Work Text:
“Hello, Ema Skye.”
Ema yawns long enough for it to drown out her entire name spoken in Franziska’s silky smooth accent. It’s nice on the ears, but would have been nicer if she had heard it before her blaring ringtone and not afterwards. “Franziska? Everything okay? It’s like, ugh”—Ema pulls the phone from her ear; she squints at the screen to try and work out the time through the blinding blue light—“two in the morning here, you know.”
There is a long pause. Then Franziska says, “I am aware. I am in the country.”
“What?” Ema murmurs. “I thought you were coming next week?”
“Yes, well, I decided to move my flight forward and as a consequence I am in the country.”
“Oh! That’s really good, actually. I’m off work the next couple of days,” Ema says. She kicks her legs out from under her comforter then shoves a hand up the front of her shirt to scratch her too-warm chest. Heat rash, maybe. Great. “Why are you calling me at 2am though? Miss me that bad?”
“I do not have a place to stay, at present,” Franziska says.
“Is that code for ‘can I come over and squeeze into your tiny little bed because I missed you that bad’?”
“No,” Franziska says. Ema can hear that it’s through gritted teeth and laughs quietly. She pictures Franziska’s face warped into a little scowl—something with less bite than she intends (because that’s always how it is when it comes to Ema, for some reason).
“Then what’s the deal?” Ema asks.
“I am outside of your apartment building,” Franziska tells her, as if Ema is the foolish one for not somehow having figured out this information from the non-existent context clues. When she focuses, now, she can hear the patter of rain against her window; droplets against an umbrella, muffled by the phone line.
“Hold on,” Ema says. “I’m hanging up.”
Franziska is half-drenched when she steps through the threshold into Ema’s apartment, and somehow she’s still just as unfathomably gorgeous when she’s only really lit from the back by the harsh white bulb in the hallway. A little puddle quickly forms around her feet where a welcome mat should be, if Ema had ever gotten around to buying one.
“Hi,” Ema says, silly and tired and maybe a little bit delirious, and then she pulls Franziska in by her waist and kisses her.
Franziska melts into it quickly, like she had seen it coming from a mile away, like maybe she knows Ema all too well. And Franziska kisses a lot like she talks—slightly harsh but guided and assured, never without direction.
“Could you not have at least waited until I had changed into something dry?” Franziska says when she finds a place to pull back (but not too far, not now that she’s here).
“So you did miss me?” Ema replies, dodging the question because the answer is obvious, a little anticipatory smirk on her face.
“Yes, you fool.”
It’s always been this weird little on and off thing—neither here nor there—since not long after the first time Ema was assigned lead detective on one of Franziska’s cases. They were still exclusively Prosecutor von Karma and Detective Skye then; titles now reserved for moments much less intimate than Franziska’s legs thrown over Ema’s lap and Ema’s fingers tracing soft circles around Franziska’s ankle as they half-heartedly bicker over their current case. They need to wrap it up tomorrow (today, technically, Ema thinks as she pays a sorry glance at her watch to see it reads twenty minutes past midnight) because in the evening Franziska is leaving again for some Interpol something-or-other that Ema isn’t allowed to know about or spray luminol on. They would have wrapped it up already, ordinarily, because Ema is good at her job, and so is Franziska, and something wedged in between that is what brought them together in the first place.
Problem is that there is always a twinge of something melancholic when they only have a few days together before Franziska has to go again; problem is that only having a few days means wanting to spend all the time you possibly can arguing about objectively bad TV shows Ema likes anyway or kissing for two hours on Ema’s kind of beat-up couch or sometimes, insufferably, both at once.
When Franziska leaves she pretends she is unaffected. She will kiss Ema once, soft but confident, and not let her follow her to the door. It’s as if her leaving is a casual thing, like she’s leaving to run to the store or to work a shift on the other side of town and she’ll be back in a few hours even though it’s probably somewhere closer to a few months. Always auf Wiedersehen instead of goodbye.
When Ema ends up in Germany her send off is a lot more dramatic than Franziska’s ever are. They’ve had six whole days consisting of too much work and not enough sleep from trying to squeeze pleasure out of the hours left over. Franziska insists on driving Ema to the airport, personally, and kisses her in the car, and walks her to check-in.
“Please let me know when you arrive back in Los Angeles,” Franziska says.
Ema loops her index finger around Franziska’s; their skin pressed together is almost taunting. “I will,” she tells her. “Although I’m pretty sure if the plane crashes you’ll hear about it.”
“Naturally.”
There is a horrible little pause where time and space seem to blur, and then Franziska pushes Ema’s suitcase gently towards the check-in desk, and whispers, “I will miss you. Now go.”
“Hiya,” Ema says as she rounds a shelf in the records room. “One of the guys said I might find you in here.”
Franziska has been in the country for two days and there has been no time. There still isn’t, really. Ema’s found peace in it, though, so she’ll use the time they do have in ways they shouldn’t anyway.
Franziska looks up from the file she’s scanning, steely for a second but then soft and unguarded when she registers Ema properly. Her eyes are oh so tired but pretty anyway. “I am jetlagged,” she says. “And working.”
“Typical.”
“I am jetlagged when we see each other quite frequently.” Franziska huffs as Ema takes the file from her hand and steps closer.
“Working too, but I’ll take what I can get,” Ema says. She tucks Franziska’s hair behind her ear with her left hand and keeps the file’s place with her right, something Franziska seems pleased by in some tiny, contained, very Franziska von Karma way when her gaze shifts to where Ema is holding it. The strand of hair falls to its previous place almost immediately—too silky to hold its position—and Ema tucks it back again. “Maybe you can get me a job in forensics to make up for it?”
Franziska makes a noise that indicates something between exasperation and amusement. “I feel that you overestimate my authority within the Los Angeles police department, Detective Skye,” she says.
“Yeah yeah,” Ema says. Franziska kisses her nose and takes the file from her hand simultaneously. “Now back to work,” she directs, and Ema gives a less than enthusiastic salute and turns on her heel.
“Wait for me when you’re done?” Ema asks over her shoulder a few seconds later, one hand on the door.
“As you wish,” Franziska says, and though she doesn’t look up Ema can just about see through the gaps in the shelves the way Franziska smiles down at the papers in her hand, definitely not by any fault of their own.