Chapter Text
There is a window in his apartment that Josh has never paid much attention to.
It sits in his kitchen, right above his sink, and looks out to the alleyway between his building and the next. There’s nothing glorious about this window, nothing that makes it stand out above the rest. It’s small, and uninteresting, and often coated with water stains from when he makes a mess doing the dishes.
There’s no breeze that blows through the screen in the summer, and the chill manages to slip barely in through the sealant in the winter, and the lock on the window itself only works about forty percent of the time. Josh has been meaning to get it fixed for over a year now but seeing as how he lives on the third floor of his building, he hasn’t deemed it a pressing enough issue to outrank any number of projects he’s been meaning to do around this place.
The view is as dull as it gets, with nothing but the brick wall of an apartment building and an unlevel side alley that sometimes floods when it rains to stare at. The only interesting thing he can see out the window is, in fact, another window, from his neighbors in the building next door. Or at least, it would be interesting, if his neighbors ever did anything of note.
The window is about fifteen feet across the alley, and it’s slightly below his own. It’s on the second floor, as far as he can count, but the ceilings in the apartments next door must be taller or something, because this window isn’t quite as low as the second floor of his own building, but it doesn’t quite rise to the third floor either. It’s a downward sloping view for Josh, if he ever spent more than a minute caring about the drab scenery out his kitchen window.
Josh doesn’t spend much time at home—being the Deputy Chief of Staff to the leader of the free world doesn’t exactly run on normal working hours—but when he is home, it’s mostly after everyone else in a ten-mile radius is asleep. His neighbors are no exception, and most nights after he gets home from the office and goes to fill the coffee maker with water, the window across the way is dark with the lights off and the shades drawn.
In the two years his window neighbors have lived in the building next door, Josh can count on one hand the number of times they’ve crossed paths.
He doesn’t know their names, or the occupations, or really anything about their friends, their families, or them. He knows they’re an older couple, around his mom’s age, and that they maybe have kids that are older because they never seem to be around on holidays. Besides that, it’s anyone’s guess.
And one day, they were just… gone.
Josh doesn’t know where they went or what happened to them, and the only reason he has any suspicion that they moved in the first place is that now, one night, the blinds are open.
It’s 3am and the kitchen light is off, but the blinds are wide open. He thinks maybe they just forgot to shut them, a fluke of some sorts, and he has no trouble believing this because certainly stranger things have happened. It’s perfectly reasonable to think that the elderly couple across the way simply forgot to shut their blinds, and way more plausible than the assumption that they moved just because one thing seemed off to him—a complete stranger to these people.
Josh leaves it at that, shaking his head and ridding his mind of the whole thing by the time his coffee is brewed. (Yes, coffee, at 3am, because it’s 9AM in Germany and he has a phone call with the Ambassador in fifteen minutes.)
Except, as he dumps a ridiculous amount of creamer into his mug, Josh sees movement in the window across from his. Shadows move across the floor of his neighbor’s apartment, just barely visible in the dark, and a woman appears in the frame. A younger woman, if he had to guess, by just a few years, and definitely not one of his old neighbors.
She’s dumping out her own unfinished cup of coffee, or tea, or whatever it is she’s drinking in the middle of the night into the sink and washing out her mug. Her hands move delicately, and a few strands of hair fall in front of her shoulder before she tucks them behind her ear. Long blonde hair that looks almost silver in the moonlight.
She dries the mug on a dishtowel and reaches up to put it back in the cabinet just up and to the left of her sink. Josh wonders if her apartment mirrors his, or maybe just their kitchens, because he keeps his mugs in the same cabinet in the same spot next to his sink. It’s a fleeting though, one that’s bookended by the realization that he’s just been watching this woman for the past few minutes, like some sort of psychopath straight out of a Hitchcock film.
The woman moves to finally close her blinds just as he’s blinking himself back to reality, and she catches him. Josh can feel the blush rise to his cheeks from embarrassment, and he can only hope that the shadows of the late hour aren’t giving all of him away. They stare at each other for a few seconds, both too shocked to move at first.
Until he flashes her an apologetic smile and raises his mug to her in a greeting, going for his best nonthreatening salutation.
She pauses for a moment, but eventually she nods with a tight smile in response, drawing her blinds and disappearing into the apartment.
Josh all but smacks himself on the forehead, running his hand over his face and gulping down half his coffee in an attempt to forget about the once-dull-turned-mysterious-window and focus on the day ahead.
It only kind of works.