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thelonelylakeunfond of memories. true detective: night country, danvers~navarro. time is a flat circle and so is the ice over the sea, or: the blizzard at tsalal, ft time loops. 3.3k words, rated t.
Liz opens her eyes to the silence that always follows the sort of words she can't take back and she thinks ah, fuck.
She's not unused to this sort of silence, and it's far from the first time she's felt it after an argument with Navarro, but in the darkness of Tsalal Station it feels more oppressive than usual. It's a chill thing, one that cuts down her throat like the knife-slash of wind in a blizzard, and by the time she gathers herself enough to speak Navarro's name into the night she already knows she's alone.
Navarro's out there somewhere, on the ice. For the first time in all the years they've known each other, she's done exactly what Liz had said and walked out, following her voice or her sister or Annie or whatever drove the Tsalal men out there. Walked out and — shit.
Liz thunks her head back against the wall. Doesn't even feel it, with her hood and hat cushioning the blow.
She goes through the motions of searching the station anyway. Even calls down into the tunnels, flickering headlamp casting shadows across walls and ice alike to keep her company.
When she can't put it off any longer, she takes a breath and pushes open the outside doors. It's not quite a whiteout, the flurries kicked up by the change in airflow clearing and obscuring the path in front of her as they swirl and settle. The wind brings more to fill the gap, the snow almost like liquid
"Navarro!" Liz yells, and then, when there's no response, "I was lying, you idiot," as if that would summon her, all raised eyebrows and yeah, no shit expression.
It doesn't. But it makes her feel better, or something like it, makes something loosen in her chest and makes her wonder if the tears stinging her eyes really are just from the wind. Makes her realise, with no little surprise, that this is the part she means.
There are no tracks, no traces, not even anything that could be Navarro's whispers in the wind. Liz manages ten steps, the storm fighting her every movement, before she trips over a drift and tumbles to land flat on her back.
The snowflakes wheel through the sky above her, cold as the stars they're hiding. They settle across her body as the futility of this sinks down over her thoughts — it's over, it's ending, all they've done is add two more bodies to this shitbowl of a case — and Liz figures, might as well go out screaming—
*
"The fuck, Danvers?"
Liz snaps her mouth shut, wondering how long she'd been screaming. She's at the makeshift campfire, tilted dangerously close to Navarro like it's six years ago again — Navarro, here, not lost and dead on the ice waiting for Peter to find her in the spring.
"Sorry," she says, and her voice is hoarse, but not hoarse like she just drowned in a snowdrift. It's easier than it would have been even a week ago, saying sorry. "I thought — it doesn't matter."
Maybe she nodded off for a moment. Maybe the hypothermia's setting in earlier than she'd thought it would. They're both still here.
Navarro's giving her a look, the 'I know you're bullshitting me and I'm actively choosing not to engage' look that Liz has fielded more times than she can count. "Move closer to the fire," she says. "Don't fucking — leave me even more alone."
"Thought we're all alone already."
"Don't make it worse." Navarro hauls herself to her feet, and Liz doesn't think too hard about how shifting closer to the fire also brings her closer to Navarro. "I just thought you'd want to know, about Holden, okay? It's not—"
The rage boils up then, lighting up something deep in the pit of her belly with the memory of what they'd been talking about before she'd dreamt she woke up alone, before they walked outside. "I don't," she hisses. Something in the fire snaps, an unasked for echo. "He's not out there. Nothing's out there. Just fucking — just go, okay?"
Navarro doesn't argue, which only serves to infuriate Liz further. "Fuck her," she says to the fire, where the flames are tracing out what might be the shape of someone's face. "Fucking Navarro," she says, when enough time has passed unmeasured by anything but her breaths that the fire is burning dangerously low.
When she opens her eyes again to silence, the oppressive silence of a building with no other inhabitants, she's reduced to just, "Fuck."
She heads straight for the doors this time, the dream — it wasn't a dream — sharper in memory than the fireside conversation, but she already knows what she's going to find.
It's snowing harder this time, the wind howling past her and into the blank distance. There's even less sense of where Navarro might have gone, where Liz's grief and her own ghosts might have driven her.
"Fuck me," she says to no one, kicking her way far enough forwards that she can feel the presence of Tsalal receding behind her.
Maybe this one's a dream, too. Navarro wouldn't actually die out here, right? She wouldn't actually let her die?
She sinks down on purpose, this time. Hopes that this time isn't real either.
*
Liz wakes up, again and again. She fights with Navarro and wakes up alone and goes outside to curl up in the snow and then she wakes up, because the past isn't past, it hasn't been since Annie's case went cold and, honestly, since so much longer.
And she doesn't know how to change it.
"Have we been here before?" She asks the fifth time, or maybe the sixth. It's the wrong question, she knows it, but even now, she still needs to work through a few before landing on the right one.
"Freezing our asses off wondering what the hell we're missing? Sure hope not." Navarro's voice is light, laughter lurking under the surface. She was always ready to laugh, or, at least, Liz has always known she's a person who could always be ready to laugh, even if she didn't see that Navarro that often.
That Navarro, who would drink with her while dodging between the country and hip-hop sides of what felt like Fairbanks' only bar. That Navarro, who returned every jibe and backhanded compliment with one of her own. That Navarro, who never talked when they fell into bed together but was always, always smiling when she came.
That Navarro, who was real, unlike whatever ice apparition was sitting in front of her.
It's too easy to think it's her, though. "No, I mean — this case. This conversation, this relationship, this—"
"You know that's not what Clark meant, about time being a circle." They're closer this time, almost close enough to touch. If they—
But that's over now, isn't it.
"Doesn't have to mean only one thing." She moves closer anyway, so their shoulders are pressed together. Casual. Light. Doesn't have to matter.
"It's about the dead." Navarro's voice is more distant than ever. "The ones who don't leave. The ones we bring with us, who stay—"
"Oh this is about my kid again, isn't it."
Just like that, the warmth of Navarro's body is gone, for all it's still pressed up against hers. She's said some version of this six times, or was it seven, and each time she's more tired, and no less angry.
"You have to—"
"I don't."
Liz doesn't get up, because she's pretty sure by now it doesn't matter which one of them gets up first and she doesn't want to leave, because this is awful but so is waking up with Navarro out on the ice. So is walking out and waiting for the storm to bring her back to the beginning.
"Rose told me," Navarro starts. "She said that there's three reasons ghosts come back. And they're all — they're all about love, okay, so would you just think about—"
"Go be with your precious ghosts then!" The words spill out of Liz before she's consciously decided to say them, and she lets out a wordless scream of frustration at herself.
There it is. Just like always.
Navarro stands up, and then even the memory of her warmth is gone, just the fire's remaining. "Fuck you too, Danvers," she says, but her heart isn't in it.
*
She tries going out first. Not because she wants to be outside in this shit — fuck does she not want to be outside in this shit — but because maybe it goes like this. Maybe she walks out onto the ice and has the big revelation she's always poking Navarro about, learns her lesson and then time starts moving on again.
It's a story. Might even be a good one, but Navarro's too fast. Drags her back in by the faux-fur trim of her hood and slams the doors shut behind them before cupping Liz's cheeks in her gloved hands, chilled through the layers of fleece.
"Oh no. You're not giving me another corpse to deal with." Her breath is the only warm thing in the space between them.
Liz thinks about saying, you don't even leave me that much. She thinks about saying, wouldn't be the first time, asshole. But Navarro doesn't remember, she knows that much by now. Knows that whatever is dragging her through the endless repetitious spiral of these few hours is dragging her alone.
Just like Navarro said, and Liz only mostly stifles the laugh that rises at the thought.
"It's not funny," Navarro says, and here between their headlamps, illuminated by Navarro's torch, Liz thinks she almost looks afraid.
Liz swallows hard, watches the light glinting off Navarro's cheek piercings. She wasn't outside that long, but she's been out so many times in the past however long that this feels like something new. Like maybe this time it could be different, so she says, "Yeah. Yeah, you're right, that was — that wasn't fair. I'm not trying to die."
Are you? But she already knows that's the wrong question, too, one that she won't even gain anything from even if she gets a non-bullshit answer.
"Good," Navarro says, and Liz is suddenly, deeply aware that her hands are still on her face. If she leaned in — if either of them did— "Because he doesn't want—"
And then it's Holden again, and Navarro storming outside again, and this time Liz could go after her immediately except she can't do that at all, can't pick herself up and open the door and follow the tracks and force this time to be different, to, maybe, be the last time, and she doesn't know why—
Except, by the time she drags herself outside, tears freezing to crystals at the corners of her eyes and everything she didn't say to Evangeline heavy on her tongue, she knows that was a lie too.
*
"Just because we used to fuck doesn't mean he was your kid," she says, one of the times when she comes back to awareness earlier, one of the times when she hears Navarro say he doesn't really look like you, but there's something in his eyes. She doesn't know why she says it, really, except she hasn't yet, and maybe this time these are the words that will break something open.
Even if she's pretty sure it's not really what she has to do to end this.
Instead she watches the walls come down behind Navarro's eyes like a physical thing, watches her retreat somewhere even more unreachable than wherever she ends up on the ice. "Jesus, Danvers, don't you think I fucking know that?"
Holden was dead before they met, but this Navarro — real, dream, ghost the storm pieced together out of whatever was left after she walked out — doesn't throw that back in her face. But she continues, "I'm the one listening now, though," and that's so much worse.
Liz stands, pulls the blanket closer with shaking hands. "So fucking get out there and listen to him then," she says. She can hardly hear her voice break over the roaring in her ears, can hardly remember that she started this conversation wanting things to be different. It doesn't matter anymore. "Go out onto the ice. I'm not gonna stop you."
She heads straight for one of the empty rooms and slams the door behind her. Turns her face to the wall and imagines the rising static of the white noise machine swallowing her up, drowning out the sound of Navarro leaving, again.
At least Navarro won't have to remember this one.
*
Would it be better, if Navarro was stuck here with her, remembering with her? Liz huddles under the extra blanket in a dead man's bed, watches the snow whip past outside like static, and turns the question over and over in her mind as she gathers the will to walk out once more.
Navarro remembers, always has. It's what made them so good as partners years ago, Liz would ask and Navarro would remember something that led them to the answer and then—
And then there was too much to remember. Too much to carry, even split between the two of them. Maybe especially with the two of them, Liz can admit now, because she wasn't really in any place to help then. Maybe still isn't.
They'd lasted longer this time, long enough that Liz had started to think that maybe she could keep herself under control if, when, Holden came up. It had felt like the best days of their partnership, until it hadn't, like there was possibility, until there wasn't.
I'm not gonna stop you. How many times has she said this now, in this endless night or in all their years together?
She doesn't stop Navarro, just follows her. Doesn't answer when Navarro asks what they are, just puts herself between her partner and the world and watches it not matter, again and again. Worries over their repeated conversation, always fundamentally the same even if the words differ sometimes. Which one is it going to be? Which words is she going to face, when she finds Navarro at the end of the night?
That, too, is the wrong question.
In the storm, further than she's ever gotten before, a faint shape on the horizon blots out the snow. Liz reaches out, arm trembling with the weight of her torch, and before the drifts take her she has time to think that this wouldn't be the worst way for the night to end.
*
It doesn't end like that. Doesn't end the time she nearly gives in to the closeness and kisses Navarro again just to see if it would be like it was before she pulls back, guilt curling slick and hot in her stomach as she learns that the ghost that drives Navarro outside doesn't have to be Holden's.
It doesn't end the time she waits for the storm to break before following Navarro and loses consciousness under the aurora instead, melting snow seeping through her layers like a cruel false spring.
It doesn't end the time she dreams of Julia, a regular spiritless nightmare like countless others she's had before Ennis, even before the accident — just Julia, dangling her feet in a summer-blue ocean saying, I told her you would follow, don't worry.
The time after that, though, when they're back at the fire Navarro says, "Aren't you tired?" and Liz hears, underneath, the real question: you know how this ends, so why don't you end it?
Sometimes it's good to know the answers before you ask questions. Sometimes it's just shit, an excuse to push the question further out of reach.
To Navarro, she just says, "Of course." Her shoulders slump, the blanket's edges pooling in her lap as she scoots closer to Navarro, close enough that she can feel just a little more warmth. "Feels like we've been working this forever. Shitbowl case, shitbowl storm."
Navarro laughs, just a little, but there's no humour lingering in her voice when she says, "Yeah. I feel that." She's quiet, like she was — is — when she talks about just walking out. Like maybe she thinks she's been walking out on the ice forever, and something clicks over in the back of Liz's mind.
I told her you would follow.
Navarro doesn't remember. Navarro isn't looping. How long has she been walking out into the ice, waiting for Liz to follow?
Guilt crashes over her then, tinder for the fire that landing on the right question always ignites. It burns hotter that the blaze in front of her, not quite as hot as some of the drive she's seen in Navarro's eyes, and, fuck, how long has this been going on?
They fight about Holden again before Liz lands on an answer, her voice trembling in her throat as she snaps don't you bring my fucking kid into this because she doesn't really want to say I'm sorry we never managed to talk about us, not when she feels so, so close to finally fixing at least one part of this night.
She goes to the kitchen for once after Navarro leaves. She never hears the doors, not even the times she's listened for them, so she doesn't even bother. The spiral of the orange peel is lying where she left it. Timeless, just like everything else in the station: Tsalal's gift, and its curse.
Don't worry. There's nothing to do in the long night but worry. Or fuck, but somehow, Liz doesn't think ghosts are much for that, no matter how fucking bored they get.
"Julia," she starts. Licks her lips and sighs when the minutes pass without an answer, not that she really expected one. "I know you love your sister. And she loves you too. But can you just ... talk to her? Not bring her with you, yet?"
Nothing. Not even the storm, kept at bay by insulation that is slowly but surely meeting its match. Julia has nothing to say to her.
And, crucially, neither does Navarro.
"Okay," Liz says. "Okay, I'm gonna find her, okay?"
And when she steps outside, she actually does feel like she will. Time is strange on the outskirts of Ennis even when it isn't endlessly looping back on itself in some cannibalistic ouroboros, she doesn't need a murderer to tell her that. But she's close to Navarro this time — can see her shape wavering close to the horizon, not quite close enough to touch.
It's easier to walk now, too: the wind pushes back with its usual relentlessness and screams into the gaps between her layers, white noise given violent shape, but the snow moves more easily in front of her. Feels a little more solid now; even though she cannot see tracks left behind Navarro stays in her vision, leading her consciously or not along a path spiraling further and further away from Tsalal.
Until she hears him. Over the storm, over the sound of her own voice yelling Navarro's name, Holden's Mommy, follow me pierces her deeper than any cold could dream.
Until the ice breaks and his face is gone, and she's still grasping for the memory — he looks exactly like I remember — when she tumbles forwards. Her whole body seizes up with the shock of hitting the water, eyes squeezing shut on instinct. It takes more energy than it should to pry them open again, but the torch is gone and sky and ice are equally black above her.
No, come on, she has time to think. No, not like this, I was so close—
She isn't sinking, isn't floating, isn't anything. Numbness spreads through her, carrying with it the dread certainty that this won't bring the same sort of reset that the snow did, and in its wake all that remains is a vague relief that she and Navarro won't have to have the same fight ever again.
Liz laughs with the last of her breath, and all that remains is a pressure at her wrist, a hand too big to be Holden's drawing her up and out of the hole she punched in the ice.
Liz opens her eyes to the silence that always follows the sort of words she can't take back and she thinks ah, fuck.
She's not unused to this sort of silence, and it's far from the first time she's felt it after an argument with Navarro, but in the darkness of Tsalal Station it feels more oppressive than usual. It's a chill thing, one that cuts down her throat like the knife-slash of wind in a blizzard, and by the time she gathers herself enough to speak Navarro's name into the night she already knows she's alone.
Navarro's out there somewhere, on the ice. For the first time in all the years they've known each other, she's done exactly what Liz had said and walked out, following her voice or her sister or Annie or whatever drove the Tsalal men out there. Walked out and — shit.
Liz thunks her head back against the wall. Doesn't even feel it, with her hood and hat cushioning the blow.
She goes through the motions of searching the station anyway. Even calls down into the tunnels, flickering headlamp casting shadows across walls and ice alike to keep her company.
When she can't put it off any longer, she takes a breath and pushes open the outside doors. It's not quite a whiteout, the flurries kicked up by the change in airflow clearing and obscuring the path in front of her as they swirl and settle. The wind brings more to fill the gap, the snow almost like liquid
"Navarro!" Liz yells, and then, when there's no response, "I was lying, you idiot," as if that would summon her, all raised eyebrows and yeah, no shit expression.
It doesn't. But it makes her feel better, or something like it, makes something loosen in her chest and makes her wonder if the tears stinging her eyes really are just from the wind. Makes her realise, with no little surprise, that this is the part she means.
There are no tracks, no traces, not even anything that could be Navarro's whispers in the wind. Liz manages ten steps, the storm fighting her every movement, before she trips over a drift and tumbles to land flat on her back.
The snowflakes wheel through the sky above her, cold as the stars they're hiding. They settle across her body as the futility of this sinks down over her thoughts — it's over, it's ending, all they've done is add two more bodies to this shitbowl of a case — and Liz figures, might as well go out screaming—
"The fuck, Danvers?"
Liz snaps her mouth shut, wondering how long she'd been screaming. She's at the makeshift campfire, tilted dangerously close to Navarro like it's six years ago again — Navarro, here, not lost and dead on the ice waiting for Peter to find her in the spring.
"Sorry," she says, and her voice is hoarse, but not hoarse like she just drowned in a snowdrift. It's easier than it would have been even a week ago, saying sorry. "I thought — it doesn't matter."
Maybe she nodded off for a moment. Maybe the hypothermia's setting in earlier than she'd thought it would. They're both still here.
Navarro's giving her a look, the 'I know you're bullshitting me and I'm actively choosing not to engage' look that Liz has fielded more times than she can count. "Move closer to the fire," she says. "Don't fucking — leave me even more alone."
"Thought we're all alone already."
"Don't make it worse." Navarro hauls herself to her feet, and Liz doesn't think too hard about how shifting closer to the fire also brings her closer to Navarro. "I just thought you'd want to know, about Holden, okay? It's not—"
The rage boils up then, lighting up something deep in the pit of her belly with the memory of what they'd been talking about before she'd dreamt she woke up alone, before they walked outside. "I don't," she hisses. Something in the fire snaps, an unasked for echo. "He's not out there. Nothing's out there. Just fucking — just go, okay?"
Navarro doesn't argue, which only serves to infuriate Liz further. "Fuck her," she says to the fire, where the flames are tracing out what might be the shape of someone's face. "Fucking Navarro," she says, when enough time has passed unmeasured by anything but her breaths that the fire is burning dangerously low.
When she opens her eyes again to silence, the oppressive silence of a building with no other inhabitants, she's reduced to just, "Fuck."
She heads straight for the doors this time, the dream — it wasn't a dream — sharper in memory than the fireside conversation, but she already knows what she's going to find.
It's snowing harder this time, the wind howling past her and into the blank distance. There's even less sense of where Navarro might have gone, where Liz's grief and her own ghosts might have driven her.
"Fuck me," she says to no one, kicking her way far enough forwards that she can feel the presence of Tsalal receding behind her.
Maybe this one's a dream, too. Navarro wouldn't actually die out here, right? She wouldn't actually let her die?
She sinks down on purpose, this time. Hopes that this time isn't real either.
Liz wakes up, again and again. She fights with Navarro and wakes up alone and goes outside to curl up in the snow and then she wakes up, because the past isn't past, it hasn't been since Annie's case went cold and, honestly, since so much longer.
And she doesn't know how to change it.
"Have we been here before?" She asks the fifth time, or maybe the sixth. It's the wrong question, she knows it, but even now, she still needs to work through a few before landing on the right one.
"Freezing our asses off wondering what the hell we're missing? Sure hope not." Navarro's voice is light, laughter lurking under the surface. She was always ready to laugh, or, at least, Liz has always known she's a person who could always be ready to laugh, even if she didn't see that Navarro that often.
That Navarro, who would drink with her while dodging between the country and hip-hop sides of what felt like Fairbanks' only bar. That Navarro, who returned every jibe and backhanded compliment with one of her own. That Navarro, who never talked when they fell into bed together but was always, always smiling when she came.
That Navarro, who was real, unlike whatever ice apparition was sitting in front of her.
It's too easy to think it's her, though. "No, I mean — this case. This conversation, this relationship, this—"
"You know that's not what Clark meant, about time being a circle." They're closer this time, almost close enough to touch. If they—
But that's over now, isn't it.
"Doesn't have to mean only one thing." She moves closer anyway, so their shoulders are pressed together. Casual. Light. Doesn't have to matter.
"It's about the dead." Navarro's voice is more distant than ever. "The ones who don't leave. The ones we bring with us, who stay—"
"Oh this is about my kid again, isn't it."
Just like that, the warmth of Navarro's body is gone, for all it's still pressed up against hers. She's said some version of this six times, or was it seven, and each time she's more tired, and no less angry.
"You have to—"
"I don't."
Liz doesn't get up, because she's pretty sure by now it doesn't matter which one of them gets up first and she doesn't want to leave, because this is awful but so is waking up with Navarro out on the ice. So is walking out and waiting for the storm to bring her back to the beginning.
"Rose told me," Navarro starts. "She said that there's three reasons ghosts come back. And they're all — they're all about love, okay, so would you just think about—"
"Go be with your precious ghosts then!" The words spill out of Liz before she's consciously decided to say them, and she lets out a wordless scream of frustration at herself.
There it is. Just like always.
Navarro stands up, and then even the memory of her warmth is gone, just the fire's remaining. "Fuck you too, Danvers," she says, but her heart isn't in it.
She tries going out first. Not because she wants to be outside in this shit — fuck does she not want to be outside in this shit — but because maybe it goes like this. Maybe she walks out onto the ice and has the big revelation she's always poking Navarro about, learns her lesson and then time starts moving on again.
It's a story. Might even be a good one, but Navarro's too fast. Drags her back in by the faux-fur trim of her hood and slams the doors shut behind them before cupping Liz's cheeks in her gloved hands, chilled through the layers of fleece.
"Oh no. You're not giving me another corpse to deal with." Her breath is the only warm thing in the space between them.
Liz thinks about saying, you don't even leave me that much. She thinks about saying, wouldn't be the first time, asshole. But Navarro doesn't remember, she knows that much by now. Knows that whatever is dragging her through the endless repetitious spiral of these few hours is dragging her alone.
Just like Navarro said, and Liz only mostly stifles the laugh that rises at the thought.
"It's not funny," Navarro says, and here between their headlamps, illuminated by Navarro's torch, Liz thinks she almost looks afraid.
Liz swallows hard, watches the light glinting off Navarro's cheek piercings. She wasn't outside that long, but she's been out so many times in the past however long that this feels like something new. Like maybe this time it could be different, so she says, "Yeah. Yeah, you're right, that was — that wasn't fair. I'm not trying to die."
Are you? But she already knows that's the wrong question, too, one that she won't even gain anything from even if she gets a non-bullshit answer.
"Good," Navarro says, and Liz is suddenly, deeply aware that her hands are still on her face. If she leaned in — if either of them did— "Because he doesn't want—"
And then it's Holden again, and Navarro storming outside again, and this time Liz could go after her immediately except she can't do that at all, can't pick herself up and open the door and follow the tracks and force this time to be different, to, maybe, be the last time, and she doesn't know why—
Except, by the time she drags herself outside, tears freezing to crystals at the corners of her eyes and everything she didn't say to Evangeline heavy on her tongue, she knows that was a lie too.
"Just because we used to fuck doesn't mean he was your kid," she says, one of the times when she comes back to awareness earlier, one of the times when she hears Navarro say he doesn't really look like you, but there's something in his eyes. She doesn't know why she says it, really, except she hasn't yet, and maybe this time these are the words that will break something open.
Even if she's pretty sure it's not really what she has to do to end this.
Instead she watches the walls come down behind Navarro's eyes like a physical thing, watches her retreat somewhere even more unreachable than wherever she ends up on the ice. "Jesus, Danvers, don't you think I fucking know that?"
Holden was dead before they met, but this Navarro — real, dream, ghost the storm pieced together out of whatever was left after she walked out — doesn't throw that back in her face. But she continues, "I'm the one listening now, though," and that's so much worse.
Liz stands, pulls the blanket closer with shaking hands. "So fucking get out there and listen to him then," she says. She can hardly hear her voice break over the roaring in her ears, can hardly remember that she started this conversation wanting things to be different. It doesn't matter anymore. "Go out onto the ice. I'm not gonna stop you."
She heads straight for one of the empty rooms and slams the door behind her. Turns her face to the wall and imagines the rising static of the white noise machine swallowing her up, drowning out the sound of Navarro leaving, again.
At least Navarro won't have to remember this one.
Would it be better, if Navarro was stuck here with her, remembering with her? Liz huddles under the extra blanket in a dead man's bed, watches the snow whip past outside like static, and turns the question over and over in her mind as she gathers the will to walk out once more.
Navarro remembers, always has. It's what made them so good as partners years ago, Liz would ask and Navarro would remember something that led them to the answer and then—
And then there was too much to remember. Too much to carry, even split between the two of them. Maybe especially with the two of them, Liz can admit now, because she wasn't really in any place to help then. Maybe still isn't.
They'd lasted longer this time, long enough that Liz had started to think that maybe she could keep herself under control if, when, Holden came up. It had felt like the best days of their partnership, until it hadn't, like there was possibility, until there wasn't.
I'm not gonna stop you. How many times has she said this now, in this endless night or in all their years together?
She doesn't stop Navarro, just follows her. Doesn't answer when Navarro asks what they are, just puts herself between her partner and the world and watches it not matter, again and again. Worries over their repeated conversation, always fundamentally the same even if the words differ sometimes. Which one is it going to be? Which words is she going to face, when she finds Navarro at the end of the night?
That, too, is the wrong question.
In the storm, further than she's ever gotten before, a faint shape on the horizon blots out the snow. Liz reaches out, arm trembling with the weight of her torch, and before the drifts take her she has time to think that this wouldn't be the worst way for the night to end.
It doesn't end like that. Doesn't end the time she nearly gives in to the closeness and kisses Navarro again just to see if it would be like it was before she pulls back, guilt curling slick and hot in her stomach as she learns that the ghost that drives Navarro outside doesn't have to be Holden's.
It doesn't end the time she waits for the storm to break before following Navarro and loses consciousness under the aurora instead, melting snow seeping through her layers like a cruel false spring.
It doesn't end the time she dreams of Julia, a regular spiritless nightmare like countless others she's had before Ennis, even before the accident — just Julia, dangling her feet in a summer-blue ocean saying, I told her you would follow, don't worry.
The time after that, though, when they're back at the fire Navarro says, "Aren't you tired?" and Liz hears, underneath, the real question: you know how this ends, so why don't you end it?
Sometimes it's good to know the answers before you ask questions. Sometimes it's just shit, an excuse to push the question further out of reach.
To Navarro, she just says, "Of course." Her shoulders slump, the blanket's edges pooling in her lap as she scoots closer to Navarro, close enough that she can feel just a little more warmth. "Feels like we've been working this forever. Shitbowl case, shitbowl storm."
Navarro laughs, just a little, but there's no humour lingering in her voice when she says, "Yeah. I feel that." She's quiet, like she was — is — when she talks about just walking out. Like maybe she thinks she's been walking out on the ice forever, and something clicks over in the back of Liz's mind.
I told her you would follow.
Navarro doesn't remember. Navarro isn't looping. How long has she been walking out into the ice, waiting for Liz to follow?
Guilt crashes over her then, tinder for the fire that landing on the right question always ignites. It burns hotter that the blaze in front of her, not quite as hot as some of the drive she's seen in Navarro's eyes, and, fuck, how long has this been going on?
They fight about Holden again before Liz lands on an answer, her voice trembling in her throat as she snaps don't you bring my fucking kid into this because she doesn't really want to say I'm sorry we never managed to talk about us, not when she feels so, so close to finally fixing at least one part of this night.
She goes to the kitchen for once after Navarro leaves. She never hears the doors, not even the times she's listened for them, so she doesn't even bother. The spiral of the orange peel is lying where she left it. Timeless, just like everything else in the station: Tsalal's gift, and its curse.
Don't worry. There's nothing to do in the long night but worry. Or fuck, but somehow, Liz doesn't think ghosts are much for that, no matter how fucking bored they get.
"Julia," she starts. Licks her lips and sighs when the minutes pass without an answer, not that she really expected one. "I know you love your sister. And she loves you too. But can you just ... talk to her? Not bring her with you, yet?"
Nothing. Not even the storm, kept at bay by insulation that is slowly but surely meeting its match. Julia has nothing to say to her.
And, crucially, neither does Navarro.
"Okay," Liz says. "Okay, I'm gonna find her, okay?"
And when she steps outside, she actually does feel like she will. Time is strange on the outskirts of Ennis even when it isn't endlessly looping back on itself in some cannibalistic ouroboros, she doesn't need a murderer to tell her that. But she's close to Navarro this time — can see her shape wavering close to the horizon, not quite close enough to touch.
It's easier to walk now, too: the wind pushes back with its usual relentlessness and screams into the gaps between her layers, white noise given violent shape, but the snow moves more easily in front of her. Feels a little more solid now; even though she cannot see tracks left behind Navarro stays in her vision, leading her consciously or not along a path spiraling further and further away from Tsalal.
Until she hears him. Over the storm, over the sound of her own voice yelling Navarro's name, Holden's Mommy, follow me pierces her deeper than any cold could dream.
Until the ice breaks and his face is gone, and she's still grasping for the memory — he looks exactly like I remember — when she tumbles forwards. Her whole body seizes up with the shock of hitting the water, eyes squeezing shut on instinct. It takes more energy than it should to pry them open again, but the torch is gone and sky and ice are equally black above her.
No, come on, she has time to think. No, not like this, I was so close—
She isn't sinking, isn't floating, isn't anything. Numbness spreads through her, carrying with it the dread certainty that this won't bring the same sort of reset that the snow did, and in its wake all that remains is a vague relief that she and Navarro won't have to have the same fight ever again.
Liz laughs with the last of her breath, and all that remains is a pressure at her wrist, a hand too big to be Holden's drawing her up and out of the hole she punched in the ice.
