PERSONAL

Okay, I know it's been a very long time since I've touched this story, but now I'm back to writing fanfiction and I promise I'll continue this story in the near future. For now, I've re-edited C1. To the lovely soul who added me to her story alert list, just hang in there, okay ?

Love, L

Disclaimer: I don't own the characters or the show, I don't make money from writing for them, I only borrow them for my own selfish purposes. Thank you to the owners for sharing.

Zero

The world was reduced to a dark haze under the most powerful thunderstorm the state had seen in a decade. In an isolated house on the edge of an isolated town, a little girl sat up in bed, afraid the wind would rip the walls out of the ground and crush her. "Mommy?" No answer.

"Mommy?" Still, the house trembled silent.

"MOMMY!" This time the thunder answered, loud enough for all of Mississippi to hear. Crying, she clutched her doll tight to her chest, whispering words of comfort in her ears. A new salve of thunder and lightning convinced her to leave her room to look for reassurance.

As she padded down the hallway, she listened for sounds of her mother, but heard only the cracking of fragile walls battling with the wind. Softly crying now, she was hugging her doll close to her when she noticed the basement door was flapping open. She went to the stairs, and though they were completely plunged in darkness, she thought she saw the flickering of candlelight on the wall at the bottom. A little encouraged, she gingerly made her way down until her bare feet slipped on some kind of sticky liquid. Crying out in surprise, she fell down the last of the steps, losing her doll in the process, sobbing in fear and exhaustion.

"Mommy…" Tears streaming down her face, she started noticing in the candlelight the rather dark shade of red of what she had slipped on. Its metallic smell reminded her of blood, only there couldn't possibly be so much of it. Looking up, she recognized her friend, the gentle man from the school. He was lying naked and still on the ground, his skin all cut up, and her mother was standing over him in her whitest nightgown. Panicked, she scrambled over to him to try and wake him, to try and make him better, but he wouldn't move. She begged her mother to help, but it wasn't until she looked up at her that she saw the bloody knife in her hands. "Don't you fret, little one, he's gone from us now. I made sure of it. He was never good enough for us, my darling."

The little girl screamed into the night, and the storm itself quaked in shame.

One

New York City, 2006.

The woman woke with a start, for which she blamed the thunder more than her alarm clock. As she risked poking her head out of the covers, she was greeted with the riotous pounding of rain on her apartment window. If it had been any other morning, she would have celebrated the temperamental skies as proof that nature was still very much alive in this world of steel and concrete. As it was, the storm's raging moods struck much too close to the nightmares that had been plaguing her all night. Thinking how useless it would be to postpone the inevitable, Glenna Lynn Bishop dragged herself out of bed and into the bathroom. Warily resting her hands on the sink, she took a deep breath and looked at herself in the mirror. She had been dreading this day for twenty years.

Today was the day her mother was being released from prison.

Two

"Bishop! Can you come to my office?"

Great. She hadn't been at her desk for five minutes and the captain was already demanding she move again. She hid the documents from the prison in a folder before she rose. The normally reassuring din of activity in the bullpen only added to her already stubborn migraine, and the smell of stale coffee did nothing to appease her nausea.

"Detective Bishop?

- Coming…"

Please don't let me throw up in public, she prayed as she made her way to her boss's office. When had they moved it so far away anyway?

"I meant now, Bishop.

- Sorry, I was just…"

She didn't bother to finish the sentence. What was the point? What could she tell him? Even as she heard Deakins shut the door behind her, she tried to shake off the hand that had been squeezing her guts since she'd woken to the thunderstorm that morning.

"So, I received word from prison. You can probably guess what I'm about to tell you."

What? How did he find out about her mother? She'd wanted nothing to do with the woman who had given birth to her, and she'd taken every precaution to hide her true identity from the moment she'd first applied to the police academy. She'd even had her name changed. What was Deakins going to do now, have her fired for guilt by association, or worse, send her to foot patrol? She didn't care what he'd say, she was prepared to fight him to the death for her hard-earned job.

"Brody, the killer of Jews you and Goren arrested yesterday? Your hunch was right, he's already begging his lawyer to have a sitdown with us. Goren's out for the day, so I'm sending you over there with Carver. You okay to back him up?"

Oh, right. Of course. Sure. No problem.

"Are you alright, detective? You seem a little pale."

FYI: G. Lynn Bishop is the name given to her by L&O:CI writers. I came up with Glenna to fit the initial, so please blame me and not them if you hate it. (It was the name of my favourite character—a gorgeous twenty-something modern-day New York City witch—in an unrelated novel, so I decided to name the mysterious detective after her.)

So, questions, comments, outrage? Tell me what you think.