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He sat, quite still, by the side of the road with his legs crossed, watching as people walked by. The air still had a slight chill to it from the fading winter, and he suspected that, if it were later in the day, he might almost be able to convince himself that nothing had changed; that he was still just a voyeuristic passenger to the world, never quite able to touch it.
It helped, of course, that it had been little enough time since his egress from the Void that he still remembered all these people’s names. The woman with the orange scarf was Katerina, and if her daily routine hadn’t changed, she was likely on her way to go shopping. The person coming the other direction with the unsteady gait and the auburn hair was Drew, and might have been visiting their brother.
But it was those ‘maybe’s, ‘might’s and ‘probably’s that started to creep in, and he was sure it wouldn’t take long before he stopped remembering people’s names, or being able to recognise them on sight. Maybe, if he was really unlucky, he’d mix them up with someone who had their likeness, but who had been dead for several decades.
Or, in a few years there would be people he’d never seen before on these streets, children brought into the world with no Outsider watching them.
It was a strange sensation, though it couldn’t realistically be called a ‘realisation’, given the way it bubbled up every time he was in a crowd (and wasn’t focusing all his effort on avoiding walking into people), but it hardly ever hit quite as acutely as this.
Maybe if he were more in the habit of watching from their window, he’d feel it like this more often.
He wasn’t, though, and he was certainly not planning on making a habit of this any time soon. He had, as he would explain later, a particular purpose to being where he was, and (this was the important part) not moving.
The place where he’d sat himself was just behind an arch leading to an alleyway, not poorly lit, exactly, but which looked from its shape like it should be poorly lit. Here, the acoustics were just so, so that the noise from the main street was mostly dulled into a white noise that he was just starting to get better at tuning out.
Here, he’d also seen the very distinctive silhouette of a small stray cat, and one of the things he could be certain of, with all his centuries of theoretical knowledge that so rarely came in handy these days, was that it wouldn’t come anywhere near him if he moved. Or looked at it.
So, he watched the people coming and going, relaxing into a familiarity that he was sure he’d have uncomfortable feelings about later, and waited.
At least, he thought, waiting was something he’d gotten very good at during his time when he couldn’t do anything, but, as with many things, it was a skill he’d perfected under the very specific conditions of the Void, and he hadn’t remembered how quickly such a position got achy, and he certainly hadn’t anticipated the prickling, and then numbness, that came from persevering.
So now he was also (if he was being honest with himself) waiting because he didn’t trust himself to be able to stand steadily, and he didn’t want to, as people said, ‘cause a scene’. He could deal with strangers most days as long as he could keep his head down and nod along to their small talk, but seeing their many and varied reactions to watching him fall on his face might just be the death of him.
So, he’d decided a little while ago, to play a little game with himself, betting on which would happen first: Billie would realise he’d fallen behind and come drag him home, or, the cat would finally decide he’d proven himself to be ‘companion material’, and come sit with him.
Any minute now.
--
“What are you doing?”
The cat had won, in the end. Or, if he was honest with himself, he was betting with himself rather than the cat or Billie, so really, the part of him that was betting for the cat won against the part of him that was betting for Billie.
But, in any case, by the time a familiar, tall figure stationed herself at the mouth of the alleyway with her hands on her hips and looking distinctly harried, another certain someone had crawled its way over, first to just behind him, then to his hand (which he had oh-so-cleverly left out on his knee, in easy reach), and finally huddled up against his thigh against the wind that made its way down the alley.
Perseverance paid off, apparently.
At the question, he raised his eyes from the familiar boots he’d chosen not to recognise the sound of, and blinked at her while, internally, shuffling his vocabulary like a deck of cards in an attempt to offer her a sentence that, as she put it, ‘actually meant anything’.
“My legs went numb from sitting too long,” he said. “So I waited,”
She peered at him for a long moment. “But why are you sitting there?”
His eyes refocused on the people behind her, still milling about in the, now slightly less intense, sunshine. He was a little nonplussed to see a couple of them slow to watch the interrogation, though when he met their eyes they mostly moved on.
“The crowds of this place are strange. In some ways, they haven’t changed in decades, but I know every face that passes, even as they look at me like they’ve never seen me before. Which, as far as they know, they haven’t,”
Her eyebrows furrowed, slightly asymmetrically around her eyepiece.
“You’re people-watching?”
“I thought it might want to join me,” he said, making no move to indicate what he meant.
The knot between her brows intensified, her eye visibly darting around in an attempt to glean some meaning from the environment. As her gaze fell on his left hand, just barely showing grey fur between his fingers where the cat was curled up against his leg, she brought a hand up, and dragged it down her face.
“You know we don’t have the—anything to be taking care of an animal, right?”
Taking care of? “I’m just visiting,”
She blinked at him, unimpressed.
“Of course,” she said flatly, and pretended not to notice the cat following as she helped her friend to his feet, and walked him home.
--
It took exactly 2 hours and 43 minutes before she was enamoured with the thing.