A/N: My confidence has taken a big hit, but seeing as this was already finished, I'm posting. This time it happens to coincide with Week 3 of #unofficialdas9. To those who have reviewed, I cannot thank you enough.

Once again, inspired by a song (see footnote for credits).

xx,
~ejb~


They talk sometimes about the Celtic concept of thin places: geographic locations where it seems that the distance between heaven and earth falls away and one can reach out and take hold of the divine. She has yet to visit any of these places, and some of them hold no particular fascination for her. She nurses a longing to see Iona, however; having come up listening to her grandparents tell the stories. He loves the Scots part of her ancestry, can see it in so many facets of her being. Iona is an itch that he intends to scratch for her before long.

She won't discount the notion without exploring it for herself, but she doesn't think that moments of supreme clarity require a particular set of coordinates. Whether divinely orchestrated or not, she's experienced a few of them in her lifetime. And two of them on this evening alone, she thinks as she works at the hob.

The first is that living with both feet firmly planted in the moment is going to require her to get out of her own head a great deal more than she's done since she was a very young woman. To be precise, she and Reg were caught up in the whirlwind of first love and medical school and running her father's surgery the last time she lived that way. Her memories of those days still send her pulse racing. Clearly it appeals. And what has she gained by spending two thirds of her life looking over her shoulder? It hasn't protected her from much at all, and it's held her back from everything.

Just … be like Richard, she thinks as she turns their sandwiches. Live like he lives. It shouldn't be all that hard. She laughs at herself. Of course it will be. But no great gains are made without taking tiny steps forward.

Her second revelation of the evening has come back around again, this quickly, which makes her sit up and take notice. She'd first thought of it while they were making love. She remembers the desperate way he held her, so tightly that they could scarcely breathe, and having thought, We're hardly two separate people anymore. Which, of course, had brought to mind a song … and in a twist of fate that song happens to start playing as she cooks.

They are one person
They are two alone
They are three together
They are for each other*

She is singing along softly as she transfers their food onto plates, when he comes into the kitchen. He stops and watches her for a moment.

"You like that one?" He seems incredulous.

She sets the plates down on the table and her hands on her hips. "I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that you don't." Her eyebrow is raised and her ire is rising. It's part of the game they play with one another: thrust and parry; match and raise.

"Have you listened to it?" His indignation matches her own to the point that it almost sounds like an insult; as though a tiff is brewing.

They do love to straddle the line.

She narrows her eyes at him. "Really, Richard? Do you suppose anyone coming of age in the Western world when we did could have escaped it?"

He shrugs. "My point is that the lyrics are morose. This bloke is pining after a woman who clearly has moved on. What's redemptive about that?"

She rests her weight on her palms, leaning against the side. "You know it was written out of a very deep love, don't you?" She fixes him with a look. "I was going to tell you that it puts me in mind of us, but never mind that now."

"Ugh," he groans, and reaches for his sandwich. She slaps his hand away. "Isobel. Why do you have to be like this?"

"Just eat," she tells him. It's just a song. Just a difference of opinion. Nowhere close to their first and far from the last they'll ever have. But for the moment it does smart a little. She lets it pass, and by the time they've finished eating she's holding his hand across the table.

oOo

"Sell me on it," he tells her later, as she's washing up.

"Sorry?" She's moved on to other things. Thoughts of what she's got to do tomorrow, and Did I remember to take that load out of the washer?

"The song," he elaborates. "Show me what I'm missing."

"You're not taking the piss are you?" She raises an eyebrow at him, drying her hands on a bit of kitchen towel.

He lifts his hands as if to say, "Don't shoot."

"Alright then." She walks to the piano, then turns over her shoulder. "Give me five minutes?" He nods and goes to finish the washing up.

She is reacquainting herself with her instrument. Somewhere, buried under years of disuse, lies her gift of absolute pitch and the ability to pick out any song by ear. She tinkers a bit, figuring out the basic structure, and before long it all falls into place. Like riding a bicycle, she thinks, deciding that she's got to have more of this in her life. There's a void in her soul that only playing fills. It's why she stuck with it as a girl, even when she resented Daddy for sitting on the bench beside her and refusing to get up until she'd put in an hour of practise each day. It's why the choice between music and medicine was such a difficult one: the former was her heart, but the latter was the blood in her veins. In the end, it came down to the fact that one could become an avocation and the other could not.

He comes and sits beside her. She is regal when she plays; the epitome of grace. Perfect posture; the curves and planes of her neck and shoulders like fine art, her face upturned. It's her peaceful, satisfied smile that draws him to her like a moth to flame.

"Now I'll grant you, the verses are maudlin," she tells him. He doesn't know how she can converse and not lose her place. She is a marvel, and he is enchanted. She sings softly, and even if he was teasing her tonight in the bath, what he'd told her was the truth: her voice is his Achilles heel.

"It's just this bit here." She sings him the chorus and it chokes her up a little. It's their love put down in words; it's the acknowledgement that the two of them together create a living, breathing entity larger than the sum of their individual parts.

She shrugs her shoulders as she finishes, telling him quietly, "It's only a song, but it's been quite revelatory for me."

He leans in and captures her lips and it's I'm sorry and all the admiration he can't speak to around the lump in his throat. He says the only thing he can manage:

"Play it again?"

She studies him for a moment before turning back to the keys. As if she could refuse him anything. Especially when he asks for precious little and gives her life in return.

He has always been a believer in the power of music to transcend space and time and barriers to communication. Even if his own skill level isn't up to hers, he's had many a "thin moment" whilst listening to certain songs or picking away at his guitar. And she's so elegant and lovely, and so given to the moment (Finally! He'll keep asking this of her all day long if it gets her out of her own head and into the here and now) that he reckons he'd buy anything she sold him, for the sheer fact that it means so much to her.

He's a doctor and a soldier and a man born during a time when feelings were weak and effeminate, and while he, personally, was never raised that way, his career has schooled him in the science of the stiff upper lip. We are all a product of our times to one extent or another. But he's also the husband of a woman who possesses a keen emotional intelligence and who couldn't hide her feelings to save her life.

So when she looks at him, her great, dark eyes imploring him to be gentle, he pulls her close so that her head rests on his shoulder. "You need to do more of this," he insists.

"Oh?" she asks. "Why?"

"If you could see yourself right now …" He shakes his head in wonderment. "The stillness inside of you when you're fully here is … it's awe-inspiring. Every answer to the questions that weigh you down and hold you back is in you already; you just have to get quiet. And when you play it just happens; you haven't even got to try. There's your clarity; there's your certainty. I've never seen anything like it." He moves his hand to rest over her heart. "It's all in here. You've just got to trust it." He smiles ironically. "I never thought I'd see the day when I'd be telling someone to trust their intuition. Me, of all people. But it's your strength, and when you lead with it …" He trails off, unable to find adequate words to describe how ethereally beguiling she is to him.

So she leans in close and lets him tell her with his kiss, knowing he will hold nothing back.

"And you," she tells him when they break apart, "you've got to stop underselling your brilliance." He tries to dismiss her with a guffaw, but he had to have known that she wouldn't relent.

"No. Listen," she insists, giving his shoulder a shove that is mostly playful but also communicates that she will be heard. "There's a reason you've been chosen as a leader time and time again despite it being the last thing you'd ever want for yourself. Your knack for reading people is unrivalled. I'm serious. You think that because you don't say much, you haven't got much to say, but you're so wrong. Your insight is bang on. You know exactly what makes people tick." She looks down; smiles knowingly; meets his eyes again. "You're a loss to anthropology, truly." Her voice softening, she adds, "You're the force that grounds me, you know. The eye of the storm. You keep me honest."

She doesn't say more for fear of embarrassing him. At his behest she continues to play, little nonsense things, really: runs of Shostakovich and Schubert; scales and speed exercises and bits of things she composed a lifetime ago and hasn't thought about in years.

"Why did you ever give this up?" he asks. He hopes she doesn't hear any accusation in the question, because that's not what he means; only that if anything brought him this much joy he'd never let it go.

She shrugs. "It was an uncertain future. Who knows how long I'd have been marketable before someone better came along. And being with Reg would have been nearly impossible. It wouldn't have mattered to me if I'd got to see the world; without him it would have had no meaning. Medicine was stable, and besides, it was a challenge. Anyway, I don't really feel that I gave up anything. I love them both equally, for different reasons."

He watches the epiphany as it is born, and knows what she's going to say before she says it. It makes them both smile and shake their heads and laugh a little.

"Like I love you and Reg. I finally get it. He and I were all youth and zeal and idealism. It was us against the world, really and truly. So many obstacles should have come between us, but they didn't. We used to have moments where one of us would look at the other like, Damn, baby, we're still standing! And we never lost that.

"And you and I are such a natural conclusion. It's like I'm … home. I don't have to wonder whether anyone else feels what I feel or if it's madness to love so strongly after being battered about by life. And it's every bit as exhilarating as it was the first time around. I'm putting it badly, I know, but it's so difficult to quantify …"

"It's good, this," he interjects. "We work."

It's wonderfully understated and perfect. Just like him. Smiling, she pulls him into her embrace.

"We do," she whispers close to his mouth. "We do, indeed."


* "Helplessly Hoping," Crosby, Stills & Nash, written by Stephen Stills. Like "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes," it was written about Stills' relationship with Judy Collins (and the downfall thereof). He would have married her; booze and Stacy Keach took precedence over him in her eyes. They're friends now, but he was pretty devastated for a long time. There's your Rock History:101 lesson for today. ;)