Title: The Visible Spectrum (Part Four)
Characters: Caleb/Cordelia, appearances by Daddy Eppes and Aurelie.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2, 022
Summary: Sometimes, life is better in color.
Disclaimer: I own them. Just not Don.
Feedback: Is greatly appreciated.
Author's Notes: Well, this is it. This is the end of the Color Fic. And I had a blast writing it. There is major fluff in these last four colors. Be forewarned.
Follows
Part One,
Part Two, and
Part Three.
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White
Cordelia is curled up against the warm form of her fiance. Her head lies where his shoulder and neck meet.
Grabbing her left hand with his right, Caleb twists their fingers together, playing with the diamond ring he had given her three months ago. She laughs and worms her feet beneath his calves.
The door to the loft opens and their spell is interrupted.
Aurélie, she of the golden hair and sharp words, breezes into their apartment. The click of her heels can be heard as she makes her way towards them. Her hand hits Cordelia on top of her head and she speaks as she continues on to her room. “Good, you’re home. I need you.”
Caleb waits until the French woman is in her bedroom before whispering, “It’s a good thing we’re moving out in a week. Else I might have to do with away with her and her interrupting ways.”
She giggles against his lips, kissing him to do away with his scowl. “She’s not bad.”
“I wasn’t kidding, Cordy! Viens ici maintenant!”
Cordelia rolls her eyes at her friend’s insistent yell. “I’m coming.” She gives her fiancée another quick kiss and untangles herself from his lap.
Aurélie’s bedroom is on the opposite side of the loft apartment, directly across from her own. Where her room is done in rich shades of crimson and brown, the blonde’s is a blend of pale pink and blue.
“Alright, alright, what’s so important, Frenchie?” Cordelia asks, giving the other women a questioning glance when she closes and locks the bedroom door.
Satisfied, Aurélie crosses back to her closet and pulls out a navy dress bag, the ones that she uses to hold her designs. Her blue eyes are shining with delight as she turns back to face Cordelia. “It’s bad luck for the groom to see the bride’s wedding dress before the actual wedding.”
The breath rushes out of her at the fact that her wedding dress is finally done. Feelings of excitement and giddiness replace her earlier annoyance.
When Caleb had proposed and she had accepted, Aurélie had begged and pleaded to be the one to create her wedding dress. She had promised a masterpiece fit just for her and Cordelia had given in. This would be the first time she would see it at all.
Aurélie hangs the bag on the back of the door. Fingers rise up to unzip it but her tall frame blocks the view. The navy plastic falls to the floor and the blonde nervously steps to the side.
And there is her wedding dress. The dress that she will wear as her father walks her down and gives her away. The dress she will wear when she changes her last name to the man that she loves more than anything else.
It is beautiful and words fail her for the first time in her life. Aurélie has created a vision of ivory and white silk with delicate beading across the corset like bodice. The bottom that flares out at her feet after a sheath like body will outline her form to its fullest.
‘Well?” Her friend asks, biting her bottom lip.
Tears in her eyes, Cordelia turns to her maid of honor. “It’s perfect.”
Brown
Caleb glances up from his book when the small brunette lets out a shriek. The loud yell is followed by an equally loud ‘thunk’. Slightly worried, he places the book down on the couch and rises to go to the kitchen.
The sight of his ‘Delia slamming her head repeatedly against a scattered amount of bridal magazines sends a small smile spreading across his face. Before she can do any further damage to her brain cells, he sinks his hands into her perfectly coiled curls. “Princess, I’d rather prefer a wife who was half way intelligent.”
His joke is lost on her as she lets out a sniffle, letting him know that something is seriously wrong. He knows that the stress of planning their wedding has started to get to her and he’s tried to take her mind off it and make it easier.
Quickly, Caleb grabs the chair next to hers at the dining room table and pulls it closer to her. “You know,” he says, using his thumbs to stroke her cheeks. “I’m beginning to think it would have been much easier if we just eloped.”
Cordelia sniffles one last time and leans her head against him. “No. My parents would never forgive us and I would never hear the end of it from Mother. It’s just kind of hard to do things when your Maid of Honor is in New York with her parents and your other planners are three thousand miles away.”
There are only two months left until their September wedding. Much of the big things, like the invitations and coordinating and clothes, have been dealt with. It’s the little things that are left.
“Alright, so what’s wrong this time?” Caleb asks, staring at the table for clues.
“My hair.” The two word answer is mumbled out.
He stares at her as if she’s lost her mind. His finger catches a curl and tugs. “Excuse me?”
She shoots him an exasperated look. “My hair. I was trying to find a hair style for the wedding, but all of these are either blonde or some varying shade or red. And all the brown ones are hideous. My hair is brown. Just plain brown.”
Caleb tugs again and slides both hands into her thick hair. “I swear sometimes you can be an idiot, ‘Delia. Your hair is beautiful. It’s not brown, it’s almost black. And I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
Her lips quirk into a grin. “Really?”
“Yes. I especially like the way it looks spread out in bed.”
Cordelia grabs one of the magazines and hits him across his shoulder. “Are you being dirty again, Caleb?”
Letting out a bark of a laugh, Caleb escapes another hit by jumping up and running back into the living room. “Silly ‘Delia, of course.”
Pink
She is not one to wear pink.
The color has never really appealed to her, not being the rich tones that she usually goes for. She thinks it looks too washed out when she’s pale in Boston and too cliché during summer in Los Angeles.
However, Cordelia finds herself clutching a pink bouquet in her hand as she awaits a knock at the door. She had been unsatisfied with any sort of flowers until her mother had suggested a combination of roses and lilies. The pink had come once the Eppes matriarch had threaded one into her daughter’s hair.
The pink had looked soft against her skin and for the first time, she had been okay with the color.
Now, Cordelia stares at herself in the full length mirror. She’s in her bedroom in her new home that her soon to be husband had built for them.
The woman looking back is familiar but hard to recognize at the same time.
The ivory wedding dress is fit to her as if it had been painted on; in truth, it had been custom made by her friend. Her neck is bare and the only jewelry she wears, besides Caleb’s diamond ring, is diamond earrings that drop and dangle. A clean face except for a faint blush and outlined eyes stare back at her.
Her hair had been curled and piled high in a stunning up-do. And matching the bouquet she clutches is one large pink lily. Her mother had placed it to the left of her ear.
Tilting her head to the side, Cordelia concludes that the pink suits her. It is young and fresh and befitting of her twenty four years of age.
The knock comes and the door opens to the figure of her father.
Cordelia turns to face him and the tears in his eyes bring forth ones in hers.
Don Eppes is silent as he looks at his only daughter. Finally, he speaks. “Oh, Baby. You look beautiful.”
“Daddy,” she chokes out because she has always been her father’s girl. “I don’t think you can call me that anymore.”
He places a kiss on her forehead and tucks her arm in his. “You will always be my baby, Cordy.”
They make their way downstairs and to the door leading out to the back yard that has been transformed into the New England fall wedding that she had wanted.
“Are you ready?” Her father asks.
Clutching her pink flowers, Cordelia nods.
“Yes.”
Yellow
"'Delia, where are you?" Caleb hollers, setting his keys in the green bowl on the dining room table.
“I’m upstairs, Caleb!” The voice of his wife yells back, muffled somewhat from the second level.
He takes the steps two at a time, intent on finding her and asking how the doctor’s visit had gone today; he’s been upset that he had had to miss it, not wanting to leave her at all during this time, but she had begged him off and sent him to work.
Cordelia is in the room next to their bedroom. One hand is jutted against her hip and the other is tapping away at her lips. Her brows are furrowed, meaning that her brain is whirling away with something.
Hannibal, their black and white Sheltie, lies at her feet. Since Cordelia had become pregnant four and a half months ago, the dog that usually followed him around hadn’t left her side.
Caleb wraps an arm around her waist, carefully laying his hand against her belly. At four and a half months he thinks she should be bigger, but she’s small and he’s been told that the first one usually didn’t see a large amount of weight gain. “What are you doing in the nursery, Princess?”
She relaxes against him, letting her weight rest in his arms. “Thinking about colors.”
They had decided that the room next to theirs would be transformed into the nursery for the baby. That is after the kid had slept in theirs for a while.
“Hmmm,” he hums against her neck as he places kisses along her collarbone. “Is Hannibal helping?”
Cordelia laughs softly and pushes him off. “He’s agreeing with me. I still can’t believe you named him after a man that ate people. I told you to let me name him.”
Throwing his palms up and out, Caleb grins. “Hey, you told me you wanted him named after a literary character.”
“And that,” she taps his nose. “Is exactly why you will never be naming our children.”
Please, he thinks, as if his suggestions would be all that bad. He decides to change tactics, suddenly remembering why she had gone to the doctor’s this morning. “So, are we painting blue or pink?”
Her eyes glitter as she turns to look at him. “Yellow.”
“Yellow?”
Cordelia nods. “We are painting the nursery yellow. Yellow is a nice, warm color. And it’s a neutral color.”
Confused, he can only stare. “Why would we need a neutral color?”
With a satisfied smirk, she makes one turn of the room before walking past him and to the right, towards their bedroom. “I don’t think our kids would forgive us for painting half of the room pink and the other half blue. It might traumatize them. Yellow is much better. Fair to both of them.”
Her words take a moment to catch up to him as he digests them and analyzes them over.
Then, he is out of the nursery and charging towards the bedroom. His feet halt in the doorway as Cordelia sits perched on their bed, coy smile in place. “Both of them? As in more than one? Just how many kids do you have in there, ‘Delia?”
She laughs. “Just two.”
“Twins?” He breathes out, barely.
Slowly, Cordelia nods. “Yes, twins. A boy and a girl.”
Caleb doesn’t have an answer to the fact that they will have to paint the nursery yellow because they are having twins.
His body locks up and he falls backwards in a faint, Cordelia’s wide eyes the last thing he sees.
*This is what
Cordelia's dress is somewhat modeled after.