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“Oh, Fuck!”
It’s not the first time Aurora has heard that phrase. Actually, if she had a cap for every time she had heard that phrase she’d be up to her waist in caps. And Aurora is tall.
She could use them to buy a new coat, one without patches on the elbows and a hole in the arm where Nick had accidentally let a cigarette burn into it while he’d stared at some papers on his desk, lost in deep thought.
She’s sitting at her desk in her home in Diamond City, flicking through a city magazine, courtesy of Piper Wright and her girlfriend living down the street. She’s not sure what the pair has cooked up, and to be frank, it sounds like she has bigger fish to fry with the shout she’s just heard outside.
She stands, cracks the crik in her back and groans under her breath as she leaves her papers and empty ballpoint pens to themselves to go and look out her front door.
She’s only just managed to open it a crack before she hears the voice again, unfamiliar to her before now.
“Ohhhh, uh-“
there’s a woman, half lying on the metal walkway between her front stoop and the railing of the path, since she lives just above the ground level of the city. She’s gripping said railing with iron fists, her knuckles white, and her boots are scrabbling against the metal.
For a second, Aurora thinks some sort of jet’d up crackhead had somehow managed to get into the city and is now flailing in front of her door, but she realizes when the first gust of cold outside air hits her in the face and turns her freckled cheeks pink- there’s ice on the metal walkway, and this woman has slipped.
Her rubber boots aren’t providing a lot of traction, and she’s kicking stubbornly against the thin layer of sparkling, early morning frost and hoisting herself upright against the metal bars.
“Um. You okay, there?”
The woman looks up at her, then down to her boots as she gains her footing, and then back to her and narrows strange, yellow eyes- she points a finger at Aurora and then opens and closes her mouth a couple of times like she thinks she’s talking, but no words are coming out.
Her face is bright pink, and Aurora thinks it’s probably more the embarrassment than the cold, at this point.
“Peachy,” she says, a little out of breath, and her pink nose wrinkles up as her breath fogs out into the cold morning air around them. She pushes blonde hair back into the hood she has tucked around her freezing ears, and grips the railing tighter.
Aurora finally relaxes a bit. This obviously is just some passing outsider, unused to the slippery walkways this time of year, and she’s giving the older woman a good second of amusement to distract from looking over cases for Nick, if nothing else.
“I’m Aurora,” the redhead tries, extending a hand to the other woman.
Something as simple as a handshake should not end is disaster, but that’s what they say about a lot of things. And a lot of things end in disaster.
The blonde takes the outstretched hand on reflex, grabbing at her bare palm, and then realizes too little, too late, that she now has lost her steadiness, and her boots are sliding forward on the iced metal again.
And Aurora, dressed only in a light,
Long sleeved cotton shirt, and some loose slacks, is suddenly losing her own footing on her front step with the weight of the woman pulling down on her arm accidentally- and she falls right off of her stoop.
They crash down together, and it’s like a bad car wreck. Aurora prays to god that everyone is still in bed right now, and hasn’t seen her take a proper tumble into the ice because of a handshake .
The small woman goes flat against the walkway, spread eagle and pancaked against the ground, the air pushed out of her in a whoosh as Aurora lands next to her, her shoulder accidentally getting the other woman in the gut.
In shock, the redhead simply catches her breath and tries to regain some composure as she takes in what just happened before trying to push herself upright, shaking ice crystals from her long hair and cursing the freeze on her bare palms.
Suddenly, the stranger bursts into laughter, wheezing and high, and shakes her head free of snowy bits. Her smile is gleaming and she doesn’t even bother to try and sit up before she says,
“Charmer, nice to meet you,”