Disclaimer: Don't Own Them!
A/N: I finally got to see "Committed" episode! It was great, though contrived a bit. I love Jorja Fox in this ep. Great job.
Anyway, here's a one shot based on Committed. I see this as taking place between the incident at the ward and the final interrogation of Nurse McKay.
It's been a month or more since I've been able to read or post anything. I am jonesing for some fiction!
She leaned back in her favorite booth in her favorite bar. Old favorite, actually. It had been a while since she had been in this place. She had favored the booth because it was out of the way and no one bothered her. When she had first started coming in, she had sat at the bar, but that was back when she was making the excuse that she had been coming here to meet people.
Finally, she had started sitting in this small booth, intended for two, stuck in the back of the room. She told herself she was sitting there so that she had more room to eat the meals she ordered when she came. The meals had eventually gone mostly uneaten while she filled up on beer.
She had left that so many months ago, and now she was back, in this booth, the same old order of veggie fajitas and a beer in her hand. It felt good and cold.
It wasn't the first beer she had drank since the "almost" DUI. It wouldn't be the last. But something about this place made her feel like she was making a small step backwards. The fajitas looked good, as they always were, and the beer was extra cold, as they always were. She squirted a little lime over the veggies, but the first bite seemed to choke her. She chewed hesitantly, forcing herself to taste the peppers and the sweet onion without just swallowing. She took another pull from her beer. The bitterness of the hops washed over her mouth, taking the acidic bile that had sat there through the shift, after the incident.
Thinking about it now made her shiver inside. What had she been thinking? What had Gil been thinking? Adam Trent had just walked in on her and in a moment, her life could have been gone. Looking back on it, she had been blithely stupid, letting her desire to be strong and in charge interfere with the intuition that had been sending warning bells off in her head the moment she had walked into Desert State Hospital.
She took another pull off the beer, ignoring how much her hands were trembling. She merely nodded when the waitress asked if her fajitas were OK. She nodded again when the girl asked if she wanted another beer.
She never liked for things to be out of control. That feeling of helplessness when she had been struggling with Trent had been worse than anything she had felt since a child. She hated knowing that someone else held her life in his hands. And then, looking at Gil's stoic face in the window, she had been furious in her fear, furious at him for putting her in the situation, furious at herself, furious at Trent, and then, she had found herself furious at her mother.
When it was over, and she had clung to the wire over the window of the hospital, she had found herself thinking of her mother again. And talking to Gil, the last person in the world she liked to talk to about those issues, but the only one it seemed she ever did, beside the therapist.
The waitress sat the second beer on the table, and Sara forced herself to eat another bite of the fajitas. This time is was mushroom and squash along with the pepper. Her stomach rumbled happily, as though it were in a separate body from her mouth, which refused to chew properly without her concentrating on the act. She didn't like to think that she had eagerly grabbed the beer, though she knew she had.
Helpless. That is what she had been. Frightened and fighting, but overall helpless, until Trent had been distracted by Nurse McKay and turned his makeshift blade onto himself. And the helpless Sara had hoped he would die. The helpless Sara would have been glad of it.
Her thoughts turned to her mother again. Is that why she had done it? That overwhelming feeling of hopelessness? Would she ever be able to forgive her own mother for giving in to hopelessness?
Sara looked at the bottle in her hand and set it back down. She looked around her, and got up, leaving the uneaten fajitas and the full beer on the table with money. She wouldn't go back down this path. She walked out of the bar, knowing with certainty she wouldn't be back.
She was not her mother. She had made a promise to herself, and she wasn't backing out. Some mothers weren't fit for the job. Her mother hadn't been; it turned out Adam Trent's had been worse.
She made it through, and she was here. She wasn't in a prison, and though she had her low points, she had plenty of high points too. She wasn't going back.
She was never going back.
A/N: Please review!