Title: Identity Crisis
Author: hbomba
Rating: T
Summary: Lauren's been running so long and been betrayed so often, but one thing remains true.
A/N: Wrote this for myself to get over the abject horror of 4x03. I hope it helps!
Lauren Lewis was free. But not without a great responsibility to the Fae, ironically enough, which she had inadvertently betrayed by working for Taft. Lauren had done her research on the guy and she even told him 'no' repeatedly to distance herself but in the end the badgering proved too much and Lauren's naiveté showed through. She was horrified with what Taft was doing to the Fae-his very own lab rats to experiment on-and Lauren felt her activism begin to stir.
Activism came with another name in another time: Karen Beattie. It had started simple enough-raids on labs that used animals for testing. The next thing Lauren knew she was roped into making chemical weapons for the group that had tricked her into joining and threatened her if she tried leaving. They never cared about saving lab rats, they used it as a front and Lauren fell prey easily.
But that was who Lauren was. Trusting to a fault. In fact, she was so trusting that even as she ran from the law and from the Fae, she still let her walls be torn down by Crystal. Crystal who also badgered her but with compliments and kindness. She was the opposite of Taft but no less ruthless. She had used flattery to set her at ease and liquor to ply her from that inkling that she still loved Bo. But she was lonely and scared in yet another world that was unfamiliar so she grabbed on to Crystal, closed her eyes and Lauren had sex with a human for the first time since Nadia.
Sex after Bo. It was unimaginable why anyone would walk away from her, but Lauren did. She had reasons and they were important to her at the time but their love was young still, and even to Lauren it felt like giving up or giving in. But she had been broken down by the Fae and she thought things would be better if she moved on. Again.
Lauren was no prude by any stretch of the imagination. She had her fair share of women in college but med school is when she really came into her own. Hospitals were insidious things. Lives were lost, lives were saved and somewhere someone, she could guarantee, was having sex in an empty bed, bunk or closet at any given moment. And if Lauren wasn't bedding down in the hospital with her favorite resident, she was picking up at the corner bar.
She settled down when Nadia came into the picture and their romance was what kept Lauren going for all those years. Even when it wasn't romance. Even when it was Nadia the patient and Lauren her faithful doctor. When she was awakened Lauren had already fallen in love with Bo but she struggled with indecision. If there was one thing Lauren knew it was science. She was always sure when dealing with it. Science, after all, was about structure and there was no room for emotion. This is why Lauren found herself so awkward, flailing between relationships and affairs, with a little black book that rivaled the yellow pages. Because in science, there was room for chaos.
But it wasn't until the Fae, until Bo, that Lauren would naively admit to finding love at last. It wasn't the first time, there was Nadia which faded fast. With Bo, however, it was something so very different. The love felt timeless and ageless. There was no fading, only intensifying, and even when Lauren walked away from Bo, she carried the emotions in her chest like a bowling ball.
Even now, as she sat in a cell, having been betrayed again so easily, that she still felt Bo's love heavy in her chest. Forgotten for a time, perhaps under a spell, it was back now. Lauren stood, brushing the red hair from her eyes. Amber was another alias in a string of aliases and Lauren wished she could just be herself again. But who was that?