Chapter Text
There is a man sitting in her seat. Gloria tilts her head on one side, sizing him up. Late forties, early fifties, a few years older than her Nicholas. Clean-shaven with longish hair: brown fading to grey at the tips and temples. He is sitting very still, unnervingly still, legs apart like all men with a degree of self-confidence about the size of their package, gold-handled cane resting between his knees, hands clasped in his lap.
She doesn’t begrudge him the seat. It is there to be sat on, after all. She has no special claim to it. But usually her very presence is enough to keep people away. Even the least psychically inclined can still sense someone watching them from the other side, and it is a sensation that unnerves most. It just so happens that this particular seat gives her the best view of Nicholas’s office window, the best vantage point from which to look out for him. She could sit right there in the room with him if she wanted, but she prefers not to get too close. She doesn’t like to crowd him, to, well, haunt him. He needs his space, just as he always did in life, and Gloria respects that. She just likes to keep an eye on him. Make sure he’s ok. Make sure he’s still eating and sleeping, even if he is subsisting on caffeine most of the time. She won’t deny that it was hard in those first few months after she passed and woke into this new… it can’t really be called a life, more a plane of existence. She spent so many long nights sitting here, watching the light in the window of his office as he worked and worked and worked to bury his grief, and she could only watch him, unable to console him as she so desperately wanted to do.
Gloria pushes the thought away; she doesn’t want to dwell on those first few painful months. They do say that the only death you can never recover from, never get over, is your own, but it has taken Nicholas such a long time.
Presently the man looks up and looks Gloria straight in the eyes, startling her.
“Can I help you?” he asks.
Gloria looks around but there is no-one else to whom he could feasibly be speaking.
“Me?” she squeaks eventually.
The man nods.
“I do believe you’re the only one who can see me. And I do believe I’m the only one who can see you.”
There’s no doubt of it now, and Gloria wonders why she didn’t see it before. She’s had so little contact with others of her kind that she can’t recognise one right in front of her. But she sees the telltale hallmarks now. He seems fainter than the other shapes that move around them in the early morning light as the campus slowly comes to life. He makes no impression on the world, because he’s only half here, half moved on. He’s dead like her, watching over his unfinished business until his loved ones move on, and allow him to move on, too.
“You’re in my seat,” Gloria says, not the best conversation starter but the first sentence that pops into her head in the circumstances. She expects some kind of dry retort, but instead the man simply slides over on the bench and indicates for her to sit beside him. Gloria curses her own obtuseness because she could have simply sat next to him on the bench before, but she takes the offered seat anyway.
“Thank you.”
They sit in silence for a while.
“I’ve not seen you here before,” Gloria says presently, by way of small talk, but there is deeper meaning behind it because there has to be a reason why he is suddenly here. Why they are both here in this same spot.
“I moved recently. From Maine. California is new territory for me.” There’s another pause. “Raymond Gold. Heart attack, three years ago.” He holds out a hand which Gloria shakes.
“Gloria Rush. Bone cancer, two and a half years ago.”
It’s a brutal introduction, but a standard one amongst their sort. They’re both dead before their time or else they wouldn’t be here, so there’s no sense in skirting the issue. Introductions made, they sit in silence for a while longer.
“Who are you looking out for?” Gloria asks eventually.
“My wife,” Gold replies. “She needed to get away from it all, from all the memories in Maine. So eventually she cut all the ties and moved here. She’s working in the college library, taking some classes on the side. You?”
“My husband’s a professor. Astrophysics.”
“My wife expressed an interest in astrophysics,” Gold muses. “She was an English major, library science post-grad. She said that if she was having a fresh start then she wanted to have a part of her life, however small, not taken up with books.”
Something’s going to happen. Gloria can feel it. Why else would they both be here, in this exact spot at this exact same time? And as she sees Nicholas wander down the street absorbed in his notebook, and a lovely young woman with rich chestnut curls and her nose in a book coming in the other direction, she knows exactly what’s about to happen and why they’re there to see it.
It’s about to begin, the event that they’ve both been waiting for, and all she and Gold have to do is wait and watch and, maybe, just maybe, lend a little helping hand to make sure that everything continues on its path as it should.
She turns to Gold.
“That’s her, isn’t it?” she asks at the same time as he says “that’s him, isn’t it?” and they both know where they stand, and they share a wide smile.
This is the opportunity that they have been waiting for – Gloria here in California and Gold up in Maine. It’s almost time to move on. Almost time for that journey to begin.
So Gloria and Gold watch on tenterhooks as Nicholas Rush and Belle Gold bump into each other outside the University of California math and physics department, neither looking where they’re going, and notebook pages flutter to the ground and takeaway cup lids fly off and tea and coffee is spilled down shirts and skirts. Gloria groans, burying her head in her hands, because this really isn’t a very auspicious start for her poor husband. Beside her, Gold just chuckles.
“Oh Belle,” he says fondly. “Never change, sweetheart.”
Apologies are exchanged and the first contact is made as the two scrabble for notebook pages. So far, so good.
“Part of me feels like we ought to be eating popcorn,” Gloria muses as Belle hands the fallen papers back to Rush and they get up off the pavement, taking in each other’s beverage-stained clothing.
“If I wasn’t so concerned with watching how this plays out, I would offer to go and get some,” Gold agrees. “I suppose there’s little hope that it’ll all work as well as it does in the cinema and we’ll go straight from meet-cute to declarations of undying love?”
Gloria snorts. “You’ve obviously never met Nicholas,” she mutters, and Gold smiles.
“Belle’s very impulsive, but not usually in that way,” he concedes, and Gloria turns her attention back to the two figures on the street in front of her outside the physics building.
“Dr Rush, isn’t it?” Belle begins. “I was in your lecture on black hole theory the other day. It was fascinating.”
Rush nods. “Thanks.”
Gloria scrubs the heel of her hand over her forehead. “Is that all you’re going to say, Nicholas? Really?”
“I, erm, I’m sorry about your coffee,” Belle continues, looking at the dark stain down his white shirt.
“It’s ok.” Rush takes in her own dirtied clothing and looks away hastily when he realises, unbidden, that her little floral skirt is actually quite short. “I’m sorry about yours.”
“Let me get you a fresh one,” Belle says.
“No, really, it’s ok. I should be going, I have a class.”
“Yes, yes, of course.” Belle opens her mouth as if she’s going to say something, but no words come out. “I’ll let you get on,” she finally finishes, and they stand there for a moment before each giving an awkward cough and hurrying away in opposite directions.
Gloria lets out a long sigh and leans back against the bench, closing her eyes.
“You know,” Gold remarks, “I think they’re going to need a bit of help.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Gloria mutters. She finally opens her eyes as Nicholas enters his office and sets his now empty coffee cup on the desk. She expects him to look at his many whiteboards or launch straight into his equations, but instead he looks down at his coffee-stained shirt.
For the first time in far too long a time, Nicholas smiles. Just a small smile quirking at the corner of his lips, but a genuine smile nonetheless, and Gloria has to give a smile of her own. Progress has been made, at least. Belle has left an impression, although the extent of it remains to be seen.
“We should be going,” Gold says beside her. She looks over at him sharply and he nods towards a couple of tired-eyed students who are looking at their supposedly empty bench. Gloria stands, Gold follows her, and by unspoken agreement they find themselves wandering in the direction of the library. She didn’t think it would be long before they went to check in on Belle, and it seems only fair. Both of them are players in this little tableau, and she can’t be expected to help Nicholas on his path if she knows nothing about the woman the universe appears to have chosen for him.
“Tell me about Belle,” she says presently as they meander along the paths through the university campus. Gloria’s walked these roads so many times, both before and after she died, and she can probably walk them blindfold, but Gold seems at ease despite being comparatively new to the place. “Sorry, that makes it sound like I’m checking she’s good enough. Well, I suppose I am a little, but it’s not like I can do anything about it.”
Gold laughs. “Oh, I don’t know. We’re here to help, but there’s nothing to say we can’t hinder.”
“I don’t think it really works like that,” Gloria says. “We’re benevolent souls at heart, all of us. That’s why we’re here, why we can’t move. We stay here to make sure they’re happy, so why would we do anything that could prevent that?”
Gold is silent for a while.
“You’re right.” There’s another long pause, but it’s not an uncomfortable one. There’s no real sense of awkwardness when you’re dead, Gloria thinks. Nothing is important any more. Everything just… is.
“Belle’s… changed,” Gold begins eventually. “She used to be so bright. She is bright, intelligent I mean. But she used to be so… vibrant. She brought the light. She always brought the light wherever she went. Even to an old sod like me. This morning… It was only for a moment but it’s the first time I’ve seen her shine in three years. She always sees the good in people, and she’s passionate about what she believes in. She’s clumsy, and infuriatingly impulsive, and those were all the things I fell in love with. What about Nicholas?”
Gloria thinks.
“Nicholas always brought the calm. The logic, the reason, the rationality. I was the artist, he was the mathematician. Yin and yang. Balance. But he’s passionate too. He just shows it in a different way. He’s not exuberant, never has been. But he’s… intense. A good kind of intense. I thought I’d lost him,” she admits. “After it happened. After he lost me, I thought he’d gone for good. Just a shell of a man. He worked with such fervour, but it…”
“It was the wrong kind of fervour. Working to forget, not for the passion of it.” Gold nods. “I’ve done the same myself.” He pauses. “Belle was my second wife. My first marriage ended… acrimoniously.”
They reach the library at this point, and keep a respectful distance, watching through the glass double doors as Belle sits at the issue desk, staring into space.
“How are we going to go about this, then?” Gold finally asks. “How do we help?”
Gloria shrugs. Now that this moment has arrived, she has no idea what to do, despite knowing that it would be coming for a long time.
“I think we start by doing what we’ve always done,” she suggests. “We observe.”
“Observe, and then act.”
Gloria nods. All they can do, for the moment, is see how things pan out. They might be putting too little faith in their partners, after all, they might come together on their own, but she’s not convinced. Gold knows Belle, and Gloria knows Nicholas, and they both know that they’ll need a helping hand.
That’s what she and Gold are there for, after all.