Drabble Post: She Lingers in the Differences
Done for HotPinkCoffee/ lisacharly on comment_fic. Prompt was Animorphs, Eva, somewhere out there there's another wife Peter never divorced (which was AWESOME, btw). Also, I know absolutely NO Spanish, so if Peter's pet name for Eva is wrong… Feel free to educate me. ;) Originally posted here, also found here.
A/N- Rocking the boat in public is one thing... But home is quite another.
oOOOo
In the aftermath- of the blood, lies, broken hearts and injured feelings, tears, loss, and living in the valley- Eva is left with questions she can't quite ask, let alone answer.
She has missed too much time, too many milestones, birthdays, and daily (mistakenly thought unimportant by those who lived them) rifts and shifts in the family she once knew every nuance and credit card payment of... And it's not all because of the son who in, bled for, and helped win a war against invading aliens since they all lived together before.
Where they had once been a family of three, there is now an invisible woman sitting across Eva's breakfast table in the hazy dawn, silent but obvious in a million tiny ways even at this early hour- and Nora refuses to leave even though no one ever says her name or acknowledges her in any way.
Nora is there in the way Peter made chicken for dinner last night, in the herb combination he's never used in front of Eva before. She haunts their bedroom, even though this is thankfully not a house Peter's second wife has ever entered. (If it had been, Eva thinks she would have dragged the furniture to the curb, repainted, and replaced every knickknack in the house.)
Eva flinches internally every time Peter attempts to please her body in ways that were not part of their marital routine before. Had Nora educated him to position them like this or that because she like it? Which wife is Peter making love to at night? (It's impossible to tell when he calls her a litany of endearments, but no given names cross his lips.)
Peter automatically sleeps on the right side of the bed now, and there's a different brand of toothpaste in the bathroom drawer. He wears different cologne, and she wonders if Nora bought him the first bottle because she preferred it over the kind Eva purchased for years.
A hand lands lightly on her shoulder, and Eva starts slightly as she comes back to herself. She looks up and meets Peter's gaze happy, but with far more small lines around the eyes and mouth than there once were in the brightening room.
"'Morning, bella dama," he kisses her cheek, clean shaven and smelling of another wife's preference in aftershave, and sets a steaming mug of coffee in front of her before sitting down with his own in the seat Nora's shade had been perched.
Peter proceeds to hum music Eva doesn't know as he reads his paper.