Book of Days Fic
Aug. 4th, 2003 02:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
doylePosting again, now we have the go-ahead. Check out the stories at the archive
Title: The River As Seen From Above
Author: Doyle_sb4
Rating: PG-13
Feedback: <mailto:doyle@ntlworld.com>doyle@ntlworld.com
Archive: Ask first, I can't imagine I'll say no.
Summary: Back to 1995, and Doyle's last day with Harry before discovering he was half-demon.
Notes: for greensilver, who wanted Doyle, an attempt to make dandelion wine, and no fluff. I'm borderline with that last requirement. Thanks to Kevin for the last-second beta.
The light was blinding. Doyle groaned, too groggy to even throw an arm over his face. He pried his eyes open just a fraction and saw, as expected, Harry standing by the window, hand still on the pulled-back curtain.
"Cruel wench," he muttered as his wife crossed the few steps to the bed and knelt on the floor. She clasped her hands on the mattress and rested her chin on them, putting the two of them nearly nose to nose.
"Look, the sun's out." She ruffled his hair, planting a quick kiss on his lips. "It's going to be a perfect day."
"It's insanely early." He blinked the sleep from his eyes and took a closer look at her. "And if you're going to callously wake a man you might have the common decency to be wearing a lacy little number or something." Suddenly awake enough to realize what a dangerous trap he might have blundered into he added, "the outfit's lovely, though. The blouse really enlarges your... eyes."
"Two words, mister: thin. Ice." But she grinned and kissed him again. This time it was slower and deeper, and Doyle knew if this went on he was going to blurt out some pansy Mills and Boon crap about how the sunshine made the highlights in her hair look like gold.
"You sleep okay?" she asked, when they had to come up for air.
He pulled a strand of her hair through his fingers. "All right. Weird dreams. You were marrying someone else and I was… god knows, working on an ostrich farm or something." But the bizarre dreams were already fading in the daylight, and he had more pressing concerns. "Come back to bed," he murmured, closing his hand around her wrist and tugging her gently towards him.
Harry's mouth tasted faintly of coffee and the strawberry lip-gloss she always wore; when she unbuttoned her blouse and skirt and let them fall to the floor, he knew beyond doubt that he'd married the most beautiful woman in the world. If that made him a nancy, well, it was a stigma he was prepared to live with.
This, he thought, was how every day should begin.
***
The shower's usual three minutes of scalding water followed by fifteen of ice was still enough to fog the bathroom's small mirror. Doyle wiped it clean, and stared at himself for a long moment.
"I'm old," he announced. "I'm an old fella."
Warm arms wound around his waist. "Silly Francis," Harry said. Her cheek was warm against his back. "You don't look a day over, oh, thirty-five?"
He flicked his fingertips over his shoulder, and she squealed as the water hit her.
He did look older this morning, he was sure of it - as if he'd aged five years overnight. Depressing stuff. Unless the lady at the off-license was of a similar mind and could be persuaded to waive America's draconian laws regarding the purchase of alcohol. That thought made him perk up. Of course, he could wait - he made to check his watch, and realised he wasn't wearing it - another twenty-some hours and buy the booze legally, but where was the fun in that?
He turned, putting his hands on Harry's waist. "Will you still love me when I'm old,
gray and probably not quite so rakishly attractive as the vital stallion that stands before you now?"
She frowned, biting her lip in deep concentration, and laughed at his hangdog expression. Her eyes crinkled in the way he saw a dozen times a day, and that still made him feel like the luckiest man to ever draw breath. She twined her arms around his neck and said, "This is forever, Francis."
"Till death us to part, and all that."
"Or at least till breakfast do us part," she solemnly agreed, giving him a hug and dropping her arms. "Waffles?"
"Just toast or something for me, love. I'll be out in a minute." She squeezed past him, always a feat of contortionism in the cramped space, while he grabbed the electric razor from the cupboard and plugged it in beside the mirror. "Twenty-one tomorrow," he told his reflection. "Time's marching on, Francis."
***
The problem with the summer holidays, even just a few days in, was that once you were out of bed there wasn't actually all that much to do. Harry had unfortunately vetoed his proposal that they never leave bed at all except when biology necessitated. He'd thought about working part-time, since the extra money wouldn't hurt, but nowhere local wanted to employ someone they'd lose again in September.
He lay sprawled over the two-thirds of the couch not occupied by Harry's chaos of textbooks and papers. The portable TV in the corner was switched on, the sound low enough that the horses were racing across the scene in near-silence. He glanced at it now and then, always turning his attention back to his lazy study of the ceiling fan's sedate rotation.
He considered doing something suitably manly, like putting up shelves or gardening - the kind of thing he'd always imagined his father doing on a Sunday afternoon, if the guy'd stuck around - but even if they'd had the room, he was about as adept at DIY as his third-graders were at open heart surgery. Gardening sounded easier, but that would require having an actual garden, and not a four-foot square patch of weeds.
Weeds, which, for some reason probably known only to herself and the Lord, Harry was bringing into the house.
Doyle watched upside down, head hanging off the end of the couch, as she moved past him into the kitchen. Her skirt swished against the floorboards.
"If you'd said I'd've bought you flowers," he said. "Well, nicked them from down the road, maybe."
"I'm making dandelion wine," she called from the other room. "Do we have any yeast?"
It took him a second to process this rather strange request. Finally, he tried: "There's some bread in the cupboard."
Even a room away, he could clearly see the expression she was most likely wearing.
"There's yeast in it," he pointed out. "I mean, seriously, who keeps yeast in the house? Is that an American thing? Do you all wake up of a morning and... I dunno, recite the Pledge of Allegiance or shoot some Red Indians, and think to yourselves 'hmm, bit peckish, I think I'll have some tasty yeast'?"
"Xenophobe," she scolded.
"Oh, I'm not anti-American," he protested, trying to keep the laughter from his voice. "At the moment I'm just feeling fairly anti-yeast."
A deep, exaggerated sigh. "Okay, I'll look for the yeast. You can find my recipe."
"Okay," he agreed, thinking: dandelions? There couldn't be a way of turning dandelions into alcohol. If there was, his grandmother's garden wouldn't have been so full of the damn things. "Where's this recipe, anyway?"
"Magazine page, in the Second World War textbook."
He sat up, eying the precarious mountain of books on the low table. The book she was talking about was near the top, so there was only a small avalanche when he slid it from the pile.
The history book fell open at the magazine page. He lifted it away, looking for a moment at the picture underneath. Ranks of Nazi soldiers, right arms stiff and raised, saluting someone off-camera. "Demons," Doyle said to himself, and turned his attention to the books he'd scattered. Attempts to scoop them from the floor only sent more flying, and he settled for picking them up one by one. As he did so, a photograph slipped from the pages of one. He snagged it from the ground. Not unusual for Harry to use anything at hand for
a bookmark.
"You find it?" Harry stopped at the doorway. He smiled at the sight of her in an apron. "What? I cook. I do the cooking thing. Where's my recipe?"
He handed her the clipping. "Who's the girl?"
"What girl?"
"In the photo. Pretty, blonde..." But when he looked at the picture in his hand he realized it was just a candid shot of Harry and two of her friends, taken at a party. The girls grinning at the camera were both brunettes. "Weird," he murmured. "Could've sworn..."
"That's okay, sweetie," she said, patting his head, "you're just going crazy, that's all."
"Where'd you get this mad wine recipe anyway?" he asked, eager to divert the subject from his potential insanity.
"Some Martha Stewart thing. It's, like, a thousand years old, I saw it at the doctor's office. Ripped the page out."
He looked up at her, frowning. "Doctor? What doctor, when was this? You never said."
"Last week," she said over her shoulder as she retreated to the kitchen.
"What was up?"
"Nothing much."
He looked down at the photo in his hand and turned it over, just to make sure the blonde girl wasn't somehow on the back.
"I kinda thought I might be pregnant," Harry said from the next room.
He sat frozen for a second, then hared into the kitchen, all thoughts of the odd photograph obliterated.
**
"Are you sure?" It was at least the tenth time he'd asked, as though he expected her to change her story on the eleventh and announce that yes, she was in the family way after all. "The doctor did tests and everything?" Doyle's high school hadn't so much frowned on sex education as looked at it in horror and covered their eyes, so he was slightly vague on how pregnancies were diagnosed. Not that this was something he'd admit to Harry. "Did they do that one they always show on the telly where you have to wee on a stick and..."
"Yes, Francis, they're sure." She was standing by the sink, facing away from him as she rinsed the yellow flowers, but he knew his girl. He could read her emotions in her stance as easily as he could in her face, and he could tell she wasn't as nonchalant as she was making out.
They'd never talked about children. Not beyond his complaints and funny stories about the kids at his school. Not kids of their own. And any logical, practical concerns about money or Harry's college or them being not far from kids themselves were drowned out by one thought:
He'd fuck it up. Just like his own father. He couldn't do anything else. The get-her-in-the-family-way-and-bolt gene would see to it.
He drummed his fingertips lightly on the kitchen table like a nervous Morse code. "What're you doing now?"
She'd moved to the worktop and was laying the dandelions in a row. "Cutting off the heads."
"Don't be using a sharp knife," he said before he could curb the third-grade-teacher instinct.
"No, I'll use a spoon," she promised, her tone one of amused exasperation, "I'll just press down really, really hard."
He smiled despite himself, and without conscious thought on his part he could suddenly picture a little girl tugging at Harry's skirt as she worked, or a boy pestering him to come and play football. Proper football, too, not the sissy American kind where everyone wore body armour and stopped for a rest every five seconds. He looked at the fridge, covered by drawings from the kids in his class and the alphabet magnets Harry had bought him for their one-month anniversary, and thought about how it would look with his son or daughter's report cards there.
"What's up with the faraway look?" Some time in his reverie, Harry had stopped her attack on the weeds and turned her attention on him.
"We should go out," he decided. "Come on, leave that. We'd never drink it anyway."
He had mixed feelings about the seemingly perpetual summer in California. Sometimes it made him complain about the heat and feel nostalgic for the overcast skies back home. Other times he got the urge to spend all his time outside, just in case it was a great cosmic joke and the downpours would start up any second. Now, with the sunlight filtering through the small windows and catching the dust motes in the air above his head, he itched for the open air.
"Shame to waste the good of the day," he said, standing up and reaching for her hands. "Let's go and enjoy the sunshine."
***
His mental image of America, prior to ever setting foot in the place, had been a somewhat confused mix of the Wild West and Manhattan. He'd been gratified to find that the area he'd moved to was far from a metropolis of skyscrapers. It had tall buildings, yes, but it also had trees, and flowers, and parks where someone might while away a pleasant July afternoon with their wife.
"What do you want to do for your birthday?"
He leaned in and nipped her earlobe, making her squeak something about public places and bat him away. "Something debauched and filthy."
"Do you think about sex all the time?" she asked, in what he thought was an exceptional parody of her mother's disapproved voice (though she ruined it a little by smirking).
"Not when I'm at work," he said reasonably, "because then I'd be a very bad man and they'd put me in prison."
She gave him a light shove. "How 'bout a movie? My friend Tyler's working tomorrow night, he can get us in for free. We could go see the new Batman."
"Not really in the mood for the dark avenger bit." He curled his fingers in the grass. Too dry; it never seemed to rain in America, not properly. "Why d'you think he does it?"
"Who, Tyler?"
"Batman. The whole helping people bit. I mean, it's not like he has to. He's got stacks of cash and, and, a butler and everything, he could just stay in the Batcave and have a grand time of it, but he goes out and saves.." He trailed off, aware that he'd lost control of his mouth several non-sequiturs back.
Harry was giving him that look that always made him feel like he was on a microscope slide. "He saw his parents murdered. He's a vigilante. Did I fall down and hit my head or are we really having this conversation?"
"You're imagining things," he assured her. He patted his lap. "Have a little sleep, all the topsy-turvy insanity'll go away."
"My mom used to tell me not to talk to strange men," she commented, resting her head on his knee and closing her eyes. "No wonder she didn't want me to marry you."
He couldn't even come up with a decent insult to his mother-in-law. Batman, he thought. Where the hell'd that come from?
**
It was tranquil, soaking up the sunshine, listening to Harry's breathing become deep and regular. He passed the time watching the other people in the park. There were kids playing over by the swings, but he had enough professional experience of young children to know that it was never a good idea to pay too close attention to what they were doing if one wanted to maintain any illusions about their sweet, wholesome games. An elderly man brought ice-cream to where his wife was seated on a bench, and Doyle smiled along with her. That was how he and Harry were going to be in fifty or sixty years.
As the park gradually began to empty, a woman walked by. She was well-dressed, about his own age, and had thick, dark hair past her shoulders. He frowned. Something was niggling there, at the back of his memory, but when he tried to reach it, it slipped from his grasp.
A hand waggled in front of his face and he blinked.
"I don't know how they do things in Ireland," Harry said, eyebrows raised and mouth twitching into a smile, "but here in the States? So not polite to check out another girl when your wife's six inches away. Jerk." Just to punctuate the point, she threw a handful of grass at him.
"I wasn't checking her out," he protested. "Which, just as a side note, sounds like I'm borrowing her from the library, can you not say 'giving her the eye' or 'perving on her'? Not that I was," he added hastily. "She just... she looks like somebody. I don't know, an actress?" He glanced back at the woman. "Princess..." But she was already out of sight.
The sun was starting to sink in the sky. "C'mon," he said, brushing the grass from his jeans as he helped Harry to her feet. "Be dark soon. Let's go home."
**
After a late dinner - which he cooked, Harry claiming weariness from her aborted winemaking adventures - they ended up outside. When they'd moved into the apartment at the beginning of the school year, the first thing Harry had done was sling a hammock across the fire escape. It was strong enough to hold them both - Doyle had insisted on strenuous testing. Purely in the interests of safety.
They watched the sunset, and talked about nothing much, and fooled around some (Doyle didn't watch baseball, national institution be damned, and so he needed constant refreshers on which base was which), and finally lapsed into comfortable silence.
He was half asleep when Harry asked, "what time is it?"
He held his watch up to the light, squinting at the hands. "Five to twelve." He laughed as she scrambled to her feet, nearly sending him crashing onto the tiles. "Here, where's the fire?"
"Be right back!" she called over her shoulder, disappearing into the apartment.
The slight breeze was cool and pleasant as he rocked gently back and forth, staring up at the night sky.
Harry was back in view, camera clutched in her hands. He pretend-groaned.
"Come on, Francis," she wheedled, "I want a picture of you at the exact moment you turn twenty-one."
"I'm not what you'd call photogenic," he said, and was a little hurt when she didn't disagree. "Go on, then, take your snapshot."
"Smile," she said.
He smiled, and the camera clicked, and he asked, "Is that it? Am I done?"
She slapped her forehead with the back of her hand. "Dumb klutz! I forgot the flash."
"No worries," he said as she fumbled at the buttons. "Still twenty seconds till midnight."
"Okay, got it." She looked up, smiling warmly as her eyes met his. "Ready to go?"
Without thinking, without even knowing why, he whispered, "no, please, not yet..."
The glare from the camera flash drowned out everything else in his vision, and the world went white.
"Why don't I have a dad?" he asked, but it made his mam sad, and he stopped asking, and later in his life his childhood was vaguely remembered as a placid stream of ordinary non-events, but he still wondered about his father.
And after she'd taken the picture - at least, the first time, when he was still on the river and couldn't see what came after he turned twenty-one, when he didn't know how everything changed - she lay down in his arms again, and they looked up at the stars together and he said, "d'you know what one of the kids asked me last week?"
He glanced up as the door of the food bank opened, and the girl who walked in was so stunning he spilled soup everywhere and never even noticed, and in that second he had the crazy thought: gonna marry that girl.
"What?
"She asked why we can only remember the past, and how come we can't see the future."
Standing in front of a judge with a girl he'd known four weeks? Maddest thing he'd ever done. And as they were told they could kiss, and he looked into his wife's eyes, he knew it was the best.
"Wouldn't that be cool, though? Seeing the future."
"Only future I want to see is next week's lottery numbers."
The alcohol didn't help. Never enough to make him forget what he was. Or what he wasn't; not the man she'd married. Not a man at all. Monster. Demon. And she lied, the bitch, said it didn't matter but he saw it in the way she looked at him. He reached for the bottle again.
"So what'd you tell her?"
"Nothing. I'm not... what's he called, your man in the wheelchair, am I? My day, question like that, you'd just get told 'because'. Or if you were really lucky 'because God made it that way'."
Harry was holding her bags, and he was screaming drunken obscenities past a raw throat, and when she stayed calm and dry-eyed he knew he'd lost her forever.
"We talked about something like that in my philosophy class last year. The professor said life's like a river."
It felt the way he'd imagined a stroke would. Like someone had taken a rusty chainsaw with his brain, but he saw…
Guilty imaginings, he told himself. Just a migraine. Till he saw for himself, and he afterwards he threw up till he was too weak to stand.
All of them dead. His fault.
Figured he'd get more booze and put it behind him, till a week later when the second vision came.
Something to atone for.
"When you're on the river - when you're alive - you can't see past the next bend."
Working for a vampire? Not where he'd seen his life going. But he had a purpose again, and it lifted a weight he hadn't fully acknowledged was there.
"You game?"
"But if you could look at the river from above, like in an airplane or…"
"A hot-air balloon."
"You'd see it all. All the turns. Where you've been. Where you're going."
"The good fight, yeah? I get that now."
"And when he was saying all this I was thinking, wouldn't that be great? To be able to see it all and know where to avoid the riptides and rapids."
Soft chuckle. "Or go back to the places where the fishing was good."
"Francis?" Trailing off, nearly asleep. "Today was good."
"The best, sweetheart."
Cordelia's taste was on his lips and the cable was in his hand, and he held on through the agony and the fire, and the light
it hurt so much, christ almighty it hurt, worse than a thousand visions at once and the light was
the light was
blinding, and he groaned as Harry crouched by the bed and said, "look, the sun's out." And she kissed him sweetly and ran a hand through his hair and told him, "it's going to be a perfect day."
END
Title: The River As Seen From Above
Author: Doyle_sb4
Rating: PG-13
Feedback: <mailto:doyle@ntlworld.com>doyle@ntlworld.com
Archive: Ask first, I can't imagine I'll say no.
Summary: Back to 1995, and Doyle's last day with Harry before discovering he was half-demon.
Notes: for greensilver, who wanted Doyle, an attempt to make dandelion wine, and no fluff. I'm borderline with that last requirement. Thanks to Kevin for the last-second beta.
The light was blinding. Doyle groaned, too groggy to even throw an arm over his face. He pried his eyes open just a fraction and saw, as expected, Harry standing by the window, hand still on the pulled-back curtain.
"Cruel wench," he muttered as his wife crossed the few steps to the bed and knelt on the floor. She clasped her hands on the mattress and rested her chin on them, putting the two of them nearly nose to nose.
"Look, the sun's out." She ruffled his hair, planting a quick kiss on his lips. "It's going to be a perfect day."
"It's insanely early." He blinked the sleep from his eyes and took a closer look at her. "And if you're going to callously wake a man you might have the common decency to be wearing a lacy little number or something." Suddenly awake enough to realize what a dangerous trap he might have blundered into he added, "the outfit's lovely, though. The blouse really enlarges your... eyes."
"Two words, mister: thin. Ice." But she grinned and kissed him again. This time it was slower and deeper, and Doyle knew if this went on he was going to blurt out some pansy Mills and Boon crap about how the sunshine made the highlights in her hair look like gold.
"You sleep okay?" she asked, when they had to come up for air.
He pulled a strand of her hair through his fingers. "All right. Weird dreams. You were marrying someone else and I was… god knows, working on an ostrich farm or something." But the bizarre dreams were already fading in the daylight, and he had more pressing concerns. "Come back to bed," he murmured, closing his hand around her wrist and tugging her gently towards him.
Harry's mouth tasted faintly of coffee and the strawberry lip-gloss she always wore; when she unbuttoned her blouse and skirt and let them fall to the floor, he knew beyond doubt that he'd married the most beautiful woman in the world. If that made him a nancy, well, it was a stigma he was prepared to live with.
This, he thought, was how every day should begin.
***
The shower's usual three minutes of scalding water followed by fifteen of ice was still enough to fog the bathroom's small mirror. Doyle wiped it clean, and stared at himself for a long moment.
"I'm old," he announced. "I'm an old fella."
Warm arms wound around his waist. "Silly Francis," Harry said. Her cheek was warm against his back. "You don't look a day over, oh, thirty-five?"
He flicked his fingertips over his shoulder, and she squealed as the water hit her.
He did look older this morning, he was sure of it - as if he'd aged five years overnight. Depressing stuff. Unless the lady at the off-license was of a similar mind and could be persuaded to waive America's draconian laws regarding the purchase of alcohol. That thought made him perk up. Of course, he could wait - he made to check his watch, and realised he wasn't wearing it - another twenty-some hours and buy the booze legally, but where was the fun in that?
He turned, putting his hands on Harry's waist. "Will you still love me when I'm old,
gray and probably not quite so rakishly attractive as the vital stallion that stands before you now?"
She frowned, biting her lip in deep concentration, and laughed at his hangdog expression. Her eyes crinkled in the way he saw a dozen times a day, and that still made him feel like the luckiest man to ever draw breath. She twined her arms around his neck and said, "This is forever, Francis."
"Till death us to part, and all that."
"Or at least till breakfast do us part," she solemnly agreed, giving him a hug and dropping her arms. "Waffles?"
"Just toast or something for me, love. I'll be out in a minute." She squeezed past him, always a feat of contortionism in the cramped space, while he grabbed the electric razor from the cupboard and plugged it in beside the mirror. "Twenty-one tomorrow," he told his reflection. "Time's marching on, Francis."
***
The problem with the summer holidays, even just a few days in, was that once you were out of bed there wasn't actually all that much to do. Harry had unfortunately vetoed his proposal that they never leave bed at all except when biology necessitated. He'd thought about working part-time, since the extra money wouldn't hurt, but nowhere local wanted to employ someone they'd lose again in September.
He lay sprawled over the two-thirds of the couch not occupied by Harry's chaos of textbooks and papers. The portable TV in the corner was switched on, the sound low enough that the horses were racing across the scene in near-silence. He glanced at it now and then, always turning his attention back to his lazy study of the ceiling fan's sedate rotation.
He considered doing something suitably manly, like putting up shelves or gardening - the kind of thing he'd always imagined his father doing on a Sunday afternoon, if the guy'd stuck around - but even if they'd had the room, he was about as adept at DIY as his third-graders were at open heart surgery. Gardening sounded easier, but that would require having an actual garden, and not a four-foot square patch of weeds.
Weeds, which, for some reason probably known only to herself and the Lord, Harry was bringing into the house.
Doyle watched upside down, head hanging off the end of the couch, as she moved past him into the kitchen. Her skirt swished against the floorboards.
"If you'd said I'd've bought you flowers," he said. "Well, nicked them from down the road, maybe."
"I'm making dandelion wine," she called from the other room. "Do we have any yeast?"
It took him a second to process this rather strange request. Finally, he tried: "There's some bread in the cupboard."
Even a room away, he could clearly see the expression she was most likely wearing.
"There's yeast in it," he pointed out. "I mean, seriously, who keeps yeast in the house? Is that an American thing? Do you all wake up of a morning and... I dunno, recite the Pledge of Allegiance or shoot some Red Indians, and think to yourselves 'hmm, bit peckish, I think I'll have some tasty yeast'?"
"Xenophobe," she scolded.
"Oh, I'm not anti-American," he protested, trying to keep the laughter from his voice. "At the moment I'm just feeling fairly anti-yeast."
A deep, exaggerated sigh. "Okay, I'll look for the yeast. You can find my recipe."
"Okay," he agreed, thinking: dandelions? There couldn't be a way of turning dandelions into alcohol. If there was, his grandmother's garden wouldn't have been so full of the damn things. "Where's this recipe, anyway?"
"Magazine page, in the Second World War textbook."
He sat up, eying the precarious mountain of books on the low table. The book she was talking about was near the top, so there was only a small avalanche when he slid it from the pile.
The history book fell open at the magazine page. He lifted it away, looking for a moment at the picture underneath. Ranks of Nazi soldiers, right arms stiff and raised, saluting someone off-camera. "Demons," Doyle said to himself, and turned his attention to the books he'd scattered. Attempts to scoop them from the floor only sent more flying, and he settled for picking them up one by one. As he did so, a photograph slipped from the pages of one. He snagged it from the ground. Not unusual for Harry to use anything at hand for
a bookmark.
"You find it?" Harry stopped at the doorway. He smiled at the sight of her in an apron. "What? I cook. I do the cooking thing. Where's my recipe?"
He handed her the clipping. "Who's the girl?"
"What girl?"
"In the photo. Pretty, blonde..." But when he looked at the picture in his hand he realized it was just a candid shot of Harry and two of her friends, taken at a party. The girls grinning at the camera were both brunettes. "Weird," he murmured. "Could've sworn..."
"That's okay, sweetie," she said, patting his head, "you're just going crazy, that's all."
"Where'd you get this mad wine recipe anyway?" he asked, eager to divert the subject from his potential insanity.
"Some Martha Stewart thing. It's, like, a thousand years old, I saw it at the doctor's office. Ripped the page out."
He looked up at her, frowning. "Doctor? What doctor, when was this? You never said."
"Last week," she said over her shoulder as she retreated to the kitchen.
"What was up?"
"Nothing much."
He looked down at the photo in his hand and turned it over, just to make sure the blonde girl wasn't somehow on the back.
"I kinda thought I might be pregnant," Harry said from the next room.
He sat frozen for a second, then hared into the kitchen, all thoughts of the odd photograph obliterated.
**
"Are you sure?" It was at least the tenth time he'd asked, as though he expected her to change her story on the eleventh and announce that yes, she was in the family way after all. "The doctor did tests and everything?" Doyle's high school hadn't so much frowned on sex education as looked at it in horror and covered their eyes, so he was slightly vague on how pregnancies were diagnosed. Not that this was something he'd admit to Harry. "Did they do that one they always show on the telly where you have to wee on a stick and..."
"Yes, Francis, they're sure." She was standing by the sink, facing away from him as she rinsed the yellow flowers, but he knew his girl. He could read her emotions in her stance as easily as he could in her face, and he could tell she wasn't as nonchalant as she was making out.
They'd never talked about children. Not beyond his complaints and funny stories about the kids at his school. Not kids of their own. And any logical, practical concerns about money or Harry's college or them being not far from kids themselves were drowned out by one thought:
He'd fuck it up. Just like his own father. He couldn't do anything else. The get-her-in-the-family-way-and-bolt gene would see to it.
He drummed his fingertips lightly on the kitchen table like a nervous Morse code. "What're you doing now?"
She'd moved to the worktop and was laying the dandelions in a row. "Cutting off the heads."
"Don't be using a sharp knife," he said before he could curb the third-grade-teacher instinct.
"No, I'll use a spoon," she promised, her tone one of amused exasperation, "I'll just press down really, really hard."
He smiled despite himself, and without conscious thought on his part he could suddenly picture a little girl tugging at Harry's skirt as she worked, or a boy pestering him to come and play football. Proper football, too, not the sissy American kind where everyone wore body armour and stopped for a rest every five seconds. He looked at the fridge, covered by drawings from the kids in his class and the alphabet magnets Harry had bought him for their one-month anniversary, and thought about how it would look with his son or daughter's report cards there.
"What's up with the faraway look?" Some time in his reverie, Harry had stopped her attack on the weeds and turned her attention on him.
"We should go out," he decided. "Come on, leave that. We'd never drink it anyway."
He had mixed feelings about the seemingly perpetual summer in California. Sometimes it made him complain about the heat and feel nostalgic for the overcast skies back home. Other times he got the urge to spend all his time outside, just in case it was a great cosmic joke and the downpours would start up any second. Now, with the sunlight filtering through the small windows and catching the dust motes in the air above his head, he itched for the open air.
"Shame to waste the good of the day," he said, standing up and reaching for her hands. "Let's go and enjoy the sunshine."
***
His mental image of America, prior to ever setting foot in the place, had been a somewhat confused mix of the Wild West and Manhattan. He'd been gratified to find that the area he'd moved to was far from a metropolis of skyscrapers. It had tall buildings, yes, but it also had trees, and flowers, and parks where someone might while away a pleasant July afternoon with their wife.
"What do you want to do for your birthday?"
He leaned in and nipped her earlobe, making her squeak something about public places and bat him away. "Something debauched and filthy."
"Do you think about sex all the time?" she asked, in what he thought was an exceptional parody of her mother's disapproved voice (though she ruined it a little by smirking).
"Not when I'm at work," he said reasonably, "because then I'd be a very bad man and they'd put me in prison."
She gave him a light shove. "How 'bout a movie? My friend Tyler's working tomorrow night, he can get us in for free. We could go see the new Batman."
"Not really in the mood for the dark avenger bit." He curled his fingers in the grass. Too dry; it never seemed to rain in America, not properly. "Why d'you think he does it?"
"Who, Tyler?"
"Batman. The whole helping people bit. I mean, it's not like he has to. He's got stacks of cash and, and, a butler and everything, he could just stay in the Batcave and have a grand time of it, but he goes out and saves.." He trailed off, aware that he'd lost control of his mouth several non-sequiturs back.
Harry was giving him that look that always made him feel like he was on a microscope slide. "He saw his parents murdered. He's a vigilante. Did I fall down and hit my head or are we really having this conversation?"
"You're imagining things," he assured her. He patted his lap. "Have a little sleep, all the topsy-turvy insanity'll go away."
"My mom used to tell me not to talk to strange men," she commented, resting her head on his knee and closing her eyes. "No wonder she didn't want me to marry you."
He couldn't even come up with a decent insult to his mother-in-law. Batman, he thought. Where the hell'd that come from?
**
It was tranquil, soaking up the sunshine, listening to Harry's breathing become deep and regular. He passed the time watching the other people in the park. There were kids playing over by the swings, but he had enough professional experience of young children to know that it was never a good idea to pay too close attention to what they were doing if one wanted to maintain any illusions about their sweet, wholesome games. An elderly man brought ice-cream to where his wife was seated on a bench, and Doyle smiled along with her. That was how he and Harry were going to be in fifty or sixty years.
As the park gradually began to empty, a woman walked by. She was well-dressed, about his own age, and had thick, dark hair past her shoulders. He frowned. Something was niggling there, at the back of his memory, but when he tried to reach it, it slipped from his grasp.
A hand waggled in front of his face and he blinked.
"I don't know how they do things in Ireland," Harry said, eyebrows raised and mouth twitching into a smile, "but here in the States? So not polite to check out another girl when your wife's six inches away. Jerk." Just to punctuate the point, she threw a handful of grass at him.
"I wasn't checking her out," he protested. "Which, just as a side note, sounds like I'm borrowing her from the library, can you not say 'giving her the eye' or 'perving on her'? Not that I was," he added hastily. "She just... she looks like somebody. I don't know, an actress?" He glanced back at the woman. "Princess..." But she was already out of sight.
The sun was starting to sink in the sky. "C'mon," he said, brushing the grass from his jeans as he helped Harry to her feet. "Be dark soon. Let's go home."
**
After a late dinner - which he cooked, Harry claiming weariness from her aborted winemaking adventures - they ended up outside. When they'd moved into the apartment at the beginning of the school year, the first thing Harry had done was sling a hammock across the fire escape. It was strong enough to hold them both - Doyle had insisted on strenuous testing. Purely in the interests of safety.
They watched the sunset, and talked about nothing much, and fooled around some (Doyle didn't watch baseball, national institution be damned, and so he needed constant refreshers on which base was which), and finally lapsed into comfortable silence.
He was half asleep when Harry asked, "what time is it?"
He held his watch up to the light, squinting at the hands. "Five to twelve." He laughed as she scrambled to her feet, nearly sending him crashing onto the tiles. "Here, where's the fire?"
"Be right back!" she called over her shoulder, disappearing into the apartment.
The slight breeze was cool and pleasant as he rocked gently back and forth, staring up at the night sky.
Harry was back in view, camera clutched in her hands. He pretend-groaned.
"Come on, Francis," she wheedled, "I want a picture of you at the exact moment you turn twenty-one."
"I'm not what you'd call photogenic," he said, and was a little hurt when she didn't disagree. "Go on, then, take your snapshot."
"Smile," she said.
He smiled, and the camera clicked, and he asked, "Is that it? Am I done?"
She slapped her forehead with the back of her hand. "Dumb klutz! I forgot the flash."
"No worries," he said as she fumbled at the buttons. "Still twenty seconds till midnight."
"Okay, got it." She looked up, smiling warmly as her eyes met his. "Ready to go?"
Without thinking, without even knowing why, he whispered, "no, please, not yet..."
The glare from the camera flash drowned out everything else in his vision, and the world went white.
"Why don't I have a dad?" he asked, but it made his mam sad, and he stopped asking, and later in his life his childhood was vaguely remembered as a placid stream of ordinary non-events, but he still wondered about his father.
And after she'd taken the picture - at least, the first time, when he was still on the river and couldn't see what came after he turned twenty-one, when he didn't know how everything changed - she lay down in his arms again, and they looked up at the stars together and he said, "d'you know what one of the kids asked me last week?"
He glanced up as the door of the food bank opened, and the girl who walked in was so stunning he spilled soup everywhere and never even noticed, and in that second he had the crazy thought: gonna marry that girl.
"What?
"She asked why we can only remember the past, and how come we can't see the future."
Standing in front of a judge with a girl he'd known four weeks? Maddest thing he'd ever done. And as they were told they could kiss, and he looked into his wife's eyes, he knew it was the best.
"Wouldn't that be cool, though? Seeing the future."
"Only future I want to see is next week's lottery numbers."
The alcohol didn't help. Never enough to make him forget what he was. Or what he wasn't; not the man she'd married. Not a man at all. Monster. Demon. And she lied, the bitch, said it didn't matter but he saw it in the way she looked at him. He reached for the bottle again.
"So what'd you tell her?"
"Nothing. I'm not... what's he called, your man in the wheelchair, am I? My day, question like that, you'd just get told 'because'. Or if you were really lucky 'because God made it that way'."
Harry was holding her bags, and he was screaming drunken obscenities past a raw throat, and when she stayed calm and dry-eyed he knew he'd lost her forever.
"We talked about something like that in my philosophy class last year. The professor said life's like a river."
It felt the way he'd imagined a stroke would. Like someone had taken a rusty chainsaw with his brain, but he saw…
Guilty imaginings, he told himself. Just a migraine. Till he saw for himself, and he afterwards he threw up till he was too weak to stand.
All of them dead. His fault.
Figured he'd get more booze and put it behind him, till a week later when the second vision came.
Something to atone for.
"When you're on the river - when you're alive - you can't see past the next bend."
Working for a vampire? Not where he'd seen his life going. But he had a purpose again, and it lifted a weight he hadn't fully acknowledged was there.
"You game?"
"But if you could look at the river from above, like in an airplane or…"
"A hot-air balloon."
"You'd see it all. All the turns. Where you've been. Where you're going."
"The good fight, yeah? I get that now."
"And when he was saying all this I was thinking, wouldn't that be great? To be able to see it all and know where to avoid the riptides and rapids."
Soft chuckle. "Or go back to the places where the fishing was good."
"Francis?" Trailing off, nearly asleep. "Today was good."
"The best, sweetheart."
Cordelia's taste was on his lips and the cable was in his hand, and he held on through the agony and the fire, and the light
it hurt so much, christ almighty it hurt, worse than a thousand visions at once and the light was
the light was
blinding, and he groaned as Harry crouched by the bed and said, "look, the sun's out." And she kissed him sweetly and ran a hand through his hair and told him, "it's going to be a perfect day."
END
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no subject
on 2003-08-03 06:59 pm (UTC)Great job!
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on 2003-08-03 07:04 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2003-08-03 07:10 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2003-08-03 07:26 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2003-08-03 07:59 pm (UTC)*curls up in a little ball cries*
Oh, this is why I don't read Doyle(-the-character)-fic, because it always breaks my heart into tiny, shivering pieces. But I make exceptions for Doyle(-the-writer)-fic, because I know it'll break my heart in a good way.
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on 2003-08-03 08:10 pm (UTC)You are the queen.
no subject
on 2003-08-04 01:03 pm (UTC)This is gorgeous -- it starts so slow and normal, and the the climax just shatters everything.