Things You Didn't Say At All
Her mother always loved to tell the story of how Marie, barely six years old, had ripped her bedsheets and wrapped them up around herself. She'd gone on, as her mother called it, an absolute tirade, stomping her foot and demanding to know where her groom was.
She supposed it stood as proof that, for almost all her life, since before she could even remember, she had wanted the fairy tale ending. She'd dreamed of the roses, the candle-lit dinners, the chocolate on Valentine's Day. She'd wanted dramatic proposals and confessions of undying romance. She'd wanted proclamations and dramatic, loud "I love you"s.
She didn't get them.
She wonders when she changed, when she stopped wanting all those things. As she looks in the mirror, it isn't too hard to envision herself younger, draped in off-white fabric, posing in an old polaroid, a pillow-case on her shoulders that she insisted was the veil. But that wasn't what stared back at her: instead, she is bloated.
She almost groans at the fact. Bloated and tired, wrapped in Stein's oversized lab-coat, her hair getting too long and her walk turned into a waddle.
What she had wanted since a little girl or no, pregnancy was tough. It wasn't magic and flowers like she always thought it was, but she realizes that she's equally as accepting of the reality. She sets a hand to her puffy belly, her ring catching the light.
She wonders when her idea of romance changed. Perhaps it was when she'd started to live in a laboratory in desperate need of furnishing, or when she went through the fridge the first time, pulling out more jars of questionable organs in various liquids from the shelves than actual edible food.
No, Stein wasn't conventional in the slightest, she'd get no Romantic Comedy plotline from him. Yet, when she heard their door click open, his voice calling out, "Marie? I'm home," and the rustle of the bag of sweets he'd gone on a run for, to ease her cravings, she smiles.
She doesn't find herself in desperate need of what she'd once envisioned was the only means of happily ever after,
There was nothing dramatic about it all. The things she had wanted as a little girl, she knew she would never get from him.
She didn't mind that, either.
Because he steps into the room she is in, rolling his eyes at the fact that she was standing on her swollen ankles and he all but scoops her up so she can rest her feet.
She figures there's more than one way to be told "I love you".
Thank you guys so much for the reviews and favorites! You're all wonderful. 3 Also, it's my personal headcanon that Stein never tells Marie "I Love You" but, rather, that he skirts around it ("You fight good", anyone?) and that Marie doesn't need the confession, anyway.