the dichotomy of mel telling becca everything about a man she knew for 1 day vs becca not even telling mel she had a boyfriend let alone that she has actively been having sex.... i'm sick to my stomach.
saw someone say that when you play as magdalene it is “a test of boredom” which i am very sad about. because i am playing as her right now and i do not know how you can be bored when learning the archaic history of tassing??
i am so SICK of these writing choices. no one wants to go to war and everything is an accident and everything is set in stone and the characters and dynamics are underdeveloped and taken at face value and no one is loyal. the fact that it was all for nothing and that war is futile and everyone will end up dead shouldn’t be a conclusion reached by the characters themselves BEFORE THE WAR EVEN PROPERLY STARTED? why should i even be watching at this point?
Mel once told Frank that she didn’t need much sleep.
“Like on my last high school band trip,” she was saying, diligently picking dirt out from underneath her fingernails as the two of them walked back to his place from the dog park, long before he knew what it was like to sleep with her, “the first night we - we slept on the bus to make sure that we made it to Nebraska in time for the opening ceremony and by eleven o’clock or so everyone on the bus was fast asleep, but I was wide awake, because I was going through all the fingerings on my clarinet. Being the first clarinet was very stressful, and having a solo?! I probably couldn’t have slept if I wanted to! And - actually, I-I just remembered that - I was so stressed that I found my first gray hair the morning of our performance - um, Becca plucked it out for me, though, she was not having it. And then her solo - she played triangle, she was… really good at it - was much better than mine, but not because I was tired, it was because the percussionist - not Becca, this was another song - and a different, um, percussion instrument - he didn’t know how to count ¾…”
What she didn’t tell him was that, when she was tired, she could fall asleep anywhere. He’d found her slumped over the table in the break room several times. She once fell asleep standing up at the hub, chin in her hand, drooling a little. (Dana handed him a Kleenex to wipe it away with before anyone noticed, which was good, because Whitaker recently discovered that he had a knack for drawing caricatures and Santos always dogged him into making much more mean-spirited ones than he wanted to.) And whenever the two of them went to the bar with the others after work, both drinking water, McKay drinking water, too, and giving Frank a knowing look, Mel sometimes nodded off while sitting upright in her chair with her jacket still on and her hands folded politely in her lap.
When he went out to the yard, he should’ve known that he’d find her fast asleep.
It was late summer, so the grass was glowing yellow when Frank pushed through the back door. Curly was laying in the garden with a bright red ball at his feet, and Mel was fast asleep in one of the adirondack chairs beside the fire pit, legs tucked beneath her and one hand behind her ear like she’d been fixing her glasses when she conked out. Her book had fallen onto the ground - she hated marking up her books, so he sort of hoped it landed on a page she’d already read - and her lemonade was standing so precariously close to the edge of her chair that it looked like it was moments away from jumping. Frank grabbed the glass first, moved it onto the plastic table beside the chair; he picked up her book and closed it. And then he shook Mel’s shoulder.
“C’mon, sweetheart,” he murmured. “Wakey-wakey…”
Curly stood up and came over to Frank, panting. But Mel didn’t wake up, and Frank grinned. She was always cute, but she was especially cute when she was asleep; she looked like a cartoon character. He should invite Whitaker - just Whitaker - over on a day that Mel had to wake up early and accidentally leave a pencil and a pad of paper out for him. That way, they’d finally have something to hang up on the wall over their new fireplace, or at least pin up behind his computer in the office. “Mel,” he tried, shaking her shoulder again, then squeezing her bicep. “Wake up, sweetheart.”
She still didn’t wake up. His grin softened into a grimace - he shouldn’t keep crouching like this. His back already hurt from taking the kids to the beach yesterday, and his sun burnt cheeks had just stopped hurting, thanks to all the aloe vera that both he and Mel had been diligently applying to his face all day. He straightened up and stretched the way his PT directed him to, bent awkwardly to the side at the waist to pat Curly’s head, and then leaned forward again.
“Hey, Mel?” he said, grabbing her bare knee - she was wearing PJ shorts with sprigs of lavender on them - and shaking that instead. “There’s a cat in a tree down the street and it really needs your help.” (Finding out how quickly she could scale a tree was one of the worst moments of his life, both because it was incredibly dangerous and somehow the most attractive thing anyone had ever done, period, no questions asked, and now he was always torn between wanting to ask her to do it every day and never wanting her to risk her life like that again.) “He’s black with one white paw, so it looks like he’s wearing a little sock. We can take him in, if you want. Call him Socky or… something.”
Nothing. He would’ve been worried that she was dead if it wasn’t for the soft huffing sounds she made every couple seconds, like she was chasing squirrels in a dream, and he would’ve bent down and scooped her up in his arms to carry her inside himself if… y’know, that was something he could do without putting himself out of work for a week. He straightened up again, stretched once more. Pressed the tips of his fingers into the place where it hurt and made a mental note to grab his hot and cold packs before they settled in for the night. Then he gave Curly a shrug and a look that probably said “I’m all out of ideas, man. What’d’ya got?”
The dog barked once, loud and percussive like a gun shot. Mel bolted upright.
“Wha-?”
“Hey, hey.” He placed one hand on her knee and while grabbing the ball from the ground with the other - he didn’t even notice Curly had brought it over - and then tossed it across the yard so they’d have a minute alone. “It’s alright, it’s alright.”
“Oh, that was Curly.” She took her glasses off and rubbed her eyes with her fists, then blinked hard a couple times to clear the sleep from them. “That scared me…”
“I know, I’m sorry. I was worried - I think the little guy was trying to help.”
She pushed her glasses higher up on her nose with a knuckle and then felt around in her lap for her book. “Um, what - why were you worried?”
“You weren’t waking up,” he explained sheepishly. It sounded stupid now that he was saying it out loud, the fact that he was a grown man who apparently couldn’t bear to be without her for a moment longer than the whole entire hour that it took him to do dishes and vacuum the living room. “I was… yeah, worried.” He handed her the book she had been looking for, then her lemonade. “I just came out here to ask if you wanted to watch something tonight.”
“Mmm, yes.” She held her arms straight up in the air. He pulled her out of her chair and into standing. “What do you want to watch?”
“I dunno,” he replied, guiding her head onto his chest and then running a hand over her braid. “What do you want to watch?”
“Well, I know we’re both still on our, um, our war kick… we could watch Saving Private Ryan?”
“What?” He reeled back enough that he could look her in the eye. “You finally wanna watch it?”
“I think right now is a good time for it. I’m feeling very emotionally stable, which means that it won’t devastate me as much as it would if I was feeling emotionally unstable.”
“Smart.”
At some point, his hand had migrated from her braid to her face. He drew a line down her nose with his finger, and they both laughed.
“You’re not sunburned,” he commented.
“Mmm,” she hummed. “Probably because I remembered to apply sunscreen...”
“Well, I was busy,” he retorted. “Taking care of my children.”
“Mmhmm.”
“Being a great and diligent father.”
“You’re always a good father.”
“Hey, I said great!”
“I mean, y- you refused to buy Penny that Bluey toy the other day even though she cried about it, so how great of a father can you be?”
“I didn’t buy her that Bluey toy because I’ve bought her five in the past two months and I’m trying not to singlehandedly create a shortage of Bluey toys in Pittsburgh.”
“But they’re mass-produced?”
“You’re mass-produced.”
“Oh!” She smacked her palms against his chest. Or tried to - it was hard to do with her book in one hand and her glass of lemonade in the other. She ended up splashing a little lemonade on his shirt, and he reached up to dab at it while she continued. “Oh, sorry. Um - before I forget, I was - I was thinking earlier that maybe we could get dinner from that new Chinese place near Becca?”
“Uh… yeah, we could.” Becca and Adam lived halfway across the city, and he was pretty sure that the new Chinese place was past them. Not that he expected there to be a lot of traffic to contend with - it was one of the last days of summer, and most people who weren’t working their ass off in the ED or catching up on a week’s worth of chores would be outside taking it in. “You sure you wanna do Chinese, though? You were pretty grumpy when you found out they added spice into the sweet and sour sauce at the last place…”
“She says they have very good, very mild sweet and sour chicken balls. Only sweet and sour - no spice. And, like I was telling you the other day, I would really like to give chicken fried rice another shot. Especially because, when the movie is making me sad, I can distract myself by picking out all the peas.”
“Mel, are you feeling alright?” he asked, raising a hand to her forehead. “Are you sure you were sleeping and didn’t just hit your head?”
She pushed herself up onto her tippy toes. “Please? She also - she said that you get to pick your own fortune cookies on the way out and that they’re surprisingly okay with it if you want to grab a handful and run.”
“What do I need a fortune cookie for?” He smiled and brushed a hair out of her face. “My future’s standing right in front of me.”
Mel’s face broke out into a grin, and she pushed herself up even higher on her toes to meet his lips. As much as he wanted to deepen the kiss as soon as it started, it wasn’t the right time, for multiple reasons - her hands were full, they were standing in the middle of their backyard in a very child-friendly neighbourhood at a time of day when those children were definitely still awake, and Curly was sitting on the grass directly behind them, panting like he’d just run a marathon. Frank gave her a rueful smile when he pulled away and reached down to grab the lemonade out of her hand, taking a sip before jerking his head in the direction of the house. “Come on, then,” he said. “Let’s go get you your sweet and sour chicken balls.”
“And boba?” she asked hopefully, grabbing onto his hand as he led her across the yard.
“And boba.” He turned and gave her a look over his shoulder as Curly streaked past them. “But you’re not allowed to get so full that you fall asleep halfway through the movie, alright? Inglorious Basterds is not as good when you start from the middle.”
“I won’t! I promise!”
And she kept that promise. She didn’t fall asleep halfway through the movie - her afternoon nap meant she made it all the way through and was up for an extra three hours doing research. In fact, Mel was still wide awake as Frank himself was falling asleep that night. And even though it wasn’t as picturesque as it would’ve been in the backyard with the summer sun shining down on him, he’d argue that being in bed with her fingers in his hair and her leg thrown over his hip was an even better place to be.
not enough people thinking about frank and mel doing their hair in the bathroom together before they leave for work!!! him holding her hair elastic in his mouth while she does her braid!!! her pushing his slut strands out of his face when he's done only for them to fall across his forehead again!!! her complaining that he doesn't wear sunscreen (they're literally going from his house to the hospital) which he does on purpose so she'll get all pouty and apply it for him while reminding him of the health benefits (that he already knows)!!! taking turns playing music on his phone!!! is this thing on!!!
