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They can see one corner of the local pool from the window of their tiny apartment. On days when the wind is low and the streets fall especially quiet, Beatrice can just make out the faintest strains of children screeching and crowing as they cavort in the water.
She doesn't pay much heed. When they train at the lakeside, she often takes the opportunity to go for a dip, but that's when she knows Ava is nearby, when she knows there's no one else close enough to trouble them. When she feels like she can let her guard down.
One of those days, she raises the possibility that the Halo might allow Ava to run on water, and Ava's mouth twists.
"I can't swim."
Beatrice feels stupid to not have thought of that, to have assumed so carelessly, to not have considered that swimming was a skill just like any other.
"Would you like to learn?"
Ava's smile is brilliant. "Would you teach me?"
Again, a step behind. Should have realised this request would follow. Can't not think about her hands on Ava's hips, guiding Ava's limbs, shifting and correcting. Her face burns. She dips under the water to collect herself, pushes her hair back and ties it into a ponytail before surfacing. Ava's eyes are locked on her. Enviously, she assumes.
She remembers the flyer she'd seen on the corkboard at the bar. "I don't know that we should carve out training time for it, given how unlikely it is that it would prove useful against Adriel-"
"I mean, I was fully expecting his next attacks to feature sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads, but if you say so."
Beatrice can't help but give her a fond smile. "Sea bass would be more likely, I should think."
"Only if they're ill-tempered, though."
"Of course," she concedes with a tip of her head. "But, as I was saying, between the bar and our training I don't know when I'd be able to find time to teach you."
"You can just say you don't want to," Ava says easily, rising and stretching her arms. She tips her head back into the sun and Beatrice can't quite make out the expression on her face. "I'll understand. I know it's not exactly high on the things-we-need-to-do-to-save-the-world list."
"What I was going to say," Beatrice says all in a rush, anxious at the way Ava's tone had dipped towards sorrow at the end of her sentence, "is that there are lessons at the pool on weekday mornings."
"Oh! Dope!" Ava grins. "Sign me the fuck up!"
//
The next morning, Beatrice heads for the poolside bleachers with a stack of paperwork and a burgeoning headache. The pool supervisor – Marta, mid 40s, born and raised in the village, two school-aged children – had been deeply apologetic about not being able to fit in an adult lesson on such short notice, but Beatrice had promised. And so Ava lines up outside the pool gate in a rashguard and board shorts, surrounded by twenty-odd children of various ages.
Ava had grinned at her and made pincers with her hands when Beatrice had told her she'd been signed up for the Crab level. Now, with Ava sitting cross-legged between a pair of girls who can't be older than five, gazing attentively up at her instructor – Bridget, early 20s, German university student on break – Beatrice can't help but wonder if that enthusiasm has waned at all.
But Ava's smile doesn't seem to have faltered, not when Beatrice glances up to find her playing rochambeau with a small boy over first rights to the instructor's help with their back float, not when she's catching a girl who's slipped from the edge of the tot dock around the waist and setting her back up on her feet, not even when the instructor is shaking her head and correcting Ava's posture as she attempts a front glide. The tension in Beatrice's shoulders eases more and more as the half hour lesson progresses, until she's almost smiling herself as Ava bounds out of the pool enclosure with a boy sitting on her shoulders.
Ava pulls up in front of Beatrice and swings the boy down to the ground, crouching to give him a high five. "Great class, Matty," she says, and it might be the lightest she's sounded in the time Beatrice has known her. "Go find your papa!"
Matty runs off towards a man seated further down the bleachers and Ava turns to Beatrice, beaming. "Did you see, Bea? I floated!"
"I saw, Ava," she confirms, packing her papers away into her bag and rising. "Well done."
Ava wriggles gleefully at the praise. She spends the walk home chattering on about her instructor, her classmates, the way Matty's afraid to blow bubbles but fearless when it comes to launching himself off the diving board.
"He reminds me of Diego," Ava comments mid-sentence, carrying on before Beatrice has a chance to interrogate the point further. She makes a mental note to follow up even as Ava barrels forward. "Daniel" – 18, Marta's nephew, working to save up for art school – "says I'm gonna be in the next level of classes tomorrow. Outpacing the competition, Bea!"
"It's not a competition. And if it were, they're literal children."
//
"Wear your swimsuit under your training kit today," Beatrice calls to Ava from the bathroom a week and a half later.
Ava's cheer echoes through the apartment. "Bea!" she crows, smacking excitedly up against the other side of the door like a moth trapped inside a lampshade. Beatrice is so, so, so thankful that Ava appears to have finally learned the extent of her boundaries, her need for privacy, and not phased directly into the room. "You mean it?"
"Yes, Ava. You passed your swim to survive standards the other day, correct?"
"Yep! Front roll into the water" – true – "fifty metre swim" – doggy paddle did count for that, she'd double checked the documentation – "two minutes treading water" – two minutes looking like she'd been actively drowning, but yes. "You're serious, Bea? We get to swim in the lake today?"
"If we get everything else I have planned done, then yes."
Training goes more smoothly than it has in weeks, Ava all but vibrating in place but still dialed in, eyes locked on Beatrice. Beatrice has barely formed the words "that's all for today" when Ava is barreling past her towards the edge of the lake, pulling her training top over her head as she goes.
Oh.
Ava's been wearing a rashguard to the pool as a concession to Beatrice's concerns about exposing the Halo. Now, though, when it's just the two of them? She's in a red bikini top, and shimmying her shorts down to reveal matching bottoms.
Beatrice watches closely as Ava reaches out a tentative toe to touch the water's edge. One moment can be all the difference between swimming and drowning, and so she keeps her eyes glued to Ava's form.
"It's colder than I expected," Ava calls back to her, but then she's shrugging and flinging herself forward into the water.
"Ava!" Beatrice yelps, crossing the clearing with quick strides and divesting herself of her singlet. "Be more cautious, please." She shucks her shorts off, down to just her racerback one piece suit, and steps in after Ava.
"Sorry, got a bit excited!" Ava beams up at her from where she's flat on her back in the shallows, water lapping up over her chest. Ava reaches out a hand and Beatrice boosts her back to her feet, steadies her with a hand at the small of her back when she stumbles into Beatrice's side. The skin beneath her palm has been only faintly chilled by the submersion, the warmth of exertion peeking through, and Beatrice draws her hand away quickly.
"What would you like to do?" she asks, wading further in and turning to keep Ava in her line of vision.
"Just experience it with you today, I think," Ava replies. Her voice has gone soft, and she follows Beatrice like she's being drawn along by a magnet. "I thought it would be like the pool, but it's not."
Beatrice nods her understanding – it is, after all, categorically different – but Ava's smiling at her like she knows exactly where Beatrice's head has gone and the degree to which Beatrice has misunderstood her point.
"The water feels different on my skin." They're deep enough now that the water has climbed over Ava's hips, and she catches up a handful and lets it slip back through her fingers. "It's softer, somehow?"
"No chlorine."
"Right, of course. Smells different, too, though that's probably the chlorine as well, yeah?"
Beatrice nods, keeps pacing backwards as Ava advances towards her. "And the water pumps. The lake doesn't really have much water movement, so things get stagnant."
Ava hums her acknowledgement. "I lake it here a lot," she admits, tipping her face up towards the sun.
Beatrice will claim in the aftermath that the splash is a pure instinctive response to the terrible pun. In reality, though, Ava's smile is broad and Beatrice isn't quite sure what she might say she "lakes" next, and so she cocks an arm back and sweeps a wave of water into Ava's face.
Ava surfaces spluttering, water streaming down her face and off her chin. "You're diving me crazy," she laughs, lunging forward to grab for Beatrice's outstretched hand. Beatrice recognises the first motions of a hold she'd taught Ava the week before, counters easily. This too is instinct, only she has severely miscalculated.
Her front is flush against Ava's bare back, one arm securing Ava's, the other hooked around her neck. They hold there a moment, Beatrice's cheek pressed to Ava's, their mingled breaths coming in unison, every patch of skin burning hot where it touches Ava's. Beatrice tries to make her limbs cooperate, tries to release the hold and back away, but–
Her stomach roils as she's flipped forward. Her back impacts the water hard, knocking all the air from her lungs, and she swallows a mouthful of water for her sins. She lets her head fall back as she transitions into a float, and shades her eyes with a shaking hand.
"I think," she says, voice kept level through as much restraint as she can muster, "that maybe separating swimming from training was the correct choice."
Ava falls back beside her, rocking Beatrice's body with the waves of her motion. "Waterver floats your boat," she replies with a happy sigh.
"Just go with the float," Beatrice agrees, and she's as buoyed by Ava's answering laugh as she is by the water.