"When You Speak, I Know All Your Days"
By: singyourmelody
Disclaimer: I don't own Derek or Casey or Life with Derek or any of that. I own the plotline and that's it? Oh, bummer. Title is from Bethany Dillon's song "My Love Hasn't Grown Cold." Lyrics are from Jeremy Messersmith's "A Girl, A Boy, and a Graveyard" which is amazing.
and i feel like i'm some kind of frankenstein
waiting for a shock to bring me back to life
but i don't want to spend my time
waiting for lightning to strike
In the end, it doesn't even matter how it started.
His hair is so thin and translucent that you can see his scalp. It's kinda funny. He never thought this thing, this growing old, would happen to him. But one day he woke up and looked in the mirror and the past fifty years had caught up with him somehow. He was young and then he wasn't.
She's aged better than he has. Her long dark locks are now silver, but they're still long and beautiful and her eyes are still shining. It's really not fair. He loved his hair.
He looks at her over top of his newspaper. She's mixing ingredients in a bowl, her once smooth and slender fingers now wrinkled and bony. She's making cookies for Sammy and Lauren, two of their grandchildren who are coming to visit. They always like Gammy's chocolate chip cookies the best.
She looks up and smiles at him.
He does too.
It wasn't always this easy. Usually it was hard.
His words were razorblades and every one would cut a little deeper into her flesh.
She was a writer, of course, and she could've sharpened his metal words with her own serrated knives and reduced his to dust, but she never did. She could've destroyed him with her true thoughts about him, but she saved her words. They were sacred to her. She let her actions speak.
And he usually didn't believe her. Until that day he came home from work to find her sitting on their couch, the one that took them three weeks to pick out, her packed rolling suitcase sitting innocently next to her as if it didn't have the power to tear him apart.
He didn't say anything at first, but just stared. At her. At the black vinyl.
Always obedient to some higher moral code, she had waited for him to come home from work. He would've just left.
"I'm sorry," she said, like she was the one who needed to apologize when he was obviously the one who let things get this far.
"Why?" was all he could say and she looked at him so skeptically that he felt ashamed for asking the question.
"C'mon, Derek. Don't."
So he didn't. He just watched. No words. No actions.
And then she was gone.
It was the longest two weeks of his life.
But stubbornness always was one of his strengths, like x-ray vision or the ability to fly. Innate. Overpowering. And hard to turn off.
On his third straight day of not going to work, not showering, and not eating, he turned on the news. Her favorite author had died. He knew she would be devastated, so he got in the car (after he threw some pants on, thankfully) and drove to Mary's. She met him on the stoop and did look devastated and also angry and a little bit like she wanted to kill him.
"I'm sorry, Case," was all he could muster out, but he hugged her and she might have punched him a little bit (the years make it hard to remember) and she pulled her already packed bag out of Mary's house and put it in their car and got in without another word.
Mary would tell him years later that she had left the bag completely packed the entire time she was there.
He was much more careful with his words from then on.
She never left again.
"Do you remember where I put the chocolate chips?" she asks, rummaging through the kitchen cupboards that he built himself.
"Third drawer down," he says not even looking up. She loves routine like he loves the Maple Leafs. He's not even sure why she needed to ask.
"Found them!" she exclaims as if this is the best news to ever happen to anyone ever.
Sometimes she drives him crazy. And he wouldn't have it any other way.
"Oh, I forgot to tell you," she says as she scoops the chips into the bowl. "Sarah has a boyfriend, Macy told me."
"Sarah? Our Sarah?" he said referring to their third oldest granddaughter. "Isn't she only fifteen?"
"Well her birthday is in March, so yes. . ." she pauses, counting the months in her head. "She'll be sixteen in March."
"She's too young."
"Derek. Stop. We were sixteen when we met."
"Yes and look where that got us!"
She shoots him a look that means she's mad, but not really. He loves how well he can read her looks. She stops stirring for a second. He knows she's thinking about the beginnings of their relationship.
He sets his paper down and looks at her.
"Derek, I swear if you don't stop bringing your bimbos back to our shared, as in you share, I share, we live in the same communal space, shared apartment, I will. . ."
"You'll what, Case?"
"You don't want to know what I'll do."
"I don't?"
"No. At the very least, couldn't you bring a smart girl home once and while? Or at least a girl who doesn't shriek, 'Derrrrrrrrrrek' at the top of her lungs at 3:30 in the morning? I can practically feel my IQ dropping every time one of them walks through the door. It's the spatial proximity alone! I have no idea how you. . ."
"How I what, Case?" he asks. He knows she doesn't like to talk about sex. At all. Ever.
"How you spend time with them," she finishes, smugly, before heading to the kitchen to start her dinner. He follows her.
"I can't bring home a smart girl, Casey—"
"Because you can't get one," she interjects.
"No, because then she'd remind me too much of you. And that's just wrong."
She stops what she's doing and turns to look at him. He knows that he just complimented her and insulted her in the same sentence. He hopes she focuses on the insult.
"You think I'm smart." Obviously she doesn't do as he hopes.
"A smart ass maybe," he counters and then they're off. She says that of course he would relate everything to asses. He says he's a guy. It's what they do, but she wouldn't know that since she hasn't been with one since fourth grade.
She grimaces and says that at least she's proud to be STD free.
It's his turn to grimace as she says that and he states that at least he's had some good times in his day, something she will never know anything about.
He strikes a bit of a nerve with that one and suddenly she's standing way too close to him and he's stuck between the counter and one hundred and ten pounds of fierce almost-step-sister.
And she's going on and on about the definition of "good times" and how she does just fine on her own and he decides that there's really no choice in this situation so he kisses her.
She shuts up at least.
And kindasortamaybe kisses him back a lot.
Things snowball from there. They're really glad they have a shared as in you share, I share, we live in the same communal space, shared apartment. Especially when the shared spaces spill over from the kitchen and living room into the bedroom and closet. He never understood why it was so exciting for her to move some of her clothes into his closet, but he suspected it had something to do with her sweaters and his sweatshirts sitting next to each other, as if that was the sign of a committed relationship.
She never understood that he was in it for the long haul as soon as he met her.
"Are they asleep?" he asks as she wanders onto the back porch.
She had just finished tucking Sammy and Lauren into bed and came back to sit with him.
"Not yet, but they will be soon. I think we tired them out," she says with a wink.
"I think it's the other way around," he retorts.
They swing for a few minutes and he holds her hand.
Finally the swing slows and he stands.
"Ready?" he asks, as he pulls her up.
They walk softly to their bedroom, the one that Lucas and Macy and Kevin and Aly would run to when there were thunderstorms, and the one that they had their first argument as a married couple in (they had been married for three hours at that point), and the one where she held him when he found out his dad had died, and the one where he had proposed a second honeymoon and they made plans to travel to Alaska, and the one that holds the bed she made every day for fifty two years. (He would sometimes help with the pillowcases. Fitted sheets just weren't his thing.)
He takes his medicine and hands her her own bottles.
He pulls back the covers and tucks her in and she teases him for being a softy. He is. He'll admit it at this point.
"Goodnight Derek," she says as she switches the light off.
"Goodnight Casey," he replies, reaching over and placing his arm around the place where her waist dips in, right between her ribs and hipbones. The place where it's been for the last half of a century. She snuggles into him as they slowly drift off to sleep.
A/N: Well, this is pretty different from anything I've written before. Not even sure how, but it just feels different. Not sure if that makes sense. Anyway, I haven't written a Derek/Casey fic in forever and this one just kinda came spilling out. Thanks for reading and reviewing! Love to all.