Apologies it has taken so heckin’ long to answer this! (Like, literally, months). In the meantime I have started THREE different aus as an answer to this prompt (that I will finish, someday, I swear!) and accidentally deleted the third try, which I actually liked! So thank you so much for bearing with me, and HAPPY VALENTINES DAY!!!!
Based mostly off of Elementary
Bee Mine
He finds her where he normally does when she disappears randomly at an off hour: on the roof, among her bees. Black puffer vest and red fair isle sweater, chunks of hair whipping around her face in the weak morning light and ice-touched air. As always with her, a kind of a chaotic peace, or a peaceful chaos.
When she sees him, her eyes widen for a moment, but she doesn’t startle, not around the bees. (They smell fear, she told him the first time he found her up here, back in his days of official sober companionship, where he wasn’t sure if she was joking or not.) He holds up his steaming cup of coffee and sits down on the overturned crate next to her, careful to check first for stray bees or pools of honey.
He blows on his coffee- too hot still to drink, but the steam condenses damply around his lips. Beyond the roof of the brownstone, beyond Brooklyn, Manhattan rises, the entire cityscape pollution smudged and gold tinged. The roaring symphony of democracy and greed, virtue and corruption, oppression and liberation, but mainly the people, people caught between the old land and the new, people trying to live out their daily lives, coming and going and buzzing along like the bees in Rey’s hives. He loves this city. He abhors it for the things that happen within. It’s etched in his soul, now, and he could never go back.
It’s a part of her now, too.
She gratefully accepts the mug of tea he holds out to her, and they sit in companionable silence for a while, the movements of the various bees, kinds of bees, meaning all sorts of things to Rey, though to him just a blur of yellow from which he tries not to get stung.
“I don’t believe I’ve every properly thanked you enough.” It’s always been a puzzle to her, the English language, that when you actually need to use them the phrases I’m Sorry and Thank You are not ever nearly enough.
“You don’t need to. He came for both of us.”
“Yes, but you took Ren down.”
Kylo Ren. Benjamin Solo. The Man. One and the same, some kind of infernal trinity, and it still makes her hands tremble to think of it. Only Benjamin Solo had never actually existed, and that’s what hurts the deepest.
“I’ve made a decision.” He studies the cracks in the mug, his fingernails, the stitching on his cuffs, all of which have suddenly become intently interesting.
She nods. Salvation or ultimatum. One or the other. Since when has someone else choice mattered so very much to her?
“I want to stay. With you. Solving crimes. Roommates.”
She hears it, and immediately it’s relief, celebration. Joy, even.
“Room mates. The brownstone was empty without you.”
She holds out her hand, and he shakes it, a proper business deal.
“I look forward to the continuation of our partnership.”
“No need to be so formal, Doctor.” She smiles, laughs, bites her lip, and he has to smile and laugh too, because this is them, the doctor and the detective, the lost and the found, one Finn, one Rey, the way it was always meant to be. “I’ve changed. For the better.”
He nods. He’s seen it, he know just how much.
“And the thing that is different about me, empirically speaking, is you.”
“It was my j-”
“Not as a sober companion. As a friend.”
A friend. Such a simple word. A child’s word, a playground word. Rey remembers, early in her studies of forensic linguistics, coming across the notion that the English vocabulary evolved contains both Anglo-Saxon and Old French, with an official, “proper,” French word for something, and an ordinary, vernacular Anglo-Saxon word for it as well. Enquire, ask. Pensive, thinking. Verdant, green. Venison, dear.
Acquaintance, friend.
In her life, Rey has had many acquaintances, and very, very few friends.
She digs up a stack of honey- streaked letters and hands it to Finn, along with a small wooden box, a carefully mounted dried bee with outstretched wings perched inside, under glass, like a jewel.
“Say hello to Euglassia finona.”
It takes a second for him to process.
“This is a bee-”
“-a species of bee-”
“-named after me?”
She’s smiling so hard she can barely answer. And he doesn’t really know how to answer himself.
“Generations of melittology students will have to study the fascinating and unusual mating habits of Euglassia fin-”
He hugs her before she can finish off with the fascinating and unusual mating habits of Euglassia finona. Or that technically, Euglassia finona should be impossible, from the apiological standpoint, the result of Osmia avosetta from Rey’s rooftop hives mating with another kind of bee, even though Osmia avosetta is it’s own species.
But she doesn’t tell him all that. Because sometimes impossible things are meant to be.
L.J.'s Obsessions 