Authors Note: A big thank you to DianeM for beta reading this. I originally wrote this just as a gift for her but she insisted that I shared it and even made it better. Big, big thank you. This is a departure from my usual style. This just flowed and that's how it turned out. It was sort of inspired by the movie Definitely Maybe. I can sort of imagine that this is Sam telling her child how it all began. Anyway, enjoy!
When I think back to that day, the first thing that comes to mind is that it was raining. I know that's weird. You'd think the first thing that I'd remember would be something a little more memorable, not just that it was raining, something it does quite a lot in New York, even in August. I think that I remember the rain because it's so intertwined in what happened. Without the rain, our missing person would have never gone missing; without the rain, I might not have partnered with Jack on that case, which took us up state; without the rain, we might not have been brought together. Although, I have to admit I don't believe that. What happened between us was inevitable, with or without the rain. Then or at another time, it would have happened. That's what I believe.
I should back up a bit and start at the beginning. What happened was logical, inevitable as I said, so there's no need to start at the very beginning. It'll suffice to say that the tension had been building almost from my first day at the office. We both felt it--the spark, the chemistry--and that's why we make such a good team in the field. If both of us then started to wonder if we'd make just as good a team out of work, neither of us ever planned to act on it. He was my boss and he was married. The first one was my problem; I've never wanted to be a cliché. The second one was his; he'd sworn vows . One thing you should know about Jack is once he makes a promise, he does his best to keep it. It might take him a while, you might even lose faith, but if it is within his power, he will always come through in the end. Okay, so here's how it started.
~ Flashback ~
"Sam, James Bond's cars been spotted upstate. Danny's having trouble getting back from Brooklyn and Vivian's still stuck in Queens. The rain's put the city in gridlock. You're with me." Jack leaned against the side of my desk, giving me that special half smile I've never seen him use on anybody else. Mind you, I can't talk. Back then I didn't let anyone else call me Sam; I still don't.
"His parents really had a sense of humour," I commented absently, standing up and grabbing my coat from the back of the seat.
"And your parents didn't, Sam Spade," Jack gently teased. I glared at him but my heart wasn't in it.
~ Flashback ~
We went down to the FBI parking garage. The missing person's unit is on the 12th floor, so it was only a short ride in the elevator. No one else entered or exited, it was just us. You know how most people spread out if the elevator is nearly empty. Those boxes are claustrophobic enough, right? Well even back then we stood together, probably a little closer than was strictly professional. I don't think we'd even realised that we did that, but even back then we just naturally gravitated towards each other.
Jack drove upstate. As a woman in the FBI, particularly at the beginning, I always felt like I had to prove myself. With anyone else, I would have felt the natural assumption that he should drive, particularly in these bad conditions, to be a slight. With Jack, I knew it wasn't. We didn't need to discuss these things, there was no awkwardness, and everything just worked out as smoothly as if we'd planned it. We didn't talk much on the drive up, didn't feel the need to. We discussed the case a little, but I think we both knew that by evening we would have found our missing person, dead or alive.
~ Flashback ~
"This is it," Jack announced as he pulled up outside an independent garage. There was a sheriff's car and deputy there waiting for us. Mercifully, the torrential downpour that was drowning New York hadn't worked its way upstate this far at that point, and it was only drizzling here. So we got out of the car, Jack exchanged a few words with the sheriff and then we walked over to our missing person's car. It was covered in mud and the front left-hand side was caved in.
"Sheriff said a local reported seeing this car in the ditch about a half mile north from here. The garage went out and picked it up, called in the plate numbers, which is when the sheriff called us," Jack told me, crouching down to closely examine the damage to the car. I looked in the car; there was nothing of interest in the glove compartment, didn't appear to be anything out of the ordinary in the car at all, certainly no clues as to where our missing Mr. Bond was. I moved back out and that's when I noticed the mud on the car sill. It looked a little different than the rest of the mud covering the car, a darker shade. I took a closer look and realised why--the mud was intermixed with blood.
"Jack," I called him over and pointed.
He looked at me, his face grim, "We need to take a look where this car was found," he said.
The sheriff showed us the way. James Bond's car had gone off the road at a bend; there was a knot of broken trees and torn undergrowth indicating where it had once rested. It was getting dark at that point, storm clouds were thickening, as the bad weather front had caught up with us. There were torches in the car and we used them to examine the area, moving slowly over the wooded and steep terrain, the road being on the crest of the hill. We hadn't gone far when I stumbled and started to fall. Jack grabbed me, skidding down a few feet in the mud. We both fell backwards and I landed hard on a broken tree stump. It tore through my coat and lodged a few splinters in my back.
"Sam, you okay?" Jack's face was the picture of concern. I pushed myself up on my arms and looked straight ahead.
"I've found Mr. Bond." Jack followed my gaze. Up ahead of us our missing person lay crumpled on the ground. Like me, he'd stumbled over the tree root above us; only unlike me, he hadn't had Jack to stop him from tumbling down the slope. He'd impaled himself on a tree branch, right through his chest and had probably died instantly. We struggled to our feet and made our way back up to the road.
"He's about 300 yards that way, 400 yards down," Jack told the deputy, who nodded grimly and reached for his radio. Then the rain started to pour down.
~ Flashback ~
By that point, it was late in the afternoon. Under normal conditions, we wouldn't have made it back to New York in the light, and under these conditions with the storm, we wouldn't have any light to travel back in at all. Winding roads would have started the journey. Tonight's weather was much like the conditions Mr. Bond had been driving in and on the same kind of roads, and neither of us fancied driving back to New York. We booked into the only motel in town. Now at this point, I want to make this clear, neither of us was expecting anything to happen, or even wanted anything to happen because of the problems I mentioned before, namely married and boss. Thinking back on it, having it happen there, out of town, is so cliché. It's like a story that's been told a hundred times--even the rain--which meant we had to stay over is just a convenient plot device. However, things become clichés because truthfully they happen a lot. The motel had a small diner next to it, so we ate there. The food wasn't fantastic but we were used to that, at stakeouts it was much worse. We talked and joked like we'd done a hundred times over takeout back out at the office; so far nothing was any different. However, I couldn't hide my growing discomfort; the splinters in my back were becoming more and more painful. Neither of us ever liked finding a missing person dead, particularly as he'd been dead before we started searching, so the depressing find of Mr. Bond had driven my injury out of my mind. Jack noticed immediately that something was wrong. While painful, the splinters were hardly serious, so he borrowed a medical kit from reception and we headed back to my room. That's when things started to change.
~ Flashback ~
I shrugged off my dripping coat and hung it on the hook behind the door; Jack did the same with his. He moved further into the room to put the medical kit on the desk and pull the second chair, which was by the window, over to the one at the desk. I took that opportunity to take my blouse off so he could see my back to patch it up. I intended to turn around so all he would see was my back but he moved faster than I did. That's when things started to change. There was a long moment; I could feel the atmosphere thickening around us, like the storm had thickened the clouds earlier. Jack swallowed hard and turned back to the kit. I quickly sat down and presented him my back. He worked quietly and quickly, apologising occasionally whenever I winced.
"That's done," Jack said, closing the medical kit back up.
I turned to look at him. "Thank you." He smiled again that special smile. "We've got an early start tomorrow. We should go to bed," I said.
"Yeah, we should," Jack agreed. Now I don't know who moved first or what we were thinking, but suddenly his lips were on mine. Such heat and passion, it was overwhelming, and rational thought was completely out of the window.
~ Flashback ~
I'm not describing what happened next, but I think you can guess; it's a dance as old as time. It wasn't until we woke up the next morning that the implications of what had happened started to set in. There was no awkwardness and, above all, no regret or guilt. What had happened had been inevitable and we both knew that now we'd crossed that line, it would happen again. We were like magnets; we'd been drawn together from the first, now we'd finally connected the pull was that much stronger.
I think I knew, though, even at that first morning that it wouldn't last. It couldn't for two reasons,--married and boss--the same ones that had tried to stop us from embarking on that journey together. Eventually OPR or his wife would tear us apart. I knew, and I've always known, even if I forgot for a while, what kind of man Jack Malone was. I'd been scared of being a cliché but I knew, always knew, it wasn't like that. Jack Malone wasn't that kind of man. What had happened was inevitable and just as inevitably it would end, and just as inevitably it would begin again. I don't believe in destiny, or fate, I firmly believe in choice. I think that day whether we realised it or not, we made a choice to be together. It took many years, several breakups, more misunderstandings than I can count. We both lost faith in us more than once. It was inevitable, though, that we'd find it again because it was what was meant to be. Just inevitable.