#dribbledrabbles

You wouldn’t call it a date.

In a manner of speaking, nothing between you worked that way. It simply fell into place in an ugly, colourful heap of things too beautiful individually to stay apart.

Neither, for that matter, would the lieutenant. Structure was a thing that held itself aloft on the tenuous physics of ruination. If either of you were to name tonight a ‘date’, the surface tension would puncture; the sodden beams of constructs still worth saving would simply unbind, given to the river.

Not a tragedy.

Just a consequence.

They weren’t goalposts to be held or swiveled out of place at will, no; only the shivering collage of self-images gingerly put back together, as like to repel out of cynicism as to yearn out of hope.

A weathered thumb and forefinger kneaded one another as he scanned in front of him for nothing in particular. What’s an angry old bastard supposed to say, now? You didn’t have the answer to that to hide from him. You had, to wit, nothing to hide at all, and it was disarming.

At length his steps slowed to a swaying halt, and he leaned his head sideways, just to permit the ambience. If you were to pry into his tired mind now, the hitching macramé of his thoughts would read out to something as haphazard as

“Being with you is almost as good as being alone”; but, were you to linger in the tangle of his threads of thought, you would also feel him slapping his own forehead ad nauseum. That wasn’t it.

He let the sleet-flecked breeze push some of his long, messy hair around the peak of his strong brow. Then he spoke.

“Uh. Sorry it isn’t exactly romantic. Don’t really know what to do with these things anymore, s’first time I’ve bothered in a long time.” He still wouldn’t look at you directly, but his brows tightened, collecting bargaining shadows to choose what next to do.

Ever the recorder, you only watched him curiously, inviting him to continue, were there anything else to add.

“…Yeah, shit.” He shook his head, freeing a few spare flintlock waves into his face.

“We could talk shop, if it’d suit you better to have something to chew on.”

“Absolutely fuckin’ not,” he snorted, but a crooked corner betrayed a kind of amusement at the suggestion. “Not unless you’ve got some sort of brilliant epiphany about those skeletons in your closet.”

“It isn’t my closet, Lieutenant, but very funny. No, nothing yet. Connor’s a godsend, honestly, though. Dry bone sampling used to take weeks to handle and process.” The older man nodded sagely, the awkward starburst-crack grin still sitting on his lips.

When you’d both stopped in the path for some time, he brought his eyes back down to earth, and shifted them to you. That was when their other most striking feature made itself obvious to you; their seething intellect and grit was familiar, but what was really arresting all of a sudden was how abyssally, pelagic blue they were. Bastions of colour and dark, set into river valleys of skin and silver and slate.

He shrugged. “No idea what the little black book says to do anymore around this point in an evening, but I got a hunch for something to fill in for it.” You smiled a little wider and pricked up an eyebrow. Few things in life were as galvanizing as when Hank Anderson muttered, mused, or spat that he had an idea.

“…Thanks, Doc.” Gravity disobeyed itself as you processed that an arm had come stiffly round your back and given your shoulder a comforting squeeze. “Think I might’a actually enjoyed myself tonight.” Some of his most forbidding, hawkish features looked softer than they ever had before. Reflexively, you offered a bow of your head. “Ah, so you are capable of shades between infuriated and glum.” He rumbled with a bout of mock-derisive chuckling.

The hand slipped reluctantly from your shoulder and looked for an exit, it seemed, into its corresponding coat pocket, but paused before docking. You were face to face, closer than before, and the humble, self-effacing stutter of his smile still lingered. With a startling docility, his tall, broad frame dipped toward yours and left an upsettingly chaste kiss at your temple.

“How do I sign up for my next appointment?”, he teased at himself, largely, head shaking slowly at the inherent sleaze in that line.

“I’m not that kind of doctor, Lieutenant.” You stand up on your tiptoes to try returning the gesture to his own hairline, but couldn’t climb any higher than the hedge of his beard at his jaw.

“So there’s no waiting period. Swing by during office hours,”, you concluded, with a firm jab in his chest.

“Ooh, lucky me. The doctor is in.”