The beginning of a short story, and the surface of an idea that could turn into something much longer.
It had just started to snow. The cold air hung in a vacant limp over them; the swirl of city-sounds caught in the wind like a cough. They walked along the docks, wedged between the sprawl of urban concrete and the beginning of the sea. The smell of diesel and something that might have been fish lofted in from either side, and met there, suspended around them, an odd connection to two very different worlds.
She was wearing the rose colored peacoat he had found somewhere in London the last time he had been called away. As they walked, she would occasionally bend into a sort of half-twirl, some prospect that thrilled her dancing from her lips, so that for a moment, they faced each other, and he saw the usual ivory glow of her skin kissed with a subtle red; the blood in her cheeks coaxed to the surface by the sharp cold of the coastal breeze. The gray all around them shone brightly in the morning light, hidden somewhere behind the opaque sky, where the snowflakes that lightly fell around them sprung into life in an endless, evenly spaced clockwork. It was the snow that made her turn, now — it thrilled her to see the artificiality of the city in the grip of something so natural. It felt, to her, that the city had fallen asleep, unsure of what to do; unable to talk or outrun the intrusion, and its own loss of control.
It was then, when she teased the city, the home that neither of them had planned on, he found her the most beautiful. In those playful movements, where she turned to look at him, as if to teach him how to take the world less seriously, he fell in love all over again. The joyful bend of her lips, clever and confident; the way the blackness of her hair, like velvet, always hung back in the arch of her turn, as if it too had not expected the thing that had suddenly flared inside her.
But those same moments, too, bore something that felt like fear into every one of his nerves; he, who knew the cruel ways of the world better than he ever would have wanted to. He worried that those teasing seconds might also draw the weight of the world in on them; the compounded heaviness that the innocent unknowingly live on — all of the countless layers of cruelty and filth they somehow squeeze through, unnoticed, in a maze of cracks, with every second hinged upon the perpetual risk that it all might come caving down in one crushing, bewildered blow. He was filled with a fear not unlike that of a father, watching helplessly from afar, as his child runs laughing into the middle of the street. He did not trust the world they lived in — the city, those who lived in it with them, nor the people who held it all in their sweaty palms. He could not bring himself to believe they would leave her be, if the moment presented itself; the opportunity to tear her world apart, leaving behind the same, shriveled reflection of a person that the rest of them had already become.