You Make It Feel Like Christmas
'I can see a better time, when all our dreams come true'
A/N: For the wonderful angel-princess-anna - I hope you like it and I hope you have the loveliest of Christmases!
The canon-compliance of this first chapter hinges on the key words 'first on-screen kiss' in the Series 1 Script Book...think of this as the first [off-screen] kiss!
25thDecember 1914
It was cold but he was not. He was distracted. John stared up at the piece of sky he could see from the chilly little courtyard - ink and water swirling across the darkness: a still, crisp Christmas night smudged with clouds scudding after the mottled face of the frostbitten moon. Could the young men (boys – if William got the call-up papers he so badly wanted, he would be a boy at war) in France see the same sky? Were they looking? (He used to look at the sky a lot in South Africa, marvelling at how different the cave - you could see that the world was curved when you looked long enough at the sky in the desert, the darkness seemed to arch away into the cosmos of classical mythology books – of stars looked to London's smoggy murk…yet it was the same sky, same stars, he knew…and that made his chest just a little tight, for all that he couldn't honestly have said he missed London terribly or was particularly desperate to return…).
The papers, the government, Mr Carson, all had said the war would be over by Christmas; John had never believed them. Or rather, John knew enough to silently ask which Christmas they were referring to. War was invariably longer and uglier than anticipated; so when the hall-boys (and William – William so eager to …what? To kill and/or be killed for some half-baked idea of patriotic glory and a few lines of a Jessie Pope poem? John knew what patriotic glory looked like when it was fought for with guns – huge eyes in the sunken faces of Boer women and children – knew that it smelled like burning grass) bemoaned the claims of the liars, the propagandists and the naïve optimists, John quietly assured them that he was sure they'd be wanted in this war before it was done [they missed the misery in his low voice, hearing – with smiles - only the certainty]…and wished with everything in him that he the one who was wrong; but he was already being proved right. The press' early cocky enthusiasm was waning – in France the men were cold and muddy, facing the Germans from lines of trenches that hadn't moved in weeks (and this was a new kind of war, a war John already didn't understand – and nor did Robert, for all that he liked to pretend he did) -
He sensed her presence more than he heard it…felt it skim across the back of his neck and down his spine, felt her quiet arrival lodge gently in his chest and the base of his throat. John looked away from the heavens, his eyes drawn irresistibly to Anna – her slight form, huddled against the cold (she was in uniform and nothing else, without a coat to keep out the bite of December), exerting a magnetic pull against which he was helpless.
It wasn't the winter night that stole his breath as she approached and thoughts of the sky and the war alike evaporated.
She settled herself on the crate next to him, close enough to touch if he dared – if he caved - but not close enough to allow a brush of bodies to be passed off as accidental.
"I wasn't sure you'd come out here tonight. It's so cold." He offered, to break the companionable silence, then instantly berated himself: don't make her think you don't want her out here – well don't make her think that you do! It's not fair. What can you offer her? Nothing. What are you even hoping to achieve with this…whatever it is – you hoped she'd come out tonight though…and 'it's so cold', really John? You're talking about the weather?...
"I knew you'd be out here regardless." She smiled softly – could a smile be soft? Hers was. The way she said it, with quiet certainty (knowing that she knew him so well…), tightened something in John's chest – like a string pulling taut across his ribs. "It's a beautiful night."
"It is," he agreed. It would have been an awkward response, but with Anna nothing felt uncomfortable – silence, ungainly words, they all just felt natural.
She looked down at her lap, where she was fiddling with her fingers, and then slowly drifted them over the folds of her skirt until her hand was resting, palm up, on the crates between them. Tentatively, ignoring the cynically pragmatic voice in his head demanding to know what he thought he was doing, John reached out and placed his fingers lightly on top of hers. She looked up as she curled her hand around his, and he could see her breath crystallising into vapour that hung on the air between them, mingling with his. Her skin was icy cold against his, and this close – close enough that he could see the wisps of blonde hair that had escaped from their pins over the course of the day, framing her temples - it was obvious that she was shivering slightly.
"Anna, you must be freezing." His voice was stronger – more normal - than he had expected (it felt as though all of the breath from his lungs must be hanging mistily in front of his face, where it was still twining mesmerizingly with her dancing exhales). "Here." He made to shrug his jacket off, intending to give it to her, but a hand on his arm stopped him.
"We can share it."
John blinked, as Anna boldly placed her palms against his shirtfront. They had both shifted – though on his part the movement had been unconscious – so that their knees bumped awkwardly, but he didn't care. He could only presume that her original intention had been to get close enough to wrap the jacket around both of them, but with her face tilted upwards and breath coming as shallowly as his, that plan seemed to have been abandoned.
There were a hundred reasons – he could have written an alphabetised list of them – beginning with his age and injury, heavily featuring his criminal record, and ending with Vera's name underlined in red ink, why he absolutely should not be lowering his face down, closer to Anna's, but in that second, with the eyelids of the one reason why he definitely should fluttering closed, so that her lashes brushed her cheekbones, which were glowing with the same cold-induced pink as the tip of her nose, John couldn't bring himself to care about – or even remember – all of those reasons…all he could see was every smile, from the first apologetic-on-O'Brien's-sour-behalf one to the slightly sad tray-at-the-door through every warm glance thrown over a shoulder or across the table in the Servants' Hall when no one else was looking; all he could feel was every brush of her fingers – the warm flood of trembling energy that would spread from the spot on his skin she had touched-
Tentatively, without realising how close he was until he felt her warm breath on his face, John ghosted his lips over Anna's. She pressed forward just slightly and suddenly they were kissing. Chaste and clumsy and sweet – so beautiful it hurt like a powerful ache in his chest - and more than everything he hadn't let himself imagine.
Anna tasted like tea and smelled faintly of lavender water and the festive spice with which Mrs Patmore's cooking had perfumed the whole of downstairs. Her lips were at once both soft and sure; and the feeling of drowning and melting and coming home all at once was so all-consuming that it wasn't until later, lying in bed and running one finger dazedly over his ringing lips, that John even thought to compare it to Vera…and came to the conclusion that if that – what he had just shared with Anna – was kissing, he had never kissed or been kissed until then.
When the mutual need for oxygen became impossible to ignore (and was it his breathing that was ragged in his ears, or hers?), the kiss was broken; but the moment was not. As their lips separated, John made to draw away – reality and all its accompanying worries and insecurities threatening to overwhelm the dam the kiss had constructed – but Anna leaned in again, her hands still resting on his chest, and this time it was her forehead she pressed against him, resting it against his shoulder (and she had to lean up to reach even there, even with them both sitting) so that when he turned his head her silky blonde hair was tucked under his chin. Her body fit against his – or his against hers, he wasn't sure – like puzzle pieces. The rest of the jigsaw of their lives was still a mess, pieces missing, lost, misaligned, forced together in spite of not matching, but they completed each other nonetheless – ragged edges coming together perfectly.
"Happy Christmas, Mr. Bates," Anna murmured – and there was no space between them for the words to fill, so they came to settle gently against his neck.
Swallowing past the lump of emotion (and he was certain it was joy, for all that it hurt, and for all that it was a hard knot at the centre of a tangle of anxieties and problems and obstacles he couldn't quite see over – but in this moment he could see through, to her) that had taken up residence in his throat, John replied "Happy Christmas."
