Fic: In Human Hands (2/?)
Title: In Human Hands
Author: rallalon | Rall
Beta: vyctori
Rating: PG, AU towards the end of Season One; 9!Smith.
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summary: A thought takes him and he wonders when the last time someone touched him was, really thinks about it. He doesn’t know. For some reason, this feels like an explanation for the strangeness, for why it feels like forgotten familiarity being slowly renewed.
He wants it to stop.
Realized I hadn't posted this yet. Oops.
The Tourist
The Girl
She no longer leaves when he gives her a place to go, doesn’t head out until his lunch break is almost at an end. She stays and talks and asks him questions and despite himself, he answers her.
She’s not that stupid, he admits to himself. Not that he’ll ever say it aloud.
There’s so much else he says that it doesn’t much matter. He rattles off facts he’d forgotten he knew, debates about the few current events of the city that she seems to be aware of. On more than one day, he talks more in those two hours than he does in the other twenty-two combined.
“Why’re you always the only one here?” she asks him on their second Thursday together. “The sign says something about ‘Miguel Sanchez’ on it, so it’s not your garage, yeah? Doesn’t anyone else work here?”
“’Course they do,” he scoffs. “Just not during siesta.”
She nods as if that’s the answer she expected. Odd, that. If that’s the case, why ask? “An’ you stay here ‘cause . . . ?”
He shrugs in the way that means the conversation is over.
She ignores the signal. “When’s your lunch break, then?”
“Now,” he says and really, it doesn’t matter.
Her eyebrows go up. “Hope you get paid overtime.”
He shrugs because, honestly, he doesn’t know if he does. Hasn’t asked. Sanchez is happy to let him work, trusts him to not destroy the garage while the other mechanic or two on duty is out. He might not get paid for this and really, he doesn’t care. There’s nothing to do now anyway, nothing he can pretend to be busy with to make her go away.
“So when d’you eat?” she asks as if she’s concerned or maybe just curious.
He wishes he knew why he was so fascinating. “When I’m hungry.”
She looks at him, bites her lip.
“What?”
“You should eat,” she decides for him. “S’not healthy, what you’re doing. I mean, it’s human biology, y’know? Regular meals required.”
“If I wanted someone to nag me, I’d be married,” he snipes at her, and really, that’s a lie. If Fred were alive, he’d be married.
If Fred were alive, he’d be a lot of things.
But she’s not and he’s not and the girl’s still there and watching him and he has nothing to do with his hands. So he raises his ring-less hand to emphasize his point and he puts it back down on his leg because he still doesn’t have much to do with it.
“Okay, fine,” the girl says. “Have fun starving yourself.”
“I’m a grown man,” he reminds her because she seems to need reminding. “I know how to feed myself.”
She tucks her hair behind her ear and leans forward. “Prove it.”
He scoffs, yet inwardly he’s almost impressed at her inventiveness. He’s heard of creative mooching, but that takes the banana. “I’m not taking you out to lunch.”
“’Course you’re not,” she readily agrees. “I’m taking you.”
“What is this?” he asks. “Befriend a sarcastic stranger month?”
“Hermit rehabilitation week, actually,” she replies. “So how about it? You pick, I pay.”
He really doesn’t understand what goes on in that little brain of hers. “Don’t you have anyone else to bother?” he asks her, asks again.
She looks down at her feet for a moment, studies her sandals. She shakes her head, hair shining as it spills over her shoulders. When she meet his gaze, she looks like Susan after a bad day at school, like Susan after the dog died; she looks small and solid and sad and stronger still for her lack of sniffling.
“Nope,” she says, standing. “Just you.”
Then she’s gone, leaving him to feel like the complete heel he is.
.-.-.-.-.-.
The next day when he tells Sanchez that he’s leaving the garage, the man seems unreasonably pleased. He can’t tell if his employer is concerned about him or about how the additional hours would factor into his pay.
He assumes it’s the latter.
Leaning against the wall of the closed garage, he has the feeling that he’s been expertly guilt tripped into this and he’s starting to resent it more than a little until she shows up. He sees her because he’s watching for her, because he’s half certain he’s being stood up and that annoys him.
She walks without the bounce he’s grown to expect from her, walks with her head bent, something small in her hands. Whatever it is, she’s holding it like it’s something precious, cradling it in her hands.
A shiver runs down his spine and he jerks, blames it on a late spring breeze. He should have worn his jacket, he thinks, the day unusually cool enough for his jumper not to be enough.
He sees her sigh to herself, assumes that’s what the rise and fall of her shoulders indicates. It doesn’t mesh, doesn’t fit with the girl he knows. Not that he knows her particularly well, he’ll readily admit. Still, he knows a cry for help when he sees one, when he hears one.
He thinks of Susan and her mother, thinks of phone calls left unmade. Thinks that this girl is someone’s daughter too.
Besides, he’s got nothing better to do and free food is free food.
As she draws near, she looks up, blinks at him and the closed garage door. The smile that lights up her face changes her, puts colour into her cheeks and pulls her to stand up taller. Tucking her something into the pocket of her jeans, she bounds over to him, seems surprised to find him as she does.
Suddenly, the prospect of her toying with him for lunch seems far less likely, only toying with him for company. She’s a child and she’s alone and she’s a damn fine actress when she puts her mind to it.
“You changed your mind,” she says, sounds as if this is a happy if unexpected turn of events.
He doesn’t remember telling her no and only shrugs. “Said I eat when I’m hungry.”
“You did, yeah,” she agrees and nods down the street, her hands in her pockets. “C’mon, then: lead the way.”
They walk and they fall in step and she asks him questions the way she always does and he answers her the way he’s getting used to doing. It’s a break from routine that feels more natural than routine. Makes sense, that. He’s always hated schedules, despised ordering up his time and dividing it just like so. He can’t remember the last time he was spontaneous and that’s a thought that scares him a little.
So he focuses on her instead. And while he’s talking about history and architecture, he’s thinking about the questions she doesn’t ask, about the things she doesn’t seem to be interested in.
He still has no idea why she’s come to him instead of someone who cares, but when he thinks about it, he realizes that he’s not the worst option she could have picked. Any bloke closer to her age would probably be working harder at getting her on her back than propping her up on her own two feet. He has different priorities.
The sooner he works this out, the sooner she’ll leave him be.
They take the metro to his market of choice, this bustling pack of stalls and buyers and produce and language, all packed together into a mass of hungry humanity. Her eyes widen at the sight, widen and perhaps light up. Not that he’s looking for a reaction, just that he’s looking. He has to keep an eye on her in the crowd.
“Don’t wander off!” he tells her perhaps more loudly than is strictly necessary, but she’s getting behind him and people are walking between them.
Acting on impulse, he holds out his hand for her, momentarily stopping the flow of foot traffic and pissing it off at the same time. She reaches for him and when her palm touches his, her fingers twitch like he’s something unexpected.
He yanks her to his side and she laughs and he staggers as she stumbles into him and they both laugh. Tightening his grip on her amid the crowd, he points out the good stalls, explains what’s where and where’s what. She nods at him, attentive eyes following his pointing finger before returning to his face.
“Is there an ATM nearby?” she asks, tugging at his hand as he makes to move from their spot, sheltered by the side of a stall.
He asks her how much she has on her and at her answer, he replies, “That’ll be plenty.”
“But,” she says and stops at that, pointing to a chalkboard displaying prices in dusty yellow handwriting.
“Watch and learn,” he tells her and proceeds to show off.
It’s been ages since he last haggled with incentive. It’s been so long and once he starts, he can’t figure out for the life of him why he stopped doing this. He gets into rapid arguments and often wins, can’t quite bask in the small yet repeated victories with the girl not understanding exactly what he’s saying.
He’s not entirely sure of her Spanish, thinks she knows the usual words like restaurante and probably necesito ir al baño. What he does know is that she’s lost when it comes to Catalan and it makes him inwardly pleased to have taken her to a smaller market where the odds of English being spoken are lower. Still, as he speaks, she starts to grin and more than once, she starts to laugh after he makes a particularly sarcastic comment. She’s reacting to tone and body language more than the words and, learning this, he deliberately searches out those willing to haggle, the stall owners who look like they’d appreciate a good argument, who’d put on a good show.
By the time they sit, plant themselves down on the broad stone structure that serves as a park fence, he’s grinning away. She looks at him like he’s something brilliant, like she’s finally catching onto the fact that he’s an impressive individual. She puts the bag between them and rations out the spoils of his impressiveness.
The bread’s a touch hard but the meat is as fresh as it is spicy and the cheese deserves a thoughtful chew. He assembles the sandwich on his denim-covered thigh and rips it in half without preamble, hands her the smaller half and ends up juggling slightly as she passes him the open bottle of orange juice at the same time. Putting the bottle down between them, the slight chink of glass against stone stands out to him, though he can’t say why.
She pulls her legs up beneath her and sits cross-legged, adjusts as she eats. She takes to this naturally, closes her eyes as she chews and considers after she swallows. Watching her face, he wonders if he shouldn’t have tried to keep the meal tame for her, decides that he’ll hit her with the full experience next time. Whatever else is going on with her, she seems to be able to handle at least this much.
Idly watching people pass them by, he wonders how she’d react to the absurdly spicy paella that place down the street has, wonders and grins.
He feels her gaze on his face, glances at her and raises an eyebrow. “What?”
“Don’t think I’ve seen you smile so much since- Don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile so much,” she amends. “You’re an argument addict, aren’t you?”
“I’d disagree, but I’d only be proving you right,” he replies dryly and she laughs, laughs and nudges his arm with her elbow.
She’s gone back to watching the crowds as she says, “Looks like I’ve trapped you into admitting it.”
“No you haven’t,” he counters promptly and she laughs again, shoves his arm again. He takes the hit and it feels strange, like something once familiar and now lost.
A thought takes him and he wonders when the last time someone touched him was, really thinks about it. He doesn’t know. For some reason, this feels like an explanation for the strangeness, for why it feels like forgotten familiarity being slowly renewed.
He wants it to stop.
They’ve lapsed into silence and she’s gone back to eating and he lets her for a while, decides to. He crunches into the stale bread of his otherwise fine sandwich and thinks the careful selection might not have been for her after all.
Going on from that thought, he tries to remember the last time he had good tea and realizes he’s distracting himself.
“What’re you doing in Barcelona?” he asks her when he finishes eating and she’s a little too quick in the turn of her head, a little too unnerved in the widening of her eyes.
“Why d’you ask?” she counters and doesn’t say it very casually, not just because her mouth is still half full.
He just looks at her. “A girl barely twenty runnin’ around a strange city alone? You have to be doing something besides tormenting innocent mechanics.”
“I’m sorry, did you say ‘innocent’?” she counters and he shakes his head at the joke, stares her down.
“I’m sorry, did you answer my question?” He raises his eyebrows as he asks, sits up tall without looking like a git for overly strict posture. He knows he can loom well.
She shakes her head and stuffs the rest of her sandwich in her mouth.
He waits. Promises himself that once he’s done with this, there’ll be no more social interaction for the rest of the year.
Finally, she stops chewing, swallows. Her hand touches her pocket, rests for a second on the circular lump inside. She mumbles something and he makes out the word “waiting” amid the soft sentence.
She’s someone’s daughter, he reminds himself. He thinks of San Francisco without meaning to, without wanting to, without ever wanting to. She’s someone’s daughter and he’ll be damned - more than he is already - if he’s going to make someone else go through that.
“Waiting for what?” he prompts in his quiet voice, wonders if that was the right thing to do. He used to be good at this, he swears he used to be good at this. Not that he’d ever tried getting a teenager to confide in him, much less a twenty-year-old girl, but Susan at least had always opened up to him. He just can’t remember why.
“My friend,” she says, might say again. “Said we’d meet here.”
She’s run off with someone, then. Might be why she’s said what she has about randy idiots annoying her. “Not the easiest city to find someone in if you don’t speak the language,” he points out.
“He gave me an address,” she explains, sounds defensive. “I know where t’ meet him.”
It’s the defensiveness that’s the tip off. It always is. “Then why’re you bothering me instead of him?”
She bites her lip, looks away. “He’s- Give him a while. ’m just early, that’s all.”
Someone’s played with this girl and they didn’t play gently. “Are you now.”
He gets her attention back immediately, her very angry attention. “Yeah,” she says, throws the word at him. “I am.”
“Over a week early?” The little tourist girl is going to go broke in none too long, he thinks.
She looks at him like the stubborn child she is. “A bit more, yeah. This isn’t the worse place to wait either.”
“What is?” he asks because something in her words stands out to him.
She shrugs. “Rather wait where he’ll be than at home, okay?”
“London?” he questions, because one can’t always be sure.
Again, she shrugs, but he thinks his guess was the correct one, not simply because of her accent.
Which is worse, he wonders. The home, or the bloke who’s pulled her out of it? He needs to know more, isn’t sure of what to ask.
In the end, he takes a swig of the orange juice, swallows pulp along with the flecks of bread crumbs floating in the shared bottle. He offers the dregs of it to her, more actual orange than juice, and she shakes her head. He finishes it off, wonders if he knows enough to start.
Rose Tyler, twenty and a month or so, a girl from London. It’ll take some work to track down her home phone number, but he’s good at computers.
Someone has to call her mum.
She’s made herself his problem, he reminds himself. She’s put that problem into his hands, practically shoved it into his hands and so he can solve it as he sees fit. Doing what she’s doing, reaching out to strangers: that’s a cry for help if he’s ever seen one.
He wishes he hadn’t finished the bottle, wishes he still had something he could reasonably occupy his hands with instead of trying to keep them still. “Your boyfriend,” he says by way of a transition. “What was his name?”
When he glances at her, she’s gaping at him. “He’s- he’s not my boyfriend!” she protests, staring at him as if the thought’s absurd. All the same, there’s more colour in her cheeks than there was before and her cry sounds like it’s been repeated more than a few times.
“Right,” he says lightly, sarcastically. “’Course he’s not.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” she repeats, says it like some sort of swearword. “You-” She bites her sentence off, shifts and turns on the stone barrier.
But she doesn’t leave.
“He’s better than that,” she finishes and that’s when he knows.
He’s seen the end product of more than one abusive relationship in his day and this fits the bill, one of the bills. Whether or not she’s being played now, she’s been played in the past, far enough in the past for her to have moved onto someone she can hopelessly idealize. The bloke’s not her boyfriend, so he’s probably working under some unrealistic title of True Love, or The Bloke Who’ll Make Everything Better If She Believes In Him Long Enough.
“And where is he?” he asks, giving her that little jab, wanting to see if her conviction will waver.
As if just to surprise him, she shrugs and says lightly, vaguely, “He’s on business.”
He feels his eyebrows rise. “Older bloke, then?”
She takes the topic into her hands and spins it with a sudden laugh and sarcasm that nearly matches his. “Yeah, a bit. He’s practically a thousand.”
“Wouldn’t have pegged you for havin’ an age gap fetish,” he mutters into the lip of the bottle, pretending to look in it.
She hits him, but she’s smiling. How she’s turned around so quickly, let his invasive questioning slid so rapidly, he’ll never know. He thinks he’ll never know, and then he does. He understands because somehow, he already knows her smiles.
It’s a game of pretend that she’s not half bad at, for a child. And she already knows that it’s difficult to pressure someone who only smiles back at you, who looks at you like she’s half a heartbeat away from calling you her best mate.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” she says again, says softly, holding her own hand. “And he’s coming back for me.”
Preferably before she breaks dear daddy’s credit card, a small part of him can’t help but snipe. Nearly two weeks in a Barcelona hotel? Whatever home she’s ignoring or running from, it has to be reasonably well off, to support that.
He shrugs. “Your life,” he says like it doesn’t matter and that’s what makes the act drop.
“Yeah,” she snaps, “it is. Mine. So everybody can stop making decisions about it for me.” She says this last part while glaring at him, almost like she knows what he’s been thinking about doing. She says it like he’s already wronged her and in a very big way.
“I wasn’t making decisions,” he tells her dryly, lies. “I was being judgmental.”
“And?” she prompts and turns to better face him and, yes, she’s drawing eyes and attention.
“You’re quite the stupid little thing, aren’t you?” The moment the words leave his mouth and her reaction spreads from her eyes to encompass her entire body, he feels a strange and distant relief that he’s the one holding the heavy glass bottle, not her.
In that instant, she looks very much like she would have brained him as a knee-jerk reaction.
As it is, she flings the empty bag at him, crumpled paper hitting lightly and only serving to annoy them both: him at the gesture, her at the inefficiency of it.
“God, you- you’re such an ape!” She hurls the insult as she stands, jumps to her feet, and it hits harder than paper could ever hope to. He’s watching her hand and it goes to her pocket, clutches at something through the cloth, and he jerks.
“And you’re a child,” he counters matter-of-factly. If they have to have a scene in public, she’s going to be the one who’s the obvious idiot. “Go back to where people actually care about you.”
People are murmuring as they walk by and more than one has stopped to none-too-subtly stare. She doesn’t seem to notice and the intensity of her gaze takes him aback. Brown eyes blazing, she stares him down, glares at him like he’s some bit of filth that’s stuck itself to the bottom of her favourite shoes, like he’s less than that. When she speaks, she speaks slowly, anger held tightly.
“Stupid. Ape.”
She calls him that and if the world were fair, she would have stalked off after, would have stormed away in a fit of late-onset teenaged drama.
That’s not what happens.
She shakes her head at him and it’s only a few steps before the crowd swallows her up, before the sight of her little blond head is lost. He’s left sitting on stone, trash at his side and crumbs on his trousers.
He did that poorly.
.-.-.-.-.-.
It’s Saturday and he has half the day off. The early half, naturally, so he takes his task to la biblioteca.
Someday, he’ll get an internet connection again and he won’t have to run by the library every time he wants to look something up. It’ll happen when he has a new laptop and something to do with it. When he has a flat that’s worth staying in for more than a few months at a time. It’s not impossible, he knows, but the same can be said of winning the lottery.
He takes his seat at the computer terminal and does a quick Google after setting the preference to English. It’ll be faster that way. Rose Tyler, he types. London.
The very first hit reads in large, bold font, capslock and all:
HAVE YOU SEEN ROSE?
Well then, he thinks and clicks on it. What he gets is a poorly made web page and it’s only the heading at the top that stops him from immediately picking up his mobile and calling the police. Rose has been found, the page proclaims. The reward for information has been accordingly withdrawn.
There’s no mention of where the girl was, but somehow, he hasn’t thought for an instant that there would be.
He scrolls down to study the old missing poster, looks at the girl’s pixilated smile. The photo is a match for his girl, the basic description fitting her to the letter for all save age. And that’s where it gets odd.
Rose Tyler goes missing at age nineteen and returns - he scrolls up to check - a year later. Age twenty. A simple look at the dates tells him something simple: she can’t be twenty and a month. Seems closer to twenty-one, actually, maybe more. He looks over the page and finds her birth date.
He frowns, leans back in his chair to consider the screen. Why lie? Just a few months, so why fudge the details? It makes no sense, makes him wonder if she honestly thought changing her age that slightly would prevent someone from tracking her down.
No. No, she’s not that stupid. When she’s not defending that boyfriend of hers, she’s remarkably intelligent. It rankles to admit that, but there it is. No, there’s something else here.
There has to be, because it makes no sense as it is now.
He hits the back button and goes through the other pages, all with very similar information, multiple teenagers clumped together into one condensed lump of missing children. He finds an article about her boyfriend being brought in to be questioned, about the bloke being a murder suspect.
Mickey Smith, he thinks to himself, makes a mental note. She’s waiting for someone “better” than Mickey Smith.
What confuses him is that there’s no article on her return, on her apparently innocent boyfriend’s release from police suspicion. No, it doesn’t confuse him, simply annoys him. There’s no follow-up. There’s never follow-up; he should know that by now.
He goes back to the original link, clicks on it once more to check the date she was found or returned or came back of her own free will. The date makes him frown and a quick copy-paste of the words and letters into the search engine reveals to him its familiarity.
That was the day that Big Ben had its clock cleaned, not to make too obvious a pun. The alien scare. He remembers laughing at it, at stupidity, at the bizarre theories as to why Big Ben was actually broken and how come the military was really called in.
Small wonder there was no real notice of her slipping back in, events like those distracting the world.
The much larger wonder is what she’s doing now, who this friend of hers is. He vaguely entertains the notion of searching out this Mickey Smith but knows from personal experience that the last name isn’t going to be much help when looking online.
After considering his options, he logs off the computer after scribbling down a note, gives Karmen the librarian a small wave that she returns. He’s still considering as he walks out into the daylight, as he heads outside.
For a moment, under all his thoughts, he nearly considers getting some lunch.
The rest of the day is spent at the garage, spent waiting for a glimpse of blond hair or a cheeky smile. No such sight is seen and he heads back to his flat with a decision. He pulls his scrap of paper out of his pocket and, looking at the number, winces for his phone bill.
For the first time - and only vaguely at that - he wonders if the reward’s gone back up. After that, there’s a moment of guilt, of wondering, of thinking of income and thinking of San Francisco. Always call the parents, he thinks.
In the end, he solves the moral dilemma of being paid back for his efforts by reversing the charges.
After all that build-up, all he gets is the answering machine, a woman’s falsely chipper voice telling him that if he’s not a good-looking man, he’d best not leave a message. The recorded voice laughs at its own joke and the familiar beep is heard.
“Hello, Mrs. Tyler?” he asks as if there will somehow be confirmation to his question. He rolls his eyes at himself and switches to his business voice, the one he hasn’t used in years. “This is John Smith from Barcelona. You don’t know me, but I’ve recently met your daughter here. She seems a bit lost and says she’s waiting for a friend of hers. Not to pry or anything, but something seemed off and after I found out about her missing year, I thought I might call.” Damn, but this is awkward.
“She’s safe,” he adds, because he knows the important thing to say here. “Maybe a bit lonely and confused, but safe. Barcelona, Spain,” he repeats and then gives her his number to call him back.
He hangs up then.
.-.-.-.-.-.
His stomach rumbles, protests at him all day for running on empty.
For the first time in years, he feels it.
.-.-.-.-.-.
<-- | -->
Author: rallalon | Rall
Beta: vyctori
Rating: PG, AU towards the end of Season One; 9!Smith.
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summary: A thought takes him and he wonders when the last time someone touched him was, really thinks about it. He doesn’t know. For some reason, this feels like an explanation for the strangeness, for why it feels like forgotten familiarity being slowly renewed.
He wants it to stop.
Realized I hadn't posted this yet. Oops.
The Tourist
The Girl
She no longer leaves when he gives her a place to go, doesn’t head out until his lunch break is almost at an end. She stays and talks and asks him questions and despite himself, he answers her.
She’s not that stupid, he admits to himself. Not that he’ll ever say it aloud.
There’s so much else he says that it doesn’t much matter. He rattles off facts he’d forgotten he knew, debates about the few current events of the city that she seems to be aware of. On more than one day, he talks more in those two hours than he does in the other twenty-two combined.
“Why’re you always the only one here?” she asks him on their second Thursday together. “The sign says something about ‘Miguel Sanchez’ on it, so it’s not your garage, yeah? Doesn’t anyone else work here?”
“’Course they do,” he scoffs. “Just not during siesta.”
She nods as if that’s the answer she expected. Odd, that. If that’s the case, why ask? “An’ you stay here ‘cause . . . ?”
He shrugs in the way that means the conversation is over.
She ignores the signal. “When’s your lunch break, then?”
“Now,” he says and really, it doesn’t matter.
Her eyebrows go up. “Hope you get paid overtime.”
He shrugs because, honestly, he doesn’t know if he does. Hasn’t asked. Sanchez is happy to let him work, trusts him to not destroy the garage while the other mechanic or two on duty is out. He might not get paid for this and really, he doesn’t care. There’s nothing to do now anyway, nothing he can pretend to be busy with to make her go away.
“So when d’you eat?” she asks as if she’s concerned or maybe just curious.
He wishes he knew why he was so fascinating. “When I’m hungry.”
She looks at him, bites her lip.
“What?”
“You should eat,” she decides for him. “S’not healthy, what you’re doing. I mean, it’s human biology, y’know? Regular meals required.”
“If I wanted someone to nag me, I’d be married,” he snipes at her, and really, that’s a lie. If Fred were alive, he’d be married.
If Fred were alive, he’d be a lot of things.
But she’s not and he’s not and the girl’s still there and watching him and he has nothing to do with his hands. So he raises his ring-less hand to emphasize his point and he puts it back down on his leg because he still doesn’t have much to do with it.
“Okay, fine,” the girl says. “Have fun starving yourself.”
“I’m a grown man,” he reminds her because she seems to need reminding. “I know how to feed myself.”
She tucks her hair behind her ear and leans forward. “Prove it.”
He scoffs, yet inwardly he’s almost impressed at her inventiveness. He’s heard of creative mooching, but that takes the banana. “I’m not taking you out to lunch.”
“’Course you’re not,” she readily agrees. “I’m taking you.”
“What is this?” he asks. “Befriend a sarcastic stranger month?”
“Hermit rehabilitation week, actually,” she replies. “So how about it? You pick, I pay.”
He really doesn’t understand what goes on in that little brain of hers. “Don’t you have anyone else to bother?” he asks her, asks again.
She looks down at her feet for a moment, studies her sandals. She shakes her head, hair shining as it spills over her shoulders. When she meet his gaze, she looks like Susan after a bad day at school, like Susan after the dog died; she looks small and solid and sad and stronger still for her lack of sniffling.
“Nope,” she says, standing. “Just you.”
Then she’s gone, leaving him to feel like the complete heel he is.
.-.-.-.-.-.
The next day when he tells Sanchez that he’s leaving the garage, the man seems unreasonably pleased. He can’t tell if his employer is concerned about him or about how the additional hours would factor into his pay.
He assumes it’s the latter.
Leaning against the wall of the closed garage, he has the feeling that he’s been expertly guilt tripped into this and he’s starting to resent it more than a little until she shows up. He sees her because he’s watching for her, because he’s half certain he’s being stood up and that annoys him.
She walks without the bounce he’s grown to expect from her, walks with her head bent, something small in her hands. Whatever it is, she’s holding it like it’s something precious, cradling it in her hands.
A shiver runs down his spine and he jerks, blames it on a late spring breeze. He should have worn his jacket, he thinks, the day unusually cool enough for his jumper not to be enough.
He sees her sigh to herself, assumes that’s what the rise and fall of her shoulders indicates. It doesn’t mesh, doesn’t fit with the girl he knows. Not that he knows her particularly well, he’ll readily admit. Still, he knows a cry for help when he sees one, when he hears one.
He thinks of Susan and her mother, thinks of phone calls left unmade. Thinks that this girl is someone’s daughter too.
Besides, he’s got nothing better to do and free food is free food.
As she draws near, she looks up, blinks at him and the closed garage door. The smile that lights up her face changes her, puts colour into her cheeks and pulls her to stand up taller. Tucking her something into the pocket of her jeans, she bounds over to him, seems surprised to find him as she does.
Suddenly, the prospect of her toying with him for lunch seems far less likely, only toying with him for company. She’s a child and she’s alone and she’s a damn fine actress when she puts her mind to it.
“You changed your mind,” she says, sounds as if this is a happy if unexpected turn of events.
He doesn’t remember telling her no and only shrugs. “Said I eat when I’m hungry.”
“You did, yeah,” she agrees and nods down the street, her hands in her pockets. “C’mon, then: lead the way.”
They walk and they fall in step and she asks him questions the way she always does and he answers her the way he’s getting used to doing. It’s a break from routine that feels more natural than routine. Makes sense, that. He’s always hated schedules, despised ordering up his time and dividing it just like so. He can’t remember the last time he was spontaneous and that’s a thought that scares him a little.
So he focuses on her instead. And while he’s talking about history and architecture, he’s thinking about the questions she doesn’t ask, about the things she doesn’t seem to be interested in.
He still has no idea why she’s come to him instead of someone who cares, but when he thinks about it, he realizes that he’s not the worst option she could have picked. Any bloke closer to her age would probably be working harder at getting her on her back than propping her up on her own two feet. He has different priorities.
The sooner he works this out, the sooner she’ll leave him be.
They take the metro to his market of choice, this bustling pack of stalls and buyers and produce and language, all packed together into a mass of hungry humanity. Her eyes widen at the sight, widen and perhaps light up. Not that he’s looking for a reaction, just that he’s looking. He has to keep an eye on her in the crowd.
“Don’t wander off!” he tells her perhaps more loudly than is strictly necessary, but she’s getting behind him and people are walking between them.
Acting on impulse, he holds out his hand for her, momentarily stopping the flow of foot traffic and pissing it off at the same time. She reaches for him and when her palm touches his, her fingers twitch like he’s something unexpected.
He yanks her to his side and she laughs and he staggers as she stumbles into him and they both laugh. Tightening his grip on her amid the crowd, he points out the good stalls, explains what’s where and where’s what. She nods at him, attentive eyes following his pointing finger before returning to his face.
“Is there an ATM nearby?” she asks, tugging at his hand as he makes to move from their spot, sheltered by the side of a stall.
He asks her how much she has on her and at her answer, he replies, “That’ll be plenty.”
“But,” she says and stops at that, pointing to a chalkboard displaying prices in dusty yellow handwriting.
“Watch and learn,” he tells her and proceeds to show off.
It’s been ages since he last haggled with incentive. It’s been so long and once he starts, he can’t figure out for the life of him why he stopped doing this. He gets into rapid arguments and often wins, can’t quite bask in the small yet repeated victories with the girl not understanding exactly what he’s saying.
He’s not entirely sure of her Spanish, thinks she knows the usual words like restaurante and probably necesito ir al baño. What he does know is that she’s lost when it comes to Catalan and it makes him inwardly pleased to have taken her to a smaller market where the odds of English being spoken are lower. Still, as he speaks, she starts to grin and more than once, she starts to laugh after he makes a particularly sarcastic comment. She’s reacting to tone and body language more than the words and, learning this, he deliberately searches out those willing to haggle, the stall owners who look like they’d appreciate a good argument, who’d put on a good show.
By the time they sit, plant themselves down on the broad stone structure that serves as a park fence, he’s grinning away. She looks at him like he’s something brilliant, like she’s finally catching onto the fact that he’s an impressive individual. She puts the bag between them and rations out the spoils of his impressiveness.
The bread’s a touch hard but the meat is as fresh as it is spicy and the cheese deserves a thoughtful chew. He assembles the sandwich on his denim-covered thigh and rips it in half without preamble, hands her the smaller half and ends up juggling slightly as she passes him the open bottle of orange juice at the same time. Putting the bottle down between them, the slight chink of glass against stone stands out to him, though he can’t say why.
She pulls her legs up beneath her and sits cross-legged, adjusts as she eats. She takes to this naturally, closes her eyes as she chews and considers after she swallows. Watching her face, he wonders if he shouldn’t have tried to keep the meal tame for her, decides that he’ll hit her with the full experience next time. Whatever else is going on with her, she seems to be able to handle at least this much.
Idly watching people pass them by, he wonders how she’d react to the absurdly spicy paella that place down the street has, wonders and grins.
He feels her gaze on his face, glances at her and raises an eyebrow. “What?”
“Don’t think I’ve seen you smile so much since- Don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile so much,” she amends. “You’re an argument addict, aren’t you?”
“I’d disagree, but I’d only be proving you right,” he replies dryly and she laughs, laughs and nudges his arm with her elbow.
She’s gone back to watching the crowds as she says, “Looks like I’ve trapped you into admitting it.”
“No you haven’t,” he counters promptly and she laughs again, shoves his arm again. He takes the hit and it feels strange, like something once familiar and now lost.
A thought takes him and he wonders when the last time someone touched him was, really thinks about it. He doesn’t know. For some reason, this feels like an explanation for the strangeness, for why it feels like forgotten familiarity being slowly renewed.
He wants it to stop.
They’ve lapsed into silence and she’s gone back to eating and he lets her for a while, decides to. He crunches into the stale bread of his otherwise fine sandwich and thinks the careful selection might not have been for her after all.
Going on from that thought, he tries to remember the last time he had good tea and realizes he’s distracting himself.
“What’re you doing in Barcelona?” he asks her when he finishes eating and she’s a little too quick in the turn of her head, a little too unnerved in the widening of her eyes.
“Why d’you ask?” she counters and doesn’t say it very casually, not just because her mouth is still half full.
He just looks at her. “A girl barely twenty runnin’ around a strange city alone? You have to be doing something besides tormenting innocent mechanics.”
“I’m sorry, did you say ‘innocent’?” she counters and he shakes his head at the joke, stares her down.
“I’m sorry, did you answer my question?” He raises his eyebrows as he asks, sits up tall without looking like a git for overly strict posture. He knows he can loom well.
She shakes her head and stuffs the rest of her sandwich in her mouth.
He waits. Promises himself that once he’s done with this, there’ll be no more social interaction for the rest of the year.
Finally, she stops chewing, swallows. Her hand touches her pocket, rests for a second on the circular lump inside. She mumbles something and he makes out the word “waiting” amid the soft sentence.
She’s someone’s daughter, he reminds himself. He thinks of San Francisco without meaning to, without wanting to, without ever wanting to. She’s someone’s daughter and he’ll be damned - more than he is already - if he’s going to make someone else go through that.
“Waiting for what?” he prompts in his quiet voice, wonders if that was the right thing to do. He used to be good at this, he swears he used to be good at this. Not that he’d ever tried getting a teenager to confide in him, much less a twenty-year-old girl, but Susan at least had always opened up to him. He just can’t remember why.
“My friend,” she says, might say again. “Said we’d meet here.”
She’s run off with someone, then. Might be why she’s said what she has about randy idiots annoying her. “Not the easiest city to find someone in if you don’t speak the language,” he points out.
“He gave me an address,” she explains, sounds defensive. “I know where t’ meet him.”
It’s the defensiveness that’s the tip off. It always is. “Then why’re you bothering me instead of him?”
She bites her lip, looks away. “He’s- Give him a while. ’m just early, that’s all.”
Someone’s played with this girl and they didn’t play gently. “Are you now.”
He gets her attention back immediately, her very angry attention. “Yeah,” she says, throws the word at him. “I am.”
“Over a week early?” The little tourist girl is going to go broke in none too long, he thinks.
She looks at him like the stubborn child she is. “A bit more, yeah. This isn’t the worse place to wait either.”
“What is?” he asks because something in her words stands out to him.
She shrugs. “Rather wait where he’ll be than at home, okay?”
“London?” he questions, because one can’t always be sure.
Again, she shrugs, but he thinks his guess was the correct one, not simply because of her accent.
Which is worse, he wonders. The home, or the bloke who’s pulled her out of it? He needs to know more, isn’t sure of what to ask.
In the end, he takes a swig of the orange juice, swallows pulp along with the flecks of bread crumbs floating in the shared bottle. He offers the dregs of it to her, more actual orange than juice, and she shakes her head. He finishes it off, wonders if he knows enough to start.
Rose Tyler, twenty and a month or so, a girl from London. It’ll take some work to track down her home phone number, but he’s good at computers.
Someone has to call her mum.
She’s made herself his problem, he reminds himself. She’s put that problem into his hands, practically shoved it into his hands and so he can solve it as he sees fit. Doing what she’s doing, reaching out to strangers: that’s a cry for help if he’s ever seen one.
He wishes he hadn’t finished the bottle, wishes he still had something he could reasonably occupy his hands with instead of trying to keep them still. “Your boyfriend,” he says by way of a transition. “What was his name?”
When he glances at her, she’s gaping at him. “He’s- he’s not my boyfriend!” she protests, staring at him as if the thought’s absurd. All the same, there’s more colour in her cheeks than there was before and her cry sounds like it’s been repeated more than a few times.
“Right,” he says lightly, sarcastically. “’Course he’s not.”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” she repeats, says it like some sort of swearword. “You-” She bites her sentence off, shifts and turns on the stone barrier.
But she doesn’t leave.
“He’s better than that,” she finishes and that’s when he knows.
He’s seen the end product of more than one abusive relationship in his day and this fits the bill, one of the bills. Whether or not she’s being played now, she’s been played in the past, far enough in the past for her to have moved onto someone she can hopelessly idealize. The bloke’s not her boyfriend, so he’s probably working under some unrealistic title of True Love, or The Bloke Who’ll Make Everything Better If She Believes In Him Long Enough.
“And where is he?” he asks, giving her that little jab, wanting to see if her conviction will waver.
As if just to surprise him, she shrugs and says lightly, vaguely, “He’s on business.”
He feels his eyebrows rise. “Older bloke, then?”
She takes the topic into her hands and spins it with a sudden laugh and sarcasm that nearly matches his. “Yeah, a bit. He’s practically a thousand.”
“Wouldn’t have pegged you for havin’ an age gap fetish,” he mutters into the lip of the bottle, pretending to look in it.
She hits him, but she’s smiling. How she’s turned around so quickly, let his invasive questioning slid so rapidly, he’ll never know. He thinks he’ll never know, and then he does. He understands because somehow, he already knows her smiles.
It’s a game of pretend that she’s not half bad at, for a child. And she already knows that it’s difficult to pressure someone who only smiles back at you, who looks at you like she’s half a heartbeat away from calling you her best mate.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” she says again, says softly, holding her own hand. “And he’s coming back for me.”
Preferably before she breaks dear daddy’s credit card, a small part of him can’t help but snipe. Nearly two weeks in a Barcelona hotel? Whatever home she’s ignoring or running from, it has to be reasonably well off, to support that.
He shrugs. “Your life,” he says like it doesn’t matter and that’s what makes the act drop.
“Yeah,” she snaps, “it is. Mine. So everybody can stop making decisions about it for me.” She says this last part while glaring at him, almost like she knows what he’s been thinking about doing. She says it like he’s already wronged her and in a very big way.
“I wasn’t making decisions,” he tells her dryly, lies. “I was being judgmental.”
“And?” she prompts and turns to better face him and, yes, she’s drawing eyes and attention.
“You’re quite the stupid little thing, aren’t you?” The moment the words leave his mouth and her reaction spreads from her eyes to encompass her entire body, he feels a strange and distant relief that he’s the one holding the heavy glass bottle, not her.
In that instant, she looks very much like she would have brained him as a knee-jerk reaction.
As it is, she flings the empty bag at him, crumpled paper hitting lightly and only serving to annoy them both: him at the gesture, her at the inefficiency of it.
“God, you- you’re such an ape!” She hurls the insult as she stands, jumps to her feet, and it hits harder than paper could ever hope to. He’s watching her hand and it goes to her pocket, clutches at something through the cloth, and he jerks.
“And you’re a child,” he counters matter-of-factly. If they have to have a scene in public, she’s going to be the one who’s the obvious idiot. “Go back to where people actually care about you.”
People are murmuring as they walk by and more than one has stopped to none-too-subtly stare. She doesn’t seem to notice and the intensity of her gaze takes him aback. Brown eyes blazing, she stares him down, glares at him like he’s some bit of filth that’s stuck itself to the bottom of her favourite shoes, like he’s less than that. When she speaks, she speaks slowly, anger held tightly.
“Stupid. Ape.”
She calls him that and if the world were fair, she would have stalked off after, would have stormed away in a fit of late-onset teenaged drama.
That’s not what happens.
She shakes her head at him and it’s only a few steps before the crowd swallows her up, before the sight of her little blond head is lost. He’s left sitting on stone, trash at his side and crumbs on his trousers.
He did that poorly.
.-.-.-.-.-.
It’s Saturday and he has half the day off. The early half, naturally, so he takes his task to la biblioteca.
Someday, he’ll get an internet connection again and he won’t have to run by the library every time he wants to look something up. It’ll happen when he has a new laptop and something to do with it. When he has a flat that’s worth staying in for more than a few months at a time. It’s not impossible, he knows, but the same can be said of winning the lottery.
He takes his seat at the computer terminal and does a quick Google after setting the preference to English. It’ll be faster that way. Rose Tyler, he types. London.
The very first hit reads in large, bold font, capslock and all:
HAVE YOU SEEN ROSE?
Well then, he thinks and clicks on it. What he gets is a poorly made web page and it’s only the heading at the top that stops him from immediately picking up his mobile and calling the police. Rose has been found, the page proclaims. The reward for information has been accordingly withdrawn.
There’s no mention of where the girl was, but somehow, he hasn’t thought for an instant that there would be.
He scrolls down to study the old missing poster, looks at the girl’s pixilated smile. The photo is a match for his girl, the basic description fitting her to the letter for all save age. And that’s where it gets odd.
Rose Tyler goes missing at age nineteen and returns - he scrolls up to check - a year later. Age twenty. A simple look at the dates tells him something simple: she can’t be twenty and a month. Seems closer to twenty-one, actually, maybe more. He looks over the page and finds her birth date.
He frowns, leans back in his chair to consider the screen. Why lie? Just a few months, so why fudge the details? It makes no sense, makes him wonder if she honestly thought changing her age that slightly would prevent someone from tracking her down.
No. No, she’s not that stupid. When she’s not defending that boyfriend of hers, she’s remarkably intelligent. It rankles to admit that, but there it is. No, there’s something else here.
There has to be, because it makes no sense as it is now.
He hits the back button and goes through the other pages, all with very similar information, multiple teenagers clumped together into one condensed lump of missing children. He finds an article about her boyfriend being brought in to be questioned, about the bloke being a murder suspect.
Mickey Smith, he thinks to himself, makes a mental note. She’s waiting for someone “better” than Mickey Smith.
What confuses him is that there’s no article on her return, on her apparently innocent boyfriend’s release from police suspicion. No, it doesn’t confuse him, simply annoys him. There’s no follow-up. There’s never follow-up; he should know that by now.
He goes back to the original link, clicks on it once more to check the date she was found or returned or came back of her own free will. The date makes him frown and a quick copy-paste of the words and letters into the search engine reveals to him its familiarity.
That was the day that Big Ben had its clock cleaned, not to make too obvious a pun. The alien scare. He remembers laughing at it, at stupidity, at the bizarre theories as to why Big Ben was actually broken and how come the military was really called in.
Small wonder there was no real notice of her slipping back in, events like those distracting the world.
The much larger wonder is what she’s doing now, who this friend of hers is. He vaguely entertains the notion of searching out this Mickey Smith but knows from personal experience that the last name isn’t going to be much help when looking online.
After considering his options, he logs off the computer after scribbling down a note, gives Karmen the librarian a small wave that she returns. He’s still considering as he walks out into the daylight, as he heads outside.
For a moment, under all his thoughts, he nearly considers getting some lunch.
The rest of the day is spent at the garage, spent waiting for a glimpse of blond hair or a cheeky smile. No such sight is seen and he heads back to his flat with a decision. He pulls his scrap of paper out of his pocket and, looking at the number, winces for his phone bill.
For the first time - and only vaguely at that - he wonders if the reward’s gone back up. After that, there’s a moment of guilt, of wondering, of thinking of income and thinking of San Francisco. Always call the parents, he thinks.
In the end, he solves the moral dilemma of being paid back for his efforts by reversing the charges.
After all that build-up, all he gets is the answering machine, a woman’s falsely chipper voice telling him that if he’s not a good-looking man, he’d best not leave a message. The recorded voice laughs at its own joke and the familiar beep is heard.
“Hello, Mrs. Tyler?” he asks as if there will somehow be confirmation to his question. He rolls his eyes at himself and switches to his business voice, the one he hasn’t used in years. “This is John Smith from Barcelona. You don’t know me, but I’ve recently met your daughter here. She seems a bit lost and says she’s waiting for a friend of hers. Not to pry or anything, but something seemed off and after I found out about her missing year, I thought I might call.” Damn, but this is awkward.
“She’s safe,” he adds, because he knows the important thing to say here. “Maybe a bit lonely and confused, but safe. Barcelona, Spain,” he repeats and then gives her his number to call him back.
He hangs up then.
.-.-.-.-.-.
His stomach rumbles, protests at him all day for running on empty.
For the first time in years, he feels it.
.-.-.-.-.-.
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