One Day at a Time, Chapter Seven -- Desperate Housewives
One Day at a Time
Chapter Seven
Pairing: Bree/Katherine
Rating: PG-13, at least at the moment
Format: Chaptered
Summary: Katherine moves in with Bree to help her quit drinking, and learns there are a few things she herself could use help with as well.
Note: Work-in-progress.
Fifteen seconds later Katherine is out of the house, and on the brink of losing it completely, and realizing that she has nowhere to go.
She had been on her way back to her own house before she realized that she'd cut off her escape route by starting those renovations. Her house will be full of workmen and Katherine doesn't cry in front of people, half her adult life has essentially been based around the concept that she does not cry in front of people, and then Bree came along and god*dammit*
This is not going to happen. It's just -- it's not going to happen. She's half-running down the sidewalk and she is going to start crying any second and she can already see little bits of faces peering out at her through almost-closed curtains, and this is just not going to happen this way. And just where is she supposed to go? Where can anyone go around here to get any privacy? She shakes her hair over her shoulders, hiding her face as much as possible, and tries to slow down. Oh, goddamn Bree and every particle of her pathetic alcoholic self for somehow making Katherine believe that there was any way she could let herself cry without a locked door to hide her and still be safe, because now that she's started letting herself cry she doesn't know how to stop, and the fact that she let herself entrust her vulnerability to a frigging addict would be hilarious if it weren't so stupid. If it weren't so terrifying. Katherine let Bree talk her into taking one hell of a risk solely on the basis of the fact that Bree was supposedly taking just as big a risk for her, but apparently Bree is not interested in risks anymore. What she's interested in is booze. Katherine could have killed Bree in that moment, but obviously Bree can handle that perfectly well by herself so long as she's got the cash for a cheap bottle of wine, so Katherine might as well leave her to it and -- and -- and what now?
Somehow she's heading in the direction of Dylan's grave. She supposes her feet, which seem to have gone on autopilot, have decided to take her to the only place outside of her house (or Bree's kitchen, damn it all!) that she has ever let herself cry. This is stupid because she thought what she had decided was that she was not going to cry, she was going to get herself under control and then decide very calmly and reasonably where to go from here. Like maybe Honolulu. Or off a cliff. Something rational like that.
So Dylan's grave is not a rational place to be going, but Katherine goes there anyway, and once she's there she lets herself fall apart for a few minutes. She's not thinking, and she's not even really sure what she's feeling; she's just letting it all go, like pus from a lanced sore. She feels awful and soiled and relieved and that's about it. When she stops crying, she's still alone -- thank goodness she was never crazy enough to bring Bree here, although Bree is probably too busy getting plastered right now to follow her anyway -- and she feels surprisingly empty. She does a little emotional inventory, taking stock of where she's at and what her options are now.
One: she's feeling betrayed. Why? Bree wasn't getting sober for Katherine's sake. Bree's betrayed herself. She hasn't betrayed Katherine. Obviously Katherine's gotten too wrapped up in Bree's life. Which leads her to --
Two: She feels stupid. Incredibly stupid. She let herself... let herself...
The emotional inventory was not a good idea. Katherine puts her head down and cries again.
Because there's no use, now, denying what Bree has meant to her. Katherine's not just concerned for her welfare and she's certainly not trying to prop up a business partner to try and keep their company intact. She fucking fell in love with Bree Hodge, and she did it at the worst time imaginable. Katherine tries to think back to when it started, and she honestly can't be sure. Acknowledging it when it first started would have been too threatening, she supposes. What she does know is that the day that Wayne pressed that gun against Bree's knee and threatened to shoot if Katherine wouldn't talk, Katherine had felt a shock of terror worse than anything she'd felt even when she'd known that Wayne had gotten hold of Adam; and she knows that from that day on there had been a little nervous tremble in her stomach and a little revving of adrenaline every time she and Bree had worked together; and she knows that she'd finally given herself an excuse to let things begin to get out of control the day that she found Bree passed out with that half-empty glass of wine next to her. Katherine might come off as cold and unapproachable enough, but she has a strong strain of the caretaker in her nevertheless: it's so much safer to let yourself care about someone who needs you than to let yourself care about someone that you need. The problem with this, the thing Katherine always manages to forget, is that she always winds up needing those people anyway. It never stays safe for long.
And this time she screwed up worse than she ever has before, because she let Bree *know* that Katherine needed her. She let herself open up. She let Bree see the ugliness and the guilt and the pain and everything else she's ever locked away from the rest of the world. And... and she let her -- well, Katherine's not sure -- but she thinks she might have let Bree see even more. She remembers the moment when Bree held her as she cried and then how things changed, and how she'd thought Bree felt it, and then she remembers how she's let that affect the way she's behaved ever since. She thinks of the understanding that she had been stupid enough to think was growing between them. She thinks of the tiny hints of flirtation she'd let creep into her stance and her expressions over the last week or so, the way she'd taken to sitting just a little too close to Bree on the couch, all of the minute ways she'd begun to show that she was maybe interested in shifting the tenor of their friendship towards something a little riskier, and a little more fun. There was probably not a single thing she had done that had been overt enough to catch Bree's attention, but that doesn't matter right now. The point is that Katherine had let herself start playing with fire this way in the first place, and that had been the clearest demonstration yet of just how reckless she'd become with her own emotions.
She's just been lonely. She's been so damn lonely. But she'd never let loneliness make her stupid before. Why had she done it this time?
She doesn't know the answer, but the truth is that it doesn't matter. So she sits on the grave of the child whose loss had first plunged her into loneliness, and she holds one of the little stones on her child's grave because there's nothing else to hold, and she tries to figure out how to get back to being smart again.
She's there for a long while, taking the time to reassemble the pieces of the old Katherine Mayfair, checking the armor to make sure it's intact. It's a relief, actually, after the emotional rollercoaster of these last few weeks, the time she'd spent tossing around the idea of letting herself become someone altogether different from the woman she'd chosen to be for so long. She'd had no idea who that woman might be or how to go about learning to be her, but she knows how to do this, now. So she'll be a cold, hard bitch again. People say that like it's a bad thing -- so much the worse for them. Katherine, on the other hand, is remembering what she'd let herself forget, that she knows better than anyone the advantages and security of being a bitch.
And once she's made that decision, her choices from here on out are perfectly clear. She'll go back to Bree's house, retrieve her possessions, and find a hotel outside of Fairview where she can stay for awhile. She'll continue to work with Bree because that's what she does right now, and she's good at it, and there's no reason to stop doing something she is good at. But from now on she's not going to try to protect Bree from herself. When Bree drinks herself half-comatose and misses an event, Katherine will pick up the slack, make it clear that she is perfectly competent to handle matters on her own, and refuse to make excuses for Bree. It's not going to take long for Bree to implode, Katherine suspects, and she may well drop out of the company altogether. But just in case she gets stubborn about keeping a finger in the pie -- or gets herself sober and regains her professionalism, although that seems highly unlikely at this point -- Katherine will make a special effort to bring in clients outside of Fairview, and she will keep a careful eye on those clients, measuring their needs and working hard to secure their loyalty. Once she's built up a core of such customers, if she hasn't already taken over the business in Fairview, she'll split off from Bree and form her own company, poaching off those clients she'd cultivated and using them to form the base of a new clientele. She's always been a bit of a second banana in her partnership with Bree anyway, which galls her because she's the better cook. Bree has the history in Fairview, though, and therefore she's the one with the connections. Thinking it over, Katherine's not sure why she's let things go on as they have been for this long, even. If she'd been looking out for herself the way she should have been all along, she'd have done this long ago.
So that's it. Simple. She won't have to go to Honolulu or Anchorage or make any of the other huge crazy changes she had considered in that first half-hour of weepy overreaction. She won't have to go far at all. She'll still (she fingers the stone in her hand) be able to stay near Dylan's grave, keep that bit of connection with one of the few things in her life that has ever really mattered. Over time maybe she'll reconcile with her living daughter, and if so, things will change then. But she can't depend on that, and her chest is growing tight again just thinking about it. Why does she keep hoping for things like that? Hoping Dylan will come around, hoping there'll be a lover or new husband to fill some of the empty space in her life, hoping Bree -- hoping whatever it was she'd hoped for from Bree? How many times does she have to get her heart ripped out before she stops letting other people have access to it?
Work. She'd told Bree, just before she'd moved in, to fill the void in her life with work. It's high time she took her own advice.
Gently, she replaces the stone at the base of the cross, and goes to collect her things from Bree's house.
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six (previous chapter)
Chapter Seven
Pairing: Bree/Katherine
Rating: PG-13, at least at the moment
Format: Chaptered
Summary: Katherine moves in with Bree to help her quit drinking, and learns there are a few things she herself could use help with as well.
Note: Work-in-progress.
Fifteen seconds later Katherine is out of the house, and on the brink of losing it completely, and realizing that she has nowhere to go.
She had been on her way back to her own house before she realized that she'd cut off her escape route by starting those renovations. Her house will be full of workmen and Katherine doesn't cry in front of people, half her adult life has essentially been based around the concept that she does not cry in front of people, and then Bree came along and god*dammit*
This is not going to happen. It's just -- it's not going to happen. She's half-running down the sidewalk and she is going to start crying any second and she can already see little bits of faces peering out at her through almost-closed curtains, and this is just not going to happen this way. And just where is she supposed to go? Where can anyone go around here to get any privacy? She shakes her hair over her shoulders, hiding her face as much as possible, and tries to slow down. Oh, goddamn Bree and every particle of her pathetic alcoholic self for somehow making Katherine believe that there was any way she could let herself cry without a locked door to hide her and still be safe, because now that she's started letting herself cry she doesn't know how to stop, and the fact that she let herself entrust her vulnerability to a frigging addict would be hilarious if it weren't so stupid. If it weren't so terrifying. Katherine let Bree talk her into taking one hell of a risk solely on the basis of the fact that Bree was supposedly taking just as big a risk for her, but apparently Bree is not interested in risks anymore. What she's interested in is booze. Katherine could have killed Bree in that moment, but obviously Bree can handle that perfectly well by herself so long as she's got the cash for a cheap bottle of wine, so Katherine might as well leave her to it and -- and -- and what now?
Somehow she's heading in the direction of Dylan's grave. She supposes her feet, which seem to have gone on autopilot, have decided to take her to the only place outside of her house (or Bree's kitchen, damn it all!) that she has ever let herself cry. This is stupid because she thought what she had decided was that she was not going to cry, she was going to get herself under control and then decide very calmly and reasonably where to go from here. Like maybe Honolulu. Or off a cliff. Something rational like that.
So Dylan's grave is not a rational place to be going, but Katherine goes there anyway, and once she's there she lets herself fall apart for a few minutes. She's not thinking, and she's not even really sure what she's feeling; she's just letting it all go, like pus from a lanced sore. She feels awful and soiled and relieved and that's about it. When she stops crying, she's still alone -- thank goodness she was never crazy enough to bring Bree here, although Bree is probably too busy getting plastered right now to follow her anyway -- and she feels surprisingly empty. She does a little emotional inventory, taking stock of where she's at and what her options are now.
One: she's feeling betrayed. Why? Bree wasn't getting sober for Katherine's sake. Bree's betrayed herself. She hasn't betrayed Katherine. Obviously Katherine's gotten too wrapped up in Bree's life. Which leads her to --
Two: She feels stupid. Incredibly stupid. She let herself... let herself...
The emotional inventory was not a good idea. Katherine puts her head down and cries again.
Because there's no use, now, denying what Bree has meant to her. Katherine's not just concerned for her welfare and she's certainly not trying to prop up a business partner to try and keep their company intact. She fucking fell in love with Bree Hodge, and she did it at the worst time imaginable. Katherine tries to think back to when it started, and she honestly can't be sure. Acknowledging it when it first started would have been too threatening, she supposes. What she does know is that the day that Wayne pressed that gun against Bree's knee and threatened to shoot if Katherine wouldn't talk, Katherine had felt a shock of terror worse than anything she'd felt even when she'd known that Wayne had gotten hold of Adam; and she knows that from that day on there had been a little nervous tremble in her stomach and a little revving of adrenaline every time she and Bree had worked together; and she knows that she'd finally given herself an excuse to let things begin to get out of control the day that she found Bree passed out with that half-empty glass of wine next to her. Katherine might come off as cold and unapproachable enough, but she has a strong strain of the caretaker in her nevertheless: it's so much safer to let yourself care about someone who needs you than to let yourself care about someone that you need. The problem with this, the thing Katherine always manages to forget, is that she always winds up needing those people anyway. It never stays safe for long.
And this time she screwed up worse than she ever has before, because she let Bree *know* that Katherine needed her. She let herself open up. She let Bree see the ugliness and the guilt and the pain and everything else she's ever locked away from the rest of the world. And... and she let her -- well, Katherine's not sure -- but she thinks she might have let Bree see even more. She remembers the moment when Bree held her as she cried and then how things changed, and how she'd thought Bree felt it, and then she remembers how she's let that affect the way she's behaved ever since. She thinks of the understanding that she had been stupid enough to think was growing between them. She thinks of the tiny hints of flirtation she'd let creep into her stance and her expressions over the last week or so, the way she'd taken to sitting just a little too close to Bree on the couch, all of the minute ways she'd begun to show that she was maybe interested in shifting the tenor of their friendship towards something a little riskier, and a little more fun. There was probably not a single thing she had done that had been overt enough to catch Bree's attention, but that doesn't matter right now. The point is that Katherine had let herself start playing with fire this way in the first place, and that had been the clearest demonstration yet of just how reckless she'd become with her own emotions.
She's just been lonely. She's been so damn lonely. But she'd never let loneliness make her stupid before. Why had she done it this time?
She doesn't know the answer, but the truth is that it doesn't matter. So she sits on the grave of the child whose loss had first plunged her into loneliness, and she holds one of the little stones on her child's grave because there's nothing else to hold, and she tries to figure out how to get back to being smart again.
She's there for a long while, taking the time to reassemble the pieces of the old Katherine Mayfair, checking the armor to make sure it's intact. It's a relief, actually, after the emotional rollercoaster of these last few weeks, the time she'd spent tossing around the idea of letting herself become someone altogether different from the woman she'd chosen to be for so long. She'd had no idea who that woman might be or how to go about learning to be her, but she knows how to do this, now. So she'll be a cold, hard bitch again. People say that like it's a bad thing -- so much the worse for them. Katherine, on the other hand, is remembering what she'd let herself forget, that she knows better than anyone the advantages and security of being a bitch.
And once she's made that decision, her choices from here on out are perfectly clear. She'll go back to Bree's house, retrieve her possessions, and find a hotel outside of Fairview where she can stay for awhile. She'll continue to work with Bree because that's what she does right now, and she's good at it, and there's no reason to stop doing something she is good at. But from now on she's not going to try to protect Bree from herself. When Bree drinks herself half-comatose and misses an event, Katherine will pick up the slack, make it clear that she is perfectly competent to handle matters on her own, and refuse to make excuses for Bree. It's not going to take long for Bree to implode, Katherine suspects, and she may well drop out of the company altogether. But just in case she gets stubborn about keeping a finger in the pie -- or gets herself sober and regains her professionalism, although that seems highly unlikely at this point -- Katherine will make a special effort to bring in clients outside of Fairview, and she will keep a careful eye on those clients, measuring their needs and working hard to secure their loyalty. Once she's built up a core of such customers, if she hasn't already taken over the business in Fairview, she'll split off from Bree and form her own company, poaching off those clients she'd cultivated and using them to form the base of a new clientele. She's always been a bit of a second banana in her partnership with Bree anyway, which galls her because she's the better cook. Bree has the history in Fairview, though, and therefore she's the one with the connections. Thinking it over, Katherine's not sure why she's let things go on as they have been for this long, even. If she'd been looking out for herself the way she should have been all along, she'd have done this long ago.
So that's it. Simple. She won't have to go to Honolulu or Anchorage or make any of the other huge crazy changes she had considered in that first half-hour of weepy overreaction. She won't have to go far at all. She'll still (she fingers the stone in her hand) be able to stay near Dylan's grave, keep that bit of connection with one of the few things in her life that has ever really mattered. Over time maybe she'll reconcile with her living daughter, and if so, things will change then. But she can't depend on that, and her chest is growing tight again just thinking about it. Why does she keep hoping for things like that? Hoping Dylan will come around, hoping there'll be a lover or new husband to fill some of the empty space in her life, hoping Bree -- hoping whatever it was she'd hoped for from Bree? How many times does she have to get her heart ripped out before she stops letting other people have access to it?
Work. She'd told Bree, just before she'd moved in, to fill the void in her life with work. It's high time she took her own advice.
Gently, she replaces the stone at the base of the cross, and goes to collect her things from Bree's house.
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six (previous chapter)