Shane Bailey is Mr Marleen McKinnon (mrmckinnon) wrote in thetowns, @ 2010-11-17 21:54:00 |
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Claire was put to bed hours ago, the candles had burned down to stumps, and the Cornish Hen on the table had long since cooled. Shane stepped out of the kitchen and just stared at the table for a few minutes before walking over, tearing a leg off the bird, and biting into it on his way to the living room. Marlene had said she didn’t have a lot on her plate today and should be home on time “if not early.” Shane had then decided to give her a plate that she could put a lot on. Which, it would seem, didn’t work out as he’d planned. He tossed himself casually onto the couch after pausing a moment to flip on the wireless and worked on the leg a bit more. Of course, he didn’t blame Marlene in the least. She was off saving lives and making a difference while he just sat at home answering questions for people about mundane things like which charms work best for cleaning up a dining room or the best way to handle a bad break-up. Sometimes, though, he just wished he could spend more time with Marly the Wife and less with Marly the Auror. Shane entertained these thoughts for awhile, then realised with suddenly that he’d dozed off on the couch. He woke with a start and realised two things: One, he still had a mostly eaten hen leg in his hand instead of his wand, and two, what woke him was the locks being opened at the front door. Marlene tried to be quiet, she truly did. Unfortunately, for being an Auror and all, she just really didn’t know how to sneak around when she wasn’t actually in Auror mode. The door opened without consequence, but the moment that she stepped inside her keys dropped to the ground. Marlene cringed. How in Merlin’s name did she manage to do that every night. After a moment of standing frozen where she made sure that Claire hadn’t woken up from the miniature crash - she very rarely did, but better safe than having to talk a toddler back to sleep - she relaxed and let the door shut with a soft thump. She locked the doors in her paranoid manner, then finally relaxed. She was coming home late, but she really hoped that Shane wasn’t going to fight her about it. That morning she had had every intention of coming home early, but one thing turned into another and before she knew it the sun had set and she was eating Sylvia’s leftover birthday cake for dinner. Marlene felt guilty about it, just like she always did, but at that point there was little she could do without help from a timeturner. Trying to stay quiet (and failing as she knocked into the coat rack and made it thwack against the wall), Marlene made her way into the house in search of Shane. “You up?” she called quietly, hoping to find him but not wake Claire. So Shane was supposed to challenge Marlene or something to make sure it was her. Seriously, though, who else could drop their keys, lock the door so quickly, and then manage to knock a coat rack against the wall? Shane relaxed a bit and walked back towards the kitchen. After her dropped the cold leg in the bin, he lingered in the dining area for a moment, picked up his wand from the table, and re-lit the candles real quick. “In here,” he called, croaking a bit from the short nap and simply not using his voice for a bit. He threw a quick heating charm under the hen, then the same for the other sides. The meal was probably still salvageable. It’s not as if they had a rodent problem or anything. Marlene breezed into the kitchen, shrugging her cloak off over her shoulders. She stopped mid step, though, when she saw the dinner. That would just...figure. Not only did she miss out on tucking Claire in, but he’d gone and made a lovely dinner and. Damn it. “Oh, Merlin, Shane, I’m sorry,” she apologized quickly, one hand coming up to thread into her hair as a look of guilt spread across her face. “I swear, I’d honestly thought that I’d be home on time.” Shane had an easy smile and he offered it to her. She looked like she’d had a hell of a day and honestly he wasn’t much in the mood for more arguing at the moment. “S’all right,” he answered, gesturing to the table. “Still edible, if you don’t mind the missing leg.” He stifled a yawn and pulled out a chair for her. “You can still eat.” If there was one thing he couldn’t abide, it was her sitting around at work munching on whatever small things she could get her hands on. Shane didn’t want her burning the candle at both ends and doing it on pastries and pepper-ups. Christ, he could be such a mum sometimes. Yawning again, he took a chair for himself. Marlene slid into the chair without question, sinking into it as she breathed a deep sigh of relief. It felt so good to be home. She loved her job, but her desk was not the same as this - being home with actual food and a sleeping baby down the hallway and her husband sitting next to her. It was like heaven compared to the office. She started to make herself a plate, the chicken looking so much better than that cake from an hour ago, and glanced at Shane. “Was Claire fussy?” “She’s your kid,” answered Shane, picking up the potatoes and scooping some onto Marlene’s plate. “Of course she was fussy. But, like her mum, she passed out as soon as she hit the pillow.” One side of Shane’s mouth curved up and he sat the potatoes back down. Now that she was home, a lot of his frustration was already slipping away. His smirk turned into yet another yawn and he sat back in his chair. He couldn’t reach the other sides and Marlene was perfectly capable of serving herself. “That’s my girl,” Marlene joked, smiling as she scooped some carrots and decided that was plenty. The cake hadn’t been all that filling, but if she ate too much too close to bed, she always had the weirdest dreams that tempted her to find a Seer. As she started in on her potatoes, though, she noticed the yawn and cringed. “You don’t have to stay up, you know. If you’re tired.” “I had a nap,” challenged Shane, giving her The Eye. She knew better than to try and trundle him off to bed when he hadn’t seen her all day. There had been too many times she had gotten home (and dropped her keys, actually) after he’d gone to bed, then had gotten up and left again before he woke up. He admired her dedication, but by Helga sometimes it was nice just to look at her. “Just yawning because I’m waking back up is all.” “Sylvia’s birthday today, wasn’t it?” he asked, remembering she’d mentioned it the day before. It was just a passing comment, but he generally liked to ask some small question about what may have happened during her day to get her talking about it, and a birthday was a lot better than asking who had been killed recently. “Yeah,” Marlene replied thickly through her potatoes, giving a glance toward Shane. She swallowed hard, giving him a slightly apologetic look at her lack of manners -- she was hungry and pregnant and therefore it was allowable -- then followed up. “Someone brought in a really good cake. It was from some bakery off of Diagon. We’ll have to check it out sometime.” Sometime when she didn’t have to work, of course. Marlene tended to always make open ended statements like that, just because she didn’t know when sometime would actually be. Making those statements and then not following through...it made her feel that much more guilty. Shane just watched her eat for a bit and nodded thoughtfully about the bakery. Inwardly he knew it’d either happen sometime way down the road (if at all) or he, not we, would be the one checking it out. Still, if that meant some people out there would get to go home to their families because of Marlene, it was something he was willing to accept. Except that she was going to have to cut back soon. The first three months were over. “When are you going to tell?” he asked, knowing he knew exactly what he meant. She was going to need to tell the Auror Office, their friends, their families... which meant they’d cut back her hours at work some, though Shane certainly wouldn’t say no to a day or two per week of Marlene actually being at home with Claire. “Soon,” Marlene replied, leaning back in her chair and looking at the remnants of her dinner a bit thoughtfully. Her being pregnant was a wonderful thing and hadn’t been something unplanned, not really. But, well, it did give her issues in a work related way. She hated how being pregnant made her feel put on a shelf, while men never had to deal with that sort of thing. It was frustrating, but it was also not a conversation for tonight. That would be a conversation for Dorcas. Reaching up, she rubbed the back of her neck and looked at Shane. “Tomorrow, I think. I don’t want to wait and risk anything.” Realizing she was done eating, Shane stood up and took her plate to the sink quickly before returning with a charmed heating pad he kept for these situations. He moved to stand behind Marlene and started massaging her neck and shoulders with the heated pad, combined with years of experience. If there was anything he’d picked up during their time together, Marlene was always more pliable after a bit of a massage after work. “Tomorrow’s good,” he finally uttered, rubbing a bit of pressure along her shoulderblades. “If you’re ready. I know how much you hate being treated like an invalid by the people who think you should always be sitting down with your feet up. They’ll come out the woodworks once they know.” He chuckled a bit and kissed the top of her head. Even her hair smelled like it had been working 18 hour shifts in a hot factory. “You need a bath, I think,” he stated, with that tone that said ‘get up and go relax in the tub.’ “Yeah, yeah,” Marlene replied, waving a hand toward him and surreptitiously bringing the other up to take a sniff at her shirt. He wasn’t kidding. She started to get to her feet, then, figuring that the sooner she took a bath, the sooner she could go to bed and if she waited too long, she would just fall asleep in the bathtub and drown and it would be all around unfortunate for all. So. Bath time. “Only because you were so polite,” she teased, stretching her arms. “But I reserve my right to sneak into Claire’s room first. You can’t stop me.” |