tie, remarking on how careless she had made him and how hard it is to find decent dry-cleaning these days.
“I made you careless?” she muttered, dazed.
“Oh, absolutely. Excellent news for you, and perhaps for me. But not so much me,” the grin was gone. Just a smile, “I don’t like it when I’m careless. What Party do you belong to?”
Her answer was a knee-jerk reaction, “Independent,” though in all honesty she had been toying with the Tories.
“Thought so. And now, Miss Quentin, I have a question.”
There had been no one else, just Harold and that laugh. That witty, dark little laugh that had no idea exactly how magnetic it was but was fairly cocky all the same. No burglar at all. Though Harold was an intruder. Lucy wondered whether to throw him out onto the curb or ask him if he’d fancy a cup of tea.
He stepped. Not closer, but further back. Slowly, he set the tie on her entryway table.
The tie was no longer reminiscent of Christmas or the eyes of babies. It was like someone had taken a blood-tipped brush and painted the sky with even strokes. Then, taking the resulting pattern, that someone had hired a different someone from Dolce and Gabana and instructed them to ‘make something tasteful out of it.’
In violation of all logic and several laws of physics, Harold’s step away had in fact brought him closer to Lucy.
“Do you really like opera, Miss Quentin?”
“No.”
She could throw him out.
“Good,” he said.
She could twitter on about the weather. She could ask about that tea and would he mind taking that shirt off too?
Lucy chose the latter option. And as it turned out, to the happiness of all involved, he didn’t mind horribly. Not at all. Harry, as she later came to call him, was in fact amazingly obliging.
He didn’t like opera either.
If you had asked Lucy anytime before that evening whether evil was prone to cuddling, she would have stared at you. Then she would have given you a nice, firm ‘Not as such,’ for a reply.
And she would have been absolutely wrong.
Not that she knew about the plots and schemes just then. She had no idea that Harold Saxon was even slightly evil. He didn’t look it.
“What was that?” he asked.
“I said, ‘You nearly made me twitter. Earlier today.’”
He nodded, looping a decidedly un-evil arm further around her waist, “I do that sometimes.”
Twittering or making others twitter? She wondered.
Lucy squinted at the ceiling of her room. There was that feeling again, the fuzzy yet ultra-sharp feeling she got when her emotions were joined to her body. She was a different Lucy entirely. Which was fitting, she supposed, because the man lying next to her was a different Harold.
First off, he was more naked. The …. offending parts were hidden by the covers, as were hers. Mostly.
Second, there was that fact that even though he was, without a doubt, naked, he didn’t look naked. There was no aura of nakedness about him. He looked exactly how one imagines the Emperor of an affluent country to look after a bawdy night with his wife. Her fault. His hair was messed up, too.
Third, and this was the most important, there was the talking. Where the twat Harold spouted off fountains of idiocy like each word was a revelation, the new Harold did the opposite. He said very sharp things. These sharp things were true revelations, and he just tossed them out there.
It was refreshing.
Some vague sense of etiquette whispered away from the back of Lucy’s mind, something about ‘setting personal boundaries,’ and ‘acquiring phone numbers.’ She was pleasantly surprised when she ignored it and went to sleep.
“What’s that noise?”
The words were out of her mouth before she knew she was speaking. The room, her room, was dark. Harold was standing, staring out the window. He still didn’t look naked.
“You hear it?”
He sounded happy about that.
“Yeah.”
“What’s it sound like?”
Her hand tapped out a rhythm on her lap, where it was softened by the duvet. Ta-ta-ta-tum, ta-ta-ta-tum, ta-ta-ta-tum, and on and on…
“You know, I haven’t even started yet,” he said, frowning a little, “And you can hear it already. That’s so interesting…”
A solitary finger pressed against her head, and she knew. He knew, she knew, they were caught in a swirl of knowing, a swirl of things that were and are and will and could exist.
It burned the back of her eyes.
“Are you going to ask me who I am?”
“I know who you are.”
She really did. There is a sketch in every elementary art book, a sketch of a lady. You look at it, and she’s beautiful. You look again and she’s changed, only she hasn’t. You simply see her differently. The chin is the nose, the ear is the eye. She’s ugly as sin. But maybe it’s backwards, from ugly to beautiful and back again.
He was like that sketch.
“Oh my God,” she said, more of a prayer than a swear.
“Yes, I rather think I am.”
She shook. It was a powerless feeling sitting there without clothes on next to a man who’s seen eternity. No matter that she’d seen it second-hand, no matter that it warped and twisted- Her breath caught.
“You made me crazy.”
“Oh, just a little.”
His hand strayed to play along the spot on her head where scalp faded to brow, running against the tiny hairs there, “You know what I think?”
“Yes.”
“Not in the general term, sweet. I mean right now.”
“No.”
“I think it suits you.”
Her eyes became saucers, blue and wide, echoing an event that took place in another time, on another world. To another person.
His eyes weren’t blue then, but she could see their swirling just the same. It was a knowledge that broke him and made him able to do what he does.
“When you were a boy,” she started. He waited for her to finish.
“When you were a boy,” she said again, “you saw it. What kind of twisted culture does that?”
“Oh, they’re cruel, the Timelords.”
“You’re cruel.”
“I was an excellent student.”
He turned around and left the room. His body retreated through the doorway and into the hallway, pale against the soupy dark. Lucy waited for him to return until the sun came up. Then she went after him.
The kitchen was orange with the sunrise. Harold sat on the table, as un-nakedly naked as ever. He was drinking tea and he offered her a cup.
“What do you think of,” he took a sip, “when you think of me?”
The tea burnt her lips. She didn’t care.
He held his white mug aloft, making arcane patterns with the steam, “How,” he said, “do I make you feel?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes you do.”
Lucy laughed. It was the driest, least humorous laugh she’d ever executed, “You are right, ‘cause yes, I do. You make me happy.”
It was true. There was the amazing Harold right there as evidence, hair mussed and brown eyes shining.
But those same eyes were twisted because of what they’d seen. There was another Harold that was a delicate touch, a pale shape and a knife in the dark that could kill you but didn’t.
“And you scare me,” Lucy said.
“Understandable.”
“And also,” she said, “I think- Ah.”
The sun slashed up into her face. It was unexpected, made her eyes water. Harold’s eyes watered too.
“I’m not really crying,” he muttered, squinting.
“Me neither.”
“Want more tea?”
He walked towards her with the pot but then he set it down instead of pouring her more tea. Her hands had found his cheeks.
“You,” she said, “I mean, what I think… I think you are the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Ah.”
“You make me feel like you feel.”
His hands were on her hands, which were on his cheeks, which were rounded in a smile, “Double ‘ah.’”
They finished their tea in comfortable silence. The sunrise made their bodies glow orange, then yellow as the morning grew.
-
-
Harold sipped at his lukewarm dregs of Earl Grey, “What do you think of people?”
“Overrated.”
“What do you think of killing people?”
She blinked at her mug and didn’t answer for a year or two.
In a year or two’s time, he was still asking her what she thinks and maybe he still cared about her response.
“What do you think of killing people?”
Wonderful Harold and pale Harold. He didn’t remember that he’d asked her before.
Lucy looked out at the clouds and saw creation swirling beneath their surface.
Japan was burning.
“I think you’re the saddest thing.”
“Oh, yes,” he said, “I remember.”
-
__ end
Authors: Kesshin
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Lucy, Harold Saxon
Disclaimer: Not mine. Don't sue.
Summary: Lucy is poised. Lucy is ahead of the game. Lucy is perfectly able to handle herself. Lucy is comfortably secure in these assumptions until a twat who isn't a twat comes along and mucks it all up. His name is Harold. He has an interesting smile.
Author's Notes: Yeah, I know. Everyone and their dog has done a Lucy/Master fic. But I had to, peoples. AH HADZ TO. This fic started out life as a happy-go-lucky drabble. Now it's... not so much. My muse is certifiable, I swear.
Also, I'm getting sappy in my old age.
-
-
“Hey, sexy momma, wanna help me destroy all humans?”
--
-
-
While light-colored, she was not particularly light-hearted, and while vaguely ethereal, failed to evoke the image of a saint. Hence, the name ‘Lucy’ had been a bit of a mistake on the part of her parents.
They wanted a sweet daughter. What they got was one that was dutifully polite.
They wanted a meek little girl. What they got was one that was not so much meek as prone to quiet plotting.
They would have been happy with a decently ambitious offspring, destined, perhaps, to win third place in the local spelling bee.
Lucy didn’t like spelling bees. She liked winning class elections while her opponents had their guards down and then shaking their hands, “Well done,” she would say, allowing her mouth to quirk into the obligatory smile, “Excellent show, and I could not have asked for a worthier opponent. You had my vote.” She watched their faces carefully. A thought ran through their heads, always, ‘But not enough votes to win.’
Sometimes they cried. She preferred it when they did. Such a preference raised feelings of guilt within her heart, but only vaguely. Lucy did many things vaguely.
But always on the surface. Underneath, things were a great deal more intense. Her body and her mind were distinctly separate. She could look one way and act another, never betraying what she didn’t want betrayed. It was a talent that could have made her a fine actress, had she been into that sort of thing.
Lucy wasn’t into that sort of thing.
“So, what are you into?”
She watched his tie with expertly disguised absorption. Her eyes did the staring while her mouth did the answering, “I like opera.”
“Oh, excellent,” his eyes sparkled in a way normally described as ‘merry.’ The tie bobbed up and down as he nodded, barely missing his bowl of soup. It was Christmas-red and baby-eye-blue- the tie, not the soup. The soup was green.
His nodding and rocking motions brought the tie closer to emersion with each passing second. Then, just when it threatened to go under, up it would come at the last moment. The whole affair was hypnotically and amazingly annoying. Much like the man.
“Personally,” he leaned in. His voice had all the zeal of a schoolboy, “And it’s just personally because I, for one,” a schoolboy on the last day of school, “know many people who won’t agree, and you can ask them, I just, I repeat, just” a schoolboy on the last day of school after a shot of speed, “LOVE the opera. Absolutely love it.”
He grinned. It was the kind of grin which some would find attractive. Lucy might have found it attractive too, had it not been attached to a drooling twat.
“So, which is your favorite, Lucy? I like Carmen and that other one, the ‘Figaro’ one. Can’t understand a word, but it’s brilliant.”
Really, when she considered it, his smile clashed with every other feature he had. There was no way that thing belonged on that face.
“Lucy?”
It was too wide, for starters. Made his eyes crinkle in a way that couldn’t be natural.
“Lucy? Hello?”
Once, in secondary school, Lucy lost her focus in the refectory. She didn’t act vague; she was vague. The momentary slip resulted in her acquiring a cheese sandwich in place of a ham one. Shameful. Since then she had taken special care to be vigilant.
But there at that particular moment, sitting across from that grinning man, she lost touch. Her mind and her body merged. All of her feelings came spilling out like ink soaking through blotting paper. She blinked and noticed, not without a sense of irony, that the sandwich on her plate was cheese on rye. Well.
“Sorry,” she mumbled. She was only acting vague now. Hopefully he wouldn’t notice the slip-up. He didn’t seem to.
No, he only nodded understandingly, yammered on about operas, and called for the check.
Then he walked her home.
How Harold Saxon got into her flat was a question that Lucy never got an answer to. Mostly she pinned it on ‘fate’ or ‘serendipity’ or whatever they were calling it these days. While Harold Saxon was actually in her flat, however, she found herself questioning her sanity.
And she was right to.
The reasons for her sensible questioning of sanity were as follows:
1. It was a blind date. A first blind date, set up by friends that she had previously held in high esteem but whose names she was now going to erase from her address book.
2. He was annoying.
3. While she had had gentlemen friends in the past, she hadn’t so much as let them set foot inside her home, though not out of any sense of prudishness. It was a matter of privacy.
4. He was annoying.
5. And finally, and this was the kicker, she had never even considered letting him walk her to the building, much less the foyer. Much less the door, much less inside…
Yet there he was, standing on her Venetian carpet. Eyeing the fading inspirational poster over the door and trying absently to remove his tie.
“Amazing,” his pale fingers struggled with the knot, “Did you make that?”
“Second year.”
He read aloud, ‘Home is where the hearts are.’ The poster featured a cluster of three hearts colored a shade of red unusually dark for a seven year old's palette. The hearts were drawn in the center of a skewered house. It was without a doubt the most sentimental object that Lucy had ever created, and she had been more than a little embarrassed when her mother had framed the ratty old thing as a graduation present.
Harold stared at the poster for a while. Then his tie was off, and he laughed.
Now, the evening had been long enough for Lucy to become familiar with Harold’s laugh. It was soft and irritating and unrefined. More of a lowbrow giggle when you came down to it.
The laugh he laughed just then was different, in the way a dry martini with an olive is different from Charlie Chaplin- in other words, completely.
So different was this new laugh that Lucy whipped her head around to check for burglars or other sorts of intruders. They would have to be particularly sophisticated burglars, she decided. Perhaps the kind that wore Armani and went read Plato on the weekends.
There was only Harold. He was nibbling the end of his tie, remarking on how careless she had made him and how hard it is to find decent dry-cleaning these days.
“I made you careless?” she muttered, dazed.
“Oh, absolutely. Excellent news for you, and perhaps for me. But not so much me,” the grin was gone. Just a smile, “I don’t like it when I’m careless. What Party do you belong to?”
Her answer was a knee-jerk reaction, “Independent,” though in all honesty she had been toying with the Tories.
“Thought so. And now, Miss Quentin, I have a question.”
There had been no one else, just Harold and that laugh. That witty, dark little laugh that had no idea exactly how magnetic it was but was fairly cocky all the same. No burglar at all. Though Harold was an intruder. Lucy wondered whether to throw him out onto the curb or ask him if he’d fancy a cup of tea.
He stepped. Not closer, but further back. Slowly, he set the tie on her entryway table.
The tie was no longer reminiscent of Christmas or the eyes of babies. It was like someone had taken a blood-tipped brush and painted the sky with even strokes. Then, taking the resulting pattern, that someone had hired a different someone from Dolce and Gabana and instructed them to ‘make something tasteful out of it.’
In violation of all logic and several laws of physics, Harold’s step away had in fact brought him closer to Lucy.
“Do you really like opera, Miss Quentin?”
“No.”
She could throw him out.
“Good,” he said.
She could twitter on about the weather. She could ask about that tea and would he mind taking that shirt off too?
Lucy chose the latter option. And as it turned out, to the happiness of all involved, he didn’t mind horribly. Not at all. Harry, as she later came to call him, was in fact amazingly obliging.
He didn’t like opera either.
If you had asked Lucy anytime before that evening whether evil was prone to cuddling, she would have stared at you. Then she would have given you a nice, firm ‘Not as such,’ for a reply.
And she would have been absolutely wrong.
Not that she knew about the plots and schemes just then. She had no idea that Harold Saxon was even slightly evil. He didn’t look it.
“What was that?” he asked.
“I said, ‘You nearly made me twitter. Earlier today.’”
He nodded, looping a decidedly un-evil arm further around her waist, “I do that sometimes.”
Twittering or making others twitter? She wondered.
Lucy squinted at the ceiling of her room. There was that feeling again, the fuzzy yet ultra-sharp feeling she got when her emotions were joined to her body. She was a different Lucy entirely. Which was fitting, she supposed, because the man lying next to her was a different Harold.
First off, he was more naked. The …. offending parts were hidden by the covers, as were hers. Mostly.
Second, there was that fact that even though he was, without a doubt, naked, he didn’t look naked. There was no aura of nakedness about him. He looked exactly how one imagines the Emperor of an affluent country to look after a bawdy night with his wife. Her fault. His hair was messed up, too.
Third, and this was the most important, there was the talking. Where the twat Harold spouted off fountains of idiocy like each word was a revelation, the new Harold did the opposite. He said very sharp things. These sharp things were true revelations, and he just tossed them out there.
It was refreshing.
Some vague sense of etiquette whispered away from the back of Lucy’s mind, something about ‘setting personal boundaries,’ and ‘acquiring phone numbers.’ She was pleasantly surprised when she ignored it and went to sleep.
“What’s that noise?”
The words were out of her mouth before she knew she was speaking. The room, her room, was dark. Harold was standing, staring out the window. He still didn’t look naked.
“You hear it?”
He sounded happy about that.
“Yeah.”
“What’s it sound like?”
Her hand tapped out a rhythm on her lap, where it was softened by the duvet. Ta-ta-ta-tum, ta-ta-ta-tum, ta-ta-ta-tum, and on and on…
“You know, I haven’t even started yet,” he said, frowning a little, “And you can hear it already. That’s so interesting…”
A solitary finger pressed against her head, and she knew. He knew, she knew, they were caught in a swirl of knowing, a swirl of things that were and are and will and could exist.
It burned the back of her eyes.
“Are you going to ask me who I am?”
“I know who you are.”
She really did. There is a sketch in every elementary art book, a sketch of a lady. You look at it, and she’s beautiful. You look again and she’s changed, only she hasn’t. You simply see her differently. The chin is the nose, the ear is the eye. She’s ugly as sin. But maybe it’s backwards, from ugly to beautiful and back again.
He was like that sketch.
“Oh my God,” she said, more of a prayer than a swear.
“Yes, I rather think I am.”
She shook. It was a powerless feeling sitting there without clothes on next to a man who’s seen eternity. No matter that she’d seen it second-hand, no matter that it warped and twisted- Her breath caught.
“You made me crazy.”
“Oh, just a little.”
His hand strayed to play along the spot on her head where scalp faded to brow, running against the tiny hairs there, “You know what I think?”
“Yes.”
“Not in the general term, sweet. I mean right now.”
“No.”
“I think it suits you.”
Her eyes became saucers, blue and wide, echoing an event that took place in another time, on another world. To another person.
His eyes weren’t blue then, but she could see their swirling just the same. It was a knowledge that broke him and made him able to do what he does.
“When you were a boy,” she started. He waited for her to finish.
“When you were a boy,” she said again, “you saw it. What kind of twisted culture does that?”
“Oh, they’re cruel, the Timelords.”
“You’re cruel.”
“I was an excellent student.”
He turned around and left the room. His body retreated through the doorway and into the hallway, pale against the soupy dark. Lucy waited for him to return until the sun came up. Then she went after him.
The kitchen was orange with the sunrise. Harold sat on the table, as un-nakedly naked as ever. He was drinking tea and he offered her a cup.
“What do you think of,” he took a sip, “when you think of me?”
The tea burnt her lips. She didn’t care.
He held his white mug aloft, making arcane patterns with the steam, “How,” he said, “do I make you feel?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes you do.”
Lucy laughed. It was the driest, least humorous laugh she’d ever executed, “You are right, ‘cause yes, I do. You make me happy.”
It was true. There was the amazing Harold right there as evidence, hair mussed and brown eyes shining.
But those same eyes were twisted because of what they’d seen. There was another Harold that was a delicate touch, a pale shape and a knife in the dark that could kill you but didn’t.
“And you scare me,” Lucy said.
“Understandable.”
“And also,” she said, “I think- Ah.”
The sun slashed up into her face. It was unexpected, made her eyes water. Harold’s eyes watered too.
“I’m not really crying,” he muttered, squinting.
“Me neither.”
“Want more tea?”
He walked towards her with the pot but then he set it down instead of pouring her more tea. Her hands had found his cheeks.
“You,” she said, “I mean, what I think… I think you are the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Ah.”
“You make me feel like you feel.”
His hands were on her hands, which were on his cheeks, which were rounded in a smile, “Double ‘ah.’”
They finished their tea in comfortable silence. The sunrise made their bodies glow orange, then yellow as the morning grew.
-
-
Harold sipped at his lukewarm dregs of Earl Grey, “What do you think of people?”
“Overrated.”
“What do you think of killing people?”
She blinked at her mug and didn’t answer for a year or two.
In a year or two’s time, he was still asking her what she thinks and maybe he still cared about her response.
“What do you think of killing people?”
Wonderful Harold and pale Harold. He didn’t remember that he’d asked her before.
Lucy looked out at the clouds and saw creation swirling beneath their surface.
Japan was burning.
“I think you’re the saddest thing.”
“Oh, yes,” he said, “I remember.”
-
__ end