we are the children of an indifferent universe
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.
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… ?”
“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.
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.
John winces at his own voice, face in half a cringe when he meets her gaze, and he opens his arms apologetically.
“Why what?” she snaps, but she sounds more exhausted than angry, and he slowly, hesitantly, moves toward her. He doesn’t quite want to - she’s frankly quite terrifying, that strong nose and beautiful eyes and hair - but he can’t seem to help himself, his legs skipping over that all important step of receiving directions from his brain and choosing to operate independently. That’s it—he’ll blame his legs.
He stops a few paces away, hovering toward the empty side of the bench, and resists the urge to shove his hands in his pockets. “Why are - were - you crying?”
She frowns, eyebrows drawing together in a way that makes her nose scrunch, just a little, and it’s ridiculously adorable. He wants to grin, though, thankfully, is socially aware enough to know that grinning while talking to crying women generally ends badly (and he has a broken doorknob to prove it).
“That’s not really any of your business,” she says finally, and he nods.
“No, it definitely isn’t. But—” He sees her shoulders stiffen even further. “I just got off work and so happen to have two of London’s finest jam doughnuts and, regrettably, couldn’t possibly finish them both.”
He has no idea what he’s doing. He doesn’t talk to women - not in that way. Not flirtatiously, which he thinks - maybe? - he might have been doing. But he doesn’t feel so awkward with her, even though they’ve barely said anything and all she’s done is threaten and snap at him, and all he’s done is stare creepily and offer her a doughnut.
The woman is - was - crying and he’s standing here offering her a bloody doughnut and how, he wonders, on Earth, is he not dead yet? How has lightening or an asteroid not just appeared to strike him down and then she smirks and says, “I don’t have that kind of luck,” and he realizes with increasing distress that he’s just said all of that out loud.
He makes what he’s certain is a pitiful noise in the back of his throat, but the woman just quirks her lips slightly and pats the bench next to her.
“Sit down, before you strain something.”
