I'm baack! I decided to write another fanfic. Unfortunately, it turned out to be another AU fanfic. And it's a modern AU. I suppose in the story's favour, it's not a high school fic, so I hope that's something. Anyway, I hope you give the story a chance, since I know very few people like modern AU stories. It's basically just a bit of fun, something cute and fuzzy to write and read. I hope you like it!

Disclaimer: The BBC's characters are not my property. I'm just borrowing them and putting them in awkward situations.

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o…o

Monday morning. The air was dry and shockingly cold, and the wind put a painful edge on that little below-zero nip in the air. It hurt to breathe, and numbed his ears and nose and cheeks; his hands were so cold they throbbed as they were clasped around a pair of styrofoam coffee cups. When the train finally arrived, he was relieved to join the crowd of people boarding it and get out of the bitter cold.

The train rattled back and forth in the dark underground tunnel, nearly lulling a barely-awake Will Scarlett back asleep again. He rested against the cold window, his head rocking against it and leaving forehead-prints on the glass. It was too dark to be awake, too cold to be out, and too early to be doing anything but sleeping. His trance was broken when the window suddenly became blindingly bright as the train came up from its underground tunnel. It startled him awake and he jolted himself upright, nearly tipping the two steaming cups into his lap. He knew this stop—the next one after it was…

He straightened nervously, used the window next to him to check his appearance. The side of his face was all red where he'd rested it against the window. His eyes were bleary. He tried to look as polished as he could manage at half past seven in the morning. He picked up his bag and placed it on the seat next to him—he wasn't going to let anybody take that seat.

The train hissed to a stop at the station and the group of drowsy, zombie-like commuters stumbled in through the door and filed down the train aisles. He fixed his best death glare on anybody who lingered too long by the empty seat next to him, warning them away from it. But very few people even noticed; they were all too tired to want to bother arguing with even the slight-built young man who didn't look like he could hurt a fly.

Tired commuters were quietly dozing in their seats, chattering on mobiles phones, reading newspapers, and for the most part ignoring their fellow passengers. He didn't take his bag down from his seat—he'd made that mistake once before, and as soon as the train moved again an overly-chatty American tourist sat down next to him and didn't shut up until he got off the train to go to work.

They were back underground again. He felt a little jolt of excitement as the train neared the next station. It was silly—he'd taken this ride every day since he got this job three years ago. He'd seen her everyday. There was no reason to get stupidly, pubescently excited about the woman who was going to squeeze on board the train with the next herd of riders at the upcoming stop.

But he was. And he felt stupid about it, like an awkward high school student swooning over an unattainable crush. His entire life revolved around the thirty minutes a day he'd get to talk to her—fifteen minutes on the way to work, fifteen minutes on the way back. Every day. For three years. He spent the first six months watching her get on and off the train, watching her every move as she read or dozed—all the while hoping and praying for her to say something to him. He was ridiculous. He could never talk to women. Clearly they taught that in school during the three weeks he was absent with pneumonia.

He remembered watching her for those months, waiting for her to talk first. Allan, his roommate and best friend, found out about it and teased him incessantly for it. Allan was always much more confident and far better at talking to girls than he ever was, and there were days that he wished that he rode the same train and could initiate conversation for him. Of course, if Allan ever had said anything, it would likely have been something humiliating, like, "Hey, my friend is madly in love with you and wants to marry you and someday father your children," so perhaps it was just as well that he didn't. And then one day she did say something to him.

"D'you mind if I sit here?" She'd asked, pointing to the empty seat next to him.

He was shocked to find her standing there and he'd dumbly nodded, staring at her, and she sat down. He went on sketching, then, and tried his best to think of something to say. But he forgot how to speak and couldn't get past the fact that she was sitting next to him.

Then she'd spoken again, looking over his shoulder and complimenting him on his doodle of a rose on a paper napkin from the coffee place. "Nice drawing."

It was all he could do at the time to keep from blurting out, "I love you." He tried desperately to remember something—anything—in the English language before he squeaked out a spectacularly high-pitched "Thank you." He'd sounded like an anthropomorphic chipmunk.

Since then, she sat with him every day and the talking had been easier. They chatted idly every morning as they sleepily rode the train to the last stop, and every night as they tiredly rode back to their respective stops. Very occasionally their lunch breaks would coincide and they'd grab a bite together before she had to run back to the doctor's office again. He tried to learn as much as he could about her in the time they had, in hopes that one day he'd have the ammunition necessary to sweep her off her feet. And the more he learned about her, the deeper in love he fell. She was perfect, as far as he was concerned. He lived for those times when they could talk—thirty minutes every day and the occasional rushed lunch. He was absolutely pathetic.

The train hissed to a slow stop once again, and he looked out the window at the group forming on the platform, looking for the familiar figure. He couldn't see her, but he didn't suspect that she wasn't there. She came to work no matter what, even if she was sick as a dog. He sat up a little straighter in anticipation.

The push of commuters squeezed in through the doors and into the aisles and descended on the remaining unoccupied seats like vultures.

"Pardon—'scuze me! Coming through. Pardon me. Shove up, please."

He recognized that voice, with the delectable husky accent.

People were jerking back and forth as they were shoved out of the way by another body pushing through the crowd. The first thing he saw poking through the mass of bodies was a head of short dark hair, followed by a petite form in purple doctor's scrubs and white lab coat under a long black winter coat. She squeezed through the last of the people in her way before somebody gave her a shove, forcing her to lunge to catch herself on the seat in front of her. And then some careless person walked by and bashed her in the head with his briefcase.

"Ow!" She yelped.

"Are you all right?" He asked gently, moving his bag and helping her into the seat.

"Yeah—ow. Yeah." She grunted and rubbed her head where she'd been hit, and shrugged her bag off of her shoulder. "Jerk."

His heart beat wildly in his chest and he forced himself to breathe evenly. Djaq Bseiso. God, she was gorgeous. Soft dark skin, her cheeks rosy pink from the cold and the wind, big black-gem eyes, glossy black hair. Her hair was longer now than when they'd first met, down to her collarbones and kept in two jaunty little plaits down either side of her neck. She could easily be mistaken for a teenager, even though she was several years older than he was. As soon as she sat down next to him, she smiled that wide, knee-jellying smile and his breath caught in his throat.

He had to sit on his hand to stop himself from reaching out and stroking one of her short plaits or touching her cheek.

"Morning," she said.

He snapped out of his reverie. "Morning. Here," he handed her one of the cups. "It's a cold morning and I thought you might like something warm to drink—it's tea."

She took the cup gratefully. "Thank you," she sighed. "Oh, it's awful cold out there! I am not made for this weather."

"Your desert blood, right?" He teased with a smile. That was always what she said about the cold weather—that she wasn't a creature of cold weather because of her heritage in the Mid East. The desert was in her blood.

"Yes—that is it exactly."

There were still people trying to get by in the aisles next to their seat, and she shifted closer to him to make room for grumpy, pushy passengers. She practically had to climb into his lap to avoid being smacked in the head with more briefcases and bags. He had to hold his breath and concentrate on absolutely anything else in the universe.

"Sorry about this," she apologized weakly as she tried to keep her head clear of passing commuters.

"It's all right," he managed to croak. "I don't… mind." Of course he didn't mind—not at all. She was squashed back against his shoulder, leaning away from the people in the aisle, nice and warm against him; he inclined forward ever so slightly and breathed deeply. Her hair smelled good—like some vaguely spicy shampoo. In his head he kept repeating over and over again, 'Don't touch! Don't touch!' to remind himself to keep a respectable distance between them.

Finally, the people in the aisles stopped moving and Djaq righted herself again. Will exhaled slowly and shakily as he felt himself bereft of the warmth where she'd been sitting. All he wanted to do was pick her up and plunk her back down in his lap where she belonged.

'Don't touch!' came that persistent little voice of reason in the back of his head.

"So how was your weekend?" She asked him as she took a drink of her tea.

He snorted. "Fantastic. I babysat my bunkie all yesterday."

"Allan?" She asked, raising her eyebrows. "What did he do this time?"

He'd told her before about Allan and his myriad bad habits.

"He was out all night Saturday and came home droolingly drunk very early Sunday morning, peed in the rubbish bin, and passed out in the bathtub with no pants on."

She snorted in her tea and sputtered briefly as she tried to laugh around her coughing. She was giggling helplessly with her face in her hand, her shoulders quaking mightily with laughter. He loved it when she laughed—she always looked so cute—and it didn't take a great deal to make her laugh so hard she cried, either. Recounting his roommate's antic and sometimes lunatic behaviour often provided the fodder necessary to make her dissolve into hysterical laughter, which was exactly what he wanted.

She was just so painfully pretty. He sighed wistfully as he stared at her. Then he realized he was staring and immediately focused on an advert on the other side of the train.

"Sounds like you had an eventful weekend," she said when she'd stopped laughing.

"I'm glad you think it's so funny. Anything interesting happen to you?"

"Well, I didn't have to take care of a drunken flatmate. I could lie and say I did something interesting or exciting, but I did not go any further than the corner shop."

"The Playstation stole your soul again, didn't it?"

"Maybe just a little."

She smiled slightly.

He melted.

o…o

"Will? Are you at home in there? Hey, Will. William! Earth to Scarlett, come in Scarlett! You are needed urgently on the Holodeck!"

The voice went from dulled and distant to sharp and clear and directly over his head as he slowly came out of his trance.

He looked up with a blank, not quite lucid look on his face. He couldn't remember what he'd been doing—or what he'd supposed to have been doing. He'd fallen into another one of those embarrassingly elaborate daydreams—in this one, Djaq fell asleep on the ride home and had to get off at his stop, and somehow he'd managed to convince her to let him drive her home as opposed to, say, taking the train back to her stop; and then he'd gotten his courage together and leaned across the car and kissed her and miraculously she didn't slap him…

"Huhn?"

Ben was laughing, shaking his head as he sat down in the chair at the end of the table to continue laughing at him, and Will suddenly found himself fully back in the real world. He quickly remembered that he was supposed to be drafting for a sarcophagus bookcase, but instead had absently sketched a familiar pair of dark eyes on the corner of his blueprint paper. He looked down at it and felt himself begin to blush. The extent to which Djaq dominated his thoughts sometimes was embarrassing. He quickly covered up the sketch with another piece of paper and looked over to the side.

"You know, it's a damn good thing you're good at what you do," Ben told him. "You've been here, what? About three years?"

"Yeah."

"Any craftsman with his head in the clouds as much as you would've been out on his sorry ass a long time ago. But you're just so damn good at what you do that the boss just overlooks everything."

Will looked down guiltily. That was truer than he liked to admit; when he got to daydreaming or thinking about Djaq, he became completely lost in thought and hopelessly distracted and often did stupid or dangerous things that should have cost him his job or even a limb. But he had a certain natural gift for his art, and was excused his absent-mindedness far more often than he should have been.

"Yeah, well…"

"Remember last year, when you accidentally slipped while prying a piece out of a dovetail joint and had to get five stitches in your hand?"

Of course he remembered that. How could he forget? The supervisor fainted when he saw the blood, and Ben had to wrap his hand in towels, and then arranged to send him across the road to the clinic where he could get his hand seen to. Djaq had been the attending physician. He was so humiliated that he wanted to just cut the hand off and slink away, never to be seen or heard of in England—or, if he could help it, the northern hemisphere—ever again.

It was also the one time he'd ever held her hand, but he hardly thought that counted because she was wearing gloves and knitting his flesh back together. She was tender and gentle, and talked to him the whole time to keep his mind off of his injury and the embarrassment about it. When she was done, she gave him a lolly from the stash they gave to children who didn't kick the doctors while getting their routine jabs. And when she asked him if there was anything else he needed, he had to concentrate on not saying, "Could we have sex a few times and then talk marriage?" and shyly said no thank you, she'd done enough.

Hurting himself had been an extreme result of his carelessness. Most of the time, the slipups caused by his daydreaming were rather less serious—like he day he somehow succeeded in nailing his shirt to a board. He really was amazed at how much he got away with just so the studio could have use of his talents.

"I'll get back to work then," he said bashfully. He avoided Ben's eye and tried to clear his head of all traces of Djaq in order to focus on the task at hand.

The studio was big and open and airy, more like a warehouse, and as such it was cold during the winter months. Most people worked with their coats and gloves on when they could. Supplies and tools were stacked on the shelves all the way up to the ceiling; the sounds of table saws and drill presses, sanders and hammers, and people trying to talk over the din filled the air. The whole studio smelled like sawdust and stains and metal tang.

Will found the work environment familiarly comforting. It reminded him of his father's workshop, the one he had in the basement when he was growing up. His father was an engineer by trade, but in his spare time he was in the little house's basement—'making sawdust', as he always called it when he was working on a new project. Dan Scarlett was, by no means, a master craftsman, but from a young age Will had been fascinated by woodwork. It seemed only natural that he would pick art as his course of study in school. Managers from the studio had seen his work before at university art shows and hired him almost immediately after he graduated. He was glad—he enjoyed his work.

…when he was actually paying attention to it.

He sighed and started drawing out his bookcase on the blueprint paper. He had to get something done today.

The studio was busy and full of cabinetmakers and artisans, all occupying separate tasks—blueprinting, planning, framing, and finishing the unique breed of woodwork made at Foster Designs. 'Functional Art' was what Foster liked to call it—making everyday items and furniture artistically. End tables with spiralled legs, curved-backed chairs with big velvet seats, oval cabinets, tables with thin slabs of enormous tree trunks for table-tops, and bookcases made in every shape but rectangular filled the place in various stages of completion. The twenty or so craftsmen who worked for the studio were scattered around as they went about their business.

The packing boys were loading a table and chairs into massive wooden crates and then onto the flat bed of a truck to be shipped out to a new home. They were arguing over what would be the best way of going about it, slinging choice insults back and forth at each other, while the nervous artisan stood uneasily nearby to oversee the task. It was always unnerving to watch the packing crew handle their creations—even though they did manage to get the job done, it always felt rather like they were going to drop something.

The lone secretary was spectacularly multitasking as she answered phone calls at her desk and took down notes and sorted through an incredibly complex filing system that was organized in such a way that only she knew where anything was or how to misplace things so that she could find them again. The week she was sick with flu, the entire studio came to nearly a dead halt.

He looked absently out through the window near his station and saw a small figure in purple darting across the pavement and ducking back into the doctor's office. He sighed sadly—that must have been Djaq. So much for having lunch with her today; maybe tomorrow he'd get the chance. He looked at his watch and wrinkled his nose. Just past three—still almost two and a half hours before he could talk to her again.

The supervisor strode by, and he quickly went back to pretending to work. But his mind was still on the woman in the doctor's office across the road, and the next time he'd get to talk to her, and all of the things he wished he could say or do when he did.

It was already long dark by the time he climbed the four flights of stairs to his flat—the lift here hadn't been working for years and he didn't expect it would ever be fixed. He trudged up the last upward pull and arrived at the door. 406, but the '6' had come loose and now hung upside down like a '9'. He was surprised to find the door unlocked when he went to open it. He pushed in.

"Hello?" He called out tentatively.

He saw a fair head perk up from behind the low wall in the kitchen.

"Hey."

"Hi—what're you doing here? I thought you had a date tonight."

When he walked around the wall and into the kitchen, he saw the answer himself. Allan was sitting at the table in front of a pile of cotton wool, a box of bandages, and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide. There was a plaster on his cheek underneath his eye and the whole right side of his face was reddened, like he'd been hit.

"Date ended early," he said sheepishly.

"I noticed," Will said. "That'll be, let's see—from the wife or girlfriend of what's-his-name, right?"

"Girlfriend. I don't fool around with married people anymore, I get vandalized that way."

Will shook his head. Allan was his oldest friend and he loved him dearly, but the man was an idiot. He was always looking for love in all the wrong places, and he had this terrible habit of going after people who were already attached. He knew Allan was bisexual—Will had known that since they were in high school—but that wasn't what contributed to his piss-poor choices in love. He just acted without thinking. Constantly.

"You've gotta stop going for people who're already involved."

"Hey, it wasn't my fault this time! I didn't know about her until she turned up unexpectedly and started throwing shit. Would you believe how dangerous high heeled shoes are?" He pointed to the cut on his cheek. "Another inch and she could've taken my eye out!"

Pause.

"Anyway, it takes two—if they've already got a boyfriend or a girlfriend, all they have to do is say 'no' to my irresistible charms. You know, as hard as that is."

"I should smack you, but you've already had your punishment today."

"Yeah, yeah—whatever."

Instead of saying anything, Will reached across the table for the containers of Chinese takeaway that were alongside the open first aid kit and picked at it with the chopsticks.

"So what about you?" Allan asked as he dug into one of the other containers.

"What about me?" Will asked back suspiciously.

"You propose to your girlfriend yet?"

He choked on a noodle.

"She isn't my girlfriend!" He protested. "She's a friend—not even really that…" He looked down into the box sadly. He hated admitting that he wasn't nearly as close to Djaq as he would have liked to be.

Allan reclined in his chair. "You know, as much as I need to make some better relationship choices, that's how badly you need to grow a pair and go on a date with that woman."

Will just shrugged.

"Oh, come on—it's not like she'll say no."

Another shrug.

"Don't just shrug at me! All you've gotta do is take her hand and look her straight in the eye and beg her to go out with you."

"And you think that'll work?"

"It can't not work. You're just too button-cute to turn down."

He wasn't sure how much of Allan's words he believed.

o…o

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I just love Allan, don't you? He's so cheeky. And a lot of fun. This is how I imagine Allan being in a more modern setting—it's fun to write him this way. You'll notice I tried to keep the length of this chapter sort of on the shorter side—I've posted this story in Livejournal, and they have a limit to how long an individual post can be. I hope you enjoyed the read so far! As always, I appreciate any feedback you might care to leave.

Until next time, then!