Chapter Text
She could be absolutely insufferable, he thought.
Cecelia was letting the servants take the fall for it, but Pegasus was increasingly sure that she was the reason his white dress shirts had been removed from the wash in a dusty pink hue, courtesy of the lone red holiday hand towel with the candy cane pattern trim.
She had hated them. Railed against their inclusion as part of the décor in their annual Christmas party.
“My dear, they are positively grotesque! Who does this?!” She had pointed to the sample. The embroidered gold letters – C & P, on a patch shaped like an angel’s wing.
Pegasus replied he had no idea what she was talking about. The personalised monogram was adorable.
Cecelia called it kitsch. Pegasus called it adorably kitsch.
He ordered the towels behind her back. She had them removed and placed in storage behind his back. He ordered them brought back out. And so on.
The position of the Christmas tree shifted between two positions on the same ten foot tract. The issue being whether it should cover up the cubist piece that Pegasus had hung over the hearth. Pegasus said it looked like Old Saint Nicholas. Cecelia said it didn’t look like anything at all, and that the collection of rectangles and half circles were lime green, not even a festive red. This started an argument about whether or not the Coca-Cola Company’s Santa design deserved any reverence at all.
They yelled at the servants instead of one another, and anyone without thick skin to take it was summarily dismissed. Most of the dirty work was done through them. Until Pegasus of his own initiative took a pair of scissors to the floofy white synthetic atrocity Cecelia called a party dress. The next day Cecelia claimed (with her most insincere apologies) an accident that resulted in a frame of Funny Bunny animation cels taking a tumble off the balcony. It was from season two, episode fifteen: Bunny in the Doghouse, one of his favourites.
The message was made. There were some lines you didn’t cross.
They exchanged Christmas presents early. Cecelia got him some original art by George Herriman and an “adorably kitsch” Funny Bunny mug. Pegasus got her a new dress in a rich, shiny emerald. But for all its svelte form, it hung loose on her. Even in the time since she’d last had her measurements taken, she’d grown significantly more emaciated.
They kissed. They made up. They doubled down on their conviction to take their frustrations about their quarrel out on the help.
The party came, with the monogramed hand towels tucked away from the guest bathrooms, Pegasus’s artwork on full display above the hearth, and some kind of mess of hors d'oeuvres and drinks and entrée items arranged in a compromise that made neither of them happy. And Pegasus could tell Cecelia was tired and did not even want to be there. But when he tried to tell her she could go lie down, she declined.
“I would be driven crazy, lying in bed knowing I’d left you to make a mess of things hosting this party yourself,” she tittered.
He smiled at this, and waved over one of the servers. But when he held a meatball covered in spicy mustard (her pick, her favourite) up to her mouth, she wrinkled her nose and turned away, looking faintly off colour.
“I don’t think I can stomach anything that rich tonight.”
The party ended a smashing success. And they had other silly disagreements in the New Year – the position of the bed in the sickroom, the tiles and towels in the adjacent bathroom, and how often the window might be left open – balancing the cold against the stagnating air inside.
But Pegasus found it harder and harder to argue with Cecelia. She became increasingly irate, increasingly controlling of even the smallest of details for every greater authority that slipped through her fingers. She became angry when he surprised her with Eggs Florentine instead the poached ones she asked for. She once said bitterly she’d asked for two slices of peach, not five – Do pay attention, dear. He had to retrieve her pillows from the main bedroom three different times before she was satisfied he’d brought the right ones – not too fluffy, not too firm.
And when he tried to banter with her about the curtains – These ones were such a drab colour. They should have bought the orange ones he picked out –
“For God’s sake, Maxie! I’m dying! You can put in whatever curtains you like when I’m gone. Just- Please!” She had never been the type of delicate to mince words. But these ones made her voice crack and tears of frustration gather in the corners of her eyes. He wanted her to have shouted, but really she had only managed a quiet wail.
She reminded him again when he didn’t like the hospice worker she had picked out. She continued to shush him, a damp towel thrown over every disagreement, up until the end. Even on that last day, before she fell comatose, she had touched his hand and willed him to stop speaking, stop crying, stop arguing with her that she might live.
She really was such an insufferable person, he thought. The terrible feeling of guilt hadn’t been enough to stop him from thinking it:
She always had to have the last word.