Relief liquified her muscles. She sagged with it, and her face contorting with the effort to keep back the foolish hot stinging behind her eyes. Breathing helped. She exhaled, harder than she'd intended, then licked her dry lips, pulled them back behind her teeth, and deliberately focused on taking one slow, controlled breath.
It was him.
On the sidewalk, the comet tail of pedestrians tapered away behind the curb across the street. The light turned red again, and again they stood waiting for it. Within her chest, amid the dry crushed leaves and flecks of rust in the wind, something else stirred -- a painfully small flicker too weak to consume anything yet, but with the fire to show its potential even now. Evey took another breath. She wasn't one for displays of affection; she'd deliberately shed all things without purpose, so she could run faster - and a twine of fingers around fingers or an arm around a shoulder, there was no purpose to that in the middle of a sidewalk. Still, her fingers twitched toward him before she could stop herself. Those hollow eyes of hers couldn't get enough of him to fill them up.
When the babbling stream of people around them finally pooled into a lake, Evey said:
"Hello. John."
And then, as if the two words broke her out of her paralysis, she did reach for his hand. Purpose settled over her and changed her completely into something far more recognizable. He didn't have to come with her. Yet, Evey was so used to directing now, that she didn't assume he'd do anything else other than exactly that. She tightened her hand around his - fingers folded lengthwise across his palm, not interlaced the way she really wanted - and she pulled them both away from the throng at the corner. This conversation - whatever it would be - would not be held at the edge of an intersection. He deserved more than that, though he might not have known it.
The back of an alley was not much better, really, but she picked a street she knew didn't have any restaurant trash cans in it, picked an alley she knew was well maintained by the shop keepers who utilized it, and walked firmly toward the very back, where they were farthest from the doors. Within the concrete corridor, the sky blue and bright over head, she finally turned and looked at him. Her back was against the wall, because it gave her the best view of both him and the alley behind him. It wasn't a defensive position, so much as one designed to allow her to see anything. She didn't much care for defense, not so much anymore. But she wanted to know. Whatever came at her, she wanted to know.
Finally, she let go of his hand.
"Where were you?" she asked. It wasn't what she wanted to say, either.