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#ALSO THE DOG NAME IS BEATRICE I CANT BREATHE
renywrites · 5 years
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I’ve been watching a lot of Mad Men because Jon Hamm and I cant stop thinking of like a sixties AU with Gabe and Beez, or just switching out broody Don Draper for Gabriel so could I suggest a domestic 60s set Ineffable Bureaucracy thing?
I decided to do 1968 because of the Apollo 7 mission (I think Bee is just a huge space nerd) and also because I have no idea what Mad Men is (thank you for giving me a new show to watch though, holy shit!! Jon Hamm is a gift). I tried very hard to do this in a 60s setting but it may come off more as 50s themed- I pulled some familiar stuff I know from The Help and read up on some careers before I hopped into this. Bee’s name is Beatrice in this because reasons.
*
Gabriel loved his life. He had a good job working as a Creative Director in a big advertising company, made enough money to be comfortable, got the weekends off to do whatever he pleased, and had a lovely wife to go home to. 
Wife. The concept was still foreign, still made him shiver and smile and feel mushy as could be. Bee would tell him to shove a sock in it, if she were here.
He and Beatrice Romanov had gotten married only a month ago, but only because she had insisted she was going to finish her college degree before he was allowed to strap her down. Gabriel would have liked to have married her the minute he had seen her under those trees in the college courtyard, but she had put her foot down. 
It took a lot more to court her than just a charming smile and a compliment, he had learned very quickly. In fact, the first time he’d done that, he’d ended up with a milkshake in his lap. 
“I’m not a cheap whore,” the soon-to-be love of his life had snapped, her dark eyes blazing with hellfire. “Don’t treat me like one.”
Gabriel had never been spoken to like that by a girl — or anyone — before. At first he was offended, so he made it his duty to try and outdo her in each of the classes they had together. Unfortunately for him, he’d found his match. She was whip smart, mean as a junkyard dog, and took shit from absolutely nobody. Many men had walked away with tattered dignity and a broken nose after attempting to tame this wildfire of a girl. 
He quickly found that instead of wanting to defeat her, Gabriel wanted to impress her. He wanted her to give him that sharp little smile she got when she won. He wanted to hear that laugh, wicked and graceless, that she would let loose on occasion when she was around her friends. He wanted those dark eyes to be on him, always. He wanted.
That wanting turned into a game of cat and mouse very quickly, both of them doing things that had society frowning and the other taunting them to continue. Heated looks across classrooms. Stolen kisses against the bookshelves of the library. His hand on her thigh, her back pressed to the cold stone wall of her dorm building. 
One night, Gabriel took the bait, and had his world shattered by his name broken on her lips, her body bare against his, those eyes looking up at him like he was the only thing that mattered in the world. 
Gabriel woke up the next morning with his vessel of hellfire next to him in bed, her inky black hair spilling over his pillow and tickling his nose. The sunlight streaming in the window made her skin look like porcelain, her body ethereal and too perfect to belong in even Heaven. The frustration and pent up tension that remained in him quickly gave way to something that melted his insides, took his breath, and made him pull her closer and press a kiss to her hair.
Three years later, he knelt in front of her with a small velvet box and watched those beautiful dark eyes glisten with tears and love and the promise of a future.
And now he got to go home to his future every single night.
“Leaving already?” Comes a teasing call as Gabriel packs his things up for the weekend.
He looks up, then gives his co-worker a polite smile. “Ah, Sandalphon. Yes, it’s my night for the dishes and Bee wants to watch the Apollo 7 launch with me.”
“You’re whipped, you know.” Comes the predictable laugh, accompanied by others in the office who were bad at pretending to not listen in on conversations. “That wife of yours has you on a leash.”
Gabriel shakes his head, unable to help his smile. “What can I say? I like a girl who takes charge. Evening, gentlemen.”
He leaves with wolf whistling and whoops following him out, but his mind is focused on calculating how much more time it would be until he got to go home to his wife. If he stopped at the supermarket and bought her favorite bottle of wine and some flowers, it would only add another fifteen minutes…
*
“You’re late!” Comes the call when he closes the door. He winces — he had been trying to be quiet so he could surprise her. Nothing got past Bee. 
“Sorry, my love.” He calls, slipping his shoes off and treading carefully into the kitchen. 
The sight that greets him is one he’d come home to for the rest of his life, but one that would always make his heart swell and his knees weak. 
His wife was standing at the stove, stirring what smelled like spaghetti sauce, a red gingham apron tied around her neck and waist. Her hair was pulled back from her face, piled messily on her head and stuck through with a knitting needle (his mother had gotten them for her, trying to insist she needed to be more ladylike. Bee wore them in her hair out of spite. Besides, they did well in a pinch).
“Hello,” Gabriel walks over, pausing to kiss her cheek before fetching a vase to put the flowers in. “I brought you something.”
Bee glances up, surprise flickering in dark eyes, before she smiles. “Sap. Put the wine on ice, we can have it with dinner. It’ll be ready in a little bit.”
“It smells good, Bee.” He does as he’s told, then pulls up a chair at the table to sit and talk with her while she finishes dinner.
His wife blows a stray hair from her face, her brows creasing. “Your mother sent the recipe to me. No, she showed up to my work to give it to me. Spent twenty minutes going on and on and on about how a good housewife always makes her husband’s favorite things…” Bee makes an irritated noise. 
“At work?” Gabriel sits up, frowning. “I’ll talk to her…”
“No need,” she says, with that grin she used to give him just before she dragged him behind a building at school and kissed him senseless. “I took care of it.”
“Bee,” he says, a rush of fondness and exasperation rolling over him. And maybe a bit of dread. “What did you do?”
“Oh, she’ll call you about it later.” She waves a hand, her smile growing. 
Gabriel didn’t even have it in him to be upset — his mother was insufferable about everything Bee did. About how she dressed, how she behaved, how she treated Gabriel. When Bee’d refused to marry her son in a church, that was when Gabriel accepted that he was going to be stuck in the middle of an eternal feud.
But watching his wife move around their kitchen and complain about her day, he found he couldn’t mind. It was amusing to see his wife come up with petty ways to get back at the people who annoyed her. It was definitely a good reminder that she would put up with none of his shit, not ever. 
“Are we watching the launch during dinner?” Gabriel asks when she turns the stove top off. 
She brightens. “Yes! And the newest Star Trek comes out tonight, too. You don’t mind if we watch both?”
Gabriel gives her a fond look, getting up to get them both some wine. “Not at all. Whatever makes you happy, darling.”
Bee grins, blocking his way and leaning up on her tiptoes for a kiss, her fingers snagging and wrinkling his work shirt. He bends to meet her, his hand resting against the curve of her spine and tugging her closer against him as their lips meet.
The chase had been well worth it, Gabriel reflects, as his wife hooks a hand around the back of his neck and pulls him down farther to her mercy with a wicked smile. He wouldn’t trade any of this for anything.
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