Eva swore, scrunched up the smudged pencil sketch and threw it into a corner. She hated this part of designing; she was not at all talented at drawing, and over the last week had repeatedly failed to get what she envisaged onto the paper.
"Mew."
"Go away, Rachel Carson," she snapped, standing up and cricking her back. "I don't need you reminding me how useless I am as well." It was late Friday evening, when Vision usually visited- she hadn't cleaned the apartment, dirty dishes were piled high in the sink and she was in desperate need of a shower.
"Useless, useless, useless," she muttered, grabbing the loose sheets of paper and stuffing them into the already overflowing trash- which provided absolutely no catharsis whatsoever. Tears that had been threatening to come for the last few hours now spilled over her eyelashes, which only succeeded in making her angrier. "This ain't gonna do."
Scrounging through the kitchen, she upended the dregs of one of her vodka bottles over the bin, then after some more searching found her old lighter. After a good couple minutes of clicking, it finally lit and she chucked it on her work, which ignited immediately.
"Evenin'," she said glumly, voice cracked from crying, as Vision let himself in a few minutes later, "welcome to the ceremonial burning of all my hopes and dreams."
"A touch melodramatic, don't you think?" asked Vision, sitting next to her on the kitchen side. He was indeed looking quite dapper in a suit, although he still wore the cape quite a bit. She let her head droop onto his shoulder.
"Nah," she replied, the flames having long since imprinted themselves onto their retinas. "I just… I got ahead of myself. Thought I might actually be able to do something."
"You are an astoundingly pessimistic person," he said, as the flames burnt lower. "How come your fire alarm hasn't gone off?"
"Oh, I disabled it months ago. I set fire to stuff a lot," she explained. "Sometimes it's even accidental."
He wrapped his arm around her shoulders, and his lips pressed against her forehead; she closed her eyes at the simple gesture, appreciating it for much more than its worth. He let her have the silence for a while, then- "when was the last time you went outside?"
"Dunno," she mumbled, "I was busy. I took time off work two weeks ago, so…"
"Take a shower," Vision said, "and then we're going to the park."
"I don't want to."
"Ah." He stood up, and pulled her to her feet. "The Eva Kresk I know would never turn down an offer of going to the park. In fact- if I remember correctly- she took me there for the first time, whilst making no secret about how much of a bother it was to her to have a plus one."
"Really?" she asked guiltily, "was I that much of a bitch?"
"Secretly, however," Vision admitted, "I think she enjoyed my company as much as I did hers."
"Did she now?" asked Eva, smiling for the first time in two weeks.
"I can't be certain. Shower, now."
%
They were lying on their backs on the rolling grass, in opposite directions so that only their shoulders brushed against each other, she wrapped up against the coolness of the small hours, he slightly warmer, for once, than the air around him. It was the darkest time of night, just dark enough, with the city as still as it got, to see the stars.
"It almost improves them," said Vision, "that it is so unusual to see the stars, I mean, what with the light pollution."
"'The citysky is changing its orange heart to black in order to hide its stars for the longest time before passing them out one by one, like gifts,'" Eva quoted. "I read that in a book, ages ago. I'll have to see if I can find it for you."
"You never cease to surprise me, Eva Kresk."
"I could never find constellations," said Eva quietly. "I didn't understand why the dots joined in the pattern they did."
"Would you like me to show you?" asked Vision, and she nodded. "You see the four that join to make a sort of box, with a line of them branching off one corner?"
"Nope."
"By the aspen tree."
"Oh, yeah."
"They compose Ursa Major. If you follow the two stars on the right hand side of the box upwards, they point directly to the North Star."
"Keep going," she smiled.
"The five arranged like a W are Cassiopeia."
"Bit of a mouthful."
"It was named after the mother of Andromeda in Greek myth," he said. "She was rather too beautiful for her name to be much of a bother, I suppose."
"Must've been nice- to be so pretty nothing else was a problem."
"Well, it did prove to be her undoing."
"Hubris is a bitch," Eva reflected.
"It is indeed," he replied.
After just half an hour, Eva had dozed off on Vision's shoulder; his voice soothing her into dreamless sleep. His eyes rested on her as she slept, her mouth slightly open and hair fluttering in the soft breeze; he pushed it back behind her ear, sat up and very gently lifted her head and cushioned it beneath a spare hoodie she had brought. He stayed with her, a silent guardian, and woke her up to watch the sunrise filtering between the skyscrapers.
A/N over two hundred favourites, at this point I'm convinced there's a glitch in the system wow I 3 you guys