DECADES

So on this day, TEN years ago, I posted my first ever fanfic. That's all kinds of crazy. Two years ago, I did an eight year anniversary piece on my first fandom. So I'm doing my ten year anniversary piece on my newest fandom. I hope you enjoy.

Clawen, AU. Snippets of a lifetime.

In the interest of this fic, they were both 35 at the time of the movie.

Five

She's really nervous, though she's not going to let anyone know that. Even Karen, who thinks she's so much more grown up at eight and a half, nearly nine. She keeps that smile plastered on her face… it starts to feel like it's fixed.

The teacher, Mrs McSomething, introduces her to the class with a smile that's too wide, and everyone looks like they aren't in the slightest bit interested. It's been four months since school started, and everyone knows each other already, everyone knows their place in the kindergarten pecking order. She'd be just fine if they were still in Connecticut with her Daddy, but since Mommy and Daddy's arguing had got worse, and Daddy had done something really naughty (she's not sure what – she suspects stealing from the biscuit tin, because that's the most unforgivable sin in her house) with his secretary Lauren, Mommy and Daddy are not going to live together anymore and Mommy's brought her and Karen to Wisconsin. Her Mommy gives a false sounding, high pitched laugh and says something about it being good, just the Dearing girls, but Claire would rather be at home, at her old school, where she has six very good friends and a seat she always sits on around the lunch table.

She doesn't like it here.

Apparently, people in Wisconsin aren't very friendly. Because no one talks to her in the morning lessons – all the girls seems to have their own friends already, and they don't want any new ones. And then when the bell rings, they all rush out to the playground, giggling, and she finds herself trailing out after them, suddenly feeling very small.

Even at five years old, and really physically quite small for her age, Claire Dearing does not like feeling small. You can't be strong, if you're small, and she's always wanted to be strong.

She sits down on the grass at the edge of the playground, among the dandelions. Because strong people don't need friends. She'll be fine by herself. She picks a flower and admires it, deciding that maybe yellow's her favourite colour after all.

"You ok?"

She looks up, and there's a grubby fair haired boy standing in front of her, his face a slight shade of pink, his hands in his pockets, grass stain on his shirt.

"I'm fine." She says, trying to keep her chin up and her face serious. She's sure she doesn't need whatever help this boy's offering.

She doesn't like boys, anyway. They're not nice like little girls.

"I'm Owen. You want to play tag with us?" he gestures towards a small group of boys chasing each other a few feet away in the playground, looking increasingly awkward.

For some reason, she says yes.

Fifteen

It's not like anything she's ever felt before. It's entirely different, and it's really quite scary. She'd been quite happy bumbling along as she was, with Owen by her side as often as possible, as he had been since the day they'd played tag in the playground at St Mark's. They'd bumbled through their schools, and she'd fought tooth and nail with her mother not to send her to the convent all girls middle school Karen had gone to – and she'd won; from an early age her skills of persuasion were impressive – now they're in high school they only have American History together, but they're on each other's lunch table, and they walk to the bus together after school and have been practically living in one another's houses since they'd met, so she still feels in the correct state. The way the world is supposed to be, or something like that.

Until now. Until Sarah.

Owen, in all his long gangly still full of childish humour fifteen years, is in love.

And she doesn't know what this feeling is that's hitting her.

Because Sarah's nice, Sarah's been her friend in Calculus since she started high school, and she's got no reason to have this feeling coursing through her, because she's always thought of Owen like a brother to her, but suddenly something feels suspiciously like jealousy.

She's NOT remotely jealous, she can't be. Maybe it's just the way suddenly it seems like Owen will bend over backwards to do anything for Sarah, and that person used to be her.

Yes, surely that's it. She's never really thought about Owen being anything to anyone, other than her best friend. Sure, she's like all the other teenage girls, she's dreamed about finding the perfect boyfriend, she's sure one day she'll fall so in love she won't know what's hit her, but she's never thought about Owen doing it, and certainly not first.

She's always thought Owen was going to be a constant.

A couple of days down the line of being particularly morose, her sister confronts her.

"What the hell is going on, Claire?" Karen asks, barging into her room without even knocking as she's always been prone to do, but hasn't done for years. "And where's Owen been these last few weeks? He's always around, normally. Is he sick?"

Claire sullenly shakes her head, and Karen raises an eyebrow. She thinks she's so wise now, being at college and being Scott the quarterback's girlfriend. "Have you fallen out?"

Another head shake. She knows her sister well, but she thinks Karen knows her even better, and she fears that if she starts talking about it Karen might read her like a book and tell her the truth she's been denying.

"What's going on, then? Because something's changed, Claire bear."

She scowls at the nickname. She's fifteen, for heaven's sake, not five. She breaks eye contact and suddenly finds something incredibly interesting out of her bedroom window.

"He's just spending a lot of time with Sarah, his new girlfriend. It's no big." She shrugs, and knows the moment she's done it that she's overplayed it.

Karen sinks into her bed in front of her, and puts a hand on her knee, a slightly bitter little chuckle behind her words. "I've been saying for years it's about time you realised you were in love with him."

Claire scowls.

Karen shrugs. "What? It's obvious now, isn't it? Now he's found someone else… I'm sorry, Claire bear."

And before she knows it, she's crying into her sister's shoulder, and that revelation is crashing down on her like it's suffocating.

After lots of much needed sisterly girl talk that night, she decides that this has to stop. She'll find herself someone too, Owen will always be her best friend, but he's never going to be anything else, and she needs to move on.

Sarah only lasts another week, but the damage is done. She's got her first boyfriend within the year, and she convinces herself she's head over heels and lets him break her heart two weeks shy of her sixteenth birthday.

And she doesn't think about Owen like that for a very long time.

Twenty five

The weather is glorious that summer, and they spend most of it on the beach, and in and out of bed in his aunt and uncle's cabin by the sea. When they'd finally fallen together, after Claire had suffered a messy breakup with her college boyfriend at age twenty one, they'd never looked back. Owen had put his arm around her to comfort her, swallowing his own long dormant feelings, using interesting and innovative curse words to insult Chad, who had not only been sleeping with her good friend Wendy for the last year, but also her Economics teacher Professor Jayne Gill, and suddenly she had looked up at him through wide, tear filled eyes, and asked why she wasn't enough.

"You have always been enough." He breathed, and his voice had sounded thicker than he had intended. "You're everything."

There'd been a frozen moment for an indeterminable amount of time, and then she'd leaned in, suddenly looking shy. When her lips had made contact with his, his breath had caught in his throat.

From then on, everyone else had wondered why they'd ever not been together, how no one else had realised how perfect they were.

They'd known each other forever, really, and maybe that was the reason they slotted so comfortably together, like they'd never been apart. She'd been in his bed by the end of the month, and it hadn't been many more weeks before he'd woken her up with a smile, a cup of fresh coffee and an awkward shrug not dissimilar to the one that had accompanied her invitation to play tag with the boys that first day on the playground.

"I love you, you know that, right?" he'd half-whispered, both as casually as if he'd been asking her what she wanted for breakfast and with as much weight as a proposal at the same time. It had floored her for a moment, because she hadn't been expecting her response to flow so easily.

"I know that." She'd breathed, setting her coffee on the bedside table and pulling him towards her. "I've loved you too, for a long time."

It hadn't always gone swimmingly, of course it hadn't, they were both headstrong, and didn't really have a huge amount in common bar the love and the memories, but they'd always come spinning back together as violently as they'd cascaded apart, and nothing seemed impossible, not then. Their arguments invariably ended in passionate make up sex followed by lazy sunlit mornings of sorting everything out in a more adult, civilised manner, involving actual conversation, and neither of them would have had it any other way. Life happened around them – Claire worked her way up the ranks at a startling pace at Masrani Global, and Owen decided he was never going to be the architect his father had always wanted, and started training to become a mechanical engineer at a Naval base.

That summer, they reached a suspension. Claire was on three months long overdue holiday, preceding taking up a new position in a different branch of the company. They spent most of that summer in the sunshine, between the waves, in one another's arms, and a sense of peace settled over them both.

Dysfunctional families and disappointed fathers could be forgotten about when the only sound you could hear when you woke up in the morning was the waves on the sand.

It was the calm before the storm, however.

The words I'm going away with the Navy echoed through Claire's ears for months afterwards, once she'd already started convincing herself she didn't care anymore. The night he told her, only weeks after they'd got back from what she could only describe as the best summer of her life, she'd just stared at him, a cold feeling seeping through her whole body, words catching in her throat. When he'd gently questioned Claire? to her silence, she'd managed to ask him when, and unable to fix his eyes with hers, he'd answered in two weeks time.

It had descended into one of their furious, boiling arguments then, with insults thrown they hadn't meant, with finalities give they would regret.

Oh I've never been enough for Miss Ivy League, have I, Claire, and now I'm finally doing something I want to do and it's still not good enough…

You're commitment phobic and you're never going to grow up and fully commit to this relationship, so you're running away…

You're not even asking me to wait for you, what do you think of me? That I'm going to wake up with the next man who offers to buy me a drink when you're barely out of the country?

I've never questioned what you've needed to do, what you've wanted to do, all those training courses and nights of late studying for yet another board exam… I've put up with you not quite living in the world with everyone else all this time, and suddenly when there might be something I want to do…

"We never would have worked, anyway. Not forever. We're too different." She hissed through her tears, the venom and the anger rising in her system to beyond controllable levels.

He didn't answer, not for a moment, just gave her that stare that she'd always felt could see right through her.

"That's what you really think, then, is it, Claire? Is that what you've always thought, or did that just occur to you?"

She took a deep breath, the unfair enormity of what she'd just spat in the heat of the moment catching up with her. "Owen, I-"

He put a hand up, looking away from her.

"I don't want to hear it. I'm sorry it had to end this way." He picked his wallet up off her kitchen table, running a hand through his hair, exasperated, "Though I spose I'm not, really, if all I've ever been to you is filling the space in time until you found someone more suitable…"

"I didn't mean-"

There was nothing but emptiness in his eyes when he met hers, one last time. "I don't want to hear it, Claire. I'll see myself out."

As the door slammed behind him, she crumpled to the floor, her shoulders shaking.

Thirty five

There's sunshine coming through the window of their cheap motel room, just outside of the town – it hadn't been easy to find a place to stay, by the time they'd finally got off Isla Nublar on the last boat. Owen had tried to persuade her to go with Karen, Scott and the boys, but suddenly with all the fear and the memories coursing through her she'd been reluctant to leave his side.

As he once had, he suddenly emanated safety again.

She lays an arm across her eyes and keeps her head resting on the pillow, his arm loosely slung across her hips. She's content to stay here, and not think, for now.

Last night was still something of a blur, which she puts down to the exhaustion more than anything else – she's surprised they'd had the energy they had, but she supposes the adrenaline still running through them had played a part in that.

There had been no words spoken when they finally found somewhere still with some space – she'd booked only one room without even looking at him. The moment the door had swung closed he'd leaned in towards her, and there'd been nothing to do but crash against him, like he was her only constant left in the world.

They'd remembered each other's bodies better than she'd ever envisaged (and despite her best efforts, she'd imagined it a number of times since he'd started working with her again – when she could remember how good it had once been, she couldn't help wondering…), she supposes it's a bit like riding a bike, really. He'd been better than she'd remembered, if that was possible, or maybe they were both just older, more experienced, and the whole situation, the last 48 hours had made them more attentive, a sudden new value to life and each other's lives in the air between them.

She'd come crashing around him like she hadn't in ten years, and for the first time since everything she'd felt deliciously human again.

He'd breathed, "I missed you." as he slumped beside her moments later, and she'd been too drained at that time to think on it, so nothing but a tiny smile graced her lips as she slid out of consciousness.

The words hang heavy over her this morning, but more because she hadn't realised how much she missed him until his life had been hanging on a thread in front of her than she hadn't wanted to hear it.

His fingers start tracing something illegible on her hip, and she turns her head to the side, to where he's pressed into the pillow beside her. His eyes are still closed, but there's the slightest curve of a smile gracing his lips. Suddenly everything seems simpler than she'd expected, and she leans towards him, pressing her lips against his.

One of those big, callused, comfortingly familiar hands threads into her hair, and suddenly their legs are tangling again, her breath is short, his fingers are everywhere….

She pulls back, gasping, a smile that feels wider that she's given in years on her face, meeting his eyes.

"Morning." She breathes, and his smile only widens.

"Morning, Ms Dearing." A low chuckle rumbles in his throat at the formality. He brushes his thumb lightly along her cheekbone, and she almost doesn't want to look in his eyes for a moment; there's something of a distant memory in the back of them she's not sure she's ready for, yet.

"I missed you, too." She breathes, and she's sure she's blushing, and she wonders if she's still high on the adrenaline of the whole thing, because she had not planned on giving him that, surrendering herself to him so soon.

He looks as if his breath catches for a moment. "I meant it though, Claire. Enough messing around. We really should stick together." He sighs, as she presses her lips to the palm of his hand, which she's not sure whether is a distraction technique or agreement. "And not just for survival. For everything that comes next."

And that's terrifying. Because everything that comes next is everything she was ready for ten years ago, when he'd never been going anywhere, when she'd have given up anything for him, before she'd become the Claire Dearing who didn't need anyone by her side.

"It's been ten years, Owen. We've changed."

His smile doesn't falter, not one bit. "Have you been happy, though, really? Have you been as happy as we were that summer on the beach? Because I haven't. I screwed everything up after that, didn't I?" he sighs.

She lowers her eyes, lacing her fingers over his on her cheek. "We both said things we didn't mean, that day, I think."

He frowns slightly. "I've never stopped regretting leaving like I did, I've never stopped wishing I'd done things differently… I should have asked you before I decided, I should have told you sooner… I should never have gone in the first place, I-"

She puts a finger to his lips, everything that's happened suddenly culminating, and a new reality seeping over her. "It's in the past. So far in the past. There's no use dragging up the past."

He raises an eyebrow. "That is not what you said to me when I first started working here. You made it quite clear that you were going to hold it against me for the rest of my life." He laughs.

"Yes, but-"

"Yes, but…" he mocks softly, pulling her hip slightly closer, fingers increasing pressure on her skin.

She rolls her eyes as his lips come against hers. Between kisses, gasping, she manages. "Survival… for now… and… and…" she's sure a blush rises in her cheeks as he rolls on top of her at what she says next. "…and everything that happens next…"

Forty five

She lives in a different world, these days. And she wouldn't have it any other way, she thinks, as she watches Owen tearing across their lawn, little Oliver on his shoulders, chasing the older two, Charlie, the eldest, using his significant height advantage over Alexander in what seems almost like a race to safety behind the big tree at the bottom of his garden.

It's been Claire and the four Grady boys for little over two years now, since Oliver was born, and she's been surrounded by boys of varying sizes for years now.

They'd gotten married the summer after the incident. Owen had given her the most decidedly unromantic proposal in history, she's sure, but she couldn't have felt more head-over-heels afterwards. They'd been stuck in traffic on the way back from a meal at Karen's with her sister and the boys, and in the middle of an argument about whether they should have taken another route off the highway.

She'd been busy telling him to stop talking if he was just going to be a backseat driver in a stationary car, he was driving her mad, and if he thought he could have picked a better route than her he should have offered to drive, let her have more than one glass of wine, when he gave her something of an enigmatic smile.

"Marry me."

That had shocked her into silence for a moment.

"What?"

"Marry me. I love you even when I'm tearing my hair out, you're driving me mad and I'm convinced we're never going to agree… that's a recipe for a marriage, don't you think?"

She'd swallowed, her anger slowly subsiding, her heart thumping in her chest.

"What?"

He'd half-laughed. "Marry me, Claire. I want to be arguing with you in the early hours of the morning in terrible traffic for the rest of my life. Marry me."

There'd seemed nothing to do but lean sideways and kiss him, nodding a tearful yes as she did so. Of course the traffic had chosen that moment to start moving and they'd been torn apart very quickly by an angry horn from the car behind.

They'd married on the beach by his aunt and uncle's beach house, because they still remembered that summer as their happiest time, despite everything that came after. They'd danced on the sand like there was no one watching, and there'd hardly been a dry eye in the wedding party.

It hadn't seemed like long before she'd found herself staring at a tiny plus sign, it seeming huge, and telling Owen with a shake in her voice and a thousand unspoken confessions about not thinking she'd be any good at this, not knowing if he wanted this, not knowing what she'd done wrong, she'd been so meticulous with birth control. But Owen's face had turned all warm and moist-eyed, and it had occurred to her that maybe she'd find a way to be happy about this, too, once she figured it all out.

Charlie was three weeks early, in an incubator for 48 hours, and to blame for the first few grey hairs on Owen's head. And when they finally got a chance to hold him he was so tiny and so fragile that they both felt entirely overwhelmed by the whole thing, as if they couldn't possibly cope with something this figuratively huge.

But Charlie grew quickly, developed as he should and laughed and smiled a lot, and was followed two years later by Alexander, and Oliver after another few years. And so Claire became outnumbered by the Grady boys, completely surrounded by immature jokes, toilet humour and mischievousness, but she wouldn't have it any other way.

As Owen comes raring around the tree, chasing her two eldest towards her, clutching Oliver's little chubby legs, her youngest son shrieking with laughter and clapping his hands, she considers that she wouldn't rather be anyplace else than beside the Grady boys.

Fifty five

It's the first year they take a holiday just the two of them in seventeen years, since Charlie was born. And of course they spend most of their time talking about the boys. Charlie's about to start his senior year at high school, and start thinking about college, and it looks like he wants to become the architect his father never wanted to be. Alex's going through the teenage years much worse than Charlie ever did, with a fondness for heavy metal music, detention and grunting as a means of communication. Ollie, although only 12, is the only one of the three Grady boys in love at this time, claims to be madly in love with Joanna he met last week, and is lovesick with worry that he'll never pluck up the courage to tell her.

But Ollie and Alex are staying with their kind-of Uncle Zack right now, and that always goes down well, they'll be cheerful when their parents pick them up. More concerning, Charlie is house-sitting. Claire's not convinced she'll return home to two living cats, intact plumbing and a car that hasn't been pranged.

But when they're not talking about the boys they're eating on the shorefront in candlelight, lazing on their sunbeds listening to the waves and they're rolling lazily between the sheets; they know each other's bodies with their eyes closed, now, but that doesn't make it any less beautiful.

One night, in the moonlight, with a glass of Bourbon in his left hand and the fingers of his right hand twining through hers, Owen smiles.

"Sometimes it feels like no time has passed at all, not really. Like we were twenty five years old on this beach, and then we blinked, and here we are. Nothing's really any different to that summer."

Claire snorts. Owen frowns. All these years, and still sometimes his attempts to be romantic are apparently more humorous than passionate.

"That was thirty years ago. I've got a LOT more wrinkles, two of your sons were late, and huge, and you're almost completely grey."

"Yes, but-" he starts, and she laughs, putting a finger on his lips and kissing his cheekbone.

"Yes, but…" she half-whispers, and there are echoes of a similar conversation in reverse many years ago, in the aftermath of everything.

He gently pushes her finger away and presses his lips to hers, softly. An electricity that has never fused out sparks between them. Claire sinks back into her chair, nursing her gin and tonic, smiling.

"I look at it the other way, I think. So much has happened in that time. We hated each other for about ten of those years, and then everything happened – and that's the only reason we found our way back – we both would have been too stubborn, otherwise… and we've got three beautiful boys, none of whom are that little anymore… and this time next year, Owen, Charlie'll be going to college. Where did all that time go, that's the way I see it…"

He twines his fingers in hers, giving her an almost-sad smile.

"We made it here, however you look at it. Thirty years since that summer and we made it here."

"We made it here." She echoes.

Sixty five

They're sitting under a marquee in the sunshine, and despite all the seemingly thousands of young women in beautiful dresses at his eldest son's wedding, he can't help thinking his wife, in her smart pale pink suit and floral fascinator, with the smile of mother-of-the-groom dancing across her face, is the most beautiful woman in the room.

He watches his son in his first dance with Lydia, the girl he met in college, and his father had told him outright she's not the sort of girl you should ever let go, and smiles.

"When did we get this old, huh?" Claire muses, but the smile doesn't falter for one second. "That little baby with the wild red hair and a huge pair of lungs is on that floor now with the woman he's going to spend the rest of his life with – when did time start going so fast?"

Owen cups his hand over hers almost idly on the table. "They have got so much ahead of them. I'm kinda jealous, really… all those years in front of them to bring it all down and build it all back up again…"

"And still end up where they always wanted to be from the start." Claire concludes, nodding with a finality that makes Owen suspect she's not quite talking about her son anymore. He traces his fingers lightly in the palm of her hand.

When she gets up to take her son's hand as Lydia's father steps out for the father-daughter dance, she can't help feeling her heart swell. Because it really doesn't seem like long since he put her through nine hours of an excruciating labour, since he cried in her arms for the first time and she realised she'd been missing out on something all these years, since his first words (Dadda), his first steps (across their living room into her arms), the first graze to his knee in their backyard. Since he first went to school in a uniform at least 3 sizes too big for him, since he first got the bus home all by himself, since the first time he lifted little Ollie onto his back in a piggyback. Because now he's her grown up architect son, with a beautiful wife with a tiny bump under her wedding dress so subtle you can hardly see it, and a whole future ahead of him – a whole future without her. And for a moment, that floors her.

She's been the number one woman for her four Grady boys for what seems like longer than she can remember, now. And suddenly, that's starting to change.

When the dance ends and the one Grady boy she's confident she's keeping hold of for the rest of their lives takes her hand, she gives him a weary smile, and lets her forehead rest against his cheek as they sway, gently.

For a moment, she feels like she's twenty five years old and dancing to the soft sound of nothing at all on the sand of a deserted beach, in the arms of a man she'd been determined to spend the rest of her life with.

Funny how you find your way back to where you're supposed to be.

Seventy five

The latest addition to the Grady clan is the little dark haired girl with the skin of a slightly different tinge to his. His youngest, Oliver, and his partner Brad, have just adopted her, and her birth mother, before she died, was Korean. Suzu-kwon, as named by her mother, to be nicknamed Susie.

He smiles as he watches his son and his fiancé cooing over the three week old like a pair of old women, and feels a weight almost lift off his chest. Since Oliver had struggled with his sexuality through high school and college, with a number of dysfunctional boyfriends, they hadn't expected him to find happiness with quite the ease he eventually had had when he'd accidentally taken the wrong coffee order in Starbucks and found himself faced with Brad. And now their wedding was planned for this Christmas, and they had brought home a little girl, all theirs, yesterday evening.

Susie's only the most recent little Grady. Charlie and Lydia have three, now, and maybe the most surprisingly, his most wayward son Alex had one day had a baby left on his front doorstep with a note from one of his many illicit flings, stating the child was his and the mother wanted nothing to do with it.

DNA tests had confirmed everything, and the paperwork had been sorted within about a week. Suddenly, Alex had come crashing down from his playboy lifestyle, and right now he was still the furiously single father to a five year old little boy.

Owen considers everything, and smiles to himself. Because in whatever unconventional ways, the Grady boys had all turned out alright, and in the right place, and that was all they'd ever wanted.

As Claire leans forward and lifts Susie out of Brad's arms, he wishes he could capture the moment for all eternity. Because standing there, in the sunshine, with an overturning of her shoulders that's only found its way there in the last few years, a slightly grimace as her knees bend as she sinks into the chair next to her son, and a smile on her face as big as it had been the first time she'd held any of their own children, she's everything she's ever been, everything he's ever wanted, and everything he'll ever need.

Eighty five

He sets a breakfast tray in front of her as she sits up in bed, groaning with the morning arthritic pains. It's been easier since they moved into the bungalow (on Oliver's insistence) before the most recent Christmas – he'd been beginning to struggle up the stairs with the breakfast tray.

"Morning, beautiful." He smiles, affectionately watching her rub the sleep out of her eyes. She rolls her eyes at him in the same way she has always responded to that morning greeting – he loves routine, he loves solidity, he loves nothing changing despite everything that's changed.

"What have we got on, today?" she asks, and he sighs inwardly as she sounds forever weary.

"Absolutely nothing." He says with a smile on his face, and wonders when he became the person that didn't need to fill every moment of his life, the person to whom absolutely nothing was like gold.

She sighs, seemingly in relief. "That'll be nice. We need some recovery from how late we were out last night."

Last night had been Bethany(Charlie's youngest)'s orchestral concert, and her first with a viola solo. The second half had gone on until just before ten, and they hadn't been out that late in years – Claire almost laughs when she realises how old they've become, almost without even realising it. Owen drove them home in their little car and they'd settled in for the night with cups of tea, full of gushing words about both their granddaughter's brilliance and how late nights weren't for them anymore.

"Brad's going to cook tomorrow night, we've been invited there." She muses, "I meant to tell you last night, but I got caught up in that Beethoven medley and how proud I was…"

Owen smiles, and eases himself into the bed next to her, presses his lips lightly on her cheekbone.

"That's always good. It's a good job Brad can cook, given we apparently did something wrong raising our youngest in the kitchen. And hopefully we'll get another attempt on Susie and Stana's apricot roulade… although not quite cooked, it was quite tasty…"

Claire frowns. "There was semi-raw egg in that Owen. You shouldn't have…"

He rolls his eyes. "Oh, it's not going to kill me now, is it? If I want to sample and praise my granddaughter's pudding, however many more minutes it should have been baked for, I will…"

She frowns. "You've never stopped arguing back."

He raises an eyebrow. "What, did you think you'd train me?"

She chuckles, and her hand finds his. "Hoped you might quieten down, a little bit, I suppose… but never thought I'd completely tame you. I'd have been mad."

He laughs, a deep rumble in his chest. "If anyone could have tamed me, it would have been Claire Dearing, you know. You're the only woman I ever really-"

She playfully slaps him. "No need to get sentimental, Mr Grady." The old and somewhat bizarre term of endearment rests easy after so many years, "We're far too old for that."

He leans forward, slower than 50 years ago, but with nothing less in his eyes.

Ninety five

He sinks opposite her, chuckling.

"The funniest thing happened today, Claire. Clara was doing a project in school on them, I guess… and she asked me in all seriousness if I was old enough to have been around in the time of the dinosaurs… I think Ben was worried I was gonna freak out, close off, but I just laughed… I guess she'll learn about the Jurassic disasters sometime, but probably not til middle school…"

He sighs, and smiles at her. "She's so like you, you know."

He runs a hand through his hair in a gesture so ingrained in him he doesn't even notice he's doing it.

"I miss you, Claire. Every day, I wake up, and for a second I think you might still be beside me… it's been four months, now, and they tell me it's going to take longer than that to start getting easier… but maybe I don't want to wait around for it to get easier… I feel so old now…"

He swallows, clasping his hands together and looking down at them. "I never wanted to be long without you… we had ten years where we were both stupid, ten years we missed… but we had almost six decades once we found our way back… and not everyone gets that, not everyone's that lucky, so I guess I should be grateful we had all the time we had… we had everything that happens next, didn't we?" his eyes sting a little, and he fiercely palms his face, and for a moment echoes of the headstrong young man in the Navy dance in the air. "But I haven't been able to make any sense of anything, not since…"

There's a chill in the air not characteristic of the season. He tightens his jacket around himself. "…I know you're not here, not really, you're someplace else, but this seems like the place where I can talk to you… and that's what I miss most, Claire…" he laughs bitterly, "Alex thinks I'll catch a chill or something one day so I shouldn't come out here by myself, but you're still everything, Claire… you have been since the day I first laid eyes on you…"

He sighs again, and he uses the arm of the bench heavily to ease himself up, every joint in his body groaning.

"We were both lucky I thought you looked like you might want to play tag, weren't we?" he chuckles, lighter this time, and kisses still rough fingers, pressing them against the shiny granite of the stone bearing his wife's name. "Who knows where we would have ended up if I hadn't."

He grips the stone for a moment, closing his eyes.

"I love you, Claire."

CLAIRE ELISABETH DEARING-GRADY

June 4th 1980 – March 12th 2075

TREASURED WIFE, MOTHER, GRANDMOTHER

ALWAYS LOVING; ALWAYS LOVED

OWEN MICHAEL GRADY

February 12th 1980 – November 3rd 2075

MOST PRECIOUS FATHER, GRANDFATHER, FRIEND AND BELOVED HUSBAND

SWEETLY SLEEPING, BACK HOME AT LAST

FINIS

That's a wrap! Phew, that turned into quite a beast! Hope you all enjoyed and it was a good anniversary piece for my TEN WHOLE YEARS here. As always, I would love to hear what you think; good, bad, constructive… when someone leaves a review an anonymous reader is given a voice, and as an author you feel like real people are reading (+/- enjoying) what you're spending so much time writing.

Thanks for all your continuing support.

Hushedgreylily.