Chapter Text
They arrive at Le Bistro du Rhône via car, a twenty minute ride from the Guillard Villa with little to no delay of traffic. Lena had practically had her eyes glued to the windows the entire ride, taking in every inch of Annecy that she could, marveling in its subtle beauty. There was so much left for her to see (Amélie was quite adamant in showing her Vieille Ville as soon as possible), but Lena was positive that if she could, she’d marry Annecy in a heartbeat.
The restaurant itself, at first glance, seems a considerably fancy place to go to for lunch; it's waiters and waitresses dressed in black slacks and white blouses and ties around their necks. The weather is beautiful, sunny and warm, so the four take a table in the small courtyard outside and Lena, once given a menu she has to have Amélie translate for her, is pleasantly surprised to see that the food and drinks aren’t nearly as expensive as she originally expected them to be.
She ends up sitting directly across from Mr. Guillard, Amélie seated off to her right in a purple blouse and her black pencil skirt. Despite her father’s initial cordiality, Lena feels as if his sharp gaze is carefully scrutinizing and picking apart her every move.
Jean-Luc, their young plump-faced waiter with a nervous smile, speaks quickly. Too quickly for Lena to possibly grasp any familiar word in French that she may have known. Her cheeks and ears flush red in embarrassment when he turns to her after everyone else has already ordered, and she sends a panicked glance in Amélie’s direction. “Uh…” She gapes dumbly, struggling to find the words. She had pointed out what she wanted earlier, but the formalities of ordering had all but erased from her memory, and Amélie had insisted she leave her pocket dictionary at home under the assurance that they would spare her the trouble and translate for her.
Amélie’s lips lift into a small smirk, not degrading by any means, before she turns to address the waiter to order for her. Jean-Luc blushes like mad under her stare, Adam's apple bobbing; Lena can hardly blame the poor lad. “Elle aura ce que je vais avoir,” Amélie says, voice melodic, and Jean-Luc nods hastily before scampering to the kitchen.
Lena swears up and down she sees him subtly adjust his pants as he’s leaving, but keeps that to herself.
Poor lad indeed.
“Thanks, love,” Lena murmurs, still a bit pink in the face. Her hand finds Amélie’s beneath the table, resting over Amélie’s thigh, and she pressed into her palm. “Don’t know what I’d do without ya!”
“Carry a French dictionary in your pocket everywhere you go,” Amélie teases in that deadpan way she always did, and intertwined their fingers together. She reaches for her raspberry cooler with her free hand, swirling the liquid a bit in her glass before taking a small sip.
“So, Lena,” Mr. Guillard begins, sitting tall. “What is it you do for a living?”
Ah, so begins the interrogation, Lena thinks. Winston had told her to prepare for that. “Well, I work at the Control Tower at the Gibraltar International Airport!” Lena explains. “I direct the movement of aircraft and other traffic and also give clearance for takeoff and landing.”
Alya, as pleasant as ever, speaks in place of her husband. “You have an interest in planes?”
“That's right! There’s nothing quite like flying.” Lena beams, radiating with warmth. Despite her justifiable hesitance toward flying now, she could never truly dispel her passion for aero planes. For a majority of Lena’s childhood and, later, adulthood, planes have been her entire life. Before her father had cut her out of his life after finding out that she liked the girls in her class instead of the boys, he had taught her almost everything she knew about flying once she was old enough to grasp the concept of aerodynamics. “I did a few years as a test pilot in the Royal Air Force before moving to the Gibraltar. Was the youngest pilot to be certified in my class, I was!”
Mr. Guillard inclines his head, his sharp face briefly appearing intrigued. “The Royal Air Force. Impressionnant,” he decides on, and Lena doesn’t miss the approving look he sends in his daughter’s direction. “What has changed?”
The smile on Lena’s face marginally falters. This is how it usually went: she would open her mouth, unable to stop herself from giving away information about herself that she probably shouldn’t, and people would ask questions - draw attention to the big Why? Lena would tell them, and the pity in their eyes was always the same. Suffocating and overwhelmingly bothersome.
With Amélie, telling her had been different. Amélie didn’t ask the unwanted questions, she just listened, and more than anything, she understood what it was like in her own way. People looked at you differently when you told them that something happened to you, or, like in Amélie’s case, if you were sick. It was their social status. The pilot with PTSD and the dancer with heart failure. It was all people ever saw.
“I don’t want pity,” Lena had told her.
“Good,” Amélie responded. “I have none to give.”
She let Lena tell her on her own terms, on her own time, when she was ready. Lena will always be thankful for that.
Now, however, put on the spot, Lena shifts uncomfortably in her seat. Amélie’s fingers press tighter against hers, cold to the touch but reassuring in its actions. Lena hates how much speaking of it still bothered her. It’s been six years. She clears her throat. “I was chosen to be the test pilot for a new prototype called the Slipstream,” she explains, and it surprises her how substantial her voice sounds. “I could bore you for hours goin’ into the mechanics of it, but there was nothin’ like it that we had. Technology is always advancing, ya know?”
Mr. Guillard nods in agreement, but otherwise stays silent. His expression is unreadable. Amélie seems to have gotten a lot of her traits from him.
“You know the risks going in, as a test pilot,” Lena continues. She removes her hand from her girlfriends, settling instead for subconsciously folding her napkin into an indistinguishable figure. Nervous habit. “Sim’s prepare you for crashing, but it still has a way of messing with ya when it happens. Hit my head a bit too hard, RAF gave me an honorable discharge from service.”
Jean-Luc chooses then to arrive with their food, balancing it on two trays in his hands and pointedly glancing away from Amélie’s direction. Lena is glad for the buffer and reaches for her cocktail as he sets down their lunch, taking a generous swig.
When their fresh-faced waiter is gone, Mr. Guillard returns his attention to Lena. “Je suis désolée,” He says.
Lena gave a half-hearted shrug, twirling a glop of pasta around her fork. “Thanks,” she responds. “I do love my work now, though. Nothing compares to flying, but I feel like it’s where I belong.”
“Does it pay well?”
“ Papa ,” Amélie cuts in suddenly, speaking for the first time in a long while. She rolls her eyes. “Enough with the 20 questions.”
Alya uses this as initiative to change the tides of the conversation as her husband smirks and turns to his food. She turns to Lena with a mischievous smile, crows feet around her dark eyes becoming more prominent on her beautiful face. “Lena, chère,” she starts kindly, “has our Amélie ever told you of the time she broke her ankle trying to dance in front of her bedroom mirror?”
“No, she hasn’t,” Lena giggles, turning in her girlfriends direction with a smile. There is, possibly, the promise of murder in Amélie’s eyes, fingers tight around her fork. “But I’d love to hear it!”
They spend their last night abroad in Paris.
Amélie acts as her own personal tour guide, showing Lena her favorite places to go to around the vast city while she lived there at university. Lena is a bit overwhelmed by everything, because there is just so much of it - Amélie was right to have said that Paris was like a whole other world compared to Annecy - but she was always good at keeping up the pace.
She blows Winston’s phone up with more pictures from their trip, and is sure to stop at one of the corner stores to grab him a few souvenirs like she had promised him she would, including a black thermos cup that said J’adore la Lune in white script on the front that she’s sure he would like.
When sunset comes, Amélie treats Lena to a romantic dinner at a quaint restaurant not far from the Eiffel Tower and their hotel. The wine is ridiculously expensive, the food has her tastebuds throwing a party in her mouth, and the way Amélie smiles at her as they clink their glasses together has Lena’s chest filling with this familiar feeling, as if she was on top of the world, right where she was meant to be.
Clothes discard the moment they are back in their hotel room, lips sticky with the remnants of sweet red wine as they meld together, familiar and wet and desperate. Lena’s back hits the mattress as Amélie straddles her hips, in nothing but a pair of lacy underwear. She’s sure that by now, her whole chest and face are flushed bright red.
Amélie’s tongue drags slowly over her lips. She pulls the bottom one between her teeth, and Lena’s mind can’t catch a coherent thought if her life depended on it.
“Bloody hell, love,” Lena breathes. Her hand soothes over the familiar intricacies of the large black and white tattoo over Amélie's thigh, all the way to her hip. “Do you have any idea what you do to me when you look at me like that?”
The wicked grin on Amélie's face suggests that, yes, she knows exactly what she is doing. “I don't know what you are talking about, ma chérie,” Amélie says. She leans forward, and waist long black hair, disheveled and pushed off to one side, falls like a curtain against Lena’s bare shoulder. Their lips touch, fleeting, before Amélie’s head dips into the crook of Lena’s neck - then lower, to her chest, and lower still.
It isn’t the first time they’ve had sex. No, that had been months ago, when they were still in the honeymoon stage of their relationship and practically undressing each other with every chance they had; which, once, Gabriel had accidentally walked in on. The first time they made love Lena had actually cried - not just because she couldn’t believe that she was so lucky to have someone like Amélie, but because it’d been so good that it had literally reduced her to tears.
Embarrassing, yes, but Amélie thought that it was cute. So that had to count for something, at least.
Nothing much about it has changed despite the fact that Lena could, for the most part, control herself enough to not cry every time Amélie did something particularly gratifying. But Amélie has this way of making Lena’s mind draw a complete blank; whether it be from something she was doing or saying or from the look in her eyes, clouded over with lust -
Kind of like she was doing right now, ochre eyes peering up at her from between Lena’s thighs.
Lena’s head throws back into the pillows and she presses her palm over her mouth, muffling the keening noise that drags from her throat. And for a few, blissful moments all there is, is Amélie .
When all is done, Lena is lying in Amélie’s lap, recounting stories of all the better times in the RAF with exuberant hand gestures and exaggeratedly mimicking the voices of her old superiors. Amélie is sitting up, leaning against the wooden frame of the bed, combing through Lena’s hair and listening intensely with the occasional chuckle. And even with the looming thought of the flight home tomorrow, just a few hours away, Lena is a peace.
“You are quite the storyteller, chérie,” Amélie says once Lena is finished. “You have made it sound like some grand adventure.”
“It was an adventure, love!” Lena quips, nose crinkling with the force of her smile. She closes her eyes, captivated by the way Amélie’s fingers work through her hair. She could probably fall asleep at any moment. “Just like this whole week was. I had a lovely time, you know. Thank you for this.”
Amélie’s smile is close-lipped, but genuine. “Thank you for coming with me.”
They fall into comfortable silence, listening to the sounds of the city and each other’s breathing as Amélie’s fingers rake through the short spikes of Lena’s hair, fingernails soothingly dragging over her scalp. Lena hears her draw in a soft breath through parted lips before she speaks again, voice a murmur. “Je t’aime, Lena.”
Lena opens her eyes and meets Amélie’s gaze. The older woman was staring down at her fondly, gracing her with a small smile, and warmth spreads through her chest, tinting Lena’s freckled cheeks pink. Amélie, who was far less trusting, who had built a brick wall around her emotions, completely exposing herself by taking initiative to say I love you first. Lena’s heart flutters, the corners of her mouth lifting into a warm smile. “I love you too, Amélie,” she says in kind; she means every word, and finally saying it aloud is like a weight lifted from her shoulders.
She’d try to tell her, weeks before, but all that had come out was: I love….your tattoos.
And she does - she really, really does love them. She loves to idly trace over them with her fingers when they cuddled, loves to admire the way they compliment her body, loves the small splashes of red color here and there on otherwise fully grayscale pieces of art. She just loves Amélie herself more.
She wishes she had the confidence to have said it first, but somehow this feels right the way it is. The two of them, snuggled on the bed in a dim lit room, in front of a large glass door overlooking the city of Paris and the Eiffel Tower as the sun began to set. Amélie's fingers in her hair, the other hand resting over Lena’s heart and feeling it’s strong rhythmic beat beneath her palm, so unlike the unsteadiness of her own.
Lena wouldn't change it for the world.