Fic: In Human Hands (6/?)
Title: In Human Hands
Author: rallalon | Rall
Beta: vyctori
Rating: PG13, AU towards the end of Season One; 9!Smith.
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summary: “Is it you?” she asks, not looking at him as he climbs onto the bed behind her.
He walks forward on his knees, boots pulling at the duvet with each movement towards her. “Yes,” he says, cups her shoulder with his hand.
A/N: PLEASE READ THIS BECAUSE OTHERWISE, YOU MAY MAKE ME VERY, VERY SAD. VERY! Okay, capslock off. As an American who has just one episode left and who is striving very, very, very hard to remain as spoiler-free as possible, I will ask you to kindly not use any spoiler-related icons should you choose to comment on this fic. I would like to be able to read your wonderful feedback with confidence and so I will ask you once again: please do not use spoiler-related icons to comment.
The Tourist
The Girl
The Runaway
The Puzzle
The Passenger
The Victim
“Run!” he yells, pulling at her hand, shaking and stumbling and fleeing from what he cannot face. She cries out in pain agony grief, runs with him, stumbling through tears.
“We have to go back!” she yells as the world burns, as the red sky sets fire. Gunshots sound behind a San Francisco sunset, behind a sky scraped with structures of steel and glass and an infinity no longer infinite. “We can’t leave him!”
“Too late,” he tells her. “It’s too late, I’m sorry.”
“That didn’t happen,” she begs him, clutching to the only hand she has left to hold. “Tell me that didn’t happen. This isn’t happening. You can make it not happen.”
“Not humanly possible,” he says and she strikes him with her gaze, rage and fury and pain etched across features too soft to hold such a mark. “It’s not,” he says and shoves her inside and the second he steps out, the second he leaves, they’ll be there, the line of boys with their weaponry, firing into his jumper with New Years firecrackers.
“Doesn’t matter! That’s never mattered!” she protests and he pushes protest aside. “You can still save him! You can, he’s still-”
There’s a gun in his hand.
He recoils, shaking himself awake. His stomach churns and he comes close to retching, has to sit up and has to lie back down, too dizzy to move. The world is spinning, turning, hurtling through space and his stomach is staying in place and the inertia is going to make him vomit.
He reaches for a hand that isn’t there, his knuckles brushing against the wall, hitting that barrier in the dark. His eyes search for a clock, the one he’s stuffed into a drawer to keep from staring at it, from watching it through the night. Annoyed at himself, he fumbles in the dark for his watch, squints at it in too little light.
After that, it finally occurs to him that he owns a mobile.
He blinks away the light, peers at the glowing digits. It’s nine-fourteen in San Francisco, he thinks. Only the beginning of the night.
That’s not too late to call.
He scrolls through his contacts, all five of them, stops at the single entry for G. The cursor blinks over her name until the screen goes dark.
He lies back and tries to imagine what he might say, what he thinks the call might actually accomplish. It’s hardly as if he can simply dial and say “I miss you.” He doesn’t, though, doesn’t miss her or even think about her in his saner moments.
Never shag a woman who’s killed you - it’s a piece of advice to himself that he’ll try to remember in the future.
She’s probably got another boyfriend by now. Some man better than that Ryan or Brian or whoever it was whose shoes he’d stolen.
Rebounding, she’d told him. Both of them on the rebound and only there to catch each other. Catch and release, like fishermen without the stomach to finish the job and kill what they’ve been torturing.
He can never decide, really, whether or not she killed him, whether or not she landed the finishing blow or helped him to climb from his grave. Maybe she did both, he’d like to say, but that seems like cheating, seems too unclear. It’s unclear and shades of grey and just once, just once, he’d love to see black and white again, just for the moment it takes to know that true colour still exists.
He’s a moody old bastard at night, he decides, dropping his mobile back on the nightstand. Enough of that. It’s giving him a headache.
A sudden thought strikes him, pulls him fully into consciousness as he grabs at his mobile again, flips it open to check the date. It’s June. Thursday the first of June. Halfway to Sunday, he thinks. Almost there.
As the surge of endorphins fades, he mulls it over, thinking. It’s a month, today. He’s been here a month in this flat, this city, and it feels like forever. Sanchez is already trying to keep him on for longer than the three months they agreed on, that first day.
And, let’s see, if he met the girl on, what, the tenth and that was a Wednesday, then...
Three weeks yesterday.
She’s been with him for three weeks. Been here for three weeks, he means. Three weeks waiting in a strange city for her unnamed friend.
He groans at his own stupidity. He’d spent days prying at her with questions and in the end, an early morning glance at his mobile answers the question: it’s been a while for a kid to wait. She’s been left, or feels like she has been.
He’ll do something nice today, he decides as he rolls over, ready to throw himself back into unconsciousness. He’ll do something nice and ask her about this mum that she seems to be close to, try to remind her that she’s got at least one person who cares. He’ll do that.
Provided he remembers when he wakes up.
.-.-.-.-.-.
“...yeah? And then me an’ my mate Shireen, we went right on up to him - she kept giggling the whole time, it was awful - you could hear her comin’ from a mile off. Anyway, we went right up to him, all ready to tell him off, and then.... Hold on. Are you asleep?”
He blinks his eyes open, raising his hand up to block the sunlight where it shines through the leaves into their shade. “You’re a bit boring,” he tells her and she grins at him, her smile dappled with sunlight. His brain is working more slowly than usual and he has the strangest urge to reach out and brush the shadow from her lips with his thumb, to feel the shade on her skin.
“You’re not exactly stimulating, yourself,” she replies, poking at his side.
“Got good taste in parks, though,” he points out, catching her prodding fingers, holding her hand.
She laughs a little, her obligatory chuckle at his obligatory arrogance. “Yeah, guess you do.” Her hand flexes in his, fingers straightening out before returning to grip loosely. Languid, relaxed.
The leaves above them shift in the slight breeze, humid air moving in a way not yet sluggish but soon to be. The air itself seems lethargic and heavy. Siesta, he thinks. Food and a nap and they’ve already eaten.
“You always know something t’ do,” she muses a moment later and he’ll ignore the way her thumb moves under his, moves against the side of his index finger, stroking up and down and slow and sliding. “What d’you do, y’know, normally?”
He shrugs a little, the movement pushing his shoulders against grass, the blades tickling his skin through his t-shirt. “Read, ride, tinker,” he recites. “Not much, really.”
She releases his hand, needing that arm to prop herself up on. Her hand cups her jaw as she shifts onto her side, one long leg resting atop the other.
He wiggles his fingers in an attempt to shake his hand out, to make it feel normal again, but she sees it as an invitation, reaches across her body to take his hand, starts to. Stops to tuck her hair behind her ear, golden strands shining as she tosses them over her shoulder. Her fingers twine with his as she looks down at him, looks down just that little amount because she’s not propped up that high after all.
“You’d started working here before I showed up,” she reminded him. “What’d you do then?”
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
He’d been miserable.
The realization hits him like a shaft of light through a layer of clouds. It’s been shining through, in bits, in moments, in thoughts and wonderings, but he’s never acknowledged it, never until today.
“Oh, this and that,” he says, looking up through the leaves instead of her. The light hurts his eyes and so he closes them. “Nothing too exciting.”
“’kay,” she says, mumbles gently.
He can feel her gaze tracing his face, but when he opens his eyes, she’s looking elsewhere, studying his arm. She doesn’t notice his noticing, acts as if his permission is an assumed thing, assumed or perhaps unnecessary. Her loose grip on his hand pulls it up until his arm is bent at the elbow, until she can peer at the blue veins at the bend of his wrist.
They drift for a time, or he does. There’s no thinking, no thought, only a sustained silence of heavy air and light touches and he wouldn’t mind falling asleep, right here, with her. He wouldn’t mind it, wouldn’t object to mutual unconsciousness, to her shoulders set against his chest and a warm hand holding to his. He wouldn’t complain at the feel of her hair tickling his cheek.
That hair spills over her shoulder and his neglected hand reaches across, tucks it back behind her ear, strokes the strands back into place as she strokes his forearm, fingers dipping down, her heat dripping down, fingers dripping down his forearm before returning to his hand, to his palm, to touch and hold and separate and begin again. He tucks her hair behind her ear and she’s still touching his arm.
Their eyes meet and neither dares to breathe.
Slowly, with something close to fear or reverence or the beautiful insanity of blind trust, he lowers his hand from her face, doesn’t brush the shifting shadows from her lips. The leaves whisper above their heads and far away there are children that yell and adults to call after them; far away, there is traffic and the noise of motion, of footsteps coming and going and returning and leaving. It is very far away.
The leaves whisper with heavy breath and he stays silenced by light touches. She breathes in, pulls the thick air into herself and her chest moves and he’s lying there in the grass, more passive than he can understand. He should pull away or pull her forward or move or act or speak. He should, but her eyes are dark in the shade.
A chill sweeps down his arm in the wake of her fingers, in the sudden lack of human heat from her human hands. She blinks as if coming back into herself, blinks as if leaving herself, and her hand goes to her hip, touches a round bulge through her pocket. It’s round and smallish and he sees the outline of it often enough, sees it almost every day, an outline of a shape in her jeans by her hip.
Her palm covers it, covers the area where hip and thigh and other places combine. Her palm covers it and she bites her lip and he can’t breathe. It’s just a tin, he tells himself. One of those little tins of mints, that’s what it must be, so why is she reaching for it? What’s she want a mint for?
“’S hot,” she says, sounding surprised, speaking to herself, not to him, speaking to herself instead of him and the sound runs through him anyway. Her hand presses on the shape and his hearts pound and his hands sweat and his mouth dries into dust. “Shouldn’t be doing that.”
He sits up, startling her. She jerks a little, jerks back and nearly falls back and sprawls on the grass beside him and he can see it, it hasn’t happened but he can still see it, can still see how it would happen if it did. Her hair is a halo, a silky nimbus of loose, dyed strands spread on soft grass and her shocked smile soon turns sultry and this is not prediction this is fantasy.
He’s on his feet because he can’t stand not to be, because he can’t sit still without the ability to run, to flee, without the option of it. This isn’t me, he wants to say. This is someone else, he wants her to know: this is someone else, someone I’ll protect you from. He won’t touch her.
No one will touch her.
Not ever.
Not his Rose.
His hands shoved into his pockets, he breathes out before looking down at her, looking down at the girl looking up him and looking so hurt. “C’mon, then. No use lazing around all day.” His voice doesn’t betray him, never does. He can trust his body, can always trust his body.
It’s his mind he can’t control.
.-.-.-.-.-.-.
Her hair is damp from her shower, dripping into her pillow as she lays there, the circle of metal in her hand. Fingertips trace the intricacies and the hair of his forearms moves in the memory of it, in the wake of her motion, her every motion.
“Is it you?” she asks, not looking at him as he climbs onto the bed behind her.
He walks forward on his knees, boots pulling at the duvet with each movement towards her. “Yes,” he says, cups her shoulder with his hand.
She sits up and his hand slips, slides down to her waist, covers her stomach. Both his hands cover her stomach. “It doesn’t seem fair,” she says, sounding resigned, and he can feel her breath beneath his palms, feel her diaphragm. “I like him.”
Jealousy pricks him and his arms tighten. She relaxes into him without leaning back, accepts the sentiment if not the support. “Who’s he?”he asks, demands.
“He’s,” she says, says it as a complete thought. This calms him.
“He is,” he agrees, watching over her shoulder as she holds the watch close to her face, as her breath warms the surface and stirs the hairs on his arms and chest.
She kisses the cool metal and he sighs into her mouth.
.-.-.-.-.-.
The nights grow warmer, his showers colder.
There is no such thing as a peaceful sleep, not for him.
.-.-.-.-.-.
It feels like forever in that timeless way summer has, even when it’s not fully summer yet. It’s an early summer, then, but for him, it was a long time coming.
Tarragona was a week ago, now, a week ago and now it’s Sunday again.
They still haven’t talked about it, Tarragona, but not for lack of trying. He gets the feeling she’s as unaccustomed to talking as he is. Maybe they’ll address it today, maybe. They might do, if she doesn’t start avoiding him completely, doesn’t keep avoiding him the way she’s been doing all week. Things are back to the way they were when this all started: she comes to him, they eat and then her night belongs to someone other than him. If he pushes her any more, she might take off for good.
Probably not, though, he assures himself as he bounds down three flights of stairs to the ground level. He has two helmets, one jacket and half a plan, but that’ll work itself out in the end. An improviser, that’s him.
He steps onto the next-to-last landing and nearly gets trampled.
Fumbling the helmets, catching them both, he yells out a loud “Oi!” of indignation before taking in those eyes and the startled look within them. Unbalanced, she staggers back and he reaches out, holding her sides with his forearms, the helmets behind her back. “Jeopardy-friendly, you are,” he tells her and she grins back at him or he grins back at her. “D’you always take the stairs like this, running like a lunatic?”
“Not always,” she laughs, hands on his lapels, fingers gripping the leather even after she no longer needs the support. His knee bumps her thigh as he shifts and she glances down distractedly. Her knee bumps him back.
He stops it before it becomes a game, before they start heading back up the stairs instead of down them. “What’re you doing here?” he asks, releasing her from the circle of his arms, finding it difficult to hold the helmets out like that for so long.
“Wanted t’ see you,” she says and she shrugs and she’s shy.
He hands her a helmet and the broad smile across his face can’t be restrained.
She blushes, hugs the helmet to her chest. “See? Knew you missed me too.”
He rolls his eyes at that, shouldering past her to go down the stairs. “Unlike somebody I could talk about, I’m employed and have more things to do with my time.”
She catches up to him, grabs at his hand. “Not today, you don’t.”
“No,” he says, smiling fondly at her as their fingers twine together. “Not today.”
There’s an extra bound in her step and they rumble down the stairs. He holds the door open with some maneuvering, holds the door with his foot and his helmet in one hand and guides her out with his other hand at the small of her back. Her shirt clings there, wet with humidity and sweat.
She takes his hand despite the heat and their skin sticks together, their palms fusing together at the contact. Not once does she ask or question their destination; not once does she falter in her footsteps beside him. Doesn’t she ever learn? Won’t she?
It’s only him she does this with, he wants to say. He wants to know. He wants her to tell him. It’s only him she runs off with, only him whose hand she takes and whose bike she rides and whose flat she visits. Only him.
If it’s only him, he doesn’t have to worry about protecting her. If it’s only him, he knows exactly how much she can get hurt. And so long as it’s only him, he can keep her from pain.
“What?” she asks and he knows he’s been staring.
He dreams of her crying. Of her reaching for him and missing him and wanting him. He dreams of it every single night. Of course he stares.
He plays it off as concern. “You all right?” he asks right back. “Tired?”
She shakes her head, gathering the strands of hair stuck to her face and trying to tuck them behind her ear. His palms itch and his fingers beg to move, but a man can control his impulses.
“All right,” he says, shrugging. He mounts the bike, pulling his helmet on in the same motion. She fumbles with hers for a moment and he pretends she’s hesitant, pretends she’s thinking about consequences when he knows she trusts him too much to wonder.
But, no, he doesn’t know that. Maybe she is thinking and maybe she’s not trusting and he doesn’t even know which one he wants for her anymore.
She maneuvers onto the bike behind him, him with his feet on the pavement and her with her hands on his shoulders, with her hands on his sides, with her arms around his waist. It’s far too hot and his jumper clings beneath his jacket and she clings as well, hot and dripping and he shivers. The R75 rumbles between their legs, the vibration shaking him into her, her against him.
He’s going to have one hell of a headache soon, can feel it coming on already, but that’s not going to make him change whatever plans he has today. He’s not sure what his plans are, only that he has some, only that they involve this.
Her hands pull at his jumper beneath leather, fist for a grip, for something to hold, and he takes it as an easy cue. The old R75, more battered than blue now, carries them out into the city traffic.
And then it carries them just a bit farther.
.-.-.-.-.-.
The second that first raindrop hits the visor of his helmet, he speeds up.
By the time they rumble to a stop beneath the overpass, he can feel thunder rolling in the distance. She doesn’t question their stopping, climbs off the bike as easily as she got on. The only thing is asks as she pulls off her helmet is “How wet are we going t’ get?”
The bike is parked on crunchy grass and dry dirt off the side of the highway and he looks up at the overpass above them. “Not very.”
“’kay.” She climbs up the hill towards their impromptu ceiling, moves up at a semi-crouch, her hands touching the blocks of rock for balance.
His glance to his bike is a natural one, quick and automatic, checking that it’s out of harm’s way and secure. When he looks back at her, her rear is parked on the rock instead of waving in the air. She pats the stone beside her and his feet move.
Removing his jacket, he bids her to stand, folds the jacket and places it down upon the rock. Her smile is as nervous as the gesture is unsure.
He sits and she burrows into his side, her helmet to the side, his on his lap. She’s warm under his arm, almost uncomfortably so. Or maybe that’s his jumper, damp from sweat and humidity and the failing rain. Why he’s wearing wool in June, he’ll never know. Habit, he’ll say. A habit he’s going to need to break.
Resigning himself to being wet for a while longer, he glances at her face, checks to make sure she’s all right. She gives him a smile, leans into him. They watch the cars drive by, sitting beneath an overpass in Spain, listening to a light rain become a downpour. The moment feels soft and surreal, so very surreal despite how reality clings to their skin, sticky and damp.
It doesn’t feel like him, like he’s the one who’s doing this, sitting here. It’s a feeling he wants to protest, wants to change. He is doing this, sitting here.
And so it nags at him, and nags at him, and without wanting to, he realizes why it does.
He drops his arm from her shoulders as the rain pours down. His lips quirk with irony instead of amusement. That’s what symbolism will get a person, usually. So much irony.
The air will spill itself out, but she won’t say a word.
“About last week,” he says. Maybe it’s not fair to her, doing this with her captive with him, but it’s the best hope he has at getting to the bottom of this. She can’t walk away from him, not here.
She shifts away from him even as her hand moves, hesitates in hot, wet air, reaching for his grip to answer hers. “Yeah?”
He turns. Looks at her, looks her in the eyes. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
Cars pass and rain pounds.
She looks away.
His helmet scrapes against the rock they sit on as he removes it from his lap. It’s a light scrape, a light noise, barely heard beneath the rain. He can hear a helmet but he can’t hear her.
Her fingers are so small, her palm soft, her wrist slight. She’s delicate and he holds her in the only way he dares, palm to palm, fingers entwined.
“Rose,” he says.
She studies his face in the shadow, shivers with the damp. She wants to pull away; he can see it. The way she wants to pull back, the way she won’t. He sees without understanding. He wants to understand, far more than he should.
“Tell me.”
White teeth press into her bottom lip; her head turns and golden hair shields her downturned face from his searching eyes. Her captured hand squeezes, the one still free touching her pocket, that compulsive double-check she has.
He shudders inside, shakes. He thinks without wanting to, without meaning to. He thinks he might not want to know.
“It sort of...” She looks at him from the corner of her eyes, tucks wet strands of hair behind the pale shell of her ear. It’s a reach across her body to do this, using the opposite hand awkwardly because he’s holding the other one. He’s holding and she’s not letting go. “It built up, y’know?”
“What did?” he asks, waits for her to bite her lip and look away again. He waits for that exact turn to her lips and dimness in her usually bright eyes. He waits and looks and sees and wonders when this knowledge of all her expressions came so completely into his mind.
She thinks about it for a while, editing and abridging her story, fabricating the bits in between. He can see it in her eyes, in the way she glances away and back. “...Everything, I guess,” she says and shrugs. “Sort of realized a couple things I’ve been tryin’ not t’ think about. UNIT stuff,” she adds with an unspoken I can’t tell you about it.
“What d’you do?” he asks anyway.
“Help people,” she answers and it’s so simply said that he can’t help but swallow the line whole.
Something like a smile pulls at the corners of his mouth, something like an expression of affection, something like that. Something sad and old and sentimental and this girl is so beautifully young.
“And sometimes we can’t,” she adds softly, says beneath the rain, and she’s not so young after all.
“But you try,” he tells her, squeezing her hand. “Better than sitting around at home, watching telly and eating beans on toast.”
She looks down, swallows. Looks like she’s about to cry and there’s already enough water in his wool, thank you. He’s seen that look before, though. He knows it.
Second day he knew her, he remembers with sudden, unnatural clarity. Second day he knew her, she’d been about to cry and he just hadn’t seen it. No, he had seen it, simply hadn’t cared, hadn’t let himself see. She’s been on the edge of tears for so long and he hasn’t been paying attention.
That stops. Right now, that stops.
“What happened?”
“Nothin’,” the girl lies.
“Rose.”
“Leave it.”
She doesn’t release his hand.
“No,” he tells her.
The cars keep going by and between the sound of engines and the noise of the deluge, he misses her reply. If she makes one. She might not.
He squeezes her hand and she startles as if she’d forgotten they were touching, as if that touch was more natural than an empty hand.
She pulls away, turns away.
He touches her shoulder, his damp palm on damp skin.
Her shoulder shakes.
It doesn’t take much, only a slight pressure from his hand. She leans back, leans against him, into him. His arm fits around her waist and then she turns into him, presses her face into wool that’s already wet and always a bit itchy. Hip to hip, thigh against thigh, they sit in the shadow of a road as the skies pour down, letting loose the building humidity, a release the ground swallows greedily.
She’s shaking from cold. She’s wet and chilled and holding to him for heat. She’s just cold. He rubs her back to warm her.
“’m sorry,” she mumbles into his jumper. “I can handle it. I can, ‘m just... I dunno, I’ll be all right.”
Sometimes, he thinks, it’s best to be blunt. And, if he’s wrong, it’ll only serve to show her that things could be worse.
“Who died?”
Her arms tighten around him as she chokes up.
“Rose,” he says, stroking her back with a touch as gentle as his voice, as gentle as he can possibly make them both. He’s not a gentle man, not a particularly careful man, but he’s trying.
“The captain, he, he was-” Her words bottle up inside her throat until she swallows them down. “We lost the captain.”
UNIT is military, he reminds himself. Of course she knows a soldier. And of course a soldier died.
“Iraq?” he asks because it’s the first thing that comes to mind.
She shakes her head against his shoulder. “No.” She sniffles, pulls away; he keeps an arm around her shoulders. “Forget it. Not important where.”
Exasperation and disbelief vie with concern. “What’s that supposed to mean, ‘not important’? Of course it’s important. He was your friend.”
“Here an’ now,” she says. “That’s where I want to be. Just here and now. S’all I want t’ think about.”
“Doesn’t help,” he tells her. “Take it from someone who’s been there. Running only makes you tired, when you finally have to stop.”
Her eyes look into his before squeezing shut, before her lips press together to keep her words inside.
He touches her face and fumbles in his own mind, wonders why her thoughts aren’t tangible beneath his fingertips. It feels like they should be, as irrational as that is. He wants to hold her and doesn’t know why he can’t, no matter how he tries. “You can tell me.”
“They killed him.”
The words leave her and fall into the air, fall numb and wet and cold and empty and there’s no belief behind them, only fact. There’s too much detachment with the words, too much incomprehension.
“When?”
She shakes her head and then reality starts to become more real. “I don’t- I- They killed him. They killed Jack and he was- You- The doctor, he, he couldn’t save him - he tried. He really did, he tried, but Jack, he was...”
“He was already gone,” he finishes for her in a quiet breath. He thinks of Susan, thinks of Susan on that freezing table, thinks of the feel of it, thinks of Fred’s cool skin and of faces in caskets and phone calls and mobiles and human idiocy. He thinks of “Are you her father?” and “Were you her father?” and saying no to both. He thinks of Grace - no, Dr. Holloway, she was only Dr. Holloway then, only some surgeon who was too slow - he thinks of her eyes and her words and that opera dress and phone calls that couldn’t be called fast enough.
“Sometimes,” he tells the girl, tells her because he knows this for truth, “the doctor can’t save everyone.”
She looks surprised, confused. Almost angry. She shakes her head, denying him. “Never stopped him from trying,” she says and he realizes she’s talking about a specific doctor.
The rain’s starting to let up, the clouds spilling themselves out to exhaustion, but they’re not done yet.
“How long ago was it?” he asks again.
She knows. He can tell from the way she stalls, the way she doesn’t want to know it off the top of her head. “What day’s it?”
“June fourth,” he answers.
“Thirty-six days,” she says, says it faster than she could possibly have done the calculations.
“Rose,” he breathes. The last day of April. Her bloke’s been dead for barely more than a month and she’s been with him for barely less and he never would have guessed except for Tarragona. What the hell did he say last Sunday? And, more importantly, why didn’t he notice before then?
Because she’s so happy, his mind answers for him. Because she looks at him and brightens up and he wants her to be happy so he doesn’t have to care. He wants her to be happy because he needs more of that in his life.
He wants her to be happy because he hates to see her any other way.
“’m okay,” the girl assures him, still answering too quickly.
“Your friend,” he says. “The one you’re waiting for.”
“The doctor,” she says. “He’s coming back.” She reaches for his hand, squeezes tight, almost desperately. “He’s not dead.”
“But you’re still scared.” It’s an easy assumption.
Her free hand drops to her pocket once more, touches that budge compulsively, her palm pressed over it, and her skin feels warm and damp and afraid through the cloth.
He hugs her back.
She murmurs into his jumper, holds to him with a force that’s not meant for him, with a force that can’t be meant for him. All he can do is gather her to him and try to be solid and stable and secure. Feels like they’re clinging to this tiny little world and, one by one, all their ties are being cut off, cut away. And if they let go...
“Yeah,” she says. “’m scared.”
“Don’t be.” Her hair tickles his chin as he speaks. “He’ll be back.” And then he adds the two words Susan would always ask him to add, would always want to hear, would always need to hear in order to know things were going to be all right. “I promise,” he tells her.
“Feels like,” she says, starts to say. “I dunno, it feels...”
“Like nothing’s real,” he finishes, not asking it.
She presses into him, holds tighter. “Like most things aren’t, yeah. Feels like... Like when the doctor comes back, the captain’ll be there with him. Like they’re both gone, but not really, y’know? Like we took the bike here and Jack just got lost in the car or something.”
He presses his lips to the part of her hair and very nearly tells her that it’ll get better. He doesn’t, can’t stand the connotation of sickness and ‘getting better’ when grief isn’t a sickness. It’s the empty space where love was, a hollow chasm that can’t be allowed to shrink.
“Eventually,” he tells her, “you start to feel again. Takes a while.”
She makes a noise, asks a question rhetorically. “How much of a while?”
Six and a half years, he doesn’t tell her. Six years, six months, and five days. Until the feeling is noticed, that is. Or maybe just until someone hits her hard enough for her to remember pain. Or for her to feel someone else’s.
“A bit of one,” he replies instead.
She makes that noise again, except now there’s something almost like amusement touching it. “That bigger than a little?”
“By a touch.”
“Slight touch?”
“Bit of a slight touch,” he answers and she lets out a breath that takes tension with it.
She pulls back in a way that isn’t pulling away, in a way that’s giving space instead of taking it. Her eyes are red, but her face was already wet and as it is, she’s going to have one hell of a case of helmet hair by the time they get back.
She’s still beautiful, though. That’s what beauty is, really, shining in the dark instead of reflecting in the light. And that’s Rose.
“Thank you,” she says and for the thousandth time, he chooses not to comment, not to ask if he reminds her of him that much, her missing friend.
He shrugs at her, awkward. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands, but her skin tells him that the bone beneath will shatter if he lets go. His grip on her is light, almost tentative despite their continued contact, tentative despite knowing the need for it.
She’s so fragile. So strong.
“You can cry over him,” he tells her. “Your captain. Cry for you, and then live for him.”
She looks at him like she knows what he’s about to say. Eerily enough, she does: “Have a fantastic life?”
He nods. “Have a fantastic life.”
Something in her expression wavers, solidifies. It’s one or the other, but he can’t tell the difference. “S’what the doctor said,” she tells him, sounding almost confused.
“Smart man,” he replies for lack of anything else to say.
No sooner than the words are out of his mouth, she’s laughing. One startled blink and then laughter, laughter and a shove at his arm. “You,” she says. “Oh my god, you- you’re just- You’re-” She shakes her head, cutting herself off with a laugh.
“I’m what?” he demands, suitably confused by the situation.
“You’re you,” she says, her hand on his arm.
“Laughable?” he questions, eyebrows rising.
“Only a bit,” she replies, grinning.
Despite himself, that grin is returned. “A touch?”
“A slight touch,” she assures him. “Very slight.”
Rolling his eyes at her, a noise suddenly comes to his attention. Or rather, the lack of a noise.
“Rain stopped,” he says, pulling himself to his feet, wondering vaguely when his body started to feel so old. He has a strange flashforward, a sudden mental image of himself sitting down with aching knees and weary feet. A shake of the head and the image is gone, that strange scenario with Susan as a young woman prodding at him and calling him “grandfather” with a laugh. Never going to happen.
“Looks like, yeah,” the girl says, picking her helmet up before glancing at him shyly. “Are we going t’ keep going?”
“Might do,” he allows, noncommittal, picking up his jacket and shrugging it back on. He’s hot and wet and damp and itchy, but it’s not like that matters. “Might start raining again, though.”
She bites her lip, looking out to the wet road, all the more dangerous for the deluge. She turns back to him and her smile is bright. “I think I can risk it,” she tells him.
He has only one reason in the world to smile, just one. One complicated, messed-up, secretive reason with admittedly complicated, messed-up and secretive relationships. One reason when that one reason should be in tears and therapy instead of at his side. One reason. He has that much and no more.
And he can’t help but grin.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Monday isn’t working the way it’s supposed to. Monday is supposed to be the relief, the breath of air after the suffocation of the weekend.
This Monday is confusing and empty. Sounds ring in his ears and the world wavers. He’s on edge, constantly on edge, constantly dropping things. He curses up a storm and even that doesn’t help. It feels like he can’t breathe despite how clear his lungs are, despite having a perfectly fine throat and mouth and nose; it feels like there’s something else that should be there, that should help him breathe, something that’s clogged up or plugged up or erased.
When he can think, his thoughts take a predictable pattern. While his hands adjust and disassemble and reassemble and grease and rotate and adjust again, while his hands do that in the garage, his mind follows a little blond tourist through the streets.
He thinks about her captain and her doctor and her family. He wonders about her life and her job and her everything. He closes his eyes and he knows where she is or he fancies that he knows and this is all getting a little too strange for him.
Someone asks him if he’s all right and he waves off the comment with a grunt. His head is pounding and he can’t be bothered for conversation.
Someone concludes that he’s hung-over and someone disagrees and there’s a bored debate he doesn’t listen to going on behind him for a time.
time he knows something about time something
His feet keep moving him towards the door and he keeps moving himself back. He should be somewhere else right now, should be holding a hand and keeping the hand’s owner safe and he could find her, really he could. If he walked out into the city blindfolded, he could find her. He needs to find her.
Something is
Something
There’s going to be
He has to
Rose is
The watch
Rose is on the street, in a crowd, another face in a crowd and so much more, is carrying so much more which is soon to be so much less and
“Smith, ¿puede-? ¿Smith?”
Rose is on the street, in a crowd, another day with walking without running run rose nice to meet you run get away move it rose rose look don’t look away look see him see him move away
“Pienso que está enfermo. ¿Smith? ¿Me oye?”
all it takes is a step closer and a step away a bump a little bump, his hand on her and her not seeing, not feeling, too numb to feel, his hand on her and he can’t breathe when the hand closes around him, fingerprints on metal and soulprints in time
His hand fumbles at his pocket, fumbles for his mobile.
she has no idea, can’t feel the fingers touching him, can’t feel the rough palm violating, taking, stealing, theft
Someone takes his mobile from him, takes it with a shout that splits his head, but he’s already dialed. The world spins beneath his feet and he lets go, loses his balance and plummets with gravity, the world on fire, the sun on fire, everything burning at his hand.
her hand reaches, touches her superphone, touches the mobile instead of the looping metal lines of his cool skin, not realizing, not realizing yet as the hand reaches as she quiets to listen as he tries to tell her of idiocy, of stupid, careless tourists in a city filled with pickpockets
“¡Necesitamos un doctór!”
she hears
“Lo soy,” he breathes. He is one.
she hears nothing and his mobile redials with a nine and a nine and a nine as he dreams a reality in his fictional life, dreams and dreams and drifts in his dreaming and all he can try to say is
“Rose...”
Save me.
.-.-.-.-.-.
<-- | -->
Author: rallalon | Rall
Beta: vyctori
Rating: PG13, AU towards the end of Season One; 9!Smith.
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summary: “Is it you?” she asks, not looking at him as he climbs onto the bed behind her.
He walks forward on his knees, boots pulling at the duvet with each movement towards her. “Yes,” he says, cups her shoulder with his hand.
A/N: PLEASE READ THIS BECAUSE OTHERWISE, YOU MAY MAKE ME VERY, VERY SAD. VERY! Okay, capslock off. As an American who has just one episode left and who is striving very, very, very hard to remain as spoiler-free as possible, I will ask you to kindly not use any spoiler-related icons should you choose to comment on this fic. I would like to be able to read your wonderful feedback with confidence and so I will ask you once again: please do not use spoiler-related icons to comment.
The Tourist
The Girl
The Runaway
The Puzzle
The Passenger
The Victim
“Run!” he yells, pulling at her hand, shaking and stumbling and fleeing from what he cannot face. She cries out in pain agony grief, runs with him, stumbling through tears.
“We have to go back!” she yells as the world burns, as the red sky sets fire. Gunshots sound behind a San Francisco sunset, behind a sky scraped with structures of steel and glass and an infinity no longer infinite. “We can’t leave him!”
“Too late,” he tells her. “It’s too late, I’m sorry.”
“That didn’t happen,” she begs him, clutching to the only hand she has left to hold. “Tell me that didn’t happen. This isn’t happening. You can make it not happen.”
“Not humanly possible,” he says and she strikes him with her gaze, rage and fury and pain etched across features too soft to hold such a mark. “It’s not,” he says and shoves her inside and the second he steps out, the second he leaves, they’ll be there, the line of boys with their weaponry, firing into his jumper with New Years firecrackers.
“Doesn’t matter! That’s never mattered!” she protests and he pushes protest aside. “You can still save him! You can, he’s still-”
There’s a gun in his hand.
He recoils, shaking himself awake. His stomach churns and he comes close to retching, has to sit up and has to lie back down, too dizzy to move. The world is spinning, turning, hurtling through space and his stomach is staying in place and the inertia is going to make him vomit.
He reaches for a hand that isn’t there, his knuckles brushing against the wall, hitting that barrier in the dark. His eyes search for a clock, the one he’s stuffed into a drawer to keep from staring at it, from watching it through the night. Annoyed at himself, he fumbles in the dark for his watch, squints at it in too little light.
After that, it finally occurs to him that he owns a mobile.
He blinks away the light, peers at the glowing digits. It’s nine-fourteen in San Francisco, he thinks. Only the beginning of the night.
That’s not too late to call.
He scrolls through his contacts, all five of them, stops at the single entry for G. The cursor blinks over her name until the screen goes dark.
He lies back and tries to imagine what he might say, what he thinks the call might actually accomplish. It’s hardly as if he can simply dial and say “I miss you.” He doesn’t, though, doesn’t miss her or even think about her in his saner moments.
Never shag a woman who’s killed you - it’s a piece of advice to himself that he’ll try to remember in the future.
She’s probably got another boyfriend by now. Some man better than that Ryan or Brian or whoever it was whose shoes he’d stolen.
Rebounding, she’d told him. Both of them on the rebound and only there to catch each other. Catch and release, like fishermen without the stomach to finish the job and kill what they’ve been torturing.
He can never decide, really, whether or not she killed him, whether or not she landed the finishing blow or helped him to climb from his grave. Maybe she did both, he’d like to say, but that seems like cheating, seems too unclear. It’s unclear and shades of grey and just once, just once, he’d love to see black and white again, just for the moment it takes to know that true colour still exists.
He’s a moody old bastard at night, he decides, dropping his mobile back on the nightstand. Enough of that. It’s giving him a headache.
A sudden thought strikes him, pulls him fully into consciousness as he grabs at his mobile again, flips it open to check the date. It’s June. Thursday the first of June. Halfway to Sunday, he thinks. Almost there.
As the surge of endorphins fades, he mulls it over, thinking. It’s a month, today. He’s been here a month in this flat, this city, and it feels like forever. Sanchez is already trying to keep him on for longer than the three months they agreed on, that first day.
And, let’s see, if he met the girl on, what, the tenth and that was a Wednesday, then...
Three weeks yesterday.
She’s been with him for three weeks. Been here for three weeks, he means. Three weeks waiting in a strange city for her unnamed friend.
He groans at his own stupidity. He’d spent days prying at her with questions and in the end, an early morning glance at his mobile answers the question: it’s been a while for a kid to wait. She’s been left, or feels like she has been.
He’ll do something nice today, he decides as he rolls over, ready to throw himself back into unconsciousness. He’ll do something nice and ask her about this mum that she seems to be close to, try to remind her that she’s got at least one person who cares. He’ll do that.
Provided he remembers when he wakes up.
.-.-.-.-.-.
“...yeah? And then me an’ my mate Shireen, we went right on up to him - she kept giggling the whole time, it was awful - you could hear her comin’ from a mile off. Anyway, we went right up to him, all ready to tell him off, and then.... Hold on. Are you asleep?”
He blinks his eyes open, raising his hand up to block the sunlight where it shines through the leaves into their shade. “You’re a bit boring,” he tells her and she grins at him, her smile dappled with sunlight. His brain is working more slowly than usual and he has the strangest urge to reach out and brush the shadow from her lips with his thumb, to feel the shade on her skin.
“You’re not exactly stimulating, yourself,” she replies, poking at his side.
“Got good taste in parks, though,” he points out, catching her prodding fingers, holding her hand.
She laughs a little, her obligatory chuckle at his obligatory arrogance. “Yeah, guess you do.” Her hand flexes in his, fingers straightening out before returning to grip loosely. Languid, relaxed.
The leaves above them shift in the slight breeze, humid air moving in a way not yet sluggish but soon to be. The air itself seems lethargic and heavy. Siesta, he thinks. Food and a nap and they’ve already eaten.
“You always know something t’ do,” she muses a moment later and he’ll ignore the way her thumb moves under his, moves against the side of his index finger, stroking up and down and slow and sliding. “What d’you do, y’know, normally?”
He shrugs a little, the movement pushing his shoulders against grass, the blades tickling his skin through his t-shirt. “Read, ride, tinker,” he recites. “Not much, really.”
She releases his hand, needing that arm to prop herself up on. Her hand cups her jaw as she shifts onto her side, one long leg resting atop the other.
He wiggles his fingers in an attempt to shake his hand out, to make it feel normal again, but she sees it as an invitation, reaches across her body to take his hand, starts to. Stops to tuck her hair behind her ear, golden strands shining as she tosses them over her shoulder. Her fingers twine with his as she looks down at him, looks down just that little amount because she’s not propped up that high after all.
“You’d started working here before I showed up,” she reminded him. “What’d you do then?”
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
He’d been miserable.
The realization hits him like a shaft of light through a layer of clouds. It’s been shining through, in bits, in moments, in thoughts and wonderings, but he’s never acknowledged it, never until today.
“Oh, this and that,” he says, looking up through the leaves instead of her. The light hurts his eyes and so he closes them. “Nothing too exciting.”
“’kay,” she says, mumbles gently.
He can feel her gaze tracing his face, but when he opens his eyes, she’s looking elsewhere, studying his arm. She doesn’t notice his noticing, acts as if his permission is an assumed thing, assumed or perhaps unnecessary. Her loose grip on his hand pulls it up until his arm is bent at the elbow, until she can peer at the blue veins at the bend of his wrist.
They drift for a time, or he does. There’s no thinking, no thought, only a sustained silence of heavy air and light touches and he wouldn’t mind falling asleep, right here, with her. He wouldn’t mind it, wouldn’t object to mutual unconsciousness, to her shoulders set against his chest and a warm hand holding to his. He wouldn’t complain at the feel of her hair tickling his cheek.
That hair spills over her shoulder and his neglected hand reaches across, tucks it back behind her ear, strokes the strands back into place as she strokes his forearm, fingers dipping down, her heat dripping down, fingers dripping down his forearm before returning to his hand, to his palm, to touch and hold and separate and begin again. He tucks her hair behind her ear and she’s still touching his arm.
Their eyes meet and neither dares to breathe.
Slowly, with something close to fear or reverence or the beautiful insanity of blind trust, he lowers his hand from her face, doesn’t brush the shifting shadows from her lips. The leaves whisper above their heads and far away there are children that yell and adults to call after them; far away, there is traffic and the noise of motion, of footsteps coming and going and returning and leaving. It is very far away.
The leaves whisper with heavy breath and he stays silenced by light touches. She breathes in, pulls the thick air into herself and her chest moves and he’s lying there in the grass, more passive than he can understand. He should pull away or pull her forward or move or act or speak. He should, but her eyes are dark in the shade.
A chill sweeps down his arm in the wake of her fingers, in the sudden lack of human heat from her human hands. She blinks as if coming back into herself, blinks as if leaving herself, and her hand goes to her hip, touches a round bulge through her pocket. It’s round and smallish and he sees the outline of it often enough, sees it almost every day, an outline of a shape in her jeans by her hip.
Her palm covers it, covers the area where hip and thigh and other places combine. Her palm covers it and she bites her lip and he can’t breathe. It’s just a tin, he tells himself. One of those little tins of mints, that’s what it must be, so why is she reaching for it? What’s she want a mint for?
“’S hot,” she says, sounding surprised, speaking to herself, not to him, speaking to herself instead of him and the sound runs through him anyway. Her hand presses on the shape and his hearts pound and his hands sweat and his mouth dries into dust. “Shouldn’t be doing that.”
He sits up, startling her. She jerks a little, jerks back and nearly falls back and sprawls on the grass beside him and he can see it, it hasn’t happened but he can still see it, can still see how it would happen if it did. Her hair is a halo, a silky nimbus of loose, dyed strands spread on soft grass and her shocked smile soon turns sultry and this is not prediction this is fantasy.
He’s on his feet because he can’t stand not to be, because he can’t sit still without the ability to run, to flee, without the option of it. This isn’t me, he wants to say. This is someone else, he wants her to know: this is someone else, someone I’ll protect you from. He won’t touch her.
No one will touch her.
Not ever.
Not his Rose.
His hands shoved into his pockets, he breathes out before looking down at her, looking down at the girl looking up him and looking so hurt. “C’mon, then. No use lazing around all day.” His voice doesn’t betray him, never does. He can trust his body, can always trust his body.
It’s his mind he can’t control.
.-.-.-.-.-.-.
Her hair is damp from her shower, dripping into her pillow as she lays there, the circle of metal in her hand. Fingertips trace the intricacies and the hair of his forearms moves in the memory of it, in the wake of her motion, her every motion.
“Is it you?” she asks, not looking at him as he climbs onto the bed behind her.
He walks forward on his knees, boots pulling at the duvet with each movement towards her. “Yes,” he says, cups her shoulder with his hand.
She sits up and his hand slips, slides down to her waist, covers her stomach. Both his hands cover her stomach. “It doesn’t seem fair,” she says, sounding resigned, and he can feel her breath beneath his palms, feel her diaphragm. “I like him.”
Jealousy pricks him and his arms tighten. She relaxes into him without leaning back, accepts the sentiment if not the support. “Who’s he?”he asks, demands.
“He’s,” she says, says it as a complete thought. This calms him.
“He is,” he agrees, watching over her shoulder as she holds the watch close to her face, as her breath warms the surface and stirs the hairs on his arms and chest.
She kisses the cool metal and he sighs into her mouth.
.-.-.-.-.-.
The nights grow warmer, his showers colder.
There is no such thing as a peaceful sleep, not for him.
.-.-.-.-.-.
It feels like forever in that timeless way summer has, even when it’s not fully summer yet. It’s an early summer, then, but for him, it was a long time coming.
Tarragona was a week ago, now, a week ago and now it’s Sunday again.
They still haven’t talked about it, Tarragona, but not for lack of trying. He gets the feeling she’s as unaccustomed to talking as he is. Maybe they’ll address it today, maybe. They might do, if she doesn’t start avoiding him completely, doesn’t keep avoiding him the way she’s been doing all week. Things are back to the way they were when this all started: she comes to him, they eat and then her night belongs to someone other than him. If he pushes her any more, she might take off for good.
Probably not, though, he assures himself as he bounds down three flights of stairs to the ground level. He has two helmets, one jacket and half a plan, but that’ll work itself out in the end. An improviser, that’s him.
He steps onto the next-to-last landing and nearly gets trampled.
Fumbling the helmets, catching them both, he yells out a loud “Oi!” of indignation before taking in those eyes and the startled look within them. Unbalanced, she staggers back and he reaches out, holding her sides with his forearms, the helmets behind her back. “Jeopardy-friendly, you are,” he tells her and she grins back at him or he grins back at her. “D’you always take the stairs like this, running like a lunatic?”
“Not always,” she laughs, hands on his lapels, fingers gripping the leather even after she no longer needs the support. His knee bumps her thigh as he shifts and she glances down distractedly. Her knee bumps him back.
He stops it before it becomes a game, before they start heading back up the stairs instead of down them. “What’re you doing here?” he asks, releasing her from the circle of his arms, finding it difficult to hold the helmets out like that for so long.
“Wanted t’ see you,” she says and she shrugs and she’s shy.
He hands her a helmet and the broad smile across his face can’t be restrained.
She blushes, hugs the helmet to her chest. “See? Knew you missed me too.”
He rolls his eyes at that, shouldering past her to go down the stairs. “Unlike somebody I could talk about, I’m employed and have more things to do with my time.”
She catches up to him, grabs at his hand. “Not today, you don’t.”
“No,” he says, smiling fondly at her as their fingers twine together. “Not today.”
There’s an extra bound in her step and they rumble down the stairs. He holds the door open with some maneuvering, holds the door with his foot and his helmet in one hand and guides her out with his other hand at the small of her back. Her shirt clings there, wet with humidity and sweat.
She takes his hand despite the heat and their skin sticks together, their palms fusing together at the contact. Not once does she ask or question their destination; not once does she falter in her footsteps beside him. Doesn’t she ever learn? Won’t she?
It’s only him she does this with, he wants to say. He wants to know. He wants her to tell him. It’s only him she runs off with, only him whose hand she takes and whose bike she rides and whose flat she visits. Only him.
If it’s only him, he doesn’t have to worry about protecting her. If it’s only him, he knows exactly how much she can get hurt. And so long as it’s only him, he can keep her from pain.
“What?” she asks and he knows he’s been staring.
He dreams of her crying. Of her reaching for him and missing him and wanting him. He dreams of it every single night. Of course he stares.
He plays it off as concern. “You all right?” he asks right back. “Tired?”
She shakes her head, gathering the strands of hair stuck to her face and trying to tuck them behind her ear. His palms itch and his fingers beg to move, but a man can control his impulses.
“All right,” he says, shrugging. He mounts the bike, pulling his helmet on in the same motion. She fumbles with hers for a moment and he pretends she’s hesitant, pretends she’s thinking about consequences when he knows she trusts him too much to wonder.
But, no, he doesn’t know that. Maybe she is thinking and maybe she’s not trusting and he doesn’t even know which one he wants for her anymore.
She maneuvers onto the bike behind him, him with his feet on the pavement and her with her hands on his shoulders, with her hands on his sides, with her arms around his waist. It’s far too hot and his jumper clings beneath his jacket and she clings as well, hot and dripping and he shivers. The R75 rumbles between their legs, the vibration shaking him into her, her against him.
He’s going to have one hell of a headache soon, can feel it coming on already, but that’s not going to make him change whatever plans he has today. He’s not sure what his plans are, only that he has some, only that they involve this.
Her hands pull at his jumper beneath leather, fist for a grip, for something to hold, and he takes it as an easy cue. The old R75, more battered than blue now, carries them out into the city traffic.
And then it carries them just a bit farther.
.-.-.-.-.-.
The second that first raindrop hits the visor of his helmet, he speeds up.
By the time they rumble to a stop beneath the overpass, he can feel thunder rolling in the distance. She doesn’t question their stopping, climbs off the bike as easily as she got on. The only thing is asks as she pulls off her helmet is “How wet are we going t’ get?”
The bike is parked on crunchy grass and dry dirt off the side of the highway and he looks up at the overpass above them. “Not very.”
“’kay.” She climbs up the hill towards their impromptu ceiling, moves up at a semi-crouch, her hands touching the blocks of rock for balance.
His glance to his bike is a natural one, quick and automatic, checking that it’s out of harm’s way and secure. When he looks back at her, her rear is parked on the rock instead of waving in the air. She pats the stone beside her and his feet move.
Removing his jacket, he bids her to stand, folds the jacket and places it down upon the rock. Her smile is as nervous as the gesture is unsure.
He sits and she burrows into his side, her helmet to the side, his on his lap. She’s warm under his arm, almost uncomfortably so. Or maybe that’s his jumper, damp from sweat and humidity and the failing rain. Why he’s wearing wool in June, he’ll never know. Habit, he’ll say. A habit he’s going to need to break.
Resigning himself to being wet for a while longer, he glances at her face, checks to make sure she’s all right. She gives him a smile, leans into him. They watch the cars drive by, sitting beneath an overpass in Spain, listening to a light rain become a downpour. The moment feels soft and surreal, so very surreal despite how reality clings to their skin, sticky and damp.
It doesn’t feel like him, like he’s the one who’s doing this, sitting here. It’s a feeling he wants to protest, wants to change. He is doing this, sitting here.
And so it nags at him, and nags at him, and without wanting to, he realizes why it does.
He drops his arm from her shoulders as the rain pours down. His lips quirk with irony instead of amusement. That’s what symbolism will get a person, usually. So much irony.
The air will spill itself out, but she won’t say a word.
“About last week,” he says. Maybe it’s not fair to her, doing this with her captive with him, but it’s the best hope he has at getting to the bottom of this. She can’t walk away from him, not here.
She shifts away from him even as her hand moves, hesitates in hot, wet air, reaching for his grip to answer hers. “Yeah?”
He turns. Looks at her, looks her in the eyes. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
Cars pass and rain pounds.
She looks away.
His helmet scrapes against the rock they sit on as he removes it from his lap. It’s a light scrape, a light noise, barely heard beneath the rain. He can hear a helmet but he can’t hear her.
Her fingers are so small, her palm soft, her wrist slight. She’s delicate and he holds her in the only way he dares, palm to palm, fingers entwined.
“Rose,” he says.
She studies his face in the shadow, shivers with the damp. She wants to pull away; he can see it. The way she wants to pull back, the way she won’t. He sees without understanding. He wants to understand, far more than he should.
“Tell me.”
White teeth press into her bottom lip; her head turns and golden hair shields her downturned face from his searching eyes. Her captured hand squeezes, the one still free touching her pocket, that compulsive double-check she has.
He shudders inside, shakes. He thinks without wanting to, without meaning to. He thinks he might not want to know.
“It sort of...” She looks at him from the corner of her eyes, tucks wet strands of hair behind the pale shell of her ear. It’s a reach across her body to do this, using the opposite hand awkwardly because he’s holding the other one. He’s holding and she’s not letting go. “It built up, y’know?”
“What did?” he asks, waits for her to bite her lip and look away again. He waits for that exact turn to her lips and dimness in her usually bright eyes. He waits and looks and sees and wonders when this knowledge of all her expressions came so completely into his mind.
She thinks about it for a while, editing and abridging her story, fabricating the bits in between. He can see it in her eyes, in the way she glances away and back. “...Everything, I guess,” she says and shrugs. “Sort of realized a couple things I’ve been tryin’ not t’ think about. UNIT stuff,” she adds with an unspoken I can’t tell you about it.
“What d’you do?” he asks anyway.
“Help people,” she answers and it’s so simply said that he can’t help but swallow the line whole.
Something like a smile pulls at the corners of his mouth, something like an expression of affection, something like that. Something sad and old and sentimental and this girl is so beautifully young.
“And sometimes we can’t,” she adds softly, says beneath the rain, and she’s not so young after all.
“But you try,” he tells her, squeezing her hand. “Better than sitting around at home, watching telly and eating beans on toast.”
She looks down, swallows. Looks like she’s about to cry and there’s already enough water in his wool, thank you. He’s seen that look before, though. He knows it.
Second day he knew her, he remembers with sudden, unnatural clarity. Second day he knew her, she’d been about to cry and he just hadn’t seen it. No, he had seen it, simply hadn’t cared, hadn’t let himself see. She’s been on the edge of tears for so long and he hasn’t been paying attention.
That stops. Right now, that stops.
“What happened?”
“Nothin’,” the girl lies.
“Rose.”
“Leave it.”
She doesn’t release his hand.
“No,” he tells her.
The cars keep going by and between the sound of engines and the noise of the deluge, he misses her reply. If she makes one. She might not.
He squeezes her hand and she startles as if she’d forgotten they were touching, as if that touch was more natural than an empty hand.
She pulls away, turns away.
He touches her shoulder, his damp palm on damp skin.
Her shoulder shakes.
It doesn’t take much, only a slight pressure from his hand. She leans back, leans against him, into him. His arm fits around her waist and then she turns into him, presses her face into wool that’s already wet and always a bit itchy. Hip to hip, thigh against thigh, they sit in the shadow of a road as the skies pour down, letting loose the building humidity, a release the ground swallows greedily.
She’s shaking from cold. She’s wet and chilled and holding to him for heat. She’s just cold. He rubs her back to warm her.
“’m sorry,” she mumbles into his jumper. “I can handle it. I can, ‘m just... I dunno, I’ll be all right.”
Sometimes, he thinks, it’s best to be blunt. And, if he’s wrong, it’ll only serve to show her that things could be worse.
“Who died?”
Her arms tighten around him as she chokes up.
“Rose,” he says, stroking her back with a touch as gentle as his voice, as gentle as he can possibly make them both. He’s not a gentle man, not a particularly careful man, but he’s trying.
“The captain, he, he was-” Her words bottle up inside her throat until she swallows them down. “We lost the captain.”
UNIT is military, he reminds himself. Of course she knows a soldier. And of course a soldier died.
“Iraq?” he asks because it’s the first thing that comes to mind.
She shakes her head against his shoulder. “No.” She sniffles, pulls away; he keeps an arm around her shoulders. “Forget it. Not important where.”
Exasperation and disbelief vie with concern. “What’s that supposed to mean, ‘not important’? Of course it’s important. He was your friend.”
“Here an’ now,” she says. “That’s where I want to be. Just here and now. S’all I want t’ think about.”
“Doesn’t help,” he tells her. “Take it from someone who’s been there. Running only makes you tired, when you finally have to stop.”
Her eyes look into his before squeezing shut, before her lips press together to keep her words inside.
He touches her face and fumbles in his own mind, wonders why her thoughts aren’t tangible beneath his fingertips. It feels like they should be, as irrational as that is. He wants to hold her and doesn’t know why he can’t, no matter how he tries. “You can tell me.”
“They killed him.”
The words leave her and fall into the air, fall numb and wet and cold and empty and there’s no belief behind them, only fact. There’s too much detachment with the words, too much incomprehension.
“When?”
She shakes her head and then reality starts to become more real. “I don’t- I- They killed him. They killed Jack and he was- You- The doctor, he, he couldn’t save him - he tried. He really did, he tried, but Jack, he was...”
“He was already gone,” he finishes for her in a quiet breath. He thinks of Susan, thinks of Susan on that freezing table, thinks of the feel of it, thinks of Fred’s cool skin and of faces in caskets and phone calls and mobiles and human idiocy. He thinks of “Are you her father?” and “Were you her father?” and saying no to both. He thinks of Grace - no, Dr. Holloway, she was only Dr. Holloway then, only some surgeon who was too slow - he thinks of her eyes and her words and that opera dress and phone calls that couldn’t be called fast enough.
“Sometimes,” he tells the girl, tells her because he knows this for truth, “the doctor can’t save everyone.”
She looks surprised, confused. Almost angry. She shakes her head, denying him. “Never stopped him from trying,” she says and he realizes she’s talking about a specific doctor.
The rain’s starting to let up, the clouds spilling themselves out to exhaustion, but they’re not done yet.
“How long ago was it?” he asks again.
She knows. He can tell from the way she stalls, the way she doesn’t want to know it off the top of her head. “What day’s it?”
“June fourth,” he answers.
“Thirty-six days,” she says, says it faster than she could possibly have done the calculations.
“Rose,” he breathes. The last day of April. Her bloke’s been dead for barely more than a month and she’s been with him for barely less and he never would have guessed except for Tarragona. What the hell did he say last Sunday? And, more importantly, why didn’t he notice before then?
Because she’s so happy, his mind answers for him. Because she looks at him and brightens up and he wants her to be happy so he doesn’t have to care. He wants her to be happy because he needs more of that in his life.
He wants her to be happy because he hates to see her any other way.
“’m okay,” the girl assures him, still answering too quickly.
“Your friend,” he says. “The one you’re waiting for.”
“The doctor,” she says. “He’s coming back.” She reaches for his hand, squeezes tight, almost desperately. “He’s not dead.”
“But you’re still scared.” It’s an easy assumption.
Her free hand drops to her pocket once more, touches that budge compulsively, her palm pressed over it, and her skin feels warm and damp and afraid through the cloth.
He hugs her back.
She murmurs into his jumper, holds to him with a force that’s not meant for him, with a force that can’t be meant for him. All he can do is gather her to him and try to be solid and stable and secure. Feels like they’re clinging to this tiny little world and, one by one, all their ties are being cut off, cut away. And if they let go...
“Yeah,” she says. “’m scared.”
“Don’t be.” Her hair tickles his chin as he speaks. “He’ll be back.” And then he adds the two words Susan would always ask him to add, would always want to hear, would always need to hear in order to know things were going to be all right. “I promise,” he tells her.
“Feels like,” she says, starts to say. “I dunno, it feels...”
“Like nothing’s real,” he finishes, not asking it.
She presses into him, holds tighter. “Like most things aren’t, yeah. Feels like... Like when the doctor comes back, the captain’ll be there with him. Like they’re both gone, but not really, y’know? Like we took the bike here and Jack just got lost in the car or something.”
He presses his lips to the part of her hair and very nearly tells her that it’ll get better. He doesn’t, can’t stand the connotation of sickness and ‘getting better’ when grief isn’t a sickness. It’s the empty space where love was, a hollow chasm that can’t be allowed to shrink.
“Eventually,” he tells her, “you start to feel again. Takes a while.”
She makes a noise, asks a question rhetorically. “How much of a while?”
Six and a half years, he doesn’t tell her. Six years, six months, and five days. Until the feeling is noticed, that is. Or maybe just until someone hits her hard enough for her to remember pain. Or for her to feel someone else’s.
“A bit of one,” he replies instead.
She makes that noise again, except now there’s something almost like amusement touching it. “That bigger than a little?”
“By a touch.”
“Slight touch?”
“Bit of a slight touch,” he answers and she lets out a breath that takes tension with it.
She pulls back in a way that isn’t pulling away, in a way that’s giving space instead of taking it. Her eyes are red, but her face was already wet and as it is, she’s going to have one hell of a case of helmet hair by the time they get back.
She’s still beautiful, though. That’s what beauty is, really, shining in the dark instead of reflecting in the light. And that’s Rose.
“Thank you,” she says and for the thousandth time, he chooses not to comment, not to ask if he reminds her of him that much, her missing friend.
He shrugs at her, awkward. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands, but her skin tells him that the bone beneath will shatter if he lets go. His grip on her is light, almost tentative despite their continued contact, tentative despite knowing the need for it.
She’s so fragile. So strong.
“You can cry over him,” he tells her. “Your captain. Cry for you, and then live for him.”
She looks at him like she knows what he’s about to say. Eerily enough, she does: “Have a fantastic life?”
He nods. “Have a fantastic life.”
Something in her expression wavers, solidifies. It’s one or the other, but he can’t tell the difference. “S’what the doctor said,” she tells him, sounding almost confused.
“Smart man,” he replies for lack of anything else to say.
No sooner than the words are out of his mouth, she’s laughing. One startled blink and then laughter, laughter and a shove at his arm. “You,” she says. “Oh my god, you- you’re just- You’re-” She shakes her head, cutting herself off with a laugh.
“I’m what?” he demands, suitably confused by the situation.
“You’re you,” she says, her hand on his arm.
“Laughable?” he questions, eyebrows rising.
“Only a bit,” she replies, grinning.
Despite himself, that grin is returned. “A touch?”
“A slight touch,” she assures him. “Very slight.”
Rolling his eyes at her, a noise suddenly comes to his attention. Or rather, the lack of a noise.
“Rain stopped,” he says, pulling himself to his feet, wondering vaguely when his body started to feel so old. He has a strange flashforward, a sudden mental image of himself sitting down with aching knees and weary feet. A shake of the head and the image is gone, that strange scenario with Susan as a young woman prodding at him and calling him “grandfather” with a laugh. Never going to happen.
“Looks like, yeah,” the girl says, picking her helmet up before glancing at him shyly. “Are we going t’ keep going?”
“Might do,” he allows, noncommittal, picking up his jacket and shrugging it back on. He’s hot and wet and damp and itchy, but it’s not like that matters. “Might start raining again, though.”
She bites her lip, looking out to the wet road, all the more dangerous for the deluge. She turns back to him and her smile is bright. “I think I can risk it,” she tells him.
He has only one reason in the world to smile, just one. One complicated, messed-up, secretive reason with admittedly complicated, messed-up and secretive relationships. One reason when that one reason should be in tears and therapy instead of at his side. One reason. He has that much and no more.
And he can’t help but grin.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Monday isn’t working the way it’s supposed to. Monday is supposed to be the relief, the breath of air after the suffocation of the weekend.
This Monday is confusing and empty. Sounds ring in his ears and the world wavers. He’s on edge, constantly on edge, constantly dropping things. He curses up a storm and even that doesn’t help. It feels like he can’t breathe despite how clear his lungs are, despite having a perfectly fine throat and mouth and nose; it feels like there’s something else that should be there, that should help him breathe, something that’s clogged up or plugged up or erased.
When he can think, his thoughts take a predictable pattern. While his hands adjust and disassemble and reassemble and grease and rotate and adjust again, while his hands do that in the garage, his mind follows a little blond tourist through the streets.
He thinks about her captain and her doctor and her family. He wonders about her life and her job and her everything. He closes his eyes and he knows where she is or he fancies that he knows and this is all getting a little too strange for him.
Someone asks him if he’s all right and he waves off the comment with a grunt. His head is pounding and he can’t be bothered for conversation.
Someone concludes that he’s hung-over and someone disagrees and there’s a bored debate he doesn’t listen to going on behind him for a time.
time he knows something about time something
His feet keep moving him towards the door and he keeps moving himself back. He should be somewhere else right now, should be holding a hand and keeping the hand’s owner safe and he could find her, really he could. If he walked out into the city blindfolded, he could find her. He needs to find her.
Something is
Something
There’s going to be
He has to
Rose is
The watch
Rose is on the street, in a crowd, another face in a crowd and so much more, is carrying so much more which is soon to be so much less and
“Smith, ¿puede-? ¿Smith?”
Rose is on the street, in a crowd, another day with walking without running run rose nice to meet you run get away move it rose rose look don’t look away look see him see him move away
“Pienso que está enfermo. ¿Smith? ¿Me oye?”
all it takes is a step closer and a step away a bump a little bump, his hand on her and her not seeing, not feeling, too numb to feel, his hand on her and he can’t breathe when the hand closes around him, fingerprints on metal and soulprints in time
His hand fumbles at his pocket, fumbles for his mobile.
she has no idea, can’t feel the fingers touching him, can’t feel the rough palm violating, taking, stealing, theft
Someone takes his mobile from him, takes it with a shout that splits his head, but he’s already dialed. The world spins beneath his feet and he lets go, loses his balance and plummets with gravity, the world on fire, the sun on fire, everything burning at his hand.
her hand reaches, touches her superphone, touches the mobile instead of the looping metal lines of his cool skin, not realizing, not realizing yet as the hand reaches as she quiets to listen as he tries to tell her of idiocy, of stupid, careless tourists in a city filled with pickpockets
“¡Necesitamos un doctór!”
she hears
“Lo soy,” he breathes. He is one.
she hears nothing and his mobile redials with a nine and a nine and a nine as he dreams a reality in his fictional life, dreams and dreams and drifts in his dreaming and all he can try to say is
“Rose...”
Save me.
.-.-.-.-.-.
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