A/N: Where this came from, I have no idea. Perhaps I'm too tired and my mind is churning out random stuff. This is just a quick one-shot, and I don't think much of it but oh well!
Sarah x
"People are odd."
After speaking to the daughter of a dead man who showed no emotion, and the widow who had shown nothing but emotion, it was a statement that came perhaps too easily to her.
"Did you only just notice?" she heard Gerry reply quite sarcastically. He was another person she found odd. Not in the sense she found Brian odd. Odd in the way that the messes he made were never born out of malice but of stupidity instead.
"I mean, how can she just sit there and watch her mother cry like that and not show any emotion?!"
"You'd do the same," he pointed out. Her head whipped around so she could effectively glare at him.
"I would not."
"You would!" he insisted. She couldn't really deny it. To see her mother cry did not have much effect on her. Not outwardly at least. She refused to cry just because someone else did; there was little point or logic to it. Mirroring someone did not ease their pain, did it?
She sighed and started the engine. "I just don't see the point of crying unless there's no escaping it. It's a waste of time and energy."
"See, you're more like that girl than you think you are," Gerry explained.
"I know, I know," she groaned. "I'm an unlovable, cold-hearted, authoritarian, emotionally impeded bitch."
"Brutally honest, as ever," he chuckled, but she noticed he did not contradict her. She drove on auto-pilot, lost in thought. She had always been like that. It was just her. She had always known her mother had never liked that about her but no amount of taunting, criticising or disapproval ever managed to change the temperament and personality of Sandra Pullman.
What had changed, though, was her many, many personae. Sandra Pullman the copper. Sandra Pullman the daughter. Sandra Pullman the boss. Sandra Pullman the friend. The list went on and on. The switches flipped on and off at will. Now she actually thought about it, it was chilling.
"You know, Sandra, everybody's got good and bad in 'em," Gerry stated, as if trying to make her feel better about what she just admitted to being. "Just in different measures for every individual person. They way I see it it's not about the measures. It's all about the core of a person. Some people are good to the core and some are downright bloody rotten to the core."
"Profound," scoffed Sandra, instantly dismissive of anything Gerry tried to sound intelligent about. She pulled over at a coffee shop and said, "If I don't get some caffeine in me I'm going to fall asleep at the wheel."
"And we wouldn't want that, would we?" he supplied cheerily, in a tone that made her want to punch him. He was utilising that deliberate and infuriating tone of excessive and unnecessary cheerfulness, and she knew he knew it got on her nerves like nothing else on the planet.
"Of course not," she repressed a smile as they got out and she locked the car. There had been no sarcasm in that last exchange, only a smile.
As they sat down next to each other on the corner bench and placed their coffee on the table, Sandra felt compelled to ask a question. "Which category do I fall into?" she said quietly. She looked up to see his blank expression so elaborated, "My core. Good or rotten?"
He gave a soft laugh. "You're good to the core, Sandra. There's no doubt about that."
His answer surprised her. She had never thought herself a good person before; she'd always seen herself as making the best of what she had, making a life for herself, not paying attention to what she was doing so she couldn't feel too bad. She'd done bad things and good things in her life. Looking back, she had done disgustingly selfish things and unbelievably selfless things.
"What's eating you?"
The question caught her off-guard and she couldn't answer immediately. It was no single thing that was getting to her. It was just that feeling of not having made enough effort to be a good person. Her line of work, if she was to do her job properly, required her to be reasonably honest and moral but that had its limits.
She was no angel. She knew that; her team never failed to tell her if she pole vaulted over that thin line of morality.
"What good have I done?" she asked. "Really. What difference have I made?"
"I'd've thought that was obvious." She threw him another glare, telling him that if it was obvious then she wouldn't have been asking. "All those families you find the truth for. All those victims who went unnoticed all those years. You're the one to bring them closure."
She sighed, falling backwards into the padded seat. She didn't know where the sudden doubt was coming from; it was just there.
"Yeah, but on a personal level. On a level that directly affects me."
"Well, you've stopped me doing some really stupid things," he admitted with a wry smile. "If you think I'm being stupid you'll tell me before I do anything that's going to cause too much trouble."
"And that affects me how?" she asked, an eyebrow raised at his admission.
"Because my stupidity has the potential to land you in some serious trouble," he reminded her of their narrow misses when it came to his less than well thought out plans. "Look, all that doesn't matter. What matters is that you know you're a good person."
She gave a short bark of a laugh. "That's the thing. I don't see myself as a good person. I just see myself as a person trying to live a decent life. And failing miserably."
"Failure," he snorted into his mug. "Failure doesn't compute with your philosophy."
"Which is?" she demanded.
"Get what you need to get by any way you can get it," he explained. "With you, survival is the number one priority." To hear it put so bluntly by someone she couldn't deny that – in one way or another – she loved brought it home to her. Yes, she got what she needed through almost any means. Sometimes she hurt people. But one thing defined her core from the rotten: when she hurt someone she always, without fail, felt guilty about it.
She looked Gerry in the eyes and asked him, "What if I hadn't put survival first? What if I ended up letting my job do to me what it's done to so many other people. Doing what it did to Brian?"
"We wouldn't let that happen."
It was a blunt statement of fact that she could not possibly doubt. She had seen his fierce protectiveness too many times before – he had stepped in too many times before – for her to believe he would simply let her get on with it if it became clear she was on a truly persistent downhill swing. With that she trusted her men implicitly.
Through all her achievement, all Gerry had just described to her, there was a single major absence: her love life. Well, more to the point, the lack of anything even remotely healthy and sustainable in her love life. Actually, now she thought about that, anything she had obtained in that particular respect had been a trainwreck just waiting to happen.
She only realised she had been staring at her coffee cup when she tore her gaze away from it and looked around at Gerry. She was surprised when he gently brushed her hair out of her eyes. It was a rare thing to see the tender side of Gerry Standing. "You're a good person," he reiterated. "The fact you don't know how to open up will never change that."
His fingers rested in her hair, and her heart skipped a beat. What was he playing at now?
What came over her in that moment, she felt she may never understand. She was drawn to him. It was nothing new. The same quiet attraction to him that she had felt for years. But the intensity was far greater.
She kissed him lightly on the lips, feeling him respond so gently she was momentarily unsure whether or not he was kissing her back. "What was that for?" he demanded when they broke apart. He kept up that bravado she knew so well but she also realised that he felt as uncertain and airheaded as she did in that moment.
"Reassuring me," she smiled. "Keeping me right."
"My pleasure," he grinned, and he leaned in and kissed her again. She realised as she kissed him back that this was the missing achievement. He was what she had been searching for. He was the sustainable.
Hope this is OK!
Please feel free to leave a review and tell me what you think!
Sarah x