Work Text:
6:00 AM
Yellow awakes, as she had for countless days before that, to the harsh blaring of her alarm clock. She hits the snooze button within seconds, only to lay back against her pillows for just a few more moments of rest. She is aware of Blue stirring beside her, but Yellow doesn’t move to comfort her. She knows by now that she won’t get a response.
The sun has barely risen, yet a thin sliver of light beams through the curtain-draped windows against the otherwise complete darkness of the bedroom. The curtains were open just a sliver, between the center of the otherwise tightly drawn curtains. Yellow must have rustled them as she got into bed the night before. She frowns, and glances at Blue’s still outline.
She’s nearly completely enveloped in blankets, and is curled facing away from Yellow. Blue is silent and unmoving, but Yellow can see the rising and falling of her chest and notices it’s become less regulated.
6:04 AM.
Yellow gets out of bed. She pulls the curtains all the way closed, and is carefully to shut the bedroom door quietly, even though at this point she’s pretty sure that Blue has been awake.
Her morning routine takes exactly 10 minutes. Use the toilet, wash hands, wash face, comb hair, gel hair, brush teeth. Dabs of thick concealer to hide the dark circles and wrinkles under her eyes. She sniffs, and notices her nose is redder than usual. She dabs concealer on the tip and pats it in with her finger. She looks at her reflection for a few moments before she turns the light off.
Once again she is gentle with the door as she re-enters the bedroom. Unsurprisingly, Blue hasn’t moved at all in the time she had been gone.
The suit she intended to wear that day was already laid out on the back of her desk chair. Yellow dresses herself in silence.
As she adjusts the suit jacket, she hears Blue let out a deep sigh. Yellow immediately looks over to her, and catches her turning over to lay on her other side. The blankets have slipped down to expose her nearly bare shoulders.
Yellow picks up her shoes and keys from the dresser. Before she leaves, she leans down and plants a kiss on Blue’s shoulder. “Can I get you anything before I head out?” she asks.
Blue shakes her head, and Yellow places a hand on her arm.
“I love you,” she says.
Blue’s response is little more than a soft hum. Yellow lets her hand linger for a moment before she silently leaves.
Yellow puts her shoes on right before she walks out of the door. She makes a point to avoid looking at the pictures on the wall. Not today.
She makes sure the house alarm is set and locks the doors.
It’s 6:23 AM. Yellow drives the long way to work.
She rolls into her usual parking space at precisely at 6:59 AM.
---
The next few hours go by quickly. Interns scurry in and out of her office with paperwork and reports. She calls a client briefly, and then goes back to the ever-growing pile of papers on her desk.
She takes a break around 9:45 AM to go to the bathroom. She checks her messages to see if Blue has texted her.
She hadn’t. Yellow turns the ringer on anyway.
As she walks back to her office, she glares at a new stack of paper that materialized on her, held together by a black binder clip. A sticky note denotes it as a draft of an acquisition contract from one of her newer clients.
Yellow simply sighs and closes the door to her office. For the next hour and a half, she plays Candy Crush on her phone.
At 11:24 AM, right as she’s starting to review the contract, she gets two texts from Blue. She snatches up her phone as soon as she hears the texts chime.
-Good morning
-Are you going to be home for dinner?
Yellow glances at the case file in front of her, and then glances at the other papers stacked off to the side. Her phone’s keyboard ticks softly as she types her response.
-Don’t know yet.
Guilt wells in the pit of her stomach, but Yellow pushes it down. Instead, she immerses herself back into her workload.
For her lunch break, she goes to the sandwich shop a couple of buildings down and orders a turkey sub to-go. She eats it alone in her office.
The rest of the day goes by without any trouble. Yellow manages to make a noticeable dent in the paperwork on her desk. She only has to refill her water bottle once.
At 4:38 PM, she gets another text from Blue.
-Dinner?
Yellow looks at the message, then at the clock, and sighs deeply. She shakes her head and doesn’t bother to proofread the message before it sends.
-Not tonight. Working late again
With that, Yellow turns off her ringer and goes back to work.
---
At 8:43 PM she locks the door to the firm and heads back to her car. She takes the long way again.
She comes home to find, as usual, a dark home. Yellow flips on the lights as she kicks off her shoes by the door. As she walks into the foyer, she checks the clock.
9:21 PM.
Yellow can hear the shower running as she walks further into the house. She peers down the hallway to see the door closed. Light pours out from under the door, brightly enough that she doesn’t need to turn on the hall light. Yellow is secretly relieved that she doesn’t have to announce her arrival.
She changes into a loose T-shirt and pajama pants before going into the living room.
---
It’s 10:07 PM.
Yellow sits in front of the TV and watches mindlessly. She doesn’t absorb much of what’s happening - two anchors drone on about politicians and scandals, and as usual, Yellow doesn’t care.
By now Yellow is used to the droning of the television and the technicolor display it cast onto the wall behind her being the only light in the house.
Yet suddenly, a soft light from the hallway prompts Yellow to turn her head to see - the door to the bathroom was open with steam drifting out. The monotonous noise from the shower was no longer buzzing in the distance and was replaced by the sound of Blue’s voice.
She’s humming, and although Yellow doesn’t recognize the tune, she feels as if she’s heard Blue sing it dozens of times before. Yellow fumbles around the coffee table to find the TV remote. She knocks an empty cup over by mistake, but manages to snatch up the remote and hit the “MUTE” button.
The TV goes silent.
She can hear the tune Blue is humming a little more clearly now, and she closes her eyes. The air conditioning blows the steam from the bathroom down the hall, and the smell of Blue’s favorite shampoo wafts down with it. Something in Yellow’s brain is lost in the moment as she listens to the familiar tune.
She remembers opening Pink’s bedroom door to the sight of Blue brushing Pink’s hair (a great feat around the ages 6-8). Blue was singing, and she had given Yellow a knowing smile as she ran the brush through the soft brown locks, now much less tangly than before. Pink immediately began rattling on about the book she was reading - a picture book on dinosaurs in the Cretaceous period, splayed out haphazardly beneath her feet. Her pajama pants rode a third of the way up her calves, with her wrists completely bare. Pink had loved that pajama set, and wore them down to rags of what they had used to be. Yellow remembers the way that Pink’s smile widened as she turned the page, and Yellow remembers the warmth in her chest she always felt as she gazed upon her gleeful face. That sweet gap-toothed smile...
Yellow is drawn back to reality as Blue’s tune comes to an end. Yellow turns to the hallway, only to find half the light being blocked by a sloping silhouette.
She was wearing one of her usual nightdresses, though she hadn’t yet dried her hair. It lay limply against damp fabric, and clung to her skin where it touched.
“You sang that to her?” Yellow asked softly.
Blue nods. Yellow can only see the outline of her face.
“Every night when we were getting ready for bed,” she says. “It was her favorite.”
Yellow gives half of a nod and turns her head away from Blue.
Surprisingly, Blue doesn’t turn back down the hallway. Instead, she lingers in the frame of the hallway.
“May I join you?” she asks, almost timidly.
Something old and familiar rises up in Yellow’s chest. She swallows thickly as if that would make it go away. Does she want it to go away? Her heart begins to beat a little faster.
Yellow nods.
The movement still feels as natural as always. Yellow raises her arm to place around Blue’s shoulders, and Blue leans into her embrace.
Blue’s wet hair soaks the shoulder of Yellow’s T-shirt, yet Yellow is surprised to find that she doesn’t mind.
“You seem different today,” she says softly, “Is it the new meds?”
“It’s always the meds these days.” Blue responds bitterly.
Yellow is silent for a few moments. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
Blue is unmoving.
“I know.”
And then, Blue rests her cheek atop Yellow’s shoulder, the same way she had thousands of times before. And so, like all those other times, Yellow turned her head to gently place a kiss on the top of Blue’s forehead.
Yellow only realizes she’s left the TV on when a commercial flashes a particularly bright light across the living room. Both women stir at the disruption.
“Wanna go to bed?” Yellow mumbles.
Blue tilts her head up to better face Yellow. She nuzzles into Yellow’s embrace.
“Can we stay here for a little longer?” she asks.
Yellow pauses, and fights her instinct to reach for her phone and check the time. She casts her eyes down to see her own blanket-covered legs spread in front of her, with Blue’s feet pulled up under her legs.
She misses this, she knows she does. She misses the late-night cuddling and the dozing off together. She misses being able to touch Blue, and to hold her. She misses Blue’s laugh.
She misses Blue.
So, Yellow lets herself have this, just for tonight. Wordlessly, she spreads out the blanket to rest on Blue’s knees as well. In her sleepy state, Blue willing accepts the warmth and folds into Yellow as she moves under it. Yellow accepts her with both arms wide open.
Yellow doesn’t know how long they laid there for, or for how long of it she was awake. Hours later, as she wakes up to shift into a more comfortable position, she is vaguely aware in the back of her mind that she doesn’t know what time it is.
And for once, Yellow decides, she doesn’t care.