SOME WILDFLOWERS FOR YOU ╯Mel King
summary : [fem x reader] you and mel king have been friends for eight months. you know her coffee order, you know the face she makes when she’s about to go on a rant, you know the way she laughs with her whole body. you’re going to a renaissance fair together. you’re so normal about it.
cw : slowburn, PININGGG so much pining, fluff (?) yearning, slightly one sided/friends to lovers-ish, soft domesticity, internal monologue that’s totally not coping
The Renaissance fair was Mel’s idea, obviously.
It had started the way most things with Mel started — mid-shift, out of nowhere, while you were both charting at the nurses’ station and she was supposed to be focusing. She’d looked up from her tablet with that specific look she got, the one where something had just occurred to her and she was physically incapable of keeping it inside her body.
“Okay but have you ever been to a Renaissance fair.”
You don’t even think this was a question, hardly anything is when Mel starts speaking.
You hadn’t even looked up from your chart. “No.”
“Okay so.” She’d spun slightly in her chair to face you more fully, which was your first warning sign. The chair spin meant you were getting the full thing. “There’s one in Millvale, like forty minutes from here, and I’ve been looking at the vendor list and there’s a glassblower, there’s a falconer —”
“— a falconer, and there’s a whole jousting tournament and they do immersive theater throughout the grounds which honestly is either going to be amazing or so embarrassing it loops back around to amazing, and I really feel like this is something we should do.”
You’d looked at her then. She was already pulling something up on her phone, probably the website, probably already planning an itinerary. Eight months of knowing Mel King and you understood that resistance was largely decorative. You were going. You’d always been going.
“Are we doing costumes?” you’d asked.
The way her face had lit up should be classified as a hazard.
So that’s how you end up here, in Mel’s apartment on a Saturday morning that is frankly too early for how chaotic this already is, surrounded by approximately one explosion of fabric.
Her bedroom is a disaster. A loving, intentional disaster, but still. There are two garment bags hanging off her closet door, a basket of what she’d described as “period-accurate accessories, mostly” sitting on the bed, and Mel herself standing in the center of it all in her jeans and a bralette, holding up two different belts with a look of intense academic focus.
“Okay,” she says, not looking at you. “The braided one reads more peasant-folk and the leather one reads more like, roguish traveler. I’m trying to figure out which direction I’m committing to.”
You’re sitting cross-legged on the edge of her bed, your own costume still in the bag because you’ve been here for twenty minutes and Mel has been narrating the entire time and you’ve been mostly just. Watching her. Which is a thing you’ve been accidentally doing a lot lately and are actively choosing not to examine.
“What’s the rest of the outfit?” you ask.
“Okay so —” she drops the belts on the bed and unzips the garment bag with a kind of ceremony, pulling out a deep green dress, linen, with billowy sleeves that lace at the wrist, a corseted bodice, and a hemline that would fall to mid-calf. It’s genuinely beautiful. She holds it up against herself. “I found it on Etsy, the shop does custom sizing, and I’ve been very normal about it for three months.”
“You’ve been very normal about it,” you repeat.
“I’ve thought about it every day,” she admits, completely without shame.
Something about that makes you smile in a way you have to press your lips together to contain. That’s Mel. That’s the whole thing with Mel, she doesn’t do anything halfway, doesn’t feel anything at a manageable volume. When she cares about something she cares about it the way other people breathe, automatic and constant and not really optional.
It was one of the first things you’d noticed about her, eight months ago. You’d been paired together on a case study, both of you hunched over the same table in the hospital library at some ungodly hour, and she’d started talking about the patient’s chart with this intensity that most people reserved for things they actually loved. Not performed enthusiasm. Real, inconvenient, overflowing interest. She’d looked up mid-sentence and caught you staring and said what and you’d said nothing, keep going and she had, and you’d sat there listening and thought privately, oh, this one’s going to be a problem.
“Try it on,” you say, nodding at the dress.
She’s already pulling it on.
Getting the bodice laced is a whole thing. She does the front parts herself with practiced efficiency, which tells you this is not the first time she’s worn this specific type of garment, which is deeply unsurprising, and then she turns around and presents you with the back like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
You slide off the bed. Your fingers find the laces at the small of her back and you start working upward, slowly, pulling each cross snug. Her hair is loose right now, falling over one shoulder to make room, and there’s a strip of skin at the nape of her neck that you are pointedly not looking at.
You’re looking at it a little.
“So what’s your concept,” Mel says, because she cannot be in a room without filling it with words and honestly you think you’d be lost without that by now, the constant motion of her voice. “Like who are you going as.”
“I was thinking some kind of herbalist,” you say. “Or a healer.”
She turns her head slightly, even though you’re still lacing. “Okay that’s so on brand it’s almost annoying.”
“Says the woman dressed as a rogue.”
“You contain a whole Renaissance fair apparently.”
She laughs, and you feel it, the shift of her back under your hands, and you tie off the laces and take a very deliberate step back.
She turns around. The green of the dress does something significant to her eyes. The sleeves fall loose and lovely around her wrists and the whole silhouette of her is like something out of a painting and you are having a completely normal reaction to this, you’re fine, everything is fine.
“Well?” she asks. She does a little turn. Unselfconscious, easy, just genuinely wanting to know.
“You look —” you start, and then have to recalibrate because the first word that arrived was not one you’re prepared to say out loud yet. “Really good. The belt’s the leather one, by the way.”
She points at you. “Roguish traveler, I knew it.”
Your costume is easier to get into, which is both a relief and slightly unfair given the circumstances.
It’s a soft, dusty-rose overdress with wide sleeves and a simple tie at the waist, worn over a cream linen underdress, and you’d found a little leather satchel to carry that fits the whole healer-herbalist thing you’re going for. Mel had procured a small collection of dried flowers from somewhere, lavender, chamomile, a few sprigs of something she’d called “vibes-accurate,” and she’d tucked them into the satchel with great focus and ceremony while you were getting dressed.
Now you’re both standing in front of her bathroom mirror doing hair, which has become a collaborative project without anyone deciding that.
She’s doing something intricate with hers, a loose braid with little sections pulled out to frame her face, and she keeps making small adjustments and then second-guessing them, and you’ve already done yours mostly but you’re still standing there because you’re helping hold a pin, or at least that’s why you’ve told yourself you’re still standing there.
“Okay and then I want to do yours,” she says, glancing at you in the mirror.
“I know but I want to put some of the flowers in it.” She meets your eyes in the mirror, briefly, and something in her expression is soft in a way that makes your chest do something embarrassing. “If that’s okay. It would look really pretty.”
The word pretty coming from her mouth in reference to you does something to you that you’re going to have to deal with privately, at a later date, in the dark.
So you stand there while she works small dried flowers into your hair, her hands careful, occasionally tilting your head gently with two fingers at your jaw to get a better angle. You’re looking at the mirror. At her face while she focuses. She has that expression she gets when something matters to her , brow slightly furrowed, bottom lip caught just barely between her teeth, the same face she makes going over a patient’s chart, the same face she makes when she’s explaining something she loves, the same face you’ve memorized completely without intending to.
“Can I ask you something,” you say.
“Mm.” She’s focused. There’s a lavender sprig in her hand.
“How did we end up like this.” You don’t totally know what you mean when you say it. You mean at a Renaissance fair. You also might mean something else.
She looks at your reflection. “What do you mean?”
“Like —” you try to find the version of this that’s safe to say. “Eight months ago I hardly knew you and now you’re putting flowers in my hair at eight in the morning on a Saturday.”
Something moves across her face, was she blushing? you held in a smile.
“I think,” she says, carefully, going back to the flowers, “that we just fit.” A pause. “Like, I don’t know. Some people you meet and it’s just… it makes sense. That they’re in your life.”
You look at her in the mirror. She’s not looking back, focused on the last pin, but there’s color at the top of her cheekbones that wasn’t there before.
“Yeah,” you say quietly. “It does.”
She smooths a piece of your hair back. Steps back to assess. Something about the way she looks at you then, she’s so… unhurried, like she’s got all the time in the world, like she’s looking at something that matters, god you might be delusional.
“There,” she says. Her voice is a little different. “Perfect.”
You look at yourself in the mirror. At the flowers in your hair. At her standing just behind your shoulder, still watching.
And you think, with the specific desperation of someone who has been thinking it for a while and is running out of room to put it — I think I’m in love with you.
You think it and you don’t say it. You turn around and smile at her instead, and she grins back, and she grabs her leather belt off the counter and says okay let’s go, I want to get there before the joust starts, and you follow her out the door.
But you almost do, when she reaches back without looking and takes your hand as you’re walking down the stairs — just to pull you along, just because she’s excited, and she says come on, come on, and your heart does something loud and inconvenient in your chest.
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