Chapter Text
The night after they nearly die by microphone and martini, Grace and Frankie crawl into Grace’s bed together and bridge the unconscionable gap between them by linking their hands together over the top of their shared blanket. This isn’t a sleeping arrangement that either of them talked about, but both of them must have known that it would somehow shake out this way nonetheless and all the same.
Frankie didn’t knock before entering, but Grace was the one who left the door wide open.
At least tonight.
And maybe the next night.
And the night after that.
(And a few extra weeks or so after that just to be safe.)
(Just to be secure.)
Grace doesn’t mind the intrusion anymore, not in the way that she did in the earlier years of their relationship when they were like two ends of a rubber band stretched tight to the point of breaking. The passing years have gradually changed them, have incrementally softened them both, kneading all their hardnesses towards each other into something infinitely less mutable—with this something, of course, being love.
Just love but never simply so.
A beautiful, indefinable, eternal kind of love.
A love that transcends life.
And a love that quite literally defies death.
Relatedly, almost losing Frankie is still fresh in her mind, a newly incurred wound that keeps leaking from beneath the bandage, the carnage vivid and undeniable, surely primed to eventually scar.
She shudders viscerally at even the thought of having been forced to return without her, waking up and knowing, without ever opening her eyes, that her friend was gone.
Agnes would have surely seen her again soon after that.
Because she knows herself.
Exhaustively.
The grief alone would have destroyed her.
She would have wasted away, would have drunk and drugged herself to death in the untenable absence of the most important person in her life.
Her roommate.
Her best friend.
Her partner.
There would have been no Grace in the after; there would only be her hollowed, fragmentary shell.
“Ya cold?” Frankie asks, adjusting her body so that she’s facing Grace. She never fails to look her in the eyes when she’s addressing her, as though she’s perpetually studying the best way to capture her likeness in whorls of paint and swirling color. Her silvery curls fall in loose spirals across her shoulders, gleaming in the dim light wash of the lamp.
“Sore,” Grace only half-lies as she wriggles carefully to see Frankie better as well, even if it means contriving to lay on her bad hip. It’s true that her entire body is rebelling against her—a reasonable side-effect of having been electrocuted—but that’s not what had made her shiver. It’s not the physical pain that drives her to the point of nearly wretching. “My ass apparently hit the ground hard when we blacked out. It’s bruised to hell and back.”
“Hah, mine too,” Frankie laughs, patting her rear gingerly with her free hand. “And my body feels like it’s been hit by a dump truck. I can barely move my legs.”
She smiles at this admission to pain, a teasing aspect in her cerulean eyes, an invitation to laugh, but Grace just as readily frowns.
“Did you take a muscle relaxer?” She prods concernedly. “Or a Percocet?” And she can hear it in her voice that she almost sounds a little patronizing—as though she’s talking to a child instead of an eighty-year old woman.
But her friend, rather than react to the condescension, only shakes her head with a small sigh.
“Nah,” comes a strangely quiet reply and then a long pause that Grace immediately itches to break. Frankie’s thin brow gathers above her eyes, all melancholy. “Would you laugh at me if I told you that I’m a little afraid to take something tonight?”
“No,” Grace says quickly—a little too quickly, perhaps—only eager to prove that she’s done ignoring her roommate’s fears after three months of doing just that. (It hurt too much to do anything differently, to rationally accept that a scarily good psychic could be right about her best friend in this entire goddamn world dying. She had panic attacks and tried to call them allergic reactions. She ingested anything that would make her own fears go away: pills and booze and pills and booze. The alcohol burned through her, temporarily eradicating almost every electrically charged nerve that worried so powerfully for Frankie Bergstein. The Valivan numbed what the alcohol could not entirely erase.)
“I wouldn’t laugh at you. I’d just want to know why.”
She’s a logical person.
If her muscles are tense and hurting, she’s damn well going to take some medicine to alleviate her pain.
And by now, she also knows that Frankie’s never usually bad about adhering to her meds either, especially in these last few months when her joints have been locking up more than usual.
Her hands.
Those long and beautiful hands.
That don’t really work anymore.
Not like they used to, at least.
She can’t hold chopsticks.
She can’t paint.
And it is that final, harrowing revelation that nearly killed them both—almost literally. In the infinitesimal seconds that elapsed before their nigh fatal embrace, Grace remembers wishing that she would have known, that Frankie would have just told her.
She swears she would have understood immediately.
Had she known, they never would have fought in the first place.
At the recognition of Frankie’s debilitating pain, there would have been nothing left to fight about.
“I want your honesty, Frances,” she continues, rubbing slow circles into the smooth skin above each of Frankie’s spiny knuckles. “All of it.”
“My honesty isn’t pretty sometimes,” Frankie warns immediately, a rare seriousness in her voice.
“Hell,” Grace chuckles dryly, “whose is? This is an ugly world sometimes, and it’s got ugly truths to match.”
Like the ugly truth that they’re getting older, for instance, and that with each passing day, they’ll feel more and more like they’re doing so. This has been Frankie’s long held fear apparently, and she’s kept it tucked away inside these last three months beneath all of her fanaticism about her death date. She goes on and on about the importance of sharing one’s feelings, about the meditative healing power of being open and introspective, but when it comes down to it, she’s just as closed off as Grace is in her own ways.
(And maybe even a little more so, frighteningly capable of subsuming her pain beneath the veneer of her wide smile.)
“Y’know, that was pretty darn emotionally sage of you to be a WASP,” Frankie grins painfully, the lines beneath her eyes unnaturally taut.
But Grace knows the difference between her fake smile and sincere one now.
Seven years ago, when they first started living together, she wouldn’t have been able to make the distinction.
She wouldn’t have had the capacity to care.
“Yeah, you’re rubbing off on me,” she replies brusquely. “Now spill.”
A pause that’s long enough for Frankie to wince follows.
“Please,” she adds softly, amending her tone. "I want to know what's going on in your head, Frankie."
And don’t deflect, she wants to say.
Wants to plead and maybe scream.
Not anymore.
Not to me.
They’ve survived too much together to be dishonest with each other now, starting with picking up the scattered pieces of themselves in the exploded ruins of their marriages and arriving at a point in time when they’ve cheated death—the sole thing that could now keep them apart. They’ve earned vulnerability between them, goddammit, fought for it and scraped for it and slowly discovered that they've always deserved it.
Frankie’s eyes suddenly seem overbright as she stares at Grace, and with a slowness that can only be tenderness, and with a tenderness that can only be love, picks up their intertwined hands and presses a long kiss against the side of her thumb.
“What was that for?” She breathes huskily, her skin tingling in the exact place where she was kissed, even as Frankie carefully lays their hands back down on the bed.
“Just because." Her roommate's mouth curves upwards again, the gesture exceedingly fond. “Just as a reminder that we’re both still here.”
“Alive,” Grace murmurs, the thud of her own heartbeat precious in her ears, every subsequent breath a miracle.
“And together… that's the part that almost feels too good to be true.” As she says this, Frankie’s smile fades from her eyes but never leaves her lips, creating a perfect expression of paradox, of bittersweetness and aching irony. It is the reflection of the very fear that now trills inside Grace, the reminder of what they had almost lost, the shadow that hauntingly remains even though they’re here and together and alive. “And I guess that’s why I’m a little afraid to take something that might make me drowsy. I don’t wanna miss another moment with you if the big guy—or gal—or gender nonconforming deity—upstairs decides that it’s still my time to go.”
Frankie’s name was on the list, Agnes had sadly said.
And even though she’d kindly allowed them to return together, there is no guarantee for how long, if for very long at all.
Both of them being alive is not a given but a merciful impulse, a fluke in what had been a seemingly precise system.
“Oh, Frances,” Grace exhales, her eyes suddenly burning. Ignoring the unpleasant stiffness in her body, she moves closer to her friend so that the space between them is now negligible and almost nonexistent, so that their warm foreheads are touching, so that their interlinked hands are the only barrier left between them. They cannot physically be any closer; perversely, it still feels as though they’re too far apart.
“Frankie,” she whispers against her nose and then kisses it gently. With her free hand, she palms the side of her face, slowly and rhythmically dragging a thumb across her sharply hewn cheek. “I don’t want to miss another moment with you either. Never again.”
She suddenly remembers a line from the wedding vows she'd told Nick in Las Vegas: As long as we both shall live.
You and me.
Us together.
(She'd looked that man in the eye and uttered these meaningful things, all the while thinking of Frankie.)
“But we can’t stay awake forever,” she continues softly, “even if we fear the night. Our only option is to just take every moment as they come and trust that Heaven won’t be so quick to want either of us back after all the bitching we did once we got up there.”
Frankie seems to laugh at this irreverent summary of their death in spite of herself, the sound hoarse and watery in the back of her throat.
“We did bitch.”
“Just a little.”
“And we also made an angel who looks remarkably like Dolly Parton cry.”
“Only because she saw firsthand how much we love each other,” Grace smiles, now tucking a stray curl behind her partner’s ear, now running her fingers through that loose, silky hair. “How it’d be so fucking cruel to tear us apart again.”
“Thanks, Agnes.” Frankie’s wet gaze briefly flicks upwards towards the ceiling. “You’re a real one.”
“Yeah, thanks,” she echoes softly as an errant tear finally escapes her disciplined control and falls from the corner of her eye. Frankie reaches over then and swipes it away with her thumb, only further complicating the tangle of their bodies.
They're already touching foreheads and brushing noses, and now they're crossing wrists and holding each other's faces, which causes both of them to laugh for no goddamn reason.
They laugh so hard that it’s really quite clear that they’re crying.
In sadness.
In happiness.
In glorious, sweeping relief.
“So I should probably take that muscle relaxer, huh?” Frankie asks when they’ve finally gotten control of themselves—sometime later—and the question is more rhetorical than it is tentative. She’s made up her mind, and it shows in the determined brightness of her reddened eyes, in the particulars of her radiant smile.
“Get me one while you’re at it,” Grace answers, “and let’s go the fuck to sleep.”
And that they manage to do.
They swallow their respective pills with a swig of water from a shared glass.
And they flick off the lamps on each of their bedside tables.
And they compulsively tell each other, I love you.
(Because it is important for them to continually remind one another of this crucial fact now, to never end another night together without saying it aloud. Life is too short to mince their words, to regret not manifesting how they feel into the shape of those three sounds, those deceptively simple syllables: I and love and you.)
And they find each other again in the gently gathered darkness, interlinking their bony fingers in the barest space between them.
Here and together and alive.
I and love and you.
And Grace and Frankie go the fuck to sleep.