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 Posted: Wed Feb 04, 2015 8:34 pm
It had taken him exactly four minutes to run, hard and thumping, from the infirmary to his house. When he arrived, he was failing to suck in enough oxygen for what his body demanded, and he was wheezing terribly as he stood in the doorway, trying to catch his breath. "MIMSY." The first word he managed to say was a hoarse scream, as he called out his wife's name. "I'M HOME, WHERE YOU AT, WHAT HAPPENED." Clearly, he was a little more worried than he should have been.
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Posted: Wed Feb 04, 2015 8:49 pm
Four minutes was not an especially long time, unless one's mind was rapidly producing very unfortunate theoretical celebrations of the apparent 'Flirt With An Ex' holiday. In such an instance, four minutes was three minutes and fifty-nine seconds too long - each half-second branched into a new possibility, multiplying exponentially until approximately three minutes into the ordeal, when Mimsy stopped and realized that this might be an annual holiday. She was haphazardly sprawled along the floor and the cabinets of the kitchen by the time he arrived, one cheek still pressed against the ground as she answered him with a small " here".
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Posted: Wed Feb 04, 2015 9:11 pm
He hardly heard her voice, but it was just enough to send him careening in the general direction it was coming from, which was enough. He saw her legs first, peeking out from behind the kitchen island, and he skidded down to his knees around it to find her. His arms wrapped around her instantly, pulling her entire body into his arms and against him until she was surrounded as much as possible. Then he bent his head down, stared into her eyes, and looked for signs of a concussion. "Baby, baby, I'm here now, it's okay. Look at me, how many fingers am I holding up?" He held up two, not including his thumb, which meant it was kind of a trick question. "Did you hit your head? Are you hurt anywhere?" His hands stretched out and felt every part of her body, checking for blood, or jutting bones, or anything out of the ordinary. He was close to tears, and shaking like a leaf. He still couldn't tell what was wrong, but he knew it was something bad enough to make her call him home from work, and that meant something.
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Posted: Wed Feb 04, 2015 9:51 pm
As appealing and positive as his concerns were, Mimsy couldn't help acknowledging that they might not be definitively indicative that everything was okay. She allowed herself to be scooped up and held, but was as helpful as a ragdoll in getting there. "Two. Three digits." Through skewed glasses she stared back at him, refusing to blink, even as her eyes began to water beneath the strain. "I didn't hit my head. All of it hurts." With a heavy sigh of an exhale, she broke the stare and settled into his arms, where she pressed her cheek against his chest and waited for it to soothe the chill of lying pathetically on the floor. She intended to stay there in silence until she could reasonably claim improvement, but the hypothetical situations arose again, and she tensed with a startled flinch at their resurfacing. "I didn't know that today--why were you not here before," she asked, her low, wavering whisper more broken than accusatory.
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Posted: Wed Feb 04, 2015 10:22 pm
When all he could discern was that she was physically healthy, he had to assume someone, or something had crippled her mentally. So he kissed her head, and then her nose, and each cheek in turn. He lifted her hands up and kissed the back of each of them, and then he hugged her viciously against his body. "Okay. I don't know what you're talking about, so you're going to have to take it slow and start from the beginning. What's the deal with today that I was supposed to be here before? It ain't your birthday, or any of our anniversaries. I know 'cause I wrote them all down and I look at them every day to make sure my dumb brain isn't forgetting nothing. It ain't my birthday either. And the babies are okay, yeah?" Their newest children, the theropods, should have been safely in their Fear cages at the time as far as he knew. "So what is it?" And then he remembered the last thing he'd done before leaving, which was yell at some a*****e on Twitter for saying it was - "Mimsy. Mimsy no." She was up in the air within moments, cradled like a baby in his arms. "Please tell me this isn't about Twitter. Please."
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Posted: Wed Feb 04, 2015 10:45 pm
Each of the kisses were accepted as readily as the attention that came before them, but none of them were returned or outwardly acknowledged. The contact made her skin feel numb, and left prickles of pins and needles in their wake that didn't seem to fade. She would have praised him for being so thoughtful and attentive of important occasions, and might have realized that this should have meant that this supposed holiday wasn't actually important, had she been able to think more clearly; instead, she produced a noncommittal sound and tried to gather her thoughts to explain. He would have been left waiting for a while as she repeatedly failed to do so, had he not discovered it on his own. "I didn't know," she muttered, rubbing clumsily at her eyes with the heels of her palms. "I didn't know. Did you go..." The remainder of her question, whatever it may have been, was buried beneath a significant amount of sniffling.
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Posted: Wed Feb 04, 2015 11:18 pm
So that was a yes. "UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH. I'M GONNA KILL THAT MOTHER ********." Robert's rage shuddered through him in one heated wave, and then he carried her with thumping footfalls to their bedroom, where he gently settled her down and laid himself half on top of her. "This stops now. Mimsy, you can't keep thinking these kinds of things when somebody says something on Twitter, because people are gonna always say stupid s**t on Twitter. It's all day with them, just saying s**t to start trouble." He put his hand on her face, and it almost engulfed her. "Please, Mimsy, I can't watch their bullshit all day. I can't protect you. You gotta remember that like 90% of the s**t they say is just supposed to be humor, even though it ain't really funny, but it's nothing to take so seriously." She asked him if he went somewhere. Where else could she have thought? He was angry at the guy who'd made her think, even for a second, that today was a day for ex's, but he belatedly realized he was getting angry that Mimsy thought he would ever do something like that to her. "You remember what we talked about earlier?" He murmured quietly, brushing his head against her needily. "About how I'll love you no matter what? And it's true, I love you even right now, even though just 'cause some dumbass says it's see your ex day, you thought I went off and did it." When he put it that way, the anger ebbed, melting instead into incredulous amusement. "Mimsy," He coo'd. "You gotta trust me better than this."
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Posted: Thu Feb 05, 2015 12:33 am
The threat of murder caused her to reflexively move to protest--then she froze, mouth agape in an unspoken complaint that slipped into slowly dawning horror as she realized what she was doing. What she'd almost just done. Mimsy was now uncomfortably aware of the fact that she had almost discouraged the violent punishment of someone's inarguably damaging actions simply because she sort of enjoyed conversing with them. When had she begun to place such value in friendships that had not even been earned? When had she started to consider her peers as something more? Something so recklessly sentimental? She felt sick with disgust as he set her down on the bed, but finally reciprocated his affection nonetheless by wrapping her arms around him as best she could. "Okay. Yes. Okay," she quietly replied, muffled against his thumb. "I remember. I love you. I am sorry. It was wrong to think that I had any reason to think...to be worried." She still couldn't say it, despite what she'd just admitted. "I trust you. I promise that I trust you. It feels nice to trust you, and it felt nice to extend trust to--I thought that they were my friends." She closed her eyes and clenched her teeth. "Because that felt nice too. But this doesn't feel nice. I was wrong. I don't want to trust anyone but you any more. I hate it and I don't want to. I'm sorry that I thought that I should. I'm--I love you, Robert. I made a very bad mistake, but I won't again. I won't forget how incomparable anything else is to you and your love for me and--" No, this was more than just a very bad mistake. This was unforgivable and unacceptable. She whined and dug her heels into the comforter in her frustration at herself, and clung to him even more fervently, but voiced no further explanations of apologies. There was no excuse, and she detested the knowledge that she'd done it at all.
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Posted: Thu Feb 05, 2015 4:55 pm
He felt the flood of relief at first, content in accepting her word immediately and without question. It felt so good to hear her promise him that she trusted him with such fervor. Every little fear that had started to creep up on him disappeared with that rush of joy. It lasted for as long as it could, and it even softened the blow of the only thing that bothered him now. She didn't want to trust anyone but him. He heard that, and his heart sank, because it overjoyed him first. He felt guilt for the sudden influx of content at being the only person Mimsy would ever listen to, because that wasn't healthy, and she needed so much more. He wanted to be her everything so bad - he wanted to be the only person she ever needed, for the rest of her life. He wanted to be her best friend, and her lover, and her family, and her support. He wanted to do it all, but his desire to be everything would never be enough to fulfill her needs. And he wished he wasn't so happy about the idea that she wanted him to be, too. "Well, some of 'em are your friends. Shu, Cami, you know. You can trust some people. It's just, if you haven't made a real, face to face connection with someone already, it's safe to assume that you shouldn't just take their word for something on Twitter. People gotta work for your trust, Mimsy. Don't give it to them so easy. But if they did work for it, if they deserve it, then that's okay." He opened his mouth to give her a good example of someone who'd earned her trust, and then closed it, biting his tongue. He did not like being selfish, but he accepted his selfishness in this one instance. He wouldn't actively endorse a friendship with Dwight. No way in hell. "But okay, I ain't saying our love isn't incomper-able. 'Cause it is. ******** everybody else. We're like, on a whole different level." He grinned at her, pulling her closer to stop her from tensing so tight. "But you can trust some people. Just don't trust Twitter."
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Posted: Thu Feb 05, 2015 8:12 pm
The tantrum over her perceived failures halted at the sound of Robert's voice, and she clutched handfuls of his clothing as her breathing slowly evened out again. His words were important, and not listening certainly wouldn't help anything. That would be unreasonably stubborn for the sake of absolutely nothing, and if it caused her to miss something especially critical, she'd have another unforgivable transgression to deal with. "They are family," she carefully corrected, shaking her head. "And I don't--I don't want to, because I had no intentions of ever--" This was frustrating in an entirely different way. She grappled with the inability to properly and concisely express the more perplexing portions of herself, refusing to give up on articulating it. "My concept of trust appears to differ from the concept that you are implying," she tried, and found herself satisfied with the stepping stone that it provided. "It isn't indicative of comfort, or my ability to divulge sensitive or personal information. If that were the case, it would have been only you for a while now. It's...um." A patchy flush was easily noticeable against her pale skin as her gaze flickered away from him. "It's trusting that I can believe someone's words without the standard necessity of questioning them. There is no process or research, and no hesitance. I don't experience a requirement to pause our exchanges to validate anything. It is blind and implicit and that is unbecoming of a scientist, but it's not...about...science." She narrowed her eyes at herself, silently questioning her own mental aptitude and general state of sanity. The status report returned with no flagged sectors (of course), so she tentatively continued. "It's another need. I don't think that I understand yet. But I don't want to share it with anyone but you. I don't want to." With wide glassy eyes and a pout of impressive proportions, she blinked up at him and whispered, "Please."
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Posted: Thu Feb 05, 2015 8:42 pm
He wanted to argue with her. He wanted to tell her that she needed to exercise that level of trust with people other than himself, because it was like a muscle, and it needed to be flexed sometimes. He wanted to say all of these things, but he had no power against the intensity in her eyes, and the way her breath floated hot against his lips as she begged him to let her simply trust only him. He was helpless. Hopeless. There was no point in bothering to try. "Anything." He breathed out, his eyelids fluttering with intoxication. "Anything you want. If that's what you think is best, then I ain't fighting it. I'm always gonna make sure I'm worth the honor of your full, complete trust. Anything you want, baby." His heart thudded hard, in his chest. "I'm all yours." With a sudden, unexpected surge of movement, he leaned in and captured her lips and that beautiful pout in a kiss, pressed hot against her. It was quick, but fervent, and when he pulled away he was grinning without meaning to. She would never understand just how maddeningly happy she made him. Her very presence, her existence, the fact that she was here, underneath him, in his arms, and his. She was going through an existential crisis and all he could think about was how lucky he was. "At least we've always got each other."
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Posted: Fri Feb 06, 2015 9:24 pm
The intention of her softspoken plea had not been to manipulate him into a more pacified state, despite the effect that it had. A year ago, it might have been tactical, something calculated to progress towards a more objectively positive result - and maybe she'd just trained him that well, but she'd lost her impartial position somewhere along the way. She had at some point begun to manipulate herself right along with him, and had been so enraptured by the fantasy that she never once realized it. It was only now, when she was faced with the fears of being lost, that she stumbled across that misplaced portion of her. That early framework of control that she'd so frequently practiced had deteriorated so significantly that it was not at all salvageable, but she could clearly see the place where it once resided. Entire segments had been granted to Robert, which she still felt comfortable with, but others were simply unaccounted for, as though someone had stolen them in her inattentiveness. But her investigation into the matter was postponed with just one kiss. Her breath caught in her throat and her thoughts skipped and derailed, and it was much nicer to focus on the easily identifiable culprit of this instead. "That's what I want," she agreed, smiling back at him, catching her breath in shallow gasps that only dizzied her further. "In addition to you, which I don't want to share either. Fortunately, as you said, I will always have you. And you will always have me." Any remnants of confusion or resentment she felt towards herself were pushed aside, drastically unimportant against the subject of them. Together they were something that transcended their separate identities, and any crisis of her own didn't matter right now. "We will have each other forever. Infinitely. Permanently. Everywhere." Her lips brushed against his with each word that she spoke, a true test of patience, but she managed to finish elaborating before returning the kiss, insistent and openly needy.
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Posted: Fri Feb 06, 2015 10:20 pm
As far as he could tell, Mimsy was calming down, and everything was going to be all right. He was sure he'd convinced her of exactly the right thing to do when it came to Twitter, and it was now time to enjoy the fruits of his labor. Namely, her love. Her all encompassing love, present in every intense word she whispered against his skin, and in the way she kissed him. The passion and thrill of knowing that he brought this out in her blinded him with delight. His eyes closed and he sated her need, returning her kiss like a ravenous, hungry animal. He'd been scared of the animal within, once. He'd always been so scared. Mimsy had stolen that fear away, and turned it into something completely opposite. She turned it into desire. She turned it into pride. He growled deep in his throat, and surged forward, taking more than her kiss in his stride. "Yeah, everywhere." He rumbled, after having pulled away just enough to get the words out. "I like everywhere. Everywhere's good. Gonna have you everywhere." And just like that, Robert wasn't talking about their love anymore.
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