#the tomato loop is something i already thought about but getting an ask abt it sealed the deal for me

[sergle]

idk if this is a question for you or for Maya Kern or if it's even a polite thing to ask (I'm sorry if it's not!!) but like. have you ever considered/would it be possible to do skirts with the pattern covering the entire thing, rather than just around the base of the skirt? I love love love your pattern art and I was just thinking that the tomato pattern in particular would be sooooo extra cute as a seamless pattern covering all the fabric 💕

firstly: totally an okay thing to ask!! I don't mind skirt questions at all, I think this kind of thing is probably okay to throw at either of us, but her inbox is frequently blowing up! I've made mostly hem designs so far, but I absolutely do wanna make some skirts w allover patterns!!!! adapting the tomatoes (and maybe other designs?) into pattern grids is something that I think could be so fun. the tomatoes in particular, I thought this was such a good idea so I did a mockup for it:

so that's not a greenlight for putting it on clothes-- but it's a fun good idea that i want to keep in mind for later, because I *do* like the loop :3 aside from that, i already do have some skirts in my mind that are all-over designs, though they aren't traditional pattern loops! these were some skirt drafts from my last batch of pitches, and maya helped me pick a couple of the landscape designs that i'm workshopping!! so there's also that!

[lolcat76]

Folie a Deux pt 9

Thanks to @okaynextcrisis for the prompt, @cassiopeiasara for the best writing advice ever, and @thisisamadhouse for the suggestion that they watch an old video. 

If you need a refresher on where we left off, it’s here. And my apologies, but the sneak peek is buried somewhere in the middle. I added to it on either side. Needed some more flavor :)

The door was ajar when Laura arrived at Bill’s apartment, Grace in tow. She figured that was as good an invitation to make themselves at home as any, so she let them in and settled Grace on the couch with her homework before following the scent of toasting bread and basil into the kitchen. Sure enough, Bill was standing in front of the stove with a spatula in one hand and a wooden spoon in the other.

“Grilled cheese and tomato soup? You spoil me,” she said with a smile.  

“Trying to,” he agreed. Bill handed her the spoon and asked her to taste the soup. She blew on it, then sucked it through her teeth. Not quite as good as her grandmother’s, but better by far than Campbell’s.

“Needs more salt.”

He waved at the spices lined up on his counter, and she eased around him to grab the salt and garlic powder for a little extra kick, trying hard to push back the memories of nights they’d fought over pasta or chicken, more pepper or salt, and whose turn it was to do the dishes.

His kitchen was small, but definitely bigger than the tiny excuse for a kitchen they’d shared in their studio apartment. She had room enough to step away from him as she stirred the pot, but she stayed close enough to lean her shoulder against his while she fiddled with the burner. Close enough that she could whisper that she liked her bread toasted, not burned, and feel his breath, warm against her ear, as he chuckled in response.

Close enough to know she was asking for trouble the longer she stood there. She dropped the spoon into the pot and took a few steps back, crossing her arms as she leaned against the counter. “I hope to God that’s not Kraft singles.”

“Muenster and cheddar. If you think I’d feed you Kraft singles, you don’t know me at all.”

She did know him. Not as well as she used to, but well enough, and that was the problem.

***

The easy peace in the kitchen was shattered the minute she and Bill brought plates, bowls and silverware to the living room. Grace was on the verge of a temper tantrum when Laura shoved a plate in front of her. Carbs and cheese? Her niece was horrified. Better she choke down gruel and weak broth than processed flour and saturated fats. “I’m not eating this,” Grace said, sounding every inch the petulant teenager. “Aunt Laura, you can’t want me to eat this. There are no vegetables!” Suddenly, Laura regretted demanding that Grace finish her biology homework before dinner.

“What do you call tomato soup?” Laura replied.

“Tomatoes are a fruit, not a vegetable. Everyone knows that.”

She opened her mouth to argue with her niece, but Bill cut her off.

“My house, my rules. You eat what’s in front of you, or you don’t get fed.”

Grace looked a little too pleased at the thought of skipping a meal for Laura’s taste.

“And if you don’t eat, you don’t dance.”

“That’s not fair!” Grace whined. “We’re not in the studio now.”

“Yeah, well, life isn’t fair. And when you’re in charge, you can figure out a way to fix that. Until then, you do what I say and you eat your damn sandwich.”

He’s changed. As Grace picked at her dinner, Laura studied her former partner. He’d always been loud and outspoken, but this new Bill - this Bill that was perfectly happy being in charge - he was a far cry from the egotistical partner she’d fought with all those years ago. She’d been forced into being in charge by circumstance and desperation, but Bill stepped into it without a second thought. Or without second guessing, she mused. She wheedled and begged and plotted to earn Grace’s cooperation - Bill demanded it without ceding an inch in return.

“If she’s not eating, I won’t either,” Grace muttered, bringing Laura’s attention back to her own plate.

“She eats. And she’s an adult, so she gets to make her own decisions.”

An adult. Ha. Still, she couldn’t argue with the fact that having Bill around, she’d started making a lot more decisions lately. Some good, some bad, but decisions nonetheless. All of which had led them to this moment in his apartment with a sullen teenager, a stubborn Bill, and a Laura with a full plate and a suddenly grumbling stomach. She picked up her sandwich and took a bite, pulling at melted strings of cheese and looping them over her finger before she sucked them into her mouth. Grilled muenster and cheddar, almost as good as the diner two blocks away from the Met where they’d celebrated the end of the run of every show. Grace could starve, but Laura had every intention of enjoying her sandwich.

They argued for a few minutes about clean-up, but Laura was firm. He cooked, she cleaned. Bill eventually backed down, mumbling that he wanted to show Grace something anyway. Truthfully, she could use a little bit of quiet with a mindless task - she was more than a little worried about Grace’s eating habits these days. She welcomed the few minutes it took to scrub off the charred remains of cheese and crusty soup - it gave her time to clear her head. Laura was always better when she had a task to focus on, and dishes were as good a task as any. By the time she had the dishwasher loaded to her satisfaction, the living room had gone quiet, the lights were out, and she could hear the angry strains of Prokofiev over the hum of the dishwasher.

Laura dried her hands on her jeans and threw the dish towel on the counter. Time to face the music, as it were. The lights were out, and Grace and Bill were sitting on opposite sides of his couch - one sullen teenager and one stubborn middle-aged man - both staring at the tv screen. She settled between the two of them, pulling Grace against her, and then turned her attention to what they were watching.

A much younger Laura Roslin flitted across the stage, ducking through set pieces as she searched for her Romeo. Laura drew in a sharp breath. God, was she ever that young?

Romeo stepped out of the shadows and extended his hand to his Juliet, and Laura couldn’t help but steal a glance at the man sitting next to her. Was he ever that young?

She wanted to stop the DVD, to stuff Grace’s books back into her bag and take them both home where it was safe and where she was nothing but a thirty-something yoga teacher. She wanted to escape, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the screen where Romeo was pleading silently for Juliet to love him. Juliet ran from him, then ran to him, innocence and passion and longing in a pas de deux that had been rehashed for decades before she and Bill had stepped into the roles. She’d seen the greats perform Romeo and Juliet, both onstage and on film, but she couldn’t deny that what she was watching made her long for the two of them to finally…finally…get it right and live happily ever after.

Juliet was her crowning glory at ABT, the role that had won her praise from critics and gotten her a promotion to principal dancer. At the time, she’d never thought much of the role, too busy critiquing every misstep in her performance to even think that maybe the critics had been right. Her Juliet was good. A slight stutter in a pas de couru was nothing compared to the raw emotion she saw on the stage, so she willed her mind to just shut up already and enjoyed watching the girl onscreen throw herself into her Romeo’s arms and kiss him as if her life depended on it.

I know the feeling, she admitted silently to her younger self.

***

“You were really good,” Grace said as they drove through the streets of Philadelphia.

“I hope so. They don’t usually promote you to principal dancer if you’re just ok.”

“No,” Grace insisted, “you were really good. Like, I remember seeing you in the Nutcracker and I’ve seen you dance around the house, but that…Aunt Laura, that was really good.”

The New York Times review was a lot more eloquent, but Laura would take that compliment any day. “Thanks, sweetie. But why on earth were you watching that?”

Grace wrinkled her nose. “Mr. Adama said that he wanted me to see what a real dancer looks like after she eats half a pizza.”

She wasn’t sure what to address first, the Mr. Adama or the pizza. Leave it to Bill to bend the facts to suit his purpose. “That’s what a real dancer looked like before she ate half a pizza. If I tried to do that variation after eating that much, I’d have made myself sick.” Mindful of Grace’s recent eating habits, she continued “But, every night after we wrapped, we’d all go out for a midnight meal. And when it was my turn to pick, I always chose pizza, and I always ordered my own and refused to share.”

“I bet Bill hated that,” Grace said, the hint of a sly smile in her voice.

Oh, so he was Bill again. “He did. But he didn’t touch my pizza because he valued his life, and because he knew I could only eat half, and he’d get the rest eventually.”

“Like your crusts.”

She grinned, picturing Bill in his kitchen, picking at the crusts he’d so carefully cut off their sandwiches long after they’d left his apartment. “Like my crusts.”

“It’s so romantic,” Grace sighed, and Laura couldn’t stop her eyebrow from shooting up as she cast a glance over to the passenger seat. “I mean Romeo and Juliet. True love. They’d rather die than be apart.”

Nothing romantic about a suicide pact, she remembered Bill saying all those years ago.

“Don’t get any ideas,” she said lightly. “True love doesn’t mean much if you’re too dead to enjoy it.”

Or too scared, she reminded herself. Grace didn’t answer, just continued looking out the car window at the safe, comfortable streets of their neighborhood. Not much risk of Mr. and Mrs. Reilly next door committing suicide to stay together. Far more likely that she’d hit him in the head with a rolling pin to get him to shut up about overwatering plants.

True love wasn’t about the grand gestures, she thought. it was about not killing the person you lived with, day in and day out, no matter how richly they deserved it. Or being grateful that they remembered that you didn’t like olives and cut the crusts off your sandwiches just to make you smile.

Grace was still such a baby, and maybe she needed to believe in the idea that true love, a terrible, destructive love that ended in death, was better than nothing. Having had eight years of nothing, Laura wasn’t in any hurry to destroy Grace’s dreams.

Given the choice, though, she’d take a man cooking her a crustless grilled cheese with muenster and cheddar and a cup of tomato soup over a teenager with a vial of poison anyday.

***

They slipped into something of a routine in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, and it happened so easily she didn’t even notice it until she realized that she’d been at his apartment for dinner twice that week and was making plans for him to join them the following night. Barring late rehearsals or Grace’s school schedule, they ate together almost every night. He came to her classes at least twice a week, and she called Billy to schedule him to teach the 10am class so that she could put on her pointe shoes and let Bill torture her in company class on Mondays and Fridays. (Tory’s good will toward Bill had burned off quickly, and she had informed Laura in no uncertain words that she was NOT there to pick up the slack so that Laura could playact at being a ballerina again.) (Tory was about two steps away from being booted out on her ass from the yoga studio; the only thing saving her job was that she was the only one who could manage to make the books balance at the end of the month.)

She was sitting on his kitchen counter, stunned into silence at the realization that she spent almost more time with Bill these days than she did with Grace. He kept talking as he loaded the dishwasher, not noticing the wide-eyed shock on her face as she realized that Bill was fast becoming a permanent fixture in her life. Again.  

“So, next week is Thanksgiving and we have a lighter load before we go into tech at the stage. I was going to head up to New York, but Carolanne is taking the boys to her parents’ house in Ohio. I was thinking maybe we’d take a drive, explore some of Pennsylvania or maybe go down to Baltimore for the day and see the aquarium.”

Her silence finally registered with him, and he slammed the door of the dishwasher before he turned the full weight of his blue eyes on her. “Unless you have better ideas. Or a better plan.”

“Like what, the zoo?”

He shrugged. “The zoo, eating leftovers in front of the TV, or a date.”

She snorted before she could help herself. “A date. That’s funny.”

Bill leveled her with a stare that told her in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t joking. “When was the last time you were on a date?”

“August of last year,” she replied without thinking. Better to not think at all about that night, and that man, and how eager she was to get away from him. “The guy who owns the building where I have my yoga studio asked me out a few times. I think Richard hoped that he could get me to agree to a lousy lease if he bought me dinner and paid me a few compliments.”

“Rookie mistake,” Bill said. He wrung out the sponge, trying to pretend that he was worried more about his cleaning supplies than he was about her answer.

“When was the last time you were on a date?” Laura asked, desperate to steer the conversation away from her love life. She didn’t want to know the answer, but she really didn’t want to keep talking about herself and her spectacular failures in the dating arena. He’d been married, even if it was to Carolanne, so he surely had a leg up on her in the romance department.

She hated to think about the legs he had on him the last eight years or so. He surely had enough recent experience to forget her legs wrapped around his waist. Her thighs twitched, muscle memory wanting to pull him close, but she wasn’t going down that path again. His muscles had memories too, and they sure as hell didn’t involve her, if his two sons were any indication.

“Depends on who you ask,” he answered, and it took her a second to remember just what she’d asked. Dating, right. She’d asked him about dating. He looked at her, again turning the full weight of his blue eyes on her. She was asking, and he was telling, and she was terrified of what he would say, because she knew without him saying a word that her legs and their kitchen played a large part in his answer.

He kept his distance, but a step to the left and he’d be settled against her, the way he used to be when they shared cooking duties. Bill kept eyeing the space she took up on his kitchen counter, and she had no doubt that to him, tonight was a date. She was wearing yoga pants and an old, beat up Eagles t-shirt, and he thought that they were on a date. One step, on hand on her thigh, and he’d move right past dating and into familiar, if ancient, territory.

Years ago, it had been threadbare tights and a beat-up sweater thrown on the kitchen floor, and the two of them gasping for breath after they’d stumbled to the hideous futon she’d hated from the first day she walked into his apartment.

At least she’d dressed up for Richard. She might be out of practice, but she knew that a date meant makeup and a dress and not hitching up yoga pants and arguing about crumbs on the counter at the end of the night.

“Good thing I’m not asking,” she muttered.

“Good thing. So, Baltimore? See some sharks, feed some fish? Or we could just stay here. Up to you.”

“Bill, what are we doing?” The words left her mouth before she could stop herself.

“Well, I’m loading the dishwasher. You’re overthinking things.” He flicked the knob on the dishwasher,and she flinched when the machine purred to life.

She furrowed her brow. Was she overthinking things, or not thinking enough? She was sitting on his kitchen counter, and for the life of her, she had no idea how she’d made the decision to come here tonight, or last night, or how she’d invited him to her house two nights before.

She liked to plan things. She liked to know the outcome before she set a course of action. She was careful, dammit, and here she was, alone in the kitchen with the most dangerous man she’d ever known while her niece read a chapter of biology in the next room.

“I don’t overthink things.” He didn’t dignify her retort with a reply, just a grunt as he dried his hands on the dishtowel “I don’t. I think about everything the exact right amount.”

“Ok, then,” he said. He slapped the towel down on the counter. “What are you thinking?”

“I think we should go on a date.”

What the hell? She was thinking about traffic to Baltimore and crowds at the Inner Harbor. She most definitely was not thinking about a date, so why the hell had she said it?

His eyebrows shot up. Clearly she wasn’t the only person in the kitchen surprised by what came out of her mouth. Whatever he was expecting her to say, he sure hadn’t expected that. Makes two of us, she mused.

“Okay…I’m not going to disagree, but where did that come from?”

Laura shrugged, helpless to take the words back and even more incapable of explaining herself.

“A date,” he repeated, more to himself than to her. “Well, we didn’t exactly date before, but,” he grinned at her, “I’m game if you are.”

Oh, God. She buried her face in her hands.

“I’ll pick you up tomorrow at seven. Nobody cooks dinner, and no teenagers. We’ll see if this date thing is a good idea. Unless you overthink yourself out of it?”

There was a better than good chance that she’d do exactly that, but she couldn’t take it back now. He’d never forgive her if she backed out. She might not forgive herself either.

“But that still doesn’t answer my question. Do you want to go to Baltimore or not?”

“I want to go to Baltimore,” Grace yelled from the living room. Oh, God. She’d heard that? And everything else? Laura silently prayed for the floor to open up and swallow her whole.

Bill wrapped his hands around her wrists and tugged her arms away from his face. “Dinner tomorrow and Baltimore this weekend.”

“I hate you,” she whispered.

“Funny way of showing it, Roslin.” He pulled one of her hands to him and brushed a quick kiss to her knuckles. “Now, go home. I have a class to teach in the morning, and you have a date to overthink.”

They were halfway home before Grace said anything. For the first ten minutes, Laura tried to convince herself that Grace hadn’t been listening, but as soon as she opened her mouth, Laura knew she was completely screwed.

“Sooo…you have a date tomorrow.”

Laura pressed her lips together. “We are not going to discuss it.”

“You’re going on a date with my teacher, and you think we’re not going to discuss it?”

Laura took her eyes off the road long enough to raise her eyebrow at her niece. “We are not going to discuss it. Some things are none of your business.”

“Well, yeah, but if he’s a bad kisser and you don’t want to see him again, and he takes it out on me, don’t you think that’s my business?”

First of all, no she did not. Second, she remembered only too well that Bill Adama was a good kisser. Good at other things, as she recalled, before she pushed those thoughts out of her mind. Third, she was going to have to have a long talk with Grace about kissing and…those other things, and she didn’t think it was possible to miss another person as much as she missed her sister right now. “You don’t need to worry about that,” she muttered.

“Of course not, because you worry enough for both of us.”

What was this, Dump On Laura Day? Bill was rubbing off a little too much on her niece for Laura’s peace of mind. “I don’t worry. I merely consider.”

“Yeah,” Grace said, sarcasm heavy in her voice. “You’re considering how to get out of going out with him tomorrow.”

She eased her foot on the brake, coming to a smooth stop at the last stoplight before she turned onto their street. “What I am considering is throwing you out of this car right now and letting you walk home.”

It was an empty threat, of course, and one she’d repeated countless times over the eight years she’d been Grace’s guardian. Maybe a little more serious this time; a walk in the chilly November night might do wonders for reminding Grace just who paid the heat bills in their house, and it would give her at least a good ten minutes to freak out in peace without a teenage audience.

Grace flexed her feet against the dashboard. “These toes are too valuable for mere walking.” At her aunt’s sharp glare, she tucked her feet under her, shifting in the seat so that she could give Laura her full attention. “But seriously,” she asked. “A date?”

A date. She hummed in response. The last thing she wanted was to discuss her love life with her teenage niece, but she was reminded of late-night phone calls to Cheryl when she’d talked about just that, going on and on about how much of an asshole her partner was, and Cheryl crowing that she liked him, and was he cute, and how did he fill out his tights, and Laura was in her twenties again and blushing furiously by the time she pulled into the garage.

“Lights out in an hour,” she said, “and I know you’re not done with your homework, so scoot.”

Grace lifted her hand to her brow in a mock salute before she gathered her bag from the floorboard. “Yes, ma’am.” She was through the door and into the house before Laura bothered to unbuckle her seatbelt.

“Shit,” Laura whispered. She banged her head softly against the steering wheel. “Shit, shit, shit.”