DISCLAIMER: All people, places, and things that rightly belong to CBS, CSI New York, and Bruckheimer remain in their custody.
SPOILERS: Set after Episode 5:13: Rush to Judgment.
Jerked Awake
Screams cutting through the terror filling the room like gas. A body twitching and shuddering, turning in on itself like a nest of vipers. And he stands, frozen, incapable of movement, fingers swollen, hands too big to do more than flap uselessly, feet growing into the ground while the retching and choking grows louder and louder…
He flung himself up, coughing and scratching at his throat as if to break the clutch of cold stiff hands, gasping and fighting down the impulse to vomit. He sat, hunched over, breathing hard, for a few minutes before falling back onto sour-smelling sheets and a wrinkled, sweat-stained pillow.
Flack scrubbed his hands over his face, and ran a wincing tongue over fuzzy teeth. Perhaps that last pitcher hadn't been a good idea. It had seemed like it at the time, nearly as good as the three before it, but maybe it really hadn't been.
The Rangers had stunk. All the way through the game they had stood on the edge of disaster, never quite tipping over, nor stepping back. His head had ached with the effort of pushing them – by the end of the evening, it had no longer mattered to them which way they went – to hell or to the Stanley Cup, as long as they moved, stopped teetering, made a decision.
Flack rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling, his body urging him up – for relief, for food, for a shower and clean teeth – his brain too tired to work out the necessary physical movements.
As a day, it had sucked. Big time. The moment that kid had gone down played over and over in Flack's head – the eyes rolling into the back of his head, the thin young body jerking uncontrollably, the foam bubbling at the corners of his mouth.
Flack rubbed his eyes again.
Then the questions, the doubt, the look in people's eyes as they had avoided him. He had felt exposed, spotlighted, sitting at his desk all day in the middle of the precinct room, waiting for something, anything, to happen. A decision to be made.
He hated waiting. He hated feeling helpless.
Jess.
He sighed, and rolled over, curling into a ball and closing his eyes. What was he going to do about Jess?
He liked her. He really did. They had a good buzz going between them. She was smart, tough, sexy, a good cop. He respected her on the job, and that couldn't be discounted when the job was such a big part of them both.
They came from the same place, the same background – lots of noisy and demanding family, that 'blue blood' that only a member of another New York cop family could completely understand.
They had moved slow at first, knowing that anything happening between them would have repercussions. But when they finally got together, snuck off for a weekend upstate after Christmas, it had all clicked. They were good together. He knew they could be good together.
But.
But.
When she had come into the room and checked the kid's pulse, she had said, "He's dead."
She hadn't said, "What did you do?"
But he had felt the question reverberating through her very skin, filling the air around him.
When she had come to tell him about her interview, she had focused on IAB's questioning of their relationship, as good as accusing him of running his mouth. Like he'd have put either of them in that position. For what? The dubious pleasure of rubbing Statler's and Kopinski's nose in the fact that he had tapped what they had been drooling over for months?
What did she take him for? A sixteen-year-old? Too young to know when to zip his trousers, or his lips?
He had been sitting, naked, flayed in the unrelenting scrutiny of men whose respect and trust he had sent months working day in and day out to get back after the Truby case in which he had been forced to turn on one of his own men. He had sat there in the glare of their renewed doubt and suspicion, and she could only think about her reputation.
As if by being with him, she had been tainted.
Flack rolled over the other way again, and squeezed his eyes even tighter against the intrusive light shining in through blinds he hadn't bothered to close the night – morning really – before, when he had fallen into bed still wearing most of his clothes.
The memory of a kiss on the cheek, cool hands wrapping around him in a comforting and public hug, the shining confidence of his innocence warmed through him with the same healing touch on his aching shoulders as the heat of the sun too bright to face.
Stella had never doubted him for a minute. The lab had his back. Danny, Hawkes, Lindsay – all had sent a message from the field or lab, not telling him anything about their findings – they knew better than to compromise the case – but assuring him they were looking for the explanation they all knew would exonerate him.
Even Adam had dropped by, stammering and blushing, with a file from another case that could easily have been put through interdepartmental mail. He hadn't managed to say much, at least not much coherent, but Flack had found a semblance of his usual grin and had bumped fists in gratitude for the show of support.
Mac. Flack didn't know whether to be surprised or not by Mac's vocal ridiculing of the idea that the kid's death could be in anyway Flack's fault. They'd always been close colleagues – hell, after a guy has tied your guts together with a shoelace, you can't be standoffish, can you? But they were different generations, different backgrounds. They were, in some ways Flack couldn't articulate, closer than he was with his father.
Like Gavin Moran, his first mentor, Mac Taylor could push all his buttons and make him crazy. But he also pushed Flack to think deeper, work harder, be better, than he ever could on his own.
Mac had stayed through the game, nursing one glass out of the endless pitchers of beer that kept showing up on the table as more and more cops were clued in – "Blue was in the clear" – and came to make up in bonhomie what they had lacked in solidarity earlier in the day. He had stayed through to the final three minutes of the game, when Chicago had finally and decisively sent the Rangers home with their tails between their legs by scoring twice on an empty net. He had dropped a hand on Flack's shoulder and said good night, and left Flack in a circle of increasingly loose Ranger fans drowning their sorrows.
Flack had barely noticed he had left.
Finally, the demands of his body were screaming loud enough that Flack could no longer ignore them, and he stumbled into his bathroom to begin repairing the ravages of the day – and night – before.
When he left a few hours later, scrubbed, fed, clean, in jeans and a sweatshirt, to go see Detective Jessica Angell and repair what he could of their friendship, the sun which had stabbed through his head like an ice pick had warmed into a kiss on the cheek and a hug on the neck and shoulders.
Like a friendly caress that carried you through the darkest times.
"Whisk," he found himself thinking again. "Huh. I knew that!"