Chapter Text
You’re thirty-three when you meet him for the first time.
It’s a perfectly ordinary Thursday in August. The tips of your gloved fingers are inked in iodine from the morning’s foray into Gram stains and there’s sweat trickling down your neck as you carefully pipette the solutions before you. The air outside your open kitchen windows is stagnate and syrupy thick and stained amber by the sun setting through the trees on the green out the back. You push the curls back from your forehead with the inside of your wrist and watch the dappled shadows dance across the fresh-cut grass and ache for a fag.
There’s nothing interesting on the police scanner and the experiment you just finished needs time to work, so you strip off the gloves and set off down Montague Street for a smoke in the slate blue shade of the British Museum.
Smoke wreaths your head as you wait at lights, breathing in the petrol, asphalt sear of a summer day in London. You wander a bit. Ordinary Thursdays are rife for people gawking and people gawk you do.
It’s soothing. Deductions calming the static fury of your mind at rest, the nicotine smoothing out the wrinkles in your thoughts, making them crisp, crystalline, stark.
Four cigarettes have carried you through Holborn and back into Bloomsbury just as the sun fully sets, the sky above you bleeding from marigold to lavender to indigo as you walk. The lamplights are just beginning to burn, molten against the black, as you duck into a pub to soothe the parched, smoke scorched scratch in your throat.
The beer is cool and honey gold and goes down easy. Froth bubbling on your lips, the glass deliciously chill against the heat of your palm. You smack your lips and lick the foam from beneath your nose, eyes strafing over the bar.
Perfectly ordinary Thursdays are for perfectly ordinary Thursday people and here they all are in their perfectly ordinary Thursday kit. The theatre crowd, the post-work crowd, the football lads dressed up for the day as investment bankers and barristers, boisterous and brash in the corner near the telly. Boring. Boring. Dull.
You take a long draught and don’t think about how you don’t fit in.
It’s almost normal now, isn’t it? How gazes skitter away from you when your eyes meet. How despite the fact that you wear the uniform, expensive black suit trousers and a tailored white button down cut from fine French linen, you are still a man apart. You will never be able to tuck into your fish and chips and mushy peas with the blokes at the end of the bar. You will never be able to chat up the two girls sipping martinis by the window. You will never be the type meeting a date for a drink before a show.
Not that you want to fit in.
No, you don’t want to fit into the mundanity of their ordinary Thursdays. You’d much rather lurk about the fraying edges of crime scenes and taste the cinder ash of chaos melting on your tongue. You’d much rather annoy that sergeant who calls you freak, all while her partner, the DI, a chain-smoker with a chronically cheating wife, takes you seriously and treats you to Chinese when you’ve helped solve a case. You’d much rather glean livers from the girl in the morgue who’s almost as strange as you and manipulate them to your heart’s content in the privacy of your kitchen. You’d much rather spend your days in the chem labs at the University of London, finishing your dissertation so that you can finally have the bloody degree in hand and your git brother will shut up about your potential. (You owe him that much as least, considering how much he paid for rehab)
You’re thirty-three and you’ve got track marks chicken-scratched into your left arm and you’re doing your level best to give this living sober lark a go and no one will look at you twice, but you don’t care, you don’t.
You drink your beer and you deduce their ordinary ill-kept secrets and it should make you feel better, but somehow it doesn’t make you feel any better at all.
You’re almost done, there’s two sips left and then you can have another two cigarettes on the walk home and that’s comfort enough to make the rest fade. You turn and lean against the smooth walnut bar and raise the glass to your lips and it takes all of two seconds for your whole life to change forever.
It’s a gut punch:
his eyes on your eyes.
Dark. Intent.
He’s dressed in a navy blue uniform, one of many RAMC officers standing in the far corner. A matching beret sits on top of his neatly trimmed blonde hair. He’s tanned a sweet tawny brown and he’s watching you. Blood pounds up to pinch your cheeks and tingle in the very tips of your ears.
He’s been watching you, you can tell the instant your eyes meet.
He’s been watching you and his gaze doesn’t skitter, doesn’t waver, doesn’t flee. He’s been watching you and the way his gaze rakes over you, like two hot, smouldering coals, he sees you and he wants you.
Wants you.
Desire like the bite of a needle and the euphoria that unfurls through your veins after a hit, he’s all of these things and more. He's a calm placid pool with untold fathoms stretching beneath. He's commanding in a quiet way that makes you stand up straighter and take notice. He's reined in and on parade and yet you catch tantalising glimpses through the veneer he's painted. Glimpses of the heart of him. He’s soft jumpers the colour of marshmallow and biscuits with milk tea and that place called home you’ve never really known.
Across the room, he’s drenched in candlelight. He burns against the soot black window, the colour of the spirits cupped in his hand; the deep topaz gold of a whiskey neat. He has the same effect: heady, intoxicating. You watch as he licks his lips, drawing his tongue, deliberately slow, across the coral pink seam, and a shiver cascades down your spine: rippling. You watch him, utterly bewitched, as he tilts his head ever so slightly towards the door.
Inviting.
You drain the last hop-sharp dregs of the beer and set it down with ten quid tucked beneath it.
He’s making his goodbyes as you do and your mind is racing, racing just as quickly as your heart, thinking:
DoctorsoldiersurgeonCaptain
“—goodbye, John!”
John.