I'm not sure whether or not I should be proud, but I've decided that I must read more of Michael Crichton's books either way. I finished Next in less than three days and loved every second of it. It kept my attention longer than any other book I have read and I felt obligated to write fanfiction just because I liked the novel that much. My favorite subplot for the book involved Dolly and Vasco's exploits, and it got me thinking about what would have happened if Alex Burnet missed with the warning shot she fired at Vasco with the shotgun she stole from the motel. This is sort of an AU story that takes place during and a few hours after chapter eighty-seven at the Solana Canyon spa where Jamie Burnet had been kidnapped and brought to. Critique, concrit, whatever you want to call it would be loved.

Just like a crow chasing the butterfly

I never thought you'd slip away

I guess I was just a little too late

The Crow and the Butterfly - Shinedown

i

From what Dolly was told, he died before he even hit the ground. She wasn't sure whether to be bothered or comforted by that.

She'd been sitting in the back of the ambulance parked outside the Solana Canyon resort for a little over two hours now. The ambulance itself arrived no latter than fifteen minutes after someone in the resort called for the police to report someone had been shot. This was after the security guards showed up to see what the commotion was about, but they were too late to stop Alex Burnet from killing her long time bounty hunting partner. It wasn't as if the paramedics were of any help of course, because Vasco Borden was already dead and there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that they could hope to revive him. The round from the sawed-off twelve-gauge shotgun had ripped through his chest, pierced his heart, and exited through his upper back. The medics immediately pounced the ex-football player dead as soon as they saw him. They did no even need to check for a pulse or anything. They just knew.

Vasco looked like shit. Dolly had not realized it until they had the police officers who had already arrived on the scene pry her away from her partner's corpse. She had been kneeling over him ever since he first went down onto his back from the gun's blast. She'd been trying to rouse him and get him to talk to her, to show that he was going to be all right and that there wasn't a reason for her to start screaming and crying in hysteria, which she did anyways regardless. She had no idea that he was already gone because she was too distracted by all the blood pouring out of his chest and back to tell. She knew that you were supposed to tie tourniquets for bleeding, but she had no idea how the hell she was supposed to do it for someone bleeding profusely from their torso. Compressing it with the towels several concerned and scared spa goers tossed to her had not helped any. Dolly had gone through at least twelve of them when the medics arrived. By then Vasco's already glazed, half-opened eyes were severely dilated and it did no look like he was breathing. Dolly couldn't perform CPR because it meant that she had to compress the area where he was shot, and she did no want to hurt him more than he already was. She did no want to hurt him period.

It wasn't as if it was going to ever matter what she did or did no do anyways. He was already dead.

It was finally when the two cops pulled her away from Vasco's lifeless body that the gravity of the situation finally struck her for real. She saw Vasco for the first time as a dead man, and what she saw scared and disturbed her deeply. He was laying on his back, his arms spread slightly away from his body, his face and dead eyes looking towards the sky, his legs parted, one foot in the air while the other was on its side, his cowboy hat sitting on the ground some few feet away so that the hole in his skull where his ear was ripped off earlier in the day by that monkey kid was exposed… he looked ghastly awful, and that was when Dolly finally started to cry. She was already screaming and entirely hysterical to begin with, true, but now tears were thrown into the mix. She could not remember the last time she cried, but she honestly couldn't bring herself to care. All that mattered now was that Vasco, her partner and her friend, was gone.

They wouldn't be going back to their hotel room to celebrate the successful citizen's arrest of Jamie Burnet like they originally thought. There wouldn't be drinks, dinner out, the ride home in the helicopter, or counting their reward money from BioGen. There wouldn't even be anymore assignments for them and certainly not even the occasional instances where they would have sex behind the scenes just because they happened to be friends with privileges. No more Dolly having to complain about Vasco smoking cigars in bed or having to clean his good shirts when he got mascara from his goatee on them.

Vasco was dead. Plain and simple. The truth hurt like a blast wound to the chest, and the thought of that made Dolly cry even harder. She was shaking with her sobs when she watched in dazed horror as the paramedics put him into a white body bag and take him into their ambulance before driving away. Two ambulances had originally showed up apparently, because the cops brought her to the second ambulance parked outside the spa so that they could attempt to help her calm down and consequently question her. She couldn't calm down. At least not right away. They let her sit there with the two friendly medics for awhile before they moved to rendezvous with the police officers. She was blissfully left alone. That aside, even when she did calm down two hours after Vasco's death, there wasn't much that the police needed to question her about. It was already obvious to them what had happened.

Alex Burnet, the woman who fired the gun, was arrested on account of obviously committing murder. Dolly figured the worst the shotgun wielding attorney would be convicted for would be manslaughter, but the fact remained that she still killed someone akin to a sort of cop. That looked bad for any defendant going onto trial, whether it was for 'self defense' or not. That aside, Alex Burnet actually had not been shooting in self defense. Dolly would personally testify in court if they tried to pull that shit over a jury or judge. Vasco had only been doing his job. He would have never actually hurt Alex Burnet's son. Despite his huge intimidating size and his otherwise unfriendly disposition, he would have never hurt Jamie Burnet. The fact remained that Alex Burnet had been resisting arrest and evading the law with her son. They were both wanted and Alex killed a legal advocate of the law to avoid being taken into custody. Dolly had watched dazed as Alex Burnet was taken kicking and screaming into one of the cruisers while Jamie Burnet, the man who had been with Alex Burnet, and the boy who looked like he was part chimpanzee were loaded into a second cruiser. As both cruisers drove away, Dolly saw a bird start to follow them. It looked like some sort of parrot. She did no think much further of it.

All she could think about was the fact that Vasco had been killed. He was dead.

There was still another cruiser on the scene. The cop was inside the spa undoubtedly collecting eyewitness accounts from the women who saw what happened. She was fairly certain that all their stories were near the same, seeing as there was such a commotion that Dolly found it hard for any bystander to account it wrongly. Vasco and Dolly had been just outside the surgicenter with Jamie Burnet, and everyone from their agency had already been inside ready to extract the kid's cells that BioGen wanted. It was bluntly obvious that Alex Burnet would have originally been a far better target to retrieve the Burnet cell line from since her cells would have been unquestionably far more akin to Frank Burnet's cells - Alex's father and the original source of BioGen's Burnet cell line, which they purchased from the UCLA - but the fact she was an attorney deterred Vasco from pursuing her. They had gone for her kid instead, which should have been easy to pull off since he was only an eight year old kid. As it turned out, between grabbing the wrong target and Vasco having his ear ripped off by some freak monkey child, it was never as unproblematic as it originally sounded at all. Also, attorneys with shotguns were just as frightening as convicted murderers.

Vasco and Dolly had the kid, no more than twenty feet away from the surgicenter's entrance, no more than three our four paces, when the kid's mother started calling to him. Jamie had called back for his mother. Dolly, being as soft for kids as she was, froze up not knowing what to do. She let go. That made Vasco angry. He tried to urge her forward towards the center, but then Jamie kept calling for his mother and Dolly wouldn't grab back onto him. Vasco tried to get her to grab onto the kid again when something - it looked like an ape dressed like a little kid, and Dolly realized it was the same little monster that bit off Vasco's ear earlier that same day - leapt onto him and knocked him back into the rose bushes. The monkey kid disappeared into the brush and Jamie bolted for his mother. Dolly saw Alex Burnet running over to retrieve her son and she froze seeing that the attorney was wielding a fucking shotgun. She was frozen in place in terror but Vasco seemed oblivious to the oncoming danger. He was up on his feet again, pushing her and telling her to get moving while the women who were watching in the spa called him out because it looked like he was abusing her.

Dolly knew better than all of them. She would speak up in Vasco's defense if she had to testify in court against Alex Burnet. Vasco would have never hurt her. Ever.

He panicked when she did no move, something she rarely saw him ever do, and pushed past her knowing that Dolly would be fine. At least she blended in partially. He looked far more out of place than she did dressed in all black like some sort of bad guy in a cheap, badly directed western film. The cops would show up, or at least security guards, and they would apprehend him regardless as to whether or not he flashed his badge at them. The fact remained that bounty hunters had to pull off their jobs as neatly as possible. If they did no, they themselves could end up arrested. They could loose their badges. Dolly would be fine, but Vasco had his career on the line. He had to get out. Everything was falling apart. Dolly watched in partial, dizzying fright as Vasco looked sideways and caught a glimpse of Alex Burnet wielding the shotgun like she knew how to use it - hand on the stock, hand on the action - and she called out that she was going to kill him if she ever saw him again. She says, "If I ever see your face again, I'll blow it off, asshole."

Vasco did no answer. He kept walking swiftly at a half-trot towards the exit of the spa. Dolly's sense of terror induced vertigo suddenly lurched into a sense of blatant horror when she saw Alex Burnet lift and aim the gun. Dolly prayed that she was only going to fire a warning shot at the bushes along the path to scare him, but the woman had no idea what the hell she was doing. She may have appeared to have known how to handle a gun, but the fact remained that she had only watched her father practice on a shooting range and she herself had never actually fired a gun before. She had no idea what she was doing. She had absolutely no idea.

Dolly remembered the exact moment when the gun was fired.

There was an explosion of sound and Vasco violently jerked to the side. Blood went flying, staining the path with bright crimson, and he went down heavier than a sack of cinderblocks. The sound of his body hitting the ground, to Dolly, seemed just as loud as the blast that killed him. Dolly was positive that those two sounds were going to haunt her for the rest of her existence. She never heard herself scream and the sound of her own footfalls as she ran for him. There was only a high pitch ringing in her ears. She could have sworn that she heard the sound of Alex blubbering and trying to explain that she did no mean to shoot him, but Dolly ignored her. All that she cared about was Vasco, and he was already dead before he even hit the ground. She wasn't sure whether to be bothered or comforted by that.

She was comforted because that meant that he must have died instantly and painlessly, but she was bothered because he was dead.

Dolly met Vasco when he signed up to receive a partner for his private investigating and bounty hunting exploits. He had already been a fugitive recovery specialist for three years after he retired from playing football because an injury he sustained to his leg at the age of thirty-nine. It was painful for him to walk on it sometimes, although he did not complain much. There had been a man and another woman that Vasco worked with on one occasion, but those two partnerships had not lasted for more than a year each. Dolly was the third assistant he applied for, and three was obviously the charm. They had worked together for five years. The first year had been casual. The second had taken on a slightly more romantic turn. As it turned out though, in the end, Dolly decided it best to end their relationship because she deemed that their chemistry did no just seem to match. Vasco had been fine with the breakup. They remained as partners and good friends for the following two years, and their final year with one another before his death… Dolly hated herself for it, but she found that she had started to fall head over heels for him.

He had been the one who moved in on her first when they first had their relationship those few years ago, and Dolly had only gone along with it because she wasn't sure how to say no. Vasco wasn't handsome - he was muscular and had an otherwise attractive build, but he himself wasn't handsome - and she found that she wasn't attracted to him at the beginning. After they broke their romantic habits to return to their somewhat normal affairs as bounty hunters, she found that she was falling for him. The fact he wasn't as good looking as what she would have liked did no bother her. Neither did his vicious personality when it came to his career. The way he grinned at her when they were paid off for a successful recovery, how he laughed her off when she scolded him for leaving his dirty clothing in the corner of their hotel rooms instead of putting it in the hamper, the manner in which he showed her affection and how he actually cared about her through his cold demeanor…

She loved him. Now it was too late for her to tell him how she felt. She let him slip through her fingers not thinking that he would, and now she was just a little too late.

The sun started to set over the horizon. Dolly watched it for a long time before she caught sight of a black figure in one of the palm trees. The crow cawed and took to the air. It looked like a black shadow against the orange and pink sky. Somewhere in a bush underneath that same tree, there was a butterfly perched on a flower as it drank its nectar. Dolly couldn't make out the insect's exact colors because her vision blurred. She buried her face in her arms and her shoulders shook with her tears. The cop came back out from interrogating the people inside the Solana Canyon spa and he had to wait another hour before Dolly had calmed down enough for questioning.

Fin