Work Text:
It starts in late October. Maybe it’s because she has the day off. Maybe it’s because she’s in a comfy old jumper and all she has to do is pop down to the shops for a few veggies. She has the space to notice things.
Things like Robbie in the Tesco carpark, pacing up and down and talking on his mobile. Like DS Hathaway leaning against the car, hands shoved in coat pockets, eyes tracking Robbie back and forth.
She has the time to pause, to watch them. People push their trolleys around her and she thinks of torches, headlights, searchlights, lighthouses. She wonders how she missed it before.
Hathaway catches her, of course. He starts, lifts his hand like a question mark. Laura glances at Robbie and back, and she can tell that Hathaway knows she knows.
*
It starts in early December, when Hathaway pulls an all-nighter and puts the puzzle pieces together into Jane Eyre. They find the man hiding in a burnt-out cottage, exactly as he predicted. Robbie tells her about it in the corridor outside the morgue. “Amazing,” he says, shaking his head.
“What’s amazing?” Hathaway asks, appearing behind him.
“You, Sergeant,” she grins, and Robbie, bless his unflappable Geordie heart, almost looks flustered.
“Thank you, Doctor,” Hathaway intones. And then (when she adds, “Or so your DI says”), “Thank you, sir.”
“Don’t go giving him ideas,” Robbie chides, but his smile is evenings by the fire, whisky and a duvet on the sofa.
*
It starts in mid-January, at a murder scene of all places, when she tells Hathaway he’s a terror and he smirks, “I heard I was dishy, Doctor”. She laughs, but he holds her gaze and blinks his face to seriousness. Her stomach does something anatomically impossible and she feels like a rabbit, a deer, a butterfly pinned to a board, my god, how does Robbie stand it?
She gestures to his scene suit. “I do have a thing for boys in blue.”
*
It starts in March, near a white tent in a field beside the M40. Laura looks across the motorway, up at the contrails fanning out over the sky. So many people in-between, she thinks, and raps on the car window. “Inspector,” she greets him. “Your DS is looking for you.”
Robbie hauls himself out of the car; squints at his shoes. She watches his breath dissolve in the cold air. “Laura,” he says. His shoulders move inside his suit, his forehead crinkles like a topographic map, the curls and folds, the plates are shifting. “Do you –? Are we –?”
(Hathaway picks his way down the muddy footpath. Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous.)
“Mm,” she agrees. “We.”
*
It starts at the end of May, when they’re taking pictures for the staff newsletter. Robbie puts his arm around her and draws her close. Hathaway, behind the camera, says, “Hold it,” and “Got it,” and she thinks he smiles with his whole body. Robbie keeps a hand on her shoulder; Hathaway turns the camera around to show them the photo.
*
It starts in June, in a heat-drunk twilight, with the three of them at a trestle table beside the river. She puts her hand over Robbie’s; he looks down, blinks.
“James,” she says; Robbie looks up, says the same thing, wordless. The evening expands around them, and Laura expects a phone to ring, a car to crash, a pint to spill.
Then – finally – Hathaway huffs out a breath, leans forward, covers their hands with long, cool fingers.
Oh, she thinks, as Robbie relaxes beside her. Home.