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The sky is gray again. Jim begins to fear that the Fair will be over before it lightens up.
“It’s only rain,” Leonard points out, even as he settles into the sofa with a glass of his favorite newly-legal whiskey, very clearly not intending to go anywhere. “Not like you’re going to melt.”
“It’s barely twenty out there, Bones.” Jim taps on the icy window, frost from the morning still clinging to the glass pane. “It’ll be snow. If we’re lucky—a blizzard if not.” It goes without saying that Jim is hardly ever lucky, these days.
“Then you definitely won’t melt.” Bones clicks on the radio, coverage from the World’s Fair immediately filling the room.
The wind rattles the windows in their frames.
“Well, freezing is hardly an improvement.” Even as he sees it, he’s getting to work on bundling up: a wool coat that was brand new right before the bank runs started, a scarf that hasn’t been new since before the war, and gloves that don’t even belong to him.
“Put those back.”
“My gloves are more hole than glove,” Jim says plaintively, checking that his coatsleeves comes down over the cuffs on the gloves. “And I’m no good to you if I lose my fingers to frostbite.”
“Those are my best gloves,” Leonard argues. “And you’re barely any use to me with your fingers in tact.”
Jim’s was new five years ago coat is wearing thinner at the elbows than he’d thought. Or, more likely, it’s so cold that he’s feeling it more where his not new five years ago sweater has already worn thin.
Quite possibly both, unfortunately.
There aren’t nearly as many people out at the fair today as there have been in his past trips, times that he’s come by with Leonard and Joanna. But it’s so cold today that there’s no way that Leonard would have let Joanna come out with him, even if she weren’t in school today. The lack of people means that Jim won’t have the previously anticipated warmth of a crowd to help save him from freezing solid.
It’s a reasonable amount of people, he supposes, for the look of the sky and the wind chill.
He works his way into the first building he finds that has people inside; it’s warmer indoors but barely. He’s not even sure that it’s warm enough to remove his scarf.
The building he’s found himself in is an exhibition hall, cases and tables telling of scientific advancements over the past century. Science has never been Jim’s primary interest, but it’s infinitely more of an interest than continuing to freeze out in the unseasonable autumn chill.
One whole wall is dedicated to the table of elements that Jim hadn’t paid attention to in school. There might be a couple more elements, not that he has any real idea.
“Fascinating, isn’t it?”
Jim turns his head, not expecting to be spoken to, and certainly not to be asked if the chemical elements are fascinating.
Also on the list of things that Jim is not expecting: for the stranger to be handsome.
He’s so enraptured by everything on the wall that he doesn’t even think he’s aware that he’d spoken out loud.
Until he points forward at a spot on the wall and says, as though Jim had asked, “This one was isolated just over five years ago, from a large sample of molybdenite, but the scientists who managed to refine it had suspected for three years previous, hypothesizing that it existed in samples of platinum ore and columbite.”
He sounds like he’s reciting the paper that they’d have published with their findings. Jim doesn’t know what half the words he’s saying mean.
“And how does one begin to suspect that there may be a previously undiscovered element hiding in a sample of platinum ore?”
The stranger looks over at him, finally, warm brown eyes with the glimmer of excitement that can only come from well and truly enjoying the conversation at hand. Jim hasn’t seen very much of it in people, these last few years. “Naturally occurring ores contain a myriad of other materials in them. Presumably, as they were isolating the platinum from those other materials, they realized that one of them was not something that they recognized.”
Jim would have simply shrugged it off, if he hadn’t recognized something he’d found, but he can respect the men and women out there who do ask the questions that lead to scientific advancements.
“Can I buy you a drink, sir?”
The man’s name is Spock. He’s not from Chicago. Or Illinois, or even the Midwest.
“I know that it’s not a good time for self-indulgent trips,” he admits over the coffees they’d decided to get instead of booze at two in the afternoon. “But who knows how long this will last, or the next time America hosts a Fair?”
“No, absolutely.” Jim gestures broadly towards the window they’re seated by, indicating the cold outside. “Why else do you think I brought myself out here in this?” Never mind that he and Leonard have already been to the Fair quite a few times with Joanna.
“Yes, the weather was something of a surprise to me, as well.” Spock watches the grey skies with the same wonder with which he’d viewed the periodic table. “I did not think it would be so cold in October.”
If Jim hadn’t already learned that Spock lives in the Nevada desert, he’d have certainly figured it out from that. Sure, it’s colder than it usually is in late October, but not by enough that it would be a surprise to anybody who’s spent even just a year in Chicago.
“But it has been worth it, these last few days,” he continues, looking back over at Jim. “It’s been difficult to have fun, lately.”
Jim thinks about just how many times Leonard has taken Joanna to the zoo and the new aquarium this past summer, because they’re both a full day of entertainment for either no money or a very small amount. “I do know what you mean. My roommate has a daughter, and it’s been difficult to keep her entertained these last few years.”
Spock tilts his head curiously. “If it isn’t too out of pocket to ask, how did you find yourself living with a man with a young child?”
Jim shrugs. He doesn’t know how much his friend is comfortable with a stranger knowing, but they also will, more than likely, never meet each other. “His wife ran out on them a couple months before the markets crashed. Found some soldier, we think. We think she might have tried to fight for custody if it weren’t for the fact that Leonard’s a doctor and in no danger of losing his job. And I used to live alone, but I certainly couldn’t afford that anymore, after…Anyway, he let me move in with him, and now it feels like I spend most of my free time helping him entertain Joanna.”
“That sounds like quite the symbiotic relationship,” Spock notes, setting his coffee mug back down on the table. It makes the hollow clink of an empty porcelain mug. “And I am certain this young Joanna is delighted to have the both of you.”
Jim thinks of delighted Uncle Jims screamed directly into his ear as she catapults herself onto the couch beside him to tell him about what she’s learned each day in school and says, “I have yet to hear her complain.”
The sky only gets darker, as the day goes on. The longer the threat of snow looms over their heads, the worse it’s going to be when it finally comes.
They’re towards the center of the fair, as far from any entrances as is possible to get, when the skies finally open up.
“Do you know,” Spock says slowly, staring up at the skies with absolute amazement, “I have never seen snow before.”
“There’s a park, not too far from here.” Jim wonders where the decision to make the offer comes from but doesn’t stop himself from continuing, “It’ll give you a much more fair first impression, if you’d like me to show you.”
“I would enjoy that very much, I think.” Spock smiles wryly. “If it would not be too much trouble.”
Jim shoves his hands, still wearing Leonard’s best gloves, into the pocket of his coat, and tries not to think too hard about why his heart suddenly feels like it’s beating irregularly in his chest. “Right this way then, Mr Spock.”
It doesn’t take long before the snow begins sticking to the roofs of the various buildings that they pass, but the wind’s so strong that it hasn’t had the chance to accumulate anywhere on the ground. He’d meant it, when he’d said that the park would give Spock a better first impression. Hardly anybody will be out at the parks in this—hardly anyone had even been at the Fair, and even most of those that had tourists and out-of-towners, like Spock is—and so the snow will remain mostly untouched. The thick blanket of white that Jim always loves about early mornings after a night of snowfall.
Spock spends the walk to the park staring at whatever surfaces have managed to accumulate snow, already so enamored with it that Jim can’t help but wonder what the man must be like when it’s not so difficult to find joy as it’s been these past few years.
Difficult, but not impossible, he supposes, as the entrance to the park becomes visible. There’s nobody there, exactly as Jim had expected, and the snow sticks to the grass in ways that it hadn’t managed to stick to the pavement, already a layer so thick that it comes halfway up Jim’s boot.
He lets Spock take three slow turns, reveling in the novelty of the experience, before he decides to show the man his own favorite thing about snow days.
The look on his face when Jim nails him dead in the chest with a snowball is priceless.
Spock splutters, staring wordlessly at him as clumps of snow fall off his coat.
Jim makes up another snowball and throws it right for his face.
It’s a little rude, since Spock doesn’t have a proper pair of gloves himself and therefore can’t retaliate properly, but Jim only has half a moment to really think about that before he finds himself tackled into the beginnings of a snowdrift.
Jim laughs breathlessly, unbothered by the icy moisture slowly saturating the back of his scarf and seeping into the interior of his coat.
“Turnabout is fair play, I guess,” he mumbles, as Spock rolls off of him. “Sorry, I couldn’t resist.”
“I doubt that I would be able to, were I in your position.” Spock stands up and shivers, the entire back of his coat soaked through. It is not a coat that was made for a wet sort of cold, but he did make the choice that directly led to him laying in a pile of snow in the first place. “However, I daresay you owe me another coffee.”
Jim wishes, more than he thinks he has to date, that the economy wasn’t in the sorry state it’s in. “It’ll have to wait until next week, I’m afraid.”
“I will be home, next week.” He seems sorry to say it. “But I will hold you to it.”
Jim smiles up at him, getting to his own feet and shaking off the snow and ice clinging to the wool of his coat. “I’ll keep in touch. Coordinate dates with you.”
Leonard takes one look at Jim, when he finally manages to make it home, soaking wet coat and cheeks red from the cold, and says in his surliest tone, “Oh, good, I can call off that damned search party.”
“I got distracted.” As if it’s nearly that simple. “Still got some of that brandy you keep threatening me with every winter?”
“Not if you’re asking for it, I don’t.” He settles back into the couch, the same spot he’d been occupying when Jim left. “Your dinner’s in the oven. Did you at least get a way to keep in touch with your distraction?”
As a matter of fact, he did. Jim kind of already wants to write him a letter, even if he’s got nothing to write about.