Laylah (laylah) wrote in 1931, @ 2008-04-19 09:22:00 |
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Current mood: | happy |
Entry tags: | chane, claire, claire/chane, short fic |
ficlet: "News," Claire/Chane
Just a quick little bit to respond to one of the prompts from earlier this week -- Claire/Chane - maritial bliss, or something like that. Owes quite a lot to the translations that karanguni has been posting, and the ways that Claire's identity is such a moving target.
Worksafe, ~600 words, warning for domesticity?
News
If he were anyone else, Chane thinks she wouldn't be half so content.
If he were anyone else, truly, she wouldn't be here, sharing this apartment with him, at all. Ordinary men -- and less ordinary ones, too -- had paid attention to her before he did. But not the way he did. She is no mystery to him; he takes her as she is, and she has tried to offer him the same.
His brothers call him Claire, fond and exasperated. The newspapers call him Vino. The marriage license says Felix. When he first wrote to her, he signed his letter Rail Tracer. Chane solves the riddle in her head by calling him nothing at all: he is the only man she thinks of, save her father, and Huey Laforet is a fixed quantity. Her husband is everything else.
The sun is sinking now, dropping below the gray clouds to send streaks of orange light across the city, so the windows and the rooftops of the buildings nearby shine unlikely gold. He will be home soon. He promised to return by sundown, and Chane has learned that his promises are more statements of fact than intent.
She pushes open the windows, leans out far enough to catch hold of the fire escape. She pulls herself up, and out onto the rails. Her heels clang against the iron, and she can feel the vibrations up through her ankles, both like and unlike the night they met. She climbs up to the roof, wondering if this time she'll be able to spot his approach.
There, movement along one of the far roofs, the flash of red and black, a scatter of alarmed pigeons. Chane smiles. So he is already pleased with himself. That should only make this a better time for the news she has for him.
He springs from the next roof, turning a graceful, perfect flip before he lands on their own building. Chane's heart flutters. No matter how many times she sees him do it, still he takes her breath away.
When he looks up, the wildness is still there in his eyes, but Chane only waits, only smiles at him, and he sets Vino aside as soon as he sees her.
"Chane," he says, gently. He comes to take her hands.
The one gift of her silence, lately, is that she never has to call him by only one name. She squeezes his hands and rises up on her toes for a kiss.
"You have news for me," he says afterward, because he knows her that well. She leaves him notes for little things, and to remind him she loves him, and for the simple pleasure of sharing words -- but this is important, and it may be harder to say it like this but she wants to.
Chane takes his hand and presses it against her belly, low and flat, where she knows the change has happened -- knows it the way he knows the world will fall into place for him as easily as dominoes. His eyes widen, almost surprise, the nearest she's ever seen, and she nods.
"Already?" he says. He laughs, pure delight. "That's wonderful! A boy or a girl?"
She shakes her head, shrugs. She could guess, but she doesn't know, not the way she knows that --
"Ah, it doesn't matter, does it?" He smiles down at her, his hand still resting there over her belly as though he can feel it, too. "Whichever it is, it'll be our baby. So it'll be perfect."
Yes. That much she knows as well as he does.