Happy birthday akachankami!

[afrakaday]

Title: Cinque Terre
Author: afrakaday
Rating: T for touristy fluff
Word Count: 3740

A/N: A little tribute to Italian holidaymaking set in the Special Prosecutions AU, in honor of akachankami’s birthday. Thanks to nixmom for the beta.



Riomaggiore

Laura grasped Bill’s shoulder for support as they alighted the bus. The ride to Riomaggiore from La Spezia had been scenic, but she’d come to regret her request that Bill let her sit by the window after the seventh or eighth death-defying switchback up and around the mountains.

Stepping off into the sun, she linked her arm through his and surveyed their surroundings. The Ligurian Sea was just barely visible down the hill where they’d been dropped off. A rainbow of brightly colored structures of several stories, built into terraced hillsides, comprised the seaside town.

She sighed happily as she felt the roiling of her stomach subside with each inhalation of the sea air. Bill placed a kiss to the corner of her mouth. “Feeling better?”

“Mmm-hmm. Happy to finally be here.” She was glad they’d had a few days in Rome and Florence to get over mild jet lag and go to the museums, but it was Cinque Terre that had been on her must-visit list when they decided to take a trip to celebrate Bill’s recent promotion to head of the Special Prosecutions anti-corruption division of the US Attorney’s Office. She and Bill had watched a documentary on the Travel Channel about it years ago, and the place had stuck with her ever since. He’d teased her at first for her insistence that they come here when they had decided to finally go on a vacation to somewhere other than their house on the Jersey Shore, but now that they were actually present in the place, she was glad she’d stuck to her guns.

Bill removed the map they’d picked up in La Spezia from the back pocket of his shorts and unfolded it in front of them. “Ready to go find our hotel?” he asked, looking around for street signs to orient himself.

“Yes, I’d like to get rid of our bags so we can go exploring.” She shifted her duffle uncomfortably where the strap was digging into her bare shoulder, and Bill took it for her.

“Here, let me.” He grimaced at the bag’s weight. “My god, woman, how much did you pack?”

“I might have brought some work files,” she admitted. “And Title 18 of the United States Code.” She’d been working on a brief before they’d left involving some novel questions regarding sentencing enhancements, and wasn’t able to resist bringing along the criminal statutes she was tasked with prosecuting.

He shook his head fondly at her as they started to walk down the hill toward the commercial part of town. “What happened to, ‘I can’t wait to read novels on our vacation’?”

“I brought A Murder on the Bayou, too,” she said lightly.

“I thought you finished that on the plane.”

“I did. So, good thing I also brought work.”

Before long they had arrived at the inn they’d booked. It was a narrow, typical structure with a yellow stucco facade. The friendly innkeep, a middle-aged woman, graciously showed them to their room despite the early hour. As soon as she was gone, Laura collapsed onto the bed and closed her eyes. Bill placed their bags on the rack at the foot of the bed and moved to join her.

“I thought you wanted to sightsee?” Bill leaned over her and ran his fingers through her wind-mussed hair.

“I do. I want to see the old castello, and then I want to walk the Lovers’ Walk with my lover.”

He bent his face down to hers and placed a sweet kiss to her full lips. “Well let’s get a move on, then, Roslin.”

She sighed and moved to sit up. “You’re right. Let me just get my daypack together; we’ll need some provisions for a five-town excursion.”

Manarola

By the time they reached Manarola, it was high noon, and Laura was not only famished but also glad that they were visiting in May as opposed to the hotter summer months; the sun was intense here. She pressed her fingers to her shoulder and cursed her fair complexion as she noted that she’d been burning.

Bill had gallantly offered to carry the daypack with their things in it, and she’d giggled when he’d slowed to a stop as they leisurely ambulated down the Lover’s Walk to whip out a permanent marker she recognized as the type they used in the office to make redactions. She gasped as he found a blank space on the graffitied retaining wall and wrote in strong block letters, “BILL ADAMA LOVES LAURA ROSLIN.” She rewarded his delinquency with a delighted kiss, oblivious to the stream of people around them, before taking the marker from his fingers to draw hearts over the I’s in both their names.

“Perfect,” she’d decreed their joint handiwork, tucking the marker back into their bag and slipping her hand into his back pocket as he wrapped an arm around her waist and they continued on toward Manarola.

Laura was pleased to see a sign announcing the existence of a COOP in this town, along with an arrow indicating it was only a kilometer up the hill. “Do you mind if we go by the store to get some sunblock? I forgot to pack it in our last hotel, and I’m burning.” She knew from their time in the larger cities that the COOP carried pretty much everything, from groceries and housewares to sunblock and flip flops.

Bill shook his head. “Of course.”

Inside the pleasantly air-conditioned store, the sight of food made Laura’s stomach rumble, so she quickly picked out a bottle of sunblock-- not much use in comparing anything but the numbers, since she couldn’t actually read the labels--and hastily counted out lira to complete the purchase. “Could you recommend a good place for lunch?” she asked the teenaged cashier in her stilted Italian.

The girl nodded. “Trattoria dal Billy,” she answered definitively. “The best seafood. On via Aldo Rollandi.” Bill took out his map, and she showed them where to go.

They stepped outside, and Laura started slathering the newly purchased lotion over her face and arms, thankful she’d chosen the strapless sundress for how easy it made the application. She wordlessly turned her back to Bill and looked imploringly over her shoulder at him.

“You’re so lucky to be able to tan so easily,” she grumbled, not for the first time in their nearly eleven-year acquaintance, as he took over the task. Once his hands had ceased sliding over her shoulders and back, she took the bottle back and applied some lotion to her calves. When she was finished, she stood to face him. “You want any?”

He just smiled and shook his head, adjusting the New York Jets cap that shaded his impossibly blue eyes and offering her his arm once more.

They easily found the Trattoria Dal Billy, thanks to the cashier’s instructions, and were quickly seated to a table by an open window overlooking the sea. Laura watched, delighted, as young people in skimpy swimwear dared each other to climb atop a craggy rock and jump into the depths below.

“How fun,” she said, smiling. They didn’t have anything like that back home in Jersey, though Laura loved the water, having grown up spending her summers at the shore. Maybe it was just the freedom of being on vacation, but she felt an irrationally strong urge to run down to the rocky coastline and join the jumpers.

Bill gave an amused quirk of his eyebrow and returned to perusing the wine list. She turned her own attention to the menu. “Squid ink linguine with seafood?”

He nodded agreeably. “Sure. And how about the pansotti with walnut pesto? It’s described as being the local dish.”

“Sounds delicious,” she said, closing her menu. She and Bill considered themselves connoisseurs of Italian-American food after years of frequenting the Ambrosia Cafe, but eating in Italy had been a revelation. Saul and Ellen Tigh’s business would benefit greatly if they took a trip like this, she mused.

While her thoughts wandered back home, Bill gamely ordered their pasta as well as a bottle of the house white. The waiter returned quickly with the wine, bearing a "Cinque Terre" label and elegant stemware that put the Ambrosia's cheap tumblers to shame. Bill tasted the wine and gave a nod of approval, then poured Laura's glass himself, politely waving the waiter away.

"Well, my love," he said, raising his own generous pour, "we finally made it. Is it everything you hoped for?"

She smiled at him adoringly and clinked her glass to his. "It really is so beautiful here. I can’t wait to see more and walk the rest of the trail.” Taking a sip and humming in satisfaction, she asked him, “What about you? There are so many other places we could have gone...”

“I like it here,” he said. “The sense of history. Makes me feel a connection to my roots.”

Laura nodded. “What does your name mean in Italian, again?”

“Adama? ‘To play checkers,’” he laughed. “Apparently all of my ancestors were old men.”

They turned their gazes back to the sea, watching the sun ripple across the blue expanse and the swimmers braving the chilly early-season water, until the waiter returned with their pasta.

“Oh my god, Bill,” Laura moaned through a mouthful of linguine. “This is the best thing ever. The flavors remind me of...jambalaya, I think” --she chewed, swallowed, and chased it down with some wine-- “but the squid ink really comes through, too.”

Bill eyed the dish in front of her. “Langoustine tails, huh. Not so different from crawfish. Looks good.” He savored his own walnut sauce-covered pasta, chewing impassively even when Laura speared a three-sided ravioli from his plate. It didn’t matter, they both knew; they’d trade plates eventually, as they always did.

Corniglia

The walk along the Blue Trail to Corniglia took a leisurely hour, the bottle of wine they’d shared over lunch causing them to feel pleasantly relaxed and in no rush to get to the middle of the five towns. The views of the coast and of the towns behind and in front of them were magnificent. But when they finally arrived at their destination, or at least the town’s train station if not the town itself, they halted and just started laughing at each other.

A daunting stone staircase appeared to be the only way straight up the side of a cliff. The small, weathered steps seemed to go on forever.

Another tourist noticed their hesitation. “There’s also a bus that runs up the hill into the town,” he offered over his shoulder, gesturing toward the other side of the train station as he began jogging up the stairs.

Bill bristled at the man’s implication. “We’ll take the stairs, right?” he asked Laura. “We can do this.”

“We’re mostly sedentary, not quite 40 year old, fairly healthy people,” she allowed. “But we’re on vacation and need to work off that pasta somehow.”

Hand in hand, they began their ascent. Bill had pulled out the map of Cinque Terre and together they looked at the section depicting Corniglia. “There are 365 steps, one for each day of the year,” he announced.

“Hmm. I wonder what we were doing this time last year,” Laura said as she considered the text and then the steps.

Bill was obviously thinking as his feet mechanically carried him up, up, upward. “I was trying a case against the mayor of Trenton for public works bid rigging. I think you were working a drug interdiction of those West Coast rappers who were using the Newark airport.”

“And we painted the shore house,” Laura remembered. “Now that we’re here amid all this yellow and pink, I kind of regret going with the blue.” She stopped and turned around on the stairs as if to try to look back at Manarola to support her point.

“Different styles,” shrugged Bill before grabbing her hand again. “No dawdling, Roslin. We’re almost there.”

She looked up and saw that he was right. She tried to ignore the fact that they were both breathing rather heavily as she powered up the last couple dozen steps with renewed vigor.

At last they were at the top of the stairs, and at the foot of the little town. Like its two sisters before it, Corniglia looked rustic and sleepy at first glance, but was bustling with tourists and the businesses that cater to them: bars, restaurants, and even the occasional discotheque.

The walk had ended up taking longer than they’d expected, and Bill was parched. “Drink?” he asked her.

She scanned the area and her eyes came to rest on a particularly inviting-looking enoteca. “I’d love to try some more of the local wine.”

They entered the enoteca, Il Pirun, and took a seat at the window facing a side street. “I want to people-watch instead of sea-watch, for a while,” Laura explained her choice of locale.

The proprietor, Mario, turned out to be an effusive man with impeccable command of English. Though they asked for the local white, he soon returned with a carafe of both red and of white and four glasses. Laura was surprised when she looked around and saw patrons drinking directly from the carafes--the namesake of the establishment, she soon figured out--holding them above their heads and letting the stream of wine flow from the narrow spout into their mouths.

“Bill, try this thing that they’re all doing,” she urged him. “It looks fun.”

He gave her a slow smile, clasped her hand and brought her hand to his lips to kiss her fingertips. “If it makes you happy.”

She smiled back. “It would.” She withdrew her hand and discreetly felt around on the floor for the backpack in order to grab their camera as Bill hoisted the pirun above his head. “Bottoms up.”

She snapped a photo of Bill trying the white in the local fashion, then laughed and shook her head when he tried to pass it to her. “I’ll have mine from a glass, please.”

He poured her a glass of the white and was pouring another of red for each of them when Mario returned with a plate of glistening anchovies and a small bowl of olives. “All from Corniglia!” he boasted. “Like the grapes in the wine you drink.”

“Grazie mille,” Laura said. Bill nodded at the man in thanks and, after Mario had turned to leave, met Laura’s eyes in an unspoken challenge.

Their fingers met one another in the olive bowl, both seeking the choicest specimens. Laura hadn’t liked olives when they’d first met, but by the time they moved in together, had developed a fondness for them to rival his own, which sometimes caused problems when they shared an antipasto salad with an uneven number of kalamatas, for example.

Once the olives were gone they were both pleased to find the anchovies incredible, as well. They lingered over those and the rest of their wine until mid-afternoon when they gaily bid farewell to Mario, determined to continue on their journey, serious buzz notwithstanding.

As they were making their way across the town, once more arm in arm, they came to a cafe with a bookshelf of worn paperbacks set up on the sidewalk. Many of them were in English, and a small handwritten sign proclaimed “Ex-pat book trade center.”

“What a good idea,” Laura remarked.

Bill stopped and tugged open the zipper of the backpack and began rooting around in it, finally pulling out A Murder on the Bayou triumphantly.

“Oh! I didn’t realize I’d brought that along.”

He smirked at her. “I grabbed it while we were at the hotel, on the hope that we might come across such an opportunity to procure you some vacation-appropriate reading material.”

“Well, thank you, then,” she said, kissing him on the cheek and turning to browse the selection. Grinning, she picked one off the shelf and placed her own contribution in its place before stashing the new acquisition, a battered mystery titled Blood Runs at Midnight, in the backpack. “Ready.”

They meandered through the narrow streets, enjoying the amazing vistas the town’s hilltop location provided. Eventually the town gave way to terraced vineyards and olive groves, and Bill stopped and pulled her against him as they took in the spectacular scene.

“You ever think about quitting the law, living a simpler life?"

Bill’s question took Laura aback. “No. Do you?”

“Sometimes,” he admitted. “Would be kind of nice, huh? Move to Italy, get a job on a vineyard, drink all the wine you want.” He reached an arm out toward the terraced hillside, swooping it down toward the sea. “Live in a place like this.”

She leaned into him and nuzzled his ear. “You’d get bored. You need the intellectual challenge.”

“You’re right. As always.”

“Maybe you’re having these kind of thoughts because of your promotion. It’s a lot more responsibility, but the flip side of it is, you’re at the top of your game. This promotion is the brass ring, and you’ve gotten it. I, on the other hand...”

“Are under-utilized,” Bill put in. “I swear, Laura, they’ve gotta make you Chief of the Criminal Division before long.”

“We’ll see,” she said with an enigmatic smile. “Until then...no hippie agricultural life for me.”

Vernazza

As the Blue Trail brought them gradually closer to Vernazza, Laura was excited to see more giant rock formations along the coast from which people were jumping.

“Bill.” She squeezed his hand. “I have to do that.”

“Do what?

“Jump off those rocks.”

He burst out laughing. “I knew it. From the way you were watching the jumpers in Manarola.”

“I’ve got my swimsuit in the daypack,” she pointed out.

“Yeah, and about a liter and a half of wine in you.”

“Bill!” she pouted. “I am absolutely sober enough to go cliff diving.”

“Jumping,” he corrected her. “The water’s way too shallow to dive, there.” They both watched; it was true, every single jumper went feet-first.

“A swim might be nice, though,” she wheedled as they passed the train station. “Wouldn’t it?”

“Maybe,” he allowed, pulling out the map and looking at the section on Vernazza. “All this climbing and hiking has made me pretty grimy.” He stopped and dug through the backpack for the camera. “Let me get a picture of you with the castle in the background first, though.”

He snapped a shot of a smiling Laura and then went to her, wrapping his arm over her shoulders and turning the camera around to take a sloppy shot that he hoped would include both of them. “Down to the harbor, then we’ll explore the town?” he asked, putting the camera away.

“Sounds good.”

“The map says the castle’s tower was built to look out for pirates. Every July, the town reenacts a medieval pirate invasion. A battle ensues, the pirates get driven off, and the whole town celebrates the successful defense of its harbor.”

Laura looked out over the sea, imagining a fleet of pirate ships advancing toward the craggy cliffs. Life out here on the rocks seemed difficult enough without the threat of raiding pirates, she decided.

The sun was beginning to sink beyond the sea, casting them and everything else in an ethereal glow, and she hurried Bill along down the path to the calm breakwaters. A small sandy beach made it easy for them to kick off their sandals and wade into knee-deep waters.

“We should have changed into our swimsuits,” sighed Laura, though she knew they’d have missed the waning minutes of this most gorgeous sunset if they’d taken the time to do so. “The water feels amazing.”

Bill scooped up a handful of azure water and splashed it over her shoulders. “How’s that?”

She gathered her skirt’s hem in one hand and splashed him back with the other. “You tell me.”

He shook off the water like a dog and wrapped his arms around her to ward off any further offense. Though it was still warm out, she shivered against him.

“Love you,” he murmured against her mouth before kissing her soundly.

Aware of his body’s growing response against her, as well as the fact that they were far from alone on the public beach, she reluctantly broke away. “About time.” It had been nearly ten years since they first spoke these words to each other, yet the exchange never got old. Hand in hand, then turned for the shore and slowly made their way up from the beach and into the town. Old-fashioned streetlamps cast a faint glow over the cobblestone streets and weathered stucco buildings.

The tourist crowds had flocked to the nightclubs for drinks and dancing, it seemed; plenty of open-air terraces blaring music were packed with people.

“Want to dance?” he asked with a gleam in his eye.

She smiled; Bill was an excellent dancer and never gave up an opportunity to twirl her around a dance floor. Their damp clothes could use such an airing out, she decided. “Sure.”

They found a place playing jazz standards and he took her in his arms once more. Laura tucked her head against his shoulder as they swayed in time to the music.

“This has been my favorite day of our vacation,” she said. “Even though I didn’t get to jump off any rocks.”

Bill laughed, his deep rumbling reverberating through them both. “Tell you what,” he said. “It’s getting late. Let’s stay here for a little while longer, find a place to get dinner, and take the train back to the hotel. In the morning we’ll take the train back here, go swimming and cliff-jumping if that’s what you want--”

“--and then hike the rest of the Blue Trail to Monterosso?” she interjected.

He kissed her cheek. “Exactly.”

“It would be a shame to not be able to say we’ve hiked the whole thing.”

“Couldn’t have that.”

“And then we can spend the afternoon sunbathing in Monterosso. I can read my new book.”

“We’ll rent one of those big umbrellas so you don’t burn.”

“And then take the ferry back to Riomaggiore when we’re done with our beach day, so we can see Cinque Terre from the sea.”

They grinned at each other like the fools in love that they were.  “Perfect,” they agreed.