allthatgoes | all this cling and clatter (Reply)

Rating: PG
Word Count: 1,801
Characters: Fabian Fitzwilliam, Bridget Neils, Claire Fitzwilliam, Ilaria Fitzwilliam and a cameo by Tara de Villiers
Summary: Fabian's first two weeks of October.

He hadn't meant to find the hospital.

Well, to its credit it wasn't even really a hospital, and so didn't resemble where he worked quite so much. But it was a place where medical care was given -- more than a simple nurse's office. It was a clinic, that was the word for it. The health clinic at the Fitzwilliam School of Dance and the Performing Arts, which his cousin ran. Where he was visiting. Where his older daughter was becoming fascinated with.

Fabian was enjoying it too; enjoying Cape Town, enjoying spending time with Claire, seeing Avery and his boys and Annabelle. He had fun at the school, though wasn't quite as fascinated with it in a hopeful way as Ilaria was. Claire had let her join in a couple of the classes with beginners her age, and she had begun to beg him to let her go.

"There aren't boarding facilities yet," he'd told her, "and we don't live here." They didn't speak Afrikaans, either, though both languages were used. That hadn't affected Ilaria, though, and she had continued to pout.

Pout until she had more kids to play with, another class to join, and Fabian wandered off to try and see how much he could remember of the tour Claire gave him. It turned out he couldn't remember much of anything at all of the tour Claire gave him, and ended up disappearing down a hall he hadn't seen before, and then he felt as if he was in a hospital.

It wasn't a hospital, but it was clearly a medical facility, and Fabian hung in the doorway as a woman with a long blonde braid in a white coat talked to a teenage girl with a wrapped ankle. He couldn't understand anything they were saying, but he watched with great interest. THey both looked like interesting people, after all.

Suddenly, the girl looked up from the bench and straight at him. "Hi," she said.

Fabian blinked, pointed to himself and then said, "Hi?"

"Who're you?"

"Fabian Fitzwilliam."

"Are you supposed to be standing in the door?" the girl asked, Cape Town accent distinct. There was no way she was from anywhere else.

"No, he isn't," said the woman Fabian assumed to be the doctor, and her accent was different indeed. Not South African; probably not African at all. She turned to face him, and he was caught up by a set of beautiful blue eyes very unlike his own.

This woman was a sight. But he couldn't think things like that. He'd promised.

She was laughing a little, though. "Can I help you?"

"Just looking around -- I'm a hospital administrator, back at home in London -- visiting Claire."

"Oh! Well." She held out her hand. "Bridget Neils."

"Nice to meet you, Bridget Neils," he said.

He didn't kiss her hand.

***

Fabian saw Bridget again the next day, in the morning. She'd invited him to come look more closely at the clinic, because he'd shown interest. He was more than happy to show up, and he was, in fact, even actually interested.

It was a nice place, if a little small. Bridget was a doctor, an MD -- she had trained at UCT, and also worked at a free clinic there (though less so at this point, only a few hours a week with some of her long term patients). She was in charge of medicine at Claire's school, and had a small but competent staff of nurses, technicians, massage therapists, a sports doctor on call, and physical therapists. She was also great to spend time with, and her tour and the way she described things made him laugh.

"But I'm sure your hospital is more impressive," she'd said.

"Hospitals, plural, and I don't know about that."

"Don't you?"

"Well, no. There's something competent and close about this place that gets lost in the environment of a large
hospital."

"I guess that's true," Bridget laughed. "I didn't spend much time in a real large hospital. Just my residency. Which I haven't been out of all that long."

"How old are you?"

"Don't ever ask a woman her age!"

"Sorry," Fabian held up her hands. "Never mind."

"Twenty-nine," she said.

They had lunch together.

***

For the next three days, in fact.

***

There was nothing sexual about it, nothing romantic about it. From either end, and Fabian was sure of it. While she was attractive, he wasn't really thinking about her that way. They were just friends, and good friends, fast friends. They got along better than he'd ever expected.

He couldn't help asking her, though, about her romantic life, and she had laughed and laughed.

(A tiny part of him thought he loved her laugh, and could listen to her laugh all day, and the way she turned her head and the way she lit up made him want to kiss her -- but most of him really wasn't thinking like that. Because they really were only friends. He thought about the appearances of most of his female friends, but he didn't think about kissing them, and he shouldn't think about kissing Bridget, either.)

"Not since secondary school," was what she had said.

"Romance or sex?"

"Romance. I've had sex a couple of times, nothing special. Medical school, a residency, the clinic -- never really leaves time. I've never really had time. You're awfully nosy."

"I always have been. I could ask more about the sex --"

"Sex for the sake of sex. With friends. Friends with benefits, but friends, never trying to be anything more than that. Like I said, no time."

"Would you have time now?"

"Are you asking me out?"

"Absolutely not."

"Good," she said, and smiled at him, and kissed his cheek, and said, "I have to go back to work."

It never came up again.

***

"Are you really twenty-nine," he asked once, leaning over her desk, "or are you thirty?"

"What?" She glanced up from her paperwork and stared at him.

"Are you really twenty-nine, or are you thirty? I hear most people who are thirty lie and say they're twenty-nine, and that leads to people who are really twenty-nine not being believed, as I'm somewhat demonstrating by asking if you're really twenty-nine or thirty. The thing is," he continued, "I've never actually met someone who was thirty and lied. So I'm curious if I ever will."

"I'm really twenty-nine," she told him, laughing again. That laugh -- but he put it out of his head again. He didn't even want to be tempted to flirt with her. And he hadn't been. Not once.

He didn't think he ever would.

He didn't think she'd let him.

They were too good a sudden set of friends.

***

That didn't mean Claire believed him.

"Back off of my doctor," she told him over dinner.

"I'm not on her back!" Fabian protested.

"No, you've just got her on hers."

"I am not having sex with her."

"Actually, I know that. I'd know. But you want to."

Not actively, he thought. And didn't say that either, because that wasn't helping his case. He really was just friends with the woman -- why didn't anyone ever believe he could have female friends who weren't Lydia? No one ever had a problem with Lydia.

"I don't think of her sexually."

"Yes you do."

"I don't!"

"Don't start to."

"I never did!"

Claire threw an ice cube at him.

***

Eventually, they were going to have to leave Cape Town. They were only supposed to be there for two weeks, and so they only were going to be there for two weeks, no matter how much Ilaria loved sitting in on the classes and being with her cousin Claire, and no matter how much Fabian was enjoying spending time with Claire and Bridget. And he was spending much of his free time with Bridget. Claire hadn't stopped teasing him about it, though she had relented in insisting that he was sexualizing Bridget once she spent time with both of them at once.

It was plainly obvious that Fabian wasn't flirting at all.

The funny thing was, he wasn't sure if Bridget was, and he wasn't sure if he wanted her to be. It would be too awkward for him -- she was his friend, he never dated his friends, he never had long-distance relationships, he was trying to avoid the entire idea of dating and sex and everything about it --

But it made it different if she wanted him. And he sure couldn't tell if she did or not. She was enigmatic about it; she talked frankly with him about those topics, but she would talk frankly with him about anything.

They simply got along. They simply fit with each other.

And while Fabian didn't believe in soul mates, he did believe in something close. That true, deep, meaningful relationships can grow from nowhere and nothing very fast if the situation called for it. He looked at his parents, at his grandparents, at his grandmother and her best friend Ian. Isabella and Ian proved these connections didn't have to be romantic or sexual, and so that was how he filed Bridget. His fast, sudden friend. One of his best friends, out of nowhere, in only two weeks.

He didn't want to say goodbye to her. Not before getting to know her even better, maybe seeing her out of where she worked and the occasional restaurant. Maybe seeing her home, meeting the cat he knew she had, going other places with her. Seeing where she lived was something he wished he'd done -- and yet she hadn't seen where he lived, either, or even where he was staying.

Ilaria had liked her too, for that matter. He wished she lived closer. Wished he didn't have to say goodbye so simply as all this.

But he did, and that was how it was. He'd be in Cape Town again. He told her that.

"I know you will," she said, dismissively, like it was nothing at all that he was leaving. "I'll see you again. Don't act like we can't be friends anymore because we're disappearing from each other. You're just going back to England, and that isn't disappearing. You know where I work and how to contact me."

"You don't know how to contact me."

"I just realized that."

"Do you want to?"

"No," she said, sarcastically, and then, "Of course."

He gave her his email.

***

When he got to his computer, the day after arriving back in London, there was already a short note from Dr. Bridget Neils: