A/N: I own nothing that you recognise.
One Day
She is cream tea on spring Sundays in the shade of a silver lined gazebo looking out at a perfect picture of empty nothingness. She is sprinkled sugar over Victoria sponge, the cream of the milk, the silverware glinting, winking, in the low lit sun. She is the icing on the cake. She is not perfection. She makes perfection.
He watches her every day. He leans over his dusty counter, pencil in hand, lead on lip for over time he has become immune to its metallic tinge. He waits for the moment when the book in her grasp catches the eye of the dozing sun because that is the moment he needs to capture. His pencil leaves a silver mark on the ridge of his mouth – a tattooed reminder of who he is – and it meets the page that he has so wished to perfect over such a long time.
To him, this nameless woman is everything. She makes a lowly bookshop into an artist's pride and joy. He does not need to know her because he can see that she makes ia/i equal ia/i and ib/i equal ib/i and makes two plus two equal four. For him, life makes sense when he sees her. He sees gravity pulling down and snowflakes gain a shape and leaves can brown and fall and he knows they will bloom again. She is rainbow sprinkles on vanilla sundae, the wash of an ocean across undiscovered terrain. She is a memory personified, stored away in a glass case.
A glass case he cannot open.
He brushes his pencil down the parchment, his scowl a form of defence as the unwanted monotony of daily life drifts past between them. He shades and erases and smudges and waits for it to take shape. The line of her neck is not quite right – it is too slender. Too perfect. So he removes the trace and starts again, the narrow line between idealism and realism blurring too bluntly.
He tries not to glance at the clock. He knows that it will soon be time for the white-laced daydream to end, however, as the froth of milk across her lip has been shyly wiped away and she has reached out for the tasselled bookmark to mark her place in the tome grasped between her fragile hands.
She puts it down as shadow falls across her eyelids, her glasses slipping off her nose and on top of the pale purple cover of her book. He prises his hand from the grip on his escape and turns away, because he always does. The rows and rows of unbought, untouched, unwanted volumes around him close inwards, tighter, a claustrophobic chaos of curtained necessity to be read and devoured and touched.
They just need to be touched.
He lets his hand drift over the rough spines, the embossed titles, the names which he envies for they are the only ones, the single people in the world who can lay sole claim to something they have done. He will never own the subject of his work. He could never dream to. Not really.
But he will.
He waits until the bang of the door shocks him open and she comes in, as punctual as the nine o'clock train to Freedom. He looks and smiles and she responds with a quirk of her lips.
It cannot be a smile, for her eyes don't shine.
Lilies and mountains and heather and ocean, they all seem to bloom and rise around her. She is snow upon a hilltop in the biting cover of March's comfort. She is foaming waves – or waving foam? – and empurpled wishes of lingering sunrise.
"Hi."
A fairy's voice of innocent ignorance and childish whim, she has never broken the tension that only he feels before.
"Alright?"
Gruff and harsh, he wants to take it back but her ghosted smile does not permit him.
"You…don't remember me, do you?"
He looks from her pale white curls to her elegant – ringless – fingers. He jerks his head – left then right and right then left and right again and she smiles shyly.
"Didn't expect you to." Her concession cuts him: a cuckoo in the middle of a bluebird's chorus. She tucks her book beneath her arm and sticks her hand out for him to take. He hesitates – just for a second – then concedes. Milk meeting coffee, they are somewhat complete. He looks for the name, he wants it so much. A whisper cuts through his head but the words twist and melt on the tip of his tongue. Agape, he forces his hanging mouth shut with a sharp mash of teeth on shattered letters.
"Do you want to know?" She does not give him chance to interrupt because her laugh – a raven's caw – slips past him. "You draw me and I write you. I come back every Tuesday. I pretend to read and when I'm bored of yellow pages and bold font, I silently buy another from you," she pauses, "then go home and tell myself I must not go back."
"But you do."
"Can't help myself," she concedes with a shrug. "Can I see it? The drawing?"
He wants to say no but her nose wrinkles and her eyes blink slowly and he gives in. He reaches under the desk and pulls it out – dog-eared corners and coffee ringed edges – to press into her hands.
"'s good."
"Could be better," he murmurs. "Bit out of practise. Difficult when the lighting's never the same two Tuesdays running."
"I could sit for you?" she offers, not taking her eyes off her widened neck and flyaway hair. "Just once, so you could get it right."
"I'd love to."
"Don't worry, I'd pay you."
"I don't want the money."
"Then…" and she trails off because the conversation has moved so quickly that she feels somewhat out of breath. He places his hand on the half-sketched lines and stares down at the too narrow eyes and the nose that points too sharply, then up at her and their noses could almost touch and he kisses her or she kisses him but who kisses who doesn't matter because they kiss anyway and it is summer sunrises and winter hailstorms and rain on the silk of a parasol.
"You said you write me," he recalls as they draw away from each other. She smiles with teeth of snowdrops caught in moonlight and nods her head, a willow kissed by a springtime breeze.
"One day."
A/N: So what do you think? Potential for the ship? The story? Reviews are love
