Gun Shy

Chapter One

It was exactly eight Jaime-sized paces from one side of the room to the other, and six paces from the window to the door. There were 96 tiles in the ceiling, and 576 on the floor. She told her new doctor those specifics as he made his evening check on her.

"I need to go home," she insisted. "There's nothing left to count."

Doctor Conrad chuckled in spite of himself. "Well," he began gently, "while I appreciate your clinical assessment, I need to know I'll be sending you home, and not back up onto the roof of that barn."

Jaime flinched. She didn't remember most of what had happened the night she'd climbed onto that roof, two days earlier. Her mind had somehow believed she was back on the roof of a burning, crumbling outbuilding with Steve, escaping at the end of a mission that had very nearly been disastrous. She'd suffered severe blood loss from a bullet wound in her side, and Steve had been badly beaten; they'd been beyond lucky to both get out alive. Jaime had been an unseen witness to the murder of an OSI secretary, and when she saw Steve's captors leading him to the same execution spot, she'd saved his life at the very last minute, using the only means available: a gun. Jaime, who had always been vehemently anti-gun, had shot four men to death.

Her physical wounds had healed quickly, and although she was unwilling to talk about what had happened, she assured everyone that she was just fine. She had been mistaken; Jaime was anything but alright. While she was in the process of moving in with Steve, she came across the gun, hidden out of sight in the back of his closet. This triggered the beginning of what appeared to be a breakdown, where the sight of a gun, even on television, caused her to freeze in place, losing virtually all control of her emotions.

It had broken his stoic heart, but Oscar had no choice; he reluctantly suspended Jaime from the OSI until she agreed to accept treatment. She grudgingly attended one session with a new therapist, Mark Conrad, who gave what was happening to her a new name: Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder. Jaime continued to insist she was ok, even when she began experiencing horrific nightmares, but after the incident on the barn roof, where she'd been teetering dangerously without any awareness of where she was or what was happening, no one could ignore it any longer. Jaime needed immediate help, and now, she knew it, too.

"I miss Steve," Jaime told the doctor.

"You'll see him soon – another day or two. We need your own memories of what happened to come to the surface, and Steve's being here could inadvertently hold you back, make you too afraid to remember, or trigger things you aren't ready to deal with yet."

"I haven't had any more of those dreams since I got here," she said tentatively. "That's progress..."

"True," Conrad agreed, "but you've been sleeping under sedation, and your memories of the incident haven't been re-triggered. Tomorrow, we'll begin desensitization, and that should give us a more accurate picture of where things stand."

"You mean, whether or not I'm loony-tunes?" Jaime asked, only half joking.

"Jaime, what's been happening to you is a fairly common reaction to severe trauma; it doesn't mean you're crazy."

"Sane people don't hide under tables or balance on the crest of a roof..." she argued sadly. "My brain isn't plugged into reality anymore, if I can't control my own actions."

Conrad patted her hand and smiled reassuringly. "You're a lot more plugged in than you realize. I want you to rest as much as possible tonight, and I'll see you in the morning, ok?"

Jaime nodded, and stretched out on her bed, feeling not in the least bit reassured.

- - - - - -

When Doctor Conrad re-joined his patient the next morning, he found her ignoring her untouched breakfast tray as she battled a rather bad case of nerves.

"I'm ready," Jaime told him with only a slight tremor in her voice. "Let's do it."

Conrad set a small box on the table by the door, and extended a manila folder to Jaime. "I want you to look at these pictures – take your time."

Jaime opened the folder slowly, and took a deep, steadying breath. Inside were a group of photos, all 8 X 10s, of six different pistols and revolvers. Determined to get through it, she looked at each one and forced herself not to cry. When she'd seen them all, she looked back at the doctor.

"Do any of them resemble the gun you used that day in the compound?" Conrad asked gently.

Jaime leafed through them all again before extracting a picture and pulling it out with shaking hands. Conrad took the folder, leaving the single picture in front of her on the bed.

"Good. Jaime, how do you feel when you look at that?"

"I...don't like it."

"Physically, what do you feel?"

"My stomach's sort of queasy, and I wanna cry...but I'm not going to," she told him.

"It's ok to cry, if you need to; it's a perfectly normal outlet for pain."

Jaime nodded, but stubbornly refused to let the tears fall. "What I'd really like...is to tear it into tiny pieces, or crumple it up and throw it away. But...Steve threw the real gun away – he crushed it – and that didn't help."

"That's right. Very good." Conrad reached out and took the picture away. "Would you like to stop, for now?"

"No. I...I'm ok."

The doctor retrieved the box from the table. "Jaime, when I give you this box, I want you to open it and look inside, but don't touch or remove the object."

"Alright," she said, fairly certain she knew what it held. She was right; inside was an exact duplicate of the gun she'd used to defend Steve and herself – the gun that, in her hands, had taken four lives. Jaime squeezed her eyes shut, but could no longer hold back the tears that began to stream silently down her cheeks. Mark Conrad watched her closely. She immediately re-opened her eyes. "That...didn't help," she told him.

"What did you see, when your eyes were closed?"

The stream of tears became torrential as pain flooded Jaime's soul. "I saw...it was...I can't do this!" She reached out and pushed the box off the bed, onto the floor.

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