HEY! I guess it's just more me dealing with shit through fic but I decided to take my existential exhaustion and foist it off on a blorbo. 41 sucks!! I'm inflicting it on Claire too! Half headcanon, half scenes that may in fact occur in my own household from time to time.
Claire's tired and realizes 41 is different than 25. Leon's a Man about it. Claire may feel like gender roles are bullshit but sometimes she guesses she's thankful for them. The house is out of ranch. The bathtub may have been turned into a foam party.
Claire was tired.
She thought back to her twenties—she’d been able to go on aid missions for work, come home, get three hours of sleep, go to the offices, go out, drink ten beers, eat food from a cart, navigate a subway system, navigate a train system, get five hours of sleep, let Leon come over from DC to visit for the weekend, spend Saturday and Sunday engaging in all-night fuckathon fests, and then go back to work on Monday morning like nothing had happened at all. While all of this was happening she generally was drinking about six beers about it and eating like shit. She’d been indestructible, a constant stream of sass and work ethic on half a night of sleep, eating terrible frozen food and firing off sexts in her scant spare time.
At 41, it hit different. She felt like if she didn’t get 8 hours of sleep she was absolutely worthless the next day. Time-zone jumping for work felt like it knee-capped her. Shitty food obtained in moments of weakness and bad decisions often fought back. 10 beers sure didn’t go down like they used to, the next day. The Metro in DC felt like a harrowing experience. She found herself spending more time gazing out her windows at her multiplying bird feeders, bird watching. If Leon tried to fuck her for six hours straight two nights in a row she’d probably spray him with the hose.
She was getting old. She was losing her edge. Which was why she was laying in the bed, dispassionately, staring off into space as the sun sunk lower in the sky.
She’d been to the Middle East for work for a week, and then immediately upon her return she’d been summoned back to NYC. While in NYC her coworkers had been bound and determined for them to relive their 20s, which led to her being sleep-deprived and half hung over every day. She returned to DC from that feeling like half her soul had left her body and immediately TerraSave began to honey-do her all over the DC metro; every day she was being sent in to harass an elected official about something, to pow-wow with other NGOs about how to make said elected officials listen, to go to luncheons on the weekend. In her 20s she would have just eaten Spaghettios in her downtime around all this, sniff-tested laundry to see if it was passable to wear again, and drank about it.
She was 41. She was the other half of a household. Things like laundry and meals depended on her.
It was Thursday night, and she was out of steam. Out of gas. Tired. Bankrupt. If her phone rang one more time with one more person demanding something of her—if she got one more email copied to five other people with a calendar event attached to it—she was going to pull her hair out. She felt like she needed a small coma for five to seven business days. She felt like she needed one of those hippie-dippie silence retreats in the mountains.
Claire was fried, and she knew there were five other things in the house she could be doing at that moment, but she had no energy to do any of them. Hence the laying in bed, staring blankly.
At around 7 PM she heard the front door open, and she rolled over some. The other half of the household was home and he himself was burdened with his own things that made him want to pull his hair out; her life was busy as a temporary annoyance, his was a permanent train wreck. Yet he pulled himself out of bed every day—way before her, to boot—and managed to make it through things without committing atrocities or snapping at her or being generally unpleasant. He reported he was unfit for human consumption at work and that was how he dealt with it. He was two years older than her and somehow never seemed out of energy.
Claire did not understand how Leon did it. A good solid three weeks of being run ragged had her dead in bed. Leon’s end of things was often perpetual chaos, inflicted upon him or invented on his own in his downtime, and she did not know how he survived. He still woke up before the sun on his days off and she’d find him in the garage with some invented task, like organizing screws or sharpening tools or something.
Claire felt vaguely like she was letting him down, but she was just so tired.
She heard distant sounds in the house, and evidently he was taking note of the lack of activity and lights on and was running out of places to look for her. Eventually he appeared in the doorway to the bedroom, in his immaculate suit, looking at her there on the bed.
“Bedtime already?” he asked, benignly.
“I am exhausted,” she replied. “At my limit. Probably beyond it. I can’t do it anymore. I’ve been in bed since I got back from DC today.”
“Alright,” Leon said evenly, beginning to shrug out of his suit coat, coming into the room.
“I’m sorry,” she managed. “I didn’t do shit when I got home. I didn’t cook. I didn’t manage the rest of the laundry. I didn’t check the mail.” She let out a gust, and looked over at him standing there, unbuttoning the cuffs of the sleeves on his dress shirt. “I’m just…fried. But there’s nothing for you to eat, and I need to—“
“Don’t worry about it,” Leon said, shaking his head some. “You’ve been getting your ass run off recently. I don’t need you to jump out of bed and make me a pot roast.”
Claire laid there and looked at him, still in the moderately dressy clothes she’d had to wear into DC. “What are you going to do?” she asked, small.
“I am 43 years old,” Leon said. “I will figure it out. You just lay there.”
She let out a heavy gust. “I don’t know that I trust you in the kitchen. You’re not going to attempt to cook, are you?” she asked, warily.
Leon looked at her, evenly, and bit his upper teeth into his lower lip in the beginnings of an emphatic <em>F</em> sound. “<em>Fuck</em> no,” he said, enunciating the word hard, looking up at the ceiling. Claire laughed some, tiredly. “I’m going to make a sandwich. Sandwiches have never let me down. Did you eat? Do you want one?”
“Not at the moment,” Claire said. “I’m so fried I think my body forgot to be hungry.”
“Alright, well,” he said, rolling his sleeves up, “let me know if that changes.”
“How do you do it?” she asked. “Be on the go constantly. Getting up before the sun, two hour commutes, getting sent into the field, being a menace all day, running around here with a to-do list a mile long on the weekends. I’d be dead.”
“I am tired, sweetheart,” Leon replied simply. “All the time. Existentially. Every day I feel one step away from collapse. However,” he said, coming to sit down on the edge of the bed, looking at her, “I was informed by my father from ages about 10 to 21 that this was what it was to be a man, so I endure. You just shut up and keep going. You’re expected to.”
Claire furrowed her brow at him. “That’s kind of horseshit. What about when you want to lay in bed and do nothing?”
“Plenty of time for that when I’m dead,” Leon said, pushing himself up. “That’s just not what you do as a man. You suck it up. You grin and bear it. You keep going.”
Claire continued with her furrowed brow. “And what about me?”
“My father had advice about that too,” Leon said. “Half given, half observed as I grew up.” He smiled at her some. “You guys are made of softer stuff than us. Prone to failure. Men keep going through that too, because someone has to.”
“This is like the most misogynistic, most enforced gender-roles way I have ever been told to take a load off,” Claire said. “I’m somehow comforted but pissed off.”
“Ma and Da are old fashioned,” Leon said. “I guess parts of it rubbed off. Anyway, I don’t care if you do nothing. The house isn’t going to burn down. Do you want anything?”
“A lobotomy,” Claire said, dryly.
Leon stood, looking at her with his eyebrows raised. “I’ve got an ice pick and a hammer in the garage. That’s all they used in the 50s, anyway.” He walked off to the bathroom and went in, turning on the light and halfway closing the door behind him. Claire looked over at the half-shut door and then back up at the ceiling, and she heard the bathtub turning on. She furrowed her brow at the ceiling, but Leon was forever running around doing things she did not understand, so she left him to his bathtub running. He was absent for long minutes, and Claire laid there, feeling like a bump on a log. She picked up her phone and looked at it—7:21 PM. The sun was still kind of up. Was it acceptable to go to bed so early?
Leon emerged from the bathroom, looking over at her, jerking his thumb behind him. “Go get in the bath,” he said. “I ran it to the insanely hot temperatures you like and dumped about 8 gallons of all the stuff in it that makes you smell like a bouquet exploded.”
Claire blinked at him. “What about you?” she asked. “Are you going to—“
“I’m going to be fine,” Leon reassured her. “And I’m pretty sure I’d incinerate to a crisp if I tried to get into that bath with you. Just like when I let you control the shower temperature. You’ve got it surface of the sun level hot.”
“When we are in the shower together your objective and concern is never the shower,” Claire said, knowingly. “Or the water temperature.”
Leon just shrugged some, as if to say <em>what’re you gonna do</em>, and wandered out of the bedroom. Claire slowly pushed herself up off the bed and grabbed her phone, shuffling over to the bathroom. True to his word, the bathtub was running and slowly filling under a pile of bubbles that nearly obscured the tub itself. He hadn’t been joking; evidently he’d dumped 8 gallons of everything in there because the bubbles were out of control and she could smell the floral nature of <em>everything</em>. He’d tried, anyway; and when Leon tried something, he usually turned the effort level to 11.
Claire began to strip out of her clothes and re-fixed her swinging ponytail into a high, sloppy knot, and went and eased herself into the bathtub. It was a temperature that would leave her pale skin bright red afterward and make her sweat, but that was, after all, how she preferred it. She fought the piles of bubbles and shifted around, feeling for all the world like she was 8 years old again and either Daddy or Chris had just run her a bath complete with Mr. Bubble.
She sat there for a minute, feeling blank, and then she shifted and leaned back in the oversized tub some, half buried in bubbles. Tomorrow she had to go out and do it all over again; still part of her was oddly incensed that Leon was conditioned to view her as a damsel prone to fits of the vapors and he needed to just man up about it, but then again she felt relieved he wasn’t currently standing there expecting her to make a dinner. She realized she was expecting those things out of herself; the making dinner, the folding laundry, the cleaning up around the place. The enforced gender-roles call was coming from inside the house. Maybe she wasn’t as modern and progressive as she purported herself to be. Maybe she could not, in fact, be everything all the time—the ass-kicking NGO employee, the person who chased down loose ends, the person who pressured elected officials into doing what she wanted, the housewife who baked cookies and made pot pies and folded socks.
“Hey,” Leon’s voice came from behind her, and she stirred some, looking back over her shoulder as he came in. “Which one of these do you want?” he asked, looking at the bags in his hand. Claire realized he’d raided her pot and pot-related things stash and was holding two bags of edibles. “You’ve got…peach rings or these ones are like sour apple flavor.”
She looked up at him standing there. “You’re encouraging me to get high?”
“Why not,” Leon said, looking at the bags. “You do seem fairly content once you’re there and Chris isn’t around to yell at you. Not that I know anything about any of it. Gotta stay drug free and pure for the government.” He looked down at her. “Do these things actually taste like candy or do they taste like ass? I ate part of a pot brownie once at like age 16 and it was God awful.”
Claire chortled a little. “Yeah. They taste just like candy. All of it does, these days. It all tastes like dessert. Which is dangerous, when you buy the brownie that’s like…200 MG of THC and you just want to eat the whole thing.”
“Oh I’d be fucked,” Leon said. “I’d eat the whole thing. If these things actually taste like peach rings I’d eat the whole bag. Peach rings are great. I’d be annihilated.” Claire reached up at him for the bag of peach rings, and he handed it down to her. She pulled open the Ziplock closure and pulled a gummy out, popping it in her mouth and chewing. She resealed the bag and handed it back to him. “There. Just be high and content,” he told her. “Do you want your headphones?”
“No,” she said. “I’m so brain dead music feels like an assault right now. I drove back from the Metro station in silence.”
“Oof,” Leon said, with a wince. “Hard times. I’m going to go make a sandwich and eat a bag of frozen tater tots.”
“The whole bag?” she asked, with her eyebrow raised.
“I fear so,” Leon said. “We’re reverting right back to age 20 or so in the absence of you to run things. I’m not going to die without you but it’s not going to be pretty.”
“I think we’re out of ranch,” Claire said. “You’re going to have to eat them with ketchup.”
Leon once again looked at her and performed the exaggerated biting of his lower lip to produce the F-sound. “<em>Fuck</em> my life,” he said. “No ranch? How did we let this happen?”
“I can’t keep up with your consumption of it,” Claire said, with a laugh. The tub was starting to become dangerously full, the bubbles at an all time high, and she reached out to swipe some at them and then scooted over to turn the faucet off. “I probably need to just start making it from scratch.”
“Jesus, you’re half dead in a bathtub and you’re still trying to invent ways to cater to my inept ass,” Leon said. “There’s no stopping you. Hidden Valley gets the job done. You don’t need to try to take it from them.”
Claire settled back against the lip of the tub, spitting a little at the bubbles that were threatening to swallow her face. “How much shit did you dump into this bathtub?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Leon replied. “An I’m-Trying-To-Take-Care-Of-You amount.” He shrugged at her. “Da just said we had to take care of women. He didn’t <em>tell</em> me how to do it. I’ve probably been fucking up ever since.”
Claire tilted her head some and offered him a patient little look, then sat up a bit and beckoned him down to her. “I think you’re doing fine,” she said. He leaned down and she kissed him, gently. “Thank you. For not expecting anything of me.”
“Sure,” he said. “I think lots of people generally probably expect too much out of you, myself included. Not tonight. Tonight I eat tater tots and drink scotch straight from the bottle.”
“Alright,” Claire said in amusement, as he righted himself, “take it easy. Don’t overdo it. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled program tomorrow, unless someone decides to send me somewhere or otherwise demands something of me.”
“Fuck ‘em,” Leon said, shuffling the bags of edibles into one hand, turning to leave the bathroom. “Call in. Tell them you quit.”
“Sure,” she said over her shoulder, watching him exit the bathroom, intent on tater tots and whatever else he could get into in the kitchen. She let out a long gust and sank into the tub some, gazing into space.
Claire generally considered herself a modern and liberated woman capable of anything, but for one night it was nice to not have to worry about it under Leon’s year 1955 view of things. She percolated in the hot water filled with suds, waiting for her edible to kick in, hoping she didn’t end up smelling things burning from the kitchen that required her intervention.
