summer is miles and miles away (river | chrissie/rosa)

[fiachairecht]

summer is miles and miles away. river, chrissie/rosa. intimacy, reclamation, moving forward. 1k words, rated t. for fanchonmoreau and the prompt 'chrissie/rosa, one character playing with the other's hair.

The first winter after Stevie's death descends on London just like the loss of her: so hidden in its inevitability that it seems to swallow the world when it finally arrives. The absence of the sun, the steady erosion of colour under the grey-white clouds is just one more loss for Chrissie to organise her life around.

She doesn't mean to keep staying in the office so late, especially now that it means leaving her children alone, but the light fades too soon, now, four in the afternoon and eight at night impossible to distinguish. Stevie used to drag her out of the office on those sorts of nights, make her eat dinner or get her a drink or at least make her promise to go home. On her good days now she'll try to do the same thing for John, and Ira, bless him, has taken it upon himself to try a few times, still figuring out where he fits around her and John and the space that is not-Stevie.

Chrissie loves him for it, sometimes, and sometimes she can't bear the awful gaping space between familiar and new that he occupies.

Tonight she stands in front of the window, just enough lights off that she can see herself reflected, hovering against the city. She looks, she thinks ruefully, awful: hair a half-contained mess, suit jacket gaping open over a rumpled blouse, glasses long abandoned. This is the worst case they've worked since Stevie's, and any hope Chrissie had that it would be easier because it wasn't Stevie dead on the street had fled days ago. She rests her fingertips against the glass where her breath hasn't fogged it up, covers up the little sparks of light one by one. So many people, so many lives, and none of them had enough time left.

She hears Rosa before she sees her, senses overly attuned to the empty room. She had sent everyone home an hour ago when they became too tired to be of any use, and even John had left. Dinner with Ira and Marianne, like he has twice a week now, and that knowledge is one of the very few things in her life that make her truly happy.

"What are you still doing here, Rosa?"

A pause, and then Rosa moves close enough that her reflection joins Chrissie's. Chrissie catches her reflection's eyes above the blue coat that blocks out skyscrapers, doesn't turn around. "How did you know it was me?"

"Hope?" Chrissie shrugs. She can answer questions with questions too, but she relents before Rosa can open her mouth to reply, before she herself can think about the truths lying behind that one word answer. "Your shoes."

There's a smile flitting around the corners of Rosa's mouth and Chrissie wants to kiss it away. Has been wanting to, she thinks, for far longer than she's admitted to herself. "Honesty for honesty," Rosa says, and she moves close enough that Chrissie can feel her warmth at her back. "I wanted to make sure you got home okay. You looked ... well, I saw you earlier today."

Chrissie snorts a bit at the unnecessary diplomacy. She opens her mouth to say something she should, like I've seen worse or it's going to be fine, you didn't need to, but what she says instead is, "Come home with me," before her hand flies up to cover her mouth a heartbeat too late.

Rosa's eyes widen and Chrissie blushes. She hasn't felt so stupid since she nearly kissed John, and now she doesn't have alcohol to blame or Stevie to guide her. "I mean. Just for a drink or — or, something, because you stayed, and ... kindness for kindness, yeah?"

And Rosa has every right and reason to reject her but instead she's stepping forward to stand next to Chrissie properly, resting the tips of her fingers on the back of Chrissie's neck through her tangled hair so Chrissie feels like she's going to burst into flames from the heat of her, her fingers and her gaze as Rosa tilts her head up to meet her eyes properly. "Are you sure?" is all she says, and all Chrissie can do is whisper yes.

 

***

 

Chrissie makes them hot chocolate when they get home; the case not quite miserable enough to justify drowning her sorrows in alcohol but definitely not at a place where she can drink in celebration. Her children are asleep or at least otherwise occupied upstairs, and Rosa is ... sitting on her sofa, flicking through channels and settling on a Great British Bake Off re-run.

It doesn't even seem strange, somehow, to see Rosa on her sofa.

(It still seems strange, even now, to think of it as her sofa, not the sofa, not their sofa. Chrissie had never had a clear idea in her head about what this sort of process, this sort of reclamation would look like, and still she feels surprised by every step along the way, it was never supposed to look like this, it was never supposed to happen.)

But Rosa is curled up on her sofa and it feels dangerous in its comfort, like she's already dreading the night when she's going to look over and feels something like disappointment that Rosa's not there  — and this, too, is a reclamation of some kind.

"Chrissie?" Rosa asks softly, and it's only when Chrissie wonders why her voice sounds a bit muffled that she realises she's drifted down to rest her head on Rosa's shoulder, that Rosa's speaking mostly into her hair.

"Oh," she says, and guilt rushes over her in a wave. Still she can't quite bring herself to sit up immediately, Rosa too real and warm under her cheek to let go of so quickly. "Sorry."

"It's okay," Rosa says, one arm slipping around Chrissie's shoulder to hold her in place. "It ... is it okay?" The note of uncertainty in her voice just makes Chrissie feel worse, because they've gotten so much closer in the past few months but they haven't really, properly talked about it and she knows that's mostly her fault.

She settles for pressing herself tighter against Rosa's side, watching steam rise from their mugs on the coffee table and sighing happily as she feels Rosa's fingers slip through her hair, over and over and still just as warm against her skin as they had been back at the station. "Yes," she says, nearly inaudibly, and then, louder, "Yes, this ... we're okay."

Okay.

It's a good word.

It's enough, for now.