No matter how it ends; 1/1
Title: No matter how it ends
Pairing: Ned/Chuck (Pushing Daisies)
Rating: PG
Summary: It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks, because this is theirs.
Note: *blinks* Yeah. What?
*
They’re in separate beds, which is strange really, but it does give her a better vantage point across the room, and she uses it to watch him sleep. Observes the silent facial twitches, the downward curve of his mouth. She wonders what Ned dreams about. He has a wry, earnest pleasantness about him during the day, an introverted mysteriousness she wishes to penetrate, to capture his secrets and make them her own - but at the same time perhaps the subtle distance between them is best. Perhaps it will make things easier.
But she feels as if she knows him already. They share some intrinsic part of the universe no one else will ever understand. And the intimacy of this room, the fact that he so effortlessly shares his space with her, his world, dispels any physical distance.
She watches him sleep with her cheek pressed into her pillow, smiling faintly when he snorts into the silence. Moonlight streaks in through the window and over the bed, illuminating his still form, and she doesn’t twitch when he turns on her side and catches her watching. As if he senses it, almost.
“What are you doing?” he murmurs, sounding adorably muffled.
“Nothing,” she responds, after a moment. “Just thinking. You snore, you know.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ve never had anyone tell me that before.”
Another small smile pulls at her mouth and she doesn’t break his gaze. “You’ve never had anyone in a position to tell you that?” It’s light and teasing, but there’s a certain undercurrent to her question, a curiosity. She wants to know everything about him.
“No one who considered it important enough to mention.”
His answer contents her more than she could have realised. She resists smiling into her pillow any more, and closes her eyes.
“Things change.”
*
Emerson doesn’t approve, but Ned doesn’t care. There are some things worth sinning for.
When Chuck enters his kitchen in the morning with her hair mussed and her pyjamas pants on inside out because they got in so late she slid straight into bed, she lights up the room. He can almost convince himself this is normal, what they have.
Then again nothing in his life has ever been very normal.
“Pancakes?” he asks, nodding his head down at the frying pan.
Chuck pauses, offering him another slow, easy smile, the kind that sets his soul alight and breaks his heart at the very same time, and slides on the stool by the counter. “I’ve always been more of a toast person,” she declares, plucking a piece from the toaster. “Call me old-fashioned.”
He smiles just faintly, because it’s always nice to learn new things about her, even as it reminds him of the time lost between them. Then she lifts an eyebrow and props her elbows on the counter. “Then again, I could always go for some pie, too.”
He laughs, a sound that escapes so unexpectedly it makes Chuck's grin grow wider. And Ned decides it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks, because this is theirs.
*
“Dead girl is not coming on this one.”
Chuck rolls her eyes; Emerson really needs to get over the whole her being sort-of-technically-dead thing.
“You know, if you’re going to call me anything, it really should be Undead Girl. Just for clarity.”
Emerson gives her a withering look, and Ned steps in, clearing his throat. “She’s coming. Okay?”
There’s a finality to it, a tired if faintly amused exasperation, and Chuck grins at him, causing Emerson to sigh heavily and climb into the passenger side. “Go team,” she says, waggling her fingers at Emerson and glancing back at Ned one last time. She feels a burst of affection and wants to kiss him right then, really kiss him, just once, just to know what it feels like, just to have that freedom.
It doesn’t really seem fair that she should finally get her life only to sacrifice what she wants.
*
“You ever wonder why?”
Ned pauses, in the midst of scrubbing down the counter, and wonders what it is she’s really asking of him.
“Why what?”
“Why you can do… what you can.” Chuck shrugs, turning around on her stool, floral skirt swirling around her legs with a lightness that doesn’t comfort him as much as it normally would.
He wonders if he’ll be able to tell her, one day, about her father and his mother and the consequences of his actions. He was nine and it should be forgiveable, it was an accident, but the entrie scope of their lives has depended on that moment. It frightens him, a little. How she will react. If this will end.
Obviously someone has machinated these rules, though if he will ever know why he has been given this gift or if it was merely some flaw in his genetic make-up, some accidental, inexplicable occurrence, it’s impossible to say.
“I stopped wondering when I can’t get any answers.”
She purses her lips, nodding slowly, and there’s a pensive severity there that hasn’t been present before. He doesn’t want it. There’s no sense wondering and wishing when this is what they have.
“Ready to go home?”
The inclusive ‘home’ isn’t lost on her; she tilts her chin and smiles up at him, jumping back off her chair. The moment fades away and he’s glad, because he much prefers to be immersed in this bubble. Sometimes ignorance is bliss, and what they have, what they share, is definitely bliss to him.
/end