Story: the heritage classic
Summary: In an unprecedented third period turn-about, Casey and Derek stop fighting. Chaos ensues.
Notes: Because of all the great feedback I got from my semi-serious Life with Derek fic, I decided to go and write a . . . not-serious-at-all fic. Yay . . . No, really, I thought the best way to not majorly suck my second time around the block was to not even try for anything remotely good.
Disclaimer: At the moment, I don't even own my soul, as I suspect I will need to sell it to pay for college in the near future. So no, not so much.
The first day starts, as most days do, relatively normal. Nora will later glumly reflect that there was no kindly warning from above, no flash-floods or burning asteroids to clue her into the future. She will be horribly put out by this.
But at the moment, she is busy enjoying the (relative) peace. From her perch at the island, she can hear the shuffle of Casey's feet, moving from her bedroom to the bathroom, and the heavy shuck of the lock. Marti won't be up for another half-hour, Nora knows, and Derek probably won't even appear conscious until Casey has already loaded Edwin and Lizzie into the car.
Feeling buoyed by normalcy, Nora sips at her coffee and promptly chokes as Derek wanders into the kitchen, yawning and scratching the back of his head. He isn't dressed—even that is too much to ask for—but he's up before seven on a school day, and Nora's Motherly Instincts raise its head and sniffs at the changing air. "Derek?" she prods.
"Hmh?" he grunts, pouring himself the last of the coffee.
"Are you all right?" she asks tentatively, even though she knows that only something truly catastrophic could have prompted this behavior.
Derek grunts again, this time most likely in the affirmative, and shuffles his way through the motions of setting up the coffee maker for another round. Then he turns on his heels, mug in hand, and disappears up the stairs. Nora is left with her mouth half-open in a decidedly unattractive pose; all she can wonder is what force managed to remind him to make another pot for Casey and George.
Derek's footsteps are muffled by the carpet, but she knows when he and Casey have a run-in in the hallway, because the bathroom door has opened and his hasn't closed. Situated on the edge of her seat, she prepares herself with minimal enthusiasm to run an early-morning intervention (god forbid Casey and Derek would let another else get a wink of sleep once they were up), but the drip and hiss of the coffee maker covers their conversation.
Calm, relatively non-psychotic conversation, judging by the volume.
The world, Nora abruptly decides as she pushes her coffee away, has gone insane.
The sound of her keys hitting the ceramic bowl by the door is muffled by the low thrum of the television. Drowning in blueprints, her heels hooked over her wrists, Nora stumbles into the living room, intent on ordering whichever unlucky child in her path to make dinner. At first all she can see is a hand, elbow to wrist splayed along the top of the couch, the fingers twisting.
The television, turned to historical romance with an almost unseemly amount of gory beheadings, is left unmolested. Nora wasn't even aware that Derek and Casey could go for more than twelve minutes without turning on each other with talon-like fingernails; the idea of them watching television together is not only mind-boggling but vaguely reminiscent of approaching apocalypse.
But no; Derek, in direct defiance of his No Touching Rule, is sprawled across the couch, watching with interest as Hapless Court Lady #34 is sent to the chopping block. Casey is pressed against his chest. Her hair is everywhere (something Derek has complained about so often and so loudly that Nora can recite most of his rant word-for-word), but the majority of it is tangled around Derek's fingers. Their eyes are fixated on the bright colors of the television, but the way they are situated—Derek lying almost flat on his back, Casey half on-top with her head on the curve of his collarbone—implies a certain degree of concentration is reserved for each other.
"Oh my god," she breathes, and drops her shoes.
Luckily—or perhaps unluckily—the fall coincides perfectly with the death of Hapless Court Lady #34, and the dramatic swelling of theme music and thud of axe on wood masks the sound of her heels striking the floor. Seeing this as a sign of sorts, Nora gathers up her shoes and makes for the kitchen. Neither of her children notice, which is odd.
She needs a drink.
To give them a certain degree of credit, they try their best to keep up their usual behavior. Casey calls Derek a chauvinistic slob during dinner ("Daddy, what's chaovistic?). Derek trips and pours the greasy remains of the taco sauce over her head in the kitchen ("Accident, Case. Really.") afterwards.
Nora, however, is having none of it after the couch incident, and she plops herself on Casey's bed, flipping through a magazine as her daughter finishes with dishes in the kitchen. She is in the midst of being regaled with the Very True Story of How This Teenage Girl Lost Her Endocrine Glands in a Freak Skiing Accident when Casey's voice precedes her person up the staircase.
"The next time you pour a liquefied meat product somewhere on my person, I'm going to slap you into next week," Casey says.
"I love it when you talk dirty," replies Derek; a second later, his head is violently introduced to the wall.
Nora turns the magazine counter-clockwise, attempting to interpret a fuzzy photograph of the teenage girl devoid of her endocrine glands, and strains her ears for further conversation. All she hears is a smothered "Hmph!" and something that is either "all your fault" or "jump the pole vault."
"Mom!" Casey's voice goes up a register when she appears in the doorway. "What are you doing here?" If Nora didn't know better—and she does, because latent sexual attraction was termed long before she hit puberty herself—she would say Casey looks vexed from yet another fraternal run-in with Derek.
"Reading," says Nora. "Did you know that skiing can be harmful to your endocrine glands?"
"No," says Casey, putting her hands behind her back (all the better to hide that she's wringing them). "Imagine that. Endocrine glands. Skiing. Huh. Interesting. I'll remember to tell Mr. Barnard that tomorrow during Biology."
"We need to talk," Nora says, fixing Casey with a look that indicates the following discussion is going to be very serious. Casey dutifully flutters from the doorway, pushing hair behind her ears and shifting her eyes around the room. Nora takes a moment to appreciate the textbook mother-daughter moment; she's pretty sure there's a diagram in How to Raise Your Teenage Daughter that outlines evasive maneuvering, and Casey's picture should be smack in the middle of that particular section.
"I can talk," trills Casey.
"Good to know," Nora replies, attempting to affix an expression on her face that is stern yet understanding. "I came home today a little early, you know. And I saw you and Derek. On the couch."
Casey pales. "Oh," she says. "Yeah. We were watching a movie. About, er, the queens? The queens of Henry VIII. And a lot of people died."
"Care to explain why you and Derek were so comfortable?" Damn, Nora doesn't want to sound like her mother, but she's managing to channel Margaret O'Sullivan rather beautifully right now. She sits on her hands rather than risk wagging a finger or two under Casey's nose. "Just, the last time I checked, you two hated each other."
"We do!" enthuses Casey, leaning nonchalantly against her desk and misjudging the distance by a good six inches. She catches herself a few seconds later, stumbling against her chair and pushing her hair away from her face. "I hate Derek, you know that." She twirls her fingers through the ends of her hair before suddenly realizing who's come before her in that arena. She stops.
Nora's eyebrow takes up permanent residence midway through her forehead. "Oh," she says. "Of course you do."
"Mom, Derek dumped a bowl full of taco sauce on my head after dinner." As far as complaints about Derek antics go, this one is relatively is innocuous. All the same, Casey pats the top of her head, her face blending between annoyed and injured. Casey is a good actress, but Nora is a better mother.
"All right," she says, standing. "Why don't you clean up, then?"
"Sure," says Casey, her smile a bit too wide. "I'll go do that."
Casey, towel in hand, disappears into the bathroom, and Nora hunts down George. He's in the kitchen, devouring what is left of the ice cream as Edwin and Lizzie cheerfully compare and contrast the merits of the History Channel versus the Discovery Channel. In a move likely to win him Husband of the Year, he sees Nora's face and immediately sends the debate club into the living room.
"What is it?" he asks.
"You remember that conversation we had after the wedding?"
George frowns. "We had a lot of conversations after our wedding. Technically, this is a conversation after our wedding."
"George."
"Sorry. What conversation?"
Nora pauses for a moment, and Edwin and Lizzie's voices stutter and begin again. Telling herself that she's in Canada, not KGB-ridden Berlin, and to stop being paranoid, she continues in a slightly softer voice. "The one about Casey and Derek. And anything that might . . . potentially happen on that front."
When George chokes on his spoonful of ice cream, Nora is reminded (painfully) of Derek; there are times where she doubts they could possibly be related, and this is not one of those times. "That conversation?" hisses George.
"Yes," she hisses back. "I think we should be worried."
In the living room, Lizzie's achingly detailed analysis of Mythbusters begins to peter out in volume; Nora and George accordingly move to the other side of the island and hunch so their backs are to the rest of the house. "How did Casey so eloquently put it when they first met? They couldn't stop fighting long enough to pretend to fight? That hasn't exactly changed."
"We knew when we were bringing two teenagers into a house together something would happen," Nora points out. "And even though we talked about possible . . . romantic repercussions . . . we prepared for warfare."
"And to think I'm supposed to be the lawyer," George says, playfully knocking her shoulder. Nora glares, and he quickly becomes serious again. "What makes you think that something is happening on that front?" His finger quotation marks deplete the severity of his declaration; Nora accordingly elbows him in the stomach.
"I came home today to find them on the couch, watching a movie together." When George isn't properly horrified, she elaborates. "Not fighting, George. Watching it together. Calmly. No fighting. And Casey was"—here Nora thinks 'snuggled' is not the right word to use, even if it is the proper one—"sitting very close to Derek."
George does not look as concerned by this development as he should be. "There was hair-touching, George." Yet another unfortunate Venturi family trait that George has passed down to his son. To prove her point, she tangles the tips of her fingers in the hair at the base of his neck. "You know what the hair means."
As his expression turns from amused to horrified, Nora is gratified to know that yes, George Venturi realizes the severity of what is going on right over their heads. The only problem is how to deal with it. Nora mentally prepares herself, and releases George's hair. "We need to deal with this."
"Oh joy," says George drily.
Nora and George both take the next afternoon off, and are sitting primly at the dining room table when the door slams open and Casey and Derek enter. For a couple minutes they don't seem to notice their parents' presence; Derek drops his bag on the floor and kicks off his shoes, and Casey follows after him like an autonomous vacuum cleaner, picking up his bag and pushing his shoes to join hers and the others under the coat rack.
". . .don't understand why you had to be so unpleasant," Casey is saying, but her tone is more gently amused than anything else.
"Ah, Case, Case, Case," sighs Derek melodramatically, turning so he is walking backwards towards the kitchen. He pops the collar of his leather jacket. "This is the Derek Venturi. I'm always pleasant."
"Really," drawls Casey, with far more subtle sarcasm than she usually possesses. "So when you pushed Josh Marcus's head into his locker—"
"I was welcoming a new student," finishes Derek, shrugging. "Marcus can now join the special club of those who can say that they have personally touched this body." His eyebrows waggle, and Casey can't muffle a giggle.
"But Josh isn't blond!" she cries, pouting. "My thesis is ruined!" Her arms full of their school things, she follows him out of the front entrance and stops dead when she sights Nora and George at the table. "Mom! George!"
Derek turns so quickly he might've gotten whiplash, looking like Edwin caught with his hand in the PS2 wiring. He is so obviously horrified at having been caught at being nice to Casey that Nora has to smother a few giggles of her own.
Then she remembers what the niceness means. The laughter is killed viciously in her throat.
"Derek. Casey."
"Is something wrong?" asks Casey as she plops the school bags on a chair and, threading her fingers nervously, joins Derek in front of their parents. He is slouching indolently, but he and Casey still manage to present a rather forcefully allied front.
George gestures to the chairs on the opposite side of the table. "Take a seat. We need to talk."
Derek, veteran of this kind of discussion, seems to take immediate stock of the situation. It's only his hand on the small of her back that moves Casey towards the proffered chair, and she stumbles on the edge of the rug before recovering. She takes a seat, and Derek leans against the side (he's better at nonchalance than she is).
"What's up?" he asks breezily.
"What's going on here?" demands George, as usual devoid of any sort of subtlety when it comes to his children. Nora frowns, but finds herself unable to contradict him. Their only hope of outwitting Derek and Casey is to become a solid parental unity (unfortunately).
"I don't know," replies Derek, raising an eyebrow. "Why are you home so early, Dad?"
"Is something wrong?" asks Casey, her eyes flitting from Nora to George to Nora. "Did something happen to Aunt Fiona?"
"No," says Nora slowly, wondering how on earth she's going to present her case. "We wanted to talk to the two of you, together. We've noticed some recent—developments, in your relationship."
Casey and Derek's expressions jerk to a halt. They look like they have been turned into marble.
Nora's last ephemeral hope—the one floating in the back of her mind, flitting around crying maybe this is all just a misunderstanding—dies a horrible death at that moment. Something is going on between Derek and Casey.
The front door opens, and Lizzie and Edwin appear. Edwin is yelling. "I can't believe you bailed on us!" he cries. "Come on, you can have cutesy couple time any day of the week."
Lizzie's horrified gasp snaps his mouth shut. In seconds, (almost) all of the household is stuck in a standstill, awkwardly looking at one another and then away. Nora isn't entirely sure how she feels about Casey and Derek becoming CaseyandDerek, but she knows that as a mother she'll need to have an official position on them, and fast. As in, within the next fifteen seconds or so.
She is deciding between stern acceptance and benign resignation when Derek abruptly seizes Casey's wrist and drags her behind him into the kitchen. A few seconds after they disappear from sight, the back door slams shut. Marti, who has until this point been presumed to be outside, noisily asks Lizzie from around the corner if Smerek and Casey are going to go make out again. Lizzie turns orange. Edwin turns magenta. George looks vaguely nauseous.
Nora buries her head in her hands. Oh god, she thinks. This is so, so, so bad.
Nora and George give the children three days of relative peace before going on the warpath. By day two, Derek and Casey are rarely seen except far-off; Nora catches a glimpse of them on the couch out of the corner of her eye, but they are gone by the time she puts down dinner and goes to check. When she is putting clean laundry in everyone's rooms, she walks in on them sitting on Derek's bed head-to-feet, Casey writing in her journal and Derek listening to music. They look startled to see her, as if she is an unexpected presence.
Day three, Lizzie has karate and Nora has errands. When she returns, Derek and Casey, grass stains smudged into the creases of their clothing, are laughing in the kitchen. Casey turns away for a moment to get a glass of water, and Derek smiles faintly at her back, his finger ghosting along the line of her spine. She doesn't seem to notice, because when she turns around she is flustered—Nora can tell, the hands always give her away—by his proximity. Eventually they realize that Nora has returned and flee quickly.
After the kitchen fiasco, Nora grabs George and decides that there has been enough peace. The first victim is Marti, who tells them, once she and Daphne have finished playing Duck Duck Goose, that Casey and Derek having been telling each other goodnight all week. She asks George if he and Nora say 'goodnight' really loudly, too, and the situation quickly gets out of hand when George begins twitching.
They escape Marti's bedroom by distracting her with the promise of purple ice cream for dessert and half of the bowl of microwaved nachos George has with him, and take a breather by the games closet before they continue with Edwin and Lizzie.
As Nora presses a hand to her suddenly rioting stomach (Goodnight? Goodnight?), she hears scratching from inside the closet and a furious whisper. ". . .Marti's good?"
"Considering how much money I shelled out for Nerds, I should hope so," someone replies irritably.
Nora lifts a finger to her lips and gestures for George to join her near the crack in the door. "Okay, George and Mom seem to be buying it so far, but I think we'll need to take it a step further. Can you two stage a kiss or something after dinner?"
There is a small pause.
"The day I kiss Derek is the day I move to Jamaica and start singing reggae on street corners."
"Like I want your tongue down my throat. Who knows what diseases it might have?"
"Oh no, you might contract chronic responsibility. That would be too tragic."
"Guys, focus here. We need to get out before Dad and Nora start looking for Lizzie and me—" But it's already too late, because Nora is turning the handle of the games closet and throwing it open.
There is a series of theatrical gasps, and Edwin is the first to say, "Surprise?"
"This was fake?" thunders George from somewhere over Nora's left shoulder.
"But you guys made such a good couple," Nora stutters. (She will later regret that this is the first thing out of her mouth. In her defense—they did. That somewhat terrifies her. She still remembers the draw of Derek's finger down Casey's back.)
"And here I was, thinking your acting was sub-par," snickers Casey, affectionately rubbing Derek's head.
"Your face is sub-par," snarls Derek, elbowing her aside and reaching up to fix his hair.
"To think, we had momentary freedom from the tyranny of Derek's sarcasm," sighs Edwin melodramatically. He raises an eyebrow at George, who has a bit of nacho cheese hanging from the corner of his open mouth. "But no, you guys just had to push the issue. And I would like to add, in our defense, that this prank was entirely Derek's idea."
"Who are you calling a tyrannist?" growls Derek, and as Casey attempts to simultaneously correct his use of the English language and prevent him from murdering Edwin, Nora closes the game closet door and leans against it, cradling her head in her hands.
"Well," says George uneasily a second later, "on the bright side, we don't have to worry about underage sex."
Casey may be a good actress, but Nora is a better mother.
"Yet," she adds darkly.
So . . . I realize this is probably not as good as those eyes tide me over, but thoughts? Was it tolerably Nora-like? Plausible? Anything?