Pairing: Tonker/Lofty
Rating: B

Disclaimer: The author makes no claim to owning the rights of anything to do with Terry Pratchett or Discworld.
Note: So yeah - this massive epic known currently as "After The Curtain Fell" has been being written on an off every time I get a Tonker/Tilda plot bunny, but cos their life is so complicated to put back together it's not really that easy to complete. But there's good bits. So these good bits might now turn up from time to time for your edification. This would be chapter 1, following on from the prologue (Dinner Without strings) which you do need to read before reading this one or it won't make any sense. We pick up the Tonker/Lofty, Tonker/Tilda, Magda/Tilda story in Ankh Morpork a good number of years after the end of MR.

After The Curtain Fell: Second Chances
by Treehugger

Tilda didn’t come back to the café the next day. Or the day after that. Magda didn’t think about it more than three times a minute, she didn’t think it was helpful to dwell on such things. Life went on. She served coffee quickly and efficiently to people who weren’t Tilda. Fredriks completed the crossword in the Times for the first time ever and moved on the Agatean number puzzle instead, Cynthia managed to get a second date with the latest paramour and missed her espresso pick up two mornings in a row, and they all nearly died of shock when Sweet-Andy cut his order down to two sugars instead of the usual five. None of these exciting highpoints managed to distract Magda from her circling thoughts.

~X~

Tilda didn’t know what to do.

Obviously the first thing to do was to stop biting the end of her pencil, this was the 4th one she’d ruined in as many days. She should have gone back to the café the next day, ordered a coffee, smiled at the barista and walked out. That would have made it clear that to all that she was pleased to have bumped into an old friend but she didn’t really have time in her life at the moment to make the effort of re-connecting. One day, done and dusted and she could have got on with her life, the meeting in the café just another humorous example of coincidences in the big city.

But this wasn’t just any old friend was it? This was Tonker. Who had been there at the very beginning and walked beside her every step of that painful road. Who had got her out of that place, and carried her over the mountains, across the plains to Ankh Morpork. The girl had saved her; didn’t she owe their past connection something more than a mere faithful customer card?

The pencil cracked under her teeth and she threw it into the waste basket with the others.

But that hadn’t been the whole of the story. If that was the only history they’d shared she would have walked into that café the very next day and made every effort to find whatever time she could in her busy schedule for the woman with the quiet eyes and the closed face behind the counter. But this was Magda. Magda whom she had loved.

And that was the truth of it wasn’t it? She had given her heart to this girl, this woman. Had loved her with everything she had for those few short years and then walked away from her, though it had almost killed her to do so. She couldn’t walk back into that situation however much she wanted to walk into the arms she knew would be extended to envelop her. She had spent a long time building herself up again and she wasn’t going to throw all that away for some old memories and an escaping tendril of red hair. For years she had fought the self-recrimination, told herself not to feel guilty, that she had had to do it, that she had been driven to leave.

But a small part of her had never quite believed. She reached for her desk drawer, but opening it found she’d finally exhausted her pencil supply. If she wanted something to chew on to banish this headache she’d have to venture out of the office. As she hauled herself to her feet she caught sight of the latest report from the boys downstairs and put the conundrum to the back of her mind for another time.

The decision could wait; she had lab data to read. Picking up her pen she turned the first page and bent her attention to the tables lain out before her.

She couldn’t go back to that life. But she couldn’t walk away either.

~X~

Magda handed over another hot chocolate and finding there were no more orders in the queue, let herself drift. It had been a week now. She’d walked past the guild a couple of times, but never stopped. She’d not been lucky enough to see the face she’d been looking for, not surprising really when she didn’t even know the girls routine. Each time, once around the corner out of sight, she’d admonished herself for behaving in such a wet manner. Tilda didn’t owe her anything. Tonker had made her bed and up till now she’d been managing well enough to lie on it. But the memories kept coming, striking her unexpectedly and catching her unarmed.

When she thought properly about the thing it did make a funny kind of sense. Her mind had almost 15 years of memories that in some way or other included a small dark haired figure to select from so it was only natural that laying eyes on the girl again would churn up some images. As the pictures danced through her thoughts Magda didn’t try and force them away this time. Instead she held onto them, her recollections bringing her some comfort. She may not have deserved anything from Tilda, but that didn’t stop her from wanting it anyway.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the bell over the door as a noisy group of boisterous young folk poured in. Magda sighed, going back to the machine and warming it up again for the rush but was stopped in her tracks by the figure trailing in at the back of the group.

It was Tilda, large as life and twice as welcome, her chin jutted up and out in that old familiar gesture.

~X~

Tilda had got caught up in the rush to coffee despite her best intentions. They’d had an unproductive week, despite the model working perfectly the first time they’d tried it in the lab, the minute they’d tried to demonstrate it they’d blown the floggle-toggle^[1] and left a nasty stain on the bench. She’d volunteered to give the lab rats a hand finding all the pieces and putting it back together, hoping the fiddly intricate work might calm her mind. Unfortunately it was the upper floggle-toggle that had gone, not the lower one, and despite hunting high and low they’d been unable to find a vital part of the second pressure dissipation coil assembly. In the end Janey had thrown her hands in the air in frustration, declaring Coffee Time.

Walking in the midst of the group busily discussing – with a wide range of emphatic gestures - the impossibility of producing results with the low level equipment the Guild persisted in using Tilda hadn’t noticed where they were headed. It was only as she looked up to catch the door as it swung back that she realised they were walking into what her brain persisted in calling “Magda’s Café”. By then it was too late to duck out, she had no real reason to turn back and no explanation she was willing to share with her colleagues. Avoiding Janey’s curious stare at her jump she put up her chin and walked inside.

~X~

“Wasn’t that...?”

“Yeah.” Magda moved out from behind the counter to collect the coffee cups and general detritus the group of engineers had left behind. Without them the café was suddenly quiet and empty, only Fredriks in the corner looking up from his fruitless hunt for another 9 to place in the top right square. He knew something of the story, having wandered in one morning on Magda asking the coffee grinder why it was that she was bothered what dark haired women thought about her anyway.

He’d asked and she’d been so startled that she’d told him the summarised version whilst brewing his extra-strong-double-filtered morning wake-up call. She hadn’t glossed over her part in the proceedings but in return he hadn’t retreated behind the barrier of disappointment she’d got used to. Fredriks was a quiet man who had lived a quiet life, but he’d said enough to make it clear that he was rooting for her despite the odds.

“She seemed a little...”

“Yeah.” Magda placed the last of the cups into the tray and carried it out into the back pantry. There was washing up to be done and that was a really good excuse not to be talking to anyone at this moment in time.

~X~

“So, who was that?”

Tilda looked up from the technical drawing she was making careful notes on to see Janey slip inside the office, closing the door behind her. Having determined that the intruder was in full intelligence gathering mode she put down her pen and prepared for damage control.

“Don’t you have reports to be writing?”

Janey shrugged. “I’ve got a minion working on them. I was much more interested in the little ‘entertainment’ I caught in a certain café this morning. Care to share what was going on?”

Tilda dropped her eyes from that enquiring gaze with a muttered “nuffin.” Picking up the ever present pencil she attempted to give out an air of someone who was extremely busy with important things that a lowly (chief) lab technician shouldn’t be interrupting.

“So the little conversation you were having with the serving girl, that was nothing?”

Tilda shrugged, her attention absolutely completely and unwaveringly on the diagram she was editing.

“Do you usually ice-maiden perfectly competent baristas?”

Tilda added a line to the drawing, joining two unimportant looking points. She noted dispassionately that her interrogator was only asking questions that could be answered with a yes or no, and that as yet Janey didn’t seem too frustrated by the lack of answers she was receiving.

“Sooo...” Janey began the relaxed stroll that generally accompanied a beautifully simple explanation of some hideously complicated concept. “I’m guessing you guys knew each other, probably sometime back before you turned up in my lab with that lost look and those detailed formulae on energy transference.”

Tilda found another two points to connect. Perhaps if she went on long enough she could turn the cutaway section into a cheerful doggie or perhaps a sailboat.

“I’m assuming from the ice-maiden performance that it wasn’t merely a casual relationship and that when it went south it went with something of a bang.”

Tilda couldn’t find the energy to do more than nod to that. Talk about the understatement of the month.

“I’m sorry T.” She rested a hand for a moment over the digits manipulating the pencil so skilfully. “So what happened? You just bumped into her there?”

“We had dinner.” Tilda found herself explaining about the meeting and then how she’d gone back and how there’d been a dinner situation. She didn’t go into much detail; it was difficult enough even to share the little she did. She had always been thankful that Janey had never pushed, merely accepting that there were things Tilda didn’t talk about. The technician had shared confidences easily but never demanded that her friend reciprocated.

“Janey?” Tilda looked up from the pencil she was twiddling between nervous fingers; she definitely had an affinity for wood-coated graphite implements in times of stress. “You won’t say anything, will you?”

“I promise.” Janey crossed her heart in the old Ankh Morpork youngster fashion, with appropriate detailed gestures and blood curdling noises before settling back against the desk to ask “what are you going to do now?”

Tilda shrugged. She hadn’t solved the previous conundrum of what to do after seeing Magda the first time nevermind any new problems arising from bumping into her again.

“As I see it, you could carry on as you are, but looking at that drawing as your chief lab tech I don’t think I should allow that. We’re on a tight enough schedule already without you drawing Laddie the Wonder Dog on my latest model blueprints.”

Tilda looked down at what she had been doing, put the pencil away from her with precise control and sat back in her chair to avoid further temptation.

“So, you have three choices. One, you totally ignore the woman. It shouldn’t be that difficult, there are any number of coffee shops in this neighbourhood. Two, you go all out the other way, have the talk with her and sort out whatever it was that went wrong in the first place. Knowing you, I’m not holding my breath for that one.” Janey looked up from counting off the options on her fingers, caught Tilda’s rueful glance and nodded to herself.

“That leaves us with number three, you don’t avoid her, but you don’t pursue her either, and we attempt polite conversation when we run into our mystery friend rather than the little miss ice-maiden demonstration you were showcasing earlier. I’m keenest on number three myself. I mean, from what I saw in the café, she seems to be ok about the whole thing. She’s not pushing is she?”

The headshake Tilda produced in denial was firm.

“Then we should at least pop in sometimes. We could go there for coffee every now and then. They do have those really good croissants.”

She moved round the table and rested a hand on a thin shoulder.

“Don’t fret too much over it T, it’s likely to be not that big a deal when all’s said and done.”

Tilda sat passively under her hand, not complaining but not responding either. Janey, her objective met for the time being, withdrew her touch, respectful of her friend’s reserve. Thinking one in-depth probing conversation was probably enough for the day she decided to leave the discussion she needed to have about the propensity for floggle-toggle explosion with the new parameters her superior had sent down until tomorrow. She turned back in the doorway, flashing a grin.

“It’s a good drawing of Laddie though. I was really impressed how you managed to blend the support beams into his jaw-line.”

Tilda sighed and shook her head but couldn’t quite hide the smile.

~X~

^[1] For an idea of the vital importance of a floggle-toggle look up almost any episode of “The Navy Lark”