necessarian: (flor)
ren ([personal profile] necessarian) wrote in [community profile] fandomweekly2019-01-13 08:40 pm

[#002] intermarginal (the spy who came in from the cold)

Theme Prompt: #002 - Heartbreak
Title: intermarginal
Fandom: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Rating/Warnings: G / mild spoilers for the first half of the novel
Bonus: yes
Word Count: 492
Summary: Liz, after Alec, before the storm.


London winter treats her roughly. When it rains she gets wet, on the way to work, on the way to party meetings. When it isn’t raining her skin is dry and she finds it hard to sleep without the steady sound on her windowpane. She can’t afford an umbrella or a new tin of hand cream from the pharmacy. At night she dreams of spring, new leaves viridescent on the trees that line her street, flowers budding in the planters that the people across the road so carefully look after.

There is an absence in her life, an article cut out of the paper and stuck on the refrigerator, only to be found missing a month later though she could have sworn she never threw it away. Perhaps it had never been there in the first place. This is what it’s like with Alec gone. She didn’t know him for long, but she knew him thoroughly. A man like him, who conversed in riddles and kept more secrets than he took breaths, was not to be known, so to speak, but she had done so admirably, she assured herself. He had opened his door to her when he had no obligation to even look in her direction. She had loved him, for as long as he’d been there; a glint of white-hot light against the window for a split-second while the sun was at just the right angle.

Now there’s nothing but dull glass, covered in the layer of grime that covers everything in a city like this.

She’s long since given up on finding him. He clearly doesn’t want to be found. She thinks this with some fondness and wonders madly what’s driven her to feel such intense bursts of romance for a man fickle as the wind and never all that warm. She has certainly never been in love so comprehensively before, and it is because she is so in love, she supposes, that her heart is in so many pieces.

On evenings, the sort when they would dine together, she sits alone at her table and imagines him sitting across from her, listening politely while she talks of nothing in particular. It is on one such evening that she sees a car too nice for this area pull up outside her block of flats. She sees it through the grime on the windowpane and she thinks for one manic moment that it could be Alec—and why couldn’t it be? She can never say for certain whether he’ll come back to her, but that does not stop her from expecting him to reappear in her life, all smudged ink on old yellowing paper and worn familiarity.

Then she sees two men step out of the car. Though Alec is long gone from her life, she knows they’re here for him. It is the closest she will come to seeing him again for god knows how long. She lets them in.

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