Okay, first fanfic ever, and my chosen subject is Naomily :) because they're great aren't they?
I really really reeeeaally wanted to write a fanfic that fixed them after what happened in Emily's episode this season, but I just couldn't. I couldn't see how it would work, so I think I'll leave that to the wonderful Skin's writing team (fingers crossed!!!)
So my little story is set a few years into the future. Not many, but just enough to make them both a little older and wiser. But not much, because that would be no fun :) Also, it means that I don't have to clean up any of the wreckage from season 4 events. Everyone likes a fresh start, right?
Any feedback you guys can give me would be greatly appreciated, good or bad, I can take it lol.
Great. Just great. The proudest moment of her life, allegedly, and she looked like an absolute twat. She'd always looked ridiculous in hats, let alone hats that were made for Oxford professors several centuries ago. She tried looking haughty, looking angry, looking nonchalant, looking seductive, as if one of them would give the impression of intellect. She noticed herself failing.
Naomi regarded her scathing reflection, wondering how many times she could possibly be made to feel stupid before she could gratefully curl up and die quietly somewhere, when her mother burst unceremoniously through the door.
'Mum!' shouted Naomi, her hands automatically rushing to her chest to cover her, thankfully bra-clad, modesty.
'Oo sorry love,' said her mother, not really sounding sorry at all, 'Lovely hat,' she noted briefly, leaving Naomi silently grateful that she mentioned nothing of her trying it on in nothing but her underwear.
'What is it you want?' Naomi asked, irritably yanking the hat from her head and scrabbling for her dressing gown.
'I just wanted to tell you to hurry up,' Gina said innocently, 'And to see what my beautiful girl looked like in her clever-person clothes,' she beamed. 'Unfortunately I've just caught you in your underwear ... again.'
Naomi rolled her eyes as she tied the belt of the gown into a bow. 'If you learnt to knock once in a while we wouldn't have this problem would we mother?' she asked, rhetorically.
'Oh I've seen all your wibbly bits before love,' Gina said, wafting her hand as if it was nothing to her. 'You got all your best ones from me,' she grinned.
'Mother!' Naomi exclaimed, exasperated. Living away from home seemed a distant memory, although it had only been two days ago that her mother had pitched up at her shared student house in order to watch her get presented with some document telling her she'd passed her degree, which she already knew, but this time had to be told in a public forum wearing a ridiculous hat.
'Anyway, hurry up we've only got half an hour before it all kicks off,' Gina said excitably.
'Mum, it's not a football match,' Naomi told her, 'And it's not like we'll miss anything exciting. It's just a bunch of people's names, who you don't know, being called out, then them walking up some steps onto a stage, shaking some crusty old professor's hand and walking away. In fact, the only interesting thing will be if someone messes up. And honestly: walking and hand shaking? Not that easy to get wrong,' Naomi reasoned.
Gina sighed, 'All the same dear, I don't fancy squeezing my derriere past a load of proud parents who've already made their way to their seats.'
Naomi rolled her eyes. That's what it always came down to. Her mother's backside.
'You're right Mum, no one wants that shoved in their face,' she told her.
'Well quite, just you get your clothes on,' Gina told her before breezing out of the room.
Naomi sighed heavily, before turning back to face her reflection in the full length mirror. It looked thoroughly pissed off. She reached for her graduation cap and slammed it over her face.
****
'Sorry ... sorry ...s'cuse ... sorry ... s'cuse me ...' Naomi mumbled as she uprooted an auditorium row full of seated people, who grumbled and made very little effort to give her room to get past.
'Naomi,' her Mum hissed, 'I just knew this would happen ... sorry ... s'cuse ... sorry.'
Naomi looked at her next obstacle. A large, sweaty, grey haired man with massive seventies style glasses and a moustache to match. 'Excuse me sir,' she said quietly, 'You're going to have to make a bit more room, there's a rather fat arse headed this way,' she thumbed backwards in the direction of her mother, who was fumbling her way towards them.
Finally, the two Campbell women sat down, flustered and irritable. Naomi wafted her hat in front of her face. The auditorium was hot, and the air was heavy. Every droplet of moisture seemed to have evaporated from the people on the lower rows to congregate stickily around Naomi, making sure she looked as red and sweaty as possible for her public showing.
Just as she began to feel slightly cooler her shoulder was tapped. She spun round to face the crotch of a pair of purple leggings that clung round legs of a rather large diameter. Looking up she saw the face of an angry looking woman, with permed mouse-brown hair and pursed lips, 'You're in my seat,' the angry face told her.
'Excuse me?' Naomi asked.
'You're in my seat. I'm here to watch my daughter graduate from university, and you're in my seat,' the woman spoke to her as if she was an idiot: slowly with lots of gesturing.
'Alright take it easy,' Naomi said, placing her temporary fan back on her head, 'The seats aren't assigned, sit somewhere else.'
'I think you'll find they are,' the lady said, waving a ticket in Naomi's face.
Naomi read the number on the small piece of card. It read GUEST: Tier 5, Row 17, Seat 34.
Naomi turned slowly in her chair, to study the number on the small brass plate screwed to the back rest. 34
'Well,' Naomi said, standing up and gracefully patting down her robe and straightening her cap, 'That all seems to be in order.' She looked down the tiered seats to a collection of black caps belonging to several rows of seated graduates. There were a few less formally dressed people rushing around in front of them, rifling through sheets of paper and pointing to an empty seat.
'I think you're meant to be down there love,' Gina pointed out helpfully.
Naomi glared at her. 'Yeah, thanks.'
The woman huffed at her and sat down heavily in seat 34, row 17, tier 5.
'You're welcome, by the way.' Naomi said.
The woman ignored her.
Suddenly, ear-splitting electronic feedback cut through the auditorium as one of the very small people at the front confronted the microphone.
'Could the graduate with seat number six on their ticket please come to the front of the auditorium,' said the voice.
Naomi rolled her eyes. That would be me, she thought, amazed at her own ability to mess up the most straight-forward of events.
She awkwardly clumped down the stairs, hitching up her gown which trailed on the floor. Fortunately, a few people were still trickling in through the double doors at the front of the room, disrupting the spectators enough to ensure that all eyes weren't on her, Naomi, the pleb who hadn't remembered to collect her ticket on the way through the door after signing her name and had left a nice gaping hole in the ordered, alphabetically arranged assortment of caps and gowns.
She reached the table at the front, where a small woman was sat, a stack of papers with lists of names and ticks in front of her.
'Hi,' said Naomi, meekly.
'Seat six?' the woman asked without looking up.
'I guess so,' she said, idly regarding her fingernails, trying to regain some semblance of cool in front of the rows of her peers that had nothing better to look at than the exchange between the two women in front of them.
The woman, satisfied, put a big tick next to the number six. Naomi rolled her eyes. She found the whole process entirely anal.
'Name?' asked the woman.
'Naomi Campbell,' answered Naomi.
The pen that hovered above the paper, scanning quickly up and down the list stopped immediately in its tracks. The hand responsible for its movement stilled. Slowly, the woman at the desk turned her head up, to face the ticket owner of seat number six. It couldn't be, she thought, could it?
Naomi's eyes widened.
'Emily,' she said reflexively, as a face buried under four years of memories was excavated.
Silence twisted and curled between them.
Emily's hair was no longer red, but brown, and slightly wavy and damp, as if she'd come fresh from a shower. But Emily's eyes were the same. Large and deep and brown. And it was these eyes that Naomi had spent so many nights trying to forget. The way Emily's eyes had loved her. The way they would lazily drag their gaze up her body, lingering at her hips, then her chest, then her mouth before finally her looking lovingly into her own eyes. Then the day they had changed. The way they turned away from her, swollen and red from crying.
Emily stared up her, those eyes wide and shocked, her mouth slightly parted as if it had dropped open of its own accord. Then she blinked as if she had snapped herself out of it. 'Naomi Campbell seat six,' she said, bringing her face very close to the sheet of paper and drawing a very heavy tick next to the name, going over it several times as if to convince herself that the person was there.
'Why are you here?' Naomi blurted out.
Emily looked up from the piece of paper. 'I've just got a part-time job at the arts and social studies library at the university,' she explained.
Naomi listened to Emily's voice more than her words. It was low, and soft and husky. And it took all the strength Naomi could muster to not drop everything and flee girlishly from the auditorium right then. She regained control of herself.
'So, shouldn't you be behind a desk demanding fines?' Naomi asked.
Emily smiled, and Naomi melted, 'My roles as a servant of this university stretch far beyond simple book lending,' she said.
'So, you also make tea and photo-copy things?' Naomi taunted.
Emily frowned, 'Well ... yeah. And also,' she countered, 'I assist poor helpless graduate students who are unable to read the numbers on their tickets. I mean, I suppose they were very small numbers ...'
'Actually,' Naomi interrupted Emily's teasing, 'I didn't remember to pick up my ticket.'
'Because that's better,' Emily noted dryly.
Naomi narrowed her eyes at the little Fitch, who seemed to have entirely got over how utterly surreal this whole situation was within a few seconds, whereas Naomi's own brain was adrift in a sea of Emily-inspired emotions, struggling to stay afloat.
Emily gestured to the empty seat ahead of her, 'Please take your seat, I'm very busy and important.'
'Oo yes, those names won't tick themselves,' Naomi jibed, before turning and slumping down in her assigned seat.
She watched as Emily stood up and tucked some stray hair behind her right ear. He fingers were thin and delicate, and Naomi suddenly had a very strong visual flashback of them intertwined with her own.
She looked down at her own empty hands.