Notes: Thanks for the lovely reviews, they are motivating. And I own neither IPS nor any of the films I'm referencing directly or indirectly. It's called "Fair Use," and it's a wonderful thing. Thanks to Ares' Warrior Babe for encouragement and my hubby, who has spent the last five years teaching me (or rather, giving me the opportunity to figure out) the things Mary desperately needs to learn.
Part 2
He quickly lost track of how long he sat there, holding her with one arm, stroking her hair with the other, as it all poured out: how her body had betrayed her, how people treated her like she was made of glass, how she struggled to put her shoes on every morning, how stupid she was to have had unprotected sex—or any kind of sex—with Mark, how worried she was that she'd make the right choice. No self-recrimination or criticism of the unjustness of the universe went unuttered. He didn't waste time arguing or even forming coherent responses. This wasn't about her needing reassurance about her choices or answers to her problems. So instead, he murmured wordlessly and soothingly into her hair, just letting her get it all out. He had no idea how anyone could have held out so long under the pressure she was under.
He also tried very hard to stifle that part of him who loved and treasured such moments—times which left him torn between the pain of knowing she hurt and the joy he felt in being the only one she would and could turn to. Everyone else knew only part of Mary—the part that scared off former partners, bosses, friends, and lovers. But there was a piece of her that she shared only with him, that belonged exclusively to him, and it was that which allowed him to stay. It was a lifeline to him, and he hated himself for cherishing those moments when her pain made her turn to him.
Loving Mary was a very special kind of hell.
The sobs were starting to fade, deep shuddering breaths taking their place, as she tried to recover, her now-stuffed sinuses making it hard to get oxygen. He blindly reached behind him to grab tissues from the box on the end table. He held the first up to her nose and firmly told her, "Blow." She complied as meekly as any child, and he cleaned her up efficiently, one arm still wrapped around her, grimacing about the accuracy of the comparison.
Mary in pain was a child to a great extent. The one left behind when her father walked out the door. The one she herself had had to forsake when his departure left her with an alcoholic mother and infant sister to care for. But as Finkle had one day pointed out to him, no one was capable of that kind of a clean break; no one went from child to adult in a day. Instead, that child remained deep inside, uncared for, un-nurtured, abandoned even by its self. Unless reclaimed, it never matured, it never learned that it was still deserving of love, and the adult was never free of the pain of those lost years.
Tonight was a small step in reclaiming that child.
Divined from scattered bits and pieces littering the past few years, Marshall knew what Christmas had been like for Mary, even before her eighth birthday. Some years, there was money for a tree and presents; some years, the day passed without mention. Every year, her mother ended the day as she did many others—drunk and hysterical. Once her father had left, Mary did what she could to provide some semblance of a holiday for her sister, often waiting until two or three days after Christmas, when people began putting their discarded trees, still bright with patches of tinsel, out on the street for the garbage men. She'd find the greenest she could, drag it back to their home in the early-morning light, and place the small gifts she'd managed to piece together over the last few weeks under it before going in to wake Brandi up to inform her that Santa had come.
Wrapped in colorful Sunday funnies, the gifts could delight only a tot like Brandi: a set of mismatched blocks, culled from garage sales where people sometimes took pity on Mary and her pennies and nickels; an old Fischer Price toy record player the preschool around the corner had tossed out in their annual purge; a pretty (but slightly stained and too-large) party dress she'd fished out of a Salvation Army dropbox when she caught sight of red velveteen and sequins hanging out of the overstuffed depository; a clay bowl she'd made and painted in bright colors in art class.
Brandi would rip the makeshift packages open and laugh and hug each gift to her chest, her smile shining on Mary and giving her back a little of the warmth that had once been hers. They'd bundle up and go for a walk, singing whatever Christmas carols Mary could remember and Brandi had the patience to learn, sometimes using the remnants of cardboard boxes, ones that used to hold the Big Wheels and Sit-N-Spins other children were now enjoying inside the homes they passed, as makeshift sleds. When they returned to the house, invariably their mother was up and in full hangover. Mary would hustle her baby sister into whatever safe place their home offered so she could play with her new acquisitions while her big sister spent the afternoon running interference so that Brandi could enjoy her gifts for a while in peace. Usually the things she was able to procure for her sister weren't worth pawning, but there had been exceptions.
Brandi was 7 before she returned from school one December afternoon to inform her sister that Christmas fell on the 25th, not the 27th. Christmases dwindled after that. The peppermint pie he received every year was as close as Mary came to celebrating the holiday as an adult. Another piece that was his alone.
He glanced down at her still-tear-stained face, and saw the beginning of her withdrawal, pulling back as she always did after such emotional displays. But he wanted to hold on just a bit longer. He was never entirely sure whether the way she closed down afterwards was shame at having lost control of herself or anger at having again done it again in front of her partner. Probably both. He wished she would let herself understand that he would never hold either against her.
"It's okay," he whispered. He let her interpret that as she would, letting the blanket acceptance lie there. "Besides, I have just the thing…" He hated letting go of her, and didn't want her to feel him moving too far away, so he pulled her up after him as he crossed to the fireplace. He removed the more stuffed of the two stockings and pulled her down, slowly but playfully, onto the carpet, kneeling on one knee and depositing the offending hosiery in her lap.
She opened her mouth to protest, to push the stocking back at him, when her eyes lit on the red saran-wrapped treats poking out of the top of it. "Oh, holy Christ, Marshall..." she practically moaned, "Please tell me that those are what I think they are."
He turned away from her and struck a long match against rough surface of the hearth, wishing to God that his partner wouldn't make such vaguely erotic sounds about food. It wasn't good for his sanity, and she did it so regularly that he had a set of images in his head—dead puppies, his high school dissection of a pig, etc—at the ready to ward off any unintended side effects.
"If you think they're a half dozen of Sharon's double-chocolate-chip cookies," he replied, touching the match to the kindling and then blowing it out once the fire caught, "then you'd be absolutely right."
The sound that erupted from her was even worse than the first, and he had to take a deep breath before turning around to face her again. What greeted him was like a little slice of heaven: his partner sat there, her legs crossed, beaming brightly, and using one hand to shovel half a cookie into her mouth while the other began to paw through the stocking cradled in her lap. The sight made him so happy, his heart ached just a little, as though it was suddenly just one size too big for his chest, and he grabbed his stocking and rocked back on his heels, pretending to look through his own.
In reality, his eyes were on Mary the whole time.
Mary retrieved a tiny gift wrapped in silver paper from her stocking. Biting into her cookie enough to hold it firmly in her mouth to free up both hands, she ripped the bow off and began shredding the paper. In less than three seconds, she was left holding an R2-D2 decorated memory stick. She looked up at him, eyebrow cocked, mumbling around her cookie.
He tried not to laugh as she almost choked, attempting to give him crap about the Star Wars-related gift without actually taking the cookie out of her mouth. "Ah, padawan," he began, and almost lost it again as this renewed her cookie-plugged outrage, "that is a small but very useful bit of data you have on there. Templates for much of our paperwork, pre-filled out with the generic information. Just open it up, resave it under another file name, and half the work is done for you."
Her annoyance melted, much as the chocolate chip caught in the corner of her mouth was doing. Her expression softened, and she mumbled heartfelt thanks at him. He could stand it no longer and reached over to grasp the cookie. "Bite," he told her. She did, taking a huge hunk out of the treat, and not bothering to chew before expressing her gratitude.
"Vith ith gweat!" she got out before he mimed closing his mouth and chewing at her. She began to chew furiously, trying to clear her mouth to tell him how much she appreciated the gift. It really was thoughtful of him, she had quickly realized. She loathed paperwork and had spent all day doing only that. The idea of having such a shortcut…that he had gone through who knew how many documents to create templates to spare her some of that, she could just kiss him right now in her joy.
The thought raised, again, a red flag for her, not to mention that she knew her mouth must be covered in chocolate at this point. But he cut her off, reaching over to place the remainder of the cookie back in her mouth.
"Finish this, before it melts everywhere." His eyes were dancing, and she knew he got how touched she was by his thoughtfulness. He always just "got" so much about her, regardless of whether it passed her lips or not. It was part of what allowed them to maintain the delicate and dangerous balance they had worked out over the years. She knew people thought she was an idiot about matters of the heart especially, but she saw that Marshall loved her, maybe even had been in love with her at one point. Part of her hoped that he given up on her and was now in love with his girlfriend, but she suspected, sometimes secretly and contrarily hoped, that he had not and was not.
It was completely unfair of her. She had long ago decided that she could never be so cruel to Marshall as to let herself return his feelings, and it was that which had allowed her to squelch her attraction to him as a man…most of the time. He wasn't her physical type, but he had a way about him that was far more appealing than any hard-bodied cowboy could ever be. Dangerous, fiercely loyal and protective, her partner sometimes attracted a curious and longing gaze from her; she'd catch herself staring at him and wondering, what if…
But the truth was that Raph had been her longest romantic relationship to date, and Marshall was a man who would not settle for something short-term and as sordid as her liaisons tended to be. Nor did she want to ever see the look on his face that would come when it ended, as things always did with her. She'd seen previews of it at various times in their friendship…times when she could feel him reaching out a tentative verbal touch in her direction, trying to open the door, and she'd try, in turn, to slam it shut on him. The part of her that always tried to take the easy way—in or out—of relationships had long ago decided that these small rebuffs were better than the long, drawn-out, and ultimately excruciatingly painful discussion.
Of course, she hadn't counted on the sheer persistence of her lanky partner. Almost a decade later and he was still trying—like he had thrust his foot in the door to keep it open, just a crack. Always reminding her that he was right there, waiting, on the off-chance that she might lose her mind and finally rip the damned thing off the hinges. What she had meant to be a kind and face-saving strategy had instead turned into this intricate dance they now did. He had once shown her some movie about a girl who ordered about the family farmhand, who in return only responded, "As you wish," until the day she realized that what his words actually meant was "I love you." That relationship was nothing compared to that between her and Marshall. She and her partner had entire conversations buried under their discussion of the minutiae of the day, sparring wit, and pointed looks. "I love you" was only the beginning between them.
Marshall was so startled by the change in her expression, one that had softened into…he swallowed hard, against hope and desire, and had to fight his natural reaction when he felt himself leaning imperceptibly closer to her. He could read the farmboy's message right there in her eyes but knew it was foolish to do anything at all about it. It could not, she could not, be forced. He had thought he had almost entirely given up on the possibility that she might someday speak the words that he read so clearly on her face. But recently events had somehow rekindled his belief that another such miracle might be possible.
"You have chocolate smeared practically ear-to-ear, Mare," he informed her, doing what he always did and giving her an easy way out. Her tongue instinctively darted out and he wondered for the hundredth time if she knew or cared what effect its wandering over and around her lips had on a man. "And a stocking that's still three-quarters filled."
His reaction made it clear that he had more than an inkling of what two cents could have gotten him in that moment, but her Marshall took no advantage: he let her off the hook yet again. She silently thanked him and reached into her stocking for the next surprise.
The stockings had not even been his idea. He had told his mother that he'd be spending Christmas with Mary, and she had sent them both, evidently a surprise she'd already had in the works. She'd knitted both of them based on the pattern she used to make the stocking he knew would be hanging from her own mantle today, surrounded by the whole Mann clan—save him—who came home for the holidays. She had filled his to the top with the kind of small gifts that greeted him every year—new gloves, batteries for a variety of his gizmos, homemade candy, and the like—while Mary's was only half-full and labeled with a note instructing him to finish off the task before giving it to his partner.
Mary had now found the fudge his mom had made the two of them, and she nibbled at it as she watched him open a couple of his gifts. He pulled on his gloves and held them up for her to inspect, and she nodded approvingly at his mother's choice. When he nudged her, she reached in and found a pair for herself, tough-looking leather on the outside, but lined in cashmere. She grinned in delight and waved them over her head like she'd won the some contest. When he insisted, she tried them on and they fit her like a glo…they fit her perfectly. Her smile gained wattage—he knew trying to find gloves for her large but feminine hands was not easy and had caused her frustration. He had tricked her into making hand-print turkeys with one of their witnesses' kids the week before Thanksgiving and had snatched the paper when she wasn't looking; he took it to a local craftsman, who had made the gloves based on her drawing and Marshall's careful instructions.
Mary next pulled out, slightly hobbled by her refusal to take the gloves off and trying to cram her hand into the stocking, a brand-new bright green padlock. She'd lost her last key to the one on her gym locker, and although he'd managed to convince her not to shoot the offending hardware off so she could get to her gym shoes, she had found bolt-cutters and was now down one padlock. There had originally been two keys to the padlock both attached to it, but once she pulled it out of the stocking, he grabbed his own keyring from his pocket and dangled it in front of her. On it was a matching key—he was her backup even in this, she thought and didn't resist her urge to lean forward and hug him. He squeezed her back, her enjoyment easing some of his guilt over his reaction to her earlier meltdown, and let her go so she could continue to plunder her stocking.
The next thing that came out seemed innocuous enough, but for some reason, her expression darkened. She held up a small ceramic picture frame, and was looking back and forth between it and him. It was the type that held two small pictures. Granted, a frame of any kind was not a good gift for a woman who didn't really enjoy a lot of Kodak moments, but that wasn't enough to explain her transformation.
"From my mom," he said, not sure why it would make that much of a difference, but it was the first thing he could think of. This bit of information didn't seem to improve things—if anything, the line between her eyebrows only deepened. There were no pictures in it, so he couldn't imagine at first what had the power to so thoroughly alter her mood.
She stopped moving her gaze from the frame to her partner and back, and instead cast it around the room: to the remnants of dinner, the pie still sitting on the table, the cheery fire, the small pile of opened gifts, and then back to her handsome, sweet, solicitous partner, the man who had managed to bring a bit of Christmas back into her life. She just stared at him intensely for a moment.
"Marshall," she finally said, low and seriously, her eyes never wavering from his, "Why are you here? Why aren't you spending Christmas with Abby where you belong?"