So, here's more fluff, with a little less-fluffy backstory, and then a little cavity-inducing stuff at the end. This one is slightly more serious than chapter 1, but with chapter 3 (The Bachelorette Party), we'll be back to more fun!
Thanks for the reviews thus far! They're all very much appreciated!
Note, this is set in the context of my other stories, but definitely not necessary to read those for this to make sense – just be aware that in my context now, Wash and Taylor are married and have a little girl named Gracie, and the Sixers have come back to Terra Nova.
Disclaimer is as usual – no profit, not mine (except Gracie, of course), just borrowing.
"The market for wedding dresses is more often than not led by emotion and aspiration rather than rational decisions and financial constraints." - Claire Birks
The Dresses, Five-and-a-Half Weeks to Wedding #1
Alicia sighs, knowing that this is going to be a long day. She, Skye, Deborah Tate, Mira, Tasha, Maddy, Elisabeth and Gracie, along with two of the seamstresses from the market, are crowded into Alicia and Nathaniel's house.
Mira and Skye talked about it, and they decided that just having a "dress day" was the easiest thing to do in order to expedite the creation of the dresses for both of the weddings, which will be taking place two weeks apart, first Mira and Guz's wedding, then Skye and Carter's two weekends later.
So, there are now piles of fabric everywhere. On one side of the room, there is a mound of earth tone fabrics, browns and greens, for Mira's wedding. On the other side of the room, there are lighter colors, cream for Skye's dress and pinks and purples for Tasha, the maid of honor, and Gracie.
Leaned against the wall near the other fabrics for Skye's wedding is a bolt of black jersey, Alicia's favorite thing in the room. At least one good thing will come of all of this wedding frippery – a slinky, sexy black dress. If she has to own more than one dress, at least one of them will be something she doesn't mind wearing. Carter's even letting her wear heels, and she has one killer pair, even though they'll make her more than four inches taller than him. He says it will be the comic relief.
She watches the women in her living room from a vantage point in the kitchen, where she's putting together some finger food. As she observes them, her mind wanders to the root cause of her dislike of wearing dresses.
One thing very few people know, at least very few people outside of Nathaniel and Guz, is that she had to go to a lot of meet and greet cocktail parties while they were planning the colony. Since their team represented what was touted as the "last great hope for the human race," they had to be put on display for the fat cats back in their time.
Part of that display included dress uniforms for Nathaniel and Guz. Much to her dismay, however, as the highest ranking female going and the second-in-command of the expedition, she was expected to dress not in her dress uniform, but in cocktail or formal attire, fancy dresses and shoes and all that went with them. Even in the 2140s, that kind of latent sexism still existed.
She can clearly remember when Nathaniel came to her to tell her what was expected of her. He looked livid at the situation. Livid was exactly what he was, but there was nothing he could do about it. He certainly tried, though; Guz told her how Nathaniel nearly lost it over the issue with the generals and civilians in charge of the future side of the project.
In the end, the series of dog and pony shows made Alicia highly uncomfortable, and it was when she developed her aversion to wearing dresses. The dresses left her feeling vulnerable. She had to play nice at the parties, as a lot of their funding and support depended on them, something that was made abundantly clear to her by the Powers that Be.
At the very first party, though, a drunken politician cornered her. The man was quite enamored with her. Despite his wife speaking with some other politicians' wives just across the room, he was very clear about how hot he thought she was and what he wanted to do to her, telling her so after trapping her with his body and sliding one hand down the back of her dress to grab her ass.
She still cringes at the memory. She froze like a proverbial deer in headlights. In enemy territory, bullets flying by and explosions all around, she knew what to do. But that political world was entirely foreign to her, the orphan girl who grew up outside the domes, completely on her own from fourteen until joining the military at eighteen. She had no idea what to do about being groped by a politician at a party meant to help them raise more funding.
As luck would have it, Nathaniel guessed that the politicians and possibly even the military might act inappropriately towards his beautiful (his word, one she'd scoffed at) younger lieutenant. He stayed close to her the whole night, and he heard what the politician said to her. Before she even realized what was happening, he grabbed the politician's arm – not accidentally, she was sure, the arm that was down the back of her dress – and he twisted it painfully behind the man's back.
Nathaniel leaned down and said something in the politician's ear. The man paled and scurried away like a frightened rabbit. When he turned back to her, his expression was one of concern. He immediately walked over to her, his eyes clearly asking her if she wanted to go. Shaken, she nodded, and he just placed a protective hand on her lower back and guided her through the crowd towards the door. One of the lead politicians tried to stop them from leaving, protested that they still had people to meet.
Nathaniel's reaction was to get right in his face and growl, "Your good friend Senator Morrison just assaulted my lieutenant. If you have an issue with our leaving early, you take it up with him. Next party, you make sure your boys understand that Wash could kill any one of them with one arm tied behind her back, but she was just too polite and cares too much about the expedition to embarrass them. They damn well better respect her from now on. If they don't, not only will they have to answer to her, they'll have to answer to me. And answering to me will entail my ripping their heads off with my bare hands after I turn Wash loose to kick their asses from here to next week. Am I clear, Sir?"
After that night, there were several more parties, but no one ever stepped out of line again. Of course, while that might've been due to the warning, it could just as easily have been due to the fact that Nathaniel always had one protective, possessive hand on her lower back for the duration of every party they attended from there on out, once again his words, "Rumors and frat regs be damned." The fiercely independent part of her chafed against his hovering, but years later she realized that was when her familial, platonic love for him began to turn into something deeper and something decidedly less than platonic.
When they left the last party, only days before he would step through the portal and be trapped here alone for 118 days, he promised her that as far as he was concerned, she never had to wear a dress ever again if she didn't want to. He has lived up to that promise. Mira and Guz's wedding in five weeks will mark the first time she'll wear a dress since that last party.
But for some reason or another, maybe because of the gleam in Nathaniel's eye when he looked at her legs – when he clearly thought she wasn't aware that he was watching her – when she was wearing them, she kept the black spike heels she'd worn to most of those parties. They'd been shoved in one of the boxes of her things sent through with the third pilgrimage, not seeing the light of day. She's pretty sure Nathaniel doesn't even realize that she still has them.
She feels a tug at her leg, drawing her back to the present. She looks down to see Gracie standing there looking expectant. "Mama make snacks for luh-adies? Cookies too?"
Alicia has to grin at Gracie's over-pronunciation of the "L" sound, and she bends down and scoops her up to settle on her hip. "Sorry, Bug, you caught me daydreaming." Gracie giggles, and Alicia leans down a little to rub her nose to Gracie's, making her giggle again. "Do you want to help me?"
"Yes! I help!"
Alicia puts Gracie down and hands her the plate of cookies to take into the living room. "Two hands, and go slow."
"'K, Mama!" Alicia smiles, laughing quietly as she watches Gracie put a death grip on the plate and toddle carefully into the living room.
Alicia picks up the other plates of fruit, cheese and crackers and carries them into the living room as well.
"Wash!" Mira grins at her. "You done hiding?"
Alicia lifts an eyebrow at her. "Hey, if you guys aren't hungry, I can just take this stuff back to the kitchen." She pretends to turn to go, and a protest rises from the other women. She turns back, smirking, and puts the two plates on the table.
The women descend on the plates like locusts, and Gracie looks at Alicia, clearly asking permission. Alicia knows what she wants. "One cookie, Bug. One."
Gracie grins and grabs one of the cookies and a small napkin. She then looks at the ladies, and with a look at the other women worthy of Alicia herself, she does her best to roll her little eyes before toddling over to her Gracie-sized chair, made for her by none other than Carter. She drops into it and nibbles on the edge of her cookie, watching the women devouring the food with a look that appears to be a cross between fascination, confusion and a small amount of fear.
Mira comes over to Alicia, her eyes on Gracie. "Damn, Wash, most of the time she seems to be almost all Taylor. Then, a moment comes when she is literally all you."
Alicia chuckles. "I don't know. I think even Nathaniel would stay on the sidelines of that pack."
"True. He's pretty good at picking his battles, at least most of the time." Mira smirks.
"Indeed."
"So, are you going to share your issue with dresses? Isaac swears that you used to wear them." Mira looks at her, a questioning expression on her face.
Alicia shrugs. "Remind him about the endless parties pre-expedition, and then tell him to think about what happened at the very first one," Alicia knows he heard what happened then, because Nathaniel told him so Guz would be his back up should he and Alicia get separated at a party, "He'll probably be able to sort it out from there."
Mira gives her a funny look, but she doesn't press further. They've now known each other long enough now to know when the other won't be any more forthcoming. "Just tell me this, Wash. If you won't wear a dress, what the hell did you wear to get married to Taylor?"
Alicia just motions to what she's wearing right now, a fitted black t-shirt, dog tags, camo fatigues and combat boots. Mira shakes her head, laughing. "Of course. How silly of me." She clears her throat. "Claire," Mira says, referring to one of the seamstresses, "Has ideas for your dress and Gracie's."
"Please tell me we aren't going to match."
"Not exactly," Mira smirks, "Yours won't have as many bows."
"If mine has even one bow, you can recruit a new Matron of Honor. But I swear I'll warn all the candidates about the bows." Alicia glares at Mira, who just laughs.
"OK, OK. No bows. As if Claire, the woman who made you maternity fatigues, would be crazy enough to try to put you in bows. Seriously, the designs are similar, but yours is bow-free and other types of frouf-free. And yours will be a-line while the Bug's has a full, fluffy skirt. Is that OK?"
Alicia has to laugh, because Mira actually sounds a little worried. She decides to mess with her just a little. "Length?"
"Mid-calf."
"What? No! Completely unacceptable!"
Mira looks up in alarm, clearly about to try to placate Wash. Alicia can't hide her smirk, and Mira rolls her eyes. "God, you're as bad as Carter. You two really do act like siblings. And Shannon, too. You're the baby, Shannon's the long-suffering oldest brother, and Carter is one hundred percent the middle child."
"That's perfect." Alicia laughs out loud.
"It wasn't a compliment, you know."
"Believe me, I know." Alicia grins. "But at least I get to be the baby."
Mira just snorts at that, and she beckons Claire over to them. Claire is doing the dresses for Mira's wedding, and she's also doing Alicia's dress for Skye and Carter's, something Alicia insisted on. She trusts Claire to let her look good and be comfortable at the same time. Elisabeth follows Claire, and the four of them go to the kitchen table to talk more about the dresses.
After a while, Alicia, who can only take so much girl time without getting bored, looks up and notices that Gracie isn't in her chair anymore. She looks around, and Maddy must see her doing it, because she points down the hall towards the bedrooms. Alicia nods her thanks, and then she turns to Mira, Elisabeth and Claire. "Ladies, I'm going to go check on Gracie. It's her nap time."
They all nod and wave her off. She's already found out that her dress will be the previously discussed dark green, a mostly-soft, flowy fabric. The top of it will be fitted and sleeveless with almost a boat-neck neckline, just slightly scooped out in the back and the skirt will be mid-calf and a-line, as Mira said. Gracie's dress will have the same top, but it will have a wide, light green sash that ties in a bow at the back, and a full, floaty skirt. She and Claire have also agreed to meet later this week to talk about her dress for the other wedding.
She gets up and heads down the hall in search of Gracie, grateful to have an excuse to escape the chattering women. She does like having female friends, but sometimes she finds it exhausting. Peering into Gracie's room, she's not entirely surprised to find it empty. Turning, Alicia heads to hers and Nathaniel's bedroom, and she smiles when she finds Gracie there, nestled into their pillows on the bed, stuffed dinosaur tucked under her arm.
The only thing that surprises her is the fact that Gracie is still awake. She looks up at Alicia and says, "Mama, it's woud out there."
Alicia laughs softly and pushes the door mostly closed before crossing the room and sitting next to Gracie on the bed. "I know, Bug. It's very loud out there." She runs a hand through Gracie's wavy black hair.
"Mama stay with Gwacie?" Alicia nods and smiles, amused by the way Gracie's Rs and Ls regress when she's sleepy.
She swings her legs up onto the bed and curls up next to Gracie, pulling the little girl tight to her. "Sleep, little Bug."
"Tell me about when you mawwied Daddy, Mama."
Alicia smiles a bemused smile. "Again, Bug?"
"Again, pwease, Mama."
Ever since the weddings were announced and planning started, Gracie has been obsessed with hearing about Alicia and Nathaniel's wedding. Since it had been secret, only Malcolm there to marry them and Reynolds and Reilly to witness, the wedding story was pretty short and boring.
She knows what Gracie really wants to hear about. "Well, Bug, after your Uncle Malcolm married us, we went home to Mama's old house. Mama made dinner with Daddy's help."
Gracie sleepily interjects, "But just with things he no have to cook."
"You're right there, little Bug," Alicia grins, loving that Gracie also now loves to tease Nathaniel about his decided lack of culinary skills, "And after dinner we sat on the sofa until…"
Gracie sighs happily, "Daddy asked you to dance."
Alicia smooths Gracie's hair back again, and she looks up as she hears the door open. She smiles when she sees Nathaniel standing there. She beckons him over with a movement of her head and goes on, "That's right, Bug, Daddy asked me to dance."
Nathaniel smiles at them as he gets to the bed. He climbs up on the other side of Gracie, dropping a kiss to her forehead.
Alicia finishes, "And we turned on some soft music, and we danced almost all night, just us in our own little world."
A now mostly-asleep Gracie mumbles, "Was perfect," and she moves slightly away from Alicia to snuggle into Nathaniel's chest.
Alicia follows her, and she and Nathaniel surround Gracie like two watchful guardians. Nathaniel reaches a hand out to Alicia with a smile. Their hands join, fingers weaving together, and they come to rest over Gracie and her stuffed dinosaur.
As Gracie starts to make a soft, snuffling sound in her sleep, Nathaniel briefly lifts their joined hands to drop a kiss on Alicia's knuckles. He murmurs, "Still is."
At that, Alicia can't help but give him a soft smile. He smiles back, and they both relax into the pillows, listening to the sounds of the women out in their living room as Gracie sleeps soundly between them.
