Chapter Text
January 1997
It is colder than a witch's twat and Merula starts watching F.R.I.E.N.D.S because Crystal loves it.
Also mainly because it's cold, and she doesn't like going out at the best of times.
To say Crystal loves it would be an understatement, actually- F.R.I.E.N.D.S is Crystal's newest religion. Last month it had been Sex and The City.
(That one had actually lasted a while, but then season two had ended and she'd bitten the nearest sitcom and held fast).
She can see why, sitting in the blank semi-darkness of her tiny living room, ruining her eyes on New Year's evening staring at a bright screen by herself. Crystal had had to attend a party (of sorts) for her newspaper, and by the painful sigh she'd shed before grabbing noisily the keys indicated really didn't want to. A car honk, the room is bright red through the window. New York is bustling around her even at night like it always does.
"All these sitcoms live in New York, huh?" Merula raises a skeptical eyebrow one afternoon. She's sitting so close to the other that their arms brush, and she'd take anything to distract from that.
"Mmm." Crystal replies intelligently through a mouth of pretzels.
Time turns semi-solid. It always feels like some form of twilight, and evenings are always punctuated by sirens.
She has to go to work the next day, but Merula stares and sips a tasteless whiskey as Phoebe finds a thumb in her juice and smothers a chuckle. It's definitely something Crystal would do.
Crystal likes Ross, she muses.
(There's a nameless pang in her chest as she wonders if it's because he reminds her of Rowan).
Crystal also likes crunchy caramel toppings on her ice-cream, and A Goofy Movie and Jessica Rabbit and absently singing Love My Way to herself while waving her toes.
Crystal keeps moaning at Merula to read The Virgin Suicides. Merula keeps saying defiantly that she thinks it sounds too pretentious. Then Crystal asks her immediately to read Waiting For Godot because it's the exact opposite, see, but also because she simply wants to annoy Merula. It's one of the great joys of her lazy early twenties.
Our love is god, let's get a slushie. Crystal says with a grin over waffles one morning, and Merula almost goes into cardiac arrest.
They stare at each other in silence for a minute and then Crystal gasps out (genuine), "You haven't watched Heathers?"
"No." Merula snaps, "and if you quite recall, we were stuck at a racist, anti-Semitic, conservative boarding school till the beginning of the decade, then we had-"
"College. Right." Crystal finishes, deflated. Then she grins again, "Big words. Catching poetry- OW," she laughed, falling off the sofa as a cushion was thrown unceremoniously towards her.
College. The natural process of life, you'd think, but it had been a terrifyingly jarring change for almost everyone at their school. Plopped from routine mealtimes and chaperoned brushing and extensive British curriculum and no touching in the face of a headmaster who seemed to the world a saint but actually ran a jail cell - into corner cafes under zigzag fire escapes, yellow buglike cab-dust, people that seemed to communicate solely by means of scream (and bars you could smoke in!) had been daunting to say the least.
Crystal perks up- "How'd you just know it was from the 80s though?"
Merul shrugs. "You've been obsessed with the 80s lately. Saw you watching The Goo-" - she begins, then stops when she notices Crystal looking at her, really looking, her eyes gleaming. So she gulps the cup of what is more cream than coffee before crinkling the newspaper on their shared (patio) dining table and stalking off.
(Dreary boarding school in the 70s could've been an aesthetic, but being cut off from the rest of the world in the 80s had been like oversleeping on the morning of your sixteenth birthday).
_________
It's all office at the firm. Telephones, people garbling lowly, polished tan hallways punctuated by plastic plants in hardy grey pots. Grey cases.
Speaking of, Merula is reviewing a particularly obstinate brief when she hears one of the glass doors to her office open and a fat file land on her desk. Merula resists the urge to look up.
"Snyde."
"Haywood." Merula drawls in what she hopes is her least interested voice.
Petite with a face finely crafted and porcelain, Penelope Haywood reminds Merula a little of Lizzy Grant, the lolita-type alternative singer whose jailhouse-style vinyl litters Crystal's room (and their living room) end-to-end, who inhabits every tape Crystal has ever made.
The resemblance ends there. Lizzy gets drunk at rodeo bars, injects neon in her veins and sings about midwest sugar daddies while Penny's already been made partner at their firm, even though she's barely a couple years older than them. Lizzy always sports messy eyeliner and some sort of biker jacket, while Merula can't imagine Penny in anything but a little mascara and maybe a lipstick, even though her skin shines. Penny is shrewd and forthright, but also charming and friendly and intelligent and her thick shiny blonde hair is twisted into an immaculate bun at the top of her skull.
(Perfect in a way Merula can only hope to attain but can't, so resentment comes easier instead.)
Penny's ice-eyes moderately veil contempt when she looks down at Merula in her bright white pantsuit, hand on hip.
"Regis wants the Shankar files too, unfortunately."
They have an unspoken vow to be civil to each other- or rather, Merula has an unspoken vow to Crystal to 'limit workspace agression to the bare minimum.'
"Today?"
"By tomorrow."
"So today."
"Yep."
Merula and Crystal might've had their angry teenage tussles, but she and Penny sparked a sort of vindictiveness in each other that was best kept at bay.
Maybe on account of Penny being Crystal's second-best friend (no one came close to Rowan) and Merula being her childhood kinda-bully. Who knows?
"I hear I'm invited to your twenty-fourth by the way," Penny raises a fair, perfectly-plucked eyebrow. "Saturday, yes?"
"Yep."
On her birthday, after the party ('party' being exactly seven people, all from their school) Crystal gifts her a big fat Lord Of The Rings.
Merula knits her brows. "I hate this nerd shit."
Crystal smiles her signature smile, the irritating one that crinkles her eyes and exposes her shapely white teeth. "No you don't."
Before she can retaliate Crystal turns away and gets another, palm-sized package wrapped carefully in shiny scarlet paper.
"If you got me jewelry I'm going to kill you."
Crystal beams. "I did!"
"Oh Jesus." Merula opens the thing reluctantly. "I hope you didn't-"
Get me silver, she almost says, but inside is a tiny necklace with the most delicate diamond snowflake at the end, teeny gold dots on the branches. It shines pale blue against West 72nd streetlight almost like real snow in Scotland, where she and her mother played mid-morning hide-and-seek.
Merula stares like an idiot, long enough so that the other starts fidgeting.
"Because you love snow. Also you're born in winter so it seemed like a good gift and if you don't like it you don't have to-"
"You got me silver." Is all Merula can think to say.
"..yeah," Crystal gets a painful sort of look on her face. "Sorry."
(She's actually slightly sorry).
Merula swallows the ball of thorns in her throat and gets up from the sofa, trying to articulate an answer.
"It's not...terrible," she manages after a minute.
Crystal nods, face plaint with relief. "Okay, good. Cool."
Merula watches Heathers that Friday night. It's better than she expects.
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"What's your novel about?" Penny asks over pancakes one Sunday.
"Doomed love," Crystal grins. "Seriously, though, I have no idea what I'm doing."
Penny nods approvingly and Merula's toast feels like cement in her throat seated on that blasted yellow sofa. She's been prodded into watching Persuasion.
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