The day of the convention Will invited us to was… interesting. She was eighteen weeks along and was going to announce the name of an element she’d decided to go public with a few months previous. Unbitrium, I think was its tentative name. Anyway, no one was more surprised to hear its official name than me. As for Flynn… he told me of his woes later.
The ballroom of the Imperial Hotel was lavishly decorated and filled with people dressed in expensive dresses and suits. They were all either scientists or relations of scientists and were currently dedicating themselves to the tasks of socializing, inquiring, and waiting.
Among the red-clothed tables stood a most glamorous pair, a member of which was most anxiously waiting for the time to speak out in public. She was never one to find herself afraid of public situations. Rather, she thrived when thrust into the spotlight. However, one thing made all the difference (though in an explanation one might count two). She was eighteen weeks pregnant and her hormones were clearly not cooperating with her.
“I am so thirsty,” she said in a plain tone.
Flynn looked at her as she scanned the room.
“So get something.”
Her eyes settling on a waiter’s tray, Will sighed longingly as she watched him go, frowning at him with a contradictorily pleading look in her eyes.
“I want champagne,” she pouted.
Flynn blinked in the manner of a double-take.
“What? You can’t have that.”
“I know. But that doesn’t mean I don’t still want some.”
“You’re not having any.”
“I know!” She paused, eyeing people with glasses of the clear-gold liquid. “But I still want some.”
Flynn half-glared at her.
“What ever happened to your willpower?”
“Oh, that?” The blonde waved her hand in the air as she spoke. “That disappeared a while ago with the cake.”
“What about the cake?” asked the caramel-eyed man as he sent a concerned glance in the direction of the cake on the far side of the room.
“Well, I wanted to try some but no one was trying to get any. So I just looked around and took a bit with my finger.” She shrugged as if it were nothing at all.
Her lover, however, looked astonished.
“How could you do something like that!?”
“Who cares? No one knows and no one’ll find out anyway.”
Flynn sighed, shaking his head. Will, a finger at her lips, considered something as she eyed another tray of champagne glasses. Seeing the look on her face and what she was staring at, the brown-haired man was now both shocked and irritated.
“No. You are not finger-dipping in other people’s drinks. That’s insane!”
“What? You think I’d do that?” She shook her head, smiling. “No!” She looked away, smiling coyly. “I’ll take some of Claire’s.”
“She’s not having any tonight as a courtesy to you, and no, you aren’t doing that!”
“Oh, come on!” She turned to face him, holding her hands together in front of herself. “It’d just be a drop or two! It’d taste more like finger anyway, so it wouldn’t really count!”
“No.”
“Please?”
“No.”
Will frowned in defeat, crossing her arms and glaring at a table decoration.
“Fine.” She paused for effect. “Now I’m going to hate it forever.”
“Then I’ll hate it with you. We’ll be the happy champagne haters for all eternity.”
“Ha, you’re so funny.”
A moment or two of mutual anger and silence passed, during which the blue-eyed woman had given her back to Flynn. Rolling her eyes and sighing, she turnd to face him again.
“Look, I can’t go around speaking in public in this state, so why don’t you just do it for me?” she stated more than asked. She ignored the stunned look he wore as she pulled something out of her handbag. She held the index cards she now held out to him. “Here’s me outline and notes in case you need to look at them. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go mingle. Bye!”
Thirst forgotten, she quickly walked in the direction of a cluster of people a few yards away, leaving a thoughtful, slightly confused Flynn behind.
He glanced at the notes she’d left him and noticed that the outline consisted of a single letter as each point. Following his intuition he read them vertically, coming up with a single sentence, a bit of punctuation, and a hand-drawn heart:
“Just kidding! *heartmark*”
Later that evening
The well-dressed guests stood in silence before her, waiting for the scientist to begin. The woman in question smoothed the front of her midnight blue dress, softly cleared her throat, and smiled.
“Since I don’t feel I’m really in any condition for long speeches, I’ll keep this concise. Thank you all for coming, and most of all thank you for giving me the chance to come up here and announce to you the name of a new metallic element, once known to the people I work with as unbitrium.”
She paused for a moment to get her breath back and look across the room.
“I have decided to call it clarium —” she smiled at a person at the back and to her left “— in honor of someone very important to me. I hope others find studying it to be as interesting as it was for me to discover it. Now, since I can’t have any champagne with you, I can’t ask you to return to your dinners as one normally would.”
The person Will had smiled to picked up a glass from a nearby tray and lifted it to her with a nod. As the blonde continued speaking, she brought the rim of the glass to her cheek and listened on, her green eyes sparkling. The man who had his arm around her smiled and pulled her closer.
“I thought you weren’t having any because of her.”
Claire smiled, her gaze drifting up to Alan.
“She obviously doesn’t want me to deprive myself of a drink tonight.”
“Yeah?” He slipped the glass out of her hand and set it on the table next to him. “I’m not letting you have enough for both of you.”
The woman rolled her eyes.
“Is cuteness the only thing you resort to?”
He shook his head, shrugging.
“Nah. It’s just what works best.”
She raised an eyebrow at him and laughed silently.
“…So once again, thank you and good night.”
Alan caught us by surprise on the way back and proposed to me. The lunkhead. Well… cute lunkhead.
AN: :P There ya go, Angel. ^^ The second part was kinda dumb, but I just had to write the whole scene. And Claire’s last comment? Improvised. It’ll probably be moved.