kiramaru7 | More His Style and Taste

Title: More His Style and Taste
Author: kira
Fandom: Prodigal Son
Characters/Pairings: Malcolm Bright, Dani Powell, Sunshine, mention of Jessica
Disclaimer: Don’t own it, wish I did!
Summary/Teaser: Malcolm decides to redecorate his loft…
Rating: G
Notes: Thanks go out to my beta Kat, for pinking this for me. This is a fill for a comment COM left over at LJ’s Comment Fic. The prompt she left was: Prodigal Son, Malcolm Bright, he wants to change out some of his mother's decorative touches to his loft, starting with the paintings

For COM…

Malcolm, coffee in hand, strolled over to Sunshine’s cage. He carefully pulled the cover off one-handedly, dropping it on the floor. The little parakeet fluttered about, chirping to be let out. Malcolm quickly obliged her. Sunshine took off, flying around the loft, before settling on one of the old paintings Malcolm’s mother had hung on the walls “to make it feel more like home.” Malcolm wondered how Ainsley had avoided their mother’s touch when it came to decorating. He figured it must have something to do with a similar sense of style. He shrugged and drank another mouthful of coffee as he watched Sunshine fly around the room. When she landed on his head, Malcolm chuckled and reached up to get her to go on his finger. Instead of having the desired effect, Sunshine flew off.

“Hey, where’re you going?” Malcolm followed after her.

After stretching her wings, Sunshine landed on the painting at the far end of the loft. She danced along the top of the gilded frame, trilling softly to herself. She would sometimes bang her tiny beak on the ornate frame, before pausing just long enough to cock her head to the side, as if wondering if Malcolm was impressed by her antics.

“Sunshine, get down from there! Great Grandmamma doesn’t like birds!” He held up his hand, his index finger extended, while his other fingers curled in, like an inviting perch.

Sunshine looked at it and let out a loud “ack-ack-ack!!” She danced to the opposite side of the frame.

Malcolm sighed. His great grandmother stared down at him from her portrait, hints of the dour old lady she would become clearly seen on her young face. Malcolm lowered his hand and stared back at the woman in the portrait. Mother had said she was about sixteen in the portrait, which had been commissioned when his great grandmother had become engaged to his great grandfather. Born in the wine country of Bordeaux, she was the daughter of a wealthy vintner and his great grandfather met her while traveling aboard. One of his aunts, however, claimed the woman was a “trollop, who forced him into marrying her” and the vineyard story was just that; a story to cover up her humble origins.

Whatever the truth was, was lost to time and the retelling of a possible lie. Malcolm wondered if that was why the woman he barely remembered was so stern. If she had to endure a lifetime of being reminded of her lower station by her “betters,” it was no wonder she was such a stickler for the rules of decorum. It was also probably why the woman adored his father. Malcolm supposed Martin Whitly’s charm was part of it.

He grinned and shook his head. The painting actually belonged to his father, despite being one of Mother’s grandmothers. Why it ended up in his loft, instead of donated to some museum, or locked away in storage, was beyond him. However, Malcolm decided it was going to go back into storage, along with his father’s other belongs. Malcolm looked around his loft. There was another painting on the far wall that he always hated; that Malcolm decided was going to join Great Grandmamma in storage.

Later on, while Malcolm was in middle of his morning yoga routine, he looked up and stared at an old painting of a horse race. He hated the ghastly thing as a child and time did nothing to give him an appreciation of it. It was then that he decided he was going to redecorate his place. Gone would be Mother’s young moneyed gentlemen’s club and in its place would be his more eclectic style. Maybe not everything… Malcolm thought as rolled up his yoga mat. There were a few pieces he loved like the little bronze nude of a woman standing on her hands and the antique cut crystal whiskey decanter and silver ice bucket, and the Picasso sketch Aunt Sonya found a Paris flea market. It was more like a “phone doodle” than something more deliberate, but it was still a Picasso, however crudely drawn on the back of a paper napkin.

He refilled Sunshine’s seed cups and gave her some fresh water, padding towards his bedroom. As he undressed to go into the shower, Malcolm decided to remove the quaint pastoral scene above his bed with a series of nudes he bought off a local artist. The prints of Chinatown, Little Italy, and the Manhattan skyline he got from a street vendor would look great in what passed as a dining room.

He turned on the taps in the shower and stepped inside. As he showered and shaved, Malcolm imagined he was decorating his loft. He would get Sunshine a bigger cage, either one of those huge monstrosities he saw on Amazon, or maybe if he looked hard enough, he could find a picture of an antique cage that he liked and get some metal worker to recreate it for him. He also wondered if he should hire a painter to give the place a bit of a face lift.

Malcolm turned off the taps and reached for his towel. He dried off, and wrapping the towel around his waist, he left the bathroom to get dressed. By the time he reached the precinct, Malcolm had thoroughly remade the loft in his image. He met Dani at the door and the two of them walked in together.

“Why so happy?” Dani asked.

“Uh, I was thinking about redecorating the loft…?”

“Yeah?”

Malcolm nodded. By the time they had reached their desks, his smiled faded. Unfortunately, Dani noticed.

“Something wrong?”

“No… I just realized that this redecorating thing might be harder than I thought.” His shoulders slumped. Frowning, Malcolm reached for the stack of folders on his desk.

“Why don’t you ask your mother?” Dani signed off on a case and got up to file it. She paused at Malcolm’s desk.

He looked up at her. “I wanted to have more my style than hers.”

“Okay.” She frowned as she thought it over. “Maybe I can help? My friend just moved into a larger place and we spent the day looking at resale and second hand shops. We also hit that new flea market down in Soho…?” she trailed off, mentally kicking herself for offering a way to get cheap furniture, when he obviously had no money issues. “I mean, I wish you could see her apartment, it has a nice retro look to it.”

Malcolm nodded. “Yeah… I ummm…” He smiled at the thought of looking in all those places, and coming up with a stylish, yet comfortable look. Maybe if he was lucky, he could find something that reminded him of Gil’s and Jackie’s place, but had his mother’s sense of style to it. “Yeah… Maybe we could go this weekend?” He figured as long as it did not look like a thrift shop, his mother could not complain.

Dani smiled. “Okay.”

“It’s a date!” The minute he said it, her eyes went wide and Malcolm could feel the color rising in his cheeks. Before he could embarrass himself any further, Gil stepped out of his office to call everyone in to discuss a new case. However, he need not have worried about saying something stupid where Dani was concerned. As he got up, Dani leaned in close, her voice soft as silk.

“It’s a date.” She smiled as he let out a sigh of relief. “Tell Gil, I’ll be there in a sec.”

Malcolm nodded. Pushing his personal thoughts aside, he quickly got into work mode and headed upstairs to Gil’s office. They had more pressing things do than worry about paint and fabric swatches…

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