Work Text:
Artwork by cubedmango
They’re here, arguably, on Important Business. Gumshoe had had his serious-police-chief face on when he’d approached their chaos of a shared desk (what had anyone been expecting, really) with the lanyards for the 56th annual Law Enforcement Collaborative Convention, to be held in Boston that September.
Ema has no doubt that he’d be disappointed to hear that she’s currently wasting the LAPD’s money by skiving off the conference, being dragged down the crowded street with her fingers interlocked with fellow detective Kay Faraday.
In their defense–they’d tried . Had shown up to the convention center with a list of panels to attend, goals of sharing their research and experiences in the off-the-wall LA trials. But the panelists were painfully bad at public speaking, and the other attendees were much more concerned with talking about their new squad cars and petty thefts in their district and wouldn’t even give Kay and Ema, in their unconventional-convention attire, the time of day.
Ema had been tempted to stick it out, had made it through half of a forensics presentation where the information being used to interpret the data was five years out of date before Kay had appeared by her side out of nowhere, breath hot against her ear as she whispered:
“You’re gritting your teeth so hard I can hear it from the other side of the room. C’mon, let’s get out of here, Gummy will be way more angry with me if you come back and need serious dental surgery than if we give up on this ‘experience.’”
And now she’s out in the bright sunshine, weaving through slow-moving tourist groups and harried college freshmen alike, musing on how, for a supposedly retired Great Thief, Kay had done a great job of effectively stealing her away from the convention.
She comes back to her senses just in time to narrowly avoid crashing straight into the object of her musings, who’s come to a dead stop across the street from a large building, outside of which a line of strange-looking vehicles sit assembled.
“Ema,” Kay says, in as serious a tone as Ema’s ever heard from her. “This is gonna be so much better than that stuffy conference.”
Ema looks up at the shiny lettering on the side of the building–oh. A science museum.
Perfect.
“I hate to admit it, Faraday,” she says, with typical acerbic cynicism coloring her tone (it’s fine, Kay’s used to it by now, she’ll see through this), “but for once your ideas are superb.”
Kay grins, lighting up like a phosphate reaction, and darts across the street. Ema realizes only belatedly as she follows that their fingers are still linked. They go through the tedious process of obtaining tickets, dodging the small children who seem intent on creating new, innovative crimes against music on the piano-key stairs (and oh, she can’t wait to get back to LA and tell Gavin how the uninspired stylings of a bunch of kids are still better than anything he’s come up with in his “band”), and emerge into the open air of the central museum atrium. The space is huge, and though Ema would bet she already knows most of the information from the youth-oriented placards in the various wings, Kay’s practically vibrating with excitement next to her at the concept of interactive exhibits.
(She has a distant memory, tucked away into that space in her brain reserved for strict non-analysis, of visiting somewhere similar with Lana back before…everything. She must have been only eight or nine, well before her sister had been the Chief Prosecutor, well before everything with Gant. A simple recollection of an afternoon spent gawking at simple demonstrations of electricity and river currents and light-sensitive compounds.)
“Where first?” she asks, directing her attention back to where Kay’s trying to evaluate the circular exhibit space of the middle floor of the museum. (She also might be scoping out the places’s security system or easily exploitable vent shafts–you could never be too sure.)
“Ummm…” Kay replies, swiveling back and forth like a broken centrifuge. “That one?”
Ema follows Kay’s pointer finger to a series of interactive displays about the science of light reflection and photography. It’s emptier than the other sections, giving them some breathing room without tripping over errant small children, which is clearly a concession to Ema’s comfort level. She nods briefly in affirmation, before they make their way into the exhibit.
Ema trails behind Kay as her unlikely detective partner lifts flaps and pushes buttons and directs little assemblages of mirrors to manipulate reflections. Kay hasn’t stopped smiling, looking back at Ema whenever the exhibit shows the thing it was designed to do.
“ Ema! Look, if you angle these just right, you can’t see anything! It’s just like that one time at Gatewater Land, you remember, except now I know why!”
Ema remembers the Gatewater Land incident–she can’t really call it a case , truly, not when she’d been seventeen or so and entirely unofficially investigating. It had been the first time she’d crossed paths with Kay, well back before either of them had had to face the harsh realities of what comes after teenage years shadowing LA’s most chaotic legal investigations.
“I’ve seen that trick used to fool cameras before, too–last year, that case with the CEO? Don’t know if you heard of that one.”
“Mm,” Kay says, distracted now by trying to get the mirrors to twist to manipulate two separate images to be side-by-side. “Could be useful to study up on that one.”
She gives up on the mirror display and moves on to the next section–a shadowy corner with a placard discussing how photoreactive surfaces can record an image in silhouette. Kay’s fingers wrap around Ema’s wrist as she pulls her forward to stand in front of the high-powered lightbulbs.
“What’s the weirdest thing we can make with shadows?” she asks, before deciding to test the display and poking at the button on the wall. After three short warning beeps, the lightbulb flares to life and leaves Ema blinking away afterimage spots.
“Kay! Warn me next time.” Kay sticks out her tongue before wrenching at Ema’s shoulder to get her to turn around and look at the wall behind them.
Framed in bright green, Ema’s silhouette is simple, only distinguished by the faint bumps of her Luminol goggles at the top of her head and her forensics bag at her hip. Kay is much more distinct, having dropped into a crouching pose and schooled her hands into shadow-puppet dog shapes, which are either intended to be talking or biting each others’ heads off–it’s unclear.
She’s tempted to ask for a re-do, but by the time she’s done looking at the image on the wall, Kay’s vanished on ahead again–distracted by newer, unexplored areas. This process repeats several times, over and over, with Kay pulling her into some elementary-level exhibition and Ema pretending that she doesn’t already know the theory, if not the specifics, behind the thing it’s trying to explain.
With anyone else, it might have been tedious. She’s never had much patience for other people explaining science to her–it’s always been her who’s had the answers, the explanations, the last-second gadget or test or reaction that makes a breakthrough in the case. But something about watching Kay’s enthusiasm for the museum tempers her familiar irritability, and something about the way her cheek just slightly dimples every time she looks back at Ema with that broad smile on her face—
Well. It’s definitely just got to be the nostalgia of seeing someone else be as awed with new science as she used to be, right?
Ema doesn’t notice that they’ve entered a completely separate wing of the museum until the change to stark white walls makes her look around. Kay’s already several paces ahead, jabbing at a touch-screen machine with exaggerated annoyance until it spits out a paper wristband that she just knows won’t come off without scissors. Her detective partner waves her over, and Ema squints at the machine.
The plaque above the kiosk reads: The Science of the Human Body ; and the screen prompts her to enter her name, age, and an email. When she does this, she’s presented with an identical wristband to Kay’s.
“It’s some sort of research initiative, I think?” Kay says, gesturing to the space beyond the doorway nearby, past which Ema can see other museum patrons completing physical assessments. “Ooo, I’m going to be the best at the one where you measure how high you can jump!”
She darts off again, and Ema still finds it impossible to be annoyed about Kay’s unbridled enthusiasm. Instead, she ambles over to a different station that seems to demand less physical activity and focuses on completing the challenge set there.
It’s nearly half an hour before she locates Kay again, noting her distinctive hair over on the other side of the room. The informational placard she’s half-blocking with her upper body proclaims something about the science behind attraction , and by the time Ema’s realized that this is the opposite of what she’d like to be participating in, Kay’s spotted her.
“Ema! I thought I’d lost you to the test-your-strength machine–look, they’ve got a quiz that you’re supposed to take that’ll measure your heart rate while you think about someone you like!”
“Sounds… fascinating,” Ema replies drily, trying not to let on how much of a waste of time she thinks this particular section might be.
“It’ll be so boring if I have to do it alone… ” Kay holds up the cable attaching a tiny heart-rate monitor to a nearby table, where a screen divides the space between the two quiz stations. Ema rolls her eyes and really, truly contemplates leaving her detective partner here.
“If you do this with me, I’ll… pay for something you want from the gift shop?” Kay tries, and Ema chews at the inside of her lip for a few more seconds before making her decision, dropping into the metal chair across from Kay.
“Fine, but only because I’ve been wanting that keychain Van de Graaff generator for ten years.”
Kay grins in victory, and Ema turns her attention to the touchscreen interface in front of her, absently Velcro-ing the heart rate monitor to her wrist. The quiz seems pretty straightforward–after a couple demographic questions, it shows her several stock photos of people of assorted genders and aesthetics, as well as asking her to rate how aesthetically attracted to these people she would say she was. In the corner of the screen, a live graph tracks her heart rate, though she’s not quite sure how accurate it can be with this equipment.
As the final results pop up on the monitor, Ema admits that it wasn’t too infuriating of a quiz to take–and the results (based on the concept that a person’s heart rate will rise when they see someone they find attractive) seem to correlate with her own assessment. She’s finished before Kay, anyway, and so she detaches herself from the wiring of the station and goes to stand on the other side and peer at Kay’s results.
Kay looks up at the movement from the other side of the table and meets Ema’s eyes. Ema only catches a glimpse of the image on her screen–some brown-haired man in a baggy t-shirt–before Kay’s arbitrarily clicked on a rating and moved on, breaking eye contact to get through the final section of the quiz. As the results pop up, Ema notices one specific, glaring anomaly in the data–there’s a massive spike in the heart rate graph right towards the end.
“Hey, that can’t be right–the monitor’s gotta be faulty, there’s no way your heart went from 72 to 118 BPM just from looking at a picture. Which one does that line up with again?”
Analyzing the timeline shows that it’s the photo from earlier; the one that Kay hadn’t even looked at. Which makes it doubly weird, then, for her heart rate to have gone up so much. Ema’s still willing to put it down to a technical fault but knows that a good scientist always covers all their variables.
“Come here, let me just see your wrist for a second? Just to be sure.”
Strangely, Kay’s cheeks color slightly at the proposition. “I–that’s fine, I’m okay, I promise! It’s gotta be the machine, right? I’m all good!”
“But if you’re not—just let me—” Ema catches one of Kay’s hands mid-flail, and turns it over to press her thumb firmly against the inside of her partner’s wrist. Kay’s uncharacteristically frozen throughout the process, and Ema feels her pulse hammering under her grasp.
“It’s not just the monitor–your heart rate’s definitely up. Do you think you need to sit down for a while, or—have you been drinking water?”
Kay snatches her arm back, surprising Ema a bit with the abruptness of the motion. “It’s not any of that! It’s—it’s fine, Ema, just don’t worry about it. Let’s just get out of this section, this was a stupid idea anyway.”
“We’ve only just done one thing here, isn’t that a bit sudden?” Ema’s really trying to piece together the puzzle with Kay’s reactions. She’s gotten to know her fellow detective quite well over the past months, really, and one thing that Kay definitively isn’t is shy. What is it about this exhibit–and the heart rate thing in particular–that’s making her usually fearless coworker desperate to leave immediately?
Her gaze happens to fall on the final quiz screen, abandoned by both of them after the whole heart rate fiasco. It’s still displaying its little informational ending, giving some ‘fun facts’ about the physical reactions associated with attraction.
When you see someone you’re attracted to, a lot of things happen at once! Your pupils can dilate, and your heart rate picks up. You might even find that blood rushes to your face, causing you to blush, or that you feel ‘butterflies’ in your stomach! All of this is completely normal, and just a part of being human–so next time you run into your crush, try not to worry if your palms are sweaty and just focus on the wonders of the human body’s reaction to emotions.
Maybe Kay was embarrassed about some of her quiz results? But the heart rate spike was on the one question where she wasn’t looking at one of the photos—it was on the question where she’d been looking at…
Perhaps it would be better to break this down scientifically.
Observation: Kay Faraday’s heart rate spiked while taking a quiz about attraction, specifically while she was looking at Ema Skye.
Hypothesis: If Kay’s heart rate increased while looking at Ema, then Kay must be attracted to Ema , because that’s literally what the experiment was testing.
Experiment: Wait, hold on a second, what?
Ema has to admit, she’s still processing the hypothesis step of her analysis when she notices that Kay’s come back to stand with her at the quiz station.
“I’m sorry,” Kay begins, uncharacteristically subdued. “I kinda overreacted.”
Ema’s not expecting an apology, so she’s caught off-guard. “I–no, that’s fine, I was just concerned, that’s all.”
“It was just a stupid quiz, anyway. No reason to get upset about it.”
Despite Kay’s words, Ema’s not convinced. She looks dejected , as though she’d been expecting a different outcome to her own experiment. As though—
Oh. For someone so intent on framing things through scientific lenses, Ema realizes she’s been really, really oblivious to having the tables turned on her.
“Kay… ” she begins, and her eyes flicker over to the screen, which has finally looped back around to the introduction page. “You know that quiz is based on actual science, right?”
Kay bites at the corner of her thumb, averting her eyes. “I mean, I guess.”
This is it, then. “Were you maybe… hoping for a specific result? To an experiment?”
Her words don’t quite provoke the reaction she was looking for, but break the tension in another way.
“Really?” Kay asks, nervousness dissipating in a heartbeat as she stops just short of rolling her eyes. “Do you have to frame everything as being part of some greater scientific method? I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely one of the things I like about you, but—”
She’s cut off as Ema decides that for once in her life, she just has to go for it , and grabs Kay’s hand as she presses their lips together, finding that something tight and anxious uncoils in her chest when Kay relaxes into the kiss.
When she pulls away, Kay’s looking just a bit dazed. “Okay, yeah,” she says, the corner of her mouth twisting up into a hint of a smile. “Maybe I was looking for a particular result to my experiment, or whatever you said.”
This time, it’s definitely Ema who can feel her heart pounding in her chest. “And did the experiment prove your hypothesis?”
“I dunno,” Kay says, leaning in again. “As my favorite scientist is ever so fond of saying, you can’t prove anything until you’ve repeated it as many times as necessary.”
Later:
“Oh,” Kay says, breaking away for a moment from where she’s entangled with Ema. “There was one more thing I was hoping to do before we left, actually.”
“Hm?” Ema murmurs, for once too distracted by the feeling of Kay’s fingers twined into her hair to have a running train of thought–or any form of thought-transport, for that matter.
“Remember that one exhibit with the light wall? I have the best idea.”