okay I need to know about The Hour (angst) 👀!!!
listen. It's really just two sets of bits of dialogue. But like. Not to brag but I kind of nailed it? whenever I sat down to write this??
"Do you know," she said quietly into the dark, "I've never told someone I hate them and meant it. Except you."
"Oh, you must be walking through the world with your eyes closed, Moneypenny." His voice was muffled, by the pillow maybe, and slower, fainter than it was. But she could hear a trace now of that unrelenting, razor-sharp wit of his that had always both charmed and infuriated her. God, she’d missed it. "There are so many people to hate."
"They don't usually need telling," she gave back. "And one so rarely gets the chance."
"Well, I'm glad I could provide... the opportunity," Freddy said, and a rustling and a low, suppressed gasp let her know he was shifting in bed - he never could be still. Idiot boy, he would break himself into pieces all over again.
Secretly, selfishly, she was a little glad for it. It frightened her how still he was now. It seemed lifeless in him, almost grotesque.
She suppressed the impulse to get up, reach for him, try to help. She couldn't keep mothering him for the rest of their lives, even if she wanted to - his bruised ego couldn't take it, and this brittle, tender thing between them, whatever it was, certainly couldn't either.
Instead, she honed in on her first response, on the stab of anger and derision at his words. Everything was always, always about him. He could never let a single thing exist in the world without somehow relating it back to himself. Bloody Freddie.
(It was more familiar, easier to handle than the rush of concern, of pity, of grief that swept over her at every laborious move he made – she resented herself for that, for all of it. But that was far too heavy to think about for tonight, and so she did her best not to.)
"You've always been so condescending," she said, quietly, sharply, with far too much truth in it.