#condolences op | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

cuckoo-on-a-string · 11 days ago

Text

Yearning

MDNI

Price's love is messy; it comes courting with grave dirt on its shoes.

CW: widow!reader, parent!reader, funerals, graves, hint of obsessive behavior

He watches the mourners file by, squeezing the new widow’s hands with feeling, then moving along, leaving her palms bare, baptized in everyone else’s clammy sweat. A beggar left to fill up on condolences and wrap her children in the warm embrace of near-strangers’ thoughts and prayers. Nothing a young mother can use. Nothing a woman who framed her life around her husband’s career can fall back against.

She needs the world and a table to lay it out on.

No one volunteers. No one steps up. Everyone respects her and her husband’s memory too much to offer the kind of help she and her little girls need.

Price can disrespect her just enough to save her.

Her girls sit in the front row wearing black sundresses – one in polka dots, one with butterflies. Those weren’t bought for funerals. The new widow’s black cotton skirt is a little too casual, at odds with her pressed blouse. They’re unprepared, and he already sees the way the woman is pulling their purse strings tight like she can rub pence together to make a pound. She’s magic, aye, but no alchemist. She’s made life, but she can’t bring back the dead.

When his turn comes, he can’t bring himself to take her hand. With everything in his heart, it would be profane, especially standing beside her husband’s closed coffin.

It had been a bad op. Rotten from the start, and though his taskforce wasn’t involved, grave murmurs of how light the body bags were upon their return echoed across base. He thinks she knows. It’s printed in dark crescents under her eyes, bloodshot despite her best efforts. Most of her makeup is on the balled-up tissue set behind the arrangement of white roses to her right, her efforts to appear collected and strong melted into faint streaks to reveal everything women paint themselves to hide.

She is too real to touch, so he folds his hands behind his back and nods respectfully. “He was a good man. A good soldier.”

Her smile is wan and polite to the point of pain. “Thank you, Captain Price. He always spoke highly of you. I’m sure he’d be glad to have left an impression.”

Nodding, pinching together his own weak smile, he glances at the girls. “How are they holding up?”

“They don’t understand it yet,” she says, taking the opportunity to check on her children around his shoulder. “But they’re upset and hurt. And because they don’t know why it makes it worse.”

He takes a deep breath. “Five-years-old last April, right?”

A little light returns to her flat expression, and he’s glad he asked.

“Yeah.”

They both watch the girls for another minute. They’re surrounded by coloring books, and their respective baby blankets sit to the side, neatly folded and ready for an emergency.

He’s glad he waited for the crowd to thin.

“And you?” He swivels, catching her eyes and angling his head to keep the connection when she reflexively drifts to the side. "Are you holding together?"

"As well as can be expected. I found one of his lost socks in the laundry yesterday and –" She pauses, and it must dawn on her that was a little too honest for polite society, and she backs away from it. “I’m fine, really.”

She’s clearly anything but. Nor should she be.

Still reluctant to reach out, he sidles a half step closer, ensuring his words are for her alone.

“Just worry about yourself. Take care of your girls. All this, all of them,” he gestures at the wreathes, and the guests, and the stiff funeral director lurking by the door, “they’ll take care of themselves. You don’t owe them anything. Do you understand?”

Her next breath shakes, and he flexes his hands to resist grabbing her, pulling her out of the limelight to a dark corner where she can cry and be a mess without worries or witnesses.

She blinks rapidly, and her hand finds his arm as she smiles through teary eyes.

“You don’t have to worry about us, Captain. Thank you.”

Still prioritizing the performance. Tending to his emotions over her own grief.

It isn’t the time or place, he knows, and he nods again with another flinching smile, stepping back so a new string of mourners can burden her with their razor-wire recollections and hollow words.

He aches to stop and speak to the girls, but they’re safely tucked away in their world of paper and crayons for the moment, and he doesn’t want to disturb them. No extended family babysit while the widow performs her duties, and the twins sit in a bubble of silence and pitying glances. He hopes they’ve had time to cry, that they’ll have space with their mother to figure out what they’ve lost.

Without permission or authority to play another role, Price finds a seat in the back of the hall, eye on the exits, arms folded. This is all he’s allowed for now, so he’ll keep watch until the time comes to speak. It’s his vigil to honor the fallen before he broaches dreams of the future.

-------

There’s no sense in this, not tactically, not practically. His entire plan is to make a selfish mistake. All his training can do is map inevitable risks and try to catch the matches before they strike, before they fall and catch on the dry fuel he’s gathering.

He looks up at the house and imagines it in flames. He’s the torch, standing at the threshold, begging for a soft place to land, even if it puts the whole structure at risk.

A whiskey sounds nice as he festers in his thoughts. But if he can’t do it sober, he shouldn’t be doing it at all. She deserves that much. They deserve that much.

It hasn’t stopped raining since the funeral. The graveside was so foul with mud the twins couldn’t get close enough to throw their flowers into the open pit. The white petals fell short, lying soggy and stained at the edge of the abyss. He’d watched their mother wipe their shoes clean as they sat with their feet dangling out the side of the car. She didn’t bother with her own, just kicking the heels off and slipping behind the wheel in stockinged feet.

She shouldn’t have had to drive herself home from her husband’s funeral. He was sure she cooked dinner when they returned, cleaned up the girls, and found herself too exhausted to mourn or sleep by the time the moon rose.

He waited three nights. He forced himself to, mocking his own rush to step into dead men’s shoes. But he never knew when he’d be called away, and without her anchor, she could be lost to the wind by the time he returned.

The rain drips from his nose and gathers in his eyebrows. His beanie is heavy with it, and as he finally lifts a hand to knock, he realizes just how he’ll enter her home: a fresh mess to clean up.

Too late to think of an umbrella now.

The porch light flicks on. Her shadow moves across the peephole, and he listens with approval as both a deadbolt and security chain clatter free.

The door opens. His breath catches.

She’s in a bathrobe, a thick fluffy thing that looks warm and soft. He can see the seam of a tank top, and her pajamas go all the way to her ankles, but the cozy intimacy is staggering. The kitchen light reflects off the hall mirror, haloing her mussed hair and weary, curious expression.

Beautiful. Effortlessly.

He isn’t here because he deserves her. The reminder barely keeps him from making his excuses and escaping into the night. He’s selfish, and she needs someone willing to selfish for her own sake.

“May I come in?”

“Of course.” She’s looking at the rain soaking his clothes, sizing up the problem she needs to manage.

As he steps through and peels off his soaked hat, she retreats to the guest bath to fetch a towel. He hangs his jacket next to a bomber jacket much too large for the woman of the house, and he unlaces his boots, leaving them beside a fleet of little sneakers and sandals in every color of the rainbow.

“Here you go.”

He accepts the towel, drying his face and neck as she leads him into the kitchen. At least he won’t leave a damp spot on her couch or the living room carpet. She pops on the kettle, and he takes a seat at the kitchen table. A tower of boxes looms in the corner, labeled but empty. A stack of flat containers wait to be assembled beside them.

She catches him looking as she drops tea bags into mugs, and says, “They gave us through the end of the month. It’s hard to pack when it feels like the girls need everything in the house at least once a day, though.”

A hum masks his displeasure. The military’s efficiency is downright criminal at times, especially when there’s an opportunity to trim the budget.

“Know where you’re going?”

“Not yet.”

The tension flows out of him. It disappears down the windows, caught in smeary raindrops that belong outside this little safe haven. He’s making the right decision. He knows it now.

Because he’s managed to wait three nights to approach – lurking at the end of her street, counting the hours like a fairytale creature making a bargain – he manages to wait for the kettle to sing, the water to burble over the tea, and the widow to come to the table with both cuppas in hand.

He accepts his with a smile. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” She isn’t looking at him. She should look comfortable here, at her own table, but she’s diminished, crumbling in, and there’s no confidence left in her slumped posture. Her finger trails the lip of her mug in an infinite circle.

He waits for her to find her courage, and he’s ready when she finally meets his eyes and asks, “Why are you here, Captain Price?”

It’s his turn to adjust his seat, leaning in as they get to the heart of the matter. Hands clasped, resting on the table where she can see them.

He’s waited, and waited, and now –

“Marry me.”

It’s honest and blunt and hopefully romantic in retrospect, but this isn’t the right time for flowers and pretty gifts. Her survival instincts are in control, and he knows he’s the only ship for miles.

“What?” Her eyes flick over his face, bouncing between his eyes, looking for the joke, but it doesn’t come, and waits until the seed roots before explaining.

“I know… a little of your story,” he says, stepping carefully for fear of landmines. He wets his lips, buying a moment between thoughts. “Without a place to return to, life after the military is… challenging for widows. Especially with children.”

Even though they’re asleep upstairs, the twins’ presence lingers. Crumbs that escaped their mother’s eye on the table. A small plastic tiger under the chair to his right. Fingerprints low on the glass door to the back yard.

Their sippy cups sit on the drying rack, and magnetic letter spell their names on the fridge.

Anna and Nora.

He clears his throat, takes a sip of tea.

“I want to marry you,” he confesses. And it is a confession. Good men did not yearn for widows before grass grew on their husbands’ graves. “I don’t expect anything, but you’ll keep military benefits, and you can decide whether or not you want to stay on base.”

“You wouldn’t offer if you didn’t expect anything.”

Her knuckles strain around her mug, and she sits up straight, alert. He doesn’t move. Breathes slowly. Keeps his head and prays he hasn’t fucked everything up in his first few sentences.

“It would be nice,” he murmurs, “to come home to people. I’m deployed more often than not, and that doesn’t leave time to keep a place of my own. If you can keep a room for me – tolerate me when I’m off-duty – that’s all I ask.”

She’s still hesitating, but war widows understand loneliness. They practice long before they bury their partners. And he isn’t lying. He will never ask for more, no matter how much he hopes for it.

He only has to plant the seed tonight. There’s time yet for it to grow. It needs to see sunlight, and she hasn’t seen that since the funeral.

“I don’t know.” There’s a battle in her eyes he has no place in. He doubts she’ll be able to sleep at all. “It’s kind of you to offer, but…”

She trails off, but she doesn’t give him a hard no. It’s time to leave before she battles herself into a corner.

“Think it over. I’m happy to wait. I know this is sudden, but I wanted to ask face-to-face, and there’s no telling when I’ll be called in.”

Moving slowly, he grabs a sheet of construction paper the girls left on the counter and writes his number in army green Crayola.

“If you want to talk more about it, or talk about anything, just let me know.”

He stands and smiles, folding the towel she lent him and setting it by his half-empty mug. “It’s not much of a proposal, but I care about what happens to you and your girls. World isn’t always kind to those it should be, and I’d be honored to help. In any way I can.”

He leaves before he can say anything he’ll regret. In a moment, there’s nothing left of him in her home but the puddle from his boots and a wet streak on the bomber jacket from where it hung shoulder-to-shoulder with the captain’s.

#captain john price x reader #john price x reader #captain price x reader #cod x reader #cod fanfic #marriage of convenience #fic: yearning

414 notes · View notes