A/N: I read an awful lot of SVU fanfic as well and it occured to me that the Taggart team tend to get out things pretty well unscathed. So that's where this came from. Again the pairing is ambiguous, the choice is yours :)
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
In The End
She watched him fall to the ground in slow motion. Before she even realised she was moving she was at his side, mobile in a shaking hand, telling Stuart what had happened, asking him to get back up and an ambulance. Then she had hung up and all but gone to pieces as she looked him. There was so much blood, surely much more than he could lose and still be functioning.
It was then that she noticed his eyes were still open, staring up at her as he took agonised breaths. She snapped back into action. "Shh...it's all right, you're going to be fine," she assured him, ripping off her jacket and pressing it – hard – against his wound as she did so. "It's going to be all right," she assured him, over and over, trying to convince herself.
"Please, just hang on," she whispered as she watched his eyes closed. They fluttered back open for a brief moment, before they shut again.
They didn't open again.
Not when the ambulance came and took him away. Not when he was in surgery to remove the bullet. Not when he was finally moved to the ICU. Not even in the several hours that she sat by his bedside, holding his hand, still wearing the clothes that were covered in his blood.
People had drifted in and out of the room, but she had barely noticed. She had just remained at his side, holding his hand and smoothing his hair back off his forehead. Her mind barely registering her own actions, just repeating the moment he had gone down over and over and willing him to stay alive.
"Please," she whispered, willing him to open his eyes, to give her some sign that he would, somehow, pull through this.
Sometime during the night she must have fallen asleep because she was suddenly jolted awake by the sound of the equipment screaming around him. Nearly every instrument that was attached to him was making some kind of deafening noise, but the only thing she noticed was that he was no longer breathing.
They had needed to forcibly remove her from the room, but she had stood outside, looking on helplessly through the window as they tried to bring him back.
She knew it was over when they all stopped what they were doing and bowed their heads in defeat as someone looked at the clock to record the time of death. She had stumbled back from the window, mercifully finding a seat at the other side of the corridor to sink into.
She barely looked up as the nurse came out to tell her what she all ready knew: there had been nothing they could have done. He was gone.
At the funeral she could barely get the words out, she had so much that she wanted to say, but she had choked on the words.
In the end all she had been able to say was the truth: "I love you."