Work Text:
Keep counting the days, she decides. It’s what she decides is the best course of action for her: to keep counting her days, weeks, months, years, if she needs to, after he has denied her her sense of true love and heart.
The days grind now, slow and strenuous. Nothing can take that edge off for her, not like he could, at least. She laughs to herself sometimes when she’s too on edge. For a Priest, he was good with… well, he was good with all of it.
The only thing that does take the edge off at this point for her is smoking, which she quits sooner than she’d like after he breaks her heart, not out of any sense of self-betterment. God no. She quits smoking because every time she flicks her lighter, she hears his annoying little quip from the first time they were alone together at her father’s engagement dinner when he was just their cool, sweary priest who in the dark, behind the restaurant asked her, “Fellow smoker?” That quip and her memories of him spread inside her body and infected her worse than any cancer could ever.
Whenever she thinks about any of it too hard, it feels like when Claire accused her of leading Martin on, she never wants that level of betrayal again, so instead, she throws herself into her work, builds Hillary a larger enclosure, and decides for herself, Claire’s batshit crazy advice to shove all of her negative emotions somewhere deep inside of her works amazingly well for her.
That is, until it doesn’t. That’s when she sobs in the cafe during her closing up the cafe, just before the night sets in London. When the broken, heaving sobs leave her lips and make her chest hurt, she eats the little bit of pie that is left in the cafe and drinks some freshly brewed coffee that makes her chest ache further in a way that is painfully satisfactory to her.
She knows she shouldn’t be drinking it, her heart hurts more and more every day and sometimes she wants to muse on the why. Is it from love? The lack thereof, or from anything else, something more… human? (The truth is, she knows that it simply reminds her of her priest.)
She pretends not to care anymore, acts like she’s too strong or too busy for love, and couldn’t care less about the concept, that it’s cheap… childish. Except when she feels his presence in her silence, like the silence of his church, he haunts her with his declaration, quiet, but filled with his personalized version of fire and brimstone, “It’ll pass.”
Oh God, how badly she prays for him to be right. She relies on his God, to allow it to pass eventually. Yet, she still, despite knowing that it isn't a very feminist lecture attendee attitude from her, would let him break her heart and haunt her soul again, even for God.