Fic: In Human Hands (9/20?)
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: “Good night,” she says again, undeterred. She hugs him again, holds tight, her arms folded behind his neck. Her earring scrapes against the side of his face, a tang of sensation that insists upon being felt, upon lasting, proof of her cheek against his.
A/N: For purely comedic purposes, I feel I should point out that the entirety of this chapter was written while I had a series of bananas duct-taped to the door. Ah, life.
The Tourist
The Girl
The Runaway
The Puzzle
The Passenger
The Victim
The Absent
The Found
The Determined
She’s not exactly subtle, his girl.
Her persistence through the stalls has already been noted on their second day of searching, and that’s not a good thing. When they find this watch of hers - and the way she moves, the way she focuses so completely makes him believe that it’s when and not if - when they find this watch, the bargaining for it will be absurd. He has no doubt she’d empty her bank account to regain the mock-timepiece for her doctor, but that’s hardly something they want the world to know, especially a world that sets the price tag.
She gives no attention to the looks she gathers, to the curious glances and the gazes more focused. He moves with her, stands at her side, corrects her Spanish and translates for her in Catalan. They sweat and he can hear her stomach rumble, but it’s him that gets them lunch, him that brings her by the hand to food and drink and rest. It’s her who pulls him back into the thick of it with nothing more than a determined glance.
This becomes their world, two people in the crowd, two lost little people looking for a tiny nothing in an ocean of everything.
And who knows. Maybe they’ll find something.
Maybe.
.-.-.-.-.-.
“Rose,” he says, and she looks at him.
Her eyes are focused, pupils matching the growing dark. Artificial light is taking over slowly around them, the sun having more than begun to set, to disappear, to vanish. Her face is in shadow without any shadow across it and he stares, wondering, until she snaps him out of it, touches his arm where there’s no sleeve to cover it.
“Yeah?” she asks, has already asked. Asks again. “What?”
Water, he thinks, looking at the worried line of her mouth only to feel his balance start to leave him. He should drink something.
“They’re packing up,” he tells her, uncertain if that’s what he initially meant to say. “C’mon. Let’s get a bite to eat.” Because lunch was a long time ago and she needs to sit down. Because he could let her go now, could take the remainder of his Saturday and spend a few moments alone. Because he could do that and he might still do that, but for now, for now he doesn’t need to.
They’ve been at it all day and he’s not sick of her yet.
She looks around them, sets down a basket of knickknacks she’d been searching through with a focus at once intent and vague, her once-bright hope now faded into smoldering determination. Two days at this, today the first full day, and she’s not half so exhausted as he’d been sure she would be. He doesn’t bother being surprised; there’s always more to her than meets the eye.
She bites her bottom lip, tempted to remain, and he takes her hand, saying, “We’ll go to the library after. Check those online auctions.”
He waits for a nod and then leads her out of Els Encants, takes her hand in his and walks past food stalls and restaurants until they’re in a part of the city he can pretend she’s safe in. She plods along beside him, bleary-eyed and just a touch clumsy, just a little lost. His hand slips from hers to rest at the small of her back, to lightly cradle the curve of her spine in the cup of his palm.
He lets her footsteps guide them once they’re in a region he might term tourist-friendly if she weren’t friendlier still towards everything jeopardous. He lets her footsteps guide them, but her footsteps only lead her to lean against his side, to lean into him, and his hand slips from the curve of her spine to the curve of her hip, concave to converse beneath a soft cotton top. Her head rests on his upper arm, a tired lean as they walk, his steps shortening to match hers, to keep from jarring her and to keep on keeping her.
“C’mon,” he says again. “We’ll get you fed.”
“Here,” she says, her jaw moving against cotton and cotton moving against skin and he wants his jacket back, wants not to have left it back at the flat. To pull the leather around him or to wrap his tank-topped companion in, he’s not sure. One or the other or both, perhaps, simply not at the same time.
“Here?” he says, pointing at the neon sign proclaiming Thai food.
“Yeah,” she says, and he brings her inside.
.-.-.-.-.-.
It’s bright and warm and loud in the restaurant in a way that quickly sends her dozing in the booth. Resting her head turns into resting her eyes and that simply turns into rest. Hardly needing to talk to her after spending an entire day attached at the hip, he lets her doze, takes a strange sort of amusement in how much she needs sleep.
Honestly, he thinks and then yawns.
He orders for her, increasingly inclined to simply put his head down on the table and join her in a light slumber as the night goes on, as he waits for the food to the sound of other people eating and talking and laughing. The noise in his life is temporarily silent and maybe he wants to wake her after all.
Head nested in her folded arms, her hair spills down her back, drapes itself haphazardly over her arms and hands and napkin, comes close to the condensation gathered upon the glass at her elbow. He reaches forward, pulls the glass closer to him, away from the arms of his sleeping girl. If she spills, sleeping in the position she is, he’s not helping to clean it up.
When the food comes, he wakes her, a hand on her arm and a slight pressure of the fingers. She blinks, sits up, gives the waiter a sheepish look that soon turns into a smile at the dishes in the man’s hands. Obviously at the dishes, not the man. The waiter makes a remark and she laughs at herself, revived for at least this moment, for at least this now.
“All right?” he asks once alone again.
“Yeah,” she says and though he’s holding a fork, his hand feels empty, feels strangely better when he puts the utensil down.
He picks up his glass, condensation slicking his palm, dampening the undersides of his fingers as he raises the water to his lips, as oversized ice cubes hit against his lips and teeth. When he sets the glass down once more, there’s more liquid water outside than within. His lips are cold from ice resting against them and he wipes his mouth warm with the back of his hand.
She’s staring at him, watching him like he’s the strange one while she behaves like a narcoleptic. “Thirsty?” she asks, brown eyebrows trying to meet a blond hairline.
“Tired?” he counters.
She smiles while rolling her eyes and pushes her glass towards him across the lacquered wood of the table, a small trail of water following, bringing the swirls in the dark wood to sparkle. He pushes it back, glass sliding easily over smooth, wet wood. They invent a game, sliding her glass back and forth before the waiter reappears, water jug in hand, ready to refill his glass and settle the issue. Another sheepish smile from his girl and he wonders.
“He’s a bit pretty,” he says derisively and she blinks at him.
“He’s a bit old for me,” she counters and they both pause, glancing at the retreating back of a man in his mid-thirties.
He brings his glass back to still-chilled lips and finds he’s no longer thirsty. It’s difficult to tell, sometimes.
“Tomorrow,” he says instead, starts to say.
“Yeah?” she interrupts, hurrying into speech.
“We’ll hit the stalls by Sant Antoni market,” he says, stating rather than asking. “Provided you can be awake for it.”
She leans forward, nodding, gathering her hair up and trying to keep it behind her shoulders and out of her food. Her eyes don’t move from his. “I will be, yeah,” she says, like she’s accepting a dare.
“Good,” he says, like he’s accepting a promise.
She closes her eyes, opens them and breathes out, the motion too slow to be called a blink. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He eyes his glass, the smudge of dirt from his hand slowly dripping down in the water droplets. It’s something to look at, something that doesn’t look back, a brown that’s literally been watered down. “And it’s only the morning - you can take a nap afterwards.”
She kicks him under the table, tries to.
She misses.
He grins.
This time, she gets his shin, a tap of the toes of her trainer. She never wears flip-flops, barely ever sandals, he recalls vaguely, wondering whether or not to bait her further and risk an accurate kick. It’s always trainers, lately, always shoes for running. Makes sense, when he thinks about her, when he thinks she spends her life running from what’s behind her.
“Isn’t that what siesta is supposed to be for? Sleeping, yeah?” she asks. “‘Cause it gets hot.”
“It’s not that hot out,” he replies. “Still only June: hardly need to bunk down and wait out the afternoon.” He looks down from her brown eyes, moves rice noodles from plate to fork to mouth. It’s a different sort of spicy than the pork sausages at lunch.
“Where’d your jacket go, then?”
He looks up, surprised at the edge in her question. “What?” he asks with his mouth full. He swallows. “I’m not allowed out without it?”
“You don’t...” She trails off, bites her lip, chewing on that instead of the neglected contents of her cooling plate.
“I don’t what?”
“You don’t look like you,” she says when he waits for an answer. “When you’re not wearing it, I mean.”
“Don’t feel like me without it,” he says, the admission unexpected, the thought unthought until spoken. Doesn’t make it any less true.
“Yeah?” she asks, somehow reassured by his uncertainty.
He doesn’t answer.
He does, however, take the hand she lays out for him atop the table, the soft pale skin of her palm too empty against the dark wood to refuse filling. She curls her fingers around his, gives to him a smile he can’t keep, only return. The heel of his hand rests against the table, his fingertips against wood, and her hand a piece of soft heat between smooth hardness.
“We can stop by the flat,” he says. “Grab my jacket before going to the library.”
The offer takes her smile and helps it grow, transforms it into a grin and sends a sparkle into her eyes that has nothing to do with reflected light. On the table, their hands remain entangled, fingers curled around fingers soft and coarse and hot and warm. His knuckles beneath the idle pad of her thumb, the small digit of her small hand wanders across his skin in the small circles within her limited reach.
“That sounds good,” she tells him.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Sometime later, they remember their hunger or they simply remember to feel it. Their hands slip apart slowly, bold fingertips crossing shy palms. When curry makes it her turn to gulp down water, it becomes his turn to laugh. She kicks at him again.
This time, she doesn’t miss.
.-.-.-.-.-.
“You can stay down here,” he tells her, turning to the stairs. “I’ll just be a mo’.”
“I’m not that tired,” she insists, doesn’t let go of his hand and instead climbs beside him. Three flights of unhurried steps bring them to his floor and a short walk more brings them down the hall. He drops her hand to pull out his keys and her fingers ghost to the crook of his elbow before falling away.
The key sticks in the lock twice before he realizes he’s using the wrong one, before he realizes that of the four keys on the chain, he’s using one of the wrong two. For the umpteenth time, he gives the door a vague study, decides for the umpteenth time that no, there’s no place to hide the extra key, no small cubby behind the “P” that isn’t there.
He pulls the door open and nearly reaches for her hand again, nearly presses palm to palm. Instead, his hand finds the small of her back, rests there for a moment as she steps inside before him, falls away as she turns towards him, her eyes on his face.
“Don’t sit down,” he feels compelled to tell her, moving around her body to get to the closet, to his jacket, to his missing outer shell. “Last thing I need is a comatose teenager on my couch.”
“I’m twenty,” she says, surprise and sleepiness keeping her from true annoyance, at least for now.
He closes his mouth before he can make an abrupt end to a tiring day, gets to the point of this stop and leaves her standing by the door. He pulls his jacket from the hanger, slings it around his shoulders, thrusting his arms through the sleeves. The leather is heavy and his even if it isn’t his old jacket, even if the pockets on this one are depressingly small. The closet door is shut with a tap of his foot, with a second shove of a tap to get the latch to stick.
He turns around and she’s wide awake, eyes and mouth open. Her hand is on the doorframe, the other over her pocket, palm pressed over something long gone and far away.
His hands fall into his pockets and she steps forward, frees herself from the doorway with an expression his body won’t lean back from, won’t edge away from. His body won’t breathe either, lungs depending upon something other than nose and mouth for air, depending on something that isn’t there.
Her hands rise to smooth lapels, straighten them. It makes his t-shirt move over his shoulders, brings cotton to bunch, but he allows it, standing still, relearning how to breathe. She holds her lip between her teeth, pink and white and leaving pale, transient indents when she stops. He can feel air ghost over his tongue as he inhales, as they both inhale, as his uncertain breaths sync with hers. Her palms press down over leather and her gaze brushes against his throat, brushes across his cheekbones and nose. Brushes even, tentatively, over his lips and breath and silent voice.
Last of all, she looks into his eyes.
Her strong gaze wavers in his grip, wavers like the air in his lungs. It wants to leave, it needs to stay, it’s twisting his mind around in circles from the way it behaves, refuses to behave, doesn’t need to behave. He breathes out and looks to her hands, her hands on his straightened lapels.
His jacket has always been his armour, always in the forever since his girls died, forever since the thirtieth of December 1999. It’s always been his armour, but somehow, it fails to keep her out. Another layer between them only makes him all the more sure of her touch when he feels it, all the more certain of her small hands as they softly defy every barrier he possesses.
He pulls his hands from his pockets and she drops hers from his chest, drops hers into his. Each matches the grip of the other, holds tight and unsure.
“All right?” he asks.
“Yeah,” she says.
She’s addressing his shoulder, the leather-covered line of it, her sleepy eyes resting upon it as if recognizing a place of comfort.
He squeezes her hands and she looks at his face, looks at him and smiles.
“Yeah,” she says again, meaning it this time, her eyes bright with joy or relief or tears. Possibly all three, but he knows what he wants to believe.
“Fantastic,” he replies, grinning, hoping, and she holds with him her arms instead of her hands, releases his hands to hug him tight. Her cheek presses against leather and leather presses against cotton and cotton presses against skin and really, it’s not that far from cheek to chest, close enough to be strange when he fails to feel the air from her lungs, a peaceful sigh, a gift of peace she breaths out into him, beneath his hands.
He chuckles into her hair. “You’re mad, you are.”
“Yeah,” she says and pulls back with an increasingly solid smile. She leaves his arms empty and aching even as she fills his hand, even as she pulls him back to the door, back to the world. “And that’s fantastic, too.”
.-.-.-.-.-.
She pulls a chair over to him, watches him type, her cheek on his shoulder. His fingers immediately grow clumsy, too blunt for the keyboard. It makes him feel like a clod tonight.
He gets a noise of protest whenever he reaches for the mouse, but that’s just what she gets for using his arm as a pillow. “You use it, then,” he tells her and she does for a while, clicking links as he searches, discards option after option as it becomes clear there’s no solution to be found in this haystack of a problem.
Scrolling with the arrow keys, using shortcuts, he regains his former technical skill, enough to be functional. That sense of cloddishness fails to fade and when she pulls away, leaving his side cold, his first reaction is of worry.
She stretches a bit, bending this way and that where she sits, his one-time gymnast. Making a sound of pained contentment, she sits herself up straight and tall and leans back instead of to the side. He looks at her, merely curious, only that.
“The chair arm,” she says, tapping it with the palm of her hand, patting it. “It was digging into me.”
He nods, silently accepting this piece of logic for what it is because this is, after all, a library. Even if it wasn’t, he wouldn’t particularly care to talk: they aren’t alone, even this time of night. It was hard enough finding an open library on a Saturday evening and it isn’t really all that much longer before it becomes Sunday morning. Early, early, early Sunday morning and they’ll have been kicked out of here long before then. Not much they’ll be able to do in the more reasonable hours of the day either, not in terms of anything computer-related. Sundays and libraries never seem to mix.
He sighs and she yawns. He gives her a look and she giggles. Shaking his head, he gets back to business while they still have time. For once, their hands meet by accident.
They fight silently over the mouse until closing time rolls around.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He hugs her goodnight between the double doors of the entryway, pulls away before her hands can pull him closer, before her hands can keep him distant. His movements are preemptory for every outcome, for all outcomes, but the way she smiles at him, she doesn’t seem hurt, doesn’t seem aware.
“Who’s waking up who?” she asks him, calls after him as he leaves, before he leaves, before he can get through that door and before she goes through hers. “And don’t give me that ‘I don’t need sleep’ talk.”
He rolls his eyes. “Compared to the narcoleptic I’m talking to.”
“I got my second wind,” she counters and yes, this is true. She’s been awake since the flat and it makes him think she’s running on reserve power, on emergency backups.
“Now who’s giving the ‘I don’t need sleep’ talk?”
She rolls her eyes at him in clear parody.
He grins.
“First one awake calls the other, yeah?” she asks him as if the plan were already decided upon, as if this were merely last-minute confirmation.
He raises his eyebrows. “You can use a phone in the morning?” he asks, a skeptic with a doubting grin.
She gives him a look, pulls her mobile from her pocket and sets to pressing buttons, beeping out some sort of process. “There,” she says once finished, almost defiant, mock-proud. “Speed dial. I could call you with my eyes closed.” With that, she grins at him, her tongue between her teeth, her eyes bright for all the exhaustion he knows she’s fighting. She’s running on adrenaline or maybe they both are and maybe that doesn’t matter so long as they part ways and go to bed, fall asleep.
He wants to challenge her words, knows she’s expecting him to, thinks she’s expecting him to, but he knows if he does, they’ll never stop talking, here between these doors, getting in the way of sleepy tourists with bulky backpacks. And if they make enough of a nuisance of themselves, he’s sure she’d ask him up and then the night would be a waste. Her couch is far, far too cramped for a man with his legs and the second he sits down, he’s dropping off to sleep.
He’d rather not spend all of tomorrow stiff and aching, he decides and so that’s why he acts the way he does.
“Have fun with that,” he tells her, trying only half-heartedly for sarcasm. “Now go to bed.”
“Good night,” she says again, undeterred in her good humour. She hugs him again, holds tight, her arms folded behind his neck. Her earring scrapes against the side of his face, a tang of sensation that insists upon being felt, upon lasting, proof of her cheek against his.
He walks back to his flat that night with his hands warm in his pockets.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Gold and brown and black, her hair is soft in his hands, between his fingers, a fluid flow in length and shade and texture.
He whispers her name into her mouth, sounds that taste of home, a summons that brings her to laugh as she stoops to lift his battered fedora from the floor.
“Always the amnesiac,” she teases, holding a hat filled with shorn curls, brown and chestnut, the reek of burnt hair interfering with the spice of her smile.
“Psychoanalyst,” he accuses.
“Psychobabbleist,” she corrects.
“Yes,” he says, taking the hat from her hands, setting it aside, trying to set it aside.
She snatches it back, looks at him accusingly, green eyes flashing brown. “You can’t wear it,” she tells him. “You fell off your chain and fell into the street.” She frowns a frown she’s yet to frown, an expression yet to belong to her. “You can’t wear it.”
“Doesn’t fit,” he says with an agitated shrug, reaching for her. “Now put it down.”
“Of course it does,” she tells him, kissing collarbone beneath cloth. “Empty it out and of course it will,” she tells his temples, whispering into burning skin with wisps of smoke buried in her lips.
“Fred,” he says and she pulls back, smiling, always smiling, forever smiling until the world burned in San Francisco and the thunder cried out, metallic and afraid.
She steps away and he lunges forward and she laughs, slipping from his grip, kissing raindrops falling from his palms.
“Fred,” he says again, that or something like it. “Don’t-”
“Do,” she corrects. “Always do, unless you haven’t.”
The fedora floats in rainwater, locks of hair curling into cinders. “What?”
She stands on tiptoe, a galaxy away, and her breath brushes the corner of his mouth goodbye.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He can see the ceiling. There’s some light from the window, entirely artificial, and he can see the ceiling.
He stares at it, unsure of where else to look, unsure of how else to stay awake.
Eventually, he closes his eyes.
.-.-.-.-.-.
“Your mother’s driving me up the wall,” he admits and two pairs of eyes focus on him.
“Whose mum?”
“Hers,” he answers.
A grin, tongue-touched. “Never can tell.”
“Mum’s always driving him up the wall,” Susan says brightly, leaping onto his back, her arms around his neck, her noise holding laughter inside. “Carry me!”
“You’re too old,” he tells her and when he sets her down, she jumps away to catch the human hand of a boy he almost approves of.
His girl laughs, watching his child leave him, watching his child want to leave him. “They’re cute,” she says, a thin, broken chain dangling from her pocket.
“No,” he says and hands her back his soul in a mint tin, her fingers hot around crafted skin.
She slips it to its chain, lets it dangle, lets it fall against her hip. Lets it rest against a soft curve of heat. “Yes.”
He shrugs. “S’pose.”
She leans into his front, her arms around his neck. “Carry me,” she says.
“You’re too young,” he tells her, but when he sets her down, it’s his hand she picks to hold.
.-.-.-.-.-.
This time, he gets up.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He hears the buzzer as he climbs out of the shower, yells through the wall that he’ll be there in just a mo’. His t-shirt sticks wetly to his back and shoulders as he shakes his legs more fully into his trousers, as he buttons up his fly. He walks as he dresses, feet bare and leaving dark footprints in a carpet he never does seem to get around to vacuuming.
He throws off the chain and gives the doorknob a twist. Pulls the door open and sees the face he expects to see.
“Hi,” she says, a paper bag in her hands.
“Hello,” he says, leaning against the doorframe.
Her eyes finally let his go, move lower. “You’ve got your t-shirt on backwards.”
“You’ve got pastries,” he counters, which is by far the worst comeback he has ever used.
She laughs, following him inside. “Did you get any sleep at all?”
He shrugs, moving to the kitchenette as she places the bag on his coffee table and drops herself on his couch. “Enough,” he replies, putting the kettle on, feeling drops of water leave his hair and run down his neck. “You?”
“Yeah.” She pulls her legs up onto lumpy cushion, hugs her bare knees as she leans against the back of the couch. Her head rests on it, her hair briefly falling over her face before she tucks it back behind her ear, before she contains it behind her shoulders. He wonders if that’s what she always looks like, when she’s leaning against him.
“You look tired,” he says.
“Your t-shirt’s on backwards,” she replies, as if settles the issue.
“I like the way the tag tickles my throat,” he answers, deadpan.
She smiles.
“Thought we were goin’ t’ call each other,” he continues, opening the cabinet above the toaster to pull out the flimsy box with the teabags inside.
“You didn’t call me,” she points out. “An’ I would’ve felt bad waking you without food.”
“You didn’t have to,” he starts to say.
“Early morning peace offering,” she interrupts. “In case of unexpected grump.”
“Grump?” he repeats, turning to her, a mug in each hand. He sets one down on the counter behind them, leaning against the surface as he looks at her.
“Happens to the best of us,” she replies, shrugging. “Mostly to you.”
“S’pose that makes me the best of us all.”
He expects her to give him a rebuttal, but she gives him a smile instead. “Yeah,” she doesn’t say: “You are.”
What she does say comes after a small shift in position, after she folds her legs a little beneath her instead of hugging her knees against her chest. “Looks like you’ve managed to avoid it, this morning.”
“Thanks, I think,” he tells her, not at all sarcastic, not looking to see if she’s smiling.
She is.
“Haven’t got milk,” he informs her after taking the smallest of looks inside the fridge.
“What have you got?”
“A carton of old Chinese,” he says, looking behind it to find that yes, that is the sum of his fridge’s contents. “So unless you’d fancy an eggroll in your tea...”
“I’ll pass,” she laughs. “Need a different kind of tea, for that.”
He gives her a look and she laughs again. Not knowing quite what to make of that, with her, he simply says, “Like ‘em cold, me.”
“Yeah?” She tucks her hair behind her ears, looking at him as if he’s just reminded her of something she already knows, something that doesn’t need repeating. “Me too,” she says, like he should know that.
He puts the other mug down, already considering that one hers. “Ever had lo mein cold?”
“Vegetable or beef?” she asks, as if that could possibly be appetizing.
“Either,” he says, shrugging.
“Nope,” she replies, looks at him as if she expects him to harass her about her need to clarify.
He rolls his eyes to make her smile. “In my professional opinion, I’d highly recommend against it.”
“Can’t be that bad.”
“Want some?” he asks, very much wanting to see her expression.
“Sure,” she says, leaning forward on the couch, her legs folded beneath her. “I’ve had weirder than that.” He’s already pulling the carton out from the fridge, opening a drawer and pulling out a fork. Dropping the utensil into the mass of lo mein and eggroll, he moves around the counter, puts the carton into her reaching hand.
She settles back into the couch and he leans against the counter to watch the first bite of cold, slippery noodles disappear into her mouth. He waits for a reaction that never comes.
“S’ not bad, actually,” she decides, swallowing the mouthful down, possibly without chewing. “D’you want the eggrolls?”
In the end, breakfast consists of the pair of them sitting side-by-side on his lumpy couch, him wiping off eggroll grease on his jeans and her balancing the carton on her knee as she sips from her mug. The pastries sit on the coffee table with his tea, sad and ignored, untouched.
Her hair hangs down, tickles his arm, brushes against his arm in a touch less tangible than the slow, unsteady stroke of her short sleeve against his skin. It’s a light touch, very slight, too slight to shift away from, too little to do anything about, to need to do anything about.
The carton on her knee slips, leans against his leg as well, caught in the crease between two thighs. He catches the fork before it can clatter to the floor, sets it back in the flimsy box and sets the entire thing down on the coffee table.
“Ready to go?” he asks her, getting up.
She nods, her eyes smiling no matter how she bites her lip.
“What?”
She smiles wider.
“What?”
It’s only when she starts to giggle that, shaking his head at her and feeling the tag scratch at his throat, he realizes his t-shirt’s still on backwards.
.-.-.-.-.-.
The market doesn’t come close to being helpful, not in the slightest. This doesn’t seem to faze her, yesterday’s surge of activity having worn down to something constant and solid and unwavering. Any signs of panic have been scraped off by experience, leaving purpose.
She’s a sight to see, now that’s she’s calm. Almost unrushed, unhurried. But something about her still gives the lie, something about her still says that no, this isn’t a tourist, this isn’t simply some random girl the crowd’s spat out. She’s someone, someone worth watching as she asks after fob watches in three languages now, her Catalan worse than her Spanish. This smiling woman is a far cry from the lost girl he found two mornings ago.
Her eyes are bright, her smile quick, her fingers alive in his hand. She’s come into her own today, is patient and bright and keeps to his side like there’s no reason in the world to leave it.
She’s fantastic.
All the same, he tries not to watch the line of her mouth when they do find old watches, when she takes a look at all of them and shakes her head, telling him in English which ways the watches are wrong, painting him a picture of her clockwork mint tin. She dims just a bit each and every time, just a little, just enough that he wants to do something stupid and overly protective, if only he could figure out what that would be.
Today, though, dimming slowly instead of burning out, she still manages to find strangers to befriend. People who look at her and glance at him, look at her and glance at him again, people who look at him and then give their hands a stare. She never seems to notice, never does more than smile when they look at him. Sometimes she looks at him too and that’s when she outright grins, like they’ve got this joke that no one else knows or could come close to understanding. Like it’s just them.
And so he thinks that maybe, maybe they have got something like that.
He smiles too.
.-.-.-.-.-.-.
He takes her to lunch in return for the pastries they never ate, sits down outside with her in chairs made of metal and plastic, chairs burning and melting in the sun. They perch and lean forward with their hands on their knees, neither risking setting their arms on the table just yet.
Chair legs scratch against stone as they eventually adjust, as their own shadows cool their seats. He looks at her in the sunlight, in the midday sun with no dappled shadow across her lips, thinks of a day in a park when there was.
“Tell me, Rose Tyler,” he says, sounding out the name as if trying to fit the person inside it. “Who are you?”
There’s no blink, no start, no show of nerves. He has the sudden feeling that nothing he can do - nothing he could ever do - could scare this girl of his.
“How d’you mean?” she asks, a simple question as she runs her fingers up and down the ice-filled glass that, supposedly, also contains lemonade. She touches her fingertips to the table afterwards, transplants condensation to watch it evaporate.
“Just stuff, I s’pose,” he replies, watching the movement of her hand. “School and home and London and all that. The things that swatted you over the head and made you grow up.”
She looks up from her handiwork, the water’s depth already half gone. “Why’re you askin’?”
“‘Cause I don’t know.”
This is what gives her pause; this is what always gives her pause. It’s never his actions, always his reasons, always the rational she just can’t quite get.
“Unless you don’t want to tell me,” he adds, shrugging like it doesn’t matter. Shrugging because he’s never been needy in his life and he’s not about to start now.
“I do,” she says quickly. “I- Yeah, I do.” She pauses, her tongue playing in her mouth to stall her words. “S’ just... you know.”
The emphasis is strange on that, makes him blink and lean forward and open his mouth to ask her what she’s on about. She interrupts before he can begin.
“Okay, maybe you don’t. Know how it is,” she adds, like it needs the adding.
“Depends on the ‘it’,” he replies, taking a sip of his similarly lemonade-flavoured ice, and she smiles at that.
“S’like...” she starts to say and by now, he knows her more than well enough not to interrupt, not to make things easy and try to speak for her, no matter how her eyes ask him to.
He drops his gaze. Finds the water on the table is gone, evaporated into the air or sucked into the hard surface while he wasn’t looking.
“S’like,” she says and it’s safe to look at her again. “S’like, when my shop blew up. I mean, I didn’t like it much, yeah? But it was a job and I’m out of school - been out since I was sixteen - and that’s what you do. You go to school and then you go to work and then that’s it. That’s life.”
He considers her when she looks for comment. “Most would add a little more to that.”
“Telly and beans on toast?” she asks, expecting a yes.
He raises his eyebrows. “That, or maybe something about continuing the species.”
“Don’t want kids,” she answers simply.
He shrugs. “You’re twenty. If you did, I’d be scared.”
She gives him a look.
“What?”
“My mum’s thirty-nine,” she says.
“Ah.”
“Don’t,” she tells him, a warning.
“Did they love each other?” he asks bluntly, using the past tense only because he knows the male half of this pair is dead.
“Yeah,” she says, and then thinks about it. “Yeah. They would’ve made it.”
A daughter’s hope or a woman’s outlook; he knows which one he thinks it is, but he agrees with her nonetheless. “All right, then.”
Their words rest uneasily between them, twisting and turning, shifting.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asks, not half so angry or defensive in tone as her words would imply. She’s curious with an edge, confused at him. “You sayin’ ‘all you need is love’ is more than a song?”
“Isn’t it pretty to think so,” he replies, mixing music quotes with literary.
“You tell me, Hemingway,” she counters, a response which blindsides him completely.
“You dropped out at fifteen and you read Hemingway?” he asks, wondering at the five years between then and now, amazed at them.
She smiles, a minx, and then she shakes her head, fingers tracing around the rim of her glass before once again dabbing the table with condensation. “Nah,” she says, and that’s where she stumbles. “I’ve- My friend. He, well. He had this library.”
She says the word like it’s special, like it deserves to be capitalized for the sheer intensity of the object and the inability of the syllables to contain that intensity, that force, that reality. He nods a bit, waiting for her to go on.
“I’d never loved a library before,” she confesses and she’s grinning and her eyes grow distant even as she looks into his eyes, as she looks through his eyes and into a place she wants to be.
“But this one?” he prompts.
“This one, yeah,” she says, a schoolgirl admitting a crush. “It felt... right, y’know? It’s like you’d walk inside and be all... all, I dunno, nestled. He had the weirdest chairs in there, but there was this one, yeah? Perfect chair. You could sit down in one of those reading sprawls - y’know, like when you’ve got your leg over the chair arm and you’re all twisted up and it should be awkward but it isn’t? Perfect chair for that.”
“And that’s where you read Hemingway?” he asks, a little lost in her tangent, a little lost with her looking through him.
She shakes her head, her hair pulled over her shoulders by the motion, helped by a soft breeze made of air and heat and salt. “He read it to me.”
“Your friend,” he says and she nods, ducks her head a little.
“Yeah,” she says, like she’s only got the one, like she’s only got the one who’s important. She tucks her hair back over her shoulder, back behind her ear and he doesn’t want her to. “Didn’t start with Ernest, though. Bit of Charlie’s stuff - Dickens, I mean, he likes to call him Charlie - and then there was a little while with mythology. Mostly Greek, really.” She laughs a bit, looking at him like he should know the joke, like she’ll try to help him see it. “With all the different versions and stuff it morphs into. And how all the gods have more flaws than the people.”
He’s been keeping his mouth busy with his drink, but it’s not long before there nothing left to be busy with. “And you like all that?”
“Most of it, yeah,” she says. “An’ Greek plays are always better when nobody gets killed during ‘em,” she adds as a strange and somewhat unnerving aside.
“You’re a comedy person,” he surmises.
“Still say comedy is humour, not just someone not dying.” She shrugs a little. “Don’t like defining things like that.”
“By negatives, you mean,” he says.
She nods. “Yeah. Spent a long time thinking about having a life without a dad. But that’s not it, not really.”
“Then what is it?” he asks because he knows she wants to tell him. Because he wants her to want to tell him things.
“Well, there was my life with my mum and my dad. And then there was life with mum. My life with Jimmy - thank god that’s over. After that, it was me with mum and Mickey and then, well. Yeah. And- and then us an’ Jack.”
“And what about now?” he asks because he wants to hear it.
“Now it’s you and me,” she says, tells him like it’s the simplest thing in the world, as if it’s really that easy to understand, that uncomplicated and straightforward.
Maybe it is.
.-.-.-.-.-.
“We could ride somewhere,” she says, asking him with a statement, looking at him as if expecting him to wander off, to get bored and irritable any moment now.
Not even a week since he’s gotten out of hospital - not even a week since he went in - and he knows he shouldn’t. He thinks to say yes, thinks of riding far and fast and getting them both some distance from this city.
He thinks of it.
“Nah,” he says, takes her hand, the one decision he never thinks about. “We’re fine here.”
.-.-.-.-.-.
Afternoon turns to evening and evening into night. A walk becomes a journey and a journey finds its destination in his little flat, the two of them sitting on the carpet with a deck of cards between them. He teaches her and teaches her again and once she beats him, then he plays for real.
“Teach me Spanish,” she says, watching him shuffle out a new game.
He glances up, the movements of his hands slowing slightly. “Demanding little thing, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” she says and of course, that doesn’t bring him to smile.
“Right then,” he says, dealing out a complicated set up, three cards face down, three face up, draw piles of many and hands of four. He never asks if she already knows the rules.
Their last lesson was a while back and so a little review doesn’t go amiss. He talks about the basics and she listens, repeats. Él y ella, he and she, him and her. Yo y tú, me and you. Nosotros.
We.
Us.
He’s talking about conjugation and tenses and he nearly waits for a voice to jokingly call him professor, but that was a long time ago and far away. He lays down the ace of clubs on the pile, grins as she glowers, as she picks up the half a deck that’s become her hand to get rid of.
They play until she loses spectacularly, and he grins at her until she grins back. From there, she gets up to use the loo and he puts the cards away slowly, fighting that irritating awkwardness of having a guest leave their poor host alone to use the bathroom.
He takes Don Quixote from his shelf, sits on his couch and reads a page or four, waiting. He feels a right idiot, waiting for her for even that short time, feels as if his life has been set on pause and pushed to the side to wait the minute she’s not next to him. It’s disconcerting in the extreme and then it’s over and fails to matter.
She plunks down next to him, sets her feet on the coffee table beside his. Lifting his arm for him, she tucks herself under, presses herself against him in a fit that’s right, perfectly right on the first try, as if this is already her accustomed place. Her shoulder beneath his arm, his arm around her shoulders. Her hair tickles the crook of his elbow, pleasant and soft. Her arm is trapped between their sides, her hand resting on her thigh.
“You read fast,” she tells him, her hand on her hand on her thigh as she settles in. Her legs cross at the ankles, mimicking his, mirroring his. Her battered trainers tap his boots, receive a like reply.
He makes no motion towards modesty, managing to turn the page one-handedly. “A bit, yeah.”
“Read to me?” This, she asks.
“At a normal speed, you mean.” He turns back to the beginning without glancing at his page number first, neither realizes nor cares.
“Yeah,” she says.
“All right,” he says, and reads.
He doesn’t have a library or an amazing chair, but he does have his voice and another man’s words and that’s going to have to be good enough. It’ll be made to be good enough. They go on, go back in time and through the space between life as it is and life as it should be. A small running commentary develops, sends her smiling against his shoulder.
He thinks she’s smiling at least. It’s difficult to tell with the part of her hair close enough to kiss: he can’t see her face. She relaxes as he reads on, laughs where it’s good to laugh and interrupts where it’s inconvenient. He explains the fictional folly of an old man when she asks or when her head turns like so and presses like this, the larger accompaniment to a confused frown he doesn’t need to see to recognize.
Night drifts towards morning and his throat dries with speech. His burr is slowly becoming a rasp and he keeps going past the point where water is needed. She prompts him towards the action with a question, one almost rhetorical.
It takes her by surprise when he takes her seriously.
Once again, there is tea and now, at the opposite end of the day, the pastries are finally eaten. He opens the bag at last, expecting something flaky and unfulfilling. That’s what he finds for her, not for him.
“What’s this, then?” he asks, holding up the small wrapped slices of something.
“Banana bread,” she tells him and he wishes he’d asked sooner.
The drink is hot and the food vaguely stale and both are consumed very, very slowly before he walks her back to her hotel, before she takes his hand in the dark.
Tonight, he crosses through both doors, hugs her close and tight in the lobby. She looks back at him as she moves to the lift, looks back at him, shy and double-checking that he’s yet to disappear. Laughing, he shoos her on up.
He walks home with a grin, falls asleep with one.
.-.-.-.-.-.
On second thought, maybe Sundays aren’t so bad after all.
.-.-.-.-.-.
<-- | -->
Author: rallalon | Rall
Beta: vyctori
Rating: PG13, AU towards the end of Season One; 9!Smith.
Disclaimer: Do not own.
Summary: “Good night,” she says again, undeterred. She hugs him again, holds tight, her arms folded behind his neck. Her earring scrapes against the side of his face, a tang of sensation that insists upon being felt, upon lasting, proof of her cheek against his.
A/N: For purely comedic purposes, I feel I should point out that the entirety of this chapter was written while I had a series of bananas duct-taped to the door. Ah, life.
The Tourist
The Girl
The Runaway
The Puzzle
The Passenger
The Victim
The Absent
The Found
The Determined
She’s not exactly subtle, his girl.
Her persistence through the stalls has already been noted on their second day of searching, and that’s not a good thing. When they find this watch of hers - and the way she moves, the way she focuses so completely makes him believe that it’s when and not if - when they find this watch, the bargaining for it will be absurd. He has no doubt she’d empty her bank account to regain the mock-timepiece for her doctor, but that’s hardly something they want the world to know, especially a world that sets the price tag.
She gives no attention to the looks she gathers, to the curious glances and the gazes more focused. He moves with her, stands at her side, corrects her Spanish and translates for her in Catalan. They sweat and he can hear her stomach rumble, but it’s him that gets them lunch, him that brings her by the hand to food and drink and rest. It’s her who pulls him back into the thick of it with nothing more than a determined glance.
This becomes their world, two people in the crowd, two lost little people looking for a tiny nothing in an ocean of everything.
And who knows. Maybe they’ll find something.
Maybe.
.-.-.-.-.-.
“Rose,” he says, and she looks at him.
Her eyes are focused, pupils matching the growing dark. Artificial light is taking over slowly around them, the sun having more than begun to set, to disappear, to vanish. Her face is in shadow without any shadow across it and he stares, wondering, until she snaps him out of it, touches his arm where there’s no sleeve to cover it.
“Yeah?” she asks, has already asked. Asks again. “What?”
Water, he thinks, looking at the worried line of her mouth only to feel his balance start to leave him. He should drink something.
“They’re packing up,” he tells her, uncertain if that’s what he initially meant to say. “C’mon. Let’s get a bite to eat.” Because lunch was a long time ago and she needs to sit down. Because he could let her go now, could take the remainder of his Saturday and spend a few moments alone. Because he could do that and he might still do that, but for now, for now he doesn’t need to.
They’ve been at it all day and he’s not sick of her yet.
She looks around them, sets down a basket of knickknacks she’d been searching through with a focus at once intent and vague, her once-bright hope now faded into smoldering determination. Two days at this, today the first full day, and she’s not half so exhausted as he’d been sure she would be. He doesn’t bother being surprised; there’s always more to her than meets the eye.
She bites her bottom lip, tempted to remain, and he takes her hand, saying, “We’ll go to the library after. Check those online auctions.”
He waits for a nod and then leads her out of Els Encants, takes her hand in his and walks past food stalls and restaurants until they’re in a part of the city he can pretend she’s safe in. She plods along beside him, bleary-eyed and just a touch clumsy, just a little lost. His hand slips from hers to rest at the small of her back, to lightly cradle the curve of her spine in the cup of his palm.
He lets her footsteps guide them once they’re in a region he might term tourist-friendly if she weren’t friendlier still towards everything jeopardous. He lets her footsteps guide them, but her footsteps only lead her to lean against his side, to lean into him, and his hand slips from the curve of her spine to the curve of her hip, concave to converse beneath a soft cotton top. Her head rests on his upper arm, a tired lean as they walk, his steps shortening to match hers, to keep from jarring her and to keep on keeping her.
“C’mon,” he says again. “We’ll get you fed.”
“Here,” she says, her jaw moving against cotton and cotton moving against skin and he wants his jacket back, wants not to have left it back at the flat. To pull the leather around him or to wrap his tank-topped companion in, he’s not sure. One or the other or both, perhaps, simply not at the same time.
“Here?” he says, pointing at the neon sign proclaiming Thai food.
“Yeah,” she says, and he brings her inside.
.-.-.-.-.-.
It’s bright and warm and loud in the restaurant in a way that quickly sends her dozing in the booth. Resting her head turns into resting her eyes and that simply turns into rest. Hardly needing to talk to her after spending an entire day attached at the hip, he lets her doze, takes a strange sort of amusement in how much she needs sleep.
Honestly, he thinks and then yawns.
He orders for her, increasingly inclined to simply put his head down on the table and join her in a light slumber as the night goes on, as he waits for the food to the sound of other people eating and talking and laughing. The noise in his life is temporarily silent and maybe he wants to wake her after all.
Head nested in her folded arms, her hair spills down her back, drapes itself haphazardly over her arms and hands and napkin, comes close to the condensation gathered upon the glass at her elbow. He reaches forward, pulls the glass closer to him, away from the arms of his sleeping girl. If she spills, sleeping in the position she is, he’s not helping to clean it up.
When the food comes, he wakes her, a hand on her arm and a slight pressure of the fingers. She blinks, sits up, gives the waiter a sheepish look that soon turns into a smile at the dishes in the man’s hands. Obviously at the dishes, not the man. The waiter makes a remark and she laughs at herself, revived for at least this moment, for at least this now.
“All right?” he asks once alone again.
“Yeah,” she says and though he’s holding a fork, his hand feels empty, feels strangely better when he puts the utensil down.
He picks up his glass, condensation slicking his palm, dampening the undersides of his fingers as he raises the water to his lips, as oversized ice cubes hit against his lips and teeth. When he sets the glass down once more, there’s more liquid water outside than within. His lips are cold from ice resting against them and he wipes his mouth warm with the back of his hand.
She’s staring at him, watching him like he’s the strange one while she behaves like a narcoleptic. “Thirsty?” she asks, brown eyebrows trying to meet a blond hairline.
“Tired?” he counters.
She smiles while rolling her eyes and pushes her glass towards him across the lacquered wood of the table, a small trail of water following, bringing the swirls in the dark wood to sparkle. He pushes it back, glass sliding easily over smooth, wet wood. They invent a game, sliding her glass back and forth before the waiter reappears, water jug in hand, ready to refill his glass and settle the issue. Another sheepish smile from his girl and he wonders.
“He’s a bit pretty,” he says derisively and she blinks at him.
“He’s a bit old for me,” she counters and they both pause, glancing at the retreating back of a man in his mid-thirties.
He brings his glass back to still-chilled lips and finds he’s no longer thirsty. It’s difficult to tell, sometimes.
“Tomorrow,” he says instead, starts to say.
“Yeah?” she interrupts, hurrying into speech.
“We’ll hit the stalls by Sant Antoni market,” he says, stating rather than asking. “Provided you can be awake for it.”
She leans forward, nodding, gathering her hair up and trying to keep it behind her shoulders and out of her food. Her eyes don’t move from his. “I will be, yeah,” she says, like she’s accepting a dare.
“Good,” he says, like he’s accepting a promise.
She closes her eyes, opens them and breathes out, the motion too slow to be called a blink. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” He eyes his glass, the smudge of dirt from his hand slowly dripping down in the water droplets. It’s something to look at, something that doesn’t look back, a brown that’s literally been watered down. “And it’s only the morning - you can take a nap afterwards.”
She kicks him under the table, tries to.
She misses.
He grins.
This time, she gets his shin, a tap of the toes of her trainer. She never wears flip-flops, barely ever sandals, he recalls vaguely, wondering whether or not to bait her further and risk an accurate kick. It’s always trainers, lately, always shoes for running. Makes sense, when he thinks about her, when he thinks she spends her life running from what’s behind her.
“Isn’t that what siesta is supposed to be for? Sleeping, yeah?” she asks. “‘Cause it gets hot.”
“It’s not that hot out,” he replies. “Still only June: hardly need to bunk down and wait out the afternoon.” He looks down from her brown eyes, moves rice noodles from plate to fork to mouth. It’s a different sort of spicy than the pork sausages at lunch.
“Where’d your jacket go, then?”
He looks up, surprised at the edge in her question. “What?” he asks with his mouth full. He swallows. “I’m not allowed out without it?”
“You don’t...” She trails off, bites her lip, chewing on that instead of the neglected contents of her cooling plate.
“I don’t what?”
“You don’t look like you,” she says when he waits for an answer. “When you’re not wearing it, I mean.”
“Don’t feel like me without it,” he says, the admission unexpected, the thought unthought until spoken. Doesn’t make it any less true.
“Yeah?” she asks, somehow reassured by his uncertainty.
He doesn’t answer.
He does, however, take the hand she lays out for him atop the table, the soft pale skin of her palm too empty against the dark wood to refuse filling. She curls her fingers around his, gives to him a smile he can’t keep, only return. The heel of his hand rests against the table, his fingertips against wood, and her hand a piece of soft heat between smooth hardness.
“We can stop by the flat,” he says. “Grab my jacket before going to the library.”
The offer takes her smile and helps it grow, transforms it into a grin and sends a sparkle into her eyes that has nothing to do with reflected light. On the table, their hands remain entangled, fingers curled around fingers soft and coarse and hot and warm. His knuckles beneath the idle pad of her thumb, the small digit of her small hand wanders across his skin in the small circles within her limited reach.
“That sounds good,” she tells him.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Sometime later, they remember their hunger or they simply remember to feel it. Their hands slip apart slowly, bold fingertips crossing shy palms. When curry makes it her turn to gulp down water, it becomes his turn to laugh. She kicks at him again.
This time, she doesn’t miss.
.-.-.-.-.-.
“You can stay down here,” he tells her, turning to the stairs. “I’ll just be a mo’.”
“I’m not that tired,” she insists, doesn’t let go of his hand and instead climbs beside him. Three flights of unhurried steps bring them to his floor and a short walk more brings them down the hall. He drops her hand to pull out his keys and her fingers ghost to the crook of his elbow before falling away.
The key sticks in the lock twice before he realizes he’s using the wrong one, before he realizes that of the four keys on the chain, he’s using one of the wrong two. For the umpteenth time, he gives the door a vague study, decides for the umpteenth time that no, there’s no place to hide the extra key, no small cubby behind the “P” that isn’t there.
He pulls the door open and nearly reaches for her hand again, nearly presses palm to palm. Instead, his hand finds the small of her back, rests there for a moment as she steps inside before him, falls away as she turns towards him, her eyes on his face.
“Don’t sit down,” he feels compelled to tell her, moving around her body to get to the closet, to his jacket, to his missing outer shell. “Last thing I need is a comatose teenager on my couch.”
“I’m twenty,” she says, surprise and sleepiness keeping her from true annoyance, at least for now.
He closes his mouth before he can make an abrupt end to a tiring day, gets to the point of this stop and leaves her standing by the door. He pulls his jacket from the hanger, slings it around his shoulders, thrusting his arms through the sleeves. The leather is heavy and his even if it isn’t his old jacket, even if the pockets on this one are depressingly small. The closet door is shut with a tap of his foot, with a second shove of a tap to get the latch to stick.
He turns around and she’s wide awake, eyes and mouth open. Her hand is on the doorframe, the other over her pocket, palm pressed over something long gone and far away.
His hands fall into his pockets and she steps forward, frees herself from the doorway with an expression his body won’t lean back from, won’t edge away from. His body won’t breathe either, lungs depending upon something other than nose and mouth for air, depending on something that isn’t there.
Her hands rise to smooth lapels, straighten them. It makes his t-shirt move over his shoulders, brings cotton to bunch, but he allows it, standing still, relearning how to breathe. She holds her lip between her teeth, pink and white and leaving pale, transient indents when she stops. He can feel air ghost over his tongue as he inhales, as they both inhale, as his uncertain breaths sync with hers. Her palms press down over leather and her gaze brushes against his throat, brushes across his cheekbones and nose. Brushes even, tentatively, over his lips and breath and silent voice.
Last of all, she looks into his eyes.
Her strong gaze wavers in his grip, wavers like the air in his lungs. It wants to leave, it needs to stay, it’s twisting his mind around in circles from the way it behaves, refuses to behave, doesn’t need to behave. He breathes out and looks to her hands, her hands on his straightened lapels.
His jacket has always been his armour, always in the forever since his girls died, forever since the thirtieth of December 1999. It’s always been his armour, but somehow, it fails to keep her out. Another layer between them only makes him all the more sure of her touch when he feels it, all the more certain of her small hands as they softly defy every barrier he possesses.
He pulls his hands from his pockets and she drops hers from his chest, drops hers into his. Each matches the grip of the other, holds tight and unsure.
“All right?” he asks.
“Yeah,” she says.
She’s addressing his shoulder, the leather-covered line of it, her sleepy eyes resting upon it as if recognizing a place of comfort.
He squeezes her hands and she looks at his face, looks at him and smiles.
“Yeah,” she says again, meaning it this time, her eyes bright with joy or relief or tears. Possibly all three, but he knows what he wants to believe.
“Fantastic,” he replies, grinning, hoping, and she holds with him her arms instead of her hands, releases his hands to hug him tight. Her cheek presses against leather and leather presses against cotton and cotton presses against skin and really, it’s not that far from cheek to chest, close enough to be strange when he fails to feel the air from her lungs, a peaceful sigh, a gift of peace she breaths out into him, beneath his hands.
He chuckles into her hair. “You’re mad, you are.”
“Yeah,” she says and pulls back with an increasingly solid smile. She leaves his arms empty and aching even as she fills his hand, even as she pulls him back to the door, back to the world. “And that’s fantastic, too.”
.-.-.-.-.-.
She pulls a chair over to him, watches him type, her cheek on his shoulder. His fingers immediately grow clumsy, too blunt for the keyboard. It makes him feel like a clod tonight.
He gets a noise of protest whenever he reaches for the mouse, but that’s just what she gets for using his arm as a pillow. “You use it, then,” he tells her and she does for a while, clicking links as he searches, discards option after option as it becomes clear there’s no solution to be found in this haystack of a problem.
Scrolling with the arrow keys, using shortcuts, he regains his former technical skill, enough to be functional. That sense of cloddishness fails to fade and when she pulls away, leaving his side cold, his first reaction is of worry.
She stretches a bit, bending this way and that where she sits, his one-time gymnast. Making a sound of pained contentment, she sits herself up straight and tall and leans back instead of to the side. He looks at her, merely curious, only that.
“The chair arm,” she says, tapping it with the palm of her hand, patting it. “It was digging into me.”
He nods, silently accepting this piece of logic for what it is because this is, after all, a library. Even if it wasn’t, he wouldn’t particularly care to talk: they aren’t alone, even this time of night. It was hard enough finding an open library on a Saturday evening and it isn’t really all that much longer before it becomes Sunday morning. Early, early, early Sunday morning and they’ll have been kicked out of here long before then. Not much they’ll be able to do in the more reasonable hours of the day either, not in terms of anything computer-related. Sundays and libraries never seem to mix.
He sighs and she yawns. He gives her a look and she giggles. Shaking his head, he gets back to business while they still have time. For once, their hands meet by accident.
They fight silently over the mouse until closing time rolls around.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He hugs her goodnight between the double doors of the entryway, pulls away before her hands can pull him closer, before her hands can keep him distant. His movements are preemptory for every outcome, for all outcomes, but the way she smiles at him, she doesn’t seem hurt, doesn’t seem aware.
“Who’s waking up who?” she asks him, calls after him as he leaves, before he leaves, before he can get through that door and before she goes through hers. “And don’t give me that ‘I don’t need sleep’ talk.”
He rolls his eyes. “Compared to the narcoleptic I’m talking to.”
“I got my second wind,” she counters and yes, this is true. She’s been awake since the flat and it makes him think she’s running on reserve power, on emergency backups.
“Now who’s giving the ‘I don’t need sleep’ talk?”
She rolls her eyes at him in clear parody.
He grins.
“First one awake calls the other, yeah?” she asks him as if the plan were already decided upon, as if this were merely last-minute confirmation.
He raises his eyebrows. “You can use a phone in the morning?” he asks, a skeptic with a doubting grin.
She gives him a look, pulls her mobile from her pocket and sets to pressing buttons, beeping out some sort of process. “There,” she says once finished, almost defiant, mock-proud. “Speed dial. I could call you with my eyes closed.” With that, she grins at him, her tongue between her teeth, her eyes bright for all the exhaustion he knows she’s fighting. She’s running on adrenaline or maybe they both are and maybe that doesn’t matter so long as they part ways and go to bed, fall asleep.
He wants to challenge her words, knows she’s expecting him to, thinks she’s expecting him to, but he knows if he does, they’ll never stop talking, here between these doors, getting in the way of sleepy tourists with bulky backpacks. And if they make enough of a nuisance of themselves, he’s sure she’d ask him up and then the night would be a waste. Her couch is far, far too cramped for a man with his legs and the second he sits down, he’s dropping off to sleep.
He’d rather not spend all of tomorrow stiff and aching, he decides and so that’s why he acts the way he does.
“Have fun with that,” he tells her, trying only half-heartedly for sarcasm. “Now go to bed.”
“Good night,” she says again, undeterred in her good humour. She hugs him again, holds tight, her arms folded behind his neck. Her earring scrapes against the side of his face, a tang of sensation that insists upon being felt, upon lasting, proof of her cheek against his.
He walks back to his flat that night with his hands warm in his pockets.
.-.-.-.-.-.
Gold and brown and black, her hair is soft in his hands, between his fingers, a fluid flow in length and shade and texture.
He whispers her name into her mouth, sounds that taste of home, a summons that brings her to laugh as she stoops to lift his battered fedora from the floor.
“Always the amnesiac,” she teases, holding a hat filled with shorn curls, brown and chestnut, the reek of burnt hair interfering with the spice of her smile.
“Psychoanalyst,” he accuses.
“Psychobabbleist,” she corrects.
“Yes,” he says, taking the hat from her hands, setting it aside, trying to set it aside.
She snatches it back, looks at him accusingly, green eyes flashing brown. “You can’t wear it,” she tells him. “You fell off your chain and fell into the street.” She frowns a frown she’s yet to frown, an expression yet to belong to her. “You can’t wear it.”
“Doesn’t fit,” he says with an agitated shrug, reaching for her. “Now put it down.”
“Of course it does,” she tells him, kissing collarbone beneath cloth. “Empty it out and of course it will,” she tells his temples, whispering into burning skin with wisps of smoke buried in her lips.
“Fred,” he says and she pulls back, smiling, always smiling, forever smiling until the world burned in San Francisco and the thunder cried out, metallic and afraid.
She steps away and he lunges forward and she laughs, slipping from his grip, kissing raindrops falling from his palms.
“Fred,” he says again, that or something like it. “Don’t-”
“Do,” she corrects. “Always do, unless you haven’t.”
The fedora floats in rainwater, locks of hair curling into cinders. “What?”
She stands on tiptoe, a galaxy away, and her breath brushes the corner of his mouth goodbye.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He can see the ceiling. There’s some light from the window, entirely artificial, and he can see the ceiling.
He stares at it, unsure of where else to look, unsure of how else to stay awake.
Eventually, he closes his eyes.
.-.-.-.-.-.
“Your mother’s driving me up the wall,” he admits and two pairs of eyes focus on him.
“Whose mum?”
“Hers,” he answers.
A grin, tongue-touched. “Never can tell.”
“Mum’s always driving him up the wall,” Susan says brightly, leaping onto his back, her arms around his neck, her noise holding laughter inside. “Carry me!”
“You’re too old,” he tells her and when he sets her down, she jumps away to catch the human hand of a boy he almost approves of.
His girl laughs, watching his child leave him, watching his child want to leave him. “They’re cute,” she says, a thin, broken chain dangling from her pocket.
“No,” he says and hands her back his soul in a mint tin, her fingers hot around crafted skin.
She slips it to its chain, lets it dangle, lets it fall against her hip. Lets it rest against a soft curve of heat. “Yes.”
He shrugs. “S’pose.”
She leans into his front, her arms around his neck. “Carry me,” she says.
“You’re too young,” he tells her, but when he sets her down, it’s his hand she picks to hold.
.-.-.-.-.-.
This time, he gets up.
.-.-.-.-.-.
He hears the buzzer as he climbs out of the shower, yells through the wall that he’ll be there in just a mo’. His t-shirt sticks wetly to his back and shoulders as he shakes his legs more fully into his trousers, as he buttons up his fly. He walks as he dresses, feet bare and leaving dark footprints in a carpet he never does seem to get around to vacuuming.
He throws off the chain and gives the doorknob a twist. Pulls the door open and sees the face he expects to see.
“Hi,” she says, a paper bag in her hands.
“Hello,” he says, leaning against the doorframe.
Her eyes finally let his go, move lower. “You’ve got your t-shirt on backwards.”
“You’ve got pastries,” he counters, which is by far the worst comeback he has ever used.
She laughs, following him inside. “Did you get any sleep at all?”
He shrugs, moving to the kitchenette as she places the bag on his coffee table and drops herself on his couch. “Enough,” he replies, putting the kettle on, feeling drops of water leave his hair and run down his neck. “You?”
“Yeah.” She pulls her legs up onto lumpy cushion, hugs her bare knees as she leans against the back of the couch. Her head rests on it, her hair briefly falling over her face before she tucks it back behind her ear, before she contains it behind her shoulders. He wonders if that’s what she always looks like, when she’s leaning against him.
“You look tired,” he says.
“Your t-shirt’s on backwards,” she replies, as if settles the issue.
“I like the way the tag tickles my throat,” he answers, deadpan.
She smiles.
“Thought we were goin’ t’ call each other,” he continues, opening the cabinet above the toaster to pull out the flimsy box with the teabags inside.
“You didn’t call me,” she points out. “An’ I would’ve felt bad waking you without food.”
“You didn’t have to,” he starts to say.
“Early morning peace offering,” she interrupts. “In case of unexpected grump.”
“Grump?” he repeats, turning to her, a mug in each hand. He sets one down on the counter behind them, leaning against the surface as he looks at her.
“Happens to the best of us,” she replies, shrugging. “Mostly to you.”
“S’pose that makes me the best of us all.”
He expects her to give him a rebuttal, but she gives him a smile instead. “Yeah,” she doesn’t say: “You are.”
What she does say comes after a small shift in position, after she folds her legs a little beneath her instead of hugging her knees against her chest. “Looks like you’ve managed to avoid it, this morning.”
“Thanks, I think,” he tells her, not at all sarcastic, not looking to see if she’s smiling.
She is.
“Haven’t got milk,” he informs her after taking the smallest of looks inside the fridge.
“What have you got?”
“A carton of old Chinese,” he says, looking behind it to find that yes, that is the sum of his fridge’s contents. “So unless you’d fancy an eggroll in your tea...”
“I’ll pass,” she laughs. “Need a different kind of tea, for that.”
He gives her a look and she laughs again. Not knowing quite what to make of that, with her, he simply says, “Like ‘em cold, me.”
“Yeah?” She tucks her hair behind her ears, looking at him as if he’s just reminded her of something she already knows, something that doesn’t need repeating. “Me too,” she says, like he should know that.
He puts the other mug down, already considering that one hers. “Ever had lo mein cold?”
“Vegetable or beef?” she asks, as if that could possibly be appetizing.
“Either,” he says, shrugging.
“Nope,” she replies, looks at him as if she expects him to harass her about her need to clarify.
He rolls his eyes to make her smile. “In my professional opinion, I’d highly recommend against it.”
“Can’t be that bad.”
“Want some?” he asks, very much wanting to see her expression.
“Sure,” she says, leaning forward on the couch, her legs folded beneath her. “I’ve had weirder than that.” He’s already pulling the carton out from the fridge, opening a drawer and pulling out a fork. Dropping the utensil into the mass of lo mein and eggroll, he moves around the counter, puts the carton into her reaching hand.
She settles back into the couch and he leans against the counter to watch the first bite of cold, slippery noodles disappear into her mouth. He waits for a reaction that never comes.
“S’ not bad, actually,” she decides, swallowing the mouthful down, possibly without chewing. “D’you want the eggrolls?”
In the end, breakfast consists of the pair of them sitting side-by-side on his lumpy couch, him wiping off eggroll grease on his jeans and her balancing the carton on her knee as she sips from her mug. The pastries sit on the coffee table with his tea, sad and ignored, untouched.
Her hair hangs down, tickles his arm, brushes against his arm in a touch less tangible than the slow, unsteady stroke of her short sleeve against his skin. It’s a light touch, very slight, too slight to shift away from, too little to do anything about, to need to do anything about.
The carton on her knee slips, leans against his leg as well, caught in the crease between two thighs. He catches the fork before it can clatter to the floor, sets it back in the flimsy box and sets the entire thing down on the coffee table.
“Ready to go?” he asks her, getting up.
She nods, her eyes smiling no matter how she bites her lip.
“What?”
She smiles wider.
“What?”
It’s only when she starts to giggle that, shaking his head at her and feeling the tag scratch at his throat, he realizes his t-shirt’s still on backwards.
.-.-.-.-.-.
The market doesn’t come close to being helpful, not in the slightest. This doesn’t seem to faze her, yesterday’s surge of activity having worn down to something constant and solid and unwavering. Any signs of panic have been scraped off by experience, leaving purpose.
She’s a sight to see, now that’s she’s calm. Almost unrushed, unhurried. But something about her still gives the lie, something about her still says that no, this isn’t a tourist, this isn’t simply some random girl the crowd’s spat out. She’s someone, someone worth watching as she asks after fob watches in three languages now, her Catalan worse than her Spanish. This smiling woman is a far cry from the lost girl he found two mornings ago.
Her eyes are bright, her smile quick, her fingers alive in his hand. She’s come into her own today, is patient and bright and keeps to his side like there’s no reason in the world to leave it.
She’s fantastic.
All the same, he tries not to watch the line of her mouth when they do find old watches, when she takes a look at all of them and shakes her head, telling him in English which ways the watches are wrong, painting him a picture of her clockwork mint tin. She dims just a bit each and every time, just a little, just enough that he wants to do something stupid and overly protective, if only he could figure out what that would be.
Today, though, dimming slowly instead of burning out, she still manages to find strangers to befriend. People who look at her and glance at him, look at her and glance at him again, people who look at him and then give their hands a stare. She never seems to notice, never does more than smile when they look at him. Sometimes she looks at him too and that’s when she outright grins, like they’ve got this joke that no one else knows or could come close to understanding. Like it’s just them.
And so he thinks that maybe, maybe they have got something like that.
He smiles too.
.-.-.-.-.-.-.
He takes her to lunch in return for the pastries they never ate, sits down outside with her in chairs made of metal and plastic, chairs burning and melting in the sun. They perch and lean forward with their hands on their knees, neither risking setting their arms on the table just yet.
Chair legs scratch against stone as they eventually adjust, as their own shadows cool their seats. He looks at her in the sunlight, in the midday sun with no dappled shadow across her lips, thinks of a day in a park when there was.
“Tell me, Rose Tyler,” he says, sounding out the name as if trying to fit the person inside it. “Who are you?”
There’s no blink, no start, no show of nerves. He has the sudden feeling that nothing he can do - nothing he could ever do - could scare this girl of his.
“How d’you mean?” she asks, a simple question as she runs her fingers up and down the ice-filled glass that, supposedly, also contains lemonade. She touches her fingertips to the table afterwards, transplants condensation to watch it evaporate.
“Just stuff, I s’pose,” he replies, watching the movement of her hand. “School and home and London and all that. The things that swatted you over the head and made you grow up.”
She looks up from her handiwork, the water’s depth already half gone. “Why’re you askin’?”
“‘Cause I don’t know.”
This is what gives her pause; this is what always gives her pause. It’s never his actions, always his reasons, always the rational she just can’t quite get.
“Unless you don’t want to tell me,” he adds, shrugging like it doesn’t matter. Shrugging because he’s never been needy in his life and he’s not about to start now.
“I do,” she says quickly. “I- Yeah, I do.” She pauses, her tongue playing in her mouth to stall her words. “S’ just... you know.”
The emphasis is strange on that, makes him blink and lean forward and open his mouth to ask her what she’s on about. She interrupts before he can begin.
“Okay, maybe you don’t. Know how it is,” she adds, like it needs the adding.
“Depends on the ‘it’,” he replies, taking a sip of his similarly lemonade-flavoured ice, and she smiles at that.
“S’like...” she starts to say and by now, he knows her more than well enough not to interrupt, not to make things easy and try to speak for her, no matter how her eyes ask him to.
He drops his gaze. Finds the water on the table is gone, evaporated into the air or sucked into the hard surface while he wasn’t looking.
“S’like,” she says and it’s safe to look at her again. “S’like, when my shop blew up. I mean, I didn’t like it much, yeah? But it was a job and I’m out of school - been out since I was sixteen - and that’s what you do. You go to school and then you go to work and then that’s it. That’s life.”
He considers her when she looks for comment. “Most would add a little more to that.”
“Telly and beans on toast?” she asks, expecting a yes.
He raises his eyebrows. “That, or maybe something about continuing the species.”
“Don’t want kids,” she answers simply.
He shrugs. “You’re twenty. If you did, I’d be scared.”
She gives him a look.
“What?”
“My mum’s thirty-nine,” she says.
“Ah.”
“Don’t,” she tells him, a warning.
“Did they love each other?” he asks bluntly, using the past tense only because he knows the male half of this pair is dead.
“Yeah,” she says, and then thinks about it. “Yeah. They would’ve made it.”
A daughter’s hope or a woman’s outlook; he knows which one he thinks it is, but he agrees with her nonetheless. “All right, then.”
Their words rest uneasily between them, twisting and turning, shifting.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asks, not half so angry or defensive in tone as her words would imply. She’s curious with an edge, confused at him. “You sayin’ ‘all you need is love’ is more than a song?”
“Isn’t it pretty to think so,” he replies, mixing music quotes with literary.
“You tell me, Hemingway,” she counters, a response which blindsides him completely.
“You dropped out at fifteen and you read Hemingway?” he asks, wondering at the five years between then and now, amazed at them.
She smiles, a minx, and then she shakes her head, fingers tracing around the rim of her glass before once again dabbing the table with condensation. “Nah,” she says, and that’s where she stumbles. “I’ve- My friend. He, well. He had this library.”
She says the word like it’s special, like it deserves to be capitalized for the sheer intensity of the object and the inability of the syllables to contain that intensity, that force, that reality. He nods a bit, waiting for her to go on.
“I’d never loved a library before,” she confesses and she’s grinning and her eyes grow distant even as she looks into his eyes, as she looks through his eyes and into a place she wants to be.
“But this one?” he prompts.
“This one, yeah,” she says, a schoolgirl admitting a crush. “It felt... right, y’know? It’s like you’d walk inside and be all... all, I dunno, nestled. He had the weirdest chairs in there, but there was this one, yeah? Perfect chair. You could sit down in one of those reading sprawls - y’know, like when you’ve got your leg over the chair arm and you’re all twisted up and it should be awkward but it isn’t? Perfect chair for that.”
“And that’s where you read Hemingway?” he asks, a little lost in her tangent, a little lost with her looking through him.
She shakes her head, her hair pulled over her shoulders by the motion, helped by a soft breeze made of air and heat and salt. “He read it to me.”
“Your friend,” he says and she nods, ducks her head a little.
“Yeah,” she says, like she’s only got the one, like she’s only got the one who’s important. She tucks her hair back over her shoulder, back behind her ear and he doesn’t want her to. “Didn’t start with Ernest, though. Bit of Charlie’s stuff - Dickens, I mean, he likes to call him Charlie - and then there was a little while with mythology. Mostly Greek, really.” She laughs a bit, looking at him like he should know the joke, like she’ll try to help him see it. “With all the different versions and stuff it morphs into. And how all the gods have more flaws than the people.”
He’s been keeping his mouth busy with his drink, but it’s not long before there nothing left to be busy with. “And you like all that?”
“Most of it, yeah,” she says. “An’ Greek plays are always better when nobody gets killed during ‘em,” she adds as a strange and somewhat unnerving aside.
“You’re a comedy person,” he surmises.
“Still say comedy is humour, not just someone not dying.” She shrugs a little. “Don’t like defining things like that.”
“By negatives, you mean,” he says.
She nods. “Yeah. Spent a long time thinking about having a life without a dad. But that’s not it, not really.”
“Then what is it?” he asks because he knows she wants to tell him. Because he wants her to want to tell him things.
“Well, there was my life with my mum and my dad. And then there was life with mum. My life with Jimmy - thank god that’s over. After that, it was me with mum and Mickey and then, well. Yeah. And- and then us an’ Jack.”
“And what about now?” he asks because he wants to hear it.
“Now it’s you and me,” she says, tells him like it’s the simplest thing in the world, as if it’s really that easy to understand, that uncomplicated and straightforward.
Maybe it is.
.-.-.-.-.-.
“We could ride somewhere,” she says, asking him with a statement, looking at him as if expecting him to wander off, to get bored and irritable any moment now.
Not even a week since he’s gotten out of hospital - not even a week since he went in - and he knows he shouldn’t. He thinks to say yes, thinks of riding far and fast and getting them both some distance from this city.
He thinks of it.
“Nah,” he says, takes her hand, the one decision he never thinks about. “We’re fine here.”
.-.-.-.-.-.
Afternoon turns to evening and evening into night. A walk becomes a journey and a journey finds its destination in his little flat, the two of them sitting on the carpet with a deck of cards between them. He teaches her and teaches her again and once she beats him, then he plays for real.
“Teach me Spanish,” she says, watching him shuffle out a new game.
He glances up, the movements of his hands slowing slightly. “Demanding little thing, aren’t you?”
“Yeah,” she says and of course, that doesn’t bring him to smile.
“Right then,” he says, dealing out a complicated set up, three cards face down, three face up, draw piles of many and hands of four. He never asks if she already knows the rules.
Their last lesson was a while back and so a little review doesn’t go amiss. He talks about the basics and she listens, repeats. Él y ella, he and she, him and her. Yo y tú, me and you. Nosotros.
We.
Us.
He’s talking about conjugation and tenses and he nearly waits for a voice to jokingly call him professor, but that was a long time ago and far away. He lays down the ace of clubs on the pile, grins as she glowers, as she picks up the half a deck that’s become her hand to get rid of.
They play until she loses spectacularly, and he grins at her until she grins back. From there, she gets up to use the loo and he puts the cards away slowly, fighting that irritating awkwardness of having a guest leave their poor host alone to use the bathroom.
He takes Don Quixote from his shelf, sits on his couch and reads a page or four, waiting. He feels a right idiot, waiting for her for even that short time, feels as if his life has been set on pause and pushed to the side to wait the minute she’s not next to him. It’s disconcerting in the extreme and then it’s over and fails to matter.
She plunks down next to him, sets her feet on the coffee table beside his. Lifting his arm for him, she tucks herself under, presses herself against him in a fit that’s right, perfectly right on the first try, as if this is already her accustomed place. Her shoulder beneath his arm, his arm around her shoulders. Her hair tickles the crook of his elbow, pleasant and soft. Her arm is trapped between their sides, her hand resting on her thigh.
“You read fast,” she tells him, her hand on her hand on her thigh as she settles in. Her legs cross at the ankles, mimicking his, mirroring his. Her battered trainers tap his boots, receive a like reply.
He makes no motion towards modesty, managing to turn the page one-handedly. “A bit, yeah.”
“Read to me?” This, she asks.
“At a normal speed, you mean.” He turns back to the beginning without glancing at his page number first, neither realizes nor cares.
“Yeah,” she says.
“All right,” he says, and reads.
He doesn’t have a library or an amazing chair, but he does have his voice and another man’s words and that’s going to have to be good enough. It’ll be made to be good enough. They go on, go back in time and through the space between life as it is and life as it should be. A small running commentary develops, sends her smiling against his shoulder.
He thinks she’s smiling at least. It’s difficult to tell with the part of her hair close enough to kiss: he can’t see her face. She relaxes as he reads on, laughs where it’s good to laugh and interrupts where it’s inconvenient. He explains the fictional folly of an old man when she asks or when her head turns like so and presses like this, the larger accompaniment to a confused frown he doesn’t need to see to recognize.
Night drifts towards morning and his throat dries with speech. His burr is slowly becoming a rasp and he keeps going past the point where water is needed. She prompts him towards the action with a question, one almost rhetorical.
It takes her by surprise when he takes her seriously.
Once again, there is tea and now, at the opposite end of the day, the pastries are finally eaten. He opens the bag at last, expecting something flaky and unfulfilling. That’s what he finds for her, not for him.
“What’s this, then?” he asks, holding up the small wrapped slices of something.
“Banana bread,” she tells him and he wishes he’d asked sooner.
The drink is hot and the food vaguely stale and both are consumed very, very slowly before he walks her back to her hotel, before she takes his hand in the dark.
Tonight, he crosses through both doors, hugs her close and tight in the lobby. She looks back at him as she moves to the lift, looks back at him, shy and double-checking that he’s yet to disappear. Laughing, he shoos her on up.
He walks home with a grin, falls asleep with one.
.-.-.-.-.-.
On second thought, maybe Sundays aren’t so bad after all.
.-.-.-.-.-.
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