(no subject)

[notinthebook]

 She kind of feels like she should have heard from Mary Margaret by now.

Right?  Isn't that sort of the deal?  True, she didn't tell Mary Margaret about everything that happened with Michael, but...that's hardly the same thing as David leaving his wife.

Unless...

She thinks back to the jacket and envelope left so neatly on her bed, and guilt roils in her stomach.  She probably should have told Mary Margaret.  At the very least, she shouldn't have found out from Michael trying so hard to get here to talk to her that he'd ended up shunted straight into a burning building.

(She still feels really kind of awful about that.)

But Mary Margaret...she wouldn't hold that against her.  Right?  Maybe she's just been busy.

Either way, the office is unbearably quiet, and she could really use a little good news, so she tosses aside her half-eaten sandwich and grabs her phone to call her roommate.

Hopefully at least one of them has some good news.

Comments

[the_fairest]

"One moment, Emma." Mary Margaret leaned down to extricate the soccer ball that rolled under the bench she was on. The murmur of her voice carrying as she laughed, light and trying, and gave it back to children calling, voices high and happy, saying thank you, before they whispered off back into the distance.

She put the phone back up. "That does sound great."

It does, even if her stomach turns and twists. She wants to be doing anything but focusing on it, on either of them, since neither of them will leave her thoughts. But finding the words for any of it is still hard.

She must have something else they could -- "Oh. Hey, did you find the stuff I left you?"

[notinthebook]

Oh.

That.

"Uh--"

She glances, guilty, at the envelope on her desk.

Michael. He's...

She doesn't know what to do with that thought, so she pushes it aside.

"Yeah, thanks. Sorry you had to play messenger boy." She transitions like a train jumping its tracks and careening into a demolished building. "So, uh, any particular kind of ice cream, or should I just get whatever kind has the most stuff in it?"

[the_fairest]

It really is. A crashing train.

A slamming door. That wall.


Michael's desperation. Inviting himself here.
Even that had been more clear than Emma's words.



Mary Margaret found herself releasing a breath she hadn't known she was holding, wasn't sure when she'd started holding. It wasn't even that she'd expected more...but she'd expected more.

"It's fine. I hadn't meant to forget to give them to you yesterday at the station. Uh." She thought. "Whatever uses chocolate too times in the title. Or sounds like you might get sugar shock just touching the carton."

[notinthebook]

"Well, things yesterday were..."

She pauses, wishing she hadn't started that sentence but unable to keep from finishing it. "Distracting," she decides, eventually. It's pretty lame, and she winces at herself. Staring at her desk, she ticks one cherry-red fingernail against the lonely cap of a pen, listening to the silence at the other end of the line and wondering how there can be so many things she wants to say and absolutely no words to say them with.

When did it start being harder to pull herself away than to reach out?

"That sounds awesome," she says, finally, because she can't say anything else. "I'll be home around six."

[the_fairest]

Distracting. To Emma. To David.

It's an effort not to raise her hand to her mouth, not to let the stinging at the edge of her eyes become more than a shine that might have been caused by the sun.

It's stupid. She knows Emma didn't mean it like that, but she ends up raising a hand to wipe away the first tear to escape since waking up. Trying to focus on the food and movie and later. Later, not at her work. "That'll be great, Emma. Thanks. I should go. The kids."

[notinthebook]

"Yeah, okay."

She bites at her lip, wishing she could think of one thing, one stupid thing to say that might make any of this better, but in reality anything she could come up with (she runs through a pathetically short list) would probably only make this worse.

Still.

"Hang in there, okay? I'll see you at home. With Chinese and ice cream."

And any jokes or funny stories or helpful advice or admittedly awkward sympathy she can manage to pull out of herself for the sake of the woman at the end of the line.

"See you later."

[the_fairest]

"You, too."



Mary Margaret rubbed her cheek clean with the back of her knuckles and her hand. Smiling at the gaggle of girls who ran by shrieking with a snaking, black-and-black, jumping ropes trailing behind them.

Mary Margaret stared after them for a long few minutes, crossing the playing ground, surveying all of them. Watching all that they were doing, that they were safe, and not doing anything against the rules.

When she looked down she realized her phone was still open, held in the curve of her hand against her leg. Emma had been trying to help. Even if the word echoed wrong, went too well with David saying she was feeling he just didn't understand.

They both wanted her to know they'd cared, for different reasons, from different places. The numb irony was lost that she scrolled through the names, until her fingertip stopped at the mid W's, at the one person who never pretended to. Care.

Guilt and the whole roll of emotions staring at his names. Remembering what he'd, she'd, they'd. She hadn't told Emma either. She shouldn't feel guilty. She shouldn't. She was an adult. She could make these choices. Go through with them, and keep them to herself.

She shouldn't feel guilty.

But she did, even as she clicked call.