Be Who God Meant You To Be

Note: AU, Future, and this will make no sense what-so-ever if you haven't read this first. It may make very little sense even if you have. This is for Lynne, of course.

December 1997

The Tuesday before Christmas, she has a day off and he has no appointments that can't be rescheduled. They sleep late (well, later), spend the morning finally getting a Christmas tree set up, have lunch in the cafe on the corner.

In the afternoon, they walk up to the movie theatre, with nothing in particular in mind, and buy tickets to the next thing showing.

It's not packed, but for a Tuesday afternoon, it's crowded. And she can see, for all that parts of it are absurd, why this is a movie it's not hard to get caught up in. She might even have gotten caught up in it herself, but she keeps getting distracted by a recurring motif in the music. She knows she's heard it somewhere before, but she can't place it. And as soon as she decides that maybe she misheard it, or reminds herself that incidental music in movies can get reused, and tries to dismiss the whole matter, it plays again and her mind goes right back to where have I heard that before?

It's not until the very end, until the credits start to roll and the vocal begins, that she actually remembers.

And then, in a theatre full of sniffling and even openly crying people, Meghan Marriner begins to laugh.

Silently at first, which is okay, because it looks a lot like crying, especially in the dark. But Ed's arm is around her shoulders, and once they start to shake, he asks if she's all right. (Not surprising; if she were crying, she'd have to be sobbing to make them shake that much.) She tries to tell him she's fine, but instead, she starts to laugh out loud.

"Meg, honey?" he says, and all Meg can manage is to hold one hand up in a gesture that she hopes he'll take to mean that she's fine. People around them -- either still in their seats or in the aisles on the way out -- are looking over at her, and even in the dim light, it's obvious that they think Meg has lost her mind.

"Meg?" Ed asks again.

"I'm fine," she manages, finally subsiding into intermittent, hiccupy giggles. She waves to the woman at the end of the row, who is frowning her disapproval of this sort of display. "Sorry," she calls. "Sorry." The woman at the end of the row gives her one last scowl and goes.

"Are you sure you're all right?" Ed asks, and she nods.

On the screen, names continue to scroll by, as the singer winds down to her haunting, if melodramatic, end. In the now almost empty theatre, Meg raises a hand in a vague salute, then turns to her now thoroughly confused husband. "I don't know about you," she says, "but I want a beer. And possibly some nachos."