AN1: This started life as a challenge fic on a livejournal community. It grew and mutated, and turned out to have nothing at all to do with the prompt.
AN2: This fic is set during the season 3 finale, Snow Day. I've said that the Irish gangsters had Belfast accents. I've made this up, because I don't have a clue. If anyone would like to enlighten me, please go ahead :D
Rating: 15 - for mild swearing and some violence.
Characters: Adam, with guest appearances from Danny and Flack.
A Drop of Blood in the Snow
You've fucked up.
Or you are fucked up. Or both.
Your head is spinning and foggy and the only thing you're certain of if that the concrete floor is cold and wet. And you are lying in a puddle; the water is soaking through the back of your shirt.
The coolness of the water is soothing on the welt you can feel forming on the side of your head. The fog is clearing, condensing to a throbbing that rattles your whole skull. You screw up your eyes and take deep breaths, until the worst of the pain has passed, completely failing to realise that someone knocked you out, that they are probably still about, and that they won't have the best of intentions.
Your luck, whatever little there is, holds out, and when you crack open your eyes you don't see a murderous maniac, just a rusting, corrugated iron roof.
You haven't been moved from where you were attacked. Your kit is lying a few feet away and you can see crime scene tape on the floor by the doorway. You can't see the police officers, and you take a moment to hope they are safe, but you do see several guys with what look like machine guns, deep in conversation.
You close your eyes again as their voices reach you. For a moment you are 10 years old again, hiding under the kitchen table as your father yells at your mother for something she did or didn't do.
Then the voices get closer, and your parents were from Dublin, but these are Belfast accents, and you are back in the warehouse, being shoved into a chair. The throbbing has returned with a vengeance, the dizziness never left, and your shirt is sticking to your back, so you think you should be forgiven when you stay slumped over when you miss the first question.
You're not. A sharp slap to the cheek makes you open eyelids you had forgotten were closed, A man with curly hair and green eyes is crouched in front of you. If it weren't for the cigarette in his mouth, the stubble on his jaw, and his general unkempt appearance, you might have mistaken him for a leprechaun.
Definitely concussed then.
You are pushed back in the chair. You make an effort to sit upright, take a deep breath. Questions are asked, but you don't answer, because there is no way they could be asking what they are asking. Do they think they can just walk into a crime lab and take a drugs haul?
Your pass is ripped from your neck as they ask their questions again. You see the blood on it and wonder who it belongs to. Until you remember that you have a head wound.
You still won't answer their questions, and you discover that the leprechaun has a traditional Irish temper when he grabs your hand and twists his cigarette into your palm.
You scream. You can't help it. The fire in your palm burns through the fog in your head and leaves you gasping. The cigarette twists again and again. You just want the pain to stop, and you are only half aware of telling them what they want to know.
When you come back to yourself the leprechaun is gone, along with most of his friends. You are in the back of a truck, in the same warehouse; you can still see your kit. You are sitting at the side of the truck. The two cops are handcuffed at the back, they are uninjured as far as you can see, looking scared and angry and concerned all at the same time. You curl around your injured hand and try to regain your senses. You haven't felt fear like this since your father left.
You sit in the truck for hours, your head slowly clearing. Danny appears, immediately suspicious. You try to yell a warning, but you're too late.
Danny is only unconscious for a few minutes, and he does all the right things, both to piss off your guards and to formulate a plan. With Danny sitting next to you, guilt takes over as fear diminishes. When Flack arrives and the plan goes into action, your adrenalin starts to pump; you jump out of the truck and unmask the cops.
In the chaos that follows you find somewhere to sit, and stay there as Danny is loaded into and ambulance by Lindsay, and the leprechaun's men are loaded in another by a couple of cops. It's not until someone puts their hand on your shoulder that you realise you are shaking.
Flack takes one look at you and puts you in an ambulance. The warehouse is spinning, or maybe it's just your head. The adrenalin has worn away and your head and hand are throbbing in time with one another. A paramedic tells you the burns look infected. You're not surprised, the warehouse isn't exactly clean, but too exhausted to care.
You lie back on the stretcher, painkillers taking affect, knocking you out. The last thing you see, as the ambulance doors close, and blackness takes over your vision, is your field kit, and the crime scene tape, fluttering in a non-existent breeze.