Fic - Constants (Mary, Marshall/Mary) pg-15, 1/1
Title: Constants
Summary: It's foreign to her, this feeling of needing. It's a good thing they're a walking contradiction.
Rating: pg -15
Author's Notes: 3,040 words. General series spoilers with specifics for Trogan Horst. All mistakes are mine. The characters, however, are not.
[prologue]
It’s foreign to her, this feeling of needing.
Mary’s never really depended on anyone before. Her father had left a mess in his wake all those years ago and ever since that day her mother picked up the bottle and never seemed to put it back down, she’s been the one who has been the caregiver. Brandi, her mother, a witness, everyone always just needs and it’s nice, she muses, to be depended on, to feel needed, because it was just so much easier than putting enough faith in somebody, to trust them enough to take care of you.
Which is why, she muses, it is inexplicable how fully she has come to depend on Marshall. Marshall, who started off as nothing - just another partner, another warm body to fill the desk across from hers - and turned into her friend, her confidant. The only person she counted on day in and day out for everything.
So, it’s easier this way, Mary guesses. Easier to sit next to him, counting his breaths and tracing the lines of face with her eyes, than the alternative. She’s lucky, she knows, they’re lucky, and it’s selfish of her to lay her hand over his and relish in the warmth and thank God for this, for his breaths and heartbeats because it’s not for him, it’s for her.
It all boils down to the fact that she could do it without him - she’s done hard before and she thinks she could move forward without him by her side if she tried hard enough - Mary just didn’t want to.
It’s a simple fact that she has no idea what to do with.
The constant beep of the monitors lures her to sleep and the stay like that for a long time, her hand resting atop his, their heartbeats as steady as the connection between them.
[one]
Marshall wasn’t her first partner. Or even her second. There was Rick and Jason and Steve, too and they even tried putting her with another woman once, but that only lasted all of thirty-six hours because all she wanted to do was talk about her feelings and Oprah and Mary would just rather not, thanks, so she had to go, too.
“Your name is Marshall and you’re a U.S. Marshal?” She’d asked, eyebrow raised, arms crossed over her chest. Stan’s in the corner, hopeful and she remembered their earlier conversation, his warning of make this one stick, Mary, there’s no one else.
“Funny. You think you’re the first person to crack that joke?”
“You know I won’t be the last, right?”
He’d shrugged. “It’s a dumb joke, so really,” he had paused and smirked and he had the hair back then, too, and when she thinks about it years later, she remembers thinking about whether or not it’s weird that he was prettier than her. “The joke’s on them.”
“Hmmm.”
“You have two first names for your full name, so,” he continued, and his arms were crossed over his own chest, his look, challenging.
“We’re quite a pair then, huh?”
[two]
Their first assignment together and their witness ends up dead. A messy affair - a ten year old kid with everything in the world left to live for who’d hid inside the cabinet under the sink as his family was brutally murdered because of a drug deal gone bad. He’d been set to testify - new identity, new family all set up and they were ambushed in transit.
Shots were fired, and even though she’d gotten the bad guys with a clean hit to the heart (rather fitting, she thinks) it didn’t really matter. After, the kid is in her arms, his blood on her hands and she took it hard.
“It’s not your fault, you know,” Marshall says hours later over paperwork and silence. “You can’t save everyone.”
“Don’t,” she says cutting him off, putting her pen to the paper. She pushes through the uncertainty.
“What?”
“You know what,” Mary continues, giving him a hard look. “That shit only works in the movies, anyway, so don’t bother.”
“Yeah,” he sighs and leans back in his chair. He looks hard, tired, and because he’s a good person, an infinitely better person than she, she knows it’s bothering him, too. “Sometimes, you still need to hear it, though.”
They share a look, long and meaningful and her heart skips a beat for that kid, the life he could have had and she tries to think of him in a better place, with his parents and God - all that bullshit they tell you when you’re young and you just don’t quite understand, but it resonates deep within her that it’s just that. Bullshit. It sucks no matter which way you look at it and she knows it, too.
“You want to go get drunk?” He asks out of nowhere and she looks up to find him looking down at the file in his hands.
Mary sighs and the weight feels heavy on her shoulders. “Why the hell not?”
From here on out this is how it goes, and she’s okay with it like this. With the banter and innuendo overlaying the budding friendship and companionship that’s lingering below the surface. It’s easy this way, and Mary, a creature of habit, welcomes the simplicity.
[three]
She doesn’t do attachment well. She doesn’t do relationships well, either.
So, it’s a little surprising when one day she just wakes up and her and Marshall are best friends and it’s the longest, consistent relationship she’s ever hard - family aside, and deep down Mary doesn’t think those even count - and it’s odd, she thinks, that in her life full of changing and shifting, he’s the only constant.
Partners blends into friendship, friendship blooms into companionship and it’s transitory, inevitable almost, like the way he brings her coffee in the morning - black with one sugar, because she keeps it simple - and Mary saves him the onions from her salads, the pickles off her burgers. It’s nothing life-changing, their relationship, nothing worth writing home about, it just boils down to the fact that they know each other, really know each other without even trying.
“What do think about salsa dancing?”
Mary looks up from her paperwork. Another late night and there’s old takeout between them, cold coffee, too, and it’s just them left in the office. It’s kind of nice.
“Salsa dancing?”
“Yeah,” he does a little dance move in his seat and she pushes herself away from her desk, and leans back in her seat, bellowing with laughter.
“What the hell was that?”
“Dancing? What? Girls like guys who can dance,” Marshall says, defensive almost, then looks at her oddly. “Don’t they?”
“How the hell should I know?”
It’s his turn to laugh and it crinkles the edges of his eyes and vibrates in her bones.
“You’re a girl.”
“I think we both know you’re more the girl in this relationship than I am.”
Food comes flying in her direction and misses her by a mile. “See, you even throw like a girl. Case and point.”
“Shut up.”
[four]
Something almost happens once.
A late night in San Fran, transporting a new witness, stuck in a motel with one bed and they were over chivalry and awkwardness and he’d plopped down beside her in airplane pajamas and she’d looked up from the paper and eyed him curiously.
“Did you know that sixty-five percent of women believe that men and woman can’t be friends?”
“Really?”
“It’s true.”
“I think you just pulled that out of your ass,” she says and he looks at her for a moment before finally smiling.
“Maybe.”
“Or you’ve just been watching too much Harry and Sally.”
Marshall shrugs innocently and grabs the sports section from her. “It was on TV the other night,” he replies innocently. “Couldn’t sleep.”
“And Sports Center wasn’t on? You are such a girl.”
“You like it,” he says patiently, and continues mindlessly, “besides, the point is, that you and I,” he punctuates his words by kicking her leg with his foot, “are a walking contradiction.”
“How so?”
“You’re a woman. I’m a man. We’re friends.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Hence the contradiction.”
“No, no I get it. I just don’t understand why this is relevant.”
“I just think it’s weird, you know,” he says, actually looking at her now - she can tell without even glancing in his direction - and she continues on with the paper without a second thought. “our relationship defies the laws of nature.”
Sighing she puts the paper down in her lap and looks at him. “Defies the laws of nature? Seriously, Marshall just stop talking. You sound like a fuckin’ idiot.”
He bumps his shoulder with hers and she stills visibly at the contact of skin on skin. “I’m just saying.”
“I know what you’re saying and if is this is your way of subtly saying that you think we should sleep together,” she begins and grins at the widening of his eyes, “I’m going to tell you that I’d rather be a walking contradiction than cliché.”
“I don’t - I’m not -“
“Of course not.”
“I was just saying -“
“Uh-huh.”
“Seriously.”
“Okay.”
Mary turns her head to look at him and she’s not really sure how it happens, but suddenly he’s there, too close, his eyes on hers and there’s a moment, short and fleeting, a possibility where she leans in a fraction of a centimeter and his eyes dance between her own and her lips. And it’s everything she doesn’t want for them, but her heart does this silly little thing and beats in her head and she pulls away before she does something stupidly impulsive and laughs.
“That was weird.”
Marshall laughs too and she feels the force behind it and crinkles the paper between her fingers. “It really was.”
“Good thing we’re a walking contradiction, huh?”
“Yep.”
He punctuates the word with a smack of his lips and the sound vibrates off the walls of the silent room.
[five]
Ralph just kind of happens.
One minute he’s teaching her how to take advantage of the standard crunch, one hand on her stomach and the other in the curve behind her knee, and the next minute she’s fucking him against the wall of the bathroom. It’s nothing she’s never done before - Relationship aren’t her thing, and really, neither are people, and while she thinks more of herself than one night stands, she’s not one to look down on casual sex.
So they’re a tangled mess of limbs and sighs and grunts, and she’ll leave like she always does, a card left behind in her wake with a number he can call, but experience has taught her he won’t. Or he will, and she won’t return the favor and that’ll be that. Only he does call, and she does return the favor, and it’s not a relationship, but it’s sex, and it’s nice, to be with someone consistently, to have them know your sighs and moans and how to touch you from experience.
One night, a couple months in, he traces the curve of her hip with a lone finger and she leans back into him, skin slick with sweat and sliding against his. “I want to meet your family, your friends,” he says so softly she has to strain to hear.
Mary stills, draws in a breath. “Raph -“
“Don’t worry,” he says, “nothing serious. I just want to get to know the woman I’m sleeping with every night.”
“It’s not every night.”
“Well, no,” he chuckles and it vibrates in her bones. “But it’s pretty damn close.”
She shrugs. “I guess.”
He kisses the spot behind her ear, draws her closer with an arm firmly around her waist. “You guess what? That it’s every night or that you want me to meet your family.” Voice soft, hand slipping between her thigh and she shifts backwards, towards him.
“We’ll see,” she breathes.
[six]
She thinks of the future sometimes. White picket fences and all that - kids and the dog and the happily ever after, but reality isn’t fantasy and almost always ends up falling up short, and she knows champagne wishes and caviar dreams isn’t something people like her really ever obtain. Mary think she wants it sometimes, the kids and the husband, but then there’s that selfish part of her, that part of her that remembers that she’s been taking care of people her whole life and she feels too old to be just thirty, too tired to still be so young.
When she does think about it though, pictures herself ten years down the road, the only constant she seems to find is in Marshall. Still by her side, still her partner, still her everything.
Mary’s not really sure what that means.
[seven]
“Ralph asked me to marry him.”
Marshall looks up from his paperwork and stares at her for a long, long second. “And?”
“I said no, of course,” she rolls her eyes, and taps her pen against the file in her hands insistently. He goes back to his work, a smile playing on his lips. “He baked the ring into a cupcake, isn’t that the most retarded thing you’ve ever heard? I mean, do guys think shit like that is actually romantic? I could have choked or something.”
“I guess, “Marshall begins, tossing his pen down and leaning back in his chair, “most women find that stuff romantic.”
She snorts. “Well, I don’t.”
Another smirk, a gentle cock of his head and he regards her for a moment. “I know.”
They go back to work - Marshall filling out paper work and her pretending to fill out paperwork. Ralph has been gone a week, and she has to admit she kind of misses him. Not so much him, actually, if she really thinks about it, but more the closeness, the intimacy. It’s a weird feeling, missing him, or whatever it was about him that she did miss, but you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone, right?
“Do you think that was the right choice?” she asks, breaking the silence, and Marshall just looks at her again. Normally, approval isn’t something she generally looks for, but this nagging feeling has been in the pit of her stomach for days, the kind she gets when she feels, fears that she’s made some kind of an irrevocable mistake. It’s inexplicable, really, the feeling, and she wants nothing more than to make it go away.
“Mary,” he sighs patiently - a learned habit. “The guy didn’t even know that you don’t like cupcakes.”
She smirks softly and goes back to her paperwork, thankful.
[eight]
Some nights, Mary has a dream about that night in the stables. Her in that dress and his hands in her hair, sure and certain, his lips against hers. It’s always odd, the feeling she has when she wakes up, because really, she’s never thought of Marshall in that way. Never thought of him in any way other than her friend, her Marshall, that dorky guy who sits across from her and knows her better than she knows herself. It makes her feel dirty, like somehow she’s breaking one of those cardinal, unwritten laws of friendship, and it scares her, too, because he is her friend, her only friend and never, ever would she want to do something to jeopardize it.
In her dreams, she always kisses him back.
This, inevitably, scares her, too.
[nine]
Deep down, she thinks she’s always known how he’s felt. And maybe it hasn’t always been there, and maybe it won’t always be there, but she knows. So when he’s sitting there, dying from a sucking chest wound, giving her the tired, it’s not you, it’s me speech she wishes she had enough fight left in her to call his bluff.
If Mary was a good person she’d let him go, move on with his life, find something better. Escape her while he still can. But the truth of the matter is she’s not a good person, she reads his mail and makes fun of him, and treats him like shit and doesn’t care, because she knows in the end, when all is said in done, that he’d still be there, her constant of sorts.
Sweeping declarations aren’t her thing, never have been and never will be, and she wants to tell him how much she cares about him, how much she values him and their relationship, but she can’t. And even if she did it would be admission of just how serious this situation is, just how real the possibility is that he could leave her. She’s not ready.
So she settles for a “You can’t die,” instead, and hopes he sees the I care about you more than you know hidden underneath.
Somehow, she knows he does. Marshall always just knows.
[epilogue]
He wakes before her, so when her eyes slide open against the harsh, early morning light, Marshall’s regarding her with that peculiar expression of his.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“You stayed.”
Mary shrugs and sits up straighter in the chair. There’s a kink in her neck and she rubs her shoulders and tries not to look at him. “Yeah, well.”
He smiles, teeth and all, and it just doesn’t feel real - the events of yesterday, their first fight, everything. She wants to shake him for being so stupid, wants to hug him for being okay. It’s a mixture of emotions balled up inside her and it lodges in her throat and for a moment she can’t speak, can’t do anything but count the worry lines on his face and remember.
A promise is made - to God, herself, it doesn’t really matter - to do better. To be better. It hurts her to think of how much of an effort it is to be her friend, her partner; to be able to deal with everything that comes with those titles. She thinks, fleetingly, about telling him to transfer, if that was what he thought he really wanted, but doesn’t.
“Thank you,” Mary settles for instead. Her throat is dry all of a sudden and she clears it before continuing. “Thank you for saving my life back there.”
A corner of his mouth quirks upwards. He manages a half - shrug. “Yeah, well.”
They share a smile.