Okay, I'm writing this b/c there aren't any Donna fictions around, and you know what? She deserves a good one where she's not being beaten up by Spike's mother, or having ink spurted in her face (even though that's hilarious when it happens to anyone, even Sam). So enjoy my one-shot, Lost.
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Donna Sabine took a long look at her self in the mirror, this ritual of staring at her self started in the days she first joined the SRU. It helped her after she decided to lie about her not having a shot to avoid killing someone. An innocent father who just wanted his baby back.
After an intense lecturing from Ed Lane, the team's fearless leader, she took a good long look at her self in the mirror. She told her self that she was an officer in the SRU, she saved lives, but sometimes to save a life, she had to end one. Now she didn't have a problem, not that killing someone still made her sick to her stomach, but she didn't shy away from her duties.
Donna got into the uniform and walked out of the locker room. She met up with Doug Riley, the gauche bomb expert.
"Morning," he greeted Donna as they walked into the briefing room.
"Morning Doug," they sat down in the back.
"Alright guys, it's been a pretty quiet day so far, but-" Sergeant Mark Reynolds's briefing was cut short as the alarm blared.
"Team three, gear up, gear up!" Kira's voice blared over the alarm, "Female threatening to commit suicide,"
"I stand corrected," he said, "let's go cool pants."
They arrived at the scene and first responders filled them in.
"Kaitlin Duff, she lives in this building, apartment 309. We tried talking to her, but she wouldn't listed," an officer stated.
"Anything else?" Sergeant Reynolds asked.
"She's a writer, graduated from Yale,"
"Okay, Doug, Fred, you guys are in the command post with me. Don, James, you are going to go through Kaitlin's things, get the keys to her apartment. I want you to get a profile. Donna, you and Scott are going up on the roof, Scott, cover Donna. Donna, I want you to talk Kaitlin down."
"Copy," almost everyone said.
"Are you sure sarge? This is my first negotiation," Donna said.
"I'm sure," Mark answered, ending that discussion effectively, "I'll be your second Donna, in your ear the whole time."
"Copy," Donna finally said, and everyone went into their different locations.
Donna and Scott went up twenty flights of stairs until they reached the roof. The building was on lockdown, so no elevators were functional.
Donna stepped onto the roof and attached her harness to a railing, Scott stayed behind, covering Donna.
"Kaitlin? My name's Donna," Constable Sabine said slowly. She took deep breaths, working against the adrenaline as the sergeant had advised.
On the edge of the roof, a figure stood she made no noise as Donna greeted her. It almost looked as if she were shrugging.
"I'm here to help," Donna said as she walked closer to the woman standing on the edge of the roof.
"Do not move any closer Constable," Kaitlin said. She leaned a bit closer to the edge.
"Alright," Donna said stopping as she heard the sergeant advised her to take it slow, "but it's going to be pretty hard for you to hear me."
"Maybe I don't want to listen," was the woman's reply, "maybe I want to off myself."
"Do you want to tell me why?"
"Why tell you? So you can 'help'? Like every other therapist in Toronto who want to dope you up on drugs? No thanks."
"Well, why don't we just talk?"
"About what? The weather? Seems a bit too mundane for standing on the edge of a roof," the cynical voice popped up.
Sergeant Reynolds cautioned into the head set, "Get her mind off of what she's about to do, talk about her job."
Donna said, "Copy," silently into the head set, and then a bit louder she said, "Why don't we talk about your job? You're a writer, right?"
"Was a writer, but my stories sucked,"
"I'm pretty sure they weren't that bad, you graduated from Yale with a degree in literature."
"Yeah, well constable, once you've been through Yale, you turn into an imagination-less slob. Your writing turns slavish and filled with clichés. I lost myself in college, and it's never going back."
"So you think jumping off of a roof will help?"
"No, but it will be like Gabriel in The Dead,"
"Care to explain?"
"James Joyce wrote a compilation of short stories, he put it in a book called Dubliners, the last story was called The Dead. The main character, Gabriel, was a hyper-educated, blasé man, he decided at the end to go west, which in the book is a euphemism for death." Kaitlin replied.
Donna was struggling, not many people in the police world had much past a high school education. Luckily, Doug was the life saver and he had looked up the said book online and finally, the gold mine. James and Dan were done ransacking through Kaitlin's stuff and they made a lot of findings. One was several handwritten, and then crumpled up and tossed, author biographies in the corner of her study.
"She's in search of her identity," Dan said, looking at several of them. They varied in what she believed in and sometimes even her past.
Donna, meanwhile, was desperately trying to get something in common with this woman, but when she heard Dan's comment, something clicked in her head, and she began talking again after Kaitlin's speech about Dubliners.
"But you don't have to be like Gabriel, Kaitlin." Donna said, "There are other ways to deal with this. I can help you out, not in the way those therapists do, but just by talking."
"Alright, so talk me down constable."
"Okay, but you're going to need to talk to me too, one sided conversations don't work."
"Fine then,"
"So, do you want to tell me why you want to commit suicide?" Donna already knew the reasons behind it, but she needed to think, and Kaitlin's responses provided ample opportunity to think ahead.
"Because I'm not myself anymore," Kaitlin answered.
Donna already had the response, "You know what? I had the same problem when I joined the SRU, I didn't know who I was."
"Care to explain?" Kaitlin's attention was now on Donna, not on the fact that she was standing on the edge of a 20 story building.
"Well," Donna said stepping closer and up onto the ledge, standing with the young woman, she made no move, "before I joined the unit, I was working undercover for narcotics. Working undercover, you have to assume multiple personalities, I lost who I really was, and so it was hard to fit in with the unit."
"So your story had a happy ending?" Kaitlin asked tentatively.
"It did," Donna said, looking Kaitlin straight in the eye.
"Will mine?"
"It's up for you to decide, you can jump, kill your self and never find out, or you can come down with me and you'll be able to write your ending."
"You think so?"
"I know so Kaitlin," Donna said seriously, "and the moment your book gets published, I'll be first in line to buy it." Donna extended her hand.
Kaitlin smiled and looked at Donna, "I'll hold that to you," she took Donna's hand and they stepped down from the ledge.
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Half an hour later, Kaitlin was sitting on a stretcher when Donna walked up.
"Hey," Donna greeted.
Kaitlin looked up at the roof top she was standing on 30 minutes ago, she then said, "I was an idiot."
"You weren't, you just needed guidance,"
"Yeah, but Gabriel Conroy didn't say he wanted to die, he wanted to end his old life, to become a better man to his wife."
"Up there," Donna said, also looking at the roof, "you ended your old life, here's a chance to start new, with a clean slate."
"Yeah," the writer laughed, "never did a cliché sound so good."
They talked for a few more minutes before the medics wheeled Kaitlin away.
Donna went back to her new team, and Sergeant Mark commended her on a job well done.
"Never have I seen a negotiation go so smoothly in my whole life," the sergeant finally said at debrief.
"Now don't over state things sarge," Donna said laughing, "I was half lost up there."
"But you found yourself," the sergeant said seriously, "and you found Kaitlin in time."
At those words, the debrief had seemed to reach a peaceful conclusion and the sergeant dismissed everyone to their locker rooms. Donna sat in her room looking at herself in the mirror again in her ritual, she was smiling.
'This is who I am,' she thought, 'this is who I am, and what I do. No questions asked.'
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Okay, I thought it was pretty good. As I said, this site needed a good Donna-centric that didn't make her into a complete head case!
And also, I was studying Dubliners by James Joyce when I wrote this many months ago . . . and English (it explains the heightened vocab there) and lemme tell you, this book is enough to make ANYONE commit suicide. I hated that guy; the Irish call him "the prick with the stick" lmao. Friends don't let other friends read Dubliners!