Chapter Text
It’s still dark outside, but the permanent twilight of high summer, the stars just starting to fade. He tilts his head back and lets a plume jet upwards into the harsh light of the building, feeling… something…
«Filthy habit,» she chuckles from just behind his shoulder.
He sputters and his hand stutters the cigarette into an arc that dies in a puddle of something that can’t be rainwater.
“Bugger.”
«Sorry,» she says, entirely unrepentantly. «Want a hand with anything?»
“No,” he says. “Thank you. Did, er, did you get your possessions back alright?”
«Some of them.» She pats her jacket.
He imagines the blades, then sees them, which ones hold memories, the grips worn to her hand. He wonders whether she’d like him to ask for the rest.
«You coming, then?»
He frowns. “I suppose so.”
«You want to hang around here?»
He heaves a breath, peels himself off the station wall. “No.”
«Good choice. Come with me.»
“Okay. Do you have a cab waiting? I couldn’t…” he taps his spasming, reluctant phone irritably, “get one.”
«Better than that. Come on.»
*
“‘Better’ turns out to be a dark, wooded path…”
“Yep.”
“Didn’t know ‘yep’ was a Welsh word…”
“Can it, Sims. Enjoy the quiet.” But there’s no bite or snarl to it. He decides that she might well just want him to enjoy the quiet.
“This feels…” he says after a while, “nice.”
She snorts. He knows it’s not the right word. His city tongue feels constrained by vagueness in places like this – everything is bosky background that can either be unpleasant (marshy, rocky, filled with the kind of kids who still summon up the victim in him) or pleasant (decent, well-lit path, well-spaced trees, no suspiciously organic smells). Not that his nose, calibrated to burnt and unburnt tobacco, and the different types of old paper that he might encounter, would be much use to him here for categorisation purposes.
She seems happy enough – snuffing up… whatever she’s getting from this, setting a brisk but manageable pace over the root-strewn but otherwise civilised ground.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say we were in a rush…”
“Just want to put some distance between us and them.”
A pause while he turns that over. “Are we… running from a police station?”
“Let’s call it ‘walking briskly,’ shall we? Don’t want to tax those smoker’s lungs.”
“I’m the product of a necessarily sedentary occupation,” he tells her, with a mock dignity.
She huffs a laugh. “That and fuck-all thought for personal fitness.”
She’s easier to deal with outdoors, he decides, when she’s diluted by, well, by open air, and a lack of people. Other people. And he realises that running alongside her in the cool, slightly damp night air could be an exhilarating experience; so much so that he almost grasps for it, until he remembers and, chilled, withdraws from that brief ambition.
This is not his path. He watches her, head back under a scudding sky, tossing her hair into the bright wind that speaks so much to her and… people like her.
People. Hah.
“What was that?”
“Huh? Oh, nothing, nothing…”
“Nice night.”
“Yes.” He is suspicious, pours caution into the syllable.
“What?”
“You’re making small talk.”
She smiles sidelong at him, shrugs more firmly into her jacket.
“You’re enjoying yourself.”
“As it goes,” she says, “yes.”
“You like being outdoors?” He is careful to make it as neutral as possible.
She looks at him sidelong again. “I guess so. Never really thought about it much. London’s a bit… I mean, it depends where you go.”
“Not exactly quiet.”
“Not exactly.” They stroll along, now at an easier pace, for a while. “Where you from? Someone said but I forgot. South coast, isn’t it?”
“Bournemouth.”
“Miss it?”
“Wh– I. Sometimes. Why?”
“Down by the sea, right?” He nods. “I miss the sea. I mean: I know there’s Docklands, and I could drive to Kent or whatever but… it’s not my sea.”
He knows what she means. He nods again.
“Where I grew up – I mean, it was a city, okay, but small. Manageable.”
“Right.”
“And there was the sea. And woods. You could… get dark. Properly dark. Quiet.”
“Right.”
“The wind was… clean.”
“Right.”
She takes a deep breath, turns a wry, self-mocking smile on him. “Probably just nostalgia. I bet home reeks pretty bad in reality.”
“Hmm.”