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Jetlag conspires with the expected unease of lengthy travel and, by the time Liz touches down in Hawaii, the regret for making this trip blooms large enough to eclipse any sense of obligation or sentiment. She’s had time to snap at two different flight attendants, slapped her passport down too hard at border control, and stared down an annoyingly young TSA agent even though her suitcase had refreshingly nothing to worry about. Though it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like any second they’ll ask to see inside her bag, and upon opening it Liz will discover that tongue in a Ziploc bag innocently resting overtop folded t-shirts and her toothbrush. Or worse, Holden will be waiting inside.
Except this is Hawaii, and those things have to stay in Ennis. Have to. Otherwise, Navarro would’ve walked into the fucking ocean here, Liz thinks grimly. What’s the point of Ennis if not to keep its ghosts the way it keeps the living. Her return ticket, while stowed deep in that suitcase, is not any less haunting.
It’s warm outside.
She still hasn’t gotten used to it. The airport had been chilly, and stepping out into the humid sunshine of Honolulu is startling. Off and wrong. She’ll have to ask Navarro how she manages it – if it’s the cold drinks or the shed layers or the water that staves off the sense of being cooked alive.
The FBI agents who’d had to haul and then freeze their asses in Ennis will probably enjoy tracking her tedious trip over the CCTV. Liz sighs and it doesn’t burn the back of her throat or her lungs, and heads out with the express mission to disappear.
-
Navarro has new tattoos, for one. Liz notices them with the eyes of a detective rather than a curious friend – the kind of noticing that can be called upon later to identify a body or a suspect. When Navarro comments on Liz’s shorter haircut, courtesy of Leah who insisted it shaved a decade off Liz, it has to be the same. The same sort of noticing. They shake hands and Navarro lets her inside.
-
“So how’s Peter?” Navarro asks, “He alright?”
“By Ennis standards he’s excellent,” Liz grins, cooling her palms around a glass of iced tea – which answers one of her prior questions on heat regulation. “His girl let him back in, last I’ve seen he’s becoming a real family man.”
Navarro snorts at the title, a dark kind of joke that sits well at home with Alaskan nights, but maybe not the stinging orange of sunsets and early pink mornings here. “You still keeping him at the station all hours of the night?”
Liz waves a hand to dismiss the accusation, “With the mines closed, our biggest worry now is fist fights and minor vandalism. Activists with nothing to do and three dozen ex-employees suddenly jobless and with too much time on their hands.” She takes another sip of the tea, ice cubes clinking gently, “Broken noses, broken windows. Nothing like the Annie case.”
The silence which follows her mention is palpable. Though the air of accusation and hatred that used to accompany it before is dissolved now, thawed and gone. Liz swallows more tea and continues, “I’m sure it’s only a matter of months before someone gets mad enough to necessitate Prior start pulling long nights again. Long enough Kayla forgets to be mad at him.”
“And is that how it works,” Navarro smiles, teasing, from behind her own glass, “You just wait until people forget to be mad at you?”
“We’re talking about Peter,” Liz grumbles and turns to watch the window.
-
“Do you even know how to swim,” Navarro walks backward for a moment to confront her. Liz thinks – has been thinking this for the day and a half she’s been here – that Navarro looks alive. She remembers glimpsing it, here and there, like signal flares on the horizon, back when they used to work together before Annie and when they had to resume working together after. Little scraps of good humor or a coiled kind of energy, like maybe there still were things to laugh about.
It seems overwhelming now, a literal pep in her step that verges on being annoying. Her smiles, dimpled by the metal studs, a playfulness previously scant.
“Yes I know how to swim,” Liz snaps at her and Navarro turns away to keep walking, down to where the pavement ends and sand begins.
“Didn’t seem like it, back there,” Navarro throws over her broad shoulder and toes her shoes off with practiced ease, stepping out onto the beach.
Liz bristles, waves crashing distantly. “You go for a swim in ice water first and then we’ll talk.”
Navarro just grins and checks her hair’s tied securely before stripping her shirt off. Liz sighs and follows her out onto the sand.
-
And Liz isn’t a strong swimmer. She’s passable, enough to not be a total embarrassment or gasp and flop around when her toes can’t find the sand floor, pulled a little too deep by the draw of retreating waves. The water is warm along its very surface and runs cooler down, down, down, feeding into the nostalgia for her almost-home six hours of airtime away from here. Navarro looks so good in the water it’s a shame to imagine her living years up there in the ice, where water kills within two minutes.
She watches Navarro do a powerful front-crawl through the water, back and forth as Liz bobs there, occasionally toeing at the floor to make sure she hasn’t been carried off, too deep to come back from.
Every time she can’t find the sand, the feeling of her shoes slugging through ice-cold water as the parka pulls and drowns her momentarily prickles up Liz’s spine. She doesn’t let it show. Just paddles once or twice, closer to the shore, until the whisper of sand is underfoot again. Navarro does another lap, stopping to float on her back and breathe heavily. It’s nice.
-
They argue about it for a good five minutes, which really is nothing compared to some of their worst moments. “Are you the one who’s lived here for a year?”
Liz rolls her eyes, “More like nine months, and if I bring my shoes, they’ll get wet.”
Navarro gives her the kind of impatient ‘are you serious’ look that’s become so familiar and crosses her arms. Liz glances at the new tattoo passively, at the way her bicep compresses against her chest. Whatever.
It turns out, of course, Navarro was right. Liz keeps a straight face as they begin the climb up onto a beachside ridge of black rocks even as their barnacle-covered edges threaten to slice her with one wrong move. Navarro, up ahead in a pair of tennis shoes, straightens up having reached the top.
-
They make it back from the rocks late into the bustle of evening. Restaurants chug along with a stream of tourists, street vendors stand like islands along the crowded streets. Liz walks carefully, to not let Navarro catch her favoring a sore foot. Her knee and both palms have finally stopped bleeding, where she took some skin off on a particularly nasty rock.
Navarro had glanced at the blood and then at Liz – up there on the rocks, the ocean stretching its azure horizon behind her, and wordlessly asked do you want me to ignore that? Liz had leveled her with a glare: yes.
Now, as the sky turns black, Navarro buys them both shave ice: “So you don’t miss home too much.”
Liz sighs and accepts the cup.
-
Her back is sunburnt to hell, especially the back of her neck and shoulders. It burns, almost like in the cold, and Navarro notices. Again, Liz thinks, probably with the eyes of a detective. Eyes trained to notice physical weakness or injury.
“Danver…” It’s chastising. Has to be. “Seriously? Like you’ve never been in the sun before. Sit down.”
Liz does, eventually, hunching on the barstool chair in Navarro’s minuscule kitchen, shorts and her bra. The feeling of Navarro standing behind her puts her on edge, though she imagines the effect would be worse with other people. It’s hard to forcefully mistrust someone who’s saved your life, and very earnestly at that.
She listens to the click of a cap open, then closed, and a tube of aloe vera is set on the counter.
Then Navarro’s icy hands are on her back- correction, the hands aren’t icy, the cream is. Chilling and startling. Liz accidentally relaxes into the touch as thumbs massage the balm into her shoulders, neck, back. The burn of damaged skin, the coolness of the cream, and the strange third unidentifiable element of Navarro’s hands are a strange mixture. Liz sags in the chair, hanging her head. It’s nice. It’s horrible.
-
Liz sleeps on the couch under only a thin blanket. Or rather - lies there in the dark, on the couch, under only a thin blanket, listening to Navarro mumble Julia’s name from the bedroom. Door open for ventilation. The sound carries like in a theater.
At first, she mistakes it for a nightmare. Braces to hear the escalation, until Navarro is kicking at her sheets and calling out too loud to ignore.
This never happens. Instead, there is the soft mumble of conversation, only one half of it. Like Navarro is on the phone. Liz lies there, staring at the partly visible coffee table, and listens until sleep overtakes her.
Navarro is saying I’m glad you’re okay, babygirl, I’m glad you’re okay.
-
Navarro, who’s always been like a drug for elderly women, unsurprisingly has already been roped into the social circle of some family here. They call her Eva, and when Liz needs to get her attention with ‘Navarro’ they kind of look at her sideways.
“Do they know where you came here from?” Liz asks her later.
“There are a lot of ways to answer that,” Navarro parries, “They know it was somewhere cold.”
Liz watches the waves. They’re sat on a public bench overlooking the ocean, tupperwares of vendor food on their laps. She finally asks, “Do you miss it?”
And Navarro smiles, turning to her, “Wrong question, Liz.”
“Oh shut up,” Liz squints, huffs, shuffles deeper into the hard bench. “Fine. Is there anything there for you to miss?”
And Navarro just looks at her and looks and looks and then finally turns away, back to the ocean, without answering.
-
Liz wakes up in a sheen of cooling sweat and the cold does little to rip the clinging, sticky memory of drowning from her mind. Navarro’s dark silhouette is in the doorway, and for a second Liz thinks it’s a ghost.
Navarro speaks before the fear can truly set in: “You were shouting. Was it about the car crash?”
Nosy, Liz thinks, before she finishes waking up. She’s on the couch, thin covers rumpled in her fists, and Navarro isn’t some apparition. Those are still locked away tightly in Ennis. It’s all fine.
“The ice,” Liz rasps and realizes only after she’s done sitting up that it barely clears up anything. It was all ice, up there, and she’s surprised she doesn’t dream of the caves more. “When I fell through it.”
Navarro sighs and walks over. She’s wearing her own thin covers, not helping the image of a ghost. When she sits next to Liz on the couch, it’s hard to tell if the mis-gauging of distance is accidental or if she’d meant for their sides to press against each other.
“You were one hell of a bitch to carry back,” she finally says, and Liz can’t help but laugh lightly in turn.
“I barely remember that. How I kept all my fingers is a mystery.”
“A mystery,” Navarro parrots, mocking. “I didn’t breathe on your hands for an hour for nothing, Danvers. Give me some credit.”
At this, Liz laughs louder, “Really? You?”
Navarro rocks sideways to bump Liz’s shoulder, “Don’t assume everyone’s heart dried up long ago just because yours has.” It’s said too warmly to really get offended over. And Liz is too tired to try.
“Sorry your flowers and sunshine personality doesn’t immediately inspire the image,” Liz smiles back, “So what, like, held my hands and tried to heat them? Actually?”
“You really don’t know how to be grateful, do you?” Navarro says it without actual chagrin, like she might’ve if they were still in that office, waving nastily at each other, deep in the throws of an argument as Annie’s file box stood between them on the table. Liz thinks about Navarro and Peter and Leah.
Peter’s grim in a new way now, a quiet way that makes him work a little harder, even if Liz isn’t there to call him at midnight and demand he find her names or dates or addresses. But he’s loyal as ever. She doesn’t even think it’s transactional, to her keeping that night a secret. He’s just like that. Gain or no gain.
She thinks about Leah, who’s on break right now, a town over from Ennis with an old classmate’s family. They’ve been texting, sharing pictures. Liz only sent the ones from her airplane and airport, all locations she would’ve been easy to track to anyway. Everything past that, she hadn’t photographed. Not the beaches, not the sunsets, not Navarro. She thinks about how Leah is obligated, almost, to love and respect Liz. It hasn’t worked that way, god knows, for years, but it’s there as an undercurrent. An expectation.
She thinks about Navarro. Thinks about all of them, who’ve saved Liz dozens of times. Thinks about Navarro some more.
Sighs and leans heavier into her side, head heavy and tired, tilting to bump into and rest against Navarro’s shoulder.
“I guess I don’t.” Then, after a second to salvage her image, “Though I’ve gotten this far, haven’t I?”
Navarro’s shoulder shakes with an easy, tired laugh, “You’re terrible."
Navarro sits back eventually, and Liz follows, having fallen asleep again in the short span between their conversation and the movement. It’s dark, not quiet, but dark. The street murmurs distantly, and so does the ocean.
The houses here aren’t well-insulated against the sounds of the outside world, yet Navarro’s deep sigh is loud against the noise. Her arm comes up behind Liz, settling to rest along her upper back and curl around her waist loosely. Heavy and warm, almost unbearably so.
It’s nice. They fall asleep sitting up, which isn’t nice at all.
-
Everything hurts the next morning and Navarro walks her through stretches, baffled and offended at Liz’s lack of familiarity with them. Liz only plays up the lack of knowledge, mostly because of how much it annoys Navarro. When the other grumbles and goes to right Liz’s posture during a stretch hands-on, that’s only an added, unacknowledged benefit.
-
They go swimming again. Navarro doesn’t let Liz anywhere near the water before she surrenders her back to a lather of sunscreen. Navarro sprays it into her own palm first and then spreads it along Liz’s back which, in Liz’s more logical opinion, is rather impractical.
When they switch, Liz catches herself doing the same, like following instructions. Spray sunscreen into palm, spread it along Navarro’s back, blink yourself out of the daze, repeat. At some point she digs a knuckle into the muscle between Navarro’s neck and shoulder and Navarro hums, “You can do better.”
It’s annoying, because if Liz doesn’t rise to the bait, she’s admitting she can’t do better. If she does, she’s playing into Navarro’s hand.
“Go to a massage parlor,” she grumbles instead, pinching the loose skin on the side of Navarro’s ribcage where she knows it hurts, and caps the spray can.
-
“You know, I still sometimes feel cold,” Navarro tells the sky. They’re lying on the same towel, watching the sky purple and curl with clouds. “Especially after the water.”
Liz thinks about ‘grateful’ and about how being here is far too warm and about Navarro right there, not touching but far too close.
“How long do you think you’ll stay here?”
“How long do you think you’ll stay up there?” Navarro asks instead.
Liz can’t imagine leaving. Not because she particularly likes Alaska, but because there’s nowhere else it makes sense to go.
“We could just both not answer,” she proposes, also to the sky.
“The wrong questions, then.”
“Probably.”
-
“The couch is real uncomfortable,” Navarro says vaguely in the direction of Liz. “How have you been sleeping on it?”
“Well enough,” she washes the dishes from their dinner, enjoying the cool stream of water. “Except last night, really.”
“That’s cause we were sitting up.” Navarro floats it like Liz wasn’t also very much there for it. “And the night before?”
Liz hadn’t slept well at all, “It was okay.” Then, through a tremendous effort of nail-tearing effort, adds: “Thanks for the hospitality.”
Navarro snorts, “Don’t burst a vessel. Feels kinda shitty to keep you on the couch though.”
This speaking in seemingly directionless sentences grates on Liz one last time and she throws a venomous little glare at Navarro, who’s stood too-nonchalantly leaning on the fridge, “And what else can you even offer?”
The response is easy, “The bed, for one.”
-
The sheets smell like her, so does the pillow. It doesn’t have to mean anything. Liz lies on her side, thin covers, back turned to Navarro. A mirror of Navarro’s own position.
Admittedly, it is better than the couch. Less lumpy and with enough leg room to really stretch out. It’s nice. Another thing to fail being grateful for.
“Hey,” Liz tries, quiet so as to not rouse Navarro if she’d fallen asleep.
“Hey,” comes a quiet answer, confirmation instead of question.
Liz waits, a beat, two, and then soldiers on, “Thanks for not giving up on me.”
Shuffling. Navarro either rolling over or looking back at Liz, “At which point?” It’s a good question. Damn her.
Liz wants to say the ice hole, the water, abandoning her search for the dead to keep Liz alive. “Just in general. When we had to untangle what happened to those scientists.”
Navarro snorts, “I had, you know. Given up on you.”
Liz frowns and rolls over also, finding Navarro now facing her. The distance between them is still polite.
“Oh quit it, no you hadn’t.”
“How do you know?” Navarro sounds like she’s smiling, “I didn’t want anything to do with you. Thought you were a lost cause.”
Liz chews this over, frown deepening, unhappy with this revelation that she’d ever lost Navarro, and then had managed to gain her back anyway. “Did my picking up the Annie case again change that?”
Navarro doesn’t answer for a while, either thinking it over or deciding how to answer best. When she does, the smile is no longer audible: “I’m not sure. I don’t think so. I still hated you, then.”
Liz grins, tolerance for sincerity begging to lighten the conversation. She reaches out to lightly punch Navarro’s shoulder, “So you don’t hate me anymore is what I’m hearing.”
Navarro breaks into wheezing, easy laughter, “Fuck off,” it’s said quietly, and then followed up with a horrible, horrible, “I don’t. You don’t make it easy but no. I don’t.”
By the midpoint of that sentence, Navarro’s hand is on Liz’s shoulder too. Instead of punching it, her palm rests against the joint, shaking her lightly twice before just settling and waiting.
Liz sighs, warm at the point of contact, “I don’t hate you too, Navarro.”
“Maybe if you’d quit using my last name, it’d sound more sincere,” Navarro jokes. The hand hasn’t left.
“You still call me Danvers, it’s only fair.”
“Okay. Liz.”
Liz frowns instinctively. Sighs again. Tired. Feeling the night creep up on her, answers, “Okay, Evangeline.”
“Okay.”
She falls asleep with the hand still there and doesn’t know if Evangeline does too – or if she stays awake longer, minutes or hours.
-
They don’t wake up interlocked, per se, but their elbows are the only place of contact, linked into each other. Liz’s arm is dead and soon prickles unpleasantly back alive. They head for a hike and inevitably end up at another beach. Liz has two more days here. The return ticket tethers her to reality.
-
Switching to calling her Evangeline works some kind of humanizing magic Liz wishes she could undo. Switch back to Navarro who was a stubborn, annoying, hardass with weird quirks and shitty opinions back in Alaska. Evangeline is still stubborn and annoying, but it’s lost its edge. They’re no longer competing against each other or against time to solve a case where very dead people are either freezing or unfreezing or bleeding all over Ennis grounds. Evangeline and Navarro have always had a hypnotic smiles. Have always been in shape and made Liz side-eye them. There: in uniform, here: in sporty swimwear and often, even on the street or in the apartment, without a shirt. Simply too warm for that.
Evangeline, who had given up on her and had then decided to restore that loyalty or whatever it was that drove her, was… okay. Nice, maybe. Liz sighed in the shower, washing the day’s salt out of her hair. Nice and objectively beautiful. Sure. That was a normal thing to think.
-
At a gift shop, she’s looking for something Leah won’t hate too much but manages to be appropriately gaudy. Evangeline occasionally looms over her shoulder to see what she’s examining. A few times she presses against Liz’s back while doing so, casual and normal.
-
She wakes with a jolt, but with the conviction she couldn’t have been shouting. The nightmare didn’t get a chance to progress – some old case, not even the cold water this time, or the car crash. Evangeline is still asleep, back turned to her.
Liz is wracked by a wave of shivers, the ugly kind that settles in her stomach with nausea at the memory, twisted and warped by dream logic. A movie-type morgue, the kind they don’t even have. Corpses sitting up or knocking from inside their little metal lockers.
She shivers again and scoots over, carefully settling an arm over Evangeline and resting her forehead against the other’s spine. Selfish, really, this stealing of comfort. Liz is good at being selfish.
-
They wake up much the same way. Maybe Liz a little closer than she’d started out, though that might be Evangeline’s fault too. It’s a slow morning. Both are remarkably reluctant to remove themselves from bed.
-
Liz - not a fan of tourism and with no penchant for sightseeing – votes to spend the last day much the same way. Water, waves, rocks, and food only when they’re both hungry with exertion.
Sunscreen and shoulders again, Evangelin pressing her palms in a little harder, the kind that feels good and does so only over muscles, lighter on the bones. Liz responds in favor, relaxing and letting herself ease the tension so natural to her body.
In turn, she digs her knuckles into Evangeline’s shoulders so hard the other’s muscles bunch up in surprise and she hisses.
“Too hard?” Liz eggs her on, kneading the knuckles in softer now, less sudden.
“You wish,” Evangeline mutters.
-
Liz holds out a shrimp on her overlarge toothpick meant for eating. Evangeline leans over easily to eat off it, leaning away just as fast. This is fine. Liz does it again.
-
They shower separately – of course – and as Evangeline is gone, Liz studies the apartment. It really does feel… easier than Ennis. Like you’re not constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, be it work or family or the wicked things that dark and cold make you see. No pictures, very few belongings. But Evangeline’s secluded little home hadn’t been overflowing with belongings either.
Some of it had to be filed away into evidence bags, when the missing person’s case came through. Liz didn’t even know who filed it. Certainly not herself or Peter. Quavvik? She doubts he’d do that. Neither would Rose. The suspicious little part of her, the one that doesn’t trust people easily, says no one did. That it came directly from above.
-
“Whatever, come here,” Liz mutters once they’re in bed, reaching for Evangeline in the semi-dark.
“Whatever?” Evangeline counters, but she rolls over easily enough, until Liz slots along her back, this time holding on boldly, not scared to wake her.
“Yeah, whatever.” She confirms, forehead and nose already coming to brace against Evangeline’s neck.
“If you say so,” Evangeline hums.
“What’s that supposed to mean.” Her words are warm where they reflect off Evangeline’s skin instead of escaping into the air.
“I don’t know, you’re the one who said ‘whatever’.”
Liz frowns, feeling like she’s losing at an argument she doesn’t understand. “Yeah. And it’s whatever.”
Evangeline rotates in her grasp until she’s lying on her back and looking at Liz, Liz’s arm still over her stomach. She’s in an old t-shirt. “Really?”
Liz’s frown deepens. “Really what.”
“That it’s whatever.”
“What’s it’s?”
Evangeline laughs, taking this much lighter than Liz is able to.
“Nothing, don’t worry about it.”
Now it feels patronizing. The investigative thorn in the back of Liz’s brain stabs at her to dig and dig and dig until she finds the answer. Her arm gets a little tighter around Evangeline, “Don’t worry about what, cause I’m gonna worry. Tell me.”
She feels rather than hears the half-chuckle, Evangeline’s stomach shaking, “Tell you?”
“Tell me.”
“How about I ask you a question and you tell me if it’s the right one?”
“I don’t like these games, Navarro,” Liz switches back to the good and the old, mostly out of habit, but as a secondary defense. At least one wall. Evangline’s still looking at her.
“It’s just a question,” horrible teasing tone.
Liz snaps, feeling like her tether to being agreeable has been fraying with the saw of that goddamn ticket, and with Evangeline’s impossible conversation pivots, “Okay! Ask.”
Silence. Outside hum again, like the white noise machine, distant cars or music or waves or Evangeline breathing. Rise and fall, like where her hand is on Evangelin’s stomach.
When Evangeline does talk, it’s very calm, “Would you like it if I kissed you, Danvers?”
Back with the Danvers… She has time to get mad at that before the right question even registers. Before she can respond, Evangeline snorts, “Or are you incapable of liking something? Maybe the right question is should I-”
Liz muffles her, annoyed beyond belief at the power imbalance of that conversation, Evangeline with all the pieces of evidence lined up in neat little piles on the floor, all pointing to Liz’s slow spiraling in the direction of yes I’d like you to kiss me yes you should yes it’s the right question. Annoyed at the yes. Annoyed at anything possible just to stave off the crashing wave of elation.
She’s long burned out the ability to really find kisses magical or world-changing or something like that. It’s just nice. Right. It makes sense the same way finding that last piece of evidence makes things click into place. The slotting of rightness into a previously discordant mystery of sunscreen, shrimp, shaved ice, waves, sunsets, and lumpy, uncomfortable couches. Evangeline sighs long and content, rolling over entirely.
It's very, very nice. Warm and familiar, even if they’ve barely shared physical space over their years of tumultuous orbiting. They’ve shared space in other ways enough. Long car rides, the office, the houses of suspects and victims, and those horrid caves, always an arm’s reach away. And now no more reaching is required.
Liz pets up and down her side which Evangeline mirrors before pinching her hip, nasty and intoxicating.
“Why do you have to be so difficult,” Liz mutters, separating at the pinch and to take a breath.
Evangeline laughs, also a nice sound, and answers: “That’s my line,” before leaning back in.