Work Text:
“You know,” Abby says, tiniest of smiles dancing at the corner of her lips, “I get what you’re doing, but you don’t have to do that anymore. It’s fine now. Besides, Erin isn’t homophobic. She knows and doesn’t care and in that area, that was one thing I could never fault her; she’s cool.”
And maybe at the start it was true (and Abby sees through her, Abby sees through her every time) but now.
“Ah,” she drawls, “what if I were to tell you, it’s not malicious, but it’s just fun to see Erin’s reactions? I only tease out of love.”
“Then I would say,” and Abby’s grin is huge now, “go forth and be free.”
--
A few months after they’ve set up shop in the basement of the Kenneth P. Higgins Institute of Science, she keeps finding chewed wires. When she leaves a pile of forgotten leftovers on her desk one night, she comes face to face with the culprit the next morning.
She christens him Remy, and starts leaving bits of food for him so he would stop chewing on her wires, she tells Abby as she arranges her leftover noodles on the floor by the strand. Abby only nods knowingly.
A few weeks later Abby comes across her sitting cross-legged on the floor, feeding Remy bites of fresh pizza by hand. Remy has a particular fondness for pizza.
“It works,” she intones, not looking up. Abby only smiles and doesn’t say anything as she walks away. Sometimes Abby passes her bits of food to leave out for Remy too. He’s a good sort. He doesn’t chew on anything that belongs to them. He keeps the other rats out.
When they get kicked out, she doesn’t have time to order pizza, so she rummages in the trash until she finds a few discarded slices. She arranges three slices on her workstation, like the radioactive logo, and sticks a fresh opened can of coke in the middle, a final offering. Remy climbs onto her workstation at that moment, well-trained to appear whenever food is in the air.
“Good to have had your acquaintance, Remy. Go find another nice lab to pick food out of. Personally I’ll suggest the biology lab on the second floor, third room from the central staircase. There’s always consumable waste from the experiments. Maybe nothing as fancy as pizza here, but you’ll survive. I’m sure you will. You might even find something better.”
Abby has been standing quietly by the door, waiting patiently for her to finish her speech. She runs her fingers over his fur one last time, and turns around resolutely to wheel the equipment out of the lab. Abby doesn’t say anything; merely falls into step in perfect sync next to her, wheeling her own load of equipment, the rusty wheels squeaking on every rotation.
--
Bonus points for Erin early on their acquaintance: She makes Abby happy in her own way. She looks like she might be up for Dance Parties (before she got distracted by minor things like small fires).
Minus point: Erin is attracted to Kevin.
It is a puzzle to tease apart.
It is not that she doesn’t like Kevin; she does. She likes him the way one likes an affable big puppish hound, not the brightest of the pack, but endearing and sweet and good to keep around for unchallenging companionship.
Not for attraction though. (She likes a fair amount of brains with her packages - she does like her brains.)
She asks Abby once, “Do you think if I get turned into a zombie, I’ll target the smartest people for their brains? Would their brains be tastier? More appealing somehow?”
“I have no doubt you’ll never get turned by zombies; you’ll break off their arms and beat their own faces with their own arms, all the time cackling ‘Stop hitting yourself!’ like a demented zombie-bully. Or you’ll combine your flamethrower with a nuclear bomb and wipe out all the zombies. Or something.”
“Ah, I do miss that flamethrower. No, I know, but what if, what if I did get turned?”
“Then that’s the end of the human race, probably.”
“I bet your brains would be real good. Real tasty. Cream of the crop. Irresistible. I’ll go straight for them.”
“That’s nice. I should be honoured that you’ve described my brains exactly the way you’ve once described original-flavoured Pringles.”
Abby loves soup, Abby gets into fights with unsatisfactory delivery boys, Abby demands standards for her food, Abby deals with the troublesome aspects of food obtainment. Abby keeps her well-fed, ever since learning that her kitchen is a nuclear wasteland and all her food is consumed in the lab, but often she forgets to eat and forgets there is such a thing as eating if food doesn’t appear magically around her. Abby starts by asking her if she wants anything whenever Abby orders takeout or goes for a quick run to grab sandwiches, upgrades to automatically including her share whenever food is procured (and memorising all her orders), and at the final stage, keeps track of her nutrient absorption ratio and takes to force-feeding her if she goes too long without consumption.
Abby is like tucking into that perfect slice of pizza, comforting and delightful.
--
The first time she blasts dance music in the lab while they were working, she’s testing the limits of Abby’s boundaries, really. (The subsequent dancing was not; she did get a little carried away.)
She waits. For Abby to frown, first pretend she doesn’t hear it, doesn’t mind, until she does, and finally breaks down and tells her to shut it. Or, for Abby to march over and tell her sternly to quit that, at once. Then she might poke back, test the limit in other ways, but eventually she’ll acquiesce if there are other plus points that outweigh, or move out. It’s familiar. It’s a well-trodden path. Doesn’t stop her from stupidly traipsing down the same path, but she can’t pretend she doesn’t know how it ends.
Abby does neither. Abby starts bopping to the music as well, never missing a beat in whatever she was doing, mouthing some of the lyrics as well. She gets so carried away she launches into her whole routine, and by the end of it Abby is saying things like “Woah!”, “Oh yeah!”, and “Good one!” at a particularly inventive move.
Abby never tells her to shut the music down, or even to lower the volume, and most of all Abby never tries to stop her from dancing.
Much later there is Patty who dances as well, and Erin who is terrible at dancing but enthusiastic, and they have Dance Parties, and nobody ever tells her to stop.
--
She babbles regretfully to Abby, unable to stop, “I’m sorry I didn’t leapt in after you at once, I’m sorry I froze, I’m sorry I was useless. If not for Erin…”
Abby silences her, “I’m sorry I tried to kill you.”
The bruises on her neck are healing, and her throat doesn’t feel like swallowing glass so much anymore. But most of all she doesn’t want Abby to look at her with guilt and remorse in her eyes every time Abby lays eyes on her neck (she’s taken to being clad in all manners of neck accessories all the time, and sometimes it doesn’t work so well in the New York summer), to be hesitant about laying hands on her, to treat her like glass. No words have been voiced on the issue, and she thinks of a million ways to tell Abby it’s fine, and none of them ever make it past her tongue.
(She’s not glass. She’s metal. She can be twisted, and hammered, and melted, and bent out of shape, but she is still there. She will still be there. She bears the scars of endless attempts to cut her up and tear her down, but she is still wholly her. And if she is broken, all it takes is a little fire to put her together again, for she solidifies under air.)
She undoes her scarf, and tilts her neck invitingly. Abby hesitates, before putting a very tentative finger on the side of her neck, touch gossamer. Abby traces around the edge of a bruise excruciatingly slowly, gritting her teeth the whole time.
She waits unmovingly until Abby’s touch grow firmer; she stops gritting her teeth, and finally Abby musters enough to cup her palm against her neck. She leans into the touch, eyes closed, feeling the warmth leech into her skin. Abby breathes heavily. When she opens her eyes, Abby is looking at her anxiously. She lets the smile spread across her face, and the spell is broken.
Abby pulls her hand away in an exhale, then pulls her in to press her lips firmly against hers.
They part reluctantly, and she rests her forehead against Abby’s for long, quiet minutes. She drawls, breath puffing against Abby’s cheek, “We good?”
Abby nods, once, but resolutely.
She waggles her fingers sticking from her fingerless glove and gives a thumbs up.
--
She has no friends. This is a fact.
In elementary school she spent all her time taking apart and building things. She refused to answer to Jill, or Jillian, until the teachers would holler “HOLTZMANN get off the roof NOW” and only then would she comply. She soon learnt this was a good way of training everyone to address her by Holtzmann, even the teachers who had persistently refused.
She had discarded Jill after everyone went around asking her “Hey Jill, where’s Jack?” and “Aren’t you going to go tumbling after him?” She was not a Jill; she tumbled after no guy. She burnt paths where there was none to be found.
Later on in her life she started jumping grades (take that! Ms Whiteman from preschool who thought she was developmentally slow when she ignored all her instructions and sent her for a psychological evaluation), ignoring teachers if they bored her, refusing to talk about the inane things kids insisted on talking about, sprouting realms of scientific and technological jargon, and discovering that girls fascinated her and captivated her in ways that boys didn’t; things came tumbling rather rapidly downhill from there.
She didn’t need friends. She couldn’t need friends, because she had none.
Then Abby came crashing into her life.
--
She’s about to go barging into the kitchen at the firestation, her third home in the same year now, when she hears Abby and Patty murmuring to each other. She pauses, decides not to barge in and stills herself by the door, eavesdropping.
“Don’t go saying things like that to me, Abby. I would do anything for all of you. And I know all of you would do anything for me. Anything. So that’s that. Besides, keeping Holtzmann alive is a full time job. You need all the help you can get.”
“Still, thank you, Patty, Holtzmann wouldn’t be alive, repeatedly, without you. Including when I tried to kill her.”
“It’s nothing at all and I won’t have you keep beating yourself up, Abby.”
“Then you'll just have to accept our gratitude and that it is a big thing, that you did.”
She creeps away from the door just as quietly, grinning like a lunatic.
--
What people don’t know about her, is that she likes dressing up too. It’s not of the skirts and dresses and laces and frilly and heels and girlish femininity variety, but there’s still plenty to explore even after eliminating those options.
It’s a creative outlet like any other. Her body is a blank mannequin for her to paint with clothes, accessories, and what goes with what is as much an art form. There is something deeply satisfying in putting everything together and walking out a masterpiece.
Abby learns, soon after they get together, that creating these art pieces means a considerable amount of ransacking thrift stores and second hand stores and vintage stores and stores with no signboards and no storefront windows and no front doors even, popping into yard sales and car boot sales and garage sales and flea markets, and even the occasional dumpster diving.
(The last one, Abby had drawn the line at jumping in to join her. But Abby had listened to her wax lyrical about dumpster diving all the way back to her apartment, had walked beside her the whole way and didn’t even pretend not to know her, or try to keep a wide berth from her.
Is this what, she thinks, dreamily staring at the water stains’ space battles on her bathroom ceiling much later, humming something tuneless and drumming her fingers, as Abby lathers up her hair without complaint and works knuckles into her scalp almost as good as orgasms, is this what it feels like to be loved?)
--
She tells Abby, “Forget zombie apocalypses, I imagine we’ll die squashed under an escaped, collapsed, thanksgiving balloon.”
Abby rolls her eyes. ‘Yeah, sorry, but that’s not how I intend to go. My plans are a bit more long-termed. And less violent.”
Abby refuses to tell her though, despite her persistent badgering.
It comes up randomly in conversation with Patty much later. Patty just stares at her, unblinkingly, brows furrowed, for a long time. “Nobody, and I do mean nobody, imagines they’ll die flattened by a giant balloon.”
“I do.”
Patty sighs. “Anyway, isn’t it obvious?”
“No?”
“Look, I don’t know exactly what Abby’s thinking of, but most people, when they think of good deaths, prefer something along the lines of ‘dying peacefully in their sleep holding hands with their loved one, at a ripe old age.’ And I’ll bet that that’s more in line with what Abby’s thinking about.”
“Oh. Really?”
“Yes, Holtzy.” And then Patty just grabs her in a hug, expression fond and something else she can’t read, and refuses to let go for a long, long while.
She ponders over that as she fiddles with wires, uncrossing and re-attaching to make them run more smoothly.
Two weeks later she tells Abby, when they’re in the middle of stalking an apartment waiting for a ghost to show up, “Okay.”
“Okay what?” Abby mutters distractedly, fiddling with her P.K.E. meter.
“No balloons. We’ll do it your way.”
Abby looks over at her finally, gives her an appraising look and just says “Okay” and she doesn’t know if Abby gets it or not, but it’s good, it’s all good.
--
Back in the days in the old lab, Abby and her investigated sightings of ghosts people reported. One such investigation had led to a wild goose chase, a bucket of water dumped on her, nearly getting knocked down by a car, running past some freshly painted walls, losing a glove in the process, gaining a stray chopstick stuck in her hair, ripping her vest almost all the way through. For all their troubles, she had ended up with an ankle so badly sprained she couldn’t stand upright without support, and no ghost to speak of.
They stare at each other; dishevelled, exhausted, looking like something the dog dragged in.
Then she starts laughing and it doesn’t take more than a beat before Abby joins in as well, and she laughs so hard she is bent over, one hand still on the wall to support her weight, and there are tears coming out of her eyes. Each time one of them tries to stop the other would set her off again.
Finally Abby takes off her glasses to wipe them clean, and puts them back on again. “C’mon,” Abby gestures to her, turns around so her back is facing her, and crouches down. Very gingerly they get her onto Abby’s back, and Abby piggybacks her all the way back to the lab.
She tilts her head up and pushes her googles out of the way so she can see the night sky, dark with no stars and no ghosts. But there is something else much bigger, something pushing, straining at her ribcage, threatening to crack them right open.
--
Very early on in their acquaintance she starts cataloguing things she knows about Abby. Somewhere in the top five is ‘Abby is mad at Erin’. She has heard, over pizza and beer dinners in the lab, the endless complaints about Erin, which at the start she doesn’t do more than nod non-committedly while Abby is grabbing her and babbling, “You’re a good friend, Holtzmann, you’re the best. You’ll never betray me and abandon our project like That Woman!”
At the end though, she dislikes this woman she has never met purely on behalf of Abby, and she hates even more that this woman turns Abby into a morose, moody drunk. So she purposefully sets something on fire accidentally, dumps the reminder of her beer on it and in the ensuing shouts and chaos and the flames shooting a few feet high at one point, grabbing for the fire extinguisher only to find it’s empty, the two of them take a few seconds to pause and marvel at how the fire is turning from green to purple.
“I didn’t even know it could do that,” Abby’s voice is full of awe.
“I am a genius!” she crows.
When the fire is finally put out, she throws an arm around Abby. “Alright, beer’s toxic waste now, let’s go out and have another non-toxic fermented beverage while the lab airs out,” and Abby grins and says yesss, Erin forgotten.
Holtzmann sets things on fire, Holtzmann scores!
Until that day Erin walks into their lab.
--
She studies Erin, she studies how Erin and Abby interact, she studies the effect Erin has on Abby, she notes how Erin can make Abby smile and laugh in a different way from what she does, she notes how Abby is happier and less angry, she notes how Erin working with Abby is a different kind of chemistry and magic.
Okay, she thinks, okay okay okay.
Then Erin saves Abby, and she thinks: Approved.
And it’s all well and good, and she really doesn’t need Erin to join in her dance parties with full gusto, or match her beer for beer, or go up to her after the grand battle and gush about the shotgun and tells her how much she loved the shotgun, or to be fascinated by her work and find her weapons cool and want to learn more from her as she works, or listen to all her stories with wide-eyed wonder and awe, or more than holds her own, and actually has her back as well when they go ghost-hunting. (Also when Erin is around everyone gets slimed just a bit less.)
But Erin does, and it’s more than nice.
It’s like having another friend; it’s like having a family, not given to you but of your own choosing, not just because they work together or hang out together, but because they made it so.
Abby happens to look over Erin’s head where they are deep in discussion, and catches her watching them, catches her eye.
She winks at Abby and licks her screwdriver. Abby laughs.
She smiles and smiles, and doesn’t try to stop it at all.