Yowzah Oneshot Collection (2)

61(G)

we are the children of an indifferent universe

                   hihoplastic

He pauses, jam doughnut halfway to his mouth when he sees her - or rather, sees hair. An inhuman amount of it, and he thinks of lions and the Venus de Milo and clamshells - ugh, clams - and how the sun off the Thames is making it look iridescent, like putting your hand through a waterfall with no idea what’s on the other side.

She’s sitting on a perfectly ordinary bench, at a particularly uninteresting spot along the promenade. She isn’t on her phone, there’s no hurried lunch or dog yapping at her feet; there’s no one next to her, and she doesn’t appear to be waiting for someone. She looks too stiff to be simply enjoying the view or the leisure of an unremarkable day.

She’s just… sitting.

It’s not unusual to see women - anyone, really - sitting on a bench looking at the river. The weather’s nice enough, though he’d much rather be at his usual cafe, sitting in his usual comfy chair. During the daytime, his fondness for the outdoors is limited to patios and the occasional park - neither of which are particularly suitable for stargazing in the city - but his regular seat had been occupied by a morose-looking elderly couple and all the other seats had been taken up by professors and researches and, to his disgust, archaeologists attending a conference at the Savoy.

What is unusual, however, is her posture—her head is bowed, hair falling over it, but her spine is ramrod straight, hands clenched in her lap, and as he moves closer he can see she’s taking slow, even-measured breaths.

He’s never been good at resisting an oddity, so he makes his way to the wall just off to the side, snack all but forgotten in its white paper bag, and tries to surreptitiously look back at her out of the corner of his eye. Clara insists he hasn’t got a subtle bone in his body, but she’s wrong. He can be stealthy when he needs to. He can fly under the radar, stay on the down low, pull a 007, blend in with his environ—

“Is there a particular reason you’re staring at me or have we come to the part where I tell you to get lost and you run away like a good little boy?”

John blinks, shaking his head to clear his thoughts only to find he’s been staring at her rather blatantly for… “How long… exactly… ?”

“A good three minutes.”

“Ah,” he says, scratching his head absently. “Right. Sorry. I do that.”

She sniffs and clears her throat. “You come to the Thames and leer at crying women on park benches?”

“What? No! I do not leer at—and nobody’s crying, what are you—”

He notices then, with some degree of alarm, is that she is - or at least was, not too long ago - in fact crying.

Not audibly, not ostentatiously, but now that he can see her face, he realizes her cheeks are streaked with tears and her nose is slightly red.

“You’re crying.”

She snorts. “Brilliant deduction.”

He swallows nervously, taking a step toward her and then quickly away, before she notices, but she isn’t looking at him anymore. Her eyeline has drifted out over the water, but he knows she isn’t really seeing that, either. There’s something else, behind those eyes - beautiful eyes, he thinks, and then, what? - and he takes another step forward. And a step back.

“Why?”

John winces at his own voice, face in half a cringe when he meets her gaze, and he opens his arms apologetically.