Title: Dull the Pain
Author: iridescentZEN
Rated: PG
Fandom: Will and Grace
Pairing: Karen/Grace
varietypack100 prompt: 080 She
Karen's not sure when the pattern started. She was drinking before it was legal, helping her to cope with a mother whose only use for her was as a back up to validate her con artist scheme of the week. Karen likes the world a little fuzzy, a little off, a little not right. A world like Grace Adler, and the not so ambiguously gay duo. It is better than seeing it the way that it really is: boring, painful and diseased. Filled with heartache and heartbreak and expectations.
She doesn't like the poor. Karen Walker has to keep up appearances, she has to "not like" the poor and look her nose down at them, because she was poor once, and she hated to be pitied. Hated not being able to stay in a house instead of run down motels or with the new friends of Mom's for the week. Poor, destitute and sober until Karen learned a way to pool her resources, to stay drunk twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. Add on drugs here and there, and sleep her way to the top.
Sometimes, when the buzz wears off, she'll call herself Anastasia Beaverhousen, because Anastasia has Karen's life, but that bitch didn't have to do any of the work to get there.
Vodka, rum, uppers, downers, nose candy and happy cigarettes. Prescription medication from Pharmacist. Round yellows and reds, oblong blues and oranges. Sometimes, if she was lucky, she got purple hexagons. Really, it didn't matter what it was as long as it did the trick. It never dawned on Karen that she was doing anything wrong. Just getting by. Just surviving another day. Just trying to pretend that money does buy happiness, when she is still that little girl who begged for money after being "abandoned" by her mother.
How could stopping the pain be wrong? How could it be something bad? You wouldn't operate on someone without putting them to sleep first. It just so happened that sobriety is like a scalpel to her soul, cutting her insides up into shreds. The booze and drugs are just her anesthesia, she can't feel her reality when she's drunk.
Stanley loves Karen. Deep down, she loves him too, but she doesn't fool herself into thinking it's a romantic, passion-filled marriage. Though she never says it, she knows full well that Stanley has, "other women." His children from previous marriages are always present; they get mad when she mistakes them for the help and asks them to get her a drink, make her a drink or drive to the store and buy her a drink. They get mad when she falls asleep in the bathtub, and they have to get Rosario (for some reason, her little nacho will always love her) and Gardener to take her out of rapidly cooling water, and put her to bed before she drowns.
She's not sure why any of them care.
Or why they save her when her head goes under water.
Karen's done her best to be nothing but the evil step-mother role she is cast in, but the children don't hate her and in a way, it would be so much better if they did. At least then they wouldn't pity her. The rich little bastards wouldn't make her feel like that little girl inside. They would never know what it is like to want for anything, and she resented them for it.
Jackie and Wilma don't pretend to understand. Jackie accepts her the way she is, loves her with all her flaws, and she can imagine growing old with him because they both have the personalities of people who will never be as free with anyone else as they are with one another.
And Gracie, well, for some reason Gracie spends her life sober, "working," and "dating." Karen has lost track of how many men Grace "dated." The metaphors are transparent.
Grace has all her men around her, but the problem is those men only like other men. Grace has a hard head. She might never say it, because she lingers and still has that romantic hope that one day Wilma will start liking vagina and breasts, and Karen knows that will never happen. That the knight on a white horse would gallop past her and save the day for a sexy prince with a killer body.
Grace should start drinking.
It might improve her fashion sense, and what she did with that hair.
"You know what I think?" Grace asks Karen, as they sit across from each other at the dinner table in Wilma's apartment.
"That I have a nice rack," Karen says, sipping at her martini the polite way, and not the way she wants, which would be to down it all in the first gulp, "And you want to touch them."
Grace smiles and it lights up her entire face. It's a smile that Karen has come to know and love intensely. Maybe a little more than she should. "Maybe a little."
Oh Gracie, don't play that game with me if you don't want to finish it.
Grace gives a shake of her curly red hair, "I don't think you're an alcoholic at all. I think you drink to dull the pain, but you could stop if you wanted."
Karen freezes in mid-motion, her glass just an inch from her dark passion red lipsticked lips, "Oh honey, with all the time I spend with you and the fruits, if I wasn't an alcoholic before, I sure as hell would be one now." It was flippant. Meant to disguise the raw aching wound of Grace, and the truth.
From reality.
Grace stands up, and moves toward Karen, finally embracing her in her arms. Karen doesn't try to move away, instead she allows the affection to warm her through and through, like a glass of brandy on a cold winter night.
"I love you, Kare-bear."
Karen fights her tears, because weakness is not acceptable. Weakness gets you no where. Her world of alcohol and drugs is due to weakness, but saves her from it every day; saves her from her inability to live in the real world where she is more Stanley Walker's whore than his wife, and she's a bad person who treats a staff that never does anything wrong like the worst staff in the world, and treats her friends like they are her staff.
They could never know.
Wilamina, Jackie, Grace.
They could never know how deeply in love she is, has always been, in love with Grace. Despite her bad choices in hair, her clothes, her boyfriends, her roommates and her friends. Karen wanted her, loved her, wished for a life with her. A life led sober, and care-free.
Karen Walker would never have that life. She would never have Grace. So it is best to numb the emotional ache with booze, and wear the drunk mask her friends are used to seeing on her. "Oh, Gracie," Karen says, hoping that Grace misses the wavering of her voice, "If I were you, I'd love me too."
End.