Now that they had some shade, Sam loosened the knot she'd tied in the flannel just below her sternum and shrugged the shirt off. Draping it over the back of a chair that was out in the sunlight brought her close to where Rebecca was setting up their small solar charger at the edge of the table.

Rebecca glanced up and grinned as she finished plugging the wires into her phone and a softball-sized Bluetooth speaker. "I think this kind of electrical work is a bit more my speed."

"Hah. Yeah, mine too at this point. Brain off time. Like one of Mike's old PC games used to say..." Sam over-enunciated her next words, mocking the sing-song lilt of a computer synthesized voice. "Shutdown sequence, initiated. He'd approve of me seeking out water to help with heat dissipation and avoid a full shutdown."

"Well, this water'll definitely do that." Rebecca arched an eyebrow towards the pool. "Maybe a little too much. I shouldn't be surprised it's not heated, but it's fucking cold. Definitely gonna take a minute to get used to."

"What? Come on." Sam gestured towards Jack, just as he leapt into the water. "You have to just jump in, get it over with."

Rebecca kicked off her shorts and dropped them onto the same chair as Sam's shirt, then followed Sam towards the edge, shaking her head. Given Sam's exuberant nature, Rebecca was unsurprised she endorsed that particular approach. Still, her aversion to low temperatures had been well-established, and the notion of her willingly diving into cold water would have been difficult to believe if it wasn't so obviously imminent.

Well, less of a dive and more of a plunge as Sam walked towards the dotted line indicating the transition to deeper water and merely stepped over the side. The initial splash was still subsiding when she resurfaced with a high-pitched gasp and exaggerated shiver.

Rebecca watched as Sam wiped the water away from her eyes. "Do you believe me now?"

"I don't know what you're talking about. This is positively balmy." Sam smirked as she half-walked, half-paddled over and earned a glower for flicking water at Rebecca's bare thighs where she sat dangling her legs into the pool. "C'mon, you're keeping everyone waiting."

Rebecca pointedly ignored her and looked over at Nate, several feet away. He was eyeing the floatation vest sitting next to him much the same way she was tempted to look at Sam at the moment. "Nate, give me a few minutes to get used to the water and then I'll come get you, okay?" He nodded, so she used her hand to splash water at Sam and shoo her away, then started to ease her way in.

Sam laughed and pushed off of the wall, swimming towards the far side with surprising speed. Rebecca was content to let Sam entertain herself for the moment and gave Jack a grimace of acknowledgement as he paddled by. Once he was clear, she slipped off of the edge and controlled her descent with her hands supporting her weight on the wall behind her. Her teeth clenched tighter as she lowered herself in, and she failed to suppress a hiss as the water reached her waist.

The cold made her sides ache at first, but she hesitantly submerged up to her neck and eventually acclimated and began to breathe easier. She gave herself another moment, then moved away from the wall. In deeper water, she leaned back, closing her eyes once at a horizontal float. With only her face above the surface, she reveled in the sensation of weightlessness — she could feel little eddies and currents as small waves broke around her or rippled through her hair as it spread around her head like a fan.

After a few moments, the feeling of letting go caught her off guard when it grew abruptly beyond physical release into mental and emotional territories. As she let her mind drift, the events of the past almost-two-years flashed through her mind, eliciting a long, slow sigh. She knew to acknowledge the traumatic parts but tried to move past them quickly, focusing on the increasingly positive later months. That was made real when, as if summoned, fingers found her left hand in the water and she immediately recognized them as Sam's before even opening her eyes.

Maybe she intertwined them eagerly enough that Sam picked up on something, because her voice was gentle -- notes of lightheartedness remained, but they were laced with tenderness. "Fancy meeting you here, sugar. You good?"

It was the same carefully teasing voice she heard a lot of back in Broadway's depths. Rebecca turned her head slightly, enough to make eye contact. "I am now."

The look Sam gave her was briefly appraising, subsequently replaced (intentionally?) by levity. "Oh, yuck. Don't make me barf in the pool, huh?" Sam batted her eyelashes, then swirled away again for another trip across the breadth of the pool.

Rebecca chuckled and allowed herself another moment of gazing up at the sky through the shade mesh before deciding she'd kept Nate waiting long enough. She tilted upright, waded to where he sat at the staircase, and started doing her best to to placate him while buckling the life vest on. "I'm sorry, big guy. But I promised your mom we'd keep it on while you were in the water. At least she found you a pretty cool looking one, right? You look like you're ready to hop on a jetski — if we ever find one, of course."

He let out a small groan, but that was better than his forlorn protests that had come before. "I guess you're right. The one at the therapy place was dumb. It was super blocky and never fit right."

Memories of her own experience with ill-fitting torso gear made her grin. "Believe it or not, I do know exactly how you feel."

She regretted the quip immediately, worried it was somehow ignorant and ableist, but Nate didn't seem to mind the comparison despite her functional lower limbs. Mercifully, he was probably too distracted lamenting his floatation gear.

Even better, his woes were quickly forgotten when she lifted him in, rocking on her heels so she was backing into the deepening water, keeping eye contact. She unintentionally repeated Sam's question as his weight settled into the water and she was only towing him along, no longer holding him up.

"You good?"

His grin was infectious. "Oh yeah."

After some initial bobbing around, Rebecca spun, whooshing him in a circle like a kids' 'speedboat' ride at a carnival. Much cackling ensued. It took a short while to catch their breath, but afterwards she released him to join the game of catch that Jack and Sam had already started. Paranoia kept her hovering nearby until confidence in his buoyancy grew, after which she allowed natural drift to move them a little farther apart. She still remained within urgent lunging distance as he pursued the floating ball, mishaps always lurking in the corner of her mind.

Once the kids were self-entertaining, Sam did another lap that ultimately led to her languidly paddling back to Rebecca's side. They shared a wordless smile as Sam pushed some hair back from her face, then she loosely tethered herself to Rebecca's submerged elbow. They watched the kids quietly for a good minute or more before Rebecca spoke.

"I never knew you were such a swimmer."

Sam's chuckle wasn't audible over the voices of other pool guests and the ambient splashing, but Rebecca knew it was there anyway from the way her cheek moved. "Build me a pool back home, you can have your very own redheaded mermaid."

"Oh my, that is very tempting. There was a low key community one just up the street from my old place. But, nothing fancy like this, and the neighborhood's kinda gone downhill the last couple years, so, yeahhh..."

"Eh, three out of ten, wouldn't move back. Not that my trip home went any better."

Rebecca hummed a nonverbal response and floundered for a way to change the subject. "Doesn't make much sense though. Water and electricity don't mix, right?"

"I mean, technically..." Rebecca caught Sam's mischievous grin too late. "The problem is it moves too quickly and unpredictably through the water, right?"

Sam pulled some kind of flip-turn and dove behind Rebecca, swatting her playfully on the way to another loop of the pool. Rebecca was successful enough at biting back her surprised yelp that only a small squeak escaped, and relieved that the other sounds around the pool probably concealed it. She was certain Sam was grinning smugly to herself even if she hadn't heard it thanks to water's improved sound conduction over air.

The occupancy of the pool changed gradually over the next half-hour or so, some families leaving, another coming in from the gate near the clubhouse end of things. Carmen, the kid who had also been playing with Rufus, must have arrived at some point because she suddenly surfaced in Rebecca's peripheral vision and joined the boys again. As time went on, the population gradually thinned enough that she let Jack hop out and bring over Sam's (waterproof) phone in its (waterproof!) case, along with an armload of pool noodles and squirtguns.

That precipitated something between a shootout and jousting tournament with Nate sitting on Rebecca's shoulders, and Jack riding atop Sam's, all while music streamed to the tabletop speaker at a respectful volume. This pleased the kids greatly, Jack had been vocally disappointed when Rebecca admonished him to not start blasting tunes right after they arrived with so many people around.

Not that they could hear the current music much anyway, especially with the screaming that erupted when Jack's wild aim caught Carmen in the ear. That carelessness prompted a retaliatory smack of the water with a foam kickboard followed by gouts of water blown through a pool noodle. The ladies quickly decided they'd had enough of being caught in the middle of all that and extricated themselves, withdrawing several feet away.

Sam spent a few minutes recording the wild fracas for later parental amusement, but stopped to beg Rebecca for a few pictures. Rebecca begrudgingly appeased her by modeling for a slow-motion recording of a rearward hair fling, even as painfully cliché as she found the idea. It felt absolutely cheesy to dunk then toss her head back, spraying a vertical arc of water from her hair, but the joy she saw on Sam's face after wiping her eyes clear turned out to be worth the embarrassment — even documented 'on film'.

Rebecca also had to admit that the joint selfie Sam took whilst draped over her shoulder was almost painfully cute. Maybe people wouldn't notice the unflattering drop of water hanging from the tip of her nose, or she could edit it out later when Sam wasn't looking.

Jack's water gun apparently wasn't up to the abuse of a protracted conflict and stopped working, so Rebecca took it to the edge of the pool to troubleshoot. It was vastly mechanically simpler than everything else that she'd ever field stripped, but that was part of the problem. Her 'complex' Tavor was designed for easy breakdown by nineteen-year-old conscripts, with quick release latches and precisely milled pieces that fit right back together again. Consumer pool toys clearly weren't built with maintenance in mind — god forbid someone ever try to fix something instead of throwing it away and buying a replacement. But, after some consternation, she eventually wrestled the two pieces of the giant syringe-like tube apart.

She'd been intent on that, so she didn't notice the guy walking up until he was only a few steps away. One of the lounging soldiers from earlier. Not the 'complimentary carrot top' fortunately, the dark-haired (but shirt-wearing) guy who had been sitting across the table from him.

"Hey, need a hand with that?" Ah, same voice that had complimented Sam's tattoo. At least he took a knee so he was closer to her height, not looming over her.

Rebecca glanced up briefly, then back to the gasket she was trying to drive one of her nails under. "Nah, thanks, I've just about got it. Looks like the o-ring's super cheap, not much better than a rubber band." She was pretty sure the twist she'd found in the stretchy seal explained both why the piston was hard to push and its reduced flow.

"Heh. Get what you pay for I guess, right?"

"Yeah, something like that." She started reversing the process that had gotten the tube apart, hooking one edge of the 'ramrod' part's front into the other tube.

"So, uh... haven't really seen the two of you around. Your friend has a really cool tattoo, how long have you known each other?"

It took her a moment to think of how to answer that. "Uh... long enough, I guess?"

"Right... so hey, the guys and I were wondering—"

Oh, there it is. Dude, don't bother a girl when she's working on her gun.

"—after you're done babysitting or whatever with the kids, if the two of you wanted to meet up, maybe get some drinks, have some fun later?"

Rebecca was grateful she'd cracked part of the decorative plastic molding around the circumference of the front tube section trying to get the pieces apart, as the extra flex made the rear half easier to lever back in. "Ehh... I'm sorry. We've got plans with family tonight and then we're leaving tomorrow."

"Aww... but after everything that's happened, shouldn't we all be trying look for true love, rebuild the world and everything? You can't squeeze in a little time after the family stuff? It's like a moral imperative..."

Fortunately, she'd gotten the piston reassembled, and kicked off the wall. "I'm sorry, but dude, really. We're both taken."

Maybe he finally got the hint or something, because he rose and stepped back from the pool edge as she swam off. One of his companions though, carrot top by her reckoning, called out past him. "Man, shot down. C'mon babygirl, you're visiting, your boys ain't here, they don't have to know!"

Rebecca slowed and looked back over her shoulder, eyebrow raised. Not quite as bad as 'princess', but—

She didn't have to come up with a reply, though. The stream of a warning shot arced overhead and splattered across the pavement near the off-duty men. Rebecca turned just in time to see Nate reloading and Sam leveling an icy gaze across the water.

"She ain't your babygirl!"

Rebecca was pretty sure there'd have been profanity involved if there weren't kids around.