A/N: Hey, everyone. I'm migrating over another older story, which will hopefully be new to a lot of you. The next two chapters of Resilient are well on their way to being finished, and I'm also working on a couple of Christmas stories, so hopefully this helps tide everyone over to the new-to-everyone stories around the bend.
Dwight Darnell raises his tattooed hand, gripping a key piece of evidence through its protective plastic bag. When its muzzle flashes and rips a shot through the air, it sets off a ripple of confused panic through the room. And again. And again. Like a wave, it gains momentum. This shouldn't be possible. Most people in the gallery try either to duck or to run. Sharon's instinct is to find a clear shot.
She's drawn her weapon without a conscious thought, and now she can put an end to this. It's chaos in detail. Small actions, like the curl of a finger, add to a sickening whole. Every movement in the room becomes an input as she cycles through potential solutions as if on autopilot.
Darnell's first four targets fall in quick succession. Doctor Joe, the deputy nearest to the jail entrance, the consulting defense attorney, DDA Rosen.
But even as she maintains sight of Darnell, fleeing spectators keep Sharon from returning fire. They seem flow out of nowhere, rising up between rows of chairs, from the jury box, crawling along the floor. They keep running and running, darting out of the room without realizing that they're keeping everyone else in danger.
With movements no less sure as his supply of bullets dwindles, Darnell turns toward Judge Richwood. He's aiming toward the bench when Taylor fires toward his back. The shot is knocked astray by yet another fleeing bystander. But the sound draws Darnell's attention and he spins, whip-fast, toward the back of the room.
Two quick flashes. Russell Taylor, a solid cop and trusted friend, the man whose goofy interpersonal awkwardness has recently found him at the center of several ongoing jokes between Sharon and Andy. His torso jerks twice as the bullets make impact.
He drops to the floor, and this is where Sharon falters.
The shock of it is a crossroads. Either brush it away, like a pesky fly, or allow it to register and risk that it'll sink in. This is when the familiarity of the tableau catches up to her. Sharon knows what happens next.
But she doesn't fix her aim right away, like she knows she should. She glances across the aisle. There, Andy mirrors her own stance, weapon raised but attention directed downward. Their eyes meet for the briefest of moments in the midst of their regrouping. Her stomach lurches with the understanding that her sentimentality has just ruined the outcome.
Sharon cannot raise her weapon quickly enough. Neither of them can. And when Darnell fires again, she braces to feel the bullets piercing her body. But they don't.
She registers Andy's gun thumping to the carpet first. He's always insisted on chrome-plated Beretta, the non-conformist option. It flashes under the fluorescent lights as it comes to rest on its broad side.
Even before dragging her eyes back across the aisle, the urge to scream builds in her chest. The sensation sours and roils, grows choking as he clutches at his neck. Blood streams between his fingers and blooms between the second and third buttons of his crisp white shirt, one she'd just brought home from the cleaners.
There is no last connection here. His gaze is undirected, skyward. Minutes seem to tick by as he collapses. The physics play out like the perverse choreography of a high rise demolition.
Andy lands face-down, with no efforts to break the fall. Blood darkens the collar of his shirt where his hand fell from his neck. He doesn't move.
And he doesn't move.
And he doesn't move.
Trying to inhale in the face of this is like sucking sand down her throat and into her lungs; a tremendous, painful effort. And once Sharon has drawn the breath, her body isn't sure what to do with the air. She's frozen in between a million options, suffocating on her own inaction.
When she finally exhales, in something between a gasp and a sob, it comes with a jolting return to reality. She isn't in Judge Richwood's courtroom. It's dark and warm. Hot, even. She is in bed, at home, panting like she's just run several miles. A nightmare. Vivid and horrifying, sending her heart racing and her eyes watering, but a nightmare.
Andy is alive and breathing and now moving and awake next to her. In a blink of clarity, she finds herself thankful that she hadn't started screaming in her sleep. As it is, he's more confused than worried, squinting at her from where he's propped up on his elbows.
She turns the covers back from her sweat-damp legs. Her stomach doesn't recover from the nightmare as quickly as her consciousness, and its intensified churning sends her toward the bathroom. She manages to not-slam the door behind her just before the gagging starts.
Sharon could probably come to terms with the fact that she'll be shooting Dwight Darnell every night for the rest of her life. Or that, on occasion, she'd fall into the dream and fail to fire or her gun would jam, and he'd turn to her with a grin and pull the trigger. Then he'd stand over her and pull it again.
Apparently those scenarios aren't enough for some part of herself.
What is the point of this? What is the damned point, other than to serve up another horror that easily could have happened in that courtroom? Reality had played out badly enough, hadn't it?
Having thrown up what little remained in her stomach, Sharon lowers to the floor. The tile is a welcome shock of cold under her shins. It's better in here, easier to breathe. It's harder to fall asleep in this harsh setting, less likely that she'll drift back to the horror show queued up behind her eyelids.
She could take another shower, stand under the spray until she's waterlogged and the water runs tepid. It would buy time, an excuse to avoid explaining why she's camped out in the bathroom, choosing the thick fog of exhaustion over sleep. But that option is a lot of work, too. The faucet, the towels, the caddy with all of the soaps, they're all so far away when she can't work up the momentum to get off the floor. Instead, she flushes the toilet and slides across to rest her back against the vanity.
It, too, is cold and hard and just uncomfortable enough to serve a purpose.
She pulls her feet in and rests her forehead on her knees, gripping her ankles, willing her heart to slow and her head to stop throbbing. She stares at the skin of her thighs, the tile floor between them, not daring to close her eyes again. Her throat is raw, coated with acidic dredges from her empty stomach.
Andy is on the other side of the door. He doesn't need to knock or say anything for her to know this, he'll just be there. He has a great poker face when it comes to concern, a quality well-suited to their professional lives. But proximity is his tell. When Andy's worried, he doesn't prod — he lingers. He'll wait and be around when there's something he can do to help.
She could do much worse than a partner who demonstrates affection via aggressive presence. Sharon knows this. But in situations like the present, she must remind herself.
Because here, there's nothing he can do to help, but he'll stick around. And his being around will only remind her that it's unfixable. The die has already been cast, and she doesn't want to discuss the final tally. She doesn't need to tell him how it played out, after all. He was there.
And how can she explain the abstract aftermath, the wall building itself within her, obscuring what she's feeling from what she's expected to feel, what she should feel? How can she possibly justify how dreams like the one she just had somehow push her remorse further afield, until it's nothing more than a blip on the horizon?
As if on cue, Andy drums the pads of his fingers against the door. It's quieter than knocking. He won't want to wake Rusty.
Sharon lets her head loll against the vanity and clears a foul coating of half-digested coffee from her throat. "I'm fine. Go back to bed."
"I don't think so."
He's so damn stubborn. On another day, she might call it 'charmingly persistent'. That's how they got here, after all; him on the other side of her bed, her having nightmares of him being murdered.
But tonight? Stubborn. To prove it, he adds, "You think I can sleep with you in there?" It's just this side of teasing, the way he says it, but it isn't a joke.
She wants to say 'yes,' but it'd be a lie. She settles for something nearer to the truth. "I don't want to move just yet."
A shadow shifts in the gap under the door. "Fair enough. But it's late and I'm tired of standing, so can I join you?"
They've been working nonstop for two days. Even if it is just an excuse to get through the door, she takes pity on his fatigue and her disruption of his rest. "Yeah."
In her periphery, the door opens and closes again. He sinks to sit beside her, stretching his pajamaed legs flat against the floor. Their shoulders don't quite touch. They stay like this for several minutes, with Sharon ignoring his intermittent glances in her direction. The silence stretches out until it grows ludicrous.
With eyes fixed forward, she says, "I'm fine."
"Okay, so then let's go back to bed."
If only it was that straightforward. She shakes her head at the prospect of returning to her dream, at the thought of having this all replay, but maybe worse the next time. Rather than rising off the floor, she bends forward and rests her forehead on her knees again.
Andy runs his palm along her back, tracing a lulling pattern up and down her spine. The warmth of it — physical and emotional — is at odds with her logic for remaining in the bathroom. Exhaustion returns to press at her eyes.
The angle of his arm changes as he shifts his shoulders against the cabinet door, bracing to say something. "Nightmares are rough."
Tears prick at her eyes. Something she can't quite identify bubbles just under the smooth surface she's been working so hard to maintain, and this threatens to be the point at which it all breaks through. She sniffs, trying to keep it together for a bit longer, just until she can switch rooms. Just until she can get through tonight, tomorrow, this case. Until she has someone to blame for this madness.
"Can I get you anything?" She shakes her head, but that doesn't stop his onslaught of helpful suggestions. "Water? Sprite? Some crackers? Advil?"
"No, that's fin—"
"Xanax?"
Sharon finds herself a little afraid of what he'd do if she said 'yes'. When she looks back at Andy, he's wearing a half-grin. She narrows her eyes, and his grin widens.
"Okay," he says, "maybe not that last one. How about a CSPAN session?"
"I'm not trying to fall asleep right now."
He frowns. "Why not? It's three in the morning."
The 'why not', vestiges of her nightmare, cling to her memory. Two bullets beyond recent events and her future, as she sees it these days, extinguished into nothing. The floors of her mind are stained with blood.
The point of this, maybe, is that everything could have ended up worse.
She sits up, scoots closer to him, rests her head on his shoulder. Her hand finds a spot on his t-shirt where she can feel his heartbeat, steady and firm, underneath. She allows the rhythm to anchor her to reality.
If Andy is confused, he doesn't show it. He wraps his arm around her back. "You're freezing."
"I guess." He is very warm, compared to the floor. Her pajamas have a hint of dampness where she'd been overheating in bed, and they've begun to chill in the air.
He squeezes her hip. "So much for not wanting to fall asleep."
"It's not a risk, believe me." On a normal day, yes. This arrangement, played out on the couch or in bed, would have her unconscious in minutes. But now it has another purpose.
"If you say so." He yawns. "So you're just planning to...hang out here for the duration?"
"Maybe."
"Speaking from too much experience, the bathroom floor is no place to spend the night."
He's trying to make her laugh. She doesn't have the heart to tell him it's not going to happen. "I'm fully aware this is absurd."
And it is. For Sharon, anyway. She's struck by an urge to explain that she doesn't do this . She doesn't allow dreams to kick her into turmoil. She doesn't get out of bed in the middle of the night to sit in the bathroom and dwell on her life choices.
But Andy knows all of this, of course. Down to her sleeping habits. That's why he's here. "I wouldn't say absurd . Maybe abnormal."
She's beyond arguing semantics. "Okay."
"No, I mean," he lifts his free hand. "There's no checklist for recovering from something like this."
Sharon isn't sure what all something like this is meant to cover, even as she's mired in it. She supposes it's the nebulous combined effect of surviving a shootout, watching a friend die, and killing his killer, all compressed into the span of a minute or two. It's easier to talk around it, giving it a vague shape instead of sketching it out.
"I know." This is an objective truth. Everyone reacts to stressors in her own way. What concerns Sharon is that she's miles away from the type of reaction she would recognize from herself.
"That's why, maybe, it's better not to know what the so-called right answers are. It's no use trying to measure yourself against some generic timeline that someone —" he catches himself, sweetly, before saying something disparaging about her past work. "Uh, put, I'm sure, a lot of well-meaning time and effort into."
"That's not what those questions are about."
"Aren't they?" Andy exhales in something like a laugh. "I have my own experiences with that song-and-dance, remember?"
"How could I forget?" She can't find the teasing edge she'd usually apply, and settles for patting his chest to offset the weariness in her voice. "The post-incident interview isn't about well-being. It's meant to address potential liability issues by ensuring that the officer is fit to return to duty once a use of force has been deemed justified."
Sharon catches her lapse into the sanitized comfort of procedure-speak just in time to register its ridiculousness, coming from the grown woman curled up with her boyfriend on the bathroom floor. She follows up with a lame, "That's all."
"Okay, Captain ," he chides, "that's all fine and good. But I don't care about liability . I care about you, and your well-being."
It still sometimes takes her aback, the way he states his feelings so simply in her presence, with no hint of self-consciousness. Andy is adept at vulnerability in a way she needs to re-learn. But, as it is now, his words combined with his fingers threading through her hair, overwhelms the dam she's been attempting to reinforce ahead of her emotions.
Her answer rides on a sob, and then there's no stopping the tears. "I don't know what to tell you."
He's quiet for an extended moment, bringing his arm around her shoulder. Then,"How about the truth?"
She draws several shaky breaths, trying to calm enough to answer him. "I don't even know what that is." She wipes at her eyes. "I can't describe how I feel, beyond saying," her voice breaks, but she pushes through with the remainder of the thought, "it's not much of anything right now."
"There's a lot going on." He reaches up to tug a few tissues from the box on the counter and hands them to her.
"I know." She dabs a tissue under her eyes. "But I don't think I've even processed what happened to Taylor, let alone the rest of it."
"This doesn't all have to happen on equal footing. You're not obligated to grieve Darnell."
"He was a human being, Andy. Now he's dead, and I did that . If I start drawing lines between who deserves my remorse and who doesn't…"
She can't finish the sentence, but Andy picks up her meaning. He sighs. "Then you're worried you're doing the same thing he did. Dehumanizing him to excuse your actions."
She nods, stifling another sob behind her palm. She'd been sickened, listening to Darnell reason, with unassailable certainty, that he shouldn't be tried for murdering those he'd deemed non-human. It was an in-the-flesh retelling of the justifications that serve as cautionary tales in history books, the kind of words that follow chapters on humankind's darkest massacres.
If Sharon can't single out an ounce of humanity to grieve in her victim, if he deserved to die, if he's just another bullet-ridden body lying in the morgue, then where does that leave her? A force in some tit-for-tat retribution scenario? Absolved due to self-defense? Evaluated and cleared on the objective scale of lives taken?
Andy presses his lips to the top of her head. "Okay. But maybe that remorse doesn't need to happen right now. Just because it hasn't surfaced yet doesn't mean it never will. And Sharon," He pauses, allowing another of her shuddering exhales to pass. "I think you'll find that being worried about this is a sign that it's in there, somewhere. Maybe there are just other things you need to be feeling, and piling on guilt over what you're not feeling isn't going to help."
She considers his point, giving time for her emotion to subside. Even though what he says seems plausible, one sentiment continues to overwhelm all others. With a deep, steady, breath, she says, "I need to find who's responsible for this."
"That's fine." He pulls back, but keeps his arms around her. "As long as you don't use that as an excuse to run yourself into the ground."
"I won't."
Her answer is too quick. Andy tilts his head to make eye contact. "I'm serious."
"I understand." She nods and reiterates, "I won't."
He tucks an errant lock of hair behind her ear. "One morning, you're gonna wake up, after a full night's sleep—"
Sharon rolls her eyes, allowing the slightest spark of humor to sneak through. "As if that ever happens."
"— and everything will be back to normal." He smiles at her quip. "In the meantime, you know where to find me."
With that, she's blinking back tears again. "I do."
And she does. He's on the other side of the bed, just outside of her office, across the kitchen counter, standing by her side. In the worst-case scenario, he's a phone call away. In this moment, there are only inches between them. She erases the distance to kiss him, to draw her thumb along the faint stubble on his jaw, to send silent thanks for his firm perspective and continued existence.
His grin becomes downright smug. "Feeling more mobile now?"
She sniffs. "Somewhat."
"Good," Andy says. "My ass is asleep, and the rest of me would like to follow. C'mon," he stands and holds out his hand to help her off the floor. "We've still got another two and a half hours of quality sleep time."
Even if her emotional state is improved over where it was before their conversation, Sharon can't imagine drifting back to sleep now. When he heads back into the bedroom, with her trailing by the hand, she stops just beyond the doorway. "Actually, I think I'm awake for the day." He lifts an eyebrow at her in response. She shrugs. "Once I'm up, I'm up."
"Okay. If you say so." Andy might not buy it, but he lets it go. He lets her go, pressing a kiss to her cheek before releasing her hand.
Sharon closes the door behind her. In the living room, she turns on the television and curls onto the couch, allowing the blue-tinted glare of CNN steal away the hours between here and work. Images of politics and war flit in and out of her attention, vying with car commercials and ads for prescription medications. But none of those are able to match the visceral staying power of that damned courtroom.