#this is genuinely the most fluffy thing i have ever written in my life haiodhfieihs

[cdyssey]

Some fluff ideas I’ve been wanting to do myself for work wives 🥹💓💝💘: ice skating!! (with the girls or a field trip or a date??) one of them isn’t very good, and the other is good enough to hold onto and guide and giggle at when one falls.

Or Janine invites the work fam out to a dinner on the last day to celebrate another good school year and everyone comes!! Special bonding moments and work wives come out and everyone cheers lol

One more: au where mel and barb live together happily and spend a cozy snow day at home thanks to a torrential blizzard/storm. They do all the blissful domestic things like bake/cook, watch movies, cuddle, read, dance, etc. Either the girls are smaller and they build forts/play, or they’ve grown up and moved out by then, whichever! :’)

WAH, TY for the excellent prompts! I'm posting the third one in this ask, but I'll keep the others in my prompt list just in case I want to revisit them later.

AO3 Link

CW: Alcohol Mentions

—

“Hell to the no,” Melissa’s firm voice appears over Barbara’s shoulder, and before she knows it, the gradebook that she had just discretely opened is unceremoniously plucked from her hands and replaced with a mug of hot chocolate. Because Melissa made it, it has all the works: a shot of Bailey’s, a whipped cream topping, and a delicate caramel drizzle. “You’re not working on a snow day!”

“Hey!” She pouts, craning her head to watch her wife retreat to the open kitchen again. But whatever she vaguely feels of indignation is somewhat curtailed by the sight of the other woman’s hips, the way they always swing a little hypnotically when she walks.

She bites her lower lip to stop a not-especially-innocent smile from rising to it.

“I was merely glancing!”

Taylor, kneeling next to the low coffee table alongside Gina, giggles lightly. The girls have been doing a thousand-piece wolf puzzle for the last two hours.

Well, more accurately, Gina has been doing the puzzle, and Taylor, who had just arrived from Manhattan last night, has been filling her mom and stepmother in on all the latest gossip from her job, starting with her two bosses “losing focus and having a consensual workplace relationship with each other” and continuing with her work nemesis getting on her last damn nerves.

("She never answers her emails! It's ridiculous!")

“You heard her, Mama,” she grins as Melissa brings two more mugs over for the girls. “Mel says it’s time for you to relax.”

“And whatever Mel says goes,” Gina muses, never once looking up from her puzzle, revolving a stray piece between her slender fingers.

“You got that right,” Melissa calls behind her, already sauntering away again—presumably to grab her own hot chocolate—and Barbara shakes her head at both of her daughters.

“I see my whole family is conspiring against me,” she sighs in mock defeat. “My poor kindergarteners…”

“They’re five. They'll live,” Gina quips, finally placing the piece somewhere in the middle. (It’s a part of the wolf's fur.)

“Mhmhmhm,” Melissa agrees vigorously as she circles around the sofa for what should be the final time—a steaming mug caught between her hands—and lowers herself next to Barbara, immediately and somewhat inelegantly pulling her knees up to her chest before leaning against her side. The younger woman vaguely smells like vanilla, having spent most of the morning baking cookies, and Barbara revels in it, smiles at her proximity. “Today should be a fun day. Who knows when we’ll get blizzarded in like this again?”

“Hear, hear,” Taylor says, fondly patting her mother’s crossed ankles. 

“And so what do you propose we do then, dear?” Barbara asks, arching what she intends to be a very serious brow, but the gesture immediately fails when Melissa, all but on top of Barbara, presses a light kiss against her cheek, nearly toppling them both over.

“Eh, we’ll figure it out.”

And so they do.

They spend another hour at least helping the girls finish the wolf puzzle, sipping on their boozy hot chocolate and simply chatting about everything and nothing. Taylor wants to go Christmas shopping this weekend; she still has to buy something for her dad and his now longtime girlfriend, a sweet woman named Carla. 

“Dad gives you his love,” Taylor says with remarkable ease as she sifts through the remaining puzzle pieces. The divorce had been hard on her at first—she hadn't wanted to understand that nothing had exactly happened between her parents... they'd just simply fallen out of love. But time has done a lot to heal that precise and aching wound. Just this past summer, when she took a few days off work to vacation with her and Mel on a cruise, she'd even told Barbara that she'd never seen her mother so at ease before.

It looks good on you, Mama, she'd murmured, squeezing Barbara's arm.

And I'm happy for you.

“He wanted to know if you’d maybe send him some of your fudge over."

“Of course,” she smiles warmly, overwhelmingly grateful at her daughter's casual tone, feeling a rush of affection for her ex-husband, now dear friend. He had always loved her baking, even when she was younger and not very good at it yet. “You can take a tin to him tomorrow if the weather has cleared up…”

Gina tells them about the experiments she and her team are working on at CalTech, something to do with microbial cultures; they’re researching how to more effectively identify mutated flu strains. 

“My baby girl is so smart,” Barbara effuses, reaching over and hugging her youngest around the shoulders, kissing her head, nearly knocking her horn-rimmed glasses askew. 

“Mommmmmmm,” she groans, though a grin crooks at the corner of her mouth. “You’re embarrassing me.”

“That's just what moms do, kid,” Melissa chuckles, the sound loud and lively, always filling a room.

After they finish the puzzle, they spend some time decorating the sugar cookies that Melissa baked earlier, listening to old Christmas albums on the record player. When they’re about halfway through the batch, though, some jazzy instrumental comes on, and Melissa suddenly grabs her hand, pulling her into the middle of their kitchen to dance.

“Melissa!” She laughs, color rapidly rising to her cheeks as her wife anchors two hands on her hips. “Down, girl.”

“Make me,” comes a low and saucy reply, making Barbara’s entire body twinge with delight. She laughs, and she relents, and she allows herself to be swept around the tiled floor, both of them bare footed and a little clumsy, but that’s what makes their attempts at dancing so fun. Melissa’s cheeks are rosy and soft in the golden light, her eyes twinkling beneath her long lashes, and Barbara is profoundly lost in her.

And yet, simultaneously, miraculously, she is so perfectly found.

“You think they’re going to do this all night?” She barely hears Taylor ask somewhere from the side.

“Probably,” comes Gina’s amused reply.

“God help us all.”

By the time the cookies are all decorated, it’s pretty much time for dinner. Melissa pulls the lasagna she had put on earlier from the oven, while Barbara tosses the salad, and the four of them eat together at the kitchen table. Between hefty bites of the delicious meal, the kindergarten teacher finds herself fondly staring at each member of her little family in turn—her beautiful daughters, her radiant wife. She’d never thought—in all the collected years of her existence—that it was possible to be as content as she is right now.

In this present moment. 

Having communion with the people she loves most.

And never having to feel as though she's betraying herself for it.

But she is content.

She is, she is, she so happily is, and tears suddenly well in her eyes.

She swipes at them as surreptitiously as possible, but she knows Melissa—always attentive to her—has already seen.

The younger woman places a hand on her leg beneath the table, the gesture soft, the meaning behind it implicit.

I know.

Once they’ve finished up their lasagna and cleaned up the kitchen, once they’ve all showered and gotten cozy in their pajamas, the four of them decide to wind down the night with a Christmas flick in the living room. The girls choose Elf, a childhood favorite of theirs, but not even an hour into the movie, both of them are fast asleep on the couch, Gina using her older sister’s lap as a pillow, Taylor lightly snoring.

Barbara, laughing silently, drapes a blanket over them and Melissa clicks the TV off, before together—without needing to say so much as a word—they pull their heaviest coats on and grab another thick blanket, quietly slipping out the back door and onto their glass enclosed porch. The blizzard has largely abated, though the snow is still thick on the ground, icing the world in white.

They turn the fire pit on and nestle on their favorite porch swing together, Barbara’s cozily feet tucked beneath Melissa’s thigh, the blanket wrapped around them both, and they watch sleet flurry down from the star-strewn heavens, dusting the trees like powdered sugar.

“I’m deliriously happy right now,” Barbara declares aloud, and it almost sounds like a confession of guilt on her oh-so-careful tongue. She supposes that makes sense—she has long associated her own pleasure with clear and damnable wrongdoing.

And loving Melissa Schemmenti had once been both.

Perfect happiness and unspeakable shame.

But now—the sadnesses of their past behind them, their complicated history untangled at the altar when they mutually said I do—all that is left is the joy. Sometimes, Barbara occasionally wonders if she isn't tempting fate by daring to be so whole in a world that assuredly isn't.

Mostly, though, after sixty-seven years of systematically caring too much about what other people think, she has learned to live in the present moment, in the warmth of her wife's hand laced in hers, in the simple brilliance of a star-strewn sky, in this minutiae of an eternity that God has so generously gifted her.

“Oh, yeah?” Melissa asks, her eyes bright in the gentle glow of the fire. 

Barbara smiles at her.

“Yes,” she nods. “Absolutely."

And she leans forward then to capture this infinitesimal moment—this slice of heaven—with a kiss, softly dividing the other woman’s lips with her own.

It is a silent night, perhaps even a holy one.

All is calm.

Barbara’s future is bright.