wha?
Wilby Wonderful fic. A random little bit of Duck and Emily gen.

No, I have no idea how that happened.


Odd Man Out

Emily tears her eyes away from Duck and stares out at the parking lot, trying to get her head around it. He's gay. Oh.

It's been that kind of day, really. Taylor is an arsehole. Her mother is... still her mother, even on Wilby, which shouldn't be surprising, but managed to catch her off-guard anyway. That thought circles right back around to Taylor (arsehole) and to Duck. Who is gay, like Mr. Jarvis, but not, she guesses, with Mr. Jarvis. Yet. Exactly. Duck McDonald. Is gay. Emily finally gets the joke, and she smiles giddily as she leans her head against the window. She doesn't look at Duck, because if she does, she won't be able to say it, and as it is she can feel the nervous laughter bubbling in her stomach somewhere. "You know, my mum used to tell me stories about you."

Duck waits a few seconds and then says "Oh?"

Emily nods, her forehead against the glass, and says, "She talked about Wilby all the time, and she told me stories about all the people she missed and all the fun she used to have, and... and she didn't talk about you like she talked about other men."

She hears Duck shift in his seat, but he doesn't say anything to that, and Emily wants to say this thing, now that she realizes it. The laughing feeling is fading away, and she folds her arms tighter against her stomach to hold still. "Yeah," Emily said. "She didn't say you guys were, like, best friends or anything, but you weren't... you weren't like other guys. I liked that, I liked her telling me about you, because--I mean--" she can't think how to say it and blurts it out. "I mean, there's only so much you want to know about your mother's sex life when you're eight."

Duck is silent, and Emily looks over, wide-eyed, opening her mouth to apologize--stupid, stupid thing to say, like she could out-cool Duck or something--but he's looking straight ahead and he just nods a little. "That is a fact."

He says it like maybe he understands, and Emily blinks at him for a second and then looks away. "By the time we came here I was convinced she was making you up," she says cautiously, because it's a funny kind of thing, and probably insulting, to tell somebody you thought they were a figment of someone else's (frequently drunken) imagination. "I thought--I don't know, the way she talked about you, you just sounded too good to be true."

"But I'm not," Duck says, matter-of-factly, but Emily knows he's taking it wrong, because she's saying it wrong.

"No," she says quickly, "I mean, yes, you're not, but not--" She swallows. "I mean, you weren't--after--my mum, but not because you were too good to, just because you didn't want to. You're not too good to be true, you're just... different."

When she looks at him again, Duck is looking at her, just like he did outside the motel room, and this time Emily doesn't burst into tears; she sticks her chin up and looks back. She's her mother's daughter, like he said. She knows the stories her mother told her, and she knows they were only stories. The truth is different, the truth can kick Taylor's arse and smells like cigarette smoke and turpentine. Finally he says, "Different doesn't bug you, huh?"

Taylor is an arsehole. Her mother is drinking again. Duck is gay. Emily knows which she'd have chosen to be the only big revelation of the night. "Different I can deal with," she says, and when she tries out a smile, Duck smiles back.