An angsty, angry, ficling (do a particular number of words constitute a ficlet?) I should add that I don't own any of this, they belong to Andrew Marlowe et Co. and I just move them around. Except for the Bartender, who is on loan from the Thrilling Adventure Hour and probably Lisa Lutz as well.

He was trying to contain his anger as he had tried to contain his love, but it made a roiling toxic mixture. By the time the elevator reached the ground floor, Rick had to turn around and get to the nearest men's room - not quite back to the same floor as Beckett's desk, thank God. He hurled till he was gasping, throat and stomach spasming far longer than they had anything left to void. Couldn't recall when he had last been so sick. Certainly from something less destructive than this nauseated anger as the bottom and sides tore out of his universe and made their way past his throat.

Rick was well into the 'seeing stars' part when he felt like he could get up, sit on the toilet (fully clothed, not much drool on his shirt, that was something). Only now he was crying. Oh, really great. He hadn't cried like this when Beckett was bleeding in the ambulance. Hadn't felt this kind of loss. He had feared he might, would, was, losing her then, but not his whole world. Not the world that had been so bright when he loved Beckett. When it was a world with his beautiful, arrow-swift, crescent-moon clean, possibly-one-daynotdistant Beckett. He was shaking.

Cannot have a breakdown at the cop shop, cannot.

He had had enough training over the years in stifling his emotions, putting their hands behind their backs, cuffing them, wrapping a coat over their head and hustling them away from anyone who might see. But they had been good little emotions, little bright-eyed things he could let loose once he was safely home. Little happy things that made life brighter, sunsets more vivid, joy more joyful… coffee more coffeeish.

Because he was in a world with someone so amazing, because whether he held her or not she was there, she was lovely and extraordinary and uniquely wonderful, and now there was no world where she was. He had taken her for a living goddess, and she was emptier and less human than …. Well, she was still lovely, and she did have a mind like … like he had rarely met before anywhere, curious and intelligent and well-read… .'You're such a snob,' he interrupted himself.

'I'm so fucking tired of explaining everything I say,' he yelled back. 'Christ, I could talk most of the time without using my short words and concrete sentences to someone besides my mother, for God's sake, and Alexis.'

'Who is leaving, by the way.'

'Just shut up.' At least, by the time he pulled out of that dialogue, his breathing was less ragged. He blew his nose. He could feel the edges of the giant hole in his calm and negotiate them, cautiously, long enough to get home. He knew well enough he would have to explore that pit again; but he could make it to somewhere less public now.

How do you think about someone who isn't dead, but never lived? Who had given him hope and joy and reasons to be a better man, a livelier man, a more useful person, a healthier person, and he was wrong, she had never been there? Rick splashed water on his face, succeeded in leaving the building, looked at the sky. Can I smell it? just a little cordite or something, not the towers again, no. But still, another explosion to leave people a little more tense, a little more crazy-scared, a little more duck-and-cover, more the-hell-with-you-Jack, I've-got-mine.

No, that was later. What he most recalled for the first week after that perfect morning on September 11 was people being infinitely kinder, gentler with one another, willing to give strangers just a little more slack because they knew exactly how injured the other people in their city had been.

Another bomb. A small bomb, not at all the size of two jets full of rocketfuel, just another stab at a place where he and the city he loved — without much illusion— was already tender.

That was good. Be angry at bombers. Think about criminals.

That strategy worked fairly well, even if he let his mother into the particular flavor of his funk, probably a mistake, since nothing she could say would make it better. She just looked like she was going to say'Time heals all wounds,' or 'No one could be what you thought she was,' and in fact anything she said would sound like the practical, irritating voice in his head. Not the one that calls me a snob, Martha is cool with things like that. Knowing that, in parts and at times he was just as bad as she was made him crazy. One of the ways he wanted to be different. She was surprised he was going back to the precinct? He wasn't letting the dismemberment of his world betray the one other people lived in. He couldn'tleave the scene of the crime (Beckett's crime. Stop it now, Ricky.) until he had done all he could to help people clear up the broken lives that lay like glass around Boylan Plaza. Alexis will notice if I'm not there. Oh, God. Alexis will notice… .

In fact, Rick felt like he was more on his game than usual. The worst part was waiting for the burner phone to show up. Gates hadn't been thrilled to hear the new suspect was a media personality; they had been sweeping all the easy places to lose something nearby as a matter of course since they realized they needed to find a garage door opener. Suspended dumpster pickups until hundreds of cadets from the academy could comb through them: though fortunately for the baby cops, someone looking at storm drains had had good luck relatively quickly. Thank God for stupid criminals, for amateur criminals, for dumb vain people who thought their looks and desires made them more important than —stop it now, getting too close there.

And yes, despite it all: even he felt glad when he knew people could stop looking over their shoulders for that particular bomber, soon enough the habit of looking extra hard at anyone who looked different wouldn't harden into hate crimes. Saving New York from weeks and months of reliving September Eleventh, keeping it to, perhaps, just a flashback, not so much of a new trauma on that old wound. He tried to dwell on that when he could, while Gates thanked them all. Was Rick glad or not that Espo and Ryan had to refuse the debriefing party? Because he still cared about them, still cared about their what they did, their staunchness, the people who did their jobs. Whether anyone could tell from reading Raley and Ochoa, knowing them had changed the way Rick saw the supporting players.

But he was glad to be released from the glass bubble that kept him from turning on Beckett. Admitting how much he had placed in her, hope for someone who burned so bright in his vision burning for him. Almost close enough to touch FOR FOUR YEARS. Even the summer he spent with Gina, Rick had still believed in Beckett as he saw her. Just thought she wasn't for him, which was hard, which had been so hard, which had made the hoping, when he had allowed it, so much more poisonous. I will not do this in front of her friends, my friends. But it was a narrow escape.

He didn't want to go home. He did not want to talk to his mother; he knew he couldn't hide his brokenness from Alexis; he wished Cannell were still alive, he had never opened his heart to Patterson; he needed more friends and fewer ex-lovers, he needed, oh, God—

Rank had its privileges; somebody managed The Old Haunt for him, but he had a room of his own there. It was a quiet place with an old but working laptop. (He had installed wireless in one room of the bar, and the offices, but the rest was still radio-silent.) As it happened the public rooms were quiet. "Hey Kent," he said to the bartender.

"Hey Rick. What you drinking?"

"Not very much, okay? No matter what I ask, no matter what I tell you."

The bartender smiled briefly. "Sorry. That made me think of Young Frankenstein for a second." They thought about Gene Wilder screaming for bit, and he handed Rick a shot glass. It smelled amazing. Rick held the glass, savored the years and the peat and the ocean and Culloden and practically the Romans. WAY too good to gulp.

"I don't remember ordering anything this good."

"You told us you wanted a range of spirits. And I know you wouldn't waste good booze. So you got a monster in your room you wanna tame?"

Surge of feeling. Rick gritted his teeth."Can't go there yet." Bartender nodded. Rick took a slow sip, tried to stay in the moment.

Kent wiped glasses. It was what he did. Offered a careful, gentle observation in case Rick might want that kind of chat. "The bombing was a terrible thing."

"That it was. Hey. We solved it."

Kent gave him a look of respect and clinked the glass he was wiping on Rick's. "Pretty good monster tamed, then."

"Stupid. Greedy."

"Not political, then?"

"Stupider than that."

The bartender shrugged. "I'm not much of a guy for causes. Good substitute for a life, I guess."

"I think it really depends. Sometimes you don't get much choice about having a life, either."