Fancy That • Pushing Daisies

[igrab]

Olive, Ned/Chuck • 1314 words • written to sheldon

Chuck had never seen herself as a fancy sort of person. Her aunts were plenty fancy enough for her, and what use did she have for fancy? She liked bees and cheese and reading books and pie smell and the little crinkles in Ned’s eyes. She didn’t need fancy.

But that didn’t mean that, maybe, fancy might not be, well, nice, sometime.

It went like this - Olive had a wedding to go to, some friend of a friend of a mutual horse or something like that, and as her resident best friend (which was bizarre and scary and totally amazing), Chuck was dragged out from one dress shop to another, looking for something to wear.

She had never seen Olive in anything but the matching dresses she wore to work (and the nun’s habit, but that had been sort of a weird experience overall so she didn’t count it), and given that Ned owned the Pie Hole and he had exactly nothing to say on the subject of what to wear while working there (except, sometimes, oh my god, and, that’s, and, you look very, and probably all those fragments were supposed to be actual sentences but the look on his face told her all she needed to know), Chuck had always basically assumed that those three dresses were exactly what Olive wanted to wear. It didn’t seem strange to her - her aunts may have had a lot of outfits but they didn’t have a lot of clothes, not the kind that meant actually wearing on a regular basis. So it didn’t seem odd. But when she came to Chuck’s door to drag her off to the mall, Olive was wearing a blouse, and high-waisted shorts that almost made her look normal-sized.

"Erm," she said, because tact in real life wasn’t something they taught in books, and "uh."

Olive gave her a rather unimpressed look. “Did you think I didn’t own any other clothes?”

"Yes," Chuck answered, a rueful look on her face. Olive just sighed.

"Come on, let’s pretend we’re real girls."

"But we are," Chuck protested, as her friend (best friend) dragged her out and down the road and halfway across town to the little bustling mall that she didn’t even know existed. “We’re real girls because we exist, not because we - “

"You know what I mean. Come on, don’t look so scared! It’s not gonna bite.”

Olive was holding up a gold stiletto heel that looked much more like a torture device than a shoe, and Chuck’s face said exactly that.

"… Much."

Leaving the monster heels behind, Chuck let Olive drag her around and hold her purse while she tried on dresses and moaned about how other people were too tall.

"And Ned is the worst. It’s terrible. Awful. I have to keep reminding myself that he’s a skyscraper and most people aren’t that towering.”

Somewhat dreamily, and perhaps lacking in that ‘tact’ department again, Chuck’s response was, “even i have to stand on a box to kiss him, I can’t imagine what that must feel like.”

With an edge in her voice, and kind of a pointed glare, Olive asked, “do you even kiss him? I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen it.”

Awkward. Mega awkward. Chuck was the worst at this best friend thing, the absolute worst.

"Of course," she muttered, shifting the load of dresses and purse in her arms to keep them from falling asleep. "I mean, not a lot. Not as much as I’d like. But he’s sort of, you know. With the touching." Sort of painfully not allowed and all possible kinds of not fair, especially when he did that thing with his eyebrows and Chuck had to exert supreme forces of superhuman will not to actually tackle him to the nearest flat surface.

"Ah," was all Olive said, and it meant so many things. ‘I still don’t understand you two chuckleheads’, and ‘whatever floats your boat but if it was my boat I would be all over that like your Aunt Lily on drug pie’, and maybe ‘I would say I hope he’s worth it but I’m in love with him too’. Maybe Olive wasn’t too great at this best friend thing either, but they were trying. They both wanted it to work.

"Here," she said suddenly, pushing something (else) into Chuck’s hands. "Try this on."

Chuck blinked at her. “What?”

"Oh, for-" Olive batted at her armload until it crashed to the floor, then shoved the dress into Chuck’s chest, the edge of the hanger poking her in the book. "Just do it. It’ll look better on you than it would on me, anyway. Go on, do it!"

Somewhat reluctantly, because it was fancy and Chuck didn’t do fancy, she pulled off her blouse (plain, but bright) and her skirt (less plain, but less bright) and tried the dress on.

It was blue, and flowy, and had gold and bronze beading in intricate swirls that, upon closer inspection, formed a pattern of interlocking hearts. The skirt was cut high in the front and long in the back, long enough that it would probably have hinted at Olive’s ankles, but on Chuck, it was just long enough to make friends with the back of her knees. The top was sleeveless, the fabric bunching at the collar to fasten to a wide, necklace-like band of gold beading and tiny white pearls. It was exquisitely detailed and yet light, almost gossamer, and Chuck felt, as she looked in the mirror and imagined her hair up in a proper bun with matching earrings and unsubtle makeup, like maybe she could actually wear this. She could be this, this fancy person, could do things that fancy people did and be beautiful enough to deserve it.

She was so caught up in this fantasy, in fact, that she totally missed Olive whipping out her camera and taking a photograph.

"Did you just…?"

"Of course," Olive said, rolling her eyes. "You look insufferably beautiful and it’s something you have to record, for posterity. Besides, I know that look," and she frowned up at Chuck with all the pointed insistence that only a very tiny person could muster. "That’s the ‘oh my god, I could actually look pretty once in a while!’ face."

Embarrassed now, Chuck reached for the zipper and started struggling free. “How do you-”

"Honey," Olive interrupted, her face still full of sharp edges, "every girl knows that face. Every girl has that face. We all have someone gorgeous and perfect inside of us that’s just waiting to be let out of its shell, and some people never find it, others get stuck in it, but the fact of the matter is, she’s in there whether you’re wearing the dress or not. It just makes it easier to see, that’s all.”

Stunned, and a little flabbergasted, for that was quite possibly the most perceptive thing Chuck had ever heard Olive say, she sat down at the edge of the seat in the changing room and mulled this over, as Olive picked up the mess of skirts and hangers that had gotten strewn over the floor.

"And anyway," she continued, "I want to see the look on Ned’s face when he sees it. The picture, I mean. Unless you want to buy the dress, but I think it’s out of any of our price ranges." She sighed, dramatically. "Well, a girl can dream. Besides, he already knows," and Chuck had to backtrack a little, try and pick up where this conversation had gotten ahead of her.

"Knows? Knows what?"

The friends (best friends) shared a long look together, and the number of things Chuck saw in that look were entirely impossible to quantify.

"He’s already seen how beautiful you are," she said, soft and bittersweet. "But I think he’ll love seeing the way you look when you see it.”