Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

“Bless me father for I have sinned. It’s been twenty-four years since my last confession.”

The weight of Ashe’s badge hung heavy around her neck. Sat like a rock against her chest. Threatened to crack her ribs open and work its way inside her where the guilt lived. She lifted a trembling hand to tuck it in between the buttons of her shirt so the light of the prayer candles outside the confessional booth wouldn't glint against the metal.

“What are your sins, my child?”

His voice was calm and gentle. Ashe couldn't see him through the grates of the confessional. Her palms were sweating so badly she had to wipe them on her knees, and speaking was the last thing she felt capable of doing.

“I'm sorry, I-” Ashe trailed off. She'd never heard her own voice sound so unsure. So shaken.

“Don't be scared, my child,” the priest encouraged softly in the darkness. “Nothing is more powerful than God.”

Funny. Ashe had always thought priests weren't allowed to lie.

She lifted herself from her knees and silently stepped through the curtain into the vast, empty darkness of the church. She left the rosary she'd bought at a convenience store in one of the pews on her way to the prayer candles flickering away against one of the far walls.

Ashe hadn't even fully un-crumpled the dollar she'd dug out of her pocket meant for the little donation slot beneath the candles when-

“You dropped something, Chérie. I should've known you were a good Catholic girl. All the signs were there.”

Ashe stopped believing in God a long time ago. But, she wondered as she slowly reached for the hand extending her dime-store rosary to her, if God and the devil were really so different. She wondered who would war for her soul with more fervor.

“I didn't tell him anything,” Ashe whispered to the candles she'd been staring at. She didn't think she could stand the sight of Amélie in a church. “Leave him alone.”

Amélie tsk’d. “I know you didn't, Detective. I am only proud of you for trying.”

When Ashe finally couldn't take it anymore - when she finally had to turn around and look - like one might at a car crash or a house fire - she half-expected to see the mask. The tight, dark clothes and the dark lipstick. She expected to see the perfect killer. But it was just Amélie. Amélie, in a long, dark coat with her hair pulled back and a soft smile on her face.

She looked like an angel.

Like she belonged in some High Renaissance painting the way the rosary was dangling from her hand and the moonlight was illuminating the stained glass behind her.

Ashe’s mouth was unbearably dry as she took the rosary from Amélie and slipped it into the front pocket of her leather jacket. Amélie watched with the smile still curling the corners of her lips. Her eyes were so warm. Like honey and earth as they glinted at her softly.

“What are you doing here?” Ashe asked - her voice barely audible.

“I came to say goodbye, Detective.”

“You call me that like it means anything anymore,” Ashe scoffed with a shake of her head as she averted her gaze. She would never understand how looking at Amélie was like trying to look into the sun for as dark as she was. For as rotten as she was. “...Where are you going?”

“Somewhere else,” Amélie said, reaching out towards the chain hanging around Ashe’s neck so she could guide the badge out from underneath her shirt past the buttons she’d slipped it through in the confessional. Amélie touched the glinting metal with her fingertips - taking special care as she traced the last name emblazoned on the front of the crest. Caledonia. “Elizabeth.”

“I’m not going, Brig,” Ashe’s voice was still raspy from the cigarette she’d just flicked into the street beside the sidewalk. She refused to look at her trainee. Pointedly. “I’m not.”

She wasn’t in the mood for the disappointment on the young woman’s face.

“If you don’t go,” Brigitte said quietly after taking a step closer. Close enough that she was now holding the tickets she’d scored just underneath Ashe’s nose. “Captain O’Deorain will want to go, and that’ll be a whole thing. A whole thing that you definitely don’t want me to go through, right?”

“You two should bond,” Ashe said, already pulling an unopened pack of cigarettes from the inner pocket of her jacket. A few months ago, Brig would’ve looked dismayed. Now, she just hated inwardly. “It might do her some good.”

“You’re telling me you’re going to shrug off a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity?” Brig asked, sounding serious enough, now, that Ashe finally glanced at her as she flicked her zippo open and lit the wick in one fluid motion that Brigitte refused to find impressive, anymore.

“What is so once-in-a-lifetime about it, exactly?” Ashe asked after dragging in a deep inhale of the Virginia Slim she’d just lit. The yellow light of the streetlamp over them caught the smoke and obscured some of Brigitte’s incredulity. Enough of it got through, though. Brigitte was nothing if not expressive.

Brigitte sighed heavily and gestured down the street from the precinct towards a rather large, rather brightly illuminated billboard. Ashe’s ruddy red eyes followed the motion of Brigitte’s hand and she squinted at the name emblazoned along the bottom edge beneath the bowed figure of a dancer. Typical white get-up save the feathers crowning her bowed head. And then, even as Ashe watched, the image shifted slowly. The dark-haired dancer went from looking demurely towards the busy street below into Ashe’s very soul. The white feathers changed to black. The white frills and lace did the same.

Ashe found the change so unsettling she looked away. She really ought to start paying more attention. She’d never even noticed the billboard before. Or perhaps it was best to not pay any attention at all in this city.

“You have no idea who that is, do you?” Brigitte asked with a wrinkle between her brows.

“Amélie Guillard,” Ashe observed dryly, repeating the name she’d only just read. “She looks creepy.”

A cab drove by and nearly drenched them both. It might have, too, had Ashe not held out an arm to guide her young partner into taking a step further back onto the sidewalk.

“You’re…,” Brigitte trailed off.

“Say it,” Ashe dared with a lift of her brow and a puff of cigarette smoke.

“I-” Brigitte rolled her eyes and looked away. “She’s possibly the most famous dancer to ever dance the role, and she’s only going to be in the country for six months. It’s not ‘Gill-erd’, by the way. It’s ‘Gee-yar’. I stayed up all night to get these tickets. A year ago.”

“A year ago,” Ashe said as she narrowed her eyes in thought. “So the second ticket was for…”

Brigitte’s expression shifted into something more somber.

“I’ll find someone to buy the other ticket off me,” Brigitte offered quietly as she slipped them both back into her bag. “It’s cool.”

“I’ll go,” Ashe said rather suddenly.

Ashe couldn’t think of the last time she’d regretted something so much as she did this moment of her life. She didn’t fit in here in her black slacks and suspenders with her usual leather coat on over her shirt. She didn’t fit in here with her slicked-back white hair and her mall-purchased makeup. There were celebrities here. Investors. Bankers.

And Ashe. Waiting for Brigitte in the cold, light drizzle of rain with her sharp eyes passing swiftly over every person that walked past her. She couldn’t really hear their conversations over the sound of the fountain in the center of the square, and she considered that a blessing.

“You look stressed,” Brigitte announced from behind her. Ashe wasn’t so easy to startle, though, so she turned slowly to face her partner with a feigned smile.

“Not stressed at all. Love big gatherings of people who deserve to be eaten. They’re one of my favorite things.”

Brigitte rolled her eyes and passed Ashe her ticket before quickly taking her arm and leading towards the entryway of Koch Center. As they walked, Ashe’s attention shifted upward towards the banners hanging in the multi-story windows that lined the building.

‘Prima Ballerina Amélie Guillard’, they read. The banners alternated between an angelic, white-clad woman and a rather dark-looking figure. It was shocking to Ashe that they could be the same person.

Ashe walked close to Brigitte. That had taken her a little getting used to. Ashe was so cock-sure and unaffected that it had taken Brigitte at least a few months to realize she was actually a ball of nerves in crowded places. She’d never mentioned it, though. SHe just tried to make herself as available as possible for comfort’s sake. Besides, she was all too aware she’d dragged Ashe here. The last thing she wanted was to make her regret it.

“Have you ever been to Koch theater?” Brigitte asked, and Ashe shook her head and craned it around looking for a bar at the same time, somehow.

“Are you…do you need something?” Brigitte continued, sounding as concerned and confused as she looked.

“Like a shot. Like one shot, that’s all,” Ashe responded. “And then I’m good.”

“Will you stay here?” Brigitte asked, surprised at how easily Ashe was allowing herself to be mollified tonight. “Like right here? I’ll never find you in this crowd if you wander off somewhere.”

“I can’t believe you think I’d move,” Ashe drawled, leaning against the nearest wall with her hands in the pocket of her jacket despite how out of place it made her look.

Brigitte narrowed her eyes, but just for a moment before she darted off to find anything that might help Ashe settle down and at least try and enjoy herself. In the end, it was a shot of bourbon. Too rich for Ashe’s tastes, Brigitte could tell, but she was trying too hard to be nice to say something that might hurt Brigitte’s feelings.

That wasn’t lost on Brigitte at all, it was just that she needed to get them to their seats. The crowds in the huge lobby were already filing towards the theater, and Brigitte could hear some pre-show music playing.

Ashe ignored the young man at the door handing out playbooks, and Brigitte took one for both of them with an apologetic smile.

“I don’t know why I walked in ahead of you,” Ashe muttered as she looked around at all the red seats illuminated by a huge golden light fixture above them. Three stories of balcony seats. The ceiling was ridiculously high. Opulent. This place was opulent. And Ashe should’ve been irritated, but she wasn’t. It made her feel small and excited like she was some sort of child and- ah. There it was. The irritation.

“We’re in the front row,” Brigitte said, once again wrapping a hand around Ashe’s upper arm through her jacket and walking her towards their seats.

“How’d you manage that, by the way?” Ashe asked with a lift of one of her eyebrows in Brigitte’s direction. “This seems…pricey.”

“Patience,” Brigitte responded simply with a quiet laugh, and Ashe quickly folded down her seat at Brigitte’s side and lowered herself into it. They were right in front of the band pit, eye-level with the floor of the stage. Ashe couldn’t help but think that there were probably more than a few ballet-loving fans out in the world who would’ve killed for this seat that she was most definitely going to waste. “How are you, by the way? Are you still marginally okay with this?”

“I’m marginally okay, definitely,” Ashe tried to reassure her with a quick smile in her direction. “I just…am not entirely sure I’m going to have any clue what’s happening, you know?”

“You don’t have to know what’s happening. It’s about the emotion.”

“Right,” Ashe agreed with a nod as she turned her attention back to the stage. She couldn’t imagine what this could possibly make her feel, so she just took Brigitte’s word for it for the time being. And besides, she was already here. Might as well make the best of it.

Ashe looked around her as the lights went low and every phone screen in the theatre simultaneously dimmed. She quickly dimmed her own and slid it inside her inside jacket pocket. It was strange - being in a room so incredibly large with so very many people and so much silence.

And then, the lights went up and the show began. It was everything Ashe suspected it might be. Frilly costumes and no dialogue. Just strings and dramatic gestures and monotonous lighting.

Until it wasn’t that any longer. Until the lighting shifted into blues and whites and washed the audience in faux-moonlight. Until the woman from the billboards made her presence known with such gentle, graceful force it nearly left her shaking.

Ashe stared, lips parted, at the sheer control the woman displayed over her every movement. If the other dancers had been good, they now looked like amateurs. Ashe wondered if this was what ballet really was. If this was what they wrote about in poems and talked about in music class.

Ashe didn’t blame the young man for falling for her, whoever this was. Odette, the Swan Queen, she wasn’t sure. Her google searches hadn’t been that extensive. All she knew was that this was Amélie Guillard, and if she hadn’t understood what the ‘prima’ in ‘prima ballerina’ meant before, she understood, now.

She began to get the gist of it when the queen had to leave her suitor. Her heart broke for him.

Ashe shifted in her seat when the lights went dark so the company could prepare for the next act, and she glanced in Brigitte’s direction quickly. Brigitte only offered her an encouraging smile and then glanced down at her playbook.

Odile.

Ashe remembered the little words in the wiki she’d only just been glancing at a few hours ago. Odile, the dark woman on half the banners outside. The one with terrifyingly piercing eyes. The one who looked nothing like the Swan Queen, and yet, was the same.

Amélie was like another person, entirely. Even the way she walked had changed subtly. Different muscles caught the stage lights. Her shoulders were held at a different cant. Further back. Broader, somehow. And Ashe could’ve sworn those piercing eyes caught her own just before the act ended. She could’ve sworn.

Ashe felt breathless when the lights went dark yet again.

“Last act,” Brigitte whispered so quietly Ashe almost didn’t hear her over the strange rushing in her ears. “Thanks for behaving.”

Behaving?

How could she possibly have done anything but sit there helplessly?

The blue wash of light returned and Ashe wasn’t sure she was ready for whatever was coming. She didn’t remember this part. Maybe her alarm to get ready had gone off. Maybe she’d gotten bored.

How did it end?

How did it end?

Ashe watched helplessly as the lovers perished together. She sat in stunned silence as their souls were reunited. She swallowed thickly around the lump in her throat as the curtain closed and the audience began clapping. The clapping felt like gunshots. The darkness felt eternal until the house lights came up.

“Are you crying?” Brigitte asked in an amused whisper into her ear. Ashe found the whisper strangely jarring.

“No,” Ashe hissed in response as the curtain began opening again. Various dancers took their bows as Ashe’s eyes scanned the stage rapidly only to find Amélie Guillard not present. Not present, at least, until the curtain began to close very slowly until there was only a slit of space left between the two giant golden sections of material.

Ashe found herself on her feet with the rest of the audience without remembering having stood up. The applause was thunderous as the Swan Queen smiled and took her bow. The eyes were soft, not piercing like those of Odile. The smile was gracious and genuine. The bow was graceful and flawless.

Amélie held her bow longer than the other dancers had and yet, it didn’t seem long enough when she turned and left the stage.

Ashe had never felt so strangely bereft in her life.

People were already filing out of the hall when Brigitte prodded her in the stomach with something. The playbook, Ashe recognized as she took it from her.

“We can hang around and see if one of the crew will take this and have her autograph it if you want,” Brigitte teased good-naturedly.

“That’s ridiculous,” Ashe said a little too quickly.

“Not really,” Brigitte countered with a shrug. “Besides, I’d like to have one, too, if a miracle happens and someone agrees to this. Too bad you didn’t wear your badge. Might have done us some good.”

“I’m not like that, Brig,” Ashe said, pressing her mouth into a flat line as she quickly wiped under her eyes before her liner could run and betray her further.

“I know, God,” Brigitte muttered. “Calm down. I’m sorry you had a life-altering ballet experience tonight, but I’m just trying to-”

“I’m sorry,” Ashe said quickly before she sighed. “I’m just…just do the thing with the autograph. I’m gonna run to the restroom. I’ll meet you at the doors.”

Brigitte seemed satisfied enough and Ashe made herself scarce. Even after she took a moment to fix her hair and her makeup, the wait at those doors seemed like years instead of minutes. And then, even longer before Brigitte finally rounded the corner Ashe had been peering at for a good fifteen minutes now.

“You missed her,” Brigitte announced somberly. “She came out and signed it, herself. Asked me for your number but I wasn’t sure you’d want her to have it.”

Ashe stared at Brigitte numbly and turned away from her without saying anything.

“I go to a two-hour-long ballet with you and all you can do is tease me afterward,” Ashe grumbled after Brigitte jogged to catch up to her.

“I just felt like I should lighten the mood,” Brigitte said with a breathless laugh. “Don’t be mad at me.”

“I’m not,” Ashe sighed as she slowed down so Brigitte could more comfortably match her pace. Ashe was thinner and shorter, but Brigitte had a lot more mass to move. She was an unstoppable force, really. Ashe was just more…squirelly. “I think I’m just tired, honestly. Haven’t been sleeping well, lately.”

Brigitte watched the lights of passing cars wash Ashe’s already pale face further out and then looked down at her Uber app. “Guessing dinner is out of the question, then?”

“Not tonight,” Ashe said, sounding at least a little sympathetic and vaguely apologetic. “Maybe next weekend.”

“Just get some rest,” Brigitte said, reaching out to pat Ashe on the shoulder. “My cab’s here. Want a ride?”

“I’m good,” Ashe said, finally managing a smile that was enough to reassure Brigitte. It wasn’t like they wouldn’t see each other in the morning, after all. And Brigitte would look like a ray of sunshine carrying a tray of coffee like she always did while Ashe was still nursing a very likely hangover. Because she couldn’t imagine unpacking her feelings regarding ballet without at least a little whiskey. “See you in the morning.”

“Iced venti mocha with a white chocolate drizzle, right?” Brigitte asked, sounding entirely too serious for Ashe’s liking. Her sarcasm had improved greatly over the past months. She was going to start giving Ashe a run for her money soon.

“Brigitte…”

“Black, no cream, no sugar,” Brigitte said with a roll of her eyes. “Because you will never allow yourself to experience any real joy in life.”

“Exactly,” Ashe responded with a lift of her brow that read like a challenge.

Brigitte smiled fondly and turned to jog towards her waiting cab.

“A double,” Ashe said, not even looking at the man who was currently standing in front of her. She didn’t need to. It wasn’t like he didn’t serve her almost every night. He knew what she wanted. Jack, dry. Two fingers. She was an easy customer and she tipped well. He didn’t pry, and she didn’t need anyone to talk to.

He sat a triple down in front of her and walked away once again polishing the glass he’d been working on since she sat down. If she’d been anyone else he’d have commented on her hair or her makeup. Told her she looked nice tonight. But not her. And that was fine with him.

Ashe was on her second glass when the bar counter began to get a little crowded for her tastes, and she lifted a finger to the man who was already heading in her direction - all too familiar with her little peculiarities.

“Want one to take to your table?” He asked, already reaching for a glass despite the fact that the one she was currently nursing was still more than half full from where he’d filled it only moments ago.

“Thanks,” She said simply, and he placed another glass down in front of her. Before the bottom of it even hit the polished wood of the bar, she was slipping from her seat as people began crowding around behind her.

The feeling of crawling skin slowly started subsiding as she removed herself from the gathering crowd and went immediately for the preferred table of her little bar. A table in the corner - low lighting, no other tables particularly nearby. Too far away for anyone to come pester her about extra chairs or a place to sit.

Her eyes almost rolled out of her head when, not twenty minutes later, someone approached with a glass in each hand. A nondescript woman. Pretty, though, from what Ashe could tell in the incredibly dim lighting.

“How do you Americans say it?” A heavily-accented voice asked. “Is this seat taken?” A graceful gesture towards the booth across from her own. A flash of warm brown eyes. A smile. Soft. Casual.

“It’s very much not taken,” Ashe said in a drawl that had a little too much of her old Southern accent in it for her own liking. Damned whiskey. “If you’d like to take it, feel free.”

The woman sat down and the hanging lamp above her table finally illuminated her features. Everything about her that had been unassuming as she’d approached was anything but now. The subtle, upward curve of her nose. The sharp yet delicate angle of her jaw. And her eyes. Her fucking eyes. Ashe had never seen brown eyes so strangely mercurial.

“You know who I am,” She said. “Might I know who you are, after you watched me so closely tonight?”

“Sorry,” Ashe said with a little laugh.

“No need for apologies,” Amélie brushed her off gently and placed the glass of amber liquid she’d carried with her beside Ashe’s now-empty one. “A drink for a name? Is that fair?”

“Name’s Ashe. And you’re Amélie Guillard.”

Amélie’s lips curled into a smile that Ashe found alarmingly, well…disarming. She was so god damned pretty.

Amélie held out her gloved hand and Ashe took it into her own bare one and gave it a gentle squeeze.

“Enchenté,” Amélie said before slipping her hand free to wrap around her own drink. Some cocktail Ashe didn’t recognize. “Did you enjoy the show?”

“I did,” Ashe said, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been more truthful. “I don’t mean anything by this, but…what are you doing in a place like this? With no security? Do you even have a driver?”

“Did you recognize me when I came to your table?” Amélie asked as she lifted her glass to her lips so she could take a sip. She looked at it with distaste and placed it back down on the table.

Ashe thought hard about the implications of that question and then nodded with both her brows raised. “Fair enough.”

“I’m my own woman, and I grow bored at times. I don’t like to feel caged. If I need a driver, a driver will collect me in no time.”

“That’s good to know, at least,” Ashe said, and Amélie began removing her gloves slowly.

“I’ve never been to a ballet,” Ashe admitted as Amélie began shrugging off her coat. “Let me help you with that.”

Ashe slid from her seat quickly and Amélie smiled all the while as Ashe guided her sleeves from her arms and folded her coat for her before passing it back to her.

“How kind,” Amélie observed, leaning against the table slightly so that the space between them was even smaller once Ashe sat back down. “This must be the Southern hospitality I’ve heard of that this place is so famous for.”

“We’re in New York,” Ashe said, but it sounded more like a question than a correction.

“We are, and I’m no more from New York than you are,” Amélie countered so easily Ashe found herself suddenly at a loss for words. A problem she wasn’t used to dealing with when it came to women she met in bars. But then, how often did she meet famous ballerinas in bars?

“Fair enough,” Ashe sighed. “I don’t usually sound like this, for what it’s worth.”

“I like it,” Amélie said easily without even giving Ashe a moment to recover. Her eyes danced at Ashe in the yellow light that hung above them. Mischief. Intrigue.

Ashe had always been so good at reading people, but reading Amélie was like reading everything and nothing all at once.

“When did you start dancing?” Ashe asked, giving up on the reading for now. It was just a drink after all. With a woman on half the billboards in New York City.

“When I was four,” Amélie said, toying with the cherry stem protruding from her drink. “I went en pointe at nine.”

Amélie cut her eyes almost slyly in Ashe’s direction. “‘En pointe’ is dancing on one’s toes.”

“Right,” Ashe said as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. “What made you want to be a dancer?” Ashe asked as she placed her empty glass down between herself and the bartender across the way. “You seem so perfectly suited. How could you have known?”

“Pierina Legnani,” Amélie said easily. “I wanted to be better than Pierina Legnani.”

“I don’t know who that is,” Ashe admitted, but with no apprehension. Amélie couldn’t help but respect that.

She smiled faintly and looked towards the bartop. “Pierina Legnani was the first Prima Ballerina Assoluta. It’s a title given very, very rarely to dancers considered the very best. Better, even, than the very best.” Amélie swirled her straw around in her glass and looked at it with a fair amount of disinterest for a moment before continuing. “The role I danced tonight, Odette and Odile…all dancers, when dancing that part, are judged against Legnani. She successfully completed 32 fouettes, a kind of one-footed turn, in one of her performances.”

“I remember,” Ashe encouraged quietly. “From the show tonight.”

Amélie’s eyes flashed to meet Ashe’s. Gauged how genuine her interest was.

“Do you know how many I did?”

“I wasn’t counting,” Ashe admitted. “I’ll be honest with you, I wasn’t entirely sure what I was looking at. All I know is that it was beautiful.”

Amélie smiled softly again and looked away.

“Thirty-four,” Amélie said quietly. “Not my best night.”

“Thirty-four,” Ashe repeated with a furrow between her brows. “So you regularly do more of these turns than…-”

“A woman known widely as the best dancer ever to live?” Amélie finished her question for her and regarded her calmly. “Yes.”

Ashe nodded her vague understanding and tossed back another sip of her drink. “I’ve never been to a ballet.”

Ashe suddenly hated that she’d admitted that, but the words had come unbidden. Like some sort of spell had befallen her. Maybe that evil sorcerer had followed Amélie here from the theater.

“I’m glad you chose this one,” Amélie said rather sweetly. “Some of them can be so boring.”

“Is it your favorite?” Ashe asked. “Favorite role, I mean.”

“Very much so,” Amélie said, suddenly reaching out a hand to touch the watch on Ashe’s wrist. “This is a lovely piece. Where is it from?”

“My father,” Ashe explained, her voice going a little quiet as she watched the way Amélie’s fingertips were dancing along the brown leather band to graze the skin of her wrist. “I don’t really know much about it.”

“Pequignet,” Amélie observed as she finally let her hand fall away. “I don’t even know that you can get them in America anymore.”

“Sounds so much better when you say it,” Ashe observed with a laugh as she put her hand back down on the table.

“And how would you say it?” Amélie asked with a little grin.

Perfect teeth. Of course.

“Penguin-net, probably,” Ashe said with a casual shrug, and Amélie’s nose wrinkled faintly as her grin broadened. “Don’t make fun of me.”

“I wouldn’t,” Amélie reassured her. “French is a difficult language, but so is yours. And I wouldn’t try to say the word you just said if you paid me. Besides, I find you charming.”

Ashe was quiet for a beat or two after that. She wasn’t sure if it was the whiskey or what, but her face felt hot. And Amélie was still smiling at her. Softly, now. It felt so intimate considering they were in a bar full of people.

“I smoke,” Ashe said rather suddenly. “I think I could use one right now.”

“I’ll stand with you,” Amélie offered leaving her largely untouched drink on the table as she reached for her gloves and began putting them on. “I might even have one.”

Ashe knew Amélie had seen the redness in her cheeks. Probably her ears, too. She wondered if it was by the grace of god or Amélie’s likely well-bred tact that she didn’t mention it.

“Here,” Ashe said as she reached for Amélie’s coat and held it open for her. Just a simple black wool pea coat, but cut to fit her so well. And the wool was so soft in Ashe’s hands as Amélie slid her arms into it.

“Merci,” Amélie said.

“No problem,” Ashe murmured - her voice low and soft. Smooth.

Amélie found the way she slipped in and out of her easy confidence endlessly amusing even as they walked out of the bar into the cold night air.

“Do you want my jacket?” Ashe asked as she pulled her pack of slims out of her coat along with her zippo.

“I’m fine,” Amélie said, taking the cigarette that was offered to her and watching Ashe with no small amount of interest. “The offer was kind.”

“I’d normally do some sort of ridiculous trick with this thing to try and impress you,” Ashe said as she took out a cigarette for herself and tucked her pack away again. “But I’m pretty sure it’d be disastrous.”

“I’d like to see a trick,” Amélie said, leaning her shoulder against the window of the bar and twirling her cigarette in her fingertips as she waited. “I’m not as hard to impress as you might think.”

Ashe cleared her throat and held her fingers on the lid and the base of her zippo, tightening her grip until it suddenly popped open and, in the same moment, she snapped her fingers and turned the gear that shot the spark that lit the wick. She was holding it up for Amélie to use even as Amélie leaned in - seemingly never having lost faith.

“You see,” Amélie said in an exhale of smoke. “Are you always so good under pressure?”

“I can be,” Ashe said. “Not always. You probably can’t relate to that.”

“I can,” Amélie lied easily, taking another drag of her cigarette as Ashe leaned against the window, herself.

A group of people bustled by, then, cursing and drowning out anything else they might have had to say to one another. Amélie’s attention wandered after that. To the cars passing by and the bright city lights, and Ashe watched them dance in her eyes.

She pulled a card from her jacket pocket and held it out to Amélie just as she flicked her cigarette into the gutter.

“If you ever need anything,” Ashe said as Amélie took the card and examined it. She looked over it silently for a while. “While you’re in the city, I mean.”

“More hospitality,” Amélie said wryly as she tucked the card away in her pocket. “I’ll be going to my hotel now.”

A car pulled up at the sidewalk, then. Ashe hadn’t even seen her on her phone. She couldn’t help but wonder for a moment if Amélie communicated with her people by way of mind-link.

Ashe followed her to the car and leaned in to open the door for her even as the darkly-clad driver got out to do just the same. Amélie didn’t even look at him. She only had eyes for Ashe as she slid into the plush, warm interior and drew her coat into her lap so it wouldn’t be shut in the door.

Ashe just nodded at her again before she shut the door and immediately regretted an infinite amount of things she had or hadn’t done over the course of the past hour. Maybe she shouldn’t have given her the card. Maybe she should’ve-

Her attention dropped to the phone she’d just pulled out of her pocket to call a cab of her own as a text notification caused it to buzz in her hand.

Thank you for your company, Detective.