Work Text:
Sunlight streamed in through the third floor window where Erin and Holtzmann slept, catching Erin across the eyes as the harsh, unfiltered rays crept past the slats in the blinds. She stirred, but did her best to ignore them at first. Wrapped in the cozy warmth of her girlfriend’s arms and their favorite fleece blanket, she wasn’t willing to relinquish the moment quite yet, even if waking up would mean they could meet their friends downstairs to open gifts. She adjusted so her face was hidden more firmly against Holtzmann’s chest, muffling the unwelcome light in the softness of her skin, and she smiled when Holtzmann instinctively tightened her arms around her waist.
It was somewhere between the last day of Hanukkah and the first day of the new year. The residents of the firehouse had lost track among all of the events and celebrations and trips home and the handful of ghosts who emerged to ensure the year ended with a bang, but it hardly mattered to Erin. Her little family was together again right where they belonged. And whether it was Christmas or one of many average, unremarkable days in December, she already had everything she wanted, right here, in the studio apartments above a nuclear reactor she was still convinced violated some zoning law or another. Or should.
Reaching up to run her fingers through the wilderness of blonde curls that stuck up in every direction, Erin settled into what she hoped was a position that would allow her to fall back asleep. Holtzmann mumbled something incoherent somewhere between a whine and a hum of acknowledgement, then mirrored the caress on Erin’s back, repeating the movements as she felt them. Erin sighed at the familiar intimacy, and surrendered to the peace she so rarely allowed herself to embrace.
The first thing she noticed upon waking up the second time was that the loving arms around her had vanished, and she missed them. The second thing she noticed was that she did feel more well-rested, and the third was that someone had shuttered the aggravating window blinds and pulled the curtains closed.
She now lie on her stomach with her face buried in a pillow, blanket tucked carefully around her shoulders and sides. Erin shrugged it off as she pushed herself upright onto her hands, swiveling her knees underneath her to sit up. She blinked blearily as she looked around the small space for Holtzmann, hoping she could entice her to cuddle her for a little longer. But Holtz was nowhere to be seen.
A quiet click in the far corner of the apartment caught her attention, and Erin turned to find Holtzmann carrying a precarious stack of two coffee cups and a pastry bag, with a second pastry bag in her teeth, attempting to close the door quietly behind her. She froze when she glanced up and realized she’d been caught. The corners of her lips twitched and curved upward to become a grin. She waggled her eyebrows at Erin, and Erin couldn’t help but laugh.
“Here, honey, let me help you,” Erin said. She climbed out of bed and crossed the room to take the cups out of Holtzmann’s hands. Setting them aside on a nearby table, she held her hands under her girlfriend’s chin. Holtz let the bag drop into them before she kicked off her boots and shed her jacket in the general direction of the coat hook.
Erin stepped forward to cradle Holtzmann’s face between her hands, smiling sleepily at her as she placed a kiss on her lips. “You’re cold,” she said. Dusting the snowflakes out of her hair, she opened her arms and enfolded Holtz within them, huffing out a soft sigh when the blonde snuggled into her. She relished in the reconnection of their bodies once more. “Here - c’mere. Your cheeks are all red.”
“Aw, I was hoping I could sneak in without waking you up,” Holtzmann replied. “I wanted to surprise you with breakfast in bed. Can you go back to bed so I can surprise you properly?”
Erin shook her head in mock disapproval of her girlfriend’s silly request. Really, though, she was never going to say no to any of her sweet gestures, and she was always happy to restage them if it made Holtzmann smile, a fact she let her know with an extra-tight squeeze. “Sure, Holtz. Whatever you want. Come and warm up.”
Holtzmann gave a triumphant sound and pushed herself up onto her tiptoes to kiss Erin’s cheek. She collected her stack of treats - in a teetering tower once more, Erin tried not to notice - and followed her over to the bed, where she climbed in after her and presented her gifts with a flourish. “Surprise,” she said, beaming with enthusiasm. “I brought your favorite. One latte and one sugar plum danish - ” She winked. “ - for my sugar plum.”
“Mm. I don’t know about that joke; it was pretty cheesy,” Erin teased. She managed to keep a straight face for all of a second or two before she couldn’t help but snicker, encouraged by the way Holtzmann brightened at her attempt at a pun. “You didn’t have to bring me breakfast in bed, sweetie. Did you go all the way over to Spring Street for this?”
“Yup. I seem to recall a certain ‘my brilliant girlfriend’ told me once it was the best way to wake up. So: twenty minutes both ways, uphill in the snow and all that. For you.”
She booped Erin’s nose with the tip of her finger, and Erin could have sworn the gentle flush in her face shifted to become something demure, no longer caused by the cold. Holtz looked at her expectantly, awaiting confirmation she’d pleased Erin - and Erin was reminded this soft, small human whose eyes looked especially, impossibly blue when not obscured by the yellow filter she used to dampen the world was Jillian Holtzmann with all of her barriers stripped away, the most vulnerable version of her only she was allowed to see.
She was amazed, four years from the day Holtzmann had taken her hand after a bust left her slimed and cheered her up by dancing in puddles in the street with her, that the simplest of gestures and touches from her could still cause her breath to catch in her throat. Still made her heart stutter in her chest from how lucky she felt to exist in the same universe as the woman who stumbled over her feelings in most situations, yet somehow never faltered when it came to engineering new ways to show Erin how much she cherished her.
They had fallen in love strangely, fiercely, and all at once, living lifetimes between coffee dates and mid-morning cuddles.
And in response to Holtzmann, Erin wanted to say, but that was before I knew what waking up next to you was like, and you’re my favorite reason to get up in the morning, but she didn’t want to take away from the lengths her girlfriend had gone to give her a sweet gift.
So, instead, she kissed her deeply, until she felt Holtzmann smile into her lips, and she raised her coffee cup for a toast. “Aww. You’re the best. Cheers to my amazing girlfriend?”
“Cheers to my amazing girlfriend.”
“Merry…” Erin’s brows knitted together. “Christmas?” she tried.
“Starbucks was open,” Holtzmann pointed out, “so it’s not Christmas or New Year’s, unless our capitalist overlords have decided that no longer means anything.”
“Oh. Well - ” Erin leaned her head on Holtz’s collar. “Merry random day in December, then.”
“There’s no one I’d rather spend this completely nondescript and uneventful day with,” Holtzmann replied, patting her shoulder.
Nudging her, Erin nodded toward the pastry bag in her partner’s lap. “What’d you get?”
“Chocolate chip cookie.”
“You’re eating a chocolate chip cookie for breakfast?”
“Yeah! Want some?”
Erin chuckled. “Kind of, yeah. Share?”
Holtzmann broke off half of her cookie and offered it to Erin, who tore off a piece of her danish to trade. They sipped their coffee and ate their snacks for a while in the serene silence of their private corner of the world, content, for a rare moment, to be perfectly still.
As they finished their breakfast, Holtz threaded her fingers through Erin’s hair, shooting her little adoring glances every so often when she thought she wasn’t looking. Erin wondered what she was thinking about. Normally by this point, if they weren’t actively engaged in the other ways they could be entangled in bed together, Holtzmann would have started fidgeting, eager to move, to get up, to start the day. Erin was always slower to rise than her ebullient partner who seemed to run off of a built-in generator. But as she laced their fingers together and smoothed her thumb over the curve of Holtz’s hand, she was struck by how uncharacteristically subdued she was. Curious, she snuck a peek of her own in Holtzmann’s direction, unable to read the expression on her face.
“Hey,” she said, gently brushing her girlfriend’s forehead. “What’s going on up here?”
“Physics.” Holtz took the free hand Erin used to catch her attention and pressed a kiss to it, offering no further explanation.
Erin raised a brow.
“Specifically…?”
“Quantum randomness. The lack of predetermined outcomes in a directionless universe, with life being an accidental by-product of a precise series of events which had to occur in the exact order they did to bring the world as we know it to where we are today. The complexity of our existence sprang out of a sea of random chance spontaneously and unguided. There were infinitely many more ways for the two of us not to exist in the same moment in space and time as the people we are than there were for our lives to converge.”
“Oh. It’s kind of incredible, isn’t it?” Erin asked, catching on to what she was getting at. “That even with the indeterminacy inherent to the system - all the random details that had to perfectly align for us to meet - we’re here, together. And there’s no reason it should have happened this way, but there’s nowhere I’d rather be, either.”
Holtzmann looked thoughtful as she reached over to draw spirals down the length of Erin’s arm. “You burst into existence,” she murmured, “stormed into my life - and my lab - and changed my whole universe for the better.”
“Wow, Holtz. That was…so beautiful and unexpected I don’t know what to say. Except that I love when you talk science to me - ” Erin shuffled upright to look at her girlfriend directly and pulled Holtzmann into a hug. She noticed, amused, the way Holtzmann’s cheeks darkened for the second time that morning, but she chose not to comment on it despite how adorable she found it. “ - and I love you, very much.”
Erin felt the kinetic shift in Holtz’s body before she saw the sparks in her eyes that ignited whenever an idea took root. She pulled back just enough to get out of the way when her spritely engineer all but leapt out of bed, compelled into motion like she had just solved a complex equation that had been plaguing her.
She knew she had spoken too soon about the lack of activity.
“Erin Gilbert, light of my life, my right-hand woman and the keeper of my heart,” Holtzmann began, “I haven’t been entirely truthful with you. I said this was a completely nondescript and uneventful day, and I’ve just decided it’s not going to be.”
Erin blinked, not quite sure what to expect.
“I have another surprise for you, but you have to close your eyes.”
Trusting Holtzmann in whatever she had in mind, she did so without question - okay, admittedly with a few questions, but she was intrigued enough to suppress them for the moment being to see how things played out. She heard a rustling off somewhere else in the apartment, and a drawer open and close, before she felt two legs move to straddle her own, a weight between her fingers as Holtzmann entwined their hands once more.
“Hey, so.” Holtzmann’s voice quavered just a little, and just enough to unveil the nervous edge that had taken hold of it. “I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, and I didn’t know how, because I’m not good at words, or feelings, or not setting your desk on fire…” She buried her face in the crook of Erin’s neck, her voice speeding up just slightly as she continued, “But I really love you a lot in ways I’ve never felt about anyone. And, uh, I accidentally just gave you the awesomest proposal speech I’ll never be able to recreate if I’m thinking about it like that, so please say yes and marry me so I don’t have to do it again?”
“Wait - what?”
Caught off-guard, Erin reflexively jerked her hands back, only to find the unusual weight between her fingers remained.
She opened her eyes.
Around her ring finger, Holtzmann had somehow slipped a delicate gold band without her noticing. It wrapped around itself like ivy, with a small cascade of red and blue stones inlaid among the twists and bends. Erin’s favorite color, and Holtzmann’s. Rubies and sapphires, the same combination of alumina and oxygen in two different iterations, intertwined like their lives and their purpose in the world and their bodies when they woke up each morning. Erin gawked, forgetting to breathe and forgetting to speak as her brain scrambled to process the unexpected question. Tears flooded her eyes without her consent and outside of her control; she brought her hands up to her mouth in an attempt to hold them back.
“I - you - what? Holtzmann!” she sputtered, unable to keep them from spilling down her cheeks. Overwhelmed both by the intensity of her feelings and the surprise of suddenly having to reckon with them, she nearly knocked over the coffee cups on the bedside table in her haste to return to her partner’s arms. Holtzmann seemed to regain some of her confidence as she rubbed Erin’s back, her hands patient and loving as she waited for Erin to find the words to speak.
“I can’t believe you proposed to me by accident, you dork,” Erin said finally, hiccuping laughs in between sobs.
“And snuck a ring onto your finger.”
“And snuck a ring onto my finger! Like you just assumed I’d say yes…”
Holtzmann winked when Erin managed to sound simultaneously overjoyed and scandalized by her antics, a grin playing out across her features. “ Is that a yes?” she asked - as though she already knew the answer - and Erin remembered she did, in fact, need to give her one.
“Yes. So much yes. Of course I’ll marry you. I can’t believe you.”
“See? My assumptions were validated by years of data in my favor.”
Erin peppered kisses along Holtzmann’s neck and the curve of her jaw, erratic breaths becoming giggles as the weight of the step they were taking began to sink in. Married.
She had always assumed she would never be married, not because there was anything particularly wrong with her, but because she was so rarely successful at integrating the revolving door of romantic partners she had over the years with her aspirations and the trajectory of her career. Some were better than others, and some were even okay enough she could have married them and lived a decent life, but whenever it came down to it, she knew she would always choose being a groundbreaking physicist over being someone’s wife. Marriage, in some respects, felt like having a twin - it might have been nice if the circumstances of her life had allowed for it, but they didn’t. There was no use dwelling on what could have been.
Yet, from the moment Holtzmann sauntered into Erin’s life all sunburst smiles and electric enthusiasm, she swept away all of Erin’s most carefully constructed defenses in her stride. It was different. She was different. Erin didn’t exactly have to puzzle-piece Holtzmann into her life and squint to make her fit when they spent their days operating nuclear lasers by each other’s sides and establishing the field of science they founded one slime-laden field test at a time. She just fit, all on her own, amplifying the most daring aspects of Erin, and soothing the most self-effacing.
Holtzmann squirmed under the attention. She made a sound somewhere between a strangled cry and a moan and Erin realized she should pull back before she, well, couldn’t. It was her turn to blush furiously as she caught sight of the hair she’d tousled and pulled in her excitement, the shirt she’d rumpled in her need to be close to Holtz. The ring sparkled in the light when she composed herself enough to let her hands fall to Holtzmann’s waist, and the reminder of its reality sent a renewed glimmer of joy through her body.
Erin cleared her throat.
“So you really didn’t plan this entire morning, the coffee and the breakfast and the speech and everything, to do this?”
“No,” Holtzmann replied. She sounded almost bashful as she reached up to brush away a stray tear from Erin’s eyes. “You just looked so pretty and happy when you woke up, it reminded me how much I want to be the reason you look like that forever. Not just today. I love you a lot, Erin. I didn’t always think I was…capable of feeling this way about another person, but I’m glad you’re the person who proved me wrong.”
Erin hummed in agreement, leaning into the tender touch and letting her smile speak for itself. After losing a second or two to gazing at Holtzmann, it was her turn for her eyes to glint with mischief as a seed of impulsiveness manifested within her, encouraging her into her next move. She stole a glance at the clock.
“I have an idea.”
“Oh, I love that combination of words coming from you.” Holtzmann perked up, intrigued. “Lay it on me.”
“I think Abby and Patty have slept enough, don’t you think?” Erin said. “And I think we’ve waited long enough to announce our engagement.”
Her fiancée nodded sagely. “Five minutes is the traditional length of time to announce such things.”
“What do you say we run through the firehouse and wake them up like we’re two kids who just discovered Santa came and brought us presents?”
“I say,” Holtz replied, as she slid her arms around Erin’s neck to kiss her, “I’m shocked and appalled at your blatant disregard for our colleagues’ sleep schedule. That’s not very professional of you, Dr. Gilbert.”
“So you’re in, then?”
“Hell yes.”
She bounced a little as she followed Erin out of bed, and the pair joined hands while they positioned themselves in front of the apartment door like they were about to run an Olympic race. With one hand in Holtzmann’s and the other on the doorknob, Erin turned to look at her partner, quirking a brow and exchanging an impish grin.
“Ready?”
The unspoken significance of the question hung heavily in the air.
“You know it.”
So, unflinching, unhesitating, and unafraid, they burst out of the room and into their future together.