Hi all,
This is the beginning of a new mini series in the lead up to the Wemma Wedding. I hope you enjoy. Apologies for not posting in a while. I've had a few requests to update some of my lingering fics and I will do my very best if the interest is there.
Thanks for reading. FP.
Something old.
His breath heaved fog into the air that morning.
"Damn it!" he cursed, running one hand through his hair, keeping the other on the steering wheel.
"Will, it's broken. Just keep driving and I'll call Burt Hummel when we get into school." Emma shivered and leaned closer, only to feel even more icy waves coming from the vent, mocking them both.
He muttered something under his breath and as they pulled onto the highway Emma steeled herself and readjusted her woollen beret that didn't quite cover her ears.
She had told him his beat up old clunker had to go. She had told him last week, stroking his arm in the grocery store. She told him in the choir room, humming the words over the piano when he'd begged her sing. Last night she had purred it in his ear, teasing him when his body couldn't resist hers.
"Will…" she began again. It was getting ridiculous. Her perfectly functioning Volvo sat idely in the garage, it had done for months, since his proposal and her acceptance and the realisation that they were going to need more than the giddy smiles of each other to pay for a wedding and everything that would follow.
Already his teeth were clenched. "Don't start Em. We are keeping this car. I love this car."
Without thinking, her arms folded over her chest. "Don't you think you're being a bit childish? I know this car is important to you but honestly Will, my fingers are numb and it's not even December yet. We need a car with heating…. And wind shield wipers" she quipped as they screeched across the glass, right on cue.
"I'm not having this argument with you right now, it's early and I'm cold."
"So am I! Will! The radiator is broken!." In other moments he would have caught the playful tone falling from her lips, not today. Her words were jarring as he stared straight ahead. He blinked and said nothing. An infuriating, stubborn nothing.
Emma saw the flare in his nostrils and changed her tactic. She was, after all trained to counsel. "Okay, give me three good reasons why we should keep this car, Will."
Will veered towards the freeway exit, the breaks squealed, as if forewarning of dangerous territory.
He gripped the wheel tighter and looked over at Emma, sitting perfectly in pink. She was adorable. And of course beautiful and charmingly sexy, but sometimes she was too adorable, too petite. Will had watched as parents and discounted her, mistook her soft, whimsical voice for one of ineptitude. He'd stood by and listened as salesmen crooned to her at the front door, thinking that the woman in yellow kitten heels would surely be an easy sale. He'd had to step in when his own mother started speaking to Emma as if she were a pretty, eager little child.
She proved them wrong, time and time again. With words that punched and more wit than Will had ever known. He loved her for it and yet it made mornings like this all the more difficult.
She rolled her eyes at his extended silence, as if to prove her point.
"I can't explain it, okay? I just don't feel comfortable getting rid of this car." He heard himself huff, begging for the conversation to be over.
"So that's it? We can't even discuss it?", her frustrated breath was cloudy condensation on the window.
"Exactly" he spoke, but quietly and with an averted gaze. Then he pursed his lips. Now it was finally beginning, the conversation he knew they were going to have since he walked out of the bathroom that morning and saw her buttering his toast.
Will heard her gasp for air, shocked by his abruptness. "You're being juvenile."
"I'm not the only one."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Emma's body jolted forward slightly as Will swerved the clunker into the parking lot. They were at school already, and the words were only going to get more venomous.
"…Nothing", he pulled back again, watching Brittany skip into the cafeteria, seemingly carefree. But then, people always seemed carefree from afar.
"Will!", she unclipped her belt and issued the challenge, already her eyes threatening tears.
He kept staring at Brittany. "It means that I didn't ask you for a reason when you stopped taking your medication last week. And I didn't ask you why you stopped watching the local news or even why you missed your appointment with Dr. Shane last month." He felt his voice shake, he heard her grasp her bag and wedge open the door with the force that it always needed.
"None of those things are your decision Will!" She spoke with one foot already on the pavement. "I'm talking about a stupid, old, silly car!"
"… And I'm talking about your life!" his head whipped just intime to see her other heel smack the firm, cold ground. "Don't walk away from me Emma!."
"I need you not to be here right now", her voice wasn't much more than a whisper two hours later when he stepped past her office door without knocking. The room smelt like upturned soil, three new ferns sat on the windowsill, so perfectly aligned.
Emma sat, making the desk her defender, and the pens and paper her distraction.
"Sorry", he said though he hadn't come to apologise.
"Fine. Now can you go please?" she didn't look up.
"Em", he sat in the chair opposite her and she froze, like she always did in moments of confrontation. "We need to talk about you and… your health. If there is a problem, we need to work it out."
"Right. Because if I want to sell our car, I must be having a mental health episode-", her voice was clipped. The dark circles under her eyes made her face look small and ghostlike.
"Emma, this is not about the car! You've been on edge for weeks!" his voice boomed. Students pacing quickened behind the glass at accidently hearing intimate intricacies.
Her stomach sank and her face flushed. Recent memories flooded her, all the things she thought had gone unnoticed, even by her self. Surges of anxiety that ached and twisted for the awful stories on the late night news, an extra two minutes in the shower, and extra thirty lying awake listening to Will's breathing.
And extra sleepless night. A little plan of what to do if Will ever left her. A big list of reasons why he should. Seven rounds of counting the pencil skirts in the closet before cooking dinner. One night's refusal to accept medication. The courage to rescheduale her appointment with Dr Shane, the rebellion to miss the second one.
Endless smiles to cover it all up so Will wouldn't know a thing.
And not once did Emma have a reason for feeling all those different kinds of wrong.
"Here" he handed her the box of Kleenex that always sat at a perfect right angle on her desk, "let's take the rest of the day off."
She watched him, she breathed.
She pulled the towel closer to her skin, walking into the kitchen. Somewhere between the conversation in her office and the forgiving steam of the bathroom, a day had past and now darkness simmered at the windows.
He sat at the table, reading the label on a bottle of valium she keeped in the back of the baking draw for emergencies. All her bottles were there, well all three of them. Still it made the table look cluttered.
"I've never even read these before. You're suppose to take them every single day and I don't even know what they are", he said.
He followed her to the bedroom, his hands on her shoulders were warm, his lips were better, his sigh made everything feel a little normal.
"I'm sorry you've been feeling sad."
"I know I should take the medication. That's what all the books say, all the doctors", she spoke from the edge of the bed, wrapping the towel around her tighter still. "It's just that, I don't see my problems the way you do."
She felt the weight of the mattress sink as he joined her, looking straight ahead and trying to comprehend. Emma continued, "I know that to you, they are my illness, but they're mine. They're the most personal part of me, they are how I saw the world for a long time, how I still see the world. And sometimes it feels like the whole universe it pressuring me to give them up, so I'll be calmer and easier to manage and, it feels like I don't have a say…. Does that make any sense at all?"
Will kept his focus on the painting of the death lilly a student has gifted Emma, that now hung somewhat out of place on their bedroom wall. Will always knew when she wasn't medicated. Her brow sweated, she fidgeted, she tortured herself with aimless fretting. "No, it doesn't", he blinked, his eyes were wet.
"I need you to get better," he said slowly, hearing his words choke with desperation. She snapped her gaze to his.
His hands were on hers then, and the urgency was everywhere. "That old version of you, I was so in love with her", he cracked feeling his heart race faster. "I used to… I just had to be near you. In the faculty room, I just had to watch you!"
Emma watched his pupils widened, his hands gripped tighter.
"Will, slow down" she whispered, feeling the towel fall from her chest but being helpless to stop it. His face just reddened.
"No, I was obsessed with you and you were so busy polishing your damn fruit and scrubbing the silverware, you didn't even notice!". Emma froze.
"I loved old you, but you didn't! You were miserable! You walked around smiling at everyone but you couldn't even look at me. You hated yourself. So, you don't get to be old you anymore!".
In the evening that followed, Emma wiped his tears with her towel, took two deep breathes and fixed a cold compress for his forehead as Will lay on the pillow, in their room with the lights out.
When the local news was over, signally the end of a day's era, she pulled the sheets back and let herself in to his domain.
A kiss on the back of his neck said 'I'm sorry'.
"I don't know what that was", his voice was husky again the far wall.
Emma did. It was too many days filled with flunking students and never ending wedding plans and fear and excitement grand ideas that needed too much energy. It was the release that had to happen, tearful, clunky and deliriously confusing.
Emma smiled ironically to herself. What made him scream and cry, made her retreat and scrub the walls.
"I loved the old you too", she said, her voice cutting through the sleep that hung in the air. She looped her arms around his chest, pressing her own into his back. "I loved that you used to take of those hideous ties Terri made you wear as soon as you walked in every morning."
Emma felt the slightest chuckle underneath his ribcage.
"I don't ever want to make you that uncomfortable", she added somewhat soberly. "or scare you. But I do think I'll talk to Dr. Shane about adjusting my medication. But," she began, her hands moving lower, trying to pull him closer, "you can't make those decisions for me. I know it's not fair, but nothing is".
He sighed, she hoped it was one of relief. "What can I do for you then?", his tone wasn't the whimsical one she was hoping for, but it was perfectly controlled and all Will.
"You can remind me why you love me. I think that would help."
Will closed his eyes. While her words were charming and romantic, he knew their meaning was dark. They meant, tell me you love me so I can hate myself less.
Make me forget what's going on in my mind for a moment.
But he complied that night, and he would again until she stepped out of Dr. Shane's office a month later with a real apology and a level of calm that suited her perfectly.
"Well, let's see. I love…." Her fingers twisted the fabric of his shirt, "I love sleeping with you."
She snickered, always shy "Will…"
"No, think about it, old Emma wouldn't dare, but you are….". Will smiled to himself, and in an energetic tanlge of limbs covered in her giggled, she was then lying on his stomach, pressing her bellybutton against his.
"…You always lean into me. That's how I know you're in the mood", he smirked, she drew her hand under her chin, blushing.
"I don't."
"You're doing it now."
She was. Her entire weighed was levelled on him. It wouldn't always be that way, but for that night atleast, it was exactly what the old Emma needed, and the new one too.