AN: Woo, I'm back with a new fic! I'm still working on the others, I swear. This little plot bunny just wouldn't leave me alone, though, so I got it outta the way.
Set a shortly after "Shock Jock", and contains spoilers thereof. It's also appropriatly angsty.
This should not be helping. Letting her lead you, hand in hand, from the bar with the taste of her on your lips should be making you feel far worse than you already do. But it's not; in fact, for first time in hours, the guilt and anguish are in a box, locked away in the corner of your mind, overshadowed totally by her.
'It's not really cheating.' You tell yourself as her hand slides under your shirt again. If it was, you would've stopped in the bar, two drinks ago, when your closeness had strayed from friendly comfort to something less defined. Under normal circumstances, you never would've let it get this far. But these were hardly normal circumstances. Normal circumstances didn't include one of your teammates lying on a slab, or your husband leaving.
Admittedly, this would've been a much better argument had this been the first time you'd been in this situation. But the first time hadn't gone this far, and those had hardly been normal circumstances either.
It had started, this time, with the team going out for a drink. Most of them, anyway. Michelle had gone home to her baby, and no one had seen Chase since they'd taken Bingo's body away. The others had come though. More out of habit than anything else. They were numb, just following the routine because it seemed like the easiest thing to do.
There was nothing, at first. Just the haze of grief and guilt, the occasional spark of familiarity when the presence of a teammate registered. There was no eye contact between them; they were all unwilling to risk seeing the same void in their chests reflected back at them. But slowly, as their private thoughts became too much to bear, the wall of silence gradually collapsed.
It wasn't really talking, just strings of half-hearted words to fill the emptiness. The talking came later, as the buzz of the alcohol dulled the grief, allowed them to remember without as much pain. For the boys, at least. She kept her gaze on her drink and barely spoke a word.
Watching her had distracted you from your own chaotic swirl of emptiness, so you were the only one who noticed. Her anguish was plain, and with each half-hearted chuckle the others let out as they recounted happier memories of your teammate, she would close her eyes briefly and take a mouthful of beer. You knew they'd been close. How close was still a matter of speculation, but at the very least, they'd become friends.
Her hands, wrapped around her fourth beer, began to tremble. You inched your chair over until your arm brushed hers on the table, satisfying your sudden and overwhelming urge to be closer to her. She didn't react to the contact at first, but after a moment, she turned her head towards you slightly with a half-hearted attempt at a smile.
Not long after she drained her current glass, someone – Vince, probably – bought another round. She stared at the amber liquid in front of her for a moment before transferring her hand from the empty glass to the full one and taking a sip. Her hand shook as she brought it back down to the table, but you caught her wrist gently to stop it slipping. She glanced at you again, but when you started to let her wrist go, she stopped you, covering it with the hand that wasn't still gripping her beer.
You don't know how long you stayed like that, with your fingers loosely entwined with hers. The combination of alcohol and emotional turmoil was making time irrelevant. The boys didn't notice your closeness, but they weren't really paying attention to anything. Just taking it in turns to fill the silence.
Because of your proximity, you were the only one who noticed her flinch as the others shared another story, which is why, when she excused herself moments later and muttered something about the bathroom, you were the one to follow her.
You found staring at her reflection in the mirror. Her tears were sliding slowly down her face, unchecked, and her knuckles were white where she was gripping the rim of the sink she was hunched over.
You stood and watched her for a moment before approaching. She didn't react at first, but when you laid your hand on her shoulder, she turned and pressed herself against you.
"He's in my head." She whispered brokenly into your shoulder as you wrapped your arms around her and ran your hand through her hair gently. "He won't leave me alone; I just want him to go."
You were drowning. The storm in your chest – of remorse over Hamish and grief over Bingo – was threatening to overwhelm you as it was; this was too much to handle. All you knew was that you needed something, anything, to make it go away.
It was nearly accidental. You turned your head slightly to whisper reassurances in her ear – though they sounded as hollow as you felt – just as she lifted her head from your shoulder. The movement brought your lips close, almost impossibly so, and from there it was instinctual.
The fact that you were kissing a woman didn't even occur to you, and wouldn't until much later. It wasn't about gender; it was about the reassurance of what was familiar to ground you as your world spun wildly out of control. But that changed, slowly, as the kiss became rougher, less gentle. It stopped being about comfort and became more about losing yourself. Forgetting that your husband was gone; forgetting the feeling of washing your teammate's blood off your hands. It wasn't until you felt your back hit the wall that you realised that maybe she needed to forget too.
You were too tired to fight it. Too tired to object when she released her grip on your shirt, took your hand and led you from the bathroom. Too tired to care that the boys barely reacted when she told them you were both leaving.
Now, as you follow her into a taxi, you know that this is a bad idea. But the reprieve it's offering you is simply too tempting. For the first time in what feels like an age, you have something to fill that void in your chest.
You know, once you're both sober and less raw, that you'll regret this. You'll probably rationalise it away, and it will become the thing you never speak about. But for now, as you feel her lips on yours again, you find you don't care. You're happy to just forget, and to have someone forget with you.
AN: Reviews?
I'm taking advantage of this space to rant, so feel free to ignore the remainder of this paragraph. Okay, so yay about the new season and everything, but is anyone else annoyed at the way Lara's being written right now? I mean seriously people, I know I don't like Hamish very much, but if that's the last we've heard from him, I'm gonna be seriously pissed. The whole divorce thing seemed, to me, to be wildly out of character for Lara, and not fighting her on it seems wildly out of character for Hamish.