cherry | Fic: All this Season of Snow and Sins [Doctor Who, Romana/Jack]

All this Season of Snows and Sins

Romana, after the Time War. Jack, at the Time Agency.

You can't fight a war, because the war always wins.

Notes: I've been working on this story for weeks now, and I think it's taken me longer to write than any other single story has. I'd like to extend thanks to

tellitslant for beta reading, and for putting up with me through all of my attempts to strangle it.

All this Season of Snow and Sins
By

cherryice

It begins, as these things often do, with a girl.

The girl, of course, is not the beginning. There was a time before this moment; there were stories before her and there will be stories after she is gone. There is, however, a very strong probability that before this moment, she didn't exist.

There is an equally strong probability that after it, she will cease to be.

In this moment, she is screaming.

*

Paris, 1979, is in a rare state of bloom. There's a breath of relief in the streets, an extra bit of gaiety in the steps of tourist and resident alike. It's the flurry of activity after a storm, but the skies have been clear for days. Jack's wristcom shows a fading series of chronotron cascades, dispersing slowly into space/time. He's sitting on top of the Sacre-Coeur Basilica, arms loosely around his knees and stone cool beneath him. It's night and Montmartre is spread out before him, Paris lit by a million streetlamps, windows, headlights, a living tapestry. The travertine of the basilica glows white, set against the darkened sky like a field of snow or bone.

There's a peculiar sense of melancholy dancing through Jack's head, a foreboding riding roughshod through his carefully constructed calm. He's not sure why he's come here, to this time and this place. Aznavour declared the death of bohemia a decade and a half before, Gen Paul so recently departed. He prefers Paris at the dawn of the twentieth century, absinthe and martinis at the Moulin Rouge.

There's a certain sort of charm about it, though, something about the smell of burning hydrocarbons twisting through the air, dancing on the same breeze that brings a distant strain of jazz music.

This moment is the last he will remember. All things considered, it's not a bad one.

Behind him, now, comes the skitter of boots on sloping stone polished by wind and rain. "Captain Harkness?" someone asks, all anachronistic clothing, speaking late greater French instead of mid-Contemporary. "They need you at headquarters."

*

The corridor is bright, calming, blue light spilling from the panels that stripe the ceiling. His boots fall almost silently against the rubberized tiles, his shadow diffuse and muffled behind him. There's a file in his hands, red, paper, and he is in uniform.

"Sir," Daniels says as Jack enters the room, back straight and hands clasped behind her.

"At ease," Jack says, distracted. Daniels is a permanent transfer from the Agency forty years down the time stream, a soldier in the Michalion army when it got hit by a temporal anomaly and largely ceased to exist. There's a scar on her cheekbone that the medics could easily fix, but Daniels wears it as a badge of honour. Jack can't agree with the sentiment, but he thinks it gives her a rakish flair.

There's a window in the room, but it doesn't look out on much of anywhere. Agency headquarters is located at the heart of a dimensional rupture in space/time, a transplanted piece of ground touching the same physical location in seven different time zones. The exterior windows are carefully constructed, the landscape outside changing from moment to moment, flickering winter and summer and spring, meadow and skyscraper and atomic wasteland.

This window in this room is nothing so interesting. It looks out onto three interior walls, white-painted and blue-lit. There are more glow panels, perhaps, than elsewhere, striping the walls and wainscoting the floor so that there is not even the suggest of a shadow to be found. There's a mattress – it's lying on the floor, but the covers are warm and the pillows are soft.

And, sitting in the corner, there is a girl.

A girl, or the suggestion thereof.

*

The file in the hands of Captain Jack Harkness is so archaic as to be laughable. Scribbles of dye and graphite on processed bits of trees. Everything inside is off the network, easy to burn and easier to deny.

It holds a sheaf of papers, doctor's charts, photographs, test results scrawled with incredulous conjecture. What the file says, in brief, is this: Subject is female, age indeterminate, disoriented. Human in appearance, but species is unknown: scans show a binary cardiovascular system and tri-lobed brain.

There’s another file somewhere, printed flexis and information chips, a standard mission write-up. Target secured is what it reads, a short description of the damage to property and the fabric of space.

Unfit to stand trial, a third reads. She’s classified as a terrorist.

*

What the files don’t say is this: she was speaking in tongues when she they brought her in, a language full of guttural stops and rolling 'r's that the computer didn't recognize. In the infirmary, she spoke in her sleep, a tangled pile of words spilling from her lips, heavy with age, troubled, the sheets tangling about her legs. She cried out, once, and an orderly reached out to drag the blankets over her. She caught his hand and when her eyes focussed on him he couldn’t move. It was the first time anyone had seen her coherent, and in her gaze there was such a sense of age that he couldn’t breathe. She reached out one hand to touch his face and it felt like he was falling, time rushing past him like vertigo.

The next morning, she spoke Mandrish Basic with his accent.

What the files don’t say is this: when they found her she was unconscious, hair and nails grown to extraordinary length, hem of her shirt faded and frayed, the silver of the circlet across her brow tarnished. Graviton particles and chronotrons had flattened a two-mile radius through ten years in the time stream. She was laying in the middle of what was now a pile of travertine, and as pale as the stone all over. The first agent who found her thought she was a ghost. When he looked at his equipment and saw the gamma and tripteron radiation readings, he thought she was an echo in time/space.

The Agency had recovery teams there, medics, but there weren’t any bodies in the rubble until farther out, until there were still some buildings standing, some lampposts stubbornly lit against the night, dust heavy in the air. They walked through the debris, calling and making scanner sweeps, their footsteps the only ones written in the grit, like the first footprints on the moon.

*

"Do you know where you are?" Jack asks. He's leaning up against the far wall, shoulders and posture open, wearing his BDUs, charcoal and navy, jacket off. He is carefully casual and just authoritative enough to be trustworthy.

The girl, woman, is sitting on the edge of her bed. The mattress is thick, and she has her hands clasped loosely around her knees. Her skin is as pale the jump suit she wears, as pale as the walls, her hair. She looks frost-touched and wild, and she stares into the corner as he speaks. Some well-meaning soul has tossed a red blanket across her bed, the only colour in the otherwise bare room. The contrast is stark, unforgiving.

From the corner of Jack's eye, it looks as if she isn't actually there.

"Jane," he asks. "Do you know where you are?" Doctor Ellison labelled her files Nomen Nescio but Jack, who has spent large swaths of time in mid-contemporary Earth, thinks she's more of a Jane Doe.

There's a ladybug in the room, and he watches it flit about, a blur of colour against the light. The girl raises her hand and it lands on her skin. Jack lets out a breath he didn't know he was holding. He has interviewed the medics, the psychs, the orderlies, read the files. He is unsure as to what Admin wants from him. At the academy, he specialized in languages and temporal mechanics; Jackson knows more about psychology than he does, Helsink has more experience with interrogation. Both have security clearance equal to his own, both are in 'stream.

It's Friday night relative to 53rd century Rio de Janeiro (the Agency maintains the front exit in relative time to all six temporal zones headquarters touches, though the code that exits into the war zone is highly restricted). Friday night means sangria specials on the deck, women and men with their skin glistening in the night heat.

"Romana," she says, and for a moment she's there with him, sitting across the glass table, face turned towards the yellow glow spilling from the windows of the cantina. Only they're still in the blue-lit cell, and her eyes are turned towards him, focussed on a point three inches above his left shoulder.

"Pardon?" Jack asks, and he can feel the night air against his skin.

"My friends call me Fred," she says, turning her head the fraction of a degree required to meet his eyes. "You can call me Romana." There's an immediacy to her stare, a mind behind it that makes him think of flying and higher mathematics, then it's gone. She's looking at him but she's looking right through him.

"Romana, then," he says, but her gaze has already wandered. She is watching the ladybug crawl across her skin, watching as it follows the lifeline slashed across her palm. Jack can still taste sangria, wine lingering thick on his tongue.

*

She sings sometimes, to herself. It's the language she first spoke in when she woke, voice low and soft. There's something about the cadence that makes him think of nursery rhymes and folk songs. She paces, back and forth and round and round, humming, lashing out at the walls. She sits quiet and still, running through litanies, fingers flicking and words repeating.

There are cameras in her cell, filling memory disks with hour after hour of nothing, of tuneless humming and meandering verse. Jack has extracted the audio track, piping it through the communication network in his quarters. Her voice isn't one made for singing, roughened by constant use. There was damage to her vocal chords when they brought her in, atrophy from years of neglect.

It wasn't made for singing, tone and tune wandering, but Jack leaves it on a loop through the half-light that surrounds him, meandering words that drip with age. He's sitting at his table, networked flexis spread across the metal surface. Each one contains entire lexicons of alien languages, pulled from the transdimensional database that connects all eras of the Agency. The only thing that bears any resemblance to Romana's tongue is in records left by the Gelth, snippets in the language of a race even older than they.

Then again, no one can prove for certain that the Gelth themselves ever existed.

Romana's singing skips and cuts out with a chime. "Sir?" Daniels' voice is flat and tinny through the comm system. "You might want to get down here."

When he enters the room, Romana is standing with her back to him, one hand flattened to the wall, the other smudged green with ink. She is balanced upon her chair, writing on the wall. Her hand is small and cramped, crawling vine-like over the white space. The script is pictorial, ancient, though it drifts into Suudalian and Japanese. It appears to be calculus, physics, derivations.

Jack is standing just inside the door, Daniels behind him with her back straight and eyes fixed on the corner of the ceiling. There's a blank book lying abandoned on Romana's bed; the cover is embossed, grey.

"Romana," Jack says. The only sign she is aware of his presence is the inclination of her head. "Romana, do you remember who I am?"

"Harkness," she says, speaking Spanish-variant Basic. The figures flowing from her pen are of unknown origin. "Captain, Jack Xarles. 97661348. There's a wolf at the door and you can't – it's not enough." Her writing slows, stops, and she strokes violently through what she's just written. "It's never enough. You're not."

The only sound in the cell is the soft hum of the lights and the scratch of the pen.

"Romana," Jack says. There's a tightness behind his eyes, a tension at the small of his back. "Do you know where you are?"

She halts. Her back is still to him, but her head is cocked to the side as if listening. Her eyes are closed and she's humming up and down the scales, like she's testing resonances. Her hum stabilizes, and there's a sigh as she tilts her chin. "Dimensional rupture," she says. "Class three, alpha black."

"You're in Time Agency Headquarters," Jack tells her. "You were found at the scene of temporal disturbance."

"Alpha orange," she says, eyes still closed. "Chronotons here are active enough to give a falsely high reading."

The pressure behind Jack's eyes increases. "Agency is in a class four omega-red site."

"Not for long," she says with an implacable smile. Her eyes snap open and she's looking at him, looking through him, and Jack's breath catches in his throat. "Two years," she says. "It's not too much to bear, is it?"

Romana turns her head again, away this time, so that all that remains is the curve of her neck, the line of her cheek seen through her wispy hair. She hums, tuneless, fluctuating about that harmony, colour faded like something left too long in the sun.

Jack feels as if he's been taken to bits and found wanting.

*

Outside, Daniels won't meet his eyes. In the observation room, she straightens stacks of flexis so that they are precisely perpendicular to the table edges. Her natural state is still, and there is something about her silence that makes many of the other agents uncomfortable. Jack finds a sort of comfort to her presence, and not just because of the way her back meets her hips.

"How many piece of Michalion are there left?" he asks. The book laying on Romana's bed has three symbols on its cover, all of them in Daniels' native tongue.

"One less now," Daniels says, and her gaze doesn't waver. "Sir."

*

"How are you today?" Jack asks. Romana is sitting across the table from him with her head cocked as if listening to some far-off melody. Her hands are the only part of her in motion, tracing circles and figure eights across the cool metal tabletop.

"I am," she says, finally, "as well as can be expected, I suppose, when one considers that I am a temporal fragment of a greater whole." The words are carefully considered, her brows drawn together. "Also," she says, brightly, "to be frank, the view is rather rubbish."

There's something about her that is at once brighter and less solid when she smiles, a flush to her cheeks. "Do you know why you're here?" Jack asks.

"Greater minds than yours have failed to answer that question," she says. The writing on the wall behind her curls up and down, wanders, a pattern of leaves and equations framing her head.

If they had met under different circumstances, he would probably find her ridiculously charming, even given her dissociation from reality. "I was wondering more precisely about this room," he says. His voice is steady.

Romana tilts her head. "You are here, I'd imagine, because you're a good little soldier. I'm here because you haven't yet given me the means to escape. Also, I find your attempts at brewing a proper cup of tea amusing."

On the table between them is a file folder. This one is orange and neatly labelled. Jack rests one hand on it briefly, careful to prevent his fingers from tapping. "There's this great little café in 43rd century Montmartre," he says. "Fantastic elderflower presse, better Thollian pear pie." Smiles. "Just this little hole-in-the-wall place, but it had a great view of the basilica. Brick on the patio, and the cutest little waitress you ever did see, too. Red hair and the brightest smile."

"Sounds lovely," Romana says.

"Turns out," Jack tells her, moving the orange file minutely with his hand, "that it never existed at all. You want to know why you're here? There's a ten-year hole where there are supposed to be cafes, vineyards, tourists, children, pear pie."

"I know it doesn't mean a great deal to you," Romana says, eyes kind, rests one hand on the folder beside his without touching. "But in the grander scheme of things, it doesn't much matter."

There are many things that Jack doesn't say. That the waitress's name was Sally, that she had smooth, creamy thighs and an easy laugh. That she was a failed artist and had a brother in the Americas she hadn't spoken to in years. He doesn't mention the vineyard at Hollier, their quaint adherence to organics and all those vintages that never existed.

He has one memory, sharp. He is walking the reconstructed cobblestones, dawn stretching gold across the horizon. There's a bruise forming at the join of his neck and shoulder and his hands are deep in his pockets, against the chill. There is a cat sprawled across a garden wall, a tortoise shell mottled against the greenery and freesia. Her tail twitches as she watches him pass.

Jack is aware that loss often leads to idealization.

"I've always loved Paris," he says instead.

*

She is sitting in the corner with her knees drawn up, and her head tilted so that she can rest her cheek on them. Her arms are around her legs, hands streaked green with ink. The floor in the semi circle around her is dense with writing, strings of numbers and symbols drawn in a violent arc. "I seem to recall that I am rather fond of it myself," she says.

Jack, turning his head, blinks. Hartnell and Gibbons were due back from the 33rd century twenty-six hours ago. Hartnell has never landed a time ship more than fifteen minutes outside of a target zone, and they have had no word from up or down the timestream that they were diverted.

"I've only been there once," Romana continues, head still on her knees and some faint trace of colour on her skin. "But I think likely I found it charming, in a primitive sort of way." She is staring at a blank stretch of wall, furrow between her eyes.

It has been eight days for Jack since their last conversation, three for her, and with Gibbons and Hartnell on his mind; it takes him several moments to catch the thread. "It wasn't an attack on Paris, then," he says.

"No." Her eyes travel across the walls. There are places that are dense with equations and words, wide white spaces separating islands of ink that drift off into nothing in the middle of symbols and numbers.

"There are two main reasons for terrorist attacks," Jack tells her.

"Politics and religion," she says as he does, her cadence matching his, words coming almost imperceptibly before his own.

"Which was it?" he asks. "What did you have to gain?"

She is staring at the arc of numbers around her. "You have to start at the beginning," she says, unwrapping from around her knees and tracing the writing on the floor with pale and shaking fingers. Her stylus is lying discarded by the foot of her bed, empty.

Jack, who has seen this coming, pulls another stylus from a back pocket and crouches down, holding it just out of her reach. The posture is disarming and his smile is charming, and he waits for her to lean forward and snatch it. Her hand brushes his, cool, body temperature several degrees below human norm.

She starts scribbling as soon it's in her hand, starting some distance away and working backwards to what she's already completed. Jack identifies Planck's constant in amongst the mess, pieces of the Hullarian paradox. The Fibonacci sequence is scrawled down the wall in Sudaalese, visible over the top of her bowed head. "Nothing," she says, finally, frowning as she flies through Green's Theorum. "I only stood to gain in that I had nothing left to lose." Pauses, frowns. "You lot say that, but you have no conception, do you?" She leaves off mid derivation, jumping forward and to the right, and begins writing again. Frequency and period and Planck's time constant. "I rather expected I'd die."

"Suicide bombings are usually religious in nature," Jack says.

She breaks off writing and looks up at him. "In all my life, I have rarely seen a race as likely to kill over conceptions of the greater good and the meaning of life as you apes." Her eyes are dark and focus directly on him. "Ideologies," she says as she dips her head and continues to write, "are rarely worth killing for, when one considers that you lot will have changed your minds within a century anyway."

"So," Jack says. "Not religion, then."

"Hush," Romana replies. "It's starting."

The floor beneath them thrums, and the moment stretches out. When time snaps back to normal flow, Jack is lying cold on the floor, limbs askew, head cushioned. When he opens his eyes the room swims around him, green and white and blue. There's a second where he thinks he can see the unity of the numbers, knows what is left to go in the spaces between, but it slips away like sand though grasping fingers. His head is cushioned on Romana's lap, and her fingers pressed to the sides of his face, skin cool and faint double flutter of her pulse beating against his cheeks, his temples, his jaw.

"Go on now," she says as the alarm sounds. "You're missing all the fun."

*

There's a hum through everything in headquarters, low and insistent. There's a glass of water sitting on the table in Romana's cell, concentric ripples spreading across its surface.

"This site," Jack says, carefully, "went class three omega black four days ago. Do you know what that means?"

Romana is standing three feet away from him, left hand pressed to the wall. There is a smudge of ink blue across her forehead, and she is surveying the symbols before her. "Jumped five omega classifications. Design safeguards of the contemporary Time Agency are three omega." Her pen is tucked behind her right ear and there is a furrow between her eyes. She is not looking at him, but leans in close to read the small, cramped numbers before her. "It would start tearing itself apart in time, pieces coming out of sync."

They found Hartnell and Gibbons' ship out of phase and embedded in the landing dock. It had been two weeks for them, out of food three days and water two.

"You're hurting me," Romana says, her voice conversational.

Jack looks down to find that he is grasping her by the forearms, knuckles white. "You knew," he says.

"Yes," she says, voice even. "Yes, I did."

He releases her abruptly, spins. The room is too small, space sucked up by the writing on the walls and the time spinning in his head. "You warned me, didn't you?"

"Yes," she says again.

He punches the wall, once, twice, three times. It's rubberized, so it doesn't hurt anywhere near as much as he needs it to.

"How many?" Romana asks.

"Sixty-three," Jack says. Slumps back against the wall. "Anomaly started going out of sync around noon, local time. Mess hall fractured seven ways."

"I'm sorry," she says. She doesn't say I could have tried harder to warn you, and Jack doesn't expect her to. She risked a paradox once to warn him.

He lets himself slide down the wall, uniform jacket rucking up, until he is sitting on his heels with his back pressed to the rubber. He rests his elbows on his knees and his head on his hands, and thinks about Daniels, who has no one left to miss her. He found her temporally stripped, ghostly pale and frostbitten, five hundred metres down the hall from Romana's cell.

Romana is writing again, muttering beneath her breath, letters jagged and uneven. "Hey," Jack says. "I guess sixty-three isn't much when you've wiped out ten years of a half-million people."

"No," she says. "It's not."

*

It's Friday night in Rio, July, sticky and sweet. The city is in the middle of a heat wave, end of the day and temperature still in the high forties. Jack is dressed down, jeans faded almost to white, fraying at the knee and back pockets, dark red wife beater and a silver chain wrapped around his wrist. The streets are pulsing with life, people calling out in Spanish-variant Basic. He thinks of going out to Sugarloaf or Corcovado, wandering the Floresta da Tijuca in the dark, letting himself get lost in the vegetation for an hour or ten.

Instead, he walks into the city and lets it swallow him whole. He lets men and women buy him drinks, buys a few himself. Music spills from clubs and bars into the streets and the city never sleeps. He finds a street that's blocked off, orquesta típica in the air, watches as the dance is joined and left and won and lost. A man of indeterminate ethnic origin pulls him in (Jack is much more out of place, looking as relentlessly Caucasian as he does), and they dance. He whirls from partner to partner in a dance whose steps haven't changed in thousands of years, hands on hips and mouths to mouths and teeth on necks. He leaves with two of them, slips out again before morning. Walks barefoot down the beach in the moonlight, sand still releasing the heat of the day.

That night, when he sleeps, he dreams that he is sitting in the observation room behind Romana's cell. He is reading about the disappearance of the Michalion army, and on the other side of the glass, Romana is singing in that hazy and unknown tongue. She is writing across the window/wall, deconstructing the universe in a dead language. Backwards, he can almost understand what it is she's trying to say. There is something comforting about the roughness of her voice, and though her words don’t change, he hears her sing:

As I was sitting in my chair,
I knew the bottom wasn't there,
Nor legs nor back, but I just sat,
Ignoring little things like that.

*

The cell is darker and darker each day. Romana is writing now with a growing fury, patches of blue and green growing across all of the white space, curling around the corners and crawling across the floor. There is colour in her hair now, and on her cheeks; she is faded but not frostbitten.

"You were stripped," Jack says. It's not a question.

She adds a line in blue into an original green one, writing over and across and through. "That would be impossible," she says. "Federial showed that the temporal trauma caused by stripping would fragment the mind and body irrevocably."

This is what she says, but what she writes belays it, the area of the wall before her darker than any of the others, Federial's equations mixed with probability and biodata, temporal interactions on a molecular level.

There is something in her eyes, a weight of time that rushes past him like vertigo, and Jack feels like he is falling, screaming. He is hurtling through time, coming undone, and everything that he has ever been never existed at all.

He blinks, and the formulas resolve themselves into symbols. "Right," he says, takes a step back. "Of course."

He takes a step forward, traces his fingers over the symbols that cover the observation wall. They're starting to take on a finished sort of cast, formulas no longer trailing off into nothing. "Half a million people over ten years isn't much for you either," Jack says. It's not a question. The scratches on his back only pull a little.

"Have you ever heard of the Bellam?" she asks.

"No," he replies, following the trail of figures as they curl in on themselves like an oncoming storm.

"You're a good little soldier," she says. "I expect you know all about collateral damage."

*

She is waiting for him when he enters the room. She is sitting at the table, hands clasped easily atop the metal. She looks nothing and everything like she did the first time he saw her. Behind her, equations and symbols spill across the wall, dark and heavy, the original white peering through like a star field.

"There was a war," Jack says, settling across the table from her. It's not a question, either. "There are rips in the time/space continuum, artefacts and languages left by higher species that never existed."

She inclines her head. "Collateral damage."

"You were fighting a war," Jack says.

"You can't fight a war," Romana tells him. There is a smudge of ink across the bridge of her nose "The war always wins."

"Fine," Jack replies, pushing his hands through his hair. "There was a war."

"Only there wasn't," she says, "because the only way to end it was to make sure that it had never happened at all."

Jack pushes back from the table and walks to the wall. He can pick out numbers and formulas as they wind their way across the paint, a rationalization of a war with no beginning and no end, art without form, math without function. "I need to know if you want this to be your monument."

"To be quite frank," she says. "I'd rather be my own memorial." Her hands are still but they are tightly clasped, white-knuckle, faded blue ink across her fingers like bruises.

"I'm not the only thing that survived, Jack." Her voice is still rough, damaged, but it's strong. "We were fighting, and we were both too close to the epicentre of the – I have to track it down, and I have to end this."

Jack closes his eyes, and wonders how many genocides simply never occurred.

Romana's head is not bowed. "It has to be worth it."

Jack takes a single deep breath, and when he opens his eyes he smiles. "You'd better be."

*

There is a first hazy light on the eastern horizon. Jack is sitting on top of what used to be an insurance office, but now serves as the local relief headquarters. The air is thick with smoke and residual pollution, and he is drinking homebrew that burns his throat. He thinks of sangria, Rio, dancing, Rose.

"Get up," a voice behind him says. It's a girl, pretty, blonde, parasol resting over one shoulder. "They told me you were likely to be up here, but I didn't quite believe them. Is the air even cleared to breathe today?"

"It's a seven," Jack says. Shrugs, offers the bottle. "Borderline." He is all out of cheer, running dangerously low on charm. She takes it gingerly from his hand, sniffs it, and sets it back down.

"What are you doing here?" she asks.

Jack shrugs. "Turns out I didn't have anywhere better to be."

"Oh," she says, and sits down beside him. Her whites are bright and her clothes don't look as if they've ever been mended. "I'm rather sorry about that, actually." She pauses, picks up the bottle and rolls it between her palms. "You don't remember me at all, do you?"

There's something about the way she smells that reminds him of the Doctor, something about her eyes that strikes him with familiarity, but – "Afraid not," he says. He stares down at his hands, at his broken nails and the fresh scar running up his forearm, and thinks about what it's like to be forgotten. Takes the bottle from her and toasts her. "Although, there's a two year hole you could have fallen into."

"Oh," she says. Captures the bottle and takes a good long pull. She makes a face and coughs. "I suppose that's all right," she says. "We'll just have to start again." She offers her hand. "Hello," she says. "My name is Fred."

He takes it cautiously, suddenly aware of the roughness of his. His shirt is sticking to his back and the air is still heavy with smoke, but when he takes her hand, she smiles. He wonders what she reads in the dirt worked into the cracks of his skin.

The sun is rising and her skin is cool. "I hear," she says, "Paris is lovely this time last year."

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Hi, I saw a link to this story on my friends-of-friends list, and I simply wanted to tell you that, well, that I haven't quite the right words left to tell you how marvellous it is.

In brief: I do love it, and I'll add it to my memories at once.

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