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Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author.  The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise.  No copyright infringement is intended.

 

Um… I really enjoy watching glassblowing.  Thus: fic.  (It doesn’t take a lot to set me off, clearly.)  This fandom is really rather ridiculously fun to write for. Oh, and this – is whimsical sloop trying to pose as romance, set sometime before Casino Night. 

 

 

It’s a Friday.  The sky is dark and looks like it should’ve started raining about five minutes ago.  It looks like it’s in pain, holding all that water in.   

She knows that Roy is going out tonight, has already left even; he told her this morning not to wait up.  (It’s going to rain and he’s going out.  She’s not supposed to wait up and she doesn’t want to not wait alone.  So.  This is okay.) 

They’re the last people in the office.  When it gets empty she sometimes feels that every sound she makes has an echo.  As if the absence of people allows the waves to bounce off the walls and the filing cabinets more freely, reflecting and magnifying.  They are completely alone and she really doesn’t know why she waited so long to ask him.  She’s silly sometimes. 

He’s pulling on his coat when she finally walks over.  She holds out her newspaper clipping to him, the one that’s been in her pocket for the better part of the week.  It’s about a glassblowing exhibit that’s come to town and, when she had read it first, when she had clipped it out, carefully, using the sharp scissors, it was him that she was picturing there with her, not Roy.  As she gives it to him their hands brush, and she can hear the raindrops start to hit the roof. 

“Will you take me?” she says. He smiles. 

“Sure.” 

- 

He drives.  She sits in the passenger’s seat and feels absurdly giddy: it’s like a field trip, really.  When she tells him so, he smiles and makes a left-hand turn.  Tells her that if she starts to sing “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round” he will absolutely kill her. 

She watches the rain fall everywhere outside the car and deliberately does not watch his hands on the steering wheel. 

- 

By the time they pull into the parking lot, the rain is not so much a downpour as a vicious attack on earth and all its creatures.  They make a mad dash for the building and, although she has the protection of a hood, Pam’s curls end up plastered to her face.  While they catch their breath inside the doors, on the rubber mats next to the ‘please wipe your feet’ sign, she shakes them out.  She can smell her own shampoo and sometimes, the way he looks at her…  She wants to close her eyes.  Tilt her head back. 

The building is ugly and grey and smells like damp concrete, but she doesn’t mind.  In the front is a makeshift display of sorts, sculptures and bowls and globes set up on mismatched furniture that doesn’t look like it deserves to exist next to such beauty.  Pam catches her breath, wishing for an easel.  She tangles her hand with Jim’s as casually as she can with her heart beating the way it is, and they walk together through the forest of glass. 

They pass starbursts of colour, whole galaxies encased in spheres.  They pass starfish and cacti, apples and waterfalls.  They pass pieces that look like nothing at all and everything at once and are all the more stunning for it.  “It’s so beautiful,” Pam says, again and again, and mostly pretends not to notice that when he agrees he isn’t really looking at the sculptures.   

- 

A long time ago, Pam remembers, when she was in school, they told her that glass wasn’t really a solid.  For all that it felt rigid and shattered and cut, it was really just a liquid.  It still flowed, they said, but very slowly, as if remembering its molten past.  This is why very old windowpanes, the ones that gather dust and cobwebs and aren’t really even clear anymore, are slightly thicker at the bottom.  The glass has flowed down with gravity, molecule by molecule.  Supercooled liquid, they said.  That’s what it was called. 

Now, Pam knows, they don’t call it that anymore.  Now there are explanations pages and pages long, involving physics and chemistry and unpronounceable words.  (And Pam misses when things were simple.) 

- 

When she sees things she likes she clutches convulsively at his hand, drags him to a stop, demands that he admire them.  She pauses maybe too long next to the sculpture of entwined lovers, and it’s easy, so easy - their smooth blank faces could be anyone’s.  His hand goes damp. 

They walk until their shoes stop squeaking against the bare concrete, until her hair has dried into a mass of curls.  They walk until she grows careless and clumsy, bumping their elbows together, their shoulders, their hips. 

He pulls her over to where sheets of glass hang from the ceiling, casting multicolored shadows.  They stand on opposite sides of the panes, watching each other through the rainbow whirls, and it’s so, it’s so…  There’s an ache in her stomach, her chest; she doesn’t trust her legs.  She makes fish faces at him until he smiles, and it’s better.  It’s okay.  

- 

Eventually, they wander together towards the backroom where there is a triple furnace, a bare bulb, and a man, demonstrating glassblowing to a small crowd.  They hover near the back.   

It’s warmer in here, and when Pam takes off her jacket she has to let go of Jim’s hand to do it.  She wants to grab it back immediately, but makes herself wait, count to five.  (At four-and-a-half she intertwines their fingers again and he smiles so widely she can see it in her peripheral vision.) 

The glass the man is working with is hot, hanging off the end what he tells the crowd is a blowpipe.  He spins his wrist, manipulating it, and it swings like drunken honey.  As he works he explains that the blowpipe is a long, thin rod used to force air from the mouth into the glass, expanding it, making it hollow.  He spins the pipe again and Pam feels dizzy.  From the heat, from the light.  From Jim’s hand.   

The man goes on to say other things, things about colour and metallic oxides, about cooling and reheating and triple ovens, about bubbles and ruined pieces.  But Pam isn’t really listening.  She’s watching the glass, turning and taking shape, shifting and swirling, hanging at the end of the blowpipe. 

- 

Later, Pam will be drinking tea with her mother and she’ll explain about the glass, the swirls, the colours. 

“You know,” her mother will say.  “I think I remember reading somewhere that you could interpret your future from glass.  If you spill it, that is, when it’s molten.  Something about the shape and the bubbles that form when it cools.” 

“Really?” Pam asks. 

“Oh my, yes,” her mother nods.  “But, then again,” she pauses, “perhaps I’m thinking of maple syrup poured on snow.” 

And Pam will smile. 

- 

Jim wants to buy her something.  A souvenir, he says, but everything is too expensive.  (Too expensive for a gift between people who are just friends.)  Eventually, the cashier, with her swinging pigtails and combat boots, takes pity and shoves a box over the scarred countertop. 

“Discards,” she says.  “Free.  But be careful – some of them are broken.” 

Inside the box is a universe of shattered colour.  Pam sifts through the pieces, carefully, and Jim hovers at her shoulder, breath in her ear.  (They both seem to have forgotten about personal space and propriety and she can’t think of what to do to fix this.)  When she reaches into the box she comes up with a small, smooth disc of glass and a cut finger.   

Jim catches her hand in his to examine it.  After an exaggerated study of the injured digit he proclaims her critical, but without need for amputation.  While she laughs he brings her hand to his mouth, sucks the blood from the cut.  Her breath does strange things in the back of throat.  He won’t look at her. 

It isn’t until they are outside, back in the rain, that she realizes she still has the glass disc, smooth against the palm of her hand. 

- 

In the car on the way back, Pam studies it.  Clear, with feathers of colour intertwining at its heart.  One side is flat, as if it was spilled into a puddle when molten, then cooled and pried away. 

Pam leans her head against the passenger's window, presses her cheek to the glass.  Thinks about the molecules flowing down the pane, one by one. 

 



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