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Peja's Wonderful World of Makebelieve Import
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Published:
2020-11-05
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864
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Beyond the Scribbling

Summary:

Fandom: Dead Like Me
Pairing: Rube/George
Rating: G
Summary: Rube, George, and a green-wrapped box.
Dis: Lied.
Author's Notes: Well, so much for this being a drabble. For michellek, who was expecting a drabble, although I doubt this will be a disappointment.
Submitted through the Makebelieve_YG mailing list.

Work Text:

Beyond the Scribbling
by Perpetual Motion

George waited until everyone else had left the diner before she reached into her bag and pulled out a box. She held it out to Rube. "Here."

He looked up from his eggs, eyed the package, and finished chewing. "What's that?"

"Just...something. For your birthday. Take it." She dropped the box onto the middle of the table, gathered her bag and coat and scarf, and slid out of the booth. "I'll see you later. I've got to get to work."

Rube watched her go, watched the way she didn't button her coat or wrap her scarf until she was outside. Watched the way she looked at him from the corner of her eye for just a second before she pushed her hair off of her face and started walking down the street. The box was still in the middle of the table, wrapped in green paper, and looking perfectly innocuous, but Rube wasn't buying it. He stared at the box as he finished his eggs and drank his coffee and flagged down Kiffany for another cup of coffee.

"You should open that." Kiffany pointed to the box with her coffee pot.

"You know what it is?"

Kiffany shrugged. "Maybe." She gave Rube a smile and walked off to another table.

He stared into his coffee, stared at the box, and decided that he wasn't stalling by drinking his coffee first. He was just taking time to savor the moment. George had given him a present. Presents should be savored. He finished his coffee much too quickly in his own estimation and pretended to ignore the impatient look on Kiffany's face when she came back to the booth. Rube held up his cup. Kiffany shook her head. Perhaps it was time to open the box.

The wrapping job was better than he'd expected. The edges were neat, there was no extra tape hanging off the ends. Rube remembered the few times George had mentioned her mother and could only assume that the occasional bit of anal-retentiveness had rubbed off on her. He slit the paper with his thumbnail and unwrapped the box slowly, trying to keep the paper intact for reasons of which he didn't want to think about at that moment. He slipped the lid off the box and squinted at the contents. It was a hat and scarf. And there was a note on a piece of torn notebook paper. It made him smile. Torn notebook paper was a George he knew. Torn notebook paper he could handle.

Happy birthday.
Stay warm and stuff.
George

There was a scribble, an obvious attempt to mark out something between 'and stuff' and her name. Rube held it up to the light, tried to see through the thick scrawl of black ink. It could just be a misspelling. Maybe she'd written 'Georgia' or started another line and decided against it. Maybe the pen had tried to run out of ink, and she was trying to get it working again.

And then he saw 'Lov' as the light hit the paper just right. And he realized that she'd been blushing when she left, her cheeks a little pink, her eyes determinedly looking away from him. She had known she'd made a mistake, known that there on the paper, behind the scribble, was a word she hadn't wanted him to see, but had wanted him to see, apparently, or she would have written a different note. Maybe not even given him the present.

Rube put down the note and started studying the present. A hat and scarf. Perfectly safe gift for a semi-boss, nothing to get excited about, nothing that said anything. He lifted the scarf out of the box. It was dark red and soft. The hat was the same color and just as soft. He wondered where she'd found them, how she'd known that he liked red.

"She spent a bunch of time in that back booth there." Kiffany had apparently decided that Rube was worthy of coffee again. She said she didn't want to work on it around Daisy."

"Work on it?" Rube looked from Kiffany to his coffee cup to the hat and scarf. It hit him suddenly. "She made these?"

"Yeah." Kiffany smiled a bit indulgently. "She hid over there every night for the past couple of weeks. I sat with her when I had a break, helped her a little when she needed it. She'd never made a hat before."

Rube wasn't sure what to say. He sipped his coffee. He watched Kiffany wipe down tables. He stood up after a few minutes, put money under his coffee cup, grabbed his coat, the note, and the hat and scarf, and headed for the door. He missed the grin that went across Kiffany's face. His mind was six blocks ahead, to Happy Time, George, and the post-it he scrawled as he waited for the light to change.

Thanks for the gift.
It'll keep me warm and stuff.
Lov
Rube