The Freedom Consideration
Set as a companion piece to 'The Band-Aid Conundrum'. Some spoilers for the last few episodes of BBT S7. I still don't own anything. Speech in italics are quotes from BBT, 7x17.
The keys are cold in her palm as she takes them, familiar and at the same time not. They're not her keys, not the ones she remembers. It doesn't feel quite right, but he's holding out the keys to her and calling it her car.
"You could say thank you. I did just buy you a car," he tells her, and she feels a little uncomfortable even as she hugs him and does so.
Later she realizes the source of her discomfort: now she feels beholden to him and his tone felt a little like a parent prompting their child in order to teach them manners. She's mostly made her own way since she's been here, even if that hasn't panned out too well.
Only half (okay, maybe more) of that has been through relying on her neighbours and slowly phasing out her own friends to adapt to her neighbours and their circle. There are days when she looks in the mirror and recognizes her features but not herself. Maybe it's growing up, maybe it's changing herself for others.
She rarely drives the car.
It doesn't quite feel like hers. The old one had been handed down to her when her father had upgraded, and she eventually grew to feel like she earned it through all the times she paid for it, getting a job to keep the fuel topped up or insurance paid, and making sure it ran properly. There was more than one time when she'd yank open the hood of the car, staggering a bit under its weight, and checking the engine for herself. This one is new – to her, anyway – and it annoys her that she didn't do anything real to earn it except date a guy who would buy it for his girlfriend.
She remembers when she dissolved her 'marriage' to Zack: she hadn't had the chance to get the papers sorted out before Leonard was handing them over for her to sign.
She's beginning to feel like she isn't getting the chance to do things herself.
Is this how things will be, if she remains with him? Him jumping to solve her every problem before she can step back and draw breath to assess things? Okay, maybe her solutions don't always work out, and maybe she doesn't have fancy college degrees after her name, but she made a life for herself here and surely that's got to count for something?
It feels suffocating, and for a minute she wonders if she's ungrateful for this, for loving someone who seems to want to shield her from problems.
Her father taught her to be self-sufficient, taught her to drive and strip a tractor to rebuild it, her mother taught her to cook and clean and she should be able to do all these things for herself, but they've all fallen by the wayside. She remembers learning how to manage finances and the best way to remove stains from carpets, but now she doesn't remember the practical side of those things. Somewhere between having frequent take-out meals and a neighbour who cleans rigorously, she lost what her parents taught her.
This is where she recognizes the problem: she's become too dependent on others, and her parents would be horrified if they knew the extent to which she was mooching off her neighbours for even the basic needs. Somewhere along the line she allowed herself to be taken care of, to the extent that someone else will buy her a car and call it a surprise –
Only it isn't a surprise in the good sense because as she takes the keys she feels like she owes him now, feels the old need to make repayments urging its head.
When she drives it for the first time, it doesn't feel right. She doesn't have the same pride she felt with her first car, and the seat is adjusted wrong, the mirrors are angled wrongly, the glovebox is too small. There are a lot of faults she puts onto this car, because it feels like dependency and owing someone a lot, feels like being stifled and treated with kid gloves.
It's also what it represents, his hope that they'll be long-term and she mentally runs through a long checklist of the things she still hasn't done, the bucket list made when she was eighteen and hated the idea of being committed to one person. She's pretty sure that you don't just buy a car for any girlfriend, even if it is a cheap second-hand deal, and she's not sure she wants to be taken care of. Some buried part of her wants to be the girl she used to, the one who managed to scrape by and look after herself on her own, not having a cluster of super-smart people around her to fix her problems for her.
(and later, when she takes a company car, she drives it proudly because she earned this one)