as long as the future keeps waiting for us (river | chrissie/rosa)

[fiachairecht]

as long as the future keeps waiting for us. river, chrissie/rosa + chrissie~stevie. post-canon soft dates for the prompt 'crave'. 982w, rated t.

There are things Chrissie is used to wanting: her children to be safe, her budget requests to be approved, her fellow officers to stop whispering behind her back about who she slept with to make DCI.

But none of that is about wanting for her, not really: it's about her children, her department and by extension everyone in London, about every woman who should be allowed to push forward and not ever be stopped by a man's hand and his voice saying not until you do a little something for me, sweetheart.

Stevie used to push her on it over the years, playful eyes and cheerful voice and always the same question, what d'you want? steady and unwavering from her formal early days as DC Stevenson asking about work to the lazier times as just Stevie, sitting on Chrissie's couch with her kids and ordering takeaway for the six of them because god knew Tom wasn't about to come home in time to eat with them, much less cook.

It had taken on more weight in the last year before Stevie's death and, like so many things about her friend's life, she's only realising it now that it's too late, too late for her to apologise for being so numb that she didn't notice Stevie trying to help, or even Stevie's own hurt. Chrissie remembers, now, remembers how the laugh lines at the corners of Stevie's eyes pulled so tight they weren't about laughter at all anymore, remembers the heaviness of what do you want pushing her towards — towards —

Stevie always wanted to talk and Chrissie always let her and, god, how did they manage to leave so many things unsaid at the end?

But now there's Rosa, sweet clever steady Rosa who makes her want so much and so unexpectedly that she blushes with the force of it and she thinks that this must be at least part of what Stevie had been not-saying. And it's absurd, really, because she's a grown woman and that really ought, for the sake of fairness, mean that when she's standing in Rosa's office asking if she wanted to get coffee with her when they get off work she should be able to do it without tripping over her words.

"Chrissie," Rosa finally says, and Chrissie falls silent, bites her lip and readies herself for rejection — of course she's going to say no, she probably has plans already, with Marcus or something, and it's not like this is a proper date, is it? — that she hadn't known how much she was dreading until faced with it.

"Chrissie," Rosa says again, and her hands settle over Chrissie's where they were fidgeting restlessly with the edges of the papers on her desk. Chrissie stills her fingers and drops her gaze to Rosa's, slim and strong covering hers, and fights the urge to lace their fingers together, wondering if she'll ever get another chance to do so. "I would really, really like that," Rosa says, and her voice is warm and Chrissie feels it settle over her skin like a sort of safety she didn't know she was missing.

She absolutely does not spend the rest of her shift thinking about Rosa's hands: how they felt against her hands, how they look tapping against her mouth while she reviews a particularly detailed filed, how they would feel tracing across her lips and throat, how they would look disappearing under her skirt —

No. She's an adult and a professional and she can handle this ... this mix of desire and confusion that's nothing like anything she's felt before. Things she shouldn't be feeling about a colleague and a friend who might not be interested in women, in her, at all. She groans and presses her oveheated cheek to the cool wood of her desk, knocking her glasses askew.

She's going to get coffee with Rosa. They're going to decide if this is a date. And then they're going to ... she doesn't even know. Hasn't dated anyone in decades.

Doesn't, in fact, realise that she's talking to herself until she hears Rosa's soft laugh. "Rosa!" she gasps, sitting up as fast as she can, pushing her glasses back up her nose with suddenly clumsy fingers. "Is it ... time, already?"

"You know," Rosa says, ignoring the question in favour of leaning a hip against Chrissie's desk in a way that has to have been purposefully chosen to highlight the way her skirt clings to her hips. Chrissie can feel herself blushing again as she focuses on Rosa's eyes. How long had she spent determinedly not noticing these things? "When two people go out on a date, they usually decide that it's a date before they start their evening."

"I ... do you want it to be?" She's faced the harshest police officers in the Met, the city's harshest journalists, and somehow it's Rosa who manages to wrong-foot her, sweep away all of her words until she's falling back on a variant of Stevie's question.

Rosa doesn't say anything for a long moment, long enough for Chrissie to wonder just how much she had said, how much Rosa had heard. And then she reaches out, brushes Chrissie's cheek with the very tips of her fingers she feels like a teenager again, suddenly convinced that no matter how long it took them to get here there's no way to go back. "I would like that very much," Rosa says, and it sounds like a promise and a future and things Chrissie wasn't sure she believed in anymore.

 

*

 

When Rosa kisses her for the first time outside of Costa she tastes like cinnamon and honey and the way she cradles Chrissie's face makes her feel cherished and when she tangles her fingers in Rosa's hair Rosa makes a soft, surprised noise against her open mouth that Chrissie never wants to go a day without hearing again.