This is my life

(I went through my WIP folder looking for something likely, so here... have a snippet of the Die Hard AU fic that absolutely no one wanted ;)

~~

John hates his job. The thought comes as a surprise to him one day as he leans over the edge of a fire escape and watches a couple yelling at each other in the alley. There's a small child, too small and too bundled up in winter clothes and too far away to tell if its a boy or a girl, hiding behind the man's legs.

The surprise isn't so much that his job is unpleasant. His job has remained unchanged for as long as he can remember. If it is unpleasant now, it stands to reason that it has always been unpleasant.

The surprise is that he's thought of it as a job at all, when he's always considered it simply a fact, in the moments he'd found to contemplate. The surprise is amplified in his head when he realizes there are options. There are so many options.

There weren't options yesterday or the day before or the million days before that. John recognizes this for what it is - Free Will - and it scares him, and then the notion that he is scared nearly sends him into a panic. He's circling in a whirlpool of doubt, and emotions threaten to swamp his craft until he forces them down.

It is entirely possible that John is no longer an angel.

~

He looks for the highest point he can reach on foot, and climbs the way he has watched children and sweethearts and people seeking endings or answers climb to the rooftops for generations. He watches the smoke twist from the chimney of a fireplace before it melds into the haze over the city. It's cold, and for the first time he appreciates the layers of clothing he wears as something other than camouflage.

For the first time that he can name, John doesn't feel called to anything, so he sits. It's not so different, but now the wind chills his earlobes where his hat doesn't cover them and he makes good use of the pockets in his heavy coat. As people pass through his unfocused gaze, he can't see into their hearts, and it disconcerts him, like trips to movie theaters used to, and art galleries before that. From the height of the roof, he can't even see the bare hints of emotion on their faces. John sits until the sun sets behind winter clouds, and the streetlights and the glow from shop windows light the world from below. He sits and waits for a hint of the connection that he used to feel in the people who scurry past each other, each turned within himself.

As the temperature continues to drop and the cold air burns his lungs, he sorts through his memory for humans of his acquaintance, with an attention to the passing of time that he's never needed. He's never had to find someone twice before, but with his limited ability to travel, he needs to find someone nearby, someone likely to remember him. He'd like to find someone who doesn't hide his heart and his thoughts behind so many walls. He'd like to find someone who'd smile. The wind sends a torn plastic bag swirling up, and then the clouds send their first attack of snowflakes drifting down past his face, and John tries to unwind hope from his tangle of unfamiliar feelings and picks a destination.

Matthew.