One Option
Disclaimer: I don't own CSI: NY or any of the characters
Summary: A badly cleared scene forces Peyton to make a difficult decision. Makes more sense if you read my other fanfiction 'Happier' first.
Peyton moved quickly out of the way of on her way into the house to allow the officer past, apparently driven by the awful sight of an apparent home invasion gone wrong. Carefully following the path taken by everyone else on the scene, Peyton entered the kitchen, where the scene was worse than she had expected, but nowhere near as bad as some she had seen before. The victim was in his late twenties, tall and wearing a dark T-shirt and faded jeans that were rolled up twice at the bottom. It appeared that he had put up a good fight: there was blood all around the counter in the middle of the room, and he had sustained several short, deep cuts to his hands in an attempt to prevent the inevitable. The front of his shirt was torn all the way from the top to the bottom, and was soaked with blood which had completely obliterated the design on the front. A vicious stab wound to his chest had been deflected away from his heart by his ribs, but had torn into the flesh below his ribcage, and pulled several of his organs away from his body as it had been roughly removed from his body.
The first officers on the scene had cleared the small house and then got out as fast as possible, unable to cope with the smell of blood that had invaded the entire building incredibly fast. Lindsay was standing in one corner of the large room, putting a blood knife in an evidence bag, completely unfazed by the smell or the corpse.
"Looks like the murder weapon" Lindsay commented as she noticed Peyton arriving, nodding at the knife in the bag and then the victim.
"Could be," Peyton agreed, "We'll have a look when we get them back to the lab." Finding that the thermometer in her kit had run out of batteries, Peyton hurried through the house into the light rain that had just started to fall to get a replacement. Hearing a crash followed by a hastily muted shriek and an ominous silence as she re-entered the house, she sped up but remained silent, not wanting to complicate whatever situation had materialised.
Reflected in the mirror in the hall, Peyton could see a man in the kitchen, holding a knife to Lindsay's neck, and hissing threats at her. Refusing to give into the panic that had started to blur her thoughts when she realised that obviously the scene hadn't been properly cleared, she spotted Lindsay's gun in the doorway between the hall and the kitchen, and silently picked it up, knowing that Lindsay was in no position to use it. Despite hating guns, Peyton had learned to fire one quite accurately, just in case she ever needed to defend herself at a crime scene, and now she prepared herself to defend her friend, who now had a thin trickle of blood running onto her shirt from where the knife pressed too hard against her neck. As the man with the knife turned around, Peyton was sure that he was not in a stable frame of mind, and a mad glint in his eye told her that if he had his way, there would be three people leaving the house in body bags that morning, and he would not be one of the. She knew better than to yell for the officers outside and risk him killing Lindsay in a panic, but fortunately he hadn't seen that's he was holding Lindsay's gun.
It became clear, as he turned his attention to Peyton, that there was no way she was going to talk him into letting Lindsay go. Deciding that she had to give him a chance, she revealed the Lindsay's gun, held steadily in her hand, and aimed it directly at his head.
"Put the knife down, let her go, and we can sort this out without anyone else getting hurt" she promised, trying not to watch Lindsay's terrified expression as the knife pressed against her neck. Peyton was almost too stunned to react as her grinned, shook his head, and revealed a gun of his own, but she managed to regain her thoughts and did the only thing that could have got herself and Lindsay out of the house alive. She pulled the trigger.
The knife fell from Lindsay's neck as the second man's body joined the first's on the floor, and Peyton dashed across the kitchen to pull Lindsay from the floor and make sure that the cut on her neck wasn't dangerous.
When the officers arrived in the kitchen having heard the shot, Peyton and Lindsay explained what had happened, and the officers insisted that they both went to the hospital, as soon as backup arrived to watch the house. The drive to the hospital was quiet; everyone was too shocked to think of anything to say, Peyton still trying to rid her hand of the feeling of the cold trigger, reminding her that yet again she had taken a human life, and repeating to herself over and over in her head that it had been the only option.
They were greeted at the hospital by Mac and Danny, who were doing a poor job of hiding their concern. Peyton explained what had happened in a flat voice, not giving any more information than necessary, and then sat with Mac while Danny went to pester someone to stitch up the cut on Lindsay's neck. Mac reached between their seats to take her hand in his, and she found that she could now force away the ghostly feeling of the gun as it was replaced by Mac's warm and real hand.
Flack showed up to get her to write down a statement of what had happened, and if he was surprised to find her holding Mac's hand he didn't show it. Having noticed how close they had been lately, Peyton guessed that Jess had told him about the somewhat unusual couple.
Writing it down in a good deal more detail than she had previously used to explain it Peyton was relieved by how easy it was to show that she had no option but to kill the man without even editing the tiniest detail. She had been afraid she would be unable to make her point clear, but it almost seemed to write itself.
The five of them drove to the station to finish arranging the necessary evidence to prove what had happened, and as soon as they were allowed to go Lindsay pulled Peyton aside.
"Thank you for doing that. I know it can't have been easy for you to kill someone." Lindsay acknowledged.
"One of you was going to die" Peyton replied, "It wasn't a difficult decision to decide who it would be, and its not the first time I've had to make a decision like that. Sometimes someone is going to die and you just have to make the right decision as to who it will be. I'm glad I was there to make that decision."
"You've had to kill someone before?" Lindsay asked, surprised that a medical examiner would find herself in a situation like that more than once in her life. Peyton decided honesty was the easier option, but didn't feel like explaining what had happened the first time she had made a life–or–death decision.
"I should go home now. If you really want to know about it I suggest you ask Stella. I don't want to explain it again." Peyton left the building and went home without looking at any of the people she passed, reciting the lyrics to some of her favourite songs over and over again to avoid thinking about anything. Mac turned up at her house nearly three hours after she had, and immediately told her that she had made the right decision, and that there was no way that any sane person could see it any differently.
Though she suffered horrible nightmares that night, she woke up convinced that she had made the right decision, and only slightly more nervous of going into work the next day than she would have been on any other day.