Work Text:
“Merry Christmas, Minkowski.”
Oh.
Fuck.
Immature as the sentiment may be, it’s all Renée’s conscious mind can produce. Her heart drops like a paperweight; the draw of eggnog in her hand tremors against its red rim.
Because there, on the top step of Dominik’s new brownstone, is Isabel Lovelace.
On the street beyond, Christmas Eve traffic rages. A couple Renée knows only vaguely from the bodega walk in matching jumpers, and a woman in scrubs crosses to the bus stop, a turn of tinsel round her braids. The air is low and dark, with nothing but forever between Manhattan and the scrubbed-clean moon, the feeble city stars. Branches of evergreens rustle in the wind, and a distinct bite hems the air. A siren sounds, and Minkowski stares, eyes fixed on one point only.
For amid the festive chill, a woman stands on her doorstep. Wrapped in a peacoat like Christmas paper, with corduroy trousers and Converse boots emerging beneath. The mismatched knitwear adorning every inch of her skin jars the naked eye (and, Renée feels, is a tad out of character). Her eyes and cheeks, red raw, form a near-smile.
Isabel Lovelace.
“I-” Renée begins. She clears her throat. No-one’s called her Minkowski since they all disbanded from the quarantine site two weeks ago. The site Lovelace left with a promise of gifts from Hawaii in the new year. “What are you doing here?” she asks. “I thought… Captain, I thought you were-”
“In Hawaii? Change of plans,” Lovelace says dryly.
The siren fades. Swallowing, Renée adjusts her jumper (lit from the inside; patterned with a Christmas tree).
“Are you… do you want to- come in, Captain? Isabel,” Renée corrects, because they’re doing that now. “I meant Isabel. Lovelace.”
“I am she,” Lovelace confirms, and widens her arms in the peacoat’s pockets, as though to say here, in the flesh, for one night only!
Instead, however, the wind tugs Lovelace’s hair out from under her hat, tight coils which blow towards her neck, and she curses, extracting hair somewhat ungracefully from her facial orifices.
“Okay,” she grits, through a mouthful, “It’s not that I don’t appreciate the prolonged doorway thing- no, really, Minkowski, you’ve got it nailed- but I’m freezing to death out here-”
Renée grabs her, exasperated, and uses her eggnog-free hand to pull Lovelace inside, shutting the wind back out to Manhattan and glaring down the captain with what’s left of her meagre height advantage.
A beat.
Somewhere beyond downstairs’ front door, Mariah Carey is blaring. (Unhelpful to the intimidation tactic, granted, but whatever.)
A beat, and two sets of roving eyes. Hungry, in Renée’s case: a moment she’s unaware of her crew’s whereabouts- for they are still, invariably, her crew- is a moment ill at ease. Though she’d never admit it, Lovelace’s Christmas vacation plans had thrown her for a loop.
Finally, when the cold has dissipated from Lovelace’s cheeks, a smirk plays the captain’s lips. (The time during which one can stand in the vice-like grip of their ex-commanding officer without putting up a fight having evaporated.) Looking Renéeup and down, she cocks her head: seriously?
Renée drops her arm.
Raised eyebrows unyielding, Lovelace removes her coat, blowing hair from her face again and tucking her hat in the pocket.
“Here, Captain, let me-” Renée begins somewhat gruffly, righting herself and taking the coat in a rush of authoritative instinct. Then, realising her mistake, she adds, “Isabel.”
Watching on, Lovelace leans against the half-tiled wall, crossing her arms. When Renée gives in and hangs her coat with the nest of party-goers’, Lovelace smirks.
“Thank God,” she mutters, “I thought you were about to go all Love Actually on my ass.”
Frowning, Renée turns. Since she left it, the party has spilled through the house; the family in the apartment below Dominik’s have a ‘pin the nose on Rudolph’ competition in full swing, and a few parents hover nearby. Upstairs, Dominik’s work friends are mingling between rooms, words drifting down the stairs.
Catching Renée’s scan, Lovelace asks lowly, “When did you get popular?”
“Oh, hush, you,” Renée mutters, refusing to smirk. Refusing.
From upstairs, her husband’s laugh rings out: loud and warm and a touch breathier than she’d ever remembered. That’s the scariest thing, Renée thinks- Dominik is different. No matter the state of the world; no matter the friends and colleagues she’d met up with, their new children and new jobs and new houses out west; no matter any of that, they’d always have each other. Or so she believed. In this fortnight, though, he’s been cooler (in both temperamental and high scholastic terms) than she’d ever known him. Also, a helltonne better dressed- but that’s beside the point. She’s changed, too. Perhaps more than he.
The voice which responds to his laughter is sweet and low; Renée winces.
There’s that, too.
She shakes her head. Pulls at her jumper. It’s Christmas Eve, after all- they’ve the rest of their lives to figure this out. Days and weeks and months where Isabel Lovelace won’t be standing in the hallway, with her hair just-so from her face, and cracks down the middle of her lips.
“They’re Dominik’s friends,” Renée says, and nods towards the stairs. “I’m not a New Yorker,” she adds, and the foreboding in her tone is dark enough that Lovelace snorts.
She mutters, “To hell you’re not,” and reaches out for the wall. “Nice place you’ve got here, huh.”
“It’s Dominik’s,” Renée feels the need to blurt. Loudly. “We- I lived in D.C., before…”
Renée leads her up the stairs, leaving that particular sentence unspoken.
“Dude, your building is awesome. And, hey,” Lovelace adds, “That’s some pretty great tile work.”
Looking over, Renée can’t quite decide if the captain’s joking. Eventually, she settles on: “…What?”
“Minkowski, fine interior décor waits for no man.” (Okay, so she is bullshitting.) “Or woman. Or person outside the gender binary.”
And while, yes, Renée agrees that nineteenth century tiling should be appreciated by any and all genders- is that really relevant? Isabel Lovelace is on the stairs to her apartment. There are more pressing matters at hand.
They reach 2B before Renée can answer, though, and they look at the varnished wooden door. Voices; glasses tinkling; drinks being poured; plates being clacked; smells of sweet cinnamon and orange and party food pastry. Up here, the music’s quieter, jazzier, and words like ‘geopolitical investment’ and ‘get-together’ float through to the landing.
Renée and Lovelace, in perfect time, burst out laughing.
“Oh, this is so you,” Lovelace says finally, through gasps for breath.
(Even though, Renée feels, it most certainly is not, not anymore.)
“Is that a-” Renée swallows back a laugh- “A bad thing, Captain?”
(Isabel a thing of the past. The party a thing of the past. Her eggnog, abandoned on the side table in the hall, an ancient relic.)
“No, no, I-” Lovelace shakes her head, a bill-and-tip grin across her features. “Just funny, that this is your life.”
As she says this, something stills between them. The words trail into seriousness, and there’s a hint of bitterness with the sweet.
“I thought you were leaving,” Renée says after a while.
Because neither of them seems particularly willing to open the door, and the upstairs landing is as good a place as any to do this.
Silence reigns, and Lovelace’s jaw is set. Her eyes latch again to the tiles, Renée notices, which continue up here in a scatter of ceramic flowers and vines. A strip of dark carpet runs through the centre of the stairs, and a black period rail twists to the small balcony where they stand, overlooking the cramped hallway. Above, an art deco lamp tinges everything gold.
Lovelace is right, Renée thinks. It may not be palatial- this is Manhattan, after all- but Dominik’s new apartment is fancy.
A frown creasing her forehead, only now does Renée realise Lovelace is watching.
“I figured you’d be lonely,” the captain says, a little tongue in cheek, “Out here on your own. Without me.”
“I-” Renée tries, but the words don’t come. It was said like a joke, like Lovelace. And yet. Oh, and yet.
Another beat. Underscored by the very finest of pre-recorded Christmas jazz.
“Come on,” Renée says finally, once her breath is back and her legs are stable enough to take charge. “Let me show you something.”
***
Renée’s being weird. Categorically. A ‘thanks for showing up and diffusing my crazy-ass holiday situation’ kind of strange; a somewhat ‘I’m happy to see you, but my husband is thirty feet below us in an NYT holiday party’ take on oddness.
For Lovelace, it must hurt to show up at Renée’s house and be treated like an estranged cousin but, well… the captain knows her. At least as well as she knows herself, maybe more. And Lovelace is a lot of things, but adept at hiding emotions from Minkowski is not among the arsenal. Relief crawls the captain’s features- so familiar an expression that Renée associates it with salvaged gas leaks and not-dead crew members.
Can Lovelace tell how freaked she is to have her and Dominik under the same roof? So much so, even, that the situation needed rectifying: they emerge now from a side door outside the apartment above, wind whirling through a black grid fire escape.
Lovelace whistles.
It is her city, after all.
“There was an… awakening in JFK,” she says, squinting out at Manhattan. Looking for Brooklyn, Minkowski figures. Christmas lights flashing white and gold in the dark, yellow cabs honking, glinting skyscrapers and the twisting Hudson, just a spark in the distance- Lovelace must look out, and see home. “The airport,” she clarifies, “Not the corpse.”
Renée looks up.
Snorting, Lovelace sits and dangles her legs under the safety bar, gazing out at Central Park. Lit evergreens line its perimeter, and the lake dazzles with moonlight. “I should so be in Hawaii right now,” she mutters- but it’s a joke. Renée can feel it, in the heat of breath against her face.
Renée runs a hand over her loose hair (curled for the occasion; she’d burnt her neck on the tongs).
“Awakening?” she asks after a while. There’s a catch in her throat, and everything depends upon the woman sat to her left, the answer she gives, the howl of wind rushing against her coatless form.
“Turns out I’m not so into tropical sabbatical when you’re in the city,” Lovelace says lowly, shrugging.
The air seems to thin, and Renée can’t quite breathe.
Luckily, the wind picks up, scattering heartbeats through her body, and distracting her from the words just said. Lovelace’s shoeless, knitwear-less predicament becomes painfully apparent.
“Hey,” Renée yells over the wind, “You okay, Captain?”
She sits down beside Lovelace, hanging on to the rail. As she does so, two sets of untied hair tangle over the captain’s face- seriously, is there some sort of magnetism there?- and an answer feels unnecessary. Nonetheless, Renée receives one.
“A- hairband might be- nice,” she says, gritted against the gale.
Smiling a little, just for herself, Renée offers a tie from her wrist. “Here. And-“ Lovelace gathers her hair in a ponytail “-Thanks. It’s… good to see you too, Captain.”
Squinting against the words, she avoids Lovelace’s eyes. Perhaps because her husband’s downstairs, celebrating in an apartment her parents visited before she did. But maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s something else, too.
Nights on the Hephaestus, talking and stiffly pressed together. Then, by some mutual agreement, close enough entwined to feel the soft and callous of their skin melding, to smell that innate girl smell. One Renée had never been slept so close to before. One she ached for in this apartment, near enough to Dominik to recognise its absence.
Before Renée realises, Lovelace is reaching behind her, gathering her hair with needless aggression.
When their skin meets- for it feels mutual somehow- Renée is not Renée. She’s Minkowski.
“Hey. Something’s up,” Lovelace says suddenly, amid the wind. “No- don’t deny it, I know you too well.” The hair tie in Lovelace’s teeth guises her words, but there’s no denying them.
When she’s finished, the captain sits back to admire her handy work.
“So, tell me,” she begins conversationally, “What’s up? Anyone get sucked out of an airlock? Have to whip out the harpoon again? Really, Minkowski, you should give the weapon usage a rest-”
“Oh, shut up,” Minkowski says, through a begrudging snort. “I’m fine, Captain.”
A noise of distinct disagreement from her left.
“What?”
“Please, Minkowski, have you met yourself? You’re as highly strung as a-”
“Alright, Captain. Yes. I know.”
Silence.
“Is it him?”
Minkowski laughs. “His name’s Dominik, Lovelace.” She sighs, taking in New York before her, letting the wind die a little before she speaks. “It’s been a long few years. For both of us. No-” she says, as Lovelace moves to interrupt- “Both of us. He thought I was dead, Lovelace. And, well… two years is a long time to think you’re a widower. Sometimes… people have to move on.”
Lovelace frowns; Minkowski can feel it in the way her shoulder presses tighter and her throat catches with a scoff. “So he cheated? Goddamn it, Minkowski-”
“No,” she says firmly. “I was dead. He did what he had to do to.”
“What, meet someone new? Please, Commander,” scoffs Lovelace. But then she softens, and says: “Sorry.”
A pause. Somewhere far below, an ambulance wails.
“She’s downstairs,” Minkowski says finally, reluctant. “He called things off when we got back. With her.”
Lovelace shakes her head. “Well that sucks.”
The commander laughs. “Yeah,” she says, “Yeah, it does. But it could be worse.”
Lovelace looks up.
“Eiffel’s coming later. With Jacobi. And Hera passed, but… We’ve made it through everything together.” Neither quite know, Minkowski realises, if the we is her and Dominik, or her and her crew. “I think we can do one more thing.”
Then their eyes meet, and it’s obvious:
Minkowski and Lovelace are the only we which matters right now.
On a rooftop in central Manhattan, with wind swirling their tied-back hair, and a light-up jumper twinkling through the city smog, they’re the only we which matters.
Lovelace puts her arm around Minkowski, a little tentatively- till Minkowski leans into it, resting her head on top of the captain’s, and winds her arm round Lovelace’s waist.
The first drop of rain hits Minkowski straight on the nose.
It’s not a kiss. And there isn’t snow. But it is Christmas, and, right now, that counts for something.
“Hey,” Minkowski mutters, “You ran out of the airport on Christmas Eve and I’m the Love Actually one?”
Two raindrops, then three. The chime of a bell close by calls twelve, riddled with wind and cab horns and party noises from the house below. Minkowski smiles.
“Merry Christmas, Lovelace.”
Merry indeed.