Title: Sight Unseen
Author: Aeshna
Fandom: Torchwood
Rating: PG
Word count: 354
Characters: the Captain and the Little Girl.
Summary: They've been here before, he and she.
Spoilers: TW 2.07, Dead Man Walking (though if you've not seen it, this won't be spoilery so much as deeply confusing!)
Disclaimer: Not mine, no matter how many DVDs and toys I buy! Everything here belongs to RTD and to Auntie Beeb, who already has my licence fee.
Archive: Sure, whoever wants it – just let me know where it ends up!
Notes: Just something small and strange that popped into my brain after seeing that rather neat little scene near the start of the most recent episode on BBC3. Every so often they'll drop something in that just throws the whole scenario wide open.... :)

Many thanks to mimarie and jwaneeta for looking this over for me. Feedback of any variety is very much appreciated but not compulsory – I'll post anyway! I've suffered for my art, now it's your turn....

They've been here before, he and she, and they will be here again.

She knows this without needing to See, knows this in her bones. It is entirely their nature to orbit around those who understand, who can look beyond the mere and the mundane and the mortal to find a higher Truth. He will seek her for answers and she will seek him for actions, an elegant dance of give and take performed over decades that leave no mark on either. Others pass through their lives – dear and determined and too soon dead – but they go on.

Here, in this shoreline city, it is simply What Is.

She likes him, although she suspects she shouldn't. He's too different, too dangerous in his curious constancy, a creature so intimately threaded through reality that he is both background and brilliance, fear and fascination, an avatar of structure and savage instability alike. He is the sun that she cannot directly gaze upon too long without losing her Sight, his endless future best observed through his influence on the world around him. He is as much a part of the natural order as gravity – and, like gravity, he must be respected.

This alone earns him a place in her own personal Arcana.

Her cards don't hold the answers, not in the sense that the mortal world would imagine. The cards merely reflect her Seeing, the subtle interplay of Knowledge and Need laid out in abstract form. It amuses her that he manifests as a knight in shining armour and she wonders if that is through his perception or her own... and then she recalls the manner of their first meeting and knows that the Mirror is hers. The size of the sword, however....

She smiles – not a little sadly – to herself and shuffles her deck, wondering if he will find what he Seeks... and if the price of success is one that he is willing to pay. She will have to remember to ask when next their paths cross, as cross they inevitably will.

They've been here before, he and she.

And they will be here again.

~ fin ~