A/N - Just a short one this time. More plot next time, I promise ;)

After he'd peeled Rose out of her corset and tucked her into his bed, he drifted over to his workspace. For a while, he just stared at the large canvas he'd set up, alternately focussing on the irregularities in the surface and on some distant point hidden behind it. His head felt insanely clear – the drinks that Rose had bought him earlier had vanished from his system the moment he'd heard Alice's voice. She said they'd see each other again. It had sounded like she wanted it, too.

Mechanically, he squeezed some greens and blues onto his palette and started painting the spot in the park where she'd first talked to him. She'd figured him out... she'd known what he needed to hear, had known when to stop asking questions, had known he needed to talk to her again. He wondered why she hadn't taken the mask off when she spoke to him – after all, she knew he'd never seen her face, either. Maybe she didn't want him to. Maybe she thought she was ugly, maybe she'd been in an accident and her face was disfigured, or she'd just been born with some blemish. He tried to imagine a disfigured face under the black paper-maché, but he couldn't. In the end, it didn't matter anyways, did it? Even if she was deformed in some way, who was he to criticise, with his body made of scars. Her voice made up for anything, at least in his mind. Perfection was boring – he thought he'd almost like her better if her face wasn't as angelic as her voice. But maybe she'd also just kept the mask on because she didn't want to ruin the impression or break character. Who knew. No point in trying to figure it out, really, he'd just have to ask her someday, when he saw her again.

He dabbed a bit of sunlight into the ripples of the pond and stepped back. A perfectly normal, perfectly boring rendition of a park on a sunny afternoon. On the one hand, normal was good. Normal was awesome, actually, considering that most of the time, all he could paint were horror stories. But it was also desperately empty – void of twisted nightmares, but also void of any cheerfulness. He felt like banging his head into the walls or throwing things again – he wanted to paint happy things, he was so tired of running circles in his head around the things he'd seen. More than anything, he wanted to be done – done thinking about the past, done waking up at night, done with red, grey and black. But something held him back, and he wasn't sure what – perhaps it was his own pathetic self.

A person, that would make the painting less empty. But the only person he really, really wanted to paint had been dressed all in black, the colour of his despair, of his failure. Well, she'd been dressed in black, but she hadn't felt black. She hadn't felt dark at all, in fact, she'd felt lively and happy and strangely excited to see him. Yellow, he realised, she'd felt yellow. The yellow was on his brush before he'd even thought about it, and a little while later, a yellow plague doctor was sprawling on the banks of the pond like it was the most natural thing in the world. He didn't care it was a strange picture, that it looked about as whacky as those melted watches by Dalí, it felt right. He'd seen her again, and she'd been yellow.

Rosalie padded into the kitchen just as he was finishing his second cup of coffee and flipping the French toast.

"Whoa, you cooked? You actually made food? Breakfast food?" He just shrugged and smiled at her. "And you're smiling." He handed her a plate with the first batch of toast.

"Yes, Rosie, people smile sometimes. It happens." His face split into a grin at her flabbergasted expression. She grabbed a piece of the toast and sprinkled sugar over it, still staring at him.

"I know. It's just... I don't even know when I've last seen you smile. I think it was before you first deployed." She picked at her food, and he knew she was remembering the goodbye, and the state he'd been in when he returned. It hadn't been pretty.

"I haven't had a whole lot to smile about since then" he muttered, not really wanting to think about it and ruin his mood.

"So what are you smiling about now?"

"Right now? Your face. You should see it, you look as if someone had switched your powder puff for a rabbit. Completely dumbfounded." He tucked in before she could question him again, and she took the hint. For a while, they sat together in companionable silence, each wrapped up in their own thoughts.

Of course, she noticed the painting when she was picking up her things. She just stood in front of it for a few minutes, her hand half-extended towards the figure on the shore.

"It's lovely. So different from what you usually paint." Her finger lightly traced the shape of the plague doctor.

"Thanks."

She turned to face him. "Is that the girl you were talking to last night?"

"Yeah. Her name is Alice. I don't really know much else about her though, so you don't need to try and question me. I don't even know her face."

"Oh. Well, I'm glad you've met someone. It explains a lot." This was one of the moments where he was glad that they got along so well – she would have badgered him with questions if he'd been anyone else, but she knew better than to try and talk to him about his emotional life if he didn't want to. "I'm sorry if I kinda interrupted your moment back then. I was kind of drunk."

He almost laughed. "Don't worry about it, sister dear. I'm sure I'll see her again." And it was true. If Alice said so, he was sure it was true.