The Immutable Truth of the Universe

[tamcranver]

Since I haven't been producing a lot of fic lately, here's a blast from the past--Flirting fic that I posted on my pretty much defunct website in 2004 but never put in my fic LJ. This one's about Danny and Thandiwe sometime not too long after the end of the movie--a year or so, maybe?

***

It’s been a week since they left Nairobi, and Thandiwe is still getting used to being safe. She still feels the urge to speed up when she hears footsteps behind her; she still starts at loud noises. She hides her lingering fears from Akello and Miremba, who have shed their sporadic terror for excitement. It’s been a long while since they’ve been out of Africa, and they’ve never been to Australia. They’re already prepared for adventure.

Thandiwe stars out the train window, at the barren grasslands all around. A cow wanders a hillside in the distance, reminding her, for whatever reason, of Jock Blair. He slips out of her mind as easily as he entered it; he’s really not interesting enough for her to devote much thought to him. Her daydreams slip over other bland young men and women she’d met at school and finally settle on the one who’d never stopped fascinating her.

Danny. Danny is waiting for her. She tries to picture him, standing there at the station, but it’s been so long, and so much has happened, that he eludes her. She can only pick up fragments of him in the recesses of her memory—-the end of his speech on rugby, his gloved hand lying limp on the boxing ring floor, his face painted half black and half white as he eyes her from his position on the stage.

He seems a millennium away from her. It seems as if she has been battling heartbreak and policemen forever. Her father is but a name in her memory, and her stepmother is fading. They’ve been gone so long. Her reality has been Akello and Miremba and danger and getting them to safety. She feels strangely bereft of purpose, sitting on this quiet train in the middle of nowhere.

She wonders if he will still feel whatever it is he felt for her when she arrives. Perhaps he has found some blond Australian girl, like the one in his picture, and has forgotten the stolen moments shared in her dorm room, their nervous caresses and sweaty school clothing, the rocks they skipped on the moat that separated their schools. Perhaps—-and this is what she really fears—-he’s turned into a dull, politely prejudiced Jock Blair. This would be worse than if he had died; this would kill the memory of him that she’s been clinging to over these long months.

Miremba and Akello chatter excitedly as they pull into the station, their noses pressed against the window. Thandiwe doesn’t even look at the window. Instead, she gathers her brother and sister like a shepherd urging his sheep onward and shoos them out onto the platform.

He is there.

The faded picture of him in her mind collides sharply with the man in front of her, and she gasps softly at the shock. His hair is longer, messier; he’s cultivating sporadic tufts of facial hair that make it look as if he doesn’t wash properly. He isn’t wearing a school uniform, but a short-sleeved plaid shirt and tan-colored shorts, and somehow this strikes her most of all. But despite all this, he’s still wonderfully the same. Still Danny Embling. Is he? She waits.

He steps forward, giving her a smile that pulls at only one corner of his mouth. “H-h…” His tongue appears briefly to moisten his lips, and he tries again. “Hello.”

“Hello,” she says calmly. Miremba and Akello are tugging at her arms, but she ignores them. She has the feeling something monumental will happen, and whether good or bad, she must watch it.

He stares at her for a minute, his dark eyes unreadable. “Have you got any bags?” he says at last.

“No,” she says. “I’d like you to meet my sister, Miremba, and my brother, Akello.”

He nods at them. “Pleased to meet you both.” They’re tickled pink at being greeted in such an adult fashion, and immediately she can see that they have warmed to him.

Then what is this distance? What is this gaping emptiness she can feel between them? Why does this feel so mundane, like meeting an acquaintance outside of the market or waving hello to a neighbor?

The months, the miles, none of it should matter now. Have they really grown on such disparate paths that they can’t find each other now, standing only a few feet away? Thandiwe feels her throat closing with overwhelming despair. No. No, it cannot end like this.

She reaches to take his hand, just as she had when the headmistress was bodily forcing her out of the motel room where they had spent the night. You keep this half of the world going, she had said. Her whole world is centered around him right now; she is in the eye of the hurricane, near the center about which everything revolves.

His hand meets her halfway there, warm and rough. He meets her eyes and his smile turns knowing, losing its shyness. “The world feels right now, doesn’t it?” he asks. In his face, Thandiwe can see the boy who suggested that they travel under the name “Camus,” who pretended to be sick in the yard and then ran away with her into the night.

The distance is nothing. She is Thandiwe and he is Danny, and no matter what has happened, they will always be able to find some peace in each other. They are the immutable truth of the universe, she realizes. They are love. This is love. She’s never said it in those words, even to herself, but it’s in the way Danny’s eyes drink her in, as if she’ll vanish at any moment, and in the way their hands cling so tightly to each other, and in the way her heart melts after so many months and the hardships she’s kept frozen there, her glacial calm, trickle away.

He holds her as she cries, shushing her somewhat alarmed siblings. The wide world stretches open for all of them, teeming with possibilities that blow about in the brisk Australian wind.