Au Revoir

So, as soon as it was revealed that Dylan and Sam took their honeymoon in Paris, I knew I had to write something about that! I love all things French and Parisian so it brought me a huge amount of bittersweet joy that she'd kept that boarding pass as something important to her.

2018

Dylan opened Sam's locker tentatively. He didn't want to do this at all. He would pretend that it was because he didn't feel it was his place; he would put up a front and tell people that someone closer to her should be doing this and not him. It was all kinds of wrong to be going through her belongings. It had been about eight years since he was welcome to touch anything that belonged to her, so now to be expected to root through a locker full of her things seemed such a violation. This act only served to cement in his mind that she was gone — something which he categorically did not want to have cemented in his mind. They'd been a long way from perfect, but they'd also been a very long way from wishing each other dead. He'd pushed her away, but now he'd do anything to have five more minutes.

Looking up and down the door at the photographs she'd deemed important enough to display, it was as though the Sam he had known, the one he'd been in love with, had vanished from existence long ago. The photos had all been taken since her return as a paramedic, as though she'd wanted to forget everything that came before. Maybe she had wanted that. There were ticket stubs too, but his eyes kept pulling his attention back to her smiles and deliberately posed faces with pouts and her tongue sticking out. She seemed more grown up in a paramedics uniform that she ever had in ED scrubs, but these photos reminded him of a much younger version of Sam.

When his eyes fell on the old boarding pass stuck in pride of place on the inside of the locker, everything stopped. He forgot that he wasn't doing this alone; it didn't matter anymore that Jacob was standing beside him and thirty seconds ago Dylan had thought that the nurse would be about a hundred times more qualified for this job.

"Oh, my word," Dylan murmured. He reached out without even thinking about it and peeled the card from its supporting piece of blue-tack. He cradled it in his hand for a few seconds. "She kept it."

Jacob frowned. "What is it?"
It took a moment for Dylan to pull himself out of his head to reply. He felt utterly absorbed by this tiny memento as if it was a black hole dragging him back to a far more pleasant past. He cleared his throat. "Um, when we got married, we had our honeymoon in Paris. Just a couple of nights. We didn't have any money, so… Cheap and cheerful…"

2010

It was ridiculously early in the morning. Such was necessary for cheap flights into Charles de Gaulle — for two doctors working at the sharp end of emergency medicine, it probably shouldn't have been such a monumental battle to be at Heathrow at half past four in the morning. But here they were, hardly keeping their eyes open after more than an hour spent at security.

They'd been married for four days, and a happier four days neither of them had ever had. It was magic of an entirely ordinary kind, to wake up beside someone knowing that they were nothing more or less than your better half. A magic which did not extend to preventing the tetchiness provoked by queuing and the whole atmosphere of airports. Sam defied anyone who insisted they could be calm and cheerful in an airport at this time in the morning. Still, with her right hand dragging her carry-on suitcase and her left linked tightly with Dylan's right, she wouldn't change a thing about today.

They found two seats in easy view of a departures board, not trusting themselves not to miss the announcement of their departure gate.

"I'm going for coffee," Dylan said, the moment Sam had sat down. "The usual?"

Sam pulled on the end of the loose plait which came down over her left shoulder and nodded. "Please." She looked at Dylan more closely. "Everything okay?" she checked, although she half-knew the answer.

He looked uncomfortable. "Fine," he said gruffly, knowing full well that she wouldn't let it drop.

She raised her eyebrows. It might have been pre-5.30am but she could still read him easily, and he didn't carry himself anything like the carefree, newly-married man whom she had left the flat with this morning.

Dylan knew that the moment he told her the truth, it would shatter this illusion of the perfect honeymoon. "I don't much care for flying," he said, so quietly that perhaps she wouldn't hear him.

But she did hear him, and stood up from her seat at once. She stood close in front of him, one hand resting calmly on his chest. Almost at once, she turned this action into adjusting the collar of his jacket. "You could have picked any number of beautiful places in the UK for this trip, and you still chose to take me to Paris, because you knew I'd never been. You're something else, Dylan. I love you." She kissed him, then hugged him tightly. It would be easy here, to make light of it all, suggest that the fearless Dr Keogh finally had a kryptonite. But she didn't. "It'll be alright," she assured him. "Now, coffee, before I request an IV supply of caffeine."

Dylan rolled his eyes gently, a smile playing on his lips. He kissed Sam's cheek, very aware of how lucky he felt at this moment.

Fifteen minutes later, he returned, balancing two takeaway coffee cups in one hand and two chocolate bars in the other. He stood about four paces away from her.

"Sam," he said loudly by way of alerting her to his return. The second she looked up, he deftly threw one of the chocolate bars at her.

She caught it, not before shooting him a look of pure daggers. Turning it over in her hands, she smiled. Cadbury Fruit and Nut, her favourite.

"I wondered if it was too early for chocolate —" Dylan began.

"—never too early for chocolate," Sam corrected him. "As a doctor, I should probably be appalled that this passes for breakfast. But I don't care; for the next two days we're having fresh croissants for breakfast."

"Three, if you count buying them when we arrive later."

"I knew there was a good reason why I married you," she said as Dylan took a seat beside her. He seemed a little less on-edge now, but she had no doubt that his previous nerves might return the moment they were taxiing down the runway.

"It's a good thing I love you," Dylan said in return for her remark, "because I hate airports."

"How you came to be an ED doctor, I will never know." Sam thought that Dylan was such a peculiar match for emergency medicine. He was exceedingly good at it, but he hated crowds, busyness, and crucially, most other people.

Sam unpicked the wrapper of her bar of Fruit and Nut. She snapped off the first square but left it in the wrapper, immediately offering it to him.

But he pulled his face in mild disgust. "Just because it's your favourite, does not mean that I want anything to do with it. There is no place for any of that in a chocolate bar. Fruit is for the weak."

"How you came to be a doctor at all, is a total mystery!" Sam shrugged and ate the square of chocolate herself.

Passport control in Paris was far more intimidating than any other place that Sam had visited. Border officers walked up and down in bulletproof vests, carrying enormous guns. Sam wasn't intimidated by them, as such, since her designs on army life had rather desensitised her to firearms. It was her limited knowledge of the French language, knowing that she couldn't answer anything that they asked, that worried her a little.

She and Dylan approached a passport desk together, and before she'd even had time to think about saying even a poorly-pronounced 'bonjour,' Dylan had let loose a stream of rapid-fire, fluent French that their passports were checked and they were ushered through before she even knew what was happening.

"You kept that one quiet," she said as they walked away.

He looked at her as if he had no idea what she was talking about.

Sam looked at him in amazement. "Yes, it's nothing really, only that you're fluent in another language!"

"I'm not fluent," he said quickly. "I simply answered his question; the douanier asked what had brought us to Paris, and I told him. I said we were doctors, just married, and we were here for our honeymoon, which I wished was a bit longer."

"You're a hell of a lot more fluent than anyone else I've ever met!" Sam said admiringly. "Fluent enough to throw a French word into an English sentence with perfect confidence, anyway.."

"Well," Dylan said slowly, "not all of us were blessed with a sparkling school sports record to make our applications to med school stand out." He nudged her teasingly. "I had to do something, and I suppose it never went away."

"And it just happened that your 'something' had to be learning just about the most romantic language that exists?"

"Yes," he replied simply.

"I think it's very impressive." Sam turned to him, still walking, and kissed the corner of his mouth.

The hotel was nothing special, but Sam had another opportunity to look on with deep admiration as Dylan spoke freely in French to the receptionist. While she couldn't understand what they were talking about, of course, the embarrassed glance and then knowing laughter from the well-dressed Frenchwoman suggested to her that there had been a joke made at the expense of her lacking linguistic ability.

The room was small, minimalist and classically French. A single red rose lay on the bed, with a white label tied to it. Madame Keogh, avec amour toujours, it read when Sam picked it up. She looked up at her husband.

"My GCSE scraped-pass has got me as far as the last word," she said, wishing she didn't have to ask. The beautiful cursive script oozed love and affection.

"Always," Dylan replied quietly. He took her hand and sat down on the bed, leading her to do the same. "Mrs Keogh, with love, always. I know we're doctors, really, but just once, I wanted us to be plain Mr and Mrs."

"Then that's what we'll be, while we're here," said Sam. She placed the rose on the pillow on her side of the bed.

"It's not much," Dylan said quickly, looking around the room, "I'm afraid I couldn't do much better. There's not a balcony overlooking the Eiffel tower, or even looking down the Seine, but…"

"But that doesn't matter to me." Sam looked out of the window, which while not leading to a balcony still opened wide and revealed a view of a tiny park between tall buildings. "I'd go anywhere, as long as I'd be with you." She pressed her lips onto his.

And they kept going, kissing needily and desperately without pausing for breath. Her right hand was on feather-light on his face while her left seized a fistful of duvet. She felt him clumsily and blindly begin to tease the hair-tie from her plait and begin to work her hair free. Her left hand rose to quicken his clumsiness, and their fingers met in her hair. Although they were still kissing, Sam smiled, and she felt a small laugh escape Dylan's mouth.

When he pulled her jacket down from her shoulders, she scooted backwards, breaking them apart.

"If we start that, I won't want to stop," she explained, her cheeks colouring slightly with exhilaration. "I have to see this city, as much as I need you."

Dylan sighed. Of course, she was right. Having pulled her jacket off her shoulders, her long-sleeved t-shirt was exposed, and he saw it properly, for the first time that day. "Oh my goodness, Sam, are you wearing Breton stripes?"

Sam bit her lip, the corners of her mouth turning upwards. "Oui." She burst out laughing when Dylan's expression shifted from eye-rolling to amusement to absolutely loving the bones of her, all in about two seconds.

It was September, and there was a little warmth left in the sun that shone down over Paris later that morning. They walked arm in arm towards the Eiffel tower, Sam still finding joy in Dylan's obtuse lack of observation.

"I can't believe it took you over two hundred miles to notice the clothes I put on this morning," she said, before going quiet as the full magnificence of the Eiffel tower put her under its spell. "Oh," she said, dragging out the sound and feeling entirely wonderful.

"It's certainly something, isn't it," Dylan said. The early morning and the unpleasantness of flight was entirely worth it now.

Underneath the Eiffel tower, there were people milling about all over, all speaking different languages and all revelling in the excitement of where they were.

There were two buskers, not far away, one playing a violin and the other singing. Their song ended as Dylan and Sam moved closer, and another began. From the opening chords, Dylan recognised it at once.

"Si tu n'étais pas là…" the singer began, making Dylan's heart soar. There wasn't a better piece of music for this moment, for this tiny snapshot in the beginning of his life with Sam.

Perhaps the people around them recognised it too, or perhaps they were just swept away by the romance of it all.

"Humour me," he said. "I'm grumpy and difficult and entirely unlovable, but dance with me, under the Eiffel tower, to this song."

Sam raised her eyebrows, wondering what emotion could have been stirred up by this smooth, lyrical piece of music. The words must have meant something good. "Alright, you unlovable grump," she replied, smiling. "Only if you'll translate the lyrics for me, later."

They were not the only couple dancing at that moment, but they might as well have been the only two people on earth.

At the top of the tower, Sam badgered the lyrics out of him. "Go on," she said, "I have to know how you came to instantly recognise that piece of music as perfect for the occasion. I'll give you that it sounded lovely, but I need the story!"

"There's not too much of one, I had an elderly French teacher with a penchant for Édith Piaf and the like. I forget the name of the artist who sang that song… It's not important. It's called Si tu n'étais pas là, that's If you were not here, in English. It goes along the lines of not knowing how to live, without you; not knowing the happiness that consumes me, if you weren't in my life; and giving my heart to you." He looked down at the floor, unused to saying openly romantic things aloud, in public. "It seemed appropriate," he said, shrugging. "I don't think I'd be me, without you."

"I think it's beautiful," Sam replied. "I'm glad we danced to it. I love you."

"I love you too."

She kissed him softly, then pulled him over to the edge of the observation platform to look over the city.

2018

It was a difficult task, picking through Sam's belongings to decide what would be kept and by whom. Dylan didn't want anything recent; it wouldn't be right to take her jacket when there were far more relevant significant people who had been in her life much more recently. And most of what was in her locker was recent; it wasn't a place for keeping one's old life in order. But there were a few older photos tucked away at the back, which he pocketed impulsively. He had to have something, besides a plane ticket.

Jacob took Sam's paramedic jacket and laid it out on the floor. He crouched down and looked at it for a few moments. "I should check the pockets," he said hesitantly.

"Then do it," Dylan replied. "If there's one thing I will remember of Sam, above all else, it was that she was the first to barrel into something, and think about it later." It felt so wrong to talk about her in the past tense, but he didn't let this on at all.

Jacob carefully put his hand into each pocket in turn. "Nothing but a few coffee shop receipts," he said, putting the crumpled slips of white paper beside the jacket.

"That sounds about right." Dylan crouched too and wished it wasn't the last time he'd see something of Sam's. A flash of purple caught his eye, poking out of a small, nearly-concealed pocket at the top of the jacket. He picked it out with his thumb and forefinger. It was the empty wrapper of a chocolate bar, and even more than the plane ticket, it made him feel a crushing wave of grief.

"Cadbury Fruit and Nut," he said thickly. "Her favourite."

Three photographs, a boarding pass and a chocolate bar wrapper. That was all he had to remember her by. She hadn't been his for a very long time, but that didn't mean he wouldn't miss her. He tucked his five mementoes into an envelope, which he tucked between two books on his bookshelf.

"I'm glad that Fruit and Nut was still your favourite," he said, his voice a little more than a whisper. "Au revoir, Sam."