Chapter Text
In the shadow of a pulsing club, a woman collapses to the pavement beneath unsteady feet. The lifeblood leaves her body while an oblivious party rages nearby, too loud to hear cries she is too weak to utter.
*******
“Annnd heels down.”
“This hurts,” Raffi grumbles.
Seven doesn’t believe her. She’s been hurling hushed complaints in Seven’s general direction all morning. Trying to get a rise out of her, trying to pass the time. Though she knows yoga isn’t quite Raffi’s exercise m.o.— she typically opts for physical disciplines involving more strategy, vigor, and tactility—Seven also knows she’s more than capable of the maneuvers in this class.
Seven had once seen Raffi throw herself down a flight and a half of stairs, bust a locked door open with one shove, sprint out into a parking lot and stop an accelerating sedan cold with a well timed kick, the driver’s door crinkling like foil under the sheer force of her will. It wasn’t the most reckless stunt she’d ever seen Raffi pull off, but her breath still caught in her chest whenever she thought about it. About how easily she could have been hurt, or worse .
And about the way Raffi had looked standing in the street, chest heaving attractively, skin dripping sweat and blood—most of it not her own—and a carnal satisfaction evident from loose hips to rigid shoulders. Every bit of her exuded power , and Seven’s mind had ground to a halt at the raw surge of lust down her spine. Raffi had turned to look for her, then, to check that she was alright, and it was a miracle she hadn’t been caught leering. Catching her eye was worse, though. They held a reflection of the heat Seven felt licking down her thighs, under her clothes. She’d felt the way you do when you have that nightmare about going to school naked with all of the nervous anticipation, but none of the shame. She’d felt like she wanted to be seen.
Seven had needed more than one cold shower that day. And for several days afterward.
The point, Seven reminds her wandering train of thought, is that Raffi is well beyond fit enough to do anything she wants.
It’s the wanting that usually trips her up. Seven knows what that feels like .
Raffi often has to be talked into anything good for her, so Seven had all but dragged her to her own morning yoga class — a move which may have lacked foresight, and which she may now be regretting.
As it turns out, a sweaty, straining Raffi is an overwhelming sight, especially first thing in the morning.
She watches Raffi’s shimmering skin stretch over solid, dense muscle as she assumes the required pose with admirable form, then stills; a gilded, kinetic sculpture carved from Carrara marble, surely freed from the confining slab of her stone by the hands of the gods themselves.
Seven considered herself a connoisseur of many types of art and archeology. She had yet to find a piece quite so arresting, or so provocative, as Raffaela Rizzoli.
“Pain is only in the mind,” she whispers back, cool, composed, and betraying none of her true musings. She’s perfectly content to settle into the slight stretch, as well as the dichotomy between her thoughts and words. She almost never says everything she’s thinking, anyway. The recent division between her mental and physical states, however, was not one she could tolerate.
She’s been exceedingly tense lately, holding whatever sensations she couldn’t work through cognitively in corporeal tissue instead, so the flexion and extension in her shoulders and calves is a welcome — if provisional — release. God, she’d needed this class today. She needed to relax.
To that end, Seven enjoys yoga. It challenges her, helps her maintain and hone what little control she can exert. It also has plenty of health benefits for a person with chronic pains and constantly flaring injuries like hers. The routine mindfulness allows her to disassociate from her anxieties, to focus on being in her body, listening to what it was trying to tell her brain with signals of pain or tightness, and rectify any misalignment between the two. It’s something of a spiritual experience for her. As close as she’d typically get, anyway.
Raffi, on the other hand, hates yoga. It’s too still and quiet, with too much empty space for her to be alone with her thoughts.
Also, there’s no running or hitting. Raffi loves those things, lives for direct confrontation, for the challenge and pursuit of and physical release of her pent up emotions. The best way she’s found to keep sane and centered was to keep moving.
And yet here she is. In a morning yoga class with the one woman with the potential — and, it seemed, the agenda — to stop her from doing that.
“Right leg up, and flip your dog.”
It certainly isn’t helping that Raffi finds the instructor irritating and insincere. And, okay, maybe she’s decided she can’t stand the guy because he keeps making eyes at Seven, leering and lingering on the generous display of flushed skin below her neck. Not that Raffi was exactly innocent herself. So, maybe he’s a creep. Maybe she’s jealous. Hell, why not both?
Seven lifts her leg and pivots on her left foot in a graceful, controlled swing. As she sets her right foot back down on the other side of her mat, Chakotay, the aforementioned instructor, saunters over to press unnecessary hands under Seven’s arched back, perfecting her already flawless form.
Raffi drops her leg back, gives up on her own flip, stretches her calf out as if it was the source of her trouble instead of the too-large hands pressed into the thin fabric of Seven’s tank top. She huffs out a frustrated breath and hears a chuckle from further up the room (some woman named Emmy, she thinks she recalls) but ignores it. She can’t think about anything except the disgustingly smug grin on Chakotay’s face as he practically straddles one of Seven’s legs.
He finally steps away to continue his circle around the room, but his eyes keep seeking her out, betraying him. Raffi indignantly inverts her pose to catch up with the rest of the class.
“Well it feels like it’s in my leg,” she mumbles back, endearingly frustrated as she mimics Seven’s fluid motion with her own delayed, too-powerful kick into a backbend. She’d tensed up again, though Seven didn’t know why.
“Back to Downward Dog.”
Raffi grunts as she shifts, straightening then bending again. Her curls curtain around her face when she turns it back toward the mat beneath her. “My mind has a cramp,” she groans under her breath.
Her comment draws Seven’s eyes to her, and she can’t help the glance she steals at the stark contours of Raffi’s abs. She’s truly a sight to behold, sweat-slick, sun-bronzed muscles rippling under the minimal effort of holding the pose, and uncovered under the practical crop of her sports bra. Seven observes the expansion and contraction of her diaphragm as she breathes, catches herself holding her own breath, traces sturdy, striking shoulders as she exhales. Raffi had remarkably defined deltoids, and the curves of her trapezius muscles were truly artful. All that brawn confined in clean, sloping lines evocative of diligent, relentless, devoted effort. Her body was a geometric marvel, like she’d stepped straight off the page of a Da Vinci journal.
Raffi easily transfers her weight to one hand, and her biceps, triceps, brachialis, brachioradialis, and flexor muscles stand proudly at attention. Seven’s thighs clench involuntarily.
God, she was supposed to be relieving tension in this session.
Raffi turns her head with the shifting poses, and Seven averts her gaze abruptly.
“You know the woman that keeps smiling at you?” Seven’s whisper comes out rougher than she’d meant, but Raffi has no reason to attribute it to anything except exertion. Hopefully.
“Emmy?” Raffi asks, clearly caught off guard by the topic change.
“Mmm. She just broke up with her girlfriend.”
Raffi startles, and Seven smirks.
Raffi winces.
Seven doesn’t notice.
So that’s where she’s going with this, Raffi thinks . Right. Of course. “Really?” She asks, a little louder than is strictly necessary, clearly overcompensating. Seven simply breathes a laugh, and Raffi sighs relief at the oblivious smile on her best friend’s face.
Of course she’s trying to set her up with someone. She has no idea Raffi isn’t interested in dating just anyone, even if they are cute and clearly interested. Raffi had noticed her looking over repeatedly throughout the few classes she’d attended, laughing at her missteps, and Seven hadn’t exactly been subtle when introducing them. But Raffi hadn’t given any thought to doing anything about it.
Maybe she would have once, but she’s too in her own head these days to really consider it, and too proud to talk to Seven about it. Hell, Raffi herself wasn’t too sure exactly what was holding her back recently. She just felt..something. Different. And indifferent to the very idea of spending so much time alone with a woman she didn’t know, who didn’t know her.
“Double date tomorrow night?” Seven’s grin is playful, light. Maybe it’s because they’re upside down, but Raffi thinks it doesn’t quite reach her eyes.
Ah, Shit . “No,” Raffi groans before she can stop herself. Definitely too loud this time, she knows, because the entire class turns to shush her. “Sorry,” she hisses back, saccharine and insincere, before turning back to Seven and dramatically lowering her voice. Better to feign interest, to keep Seven happy and unsuspecting. “What does she do?”
Raffi’s attention is diverted from her answer with the rocking of Seven’s hips as she self-adjusts to widen her stance, and Raffi becomes acutely aware of sweat collecting under her own palms.
Shit , Seven thinks. She’s suggested a double date, which she fully realizes is going to be painful to witness so closely. Maybe Seven is more of a masochist than even she herself is aware. But Raffi is beautifully kind, generously talented, and so, so good in every meaning of the word. She’s charming and funny, smart and sexy, astonishingly effervescent despite the world around her. Because of it, even. She deserves someone to devote to her even a fraction of the energy she gives so freely, to reciprocate the care she shows anyone but herself.
She knows seeing someone else do that will hurt — who is she kidding, it will probably rip her heart clean from her pericardial cavity — just as she knows she couldn’t stomach not being there. It’s like a vehicular accident of her own emotions: she knows she ought to focus on the road ahead, but she can’t quite tear her eyes away from the carnage.
Seven knows what she feels, had categorized these reactions long before medical school, or even her awkward teenage years doing undergraduate work. She also knows that Raffi does not feel that same attraction, but she’s more than equipped to live with that. If it meant she’d get to keep this woman in her life in any capacity, Seven would gladly suffer much worse.
“She works in medicine,” Seven whispers proudly.
Raffi tries in vain to look intrigued, to hide her distracted staring, but the burgeoning light from the studio’s eastern facing windows glitters across the divots of Seven’s biceps, and Raffi is drawn to the movement of substantial yet subtle muscle under impossibly soft looking skin. It’s an alluring paradox, like sheer silk shifting over the surface of rounded steel. The thin fabric of Seven’s leggings hug the deep contours of muscle at her thighs, just above her knees, and Raffi feels somehow as if she’s drooling with a dry mouth. She realizes she’s zoned out, wipes damp hands on her mat to recenter herself.
Or she tries. Her effort proves futile, though, because it's at this moment that her phone — which she’d left on and under her mat, against studio policy — rings loudly in the serene space. The class has once again turned to eye her in the back, and Raffi shrugs off her pretense of peaceful meditation altogether as she begins reaching for the offending device. “Oh, all right,” she says, to no one and everyone, visibly rolling her eyes.
“Raffi,” Seven admonishes above her. She takes all this seriously, sincerely invests in all the inanity. It’s really only tolerable — maybe even kinda cute — to Raffi because Seven does it. Everyone else here looks ridiculous where Seven looks poised and polished, the picture of grace and composure. She’s beautiful, blushing from exertion. Differently so than usual. Especially so.
But in all probability, this phone ringing means someone, somewhere is unfortunately, unfairly dead. It’s a sobering thought. She shakes her head and accepts the call.
She answers it with a short, sharp, “Rizzoli.”
Raffi feels a sulky shadow, looks up to find Chakotay squatting in front of her, clearly irked. “Mindful awareness is what can subdue the primitive consciousness, and bring the physical body under control of the will,” he says, none too pleased. Raffi can see Seven nodding sagely while maintaining warrior pose in her periphery.
“I totally agree,” says Raffi, effectively brushing off whatever spiritual frivolity Chakotay was spouting in favor of listening for the location of their latest crime scene.
She doesn’t have anything against the man, really. She’s got no issue with his beliefs and practices, and Chakotay himself had never done anything to put Raffi off. But something in her gut said this man was just a little wrong. She couldn’t quite name the feeling she had, but she’s a damn good detective.
She’ll figure it out eventually. She always does.
“I have to go,” Raffi states, and she makes no effort to hide the relief in her voice at having an excuse to get the hell out of this place. Raffi looks over to Seven, who’s still cycling through the poses from muscle memory, for backup.
“You can't leave before Savasana,” Seven urges.
Unbelievable , Raffi thinks, but Seven mistakes her look of frustration for one of confusion.
“Corpse pose,” she eagerly explains, doing absolutely nothing to help Raffi’s case.
“Seven, let's go.” There’s no room in her tone for argument, and Seven relents easily. She pauses briefly to address Chakotay with a quick, “Thank you. Namaste.”
Her smile is bright and infectious, and Chakotay follows suit. “Namaste,” he parrots back to her, slightly less surly when addressing Seven individually.
“Come on,” Raffi groans, dragging her useless sidekick along behind her toward the locker rooms and, more importantly, away from this class. (And its instructor).
*******
They meet Elnor at the crime scene – a little alley tucked away behind a club – with sweats hastily thrown over their workout clothes. Seven can’t help thinking that Raffi has no right to look as good as she does in her spandex shorts, grey hoodie zipped over her sweat-damp sports bra, badge swinging from a long chain around her neck, swaggering up to the tape line.
“You got her to do yoga?” Elnor’s delighted surprise is eclipsed only by his amusement. He’d only been Raffi’s partner for a short time, but they’d instantly developed a rapport, and a mutual respect that had only deepened over bad coffee and brutal stakeouts.
“ Nooo , it was my idea. I love yoga,” Raffi quips, waving her hands for emphasis. Raffi had needed to push a little at first, but soon enough they’d fallen into a natural sort of fraternal banter, ribbing each other to make the melancholy of their vocation a little more bearable.
“We had to leave before Ardha Chandrasana,” Seven says with an unfairly adorable tilt of her head. “I feel very unbalanced,” she laments from behind Raffi, earning a perplexed stare from the partners.
Raffi looks down to find disturbed gravel. “She was dragged here,” Raffi starts, trying to direct her focus back on scene and away from the absolute vision of Seven in a perfectly fitted (likely tailored) windbreaker over her yoga clothes in the nascent, midmorning sun. With her hair up Raffi could see the focus in her eye and in the set of her jaw, had a front row seat to watch Seven settle into work mode.
Seven presents a version of herself in public that is more palatable, arms herself with clothes and heels and makeup to disguise her insecurities and idiosyncrasies. It’s a ruse that works on most people. They look at her and see poise and class, look right past the inelegant way she stumbles through social interactions for which she has no clear protocol.
Raffi is not most people.
Raffi knows she’s a damn good cop, but Seven Isles is beyond a shadow of a doubt the brightest person in the field, and the best possible asset to their victims – as well as the loved ones they leave behind. No one Raffi has ever worked with cares the way she does, and they definitely don’t have Seven’s genius. She’s a rare breed, an impossible combination of intelligence and integrity. It’s admirable, taking a stigmatized, thankless job like hers. Raffi knows, probably better than most.
Seven’s a brilliant mind with a heart of gold. Raffi would be the world’s worst detective if she didn’t see that, and she’d likely be out of a job altogether if the universe had more people like Seven. Some people really do find their calling, it seemed. And Seven’s was here, in the dirt and the grime of the exhausting, unforgiving, sinking ship that was the fight to get justice for the outcast and forgotten.
Raffi’s own calling, she’d long since decided, was in the trenches right next to her, doing whatever she could to help lighten her load.
She’d be remiss not to admit, if only in her own mind, how easy it’d be to fall for a woman like that. A good woman. One of the best.
If only she herself were a different woman, of course.
Elnor interrupts her reverie to tell them that everything has been photographed and inventoried, trailing behind the two of them as they approach the body and pull on their gloves. Raffi surveys the woman, snaps stale-smelling latex against her thin, heated skin. She spots a wallet right off and pulls out the contents, reading aloud as she goes. "Last name Gaynor-Randle, first name Katie, age 32. $100 in cash. Well, we can scratch robbery,” she shrugs.
“Vintage,” Seven observes affably. “She had a flair for clothes.” She’s kneeling next to the body on the pavement, gently looking her over from an even, unassuming vantage point.
Seven had a habit of doing this: humanizing, even relating to the people whose deaths they preside over. It was a gift, as far as Raffi was concerned.
It was often Seven that kept Raffi human on tough days, kept her focused on why she did what she did when she occasionally lost sight of herself. Seven had an impeccable ability to remind Raffi who she was, and why the hell she bothers to keep staying, keep trying.
Raffi wasn’t really a ‘practicing’ catholic anymore, hadn’t been for a long time. But if it had been Seven as her priest, reciting liturgies and divining meaning from story after story of suffering, perhaps she’d have stuck it out a little longer. Maybe going through the motions of faith wouldn’t have felt quite so empty if she’d been doing it for her.
“Looks like she was struck in the head with something,” Raffi remarks plainly from over Seven’s shoulder.
“Reddish-brown stains around a flesh wound over the parietal ridge and occipital bone,” Seven corrects, none too subtly, but without condescension. She’s teasing, in her own way, though only Raffi would catch it.
“I hear an echo,” Raffi drawls.
It’s a little game they play with each other, this banter. There’s a specific pattern to it, a cadence unique to the two of them. Raffi sasses her, and Seven pretends to be exasperated behind satisfied smirks. Seven says something extremely clever, and Raffi pretends it isn’t terribly attractive.
“You find what was used to hit her?” She calls back to Elnor, trying to prevent herself from admiring Seven too closely. Raffi would swear sometimes, if she focused, she could see the gears turning in that beautiful, brilliant head.
“Not yet,” Elnor calls from the nearby dumpster. He’s squatting in a corner digging through some piles of discarded pallets and overflow garbage bags.
“There’s a gold band on her ring finger. She was married,” Raffi smirks. Point gained for her. “Pager's totaled,” she notes absently with a nod toward its location on the ground nearby.
“It's not a pager.” This gets Raffi’s attention. “It's a glucose-management system,” Seven finishes as she examines it. “Insulin pump. She was diabetic,” she supplies when Raffi looks lost.
Damn . Point yielded.
It’s a losing game, trying to outwit Seven. But Raffi has never been one to shy away from exercises in futility. A lot of her interactions with Seven are like that, suppressing the desire to be too honest or reveal too much, resisting the near constant urge to reach for her.
Raffi knows one day she won’t be able to. It’s getting harder all the time.
And it’s familiar in a way, reminds her of her last nauseating days in service, all the cynicism and guarded escapism. She’d fought more red-tape and bureaucracy than she had actual combat. This felt like that.
People in her (former) line of work couldn’t act without intel that could predict their next move, their next ten moves. She’d been a stand out operative from the time she’d been tapped in undergrad, exceptionally skilled in blending in. Smart enough to know when to leave, and agile enough to create an exit. A chameleon, in some people’s words. A ghost in other’s. Her defining characteristic, though, had always been her backbone. She’d always been outspoken, to the dismay of several of her superiors, but she was always clever enough to skirt any real repercussions. Until her luck ran out.
This felt like that.
Raffi was many things, but oblivious was not one of them. She knew a false flag when she saw one. She’d heard the death knell long before the call came, had already packed her duffel bag. She had hoped not to be the only one on the right side of the conflict, but being alive to be on any side had been a principle she could at least understand, though not share.
Being on her own was something Raffi was good at, anyway. She’d always worked alone, had always been singularly convicted and difficult to deter. She’d always worn her heart on her sleeve, and she’d paid the price for it time and again. But even the betrayal of the brass who’d abandoned their pledge of ‘honor’ and ‘valor’ the second it became inconvenient for them hadn’t provoked any actionable self-preservation instinct in her, and she’d gladly taken the discharge.
That’s what makes this thing with Seven so tricky. This didn’t feel like that.
Raffi knows she feels something – something deep, something earth-shatteringly, astronomically extraordinary. But in the absence of absolute assurance, acting on just feeling something seems..selfish. Blowing up a great working relationship for some ridiculous crush — or, god forbid, losing Seven because she couldn’t keep herself in check — simply isn’t something she’s prepared to do. No matter what she felt.
No point in wasting time unpacking it, then.
And yet she knows that her resistance to addressing the nature of her feelings for Seven is only delaying the inevitable. She knows there’s a deadline, knows it’s fast approaching, can feel it accelerate with the beat of her heart every time Seven’s eyes linger on the back of her own head, her hands, her lips…
Seven’s lips are moving. Shit .
“She kept careful records. Her last glucose-level reading was over 400.” Seven’s voice startles her out of her rumination, but Raffi’s brain is taking a bit too long to catch up.
“Is that good or bad?”
“It's extremely high,” Seven says in that simple, sincere tone that Raffi loves to hate. It gave her absolutely no hints about what she really meant.
“Is that good or bad?” Raffi laughs.
“Bad. Very bad. She wasn't getting any insulin. She probably had slurred speech, trouble walking,” Seven trailed off as she turned the body to get a better look at her head wound. She couldn’t hide the concern in her voice if she tried. (She didn’t).
“Huh. Well that explains the lack of defensive wounds: she couldn't fight back.” Raffi shifts her hands higher on her hips and her badge swings with the movement, glinting in the rising sun.
“Murder weapon has a rectangular edge on it,” Raffi calls to Elnor.
“Oh, I can't confirm that.” Seven’s tone is surprised, tense with characteristic anxiety.
She doesn’t have gut feelings the way Raffi does, so guessing is disastrous in her book. Seven can’t stand for her mistakes to cost anyone but herself, can’t afford to let anyone else suffer for her miscalculations. She needs to be right to protect everyone from herself, so much so that her body physically rejects uncertainty. Her mutinous nerves betray her, and she almost immediately develops urticaria whenever she lies. Or, she supposes, maybe it’s some twisted defense mechanism.
She treats their victims much more gently than she does herself—they’re only human, after all. Perhaps more so than she is. She would not risk their last chance at peace, at recognition and connection on a gamble.
She tries not to think of the risk to the tenuous sense of connection she felt with her Boston collective, or the sense of potential she felt with Raffi. She shakes her head, tries to shake the nervous energy, to focus on the body in her hands.
“Hey, Elnor, we're looking for a 2-by-4,” Raffi says as she looks over the square-ish gash in the victim’s head. She spins on her heel to face him, and, in doing so, grants Seven a brief reprieve from her gaze.
She finds Elnor, eyebrows raised in silent question, holding a 2-by-4 bloodied on one end.
“Elnor, we're looking for an idiot,” Raffi mocks, disbelieving.
“Is that your way of saying you wanna talk to the husband?” He’s teasing, amused by the apparent vexation in Raffi’s tone.
“Yeah. You know, what's it say about relationships that the husband's our first suspect,” Raffi volleys back. They share an exasperated laugh while Seven taps open a photograph from the woman’s tablet. “Raffi... it may not be the husband,” she says haltingly.
Raffi peers curiously over her shoulder to get a look at what Seven, having anticipated her move, is already holding up for her. She nods, verbalizes the rest of Seven’s thought for her.
“Because she didn't have a husband.”
*******
“We're sorry for your loss, Mrs. Randle.”
“I prefer Jay. And it's ‘Gaynor-Randle.’ We took each other's names. The Commonwealth recognizes our marriage. I have a right to know who did this,” she insists through subdued sobs.
Raffi softens a little at this, despite her reservations. She knows what it’s like to always be playing defense.
“Of course you do. We wanna know too,” she placates the crying woman softly before beginning her questioning. “When was the last time you spoke to her?”
“Um... Five o'clock, maybe?” She sniffs, trying to dry tears that just keep coming. Despite herself, Raffi’s lips pull down in a sympathetic pout. Elnor adds that to the interview summary in his book while Raffi follows up. “Did she always work late?”
“Always, on my night out. I'm the captain of the LGBT bowling league.”
Huh. Bowling didn’t seem quite rich enough for this woman’s blood, but she’s heard stranger things. Raffi makes a mental note to check up on that later anyway.
“What time did you get home?” Elnor has adopted her demeanor, seamlessly following her lead. They were good together like that. Raffi focused on body language, tone, any sort of giveaway a suspect may be keeping something from them. Elnor’s expertise was at catching people in a lie with their own words, often with things they didn’t mean to admit.
“About 10:00. I called Katie's office, her cell. By midnight, I was calling the ER and you guys, over and over again. You can check with my alarm company, my cell records, the bowling alley…,” she recites. Her tone is agitated, but not accusing. It’s either a sign of rare emotional maturity, or something else. Rehearsal, maybe.
Raffi makes another mental note, then nods, considering the woman in front of her. She’s more competent, more composed and articulate than most spouses Raffi’s interviewed. Still, her higher education and job description—she’s a lawyer, and it showed—could account for that. And her grief at least seemed genuine on the surface.
Raffi decides to level with her.
“We will have to verify your whereabouts,” she remarks, letting a touch of the compassion she can’t help feeling color her tone. In another life, hell even in a decade or so in this one, she could be her.
“Understood. The spouse is always the first suspect,” Jay nods.
She sounds resigned, but there’s an undercurrent of guile in her demeanor that Raffi can’t quite shake.
*******
“You haven’t touched your fancy coffee. You never don’t touch your fancy coffee,” Raffi observes, poorly hiding her amused concern. Seven’s coffee sat untouched on the nearby table, likely cold by now.
They’re reclined together, sinking into Seven’s couch. Seven is pulled into herself, knees up next to her hips and head resting in one hand, elbow propped behind Raffi’s head. Raffi is sprawled out, neck resting across the back of the sofa next to Seven’s arm, feet up on the coffee table — she took her shoes off this time, alright — and a plush blanket that probably costs more than her weekly salary balled up in her lap.
It’s late, but they’ve both got too much on their minds to really rest. So they sit, serene, sedate, and syndicated, off in their own little universes until one of them wants to speak, to draw the other into their musing.
Raffi spends the vast majority of her waking minutes with Seven, but this thing they do at night is purely their own. It’s almost a tradition now, and Raffi can appreciate the ritual of it without being ecstatic about its abstraction. She’s a creature of habit deep, deep down, and she benefits immensely from it even while she loathes to maintain it. But it’s probably good for her to do some self reflecting, and she knows Seven thrives in the closeness. There aren’t many people she feels comfortable being silent with, Raffi knows.
Their somnolence borders uncomfortably on meditation tonight, and Raffi normally can’t stand to meditate. Too much stillness and not enough distraction. Too much time for her to think about things she needs to forget, or feelings she can’t afford to have.
It’s unbearably like yoga in that way.
It’s easier with Seven, though, this loitering in the waning day.
So is the yoga.
Raffi does her best to keep a tight lid on the pining for something, maybe even someone , that inevitably bubbles to the surface in these prolonged silences. She’s hardly ever sure how well she succeeds. Tonight, though, she’s failing spectacularly.
There’s a palpable something in the room with them this time, something that’s been looming over them for a while now. If Raffi’s being totally, brutally honest, she’d seen it on the horizon months ago. She’d been naive to assume it would linger there, on the edge of her periphery. But relationships like this have a way of sneaking up on her, and she finds herself in the middle of the storm before she stops to listen to the siren.
Raffi is a speck on the doppler encompassed by a dangerous, ravishing, scarlet mass of… something.
Seven would probably know the word for it. Seven knows probably every word there is to know. Seven probably even knew those three that Raffi stubbornly refused to say. Simply assuming she knew, though, was never as satisfying as she’d hoped.
If Raffi’s being totally, brutally honest, she’d known months ago that hoping would never be enough. She’d been naive to assume she could contain this tidal wave of…something. Tsunamis had a way of sneaking up on people, their deceptive tides receding, disappearing briefly only to come back impossibly stronger, more insatiable, to consume whole coasts in one fell swoop.
Raffi is a stupid little unmoored dinghy, devastatingly unprepared for the fate god or Mother Nature or the universe had bestowed upon her.
The point is, there’s a tension in the room, one that’s prompting Raffi to wax poetic about how hopelessly, absurdly, desperately gone she is for her best friend.
Their familiar, intimate position is strikingly discordant within the fragile air stretched taut between them.
“Can you imagine losing that?” Seven asks, without meeting Raffi’s eye.
She doesn’t need to ask what she means. She’d been thinking about it today too. Ah, so that’s what’s been bugging her. Makes sense it’s something to do with their current case.
Wait, fuck, did she know what Raffi had been thinking about? Had she recently developed some sci-fi mind-reading ability that Raffi somehow didn’t know about? That would be just like her, honestly, she thought. If anyone would survive a freak science accident and come out the other side not only unscathed but with superpowers, it’d be Dr. Seven-goddamn-Isles.
Raffi inhales sharply, forces a measured exhale.
No, there’s no way she’s thinking the same thing. There’s gotta be a more logical explanation. It’s Seven, after all. There’s always a logical thread to her anxieties. She just needs to find it.
Raffi turns to face her, knowing full well what she’ll see.
Seven does this sometimes, asks Raffi questions — later, when they’re alone and she’s contemplating. To the average person, she wouldn’t look the least bit relaxed. Raffi suspected Seven was never truly relaxed, at least not in the way she understood the concept. But Raffi can read the nuance in Seven’s body better than she ever could any perp’s.
Her face is neutral, open, that facade of mimicked expression fallen away to reveal her natural state: Calm, but not idle. Distant, but not far.
Captivating, supplies the voice in her head Raffi’s too tired to suppress.
When she’s comfortable —or as close as Seven ever gets— she communicates more with subtle shifting than with the seemingly infinite vocabulary at her disposal. Raffi knows this language pretty well by now, could probably predict the minute articulations of her brows or the specific shine of her eyes.
Her rigid posture is intact as ever, but a little less stiff in the security of her own home. Raffi’s chest tightens with the awareness that somehow her own presence in this sacred space doesn’t negate that sense of safety. That Seven permits Raffi to witness, even experience her in it, is a miracle all its own.
This Seven, the one who doesn’t feel the need to fill the silence, the one who sits still in these moments, the one who is content with just Raffi’s presence without expectation or pretense, is one of Raffi’s favorites (though, gun to her head, she’d never admit she had one).
This Seven is one Raffi is enough for, and her access to her is a privilege she tenderly attends to.
This Seven is her Seven. Just hers.
Questions like the one she’s just voiced almost always mean that Seven is stuck on something. They seem spontaneous, but the reality is that Seven has probably been stewing in whatever it is for hours. It’s usually some interaction she feels was unresolved, though occasionally it’s some existential quandary far too cerebral for Raffi to fully follow. Seven doesn’t usually articulate all the inner workings of her mind, anyway, but these minute glimpses, surrendered in private moments, are the closest she gets to the whole, true Seven.
Raffi revels in them.
She’s always honest when they talk like this. She can’t bring herself to hide much of anything from Seven, knowing how lies affect her. She’ll bare whatever Seven asks to see, can hardly deny this woman anything — except, of course, that something: that part of herself she so desperately longs not to deny.
“I can’t imagine having it,” Raffi finally admits, with only thinly veiled dejection.
Seven hums her understanding, lets that flash of self-deprecation ebb and fade into the quiet rather than stoke the embers of it. She lets the smoke clear before speaking again, afraid if she doesn’t she’ll spark an entirely different fire she doesn’t yet know how to put out.
“I find commitment–” Seven pauses, stares at the ornate crown molding of her living room, searches along its grooves for the invisible trail of her thought, tries to draw the boundary she wants to set out of thinning air.
“Suffocating?” Raffi’s tone is light, not accusatory but incongruous.
Raffi’s giving her an out, but Seven doesn’t feel the need to take it. Not at home. Not with her. And really, aren’t those the same sentiment?
“...Baffling,” Seven offers instead. Her voice is thick, laden with a pain she knows Raffi recognizes too well. “Still, I think it might be nice. To tether yourself to someone that way. To create something worth grieving.” Her eyes are fixed pointedly at her hands fidgeting in her lap.
“Yeah. I know what you mean,” Raffi says, and Seven could swear she feels eyes on her lips. “This case does have me…wanting…,” she trails off wistfully, gesturing abstractly with her hands for want of something to do with them.
Seven redirects her gaze to follow their articulations, can’t quite bring herself to look at Raffi’s face yet. She has the distinct feeling that Raffi’s own radiance would prove blinding in the shadow of her ignorance; that what she might find there, in Raffi’s expression, isn’t meant for her eyes.
Sometimes, when they’re sitting like this, thighs pressed together, bodies converging between too-soft throw pillows, Seven’s vision flares. She gets a sort of high off this intimacy, can almost glimpse… something . A delusion, probably.
A possibility, maybe.
“ ...something . Something more.” Raffi finishes distractedly. It would seem they’re in sync even in their individual preoccupations.
Raffi’s body heat, her physical presence as a whole — in Seven’s life in general, but especially on this night, on this couch — is scorching. She makes Seven feel like she’s sitting in the middle of a coronal mass ejection. Her whole body burns, feels irradiated simply by proximity to her. But the truth, on closer examination, is an inviting warmth so tempting Seven wants to say to hell with catching fire.
Frisson ossifies her spine at the thought of letting it consume her. She feels the sudden urge to bolt.
She leans into it, and into the woman at her side. She’s feeling uncharacteristically careless, tonight. Something about this case, probably.
Something about this woman, possibly.
Raffi, for her part, had convinced herself a long time ago that she’d be happy just being in Seven’s life, in whatever form that took. And while that was still probably true, she’d certainly underestimated how agonizing it could sometimes be, to be this close to something truly good.
Cases like this one hit a little close to home.
Nights like this left her with the distinct impression that maybe home wasn’t a Boston brownstone.