tragic_mask | (no subject)

"Well... if you have comfortable shoes, swimsuits, cold and warm weather clothing you prefer. Anything you may need, to be gone for a while. I travel light, but I still prefer to have some things with me. Just in case."

"When we're there," she says, "I take it we'll be dropping the stories, the façades, as we discussed. Or is that for another time?"

"We will not be going around flaunting what we are," he says, "not among people, anyway. But we'd have no particular need of a story."

"I'm no good at them, anyway," she says, wryly.

"You inspire me, or I'd be no good at them either," he says with a quiet chuckle.

"Is it really me?" she asks. "I feel that the stories I inspire would be much more filled with strife, and much less... ordinary. You'd be cheating on me with your secretary-- if you had a secretary-- and this trip would have been a sad attempt to re-find the fire that lit our marriage when it first began."

She shrugs. "For example. I mean, there's nothing tragic at all about the story we've fabricated. Which, I don't mind telling you, is fine."

"There's normally--"

He stops, trying to think of the words.

"Normally a sense of sadness, of something missing, I suppose? I have it naturally, or so I'm told, and I wanted a vacation from that. The illusion of fulfillment, a fiction of ordinary happiness, seemed to be the best way around that. For both of us."

"Yes," she says gravely. "I'm told I have the air about me, as well."

"That's why we are so perfect together," he says. "I think we have less of it this way."

"Two wrongs make a right?" she says, paraphrasing an idiom. "Seems mathematically impossible."

"That would depend on what exactly each of us is missing."

"And what are you missing?" she asks, looking up at him. "Besides a heart, I mean. That's already been taken by the Tin Man."

"Something besides myself," he says. "It may sound simple, but there it is."

"I feel that's a fairly easy thing to fulfill," she says. "As long as you're willing to not be alone, which you clearly are, at this juncture."

"But I need the right kind of company," he says. "Company that will not simply absorb or reflect. Company that will remain itself, distinct. That's where you come in."

She smiles. "Yes, I could only ever be with someone who acknowledges my uniqueness, my independence."

"And you," he says. "What is it that you lack, on our journey?"

"A reminder that I'm not alone," she says, not looking at him now, but rather at the cracks in the sidewalk. "That... I have significance, in some way, in more than just the written word."

"So there we are," he says softly. "The things we are missing fit together nicely. Unstoppable, as I said..."

"Yes."

She finds this a good moment to slip her hand into his, as they walk. It feels right.

He squeezes her hand, gently.

There doesn't seem to be anything else for him to say--nothing that needs to be said. Just enjoying the silence and her company, as they walk along.

It's a good silence.

After not too long, they reach the parking lot of the hotel, crunching bits of gravel under their feet.

He chuckles quietly as he looks up at the hotel.

"How are we handling our trip home, then? Driving back? Bothering to check out?"

"Not like we brought much... still, we should probably check out. Unless you want the manager to think we were ghosts." She grins.

"...you know, that is an appealing idea," he says. "I don't quite feel up to paperwork today. Let's be ghosts."