"London is always a different city."
Joan knew it was a long shot, that there would be time, and gave it up once they got to his abruptly no-longer-his old flat. It was business and complicated personal history unexpectedly compounded and a satisfying puzzle completed, and then it was time to leave. But while she waited for Sherlock at the train station, she allowed herself a wistful fifteen minutes reminiscing about the return trip she didn't take, to the Tate. The old one, the only one they had the first time she'd been to London. She remembered William Blake's paintings of heavens and hells and the girl from New Delhi she met in the museum cafe who was staying at the same hostel.
At nineteen, Joan expected the next ten years of her life to be filled with medical school and training and ambition and student loans; this would be her last chance for a long while to splurge on money and time. It seemed like a thing she should do, and it was something she'd dreamed of, but sitting alone in that crowded cafe, she felt lost. When her mother was nineteen, she had emigrated from China on her own; Joan's trepidation about two solo weeks in England seemed pathetic in comparison. And then someone asked if the seat across from her was free, and she looked up and was found.
When they emerged from the museum and paused by the pillars outside, Savita spoke of her own homesickness. Joan was surprised; she had seemed so confident, eager for new experiences and making plans far head, and then Joan realized she was the same. It was all right to be afraid and excited and happy and terrified, all at once. The exhilaration was as much joy as terror, the same feeling when she stopped herself from stopping herself from reaching out to cup Savita's face with a hesitant palm. And again the same when Savita's own hand came up to press hers gently, and her other to draw Joan closer.
Savita was in London for a semester abroad, staying at the hostel until the university lodging opened up. She wanted to return in two years, after she graduated, to study at the London School of Economics. She had a lovely low voice and knew it, reading Blake aloud in long light evenings on park benches or murmuring quiet lullabies into the back of Joan's neck as they lay nested in a single bunk before dawn, slipping in together after lights out and separating before the rest of the hostel dorm stirred. It was the most romantic week of Joan's life, Romantic poetry, Romantic art, infatuation and frisson and everything sublime.
From her vantage point now they were both so young, twenty-five years ago, but defiantly women to themselves at the time, and that first kiss outside against the great marble columns in the late summer dusk was not childish in any way except for the giddiness and uncertainty up until the moment of touch, and then it was a kiss like the few others she'd tried with fumbling boys in high school (and yes, they were boys, clearly, to sixteen and seventeen-year-old Joan). Like and not like, because there it was, that whatever it was you were supposed to feel from a kiss that had never quite materialized before but she felt that time, in tingling waves through her scalp, in her breasts, in her shaking knees and trembling hands.
A/N: a shorter version of this was originally posted on tumblr.