Work Text:
Baltimore, 1974
Hannah is walking in the Inner Harbor on a half-sunny lunch hour when a pretty brunette woman in a tailored suit and a pencil skirt rushes past her, her jaw set on some private mission, dodging in between people and seeing no one.
It isn't Ben. But it could be Ben, and that's enough to pull Hannah's head around to look after her, her belly flipping over with longing. She walks backwards for a few steps, watching the brunette cut across the grass and run out of her life, and almost bumps into someone herself—watch where you're going, sweetheart—excuse me, sorry—before turning away.
She has this problem when there are a lot of people around. Anyone she sees could be him, and it's hard not to let her gaze catch on the multitude of candidates. Anyone who looks slightly lost, whose brow furrows at a newsstand... worried about the recession, or surprised by the date? Or conversely, anyone who looks intense, determined, conscious of stakes that no one else understands.
Over the last twenty years, that's become all she sees of people—the way their bodies move, their eyes move, their lips move. She increasingly has to remind herself that other people see other things. Like when she kissed a charming stranger in the shadowed corner of a jazz club in 1962 and it wasn't until they were halfway to her apartment that Hannah remembered with a disorienting mind-twist that it was supposed to mean something that the stranger was a girl.
She's tried so many times to explain that she just sees people, that the outside is only a flimsy mask. Tried to tell it to friends, to lovers, her eyes searching, her hands gesturing vainly as if to grasp the words from the air. But hardly anyone understands; they think she's gotten into some Age of Aquarius junk. They can't know what it's like to have seen the same person look at you from four different faces.
Josh, though... A month in, he told her (leaning over the restaurant table with softness in his eyes) that he admired that about her—that she went by what was in people's hearts, and nothing else. When she remembers that, her toes curl with the ache of it, still longing for him too.
And with a flinch, she wishes she'd been able to explain to him in a way he could understand how the love she feels for different people adds up inside her. Just adds, and never takes away.
She still has time before she goes back to work. She sits on a bench facing the water, and looks out over the glittering surface of the murky harbor, and takes a deep breath in, out. The way the ripples of the water interfere reminds her of light (though she knows for most people learning physics they see it the other way around) and it calms her, makes her feel less alone. Everything in the universe is just physics, after all, and so is she.
There is no one in her field of view, just now. Empty spaces, too, have taken on great significance to her. A stretch of sweet-smelling grass dappled with the shadow of a tree. A vacant street corner, the pale pavement glittering with mica.
Addison could be standing in any of those places. Watching, evaluating, helping, encouraging. Hannah's never been religious, but she has come to understand the appeal of being guided by someone unseen, someone who hears you even when you can't hear them.
Hannah doesn't know what Addison looks like, but sometimes she has felt she could almost see the shape of her, drawn in the negative space under Ben's gaze. When he looks at Addison, he isn't looking at emptiness, he is looking at a person in her full complexity—a partner in work and a partner in life. Each time, Hannah looks eagerly in the direction of his gaze, searching the space as if she could see what he sees if she just looked hard enough.
A cloud shifts and the sun is suddenly hot on the crown of Hannah's head. It reminds her of the sun in Cairo, how people and their clothes and their hair smelled subtly different under the relentless heat. It reminds her of lying beside Ben, when they thought they had time, and how he talked of how he'd been young and old, every color, male and female.
It makes her want to be with him that way again. And—something she yearns to believe he would understand—to be not just with him, but, somehow, with Addison too. To not just add love to love, but to multiply it until it connects every which way, as thrilling in its glory as a cascade of beautiful mathematics sprawling across a bright green chalkboard. Every part of her cries out for that, even if she has to wait until she is an old, old woman in a far-off twenty-first century year.
Brought back to herself by the scent of here and now, of harbor fish and industrial oil, she shakes her head and stands up to leave. She will not have to wait that long to be with Ben again, at least. The legal pads full of scribbled figures that lie stacked in banker boxes under Hannah's bed can't narrow it down precisely, so she doesn't know if it will be months, days, hours, or minutes. But she knows it will happen, and she cherishes that knowing. Even if it will be the last time.