A/n: Thank you everyone for your patience with me, I know the updates are coming slow. Life has been a mess for me lately after an event at work 3 weeks ago. Basically I took a vacation from life for a while, but now I'm back again, so hopefully the updates will be more frequent. This chapter is sort of filler sort of not a filler. Decide for yourself, either way it's short. I got stuck at this chapter for months! Hope you like it!
And in the winter night sky ships are sailing
Looking down on these bright blue city lights.
And they won't wait, and they won't wait, and they won't wait
We're here to stay, we're here to stay, we're here to stay.
OF MICE AND MEN – King and Lionheart
CHAPTER 8 – Snow
She clutched the cup of tea tightly in her hands. The warmth seeped through her cold fingers and warm up her blood. The tranquility of the moment had her turning her lips up in a small smile, reveling in the feeling of rooting. The earth wasn't spinning out of control. The air wasn't in short supply. Her mind sluggishly registered the letters – but not the words – of the book titles in his shelves. Golden arches of As, and worn down and barely visible Ts lined the shelves as proud trophies of alternative lives lived. Dreams which expanded beyond the mind to have been recorded on paper.
In the periphery of her vision she could see him sprawled out on the couch. He was pretending to read the morning's paper, but he kept glancing up at her. Hours before he'd left her at her place for dinner with his daughter, and he had not expected her to turn up at his place. They led two completely different lives which occasionally seemed to intersect. But as time got on they became more woven together, each life affected by the other's. She stalled her thinking before she ventured into territories where the world would jerk to a start and spin her into the dark vastness of the universe.
"How's Alexis?" she asked after a long silence, her eyes resting on a larger book. She didn't need to read the title to know that it was The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Her fingers itched to touch it. She remembered being a kid, flipping through the pages with unprecedented eagerness, for her, eager to devour the contents of it.
"She's good, busy studying for finals." She looked over her shoulder and saw him sitting on the couch watching her attentively. Not bothering with the pretense of the paper anymore. "How's your dad?"
"Sober," she said, watching him as his eyebrows furrowed just slightly in confusion, and then raise up in understanding. "Alcoholic." sShe sighed as she sat down on the couch next to him. That word was an unuttered word. It was something she hid in shame to not expose her own failures as a daughter. She'd said it a few times when she still lived at home, but back then she would naively start with "he's not". Denial engrained so deep that she thought that if she denied it then it wouldn't be true.
"Is that why you came back to New York?" he asked. A laugh bubbled up, nervous, and uncontrollable. It lasted only for a few seconds, but the piercing stare he gave her made her want to cry instead.
"No," she replied. "It was… one of the reasons I left." With him honesty felt natural. It felt like an obligation to not only him, but to herself, to tell someone in her life the truth of what her life had been. Not the gritty and dark parts of herself. Not bare herself naked. But to give someone a glimpse at who she actually was.
"Why did you come back?" Her lungs suddenly felt depraved of air so she drew in a sudden deep breath. It was much harder than she thought to open herself up, to show him herself. Because despite keeping many walls she pulled up she still felt completely bare and vulnerable. As if she would crumble by a gust of air.
"I looked up one day and didn't feel like I was in the right place, I didn't belong where I was, and..." she paused for a moment, weighing the words she wanted to say against each other. "New York was the only place that I could think of that I last felt like I belonged."
"Do you feel like you belong now?"
"Sometimes." Tears prickled her eyes. He looked at her with such intensity that she had to look away, focusing on a spot on the top corner of his shelf. "I feel now that I'm on the path that will get me there."
"I think whatever happens in our lives, good or bad, was meant to be. We were meant to meet that night, to have this baby," he said, reaching across the couch to brush his hand over hers that still clutched the cup of tea.
"Like destiny?" she asked, raising her eyebrows dubiously at him. "You believe life has a predetermined path, and we're just going through the motions?"
"When you say it like that it just sounds boring." She wiggled her eyebrows and took a sip of her tea. "It's something magical. Like what you do in life leads to specific events, and you know that no matter what you are never off your path. You are always looking in the right direction."
"That sounds… I wish I could believe in something like that." She released the hold of her cup, putting it on the table and relaxing into the couch again. She rested her head in the palm of her hand, scanning his face as he continued talking.
"I think pain, and bad things, happen for us to learn something, to keep us on our track."
"But… that also means that people die for a reason, to further other people's destiny." She said matter-of-factly, seeking holes in his theory.
"Yes, that's a grim way to look at it, but then that must be true." She shook her head.
"That means that some people only live for others, that their sole purpose of existing is to help other people's destiny. And it would also mean that your destiny isn't in itself an inherently good thing. It could also mean that you are destined to be killed tomorrow in an accident only to make someone else stop texting and driving."
"That's not an argument against destiny though," he said, and sat up straighter on the couch as he prepared his argument. "If a person dies it means that their destiny, their purpose in life, and everything they were supposed to do for others and themselves, has been fulfilled. And that fulfillment intersects with other people's lives. Making destiny a spider web of connections rather than one path."
He paused for a second, staring into the middle distance to gather his thoughts, and then turned to look at her again.
"Take your life, what you do now affects me, it affects my daughter, my mother, and it affects your father. The people you meet at work and those you help, the people you've hurt, and the stranger you smiled to on the street – all those lives crossing yours has been a part of not only your destiny, but also theirs. and how you were affected by them in turns affects me, and so on."
"Destiny means we're all connected?" She bit her lip, musing over the theories he put forward.
"Yes, and being connected means that you're… you're never detached from others. You are always a part of the bigger picture," he said with a smile.
"That does sound better than simply living a path that's already been decided for you." She smiled back at him. Watched as his face that had been lit up in excitement as he spoke, with a feverish tone that almost had her own heart racing along with his theories, settle into a smile that didn't radiate as he had done as he spoke but still simmer with the stimulus the debate had given him. It had been a while since he had argued his points like this with someone. Someone who met his theories with questions and challenged them.
"You still don't believe in destiny?" She shook her head. "Not even in the slightest?" She opened her mouth to say something, but before the words fell off her lips she shut it again. She wasn't quite sure what she believed.
"It sounds appealing. Nut it's one of those things which you can't prove, it's just a theory that people… I don't know, seek comfort in?" She sighed.
"But you do believe there is a right path?" he asked then, prodding a bit further, wanting to pick her brain and find out how she ticked. The past months they had spent circling each other politely. Smiling when they should, speaking what was expected of them. Finally he was able to start peeling back the layers of her onion.
"I believe there are many paths we could take that will lead to different consequences. Some which are good and some which are bad." She shrugged her shoulders. Then she thought of an example and held out her hand as if she was offering the story on a plate. "For example, the other day we picked up a kid. He'd taken a hit in a school fight after getting involved in the wrong crow. Had he made other choices he might've been a mathlete, or valedictorian. Now he's got a record, and bad influences."
"I think people like us prove that life isn't just coincidence. That things don't just happen. Because what were the chances that we would end up at the same bar that night? What were the chances that we would see each other, speak to each other? What was the chances that the condom would break, that the plan b wouldn't work?"
She drank from her cup as she contemplated his words, tasting them, and watching him as she mused over them. The idea of fate was both intimidating in how little say she would have in it, and comforting in knowing then that she had never strayed off her path.
"I was meant to meet you?" she asked almost laughing as she hid her smiling mouth behind the large cup of tea. "You're my savior?"
"I didn't know you needed saving," he said, smoothing it over as he heard the somber tone in her voice.
"You're perceptive enough, Rick. I think you know why you haven't asked to know more about me." The easy mood started to fade. She looked over towards the window where the snow was deftly falling from the sky, looking deceptively serene.
"I figured that the topic would eventually come up… we've only known each other for 3 months," he trailed off. His eyes flickered over her face for a few long seconds before he quietly continued. "Didn't want to impose".
"It was my mother," she said quickly, before she lost her courage. It had built in her gut, like the water tension at the surface of an overfilled cup where the water waited in suspense at a single jolt that would cause it to spill over. "I was home for Christmas my freshman year of college, and we were going out for dinner. My mother was going to meet us there, but she didn't show up. When my dad and I got home a few hours later there was a cop waiting for us." She drew a shaky breath, remembering Detective Raglan standing by their door expressionless. "She'd been murdered, stabbed to death in an alley. Said it was some robbery gone wrong, they took all her jewelry… they never caught the guy."
"You don't believe it was a robbery?" he asked.
"No." She had been furious at how they neatly they boxed it up, put a generic sticker on it to avoid having to deal with it. "I had wanted to be a lawyer before she died, like her. But it just felt meaningless without her, everything felt so wrong. Like no matter what I did I was doing it without her, and that felt like such a betrayal, you know?"
Of course he did not know, he had never experienced that type of loss in his life. He'd been spared death, his hardships had been in other forms. His experiences with death was not personal in the same way. There hadn't been memories to attach to bodies, emotions that echoed inside long after their hearts stopped beating. He had no experience.
"I considered applying to the police academy instead. Become a detective, but my dad picked up the bottle, and I just ran instead." She looked up at the ceiling, hoping to stop the tears that were forming in her eyes from spilling over. "I tried to help him, but I was only 19 and I was grieving too. I hated him for making me suffer even more than I already was, that he made me lose a father as well."
Without hesitation he pulled her into his arms and hugged her tightly to him. She turned her face towards him, drawing in the deep scent that she remembered in the crook of his neck. He was warmth, something alluring in the safety his arms brought. "You are a good guy, Rick," she said into his neck, resting her cheek against it.
"You are a good person too, Kate." His voice was low, barely a whisper into her hair. Her eyes closed instinctively. The tears that pressed against her eyes were a yearning to believe him, believe that despite her past she could be good enough for him. It struck her that he was the first person in a very long time that she wanted to be someone for. The desire to transform into someone happier, someone with a purpose, wasn't just selfish anymore. That desire had expanded to him – she realized that she wanted him in a way she hadn't wanted anyone before.
All she had to do was to be better.
A/n2:
Reviews and the like are very much welcome, I love to hear your thoughts! If you want to find me on tumblr my fandom tumblr is redkiera, and my personal one is sinisterkid92.
:)
