Home Front ( "Opening" entry)

[templeremus.livejournal.com]

Title: Home Front
Rating: PG
Genre: Romance/Character Study
Characters/Pairings: Tallulah/Laszlo
Author: templeremus
Word Count: 500
Summary: It's 1942 and the world is at war, but the show must go on. Tallulah and Laszlo, afterwards. Spoilers for Daleks in Manhatten/Evolution of the Daleks.

On opening nights, Tallulah slept in late.

Years ago - when she was young enough to believe herself invulnerable - she'd have been up at dawn, prickling all over with nerves. Now she took things quietly, going about barefoot, fixing lunch while Laszlo cleared the table of his repair-work. Every so often he'd plug in a customer's wireless to test it, and they'd get a snatch of a news broadcast or a love song. The big-band music which the two of them had first danced to was being eclipsed. Loyal devotion was the new fashion: girls crooning about absent sweethearts, about fresh-faced men in uniform and brave goodbyes on doorsteps.

It was straightforward stuff, too formulaic really to cut deep, but audiences loved it. Nobody expected Tallulah to shimmy or pout any more. The angel costume had started to moult, and been thrown away. These days she wore dresses which gathered around her ankles, close-fitting but austere enough for the mothers of those uniformed boys. Laszlo did up the top button for her, kissed the back of her neck and whispered: "Go break their hearts, gorgeous."

Onstage she worked harder than she had ever done. Servicemen home on leave packed into the front-row seats, whistling and hollering loud enough to drown the orchestra. Behind the scenes, wartime bred the kind of solidarity that had last been abundant in the weeks after the markets crashed. She bought coffee and hot rolls for the girls to cheer them up after their guy's leave was over: redid their makeup and fixed their hair between acts.
The junior ones called her 'Momma Tallulah', despite her protests that it made her feel ancient. Secretly, though, she was glad. For too long she had been an object of pity, someone to be whispered about whenever her back was turned. Now that disaster hovered at every family's door, pity was in short supply. The wirelesses which Laszlo mended crackled with stories of triumph in adversity. Girls almost two decades younger than her were driving ambulances with the Red Cross. Doctors in England were rebuilding the faces of airmen burnt half to death in crashes.

Tallulah studied the angle of her husband's shoulders as these broadcasts concluded. He still preferred to move about in the dark once the working day was over; she'd get home after her final number and nearly stumble into him. It was the sole thing about him which she found frustrating on occasion: this habit of making himself inscrutable even to those who knew him best. Try as he might to explain, such behaviour was alien to her. She believed in opening the curtains and inviting other people's judgement, come what may.

For his sake, however, she held back. After a moment he turned; reached out his hands for hers, and smiled the crumpled old-man's smile that fitted him better with every year.

"How were they? Inconsolable, for sure."

"In itty-bitty pieces", she told him. When it was only the two of them they could pretend that the whole war was a joke - some grotesque sideshow which the men in uniform had got up to amuse themselves. It would end, as had every war before it. Until then, they would play their parts as best they could: love each other with all they had, and survive.