Invisible people can see each other.
He knows what he is, knows his role, his place, his lines, all the things that let everyone overlook him even when they're staring right at him. He's invisible, and that suits him just fine.
But she sees him anyway.
The others catch glimpses of him, sometimes. Gwen more than others; he makes her sad, he thinks. She's a compassionate soul, and he triggers her pity reflex, even though her pity is shallow and soon forgotten. Owen sees him in short flashes, but those are shoved away as quickly as they come. They're more alike than Owen wants to think, and the thought makes him smile a little.
Jack sees him sometimes, but he twists the image until what's left isn't really him at all. He's not sure what Jack's looking for: absolution, revenge, love...it's all the same in the end, really...but whatever it is, it isn't him. It falls like a switch, like clockwork, and thirty seconds in, he's invisible all over again, even held in a lover's embrace. Jack is holding someone else, apologizing to someone else, loving someone else. Who someone else is, he's never found out. He lets it go on, for reasons that are part revenge, part desperation, part empathy, and part morbid fascination. It's so interesting to be invisible, to be the replacement. He wonders if it will ever be different.
But he can't slip by her radar at all.
He doesn't know how it started, or why, or how it will end, or if it has already. He just knows that she sees him, and it frightens him and thrills him all at once. He found her crying one day, behind some pile of metal Jack swears up and down is useful. It was something Owen had said, something stupid and cruel, like Owen is most days. He put on his hotel-manager-mask and knelt beside her.
"Tosh? You okay?"
She had just stared at him. Stared, tears sliding down her cheeks in dead silence. And he knew, somehow, that she was looking at him, not around him or over him or through him. And then he'd found himself holding her, stroking her hair, kissing her mouth, and saying her name.
Now, he never asks if she's okay, and she returns the favor. Somehow, she understands his hurt and loss and utter loneliness without ever saying a word, and he knows that words are cheap, anyway. Instead, she orders pizza just the way he likes it, and he watches the black-and-white girly movies she loves, and they draw insulting pictures of Owen together, and between them both, the hurt and loss and loneliness is a little lighter.
And she never gets angry when he stays late with Jack, and he never rolls his eyes when she follows Owen like a lost puppy. She's just there whenever he's tired of being the replacement, and when she calls, lonely, at 3 a.m., he comes over right away.
In the morning, she always has green tea with just a smidgen of honey, even if everyone else is making do with reheated coffee, and there's always a doodle on a Post-it waiting in his cupboard. On his birthday, the one everyone forgot, he found his files alphabetized, his ties arranged by color, and a bottle of his favorite wine nestled between his disinfectants. He made sure there were at least a dozen chocolate kisses in her desk drawer at all times for a week afterwards.
She works less overtime, and he smiles a little bit more often. She remembers how to laugh out loud, and he remembers that talking isn't always such a terrible thing. She makes him go to a modern art museum, and he makes her clean out her closet.
Nobody ever knows what's different; nobody ever sees them.
But, then again, they're both invisible.