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It generally surprised no one to learn Jillian Holtzmann’s love language was a combination of “acts of service” and “gifts.”
Unlike Erin Gilbert and her theoretical particles, the world Holtzmann inhabited was grounded in that which she could see and feel. Service and gifts were tangible and quantifiable, measurable with actual data - the number of times Erin smiled at her, or let her hand rest on her back in response to something Holtzmann did, for example.
Holtz was a woman of action, well-trained and well-practiced in the science of tangible means to tangible ends.
It started the day Erin first made the choice to uproot her life and rededicate herself to their collective cause. After stealing a bevy of equipment from Holtzmann and Abby’s former place of work, much to Erin’s chagrin, the three of them moved into the second floor of Zhu’s Authentic Hong Kong Food and established their commitment to run boldly and breathlessly into the unknown. While Holtz was building their proton packs, Erin sat in the corner looking stiff and standoffish in the skirt and heels she hadn’t yet ditched. Holtzmann decided to fix that. Erin looked at her like she was nuts when she set her desk on fire as an unfortunate side effect of performing an epic lip-sync to DeBarge, but her friend did smile, and she did loosen up.
It had to be taken to the next level when the media dedicated itself to humiliating her at every turn following the back-to-back incidents involving Martin Heiss and the reporter Erin cold-clocked in the street in front of at least a dozen cameras. Holtzmann offered her the first choice of the artillery, and amped up the one she selected as her favorite to make it especially badass for her. She also presented her with her own Swiss Army knife, Holtzmann’s way of telling her she needed no fancy weapon to save the day; Erin was strength and power personified all on her own.
It was clear the physicist hadn’t understood the gestures for what they were, at first. But Holtz had seen her face after she strode up to them during the battle of Times Square with the knife in hand, the remnants of the reanimated balloon from hell at her feet, and one look at her conveyed she absolutely did in that moment. She brimmed with pride and vibrated with power, having blazed into being the woman who would go on to avert the apocalypse. Holtzmann remembered it as one of the few times in her life she’d ever been speechless, and it made her feel a little wobbly that one of her gifts had worked so well in her favor.
It continued when Holtz kept up her random dance breaks to 80s pop and Erin participated in them, then began to initiate them on her own. She even stopped minding - or at least, stopped openly objecting, but what was the difference? - to the fact Holtzmann didn’t always set down her blowtorch before joining in.
It culminated, most recently, in a long, starlit conversation on the roof, where they held hands and shared some of the most intimate and vulnerable parts of themselves and the lives they’d led up to this point. After a little too much of the cheap wine Erin had brought knowing Holtzmann loved it, the engineer had confessed her feelings for her. Erin responded by squeezing her hand and snuggling up to her for the rest of the night, but not actually confirming whether or not she felt the same way.
Lately, Erin had taken to bringing her Pringles and coffee at her desk. There was never any rhyme or reason to these visits; Holtzmann wasn’t always engrossed in something which required total focus or which might cause her to skip lunch when she stopped by. It seemed she just liked to, and was making excuses to be close to her.
She wasn’t sure if they were dating now or what. She was almost afraid to ask, lest she’d misinterpreted Erin’s gestures, or made the mistake of assuming the physicist intended them the same way Holtz would have if they’d come from her. Erin hugged her and touched her with an ease she didn’t before, though Holtzmann reasoned her increased affection could be due to the pair becoming closer as friends and nothing more. There were moments where they held each other’s gaze just long enough to feel like it meant something, and others where Erin hesitated in the doorway just long enough to make her wonder, but with neither willing to bridge the gap, they lived in a state of awkward limbo: not quite where they were, but not quite where they could be, either.
Holtzmann wanted Erin to feel something for her, too. More than anything. She wanted Erin’s permission to fall in love with her even though she very much already had. But it struck her that something was blocking them both, preventing them from moving forward until they addressed its demands to be heard.
Her working theory - a conclusion she couldn’t exactly articulate how she had come to; it simply materialized from the ether in the form of one of those gut feelings she knew better than to ignore - was that whatever was standing in the way of the two of them taking their blossoming connection beyond rooftop chats and fire-spangled dances during work hours, it wasn’t psychological. Or at least, it wasn’t strictly psychological.
She could think of at least one very real, very physical thing which never failed to damper Erin’s mood no matter how happy she’d been prior to its latest intrusion into her life.
Ectoplasm was the nature of the Ghostbusters’ reality as they contended with often frightened, sometimes malevolent entities in their line of work. It was also a reality which continued to land disproportionately on the physicist’s shoulders - and in her hair, and down her back, and in her shoes for good measure, too. During the battle for Times Square, Erin had pouted that it seemed like the slime was after her personally after she landed flat on her back on top of her proton pack right before their confrontation with Rowan. At the time, Holtzmann had more or less written the handful of incidents off as coincidence borne in the fact that Erin tended to position herself at the front of the pack. Of course she got slimed more often than Holtz, Abby, or Patty. In most situations, she charged into the unknown full of fire and fury while they followed behind her, so Erin remained the one in prime placement to be surprised by a spirit with little to lose but the contents of its spectral guts.
However, when it started to occur with greater and greater regularity on busts that the ghosts targeted Erin, specifically - even when she was not the lead on their trail - Holtzmann began to put greater stock in her suspicion. In her spare time, she researched the question of whether a human being could attract ectoplasm, or if something about Erin on a metaphysical level could be inciting the entities’ rage without her knowledge. She found no answers; no one before them had any means to conduct testing on the matter, and while Abby agreed it seemed plausible both could be true, she was equally at a loss for ideas of how one could prevent it from happening.
Holtzmann didn’t understand why Erin hated the stuff so much that she sulked over the temporary residence it took up on her skin even after washing it away, but then again, the engineer spent most days elbow deep in all manner of slippery and disgusting substances. It was rare she didn’t find traces of grease or oil or experimental liquids lodged in her hair, or stuck to the insides of her wrists, when she peeled off her layers at the end of an evening. She was oddly fond of these little remnants of her work. She liked the way they appeared at unplanned and irregular intervals to remind her she had forged a family in the chaos of existence - a family who loved and cherished her because of, not in spite of, her whirlwind ways.
Erin wasn’t Holtzmann, though. Erin was conventional and reserved. After all, this was the same woman who had to be slimed by a ghost twice in her expensive tweed two-pieces before she realized the flaw in her wardrobe choice. The former tenure-track professor at Columbia University had spent a lifetime perfecting her presentation, ensuring every tiny bow tie was just so, because that’s how she’d survived the pristine sterility of academia enough to succeed. She was always clean and put-together when she could help it. She was never messy or grimy if she could avoid it.
Maybe Erin had OCD. Holtz didn’t know. She herself had sensory processing issues, aversions to certain textures and tastes which made her skin scream out in protest and threaten to run away in revulsion whenever she encountered one. She wondered if ectoplasm felt the same to Erin’s body as satin and shirt tags did to her own. She hated to think the sadness in the physicist’s eyes after particularly brutal busts resulted in slimings stemmed from the sensation of being violated against her will, but it was an experience Holtzmann knew well if that was the case. Extended exposure to any of her trigger textures always made her feel that way - violated, like she had no control over what would and would not be part of the space she occupied in the world.
Holtzmann never knew the Erin Abby had grown up with prior to the day she walked into their lab at the Higgins Institute. She had heard stories, colored through the lens of bitterness and betrayal, but her understanding of who their friend was and how she ticked began at a much later point only after Erin decided to come back and saved the city by their side. Since then, Holtz had seen enough to recognize just how hard the physicist worked to deconstruct the barriers she built up around herself over the decades she spent repressing herself. Holtzmann had also witnessed enough of the aftermath of ectoplasm events to notice how something about them, whatever the issue was for Erin, managed to knock her out of all of the progress she’d made in her time with the team for upwards of days at a time. Sometimes disappearing for hours after a bust went wrong, Erin bit her lip like she was biting down dark memories along with it.
The mystery of how to cheer Erin up when the ghost of the week threatened to steal the stars from her eyes, as they always seemed to like to do with their never-ending projectile ooze, remained an enigma to the wiry engineer.
Holtz would find out, though.
She wasn’t about to sit idly by while a bunch of dead guys continually traumatized the woman she cared so much about - the person who carried the sun in her smile and deserved the entire world if Holtzmann could find a way to give it to her, not this bullshit from those who lingered on the wrong side of the void.
Somewhere between what she did and didn’t know about Erin, she would uncover an answer to the problem at hand. She would invent one herself if she couldn’t. She was a scientist who studied ghosts for a living, after all - no conundrum was too great as to be unsolvable, and boy was she ever invested in unlocking the secrets to make Erin smile.
Her opportunity presented itself unexpectedly - cliché as it was - during a dark and stormy afternoon. It was about four o’clock when the call came in: a class III entity in the form of a young woman who had taken up residence at an abandoned factory just outside of the Chelsea historic district. The security guard who reported the spectre sounded near to tears as he described a bloodied, black-eyed girl with a distinct, full-torso human form. He originally assumed she was a homeless woman. It was only when she stood upright and distorted into a spindly, elongated mockery of a human being that he realized she wasn’t.
Holtzmann anticipated this would be an easy one. Though the property was sprawling, with any number of places a ghost could hide, it was also as safe as it could be for the Ghostbusters’ purposes. A single story illuminated by plenty of light, the space was empty and open. There were no stairs to tumble down, rotted-out sections of flooring to carefully avoid, or structural barriers to obscure a sneak attack. There was a small possibility the storm could act as an ionizing mechanism by which the spirit could draw energy, but Holtzmann wasn’t worried about it. Conditions were optimal for the bust to go off without a hitch, all things considered.
They split up. Abby and Patty covered one side of the factory, and Holtz and Erin took the other. The two of them moved without a word as they scanned the room for signs of the entity.
Erin stopped her suddenly. She motioned for Holtzmann to be quiet, and Holtz listened. The faintest of whimpers was almost lost in the ferocity of the storm raging outside, but once Erin pointed it out, she could hear it. It seemed to materialize out of the air, nearby and faraway all at once. Holtzmann couldn’t pinpoint exactly where the fleeting noise originated from, but the older Ghostbuster, whose tracking abilities were just a bit better-honed than her own, pointed behind a decaying old desk.
The girl they found curled up in the furthest corner of the room was young enough that in another life, she could have been one of Erin’s students, somewhere between her late teens and early twenties if Holtzmann had to guess. The blood on her front concentrated around her side, where her shirt was ripped. Her eyes were wild with fear, but the engineer could see they were normal; in fact, they were brown, not black. She shrank away from Holtz and Erin as they dared to walk closer.
It must have been her youthfulness and terror which tugged at Erin’s heart, because she placed a hand on Holtzmann’s arm, encouraging her to lower her neutrona wand. “I’m going to try to talk to her,” she said.
“Go for it,” Holtz replied, patting her shoulder. “I’ve got your back if things go south.”
Emboldened by Holtzmann’s support, Erin stepped forward and announced herself to the spectre.
(Second on the list of things Holtz didn’t quite understand about Erin Gilbert was her need to introduce herself to the undead by her full name and title, but she found it endearing anyway, in a dorky sort of way. It usually only served to agitate the already-volatile spirits, especially those who couldn’t remember their own identities. It never seemed to deter Erin from doing it, though.)
Erin asked the girl if she remembered her name. She didn’t respond, but she did raise her gaze to look at the two of them, her eyes darting back and forth between them.
“We’re not here to hurt you,” Erin said softly. “We can help you, if you let us. If you come with us, we can take you away from here, someplace where you’ll be safe…”
At the mention of being taken somewhere else, the ghost shrieked, shattering the overhead lights in their corner of the factory with the intensity. A flash of lightning lit the building up in blue, followed in quick succession by a clap of thunder so loud Holtzmann swore it shook the foundation under their feet.
As usual, the small possibility the engineer hadn’t bothered to worry about was precisely the one which was about to cause a problem for herself and Erin. The girl’s figure buzzed as it was infused with the energy of their surroundings, and in the split second that followed, she deformed into an emotion bent out of shape - a twisted version of herself twice as tall and twice as menacing with a sharp-angled stance. Her eyes darkened. Her hair stood on end. She zeroed in on Erin before Holtzmann had the chance to react.
Erin’s reflexes were just quick enough that she was able to cover her face before she was hit with the full brunt of the spirit’s bitterness. Her ponytail spared some of her hair from the slime, but it soaked into every crevice of her jumpsuit and boots; ectoplasm dripped down her neck and slipped underneath her collar for good measure, too. When the entity was finished, she turned - not toward Erin and Holtz, but on her heels to flee.
Holtzmann, whose proton gun was now at the ready, stopped her from doing so. Disconnecting the ghost trap from her pack with her free hand, she kicked it in the girl’s direction and activated the button on her sleeve to release the switch. She opened the trap and wrangled the ghost into it with ease. It snapped shut, sealing their success.
She almost felt bad. She wondered what had happened to the girl at the end of her life to leave her so traumatized in the afterlife. Whatever her story, though, cornered animals - or entities - were no less dangerous just because their behavior was understandable. One look at the still-reeling Erin, who sent splatters of slime to the floor with a disheartened flick of her wrists, made her feel less guilty over the ghost in the trap.
The team regrouped outside of the factory, where the thunderstorm had diminished to a faint drizzle of rain. For Holtzmann, the adrenaline rush of capturing the ghost had worn off in the time it took to move outdoors from indoors, and she saw the weight settling into Erin’s shoulders once more as she contended with the reality she was blanketed from head to toe in a layer of slime. Her own smile fell when she noticed Erin’s gaze fixed firmly on the ground, silent and defeated in spite of their victory.
Her heart lurched into her throat. That was the look she dreaded, because it reflected the pain she didn’t understand and didn’t know how to fix. Holtzmann’s immediate impulse was to speak to fill the void of conversation, to say something to distract Erin and to draw her attention to anything other than the state of her clothes and hair. If she were being really honest, Holtz found most silences uncomfortable, but there was something uniquely visceral about the way the spirited physicist crumbled into herself after a bust ended this way that stole the air out of her own lungs. It wasn’t a pensive quiet, like Erin adopted from time to time while puzzling out the latest theoretical concept to take root in her mind. It was a crushed closing-down on the barriers she had worked so hard to open up to them, and it was wrong.
Holtzmann’s pulse quickened as anxiety coiled in her core, twisting her stomach up in knots. She knew she couldn’t fix this by speaking. If she tried to come up with something silly to say to distract Erin, the probability was too high for her comfort that she’d upset Erin worse by making light of what was a negative experience for her. If she pivoted to say something serious and thoughtful, she’d stumble over unpracticed words and they’d be useless; then, she would probably get flustered and frustrated and cry. Her attempt to comfort Erin seemed destined to fail no matter what she came up with to say.
No, Holtzmann thought. She was a woman of action. She was well-trained and well-practiced in the science of tangible means to tangible ends. She had to do something.
She had to find her opportunity somewhere in their surroundings to do something for Erin, with Erin, to show her they could always create their own light in the darkness no matter what life threw at them, or spewed at them. Her Swiss Army knife moment. Her proton shotgun moment. Erin’s “bringing her Pringles and dancing with her to 80s pop” moment.
Abby and Patty were chatting, but Holtzmann wasn’t listening. Their voices blended into a hum in the background as she surveyed the landscape, lost in a quest known only to her. The little fall of rain went on, and a low rumble of thunder in the distance cautioned that the storm hadn’t passed them by quite yet.
The combination of the two ignited the spark Holtzmann needed to decide what she would do next.
“Oh!” she cried out, causing the three other Ghostbusters to turn and look at her.
A nanosecond passed between idea and implementation. Holtzmann turned her head to confirm - yes, that would work. She passed the ghost trap off to Abby, practically shoving it into her arms in her eagerness to try out her promising new theory, and with her standard flair, she bowed to Erin. As she straightened upright, she extended her hand. “Erin, if you’ll follow me, please!” she said.
For a moment, Erin stood, flabbergasted, and just stared at Holtzmann, her eyes wide and full of questions. She hesitated, but closed the gap, so Holtzmann grinned and wasted no time. As soon as Erin moved to interlace their fingers, she whisked her away from the others and they sprinted off in the opposite direction from the car.
“Wait - Holtzmann! The keys!” Abby called after her.
It was too late. Holtz was already bounding down the parking lot to the dip in the road where a substantial amount of rainwater had accumulated into an expanse of interconnected puddles, the keys to the Ecto-1 jangling at her hip. Despite the lack of information about what they were doing or why, Erin followed at her heels. Holtzmann skidded to a stop in front of the largest puddle, and Erin almost crashed into her.
Releasing Erin’s hand, she leapt forward into the center of the puddle, sending ripples of water outward around her as she did. She proceeded to stomp around a bit to compensate for the underwhelming lack of mess it made when she landed. “Come on, Erin!” she said. She reached out for her friend’s hands again to entice her closer, only to find that Erin had hopped back.
“Holtz!” the breathless physicist gasped out, recoiling from the splash. “What are you doing?”
“Erin.” Holtzmann looked her in the eyes with a sudden gravity that suggested the fate of the world hung in the balance of what she was about to say. Punctuating every syllable for emphasis, she continued, “Sweet, lovely, Erin, you are already covered in ectoplasm, so let’s have fun! No matter what happens from here, you can’t get more dirty.”
“What?” Erin’s voice rose a few pitches in surprise. Her hands flew up to her mouth, although it didn’t escape Holtz’s attention that the hint of a smile peeked out from behind them. A flicker of intrigue at the idea of shenanigans danced behind the physicist’s eyes, like she was so close to jumping over the line of lost inhibitions with Holtzmann, but she needed a bit more convincing to embrace her impulsive side in the way she wanted to. “That’s…not at all correct! We can absolutely get more dirty than we are right now.”
“Technicalities.” Her hand still outstretched, Holtzmann wiggled her fingers, beckoning Erin to join her. “At least now you can have fun without the fear of getting dirty.”
Erin tilted her head, a skeptical expression fixed in her quirked brow, but she noticeably brightened the longer she considered the idea. Her shoulders relaxed, and she tentatively stepped into the outer rim of the puddle alongside her - to Holtzmann’s delight, accepting the gesture for what it was. “I guess…I can’t argue with that,” she conceded.
Giving her the space to make the first move, Holtzmann watched her and waited. She nodded when Erin, in all she left unspoken, asked if they were really doing this - and she couldn’t help but bounce on her feet when the physicist began to play in the puddle with her, the absurdity of the situation Holtz created for them softening the sharp angles of the walls Erin used to shield herself.
But while she was elated her plan was working out exactly how she’d intended and hoped for, she was still rather taken aback when Erin turned toward her and directed a splash at her.
Holtzmann put on her best scandalized face. “Erin Gilbert,” she gasped. Her eyes were comically wide as she clutched at her heart, feigning shock and hurt. “I am surprised at you. Here I thought we could take on this ginormous puddle together, and you do this to me?”
The smile Erin offered in response was shy and just innocent enough for Holtz to know the veneer of innocence on her face was bullshit. It was almost childlike, the way mischief sparkled in that smile. She looked Holtzmann in the eyes the entire time she brought her toe forward through the puddle and slammed the ball of her foot down hard on the pavement, sending a gush of water, even bigger than before, over the front of the engineer’s jumpsuit.
Holtzmann squealed from the cold, but she decided two could play at that game. Her hands shot out before Erin could process what she was doing and she gripped the physicist’s in her own. Lacing their fingers, she pulled her forward, causing Erin to stumble into the deepest section of the giant puddle. Water splashed up all around them as they struggled to find their footing. Whenever one of them would pause, the other would careen her another direction, and it wasn’t long before both were thoroughly soaked.
Their movements were a blur amidst the misty rain, the low fog, and their own electric enthusiasm, but occasionally, Holtz caught sight of the impossible blue of Erin’s eyes below disheveled red hair, and the joy she saw reflected there ignited a warmth in her chest. They danced in the puddles as allies and adversaries alike, swept away in the playfulness until the world around them dissolved at the edges, leaving only the two of them at its center.
The ectoplasm long forgotten by the time they stopped, Erin giggled so hard she couldn’t catch her breath. Holtzmann beamed at the effect she had on her; Erin’s laugh was effusive and effervescent. She laughed so much more these days than she used to, but that didn’t mean it delighted Holtz any less to be the cause of it again and again. She loved drawing that sound out of the buttoned-up beanpole. She couldn’t describe it, except in terms of how it made her feel. Bouncy. Rosy. Happy. Oh-so-happy. She embraced the slime which had migrated from Erin’s gloves and come to rest between her fingers as a well-worth-it trophy for having made her friend laugh.
As the rain began to come down around them with renewed vigor, she was so caught up in the bliss of Erin’s laughter that she didn’t hear the chorus of voices - Abby’s, followed by Patty’s, and then both - call out behind them from the Ecto-1.
“Holtz! Holtzy! The keys!”
And then she pretended not to hear it, just so they could linger in the moment together for a while longer.
Erin squeezed Holtzmann’s hands. She had moved closer at some point in the interim, and she let her hands drift lower to rest on the engineer’s forearms. They weren’t moving any more, but Holtzmann felt like she was spinning, because something about the subtle shift in their positions invoked a perceptible charge in the air. She could have sworn Erin’s eyes, which were fixed on her with an intensity that made her shiver, were darker, yet warmer somehow, simultaneously. She made no additional effort to get closer or further away from Holtzmann, but rather seemed to idle in the moment in which they’d arrived, looking to her friend to chart the course for where they would go from there.
Was she waiting for something?
Holtzmann pondered the new variables for a couple of beats, which was just enough time for another idea to take root. It was a risky choice; however, Holtz felt reasonably confident it was risky in the same sense that rolling into the alleyway with untested nuclear weaponry was risky: something could blow up in her face, but she trusted herself to understand the factors at play well enough to set herself up for success in advance. She would owe Abby and Patty a cheesesteak or two for this one, but there was one more thing she needed to do before she would be content to go back to the car.
Erin was definitely waiting for her to do something.
Cautiously, she leaned up and placed her hands on either side of Erin’s face, gingerly brushing the redhead’s cheeks with her fingers. Holtzmann gave her ample time to pull back if she were going to, then - taking the smile and the shuddery breath she gave in response as consent - pressed her lips against Erin’s. She watched as long auburn lashes fluttered shut before she closed her eyes herself.
When she pulled back, Holtz realized she had left a smear of ectoplasm across Erin’s cheeks from where she had cradled her face. She was about to reach out to rectify that and reclaim some for herself, but Erin beat her to it, wiping away the slime with her thumbs. She deposited it on Holtzmann’s face in the same manner the engineer had hers.
Holtz wrinkled her nose, but she couldn’t help the toothy smile that illuminated her features. “Now we match!” she exclaimed.
Erin didn’t take her hands away, though.
Instead, she let her gaze flick down to Holtzmann’s lips and back up in a way that sent the engineer’s heart accelerating. In between beats, a flush climbed up her neck and settled firmly under her skin. She buzzed with excitement and nerves which manifested in her body as a tremble; she was certain Erin could feel it, too. Letting out a nervous laugh, she held the breath she managed to draw. And she fidgeted, fighting the urge to look away. In spite of the rain, it felt like fire to look at Erin, and she was melting under the heat.
Erin tilted her chin up and returned the kiss, capturing her lips with a tenderness that short-circuited her brain.
Holtzmann wasn’t a planner, and she hadn’t planned far enough in advance beyond that initial kiss to have practiced not being completely overwhelmed by the intimacy of the touch on her skin. The way the physicist steadied her as she caressed her and kissed her was soft and sweet and so very Erin. The way she let her fingers drift higher to brush aside a few errant blonde curls that had fallen down into Holtz’s face was reciprocation in no uncertain terms. The way she could stay so gorgeous under a layer of slime was very much too much for Holtzmann to handle, but she reciprocated Erin’s own gift to her all the same, ecstatic to receive it.
This was, after all, the best outcome she could have hoped for.
“Now we match,” Erin affirmed in a low purr.
A tug at her hip brought Holtzmann back to the present while she attempted to rediscover how to breathe in light of what they’d just done. She turned to find Abby had marched up to her - evidently tired of waiting on them - and unclipped from her belt the carabiner which held the keys to the car. Holtz offered her best friend an apologetic grin; however, she was not sorry, and she was certain Abby knew that, too. Abby rolled her eyes, but she was also smiling as she started back toward the Ecto-1. “Patty, I got ‘em!” she said, shaking the keys as she held up her prize.
Patty cheered from afar. “Come on!” she called out to Holtzmann and Erin. “Save whatever it is you two are up to for the firehouse where it’s dry.”
“You got it, Pats!” Holtzmann replied, but she and Erin dissolved into snickers the moment they were facing again. Now, it was Erin’s turn to blush, a pink tinge creeping across her nose.
“Right, um.” She cleared her throat. “We probably should head out. Now that she has the keys, I don’t think Abby’s above leaving us out here.”
“She’s not. Learned that one the hard way. But she’d come pick us up, eventually.”
Erin shot her a look somewhere between apprehension and disbelief, so Holtzmann acquiesced, not wanting to push her luck on teasing her to the point of ruining the moment. “Awwright,” she agreed, pretending to pout. “We can go back to the hearse.”
She spun around to make a dramatic exit, but Erin piped up from behind her and that stopped her in her tracks.
“Holtzmann?”
The sheepish sound of the physicist’s voice ignited a worry that perhaps Erin regretted kissing her after all, but any anxieties Holtz may have had melted away as she found herself swept into a tight hug. The embrace was made somewhat awkward by the proton packs, which Holtzmann had completely forgotten were still strapped to their backs, but she returned it with vigor as best she could anyway.
“Thank you...for this,” Erin continued. “It was fun. And very sweet. I never would have done it on my own, but this - all of this - was exactly what I needed.”
Holtzmann bit her lip as it dared to quiver, her joy threatening to spill out of her and create new puddles in the parking lot, so she moved to kiss Erin’s cheek to give it something productive to do instead. “Anytime, cupcake,” she murmured, when she felt she could speak again.
Their lips met once more in a brief exchange, a quick confirmation that the events of the past several minutes were real. This time, when Holtz offered her hand to Erin, she didn’t hesitate to take it.
And as they walked off toward the car and the future, each of them equally drenched in water and sticky with slime without a care in the world, Holtzmann understood why her ingenious impulse to cheer Erin up with a little fall of rain had worked so well. It was a promise - a declaration, followed through upon with action, that however this wild world had thrown them together, they would never again have to face its callous indifference and casual cruelty alone.
Without a single word, and better than words ever could have conveyed, Holtzmann found a way to show Erin she was now, after a lifetime of expectations and demands of perfection, safe by her side in her vulnerability and all of the messy realities of being. Like the ghost in the factory, the ghosts from their pasts they’d carried with them into their new lives were best tackled in tandem, because they were stronger together. If that meant getting splattered with slime just to share in the experience of it with Erin, Holtz knew she would gladly do so again - especially if it led to playing in puddles and kisses and the opportunity to make her laugh.
After liberating themselves from the weight of their packs, Erin let herself into the backseat of the hearse on the right, and Holtzmann followed her on the left. She didn’t stay there for long, though. Forgoing a seatbelt, she climbed across the seat and wrapped her arms around Erin’s waist, letting her head rest on her friend’s - her girlfriend’s - chest. She ignored the ectoplasm which adhered to her skin as a result, because it didn’t matter. All that mattered was the hum of amusement Erin let out as she did so, the arm she looped around Holtz’s back to hold her closer, and the fullness in her own heart for succeeding so spectacularly.
Erin reached down to thread her hand in the blonde curls that spilled out across her jumpsuit, and Holtzmann daydreamed about all of the other ways she could field-test making her happy the whole way home.