Work Text:
All Sara remembers from the night before was falling asleep too early and waking up to pitch dark, rain whipping against the window, her heart pounding and hands trembling. She never did well waking up in bad weather; it felt too much like waking up on a slab of shipwrecked metal in a rushing ocean.
She remembers gathering Ava close and holding tight, her half-asleep words of comfort helping Sara’s lungs to work again. It’s so different than years past, when nothing could break through the panicked horror of her nightmares until her body had exhausted itself back into unconsciousness.
The next time she wakes up, the sky is a deep grey, muted by clouds and drizzle, hinting at daylight that’s still a while away. Her arms are empty now and she’s alone, but it’s so early and she’s still so tired that she can’t find the energy to worry.
She’s not sure when waking up unexpectedly alone stopped being accompanied by a wave of nausea and ringing in her ears. Only that now, when she does, she listens for Ava in the kitchen or the shower and doesn’t start to catalog all the reasons she may have finally given up on her and left in the night.
She moves herself to the middle of the bed and melts back into the warm linens Ava left behind, focusing on the soft rustling downstairs. The sound of Ava making coffee is so familiar now that Sara can almost see it.
She hears the bag opening, hot water pouring over grounds, one mug set down gently so that it doesn’t make too much noise, the other mug making a loud clatter followed by Ava softly swearing at it. The scrape of the glass milk jug sliding off a shelf, the clink of a spoon stirring against ceramic and the muffled slap of the refrigerator door closing.
It’s one of Sara’s favorite things Ava does. She’s not sure why—maybe just because in all the insanity of her life, she’s not used to someone who knows her and loves her well enough to take care of her like this. The smaller the thing, the more she treasures it.
She’d never quite figured out how to make really good coffee herself. It always came out too strong or too weak, and most of her adult life had been filled with much bigger problems to solve.
But Ava’s coffee is perfect—she adds the perfect amount of cream, stirs in a hint of cinnamon and always takes a sip of Sara’s before she hands it to her.
More than once, Sara had caught herself absently thinking that she wanted Ava to be the one making every cup of coffee she would ever drink. The first time, she’d panicked. Nearly gotten sick at how unguarded she’d become. It had been such a warm, fleeting series of thoughts, showing up before she could stop herself…the two of them settling into their 40s someday, Sara making breakfast while Ava scoops grounds out of a bag, moving around each other easily from years of habit…a couple of years from now in a cabin somewhere on vacation, buying herself a few more minutes before she gets up so she can lay in bed and watch Ava fiddle with unfamiliar kitchen appliances in just her underwear…on any inevitable day in their future where they wake up angry at each other, Ava still setting down a mug in front of Sara abruptly and walking away until they’re ready to talk things out.
Since when did she start thinking that far into the future? Since when did she even consider she had that much of a future to look forward to?
Since Ava, apparently. It scares her, but the more she’s let herself think of it, the more she wants it. All of it. The good, the chaos, the warm safety of a life together, and any ugly, horrible days that come with it.
Her wandering mind comes back to the present as she hears Ava’s bare feet climbing the stairs and stepping onto carpet. She sets down two cups and nudges Sara back to her side of the bed with her knee.
Sara lets herself rest in the moment. Nowhere to be, nothing to do besides watch as she reaches for her book and starts reading. It’s barely light out, the world is quiet, and Ava is so, so beautiful. Her hair is still damp and unbrushed from their hasty shower the night before, but still manages to fall in a way that makes Sara want to tangle her hands in it and kiss her senseless. She watches Ava’s lips twitch into a hint of a smile as her eyes scan the pages.
Mona had harassed Ava into reading Harry Potter and she’s grudgingly enjoying it. The copy she’s holding was Sara’s when she was young, the cover worn and margins covered in doodled words and shapes that Sara can see from where she lays. She always absently drew in her books as a kid, never able to focus otherwise. Laurel hated it, which only made Sara do it more.
She blinks against unexpected hot tears that burn the backs of her eyes. When she and Laurel were younger and occasionally let themselves giggle and daydream about their futures, it always assumed a husband for each of them. As she got older and found herself slipping away with a girl here or there at a high school party to share a bit of drunken intimacy, she told herself it was just for fun, just something everyone experiments with when they’re that age.
She prioritized the longing she felt toward boys over what she felt toward girls, because what else was she supposed to do? She’d heard the charitable but distant way her family talked about the children of the occasional acquaintance—
Oh, the Sampsons down the street said their girl is going through one of those bisexual phases… god bless them for taking it so well.
The Johnsons’ daughter cut her hair short and brought home her little girlfriend for Thanksgiving…but hey, people should be able to do what they want, right? None of my business, I guess.
She tried not to let it bother her but suffered bouts of desperate sadness at the thought of falling in love by chance with someone her family might not know how to embrace.
All of that seems so far away now, laying there with Ava, living—to some extent—the most well adjusted life her family could have ever imagined for their wild daughter.
She tries to burn the sight of Ava holding her old book into her mind and send it back through time and space to her younger self.
Don’t worry, kid, she’s more than you could imagine, and they would have ended up liking her better than they like you.
The thought makes her smile and she moves closer, pulling Ava’s robe away and kissing the side of her thigh. She grimaces at a sizable bruise that must have come from their mission the prior day—it had been fairly uneventful but left the team tired, overheated and irritable.
“Hi.”
“Morning,” Ava responds, reaching to move Sara’s hair off her face and smiling down at her.
“If Ray still wants us all to go hiking today after yesterday, I’m going to put him in the jump ship and leave him in the Stone Age.”
Ava breathes out a laugh and slides down until their faces are close together.
“I support that.” She kisses the tip of Sara’s nose and then rubs her own against it.
Sara feels her whole face break into a smile and presses her lips to Ava’s a few times, and then a few times more just because she can, before she tucks herself against Ava’s chest. The drizzle outside picks up to a steady rain again, and they nestle in closer to each other, an unspoken agreement that they aren't going anywhere today.
Sara takes her time breathing in and then back out. It took her so long to learn how to breathe again, but here she is, somewhere close to healthy, and right in the middle of happy. Happier than she ever thought she would manage. In a minute she’ll sit up and drink her coffee and maybe even get up to make breakfast, but first, she turns her mind back to an earlier version of herself one more time and thinks, with Ava’s warm breath against her hair and a lump of emotion in her throat…
You have nothing to worry about.