Anything You Can Do

(rated G)

She pauses just outside the door, key clasped in her hand, and tilts her head slightly to the side.

There's a noise coming from inside the loft, something soft and whirring and mechanical—

A drill?

She slides the key into the lock and twists the knob in one smooth movement, pushing over the threshold, and then stops, rather abruptly.

She isn't quite sure what she expected—half of her envisioned some sort of eccentric burglar, while the other half pictured her father in all his flannel glory—but the reality certainly isn't it.

"What are you doing?"

Killian starts, the power tool dropping from his hand to the floor with a loud crash. She winces while he yelps out a curse, and then the two of them are just standing there facing each other in the sudden silence.

She blinks, slowly taking in the half-formed shelving unit that has appeared on the living room wall, an open toolbox on the ottoman and various wrappings and packagings strung about the floor.

"What are you doing?"

Her repeated question seems to break some sort of spell. He shuffles on bare feet, reaching up to toy at the lobe of his ear—a nervous gesture, she's learned—and she spots the tell-tale hint of pink coloring his cheeks.

"The other evening, you mentioned that you might like a shelf to set the television on." He glances back over his shoulder, gesturing rather redundantly. "I took it upon myself to procure one."

Her heart melts just the littlest bit—it has a tendency to do that with him, she's noticed—and she takes a step farther into the room, setting her keys on a side table, to more closely inspect his handiwork.

"You did this?" she verifies, glancing over the brackets and mounts, all flush neatly against the wall, before casting her eyes back to him. "All by yourself?"

His expression is guarded, careful, and his hand makes a circuit through his hair before coming down to snag in a belt loop. "Does that surprise you?"

Truthfully, it kind of does. She doesn't have a history of staying any one place long enough to even think about putting up shelving, hanging pictures, painting walls—and they're certainly not to the point in their relationship that she would consider him doing those things for her, for them.

But, then she remembers that he did spend well over three centuries doing manual labor aboard a ship, and he does seem to have an uncanny ability for adapting to the modernity of this new life that he's chosen, and suddenly it's not so difficult to picture him strolling through the aisles at the local hardware store.

She runs her fingers over the cool metal of the shelf, tracing the meticulously placed tic marks on the still-exposed expanse of wall, and she can't quite manage to keep a smile from her face, because she knows that every time she looks at this shelf, every time she touches it or dusts it or rearranges Henry's obscenely large collection of DVDs, that she'll think about this, about him, standing barefoot and bare chested in the middle of the loft that's mostly hers and a little bit his and slowly becoming theirs, and she knows—she knows and she hopes and she wants—that this is only the first of many improvements he'll bring to her life and her home.

"No," she answers finally, turning to face him. She reaches out and catches the pocket of his jeans, tugging him closer, and sighs when his arm comes up around her shoulders. "No, it doesn't."