Disclaimer:
I don't own it, I don't pretend to own it, I intend no monetary gain off of this, and don't wish any kind of copyright infringement on Top Cow production or TNT or whomever.
In honour of the officers of the NYPD who served and protected their last on 9-11-01
Chapter one
Detective Sara Pezzini, NYPD homicide, eleventh precinct, was currently dressed in a flowery apron, liberally coated with fine grey dust. Her stalker, occasional ally, and overall tall-dark-and-scary type, Ian Nottingham, sat across from her, on the sofa, black hair and beard liberally coated with the fine grey powder, ageing him about forty years.
It was October thirty-first, Halloween or Samhain, depending on the mystical affiliation of the person. It had been a little over a month-and-a-half since the Day. The two of them had just finished the exhaustive task of clearing every bit of the fine grey powdered concrete out of Pezzini's apartment.
Her buddy, Gabriel, was fixing something mysterious out of the freezer. Her neighbours had sent literally hundreds of 'care' packages to Sara after the Day, most of which were still in the freezer. There was enough food that Sara wouldn't have to worry about making a meal for the next year, if she was careful. She had also been drowned in a sea of grey-and-blue NYPD t-shirts, sweatshirts, and jogging pants.
The support was nice, half the time her neighbours referred to her as 'the cop in the loft' and avoided her eyes in the corridor, but after the Day, well a little extra was always nice. It helped. Not that there was much that could help. She blinked back a memory:
"Thanks" said a man, whose name she neither knew nor asked.
His suit, probably once a fashionable Armani or something like that, was grey just like her clothing and everything else on this godforsaken bit of street. The world was backlit by an eerie glow, everything was grey. So damn grey.
She crawled out from behind the squad car. She'd shoved him, and then dove herself, behind the overturned vehicle when One World Trade collapsed. She'd already seen the South Tower go, had in fact been stuck in the debris.
"No prob" she replied breathlessly, "Now get out, before we all get killed,"
He nodded, soot caking off his body. Pezzini fetched her water bottle, now cracked and bleeding on the concrete, and wet a scrap of her jacket, that had gotten ripped off in the initial explosion. She handed it to him.
"Thanks" he said again, wiping the dust, now a pasty mud, out of his face.
"Get out," she repeated; "God knows what'll go next." she turned around, preparing to head back into the…mess.
"Where are you going?" he asked, puzzled that she wasn't returning to safety with him.
"Back" she grunted, adjusting the almost worthless dust mask, "There're still people out there."
"What! Are you nuts!" he exclaimed.
"I'm a cop" she swished the last usable mouthful of water in her mouth and spit out the grit, "Same thing"
"Sara, Sara, SARA!" Gabriel shouted, holding a plate of what resembled beef in front of her face, "Jesus, Sara, don't do that, it scares the hell out me."
"Sorry" she apologised, mechanically moving the plate to her lap. She put her boots up on the table, using her knees as a balance for her plate.
Looking across at Ian, she stifled a laugh, "You look about sixty years old, Nottingham."
"Yeah, well, I wish I looked that good at sixty," Gabriel said wistfully. Ian studiously ignored them both, instead applying himself to the food.
"What no snappy, erudite comeback?" Sara teased.
"Far be it for me, Lady Sara, to impugn on your humour" he said darkly.
"Boo," Gabriel scoffed, "Don't you ever lighten up?"
"Nope," Sara teased, "he's a post-modern Dark Knight. Perpetually gloomy."
"I guess it's hard to pull off that bad-ass assassin role if you're sunshine and light." Gabriel said grinning, " 'specially if you're in a pink apron with little polka dots."
Nottingham glared at the young netfreak, promising retribution, but still doggedly shovelling food from plate to mouth. Gabriel shucked up a chair, backwards, and dropped into it with a thump.
The door knocked. Ian looked to Sara, who looked to Gabriel, who sighed and levered himself out of the hardback kitchen chair. He yanked it open, without checking the peephole or asking who was there.
Ian's hand moved from plate to chest, probably feeling for a weapon of some kind, but Sara just sliced off another piece of pot roast and chewed, if someone was going to try and kill her, at least she would go out on a full stomach.
"Hey Pez," it was Danny Woo, her partner, whom she'd been in contact with only sporadically since the Day.
"Hey," she grunted, swallowing with effort, her throat was raw from inhaled concrete, "What's a nice guy like you doing in a dump like this?"
"Cute, very cute," Danny took in the sight, the three intrepid Merry Maids, one a homicidal assassin, the other a mystical warrior with a magic gauntlet, and the third, a geek who probably didn't know which end of the mop was up.
"Care to join the party?" Gabriel asked, pointing to the half unfrozen lump of beef and gravy and little cooked carrots, "It's pretty decent."
"Thanks, but I just ate," Danny pulled up her only remaining seat, one of the barstools tucked up under the kitchen countertop, "So how are things?"
"I'm so sorry, Danny, I know I've been…well, not here, but…"
"Hey don't apologise to me, Pez, I know you've had it rough since…it happened" he nodded, to Ian and Gabriel, "I'm just glad you found some help."
She nodded, tears forming behind her throat. It seemed as if they were a hell of a lot closer now than they ever had been before, "Thanks Danny"
"Going back to work tomorrow?"
"Yeah," she nodded, trying to concentrate on slicing her beef instead of her upcoming job, "They kicked me off the Site, too much…stuff going on"
"That's a bitch," he commented sadly, but suddenly grinned, "Dante's looking forwards to having you back"
"Is he now?" she asked, wryly, "Bringing out the red carpet, huh?"
"Just warning you," Danny remarked, "Jake's been having it pretty rough too, blames himself for leaving you there."
"I told him to go," Sara said defensively, "he didn't need to get swept up in it all."
"He damn near put a pistol in his mouth when we couldn't find you," Danny admitted, darkly, "wasn't the only one."
Danny ducked his head down, long black locks covering a sheepish expression, Sara's heart cracked, "I'm sorry Danny, I shoulda tried to find you afterwards, I just got…distracted."
"Yeah, I know," he muttered. She'd been on the list of the missing for nearly a week before her frantic partner caught sight of her with a group of fire-fighters, digging out the rubble.
"So…" said Gabriel, trying to lighten the mood, "How are things going down in the precinct?"
"Pretty good, nothing too nasty coming up," he tucked an absent strand of hair behind an ear, "We got a live one though, some psychic says she 'saw' a homicide out by the docks."
"Ah," Sara chuckled, "that's why Dante wants me back."
Even before she got the Witchblade, she'd had a reputation for working really well with the 'live ones'. The stranger the case the better, and even outside the precinct, lots of Detectives, homicide or no, brought the really bizarre cases to Pezzini.
"Nothing to do with your affinity for the strange and unexplained, does it?" Gabriel teased, smiling.
"Nonsense" Danny grinned, "just her stellar skills as a homicide cop."
"You should be mindful, Lady Sara," Ian said morosely, "that man, Dante, does not mean you well."
"Thank you Dr. Doom-and-Gloom," Sara snipped "I think I've gathered about that much and I told you to quite calling me 'Lady'."
"Yes Lady," he acknowledged, still managing to bow his head elegantly, even though he was seated on her sofa and wearing a pink apron with little yellow polka dots.
"You goin' somewhere, Danny, or you wanna camp out on my sofa? It's clean." she offered.
"No thanks," Danny stood up, "On my way to Mija's recital, just stopping by to check up on you."
"Thanks" she got up and hugged him around the middle, "I appreciate it."
"No prob" he hugged her back, tightly. "Take care"
"You too" she turned back to the sofa, only to discover that during the little Kodak moment, Ian had also vanished, his plate scraped clean and cushion still warm.
"You know that's kind of scary," Gabriel muttered, "he just…"
"Vanishes" Sara said, her voice raspy, her throat would probably never fully recover from the prolonged inhalation of grey concrete dust, "You get used to it."
"I guess," he said uncertainly, picking up Ian's dishes and his own, and loading them into Sara's brand-new dishwasher.
Her apartment had gotten pretty trashed, being the loft view and on the right side, or wrong side all things considered, to bear the biggest brunt of the explosion. The windows had all shattered in and over the course of a few weeks it had been buried in nearly a foot of wafting concrete dust. She'd stayed with Gabriel until just recently, when Ian had taken the initiative to clean out the entire place and had new furniture and clothing brought in to replace the ones that had been pretty much ruined.
All on Irons's credit account, of course.
But Ian was refined, for an all-around bad boy, and hadn't just stopped at replacing the broken bits. He'd ordered a new Jenn-Air Sub-Zero kitchen set, expensive hardwood-and-granite flooring, outrageously chic cast-iron bed set, and all around luxury items, like a hand-woven Turkish carpet and antique living room furniture, which he probably thought were the bare bones of civilization, but weren't things Sara could have ever afforded on a cop salary.
Not that she'd dream of telling him, after all, he'd gone to such trouble.
"Getting tired, chief?" Gabriel asked, they'd come to a mutual understanding when she stayed with him, essentially a version of the Army's 'don't ask, don't tell' system. He didn't ask, she didn't tell.
"A bit," she admitted, knowing that it was pretty useless to argue with him, "Maybe I'll turn in."
Gabriel tucked her in, as he'd become accustomed to doing, and kissed her softly. She resisted the urge to tug him in under the blankets, as she had done before, and use his chest as a human pillow. It was partly out of grief and desire for physical comfort, and partly out of the simple need for someone else to shoulder the burden for a while.
Nottingham she wouldn't trust herself to fall asleep on, afraid of waking up somewhere other than where she'd fallen asleep. Danny, well, Danny would want to 'talk it out' or 'address the issues' and she didn't feel like she could really just drop her 'tough cop' attitude while he was around.
Gabriel, on the other hand, never asked for an explanation, never offered one of his own, and just accepted whatever she did as 'normal' even when they both knew that it really wasn't. He was gentle, and sometimes, especially now, when she quit being 'Pez' the hard-nose cop or 'Lady Sara' the semi-mythical Wielder and lapsed into 'Just plain Sara' a woman who needed a little bit of comfort and a big strong man, now and then.
Not that she needed it all the time, just now and then, and Gabriel Bowman was pretty damn good at now and then.
For his own part, Gabriel had a humongous crush on Detective Pezzini. Always had, just a little bit, and whether it had been the appeal of the Witchblade or the appeal of the I-eat-nails-for-breakfast attitude, he'd fallen hard for it. Something he accepted with a shrug and a bit of salt tossed over his shoulder.
Even in her grief and loneliness he knew damn well she didn't really see him as a man. Nottingham was a man, Danny was a man, but Gabriel was a 'buddy'. In other words emotionally 'safe'. She could bawl her eyes out in his arms not feel awkward because he was 'safe'. Beggars couldn't be choosers, though, and he took what she gave him, happily too, because she trusted him with it.
Trust was good. Trust was a very good thing indeed.
See the little blue button right there?
Push it.
Now
I wrote 2,091 words here.
I only need a few back.