A/N: Humongous list of caveats:

I'm no fanfic writer, so this is the first real fanfic ever. (So obv do not own anything except for shoddy head!canon, poor writing skills and awesome flair for procrastination.)
This was a warm-up writing exercise, so treat this as a first draft material. Biggest typos eliminated, everything else as is.
Sorry for Brit spelling.

Written before season 2.5 premiere based on a conversation I had with a friend regarding "There's No Place Like Home". Spoilers up to that one.

One-shot, posted in two parts.
Andy/Sharon + Rusty for flavour (in part 1).

She really had tried to be 'his friend Sharon'. Truthfully, it hadn't been all that hard. Sure at first the situation felt a bit awkward with the usual first-date-esque pauses in conversation filled with furtive glances and self-aware embarrassed chuckles. Except it really wasn't a first anything and it certainly wasn't a date.

If it had been, the evening would have been a total success. Eventually. At least it would have been all that much easier to relate to the whole thing. As it stood, the whole thing was just a big mess and a veritable headache.

Everything got complicated only at the very end of the evening. That was a blessing in itself. Unfortunately there had not been any signs of the danger ahead. She had had a good night, a great night. She suspected he had had one too. At least he had said as much but not in so many words.

Because she hadn't given him the chance.

She had laughed at something he had said. She had done that a lot.

Her mood was nothing like he had seen her sporting, ever. It amused him and made him try to say things that would keep her doing whatever she did on and on. It always started as a big smile paired with attentive eyes (at some point he had noticed she always stopped whatever she happened to be doing — mid-sentence, mid-movement, mid-gesture — whenever he opened his mouth), then the smile turned into a grin and that grin transformed into a rolling laugh that made her hair flick attractively behind her shoulders. It was quite hypnotizing really.

He made it his game to have her laugh, or at least chuckle, at something as often as he could. At one point, just before the wedding party truly started to disband, he had made her laugh so often in a row that he actually got her to cry. She would blame the champagne, obviously.

Even during the ride to her appartment he had kept up his game. He didn't ask or in fact mention it at all when he started to walk her inside and she just laid her hand on his arm. He still marvelled how she kept her attention to him even in the downstairs lobby where she quickly nodded an answering greeting to a neighbour or two passing.

Waiting for the elevator she slipped her arm around the crook of his and amused, he watched her crouch down and one after the other slipped her heels off. Her eyes never left his and she offered no explanations to his wondering quirk of an eyebrow. She just listened what he was saying and absentmindedly gathered the killer shoes in her hand.

In the elevator he started to tell her a story about the time Nicole left for a visit with her grandparents and managed to forgot her absolute favourite stuffed bunny. The story continued all the way up to her floor and the start of the hallway.

After that she had no clue what he had said. All she remembers is that it was something funny.

And then she did probably the most stupid thing she had done in a while. The most stupid thing in years. Possibly in decades.

She stopped. She turned to slightly face him. She laughed. She tilted her head back and then brought her eyes up to meet his. She let herself rise up on her toes. And she kissed him.

The one and half a second her lips touched his was quite sobering experience. Two seconds before she would have (grudgingly, but still) admitted to be too drunk and — well, happy (or something) to attempt anything that required any semblance of poise or coordination. Remarkably she would have been wrong. The way she managed to shuffle three quick steps backwards in a straight line while simultaneously raising three fingers to cover her lips, holding tight to her shoes and not hit the narrow corridor's walls was almost graceful.

For the next six seconds she kept her wide eyes on his similarly widened ones. When the time was up, she started to slowly shake her head and he tried to get a hold of some words that would agree to come out properly. Instead he straightened out his hand and tried to approach her.

"Sharon —"

She leapt backwards more and faster than her first reaction had been. His eyes switched from wide to resignated, and on a later recollection, perhaps even some amount of hurt. At that point in time she had not concentrated on anything but moving backwards, shaking her head and keeping her lips hidden.

That would have been alright but then she reached her door (to be fair, she actually backed past it) where she realised she didn't have a free hand to dig out her keys. Deciding it would be so much easier to keep an eye on him in case he tried to approach again if she didn't let go of her shoes, she removed the fingers from her lips in order to fish the keys from her purse before she attacked the lock like her life depended on it.

When the key turned in the lock, she assumed it safe to turn her back on him and she continued to slip through the smallest crack possible into her home. Not before he had tried again with her name to which she, without looking, only mumbled an incoherent effort at a 'good night' in response.

Inside she was greeted with silence, one lamp set to low and light reflecting from the kitchen's under the cabinet lights. Those told her Rusty was already back and doing something in his room. She laid her keys on the cabinet by the door and the shoes on the floor beside it as quietly as she could before traipsing soundlessly to the nearest seat on the couch. She still had the purse under her arm and as she sat down she brought the fingers again to cover her lips.

Out in the hallway Andy's feet were stuck to the floor. His mind was stuck on a loop. What the hell happened? He stared at the door that had clicked shut maybe minutes ago. What the hell was up with that too? When the questions starting with 'what the hell' gave the smallest in for any other thought his first response was to go and knock on the door and talk this — what the hell 'this' exactly was — out with her.

Staring the closed door, his hand at the ready to knock, his mind truly started to work. She had looked so... bewildered. So surprised, so startled, so... scared? He wasn't finding the words but he knew what he meant. The point was that she wasn't herself, thinking like herself. And Sharon wasn't someone who liked to have a talk with a capital t while getting her ducks in a row. No good would come from insisting to see her right now.

He debated what the hell he should do. On the other hand he suspected she would blow this all out of proportions if he didn't get a chance to reassure her. After all, it was nothing. Honestly, he was more surprised by her reaction than the action itself. After all, what was a second of quite nice action to a minute of almost comical reaction. Personally, he would have liked it the other way around any day.

Sharon almost jumped up from the couch when her phone vibrated. She dropped the purse next to her and dug out the offending item, still with one hand stuck to her lips. Her mind was blank and she stared the phone like she had forgotten what it was for or how it worked. She was still staring it when the vibration began again springing her to action. She dropped the phone on the seat and backed all the way to the kitchen wide-eyed.

She rested her hand on the breakfast island and the coolness of the surface kick-started her mind. 'Oh. My. God.' was pretty much the extent of her mind's capabilities at the moment, but still, it was a start. The second coherent thought was 'Wine. Need wine.' and that was okay too.

The clink of the bottle against the glass was a tell-tale sign of her hand's shakiness. It almost got her more upset since this wasn't her. She needed to get her nerves together and her mind working. And she needed to be quiet because the last thing she wanted was to have a conversation with Rusty. Which would probably be more like a big brush-off and require a lot of explaining and apologising on its own tomorrow.

The first glass of wine calmed her somewhat even if her phone kept buzzing in the couch cushions. At least the fingers glued to her lips seemed to relax their post. Standing in the kitchen she kept looking in the direction she knew her phone was. Reaching the bottom of the glass her mind had found too many thoughts. Primarily self-berating ones but the last sip of the wine brought a urgent sense of duty. It really could be work and she really, really, should answer.

Sighing she poured herself another glass and defeatedly started skulking back into the living room where fate awaited. She sat down and picked the phone in her hand. With a look up and a silent prayer she hoped it wouldn't be work.

It wasn't. It was worse than that.

Four missed calls from Andy. A text message.

"Oh God."

Sharon let her hand fall on her lap and her neck to relax against the back of the sofa. Closing her eyes she started to think about the evening they had had.

The wedding had been beautiful, the reception relaxed. No big incidents, no tricky situations. She had liked the wedding. She had liked the food. She had liked the company.

She had liked the company too much. She had been too relaxed. She shouldn't have done that.

But it had kept Andy relaxed. He had deserved to see his little girl get married without going through all the techniques learnt in anger management. And he had been great company.

When it came down to it, between her letting her guard down and the way weddings affected her, unfortunate situations were inevitable. Especially when combined with the champagne. Yes, the champagne was definitely it.

And the 'unfortunate situation' wasn't so bad, really. Frankly, what was a little peck between friends. And if she really thought about it, she would have kissed any man she had been with, what with the mood she was in and the alcohol in her system. Which was entirely too much even before the two glasses of wine she had just polished off.

Except that they weren't just friends. They worked together. And she had kissed this man. Because she had wanted to. Besides three glasses during the whole evening wasn't all that much. And —

"Sharon, you awake?"

Shit. This on top of everything. Should she pretend to be asleep just to ignore him? Wasn't that wrong? But she couldn't muster the energy for any sort of even remotely sensible conversation.

"Sharon, your phone is ringing. And your fake sleep isn't that great."

Well, luckily his voice carried some sense of amusement. She testingly opened one eye and looked at the smirking face of a teenager.

"I'm not faking sleep. I'm thinking."

"Yeah."

It sounded like a question but Sharon knew he wouldn't, in the name of politeness, press her for an answer if she didn't offer one.

"So what are you thinking about in your party dress, at midnight, ignoring your phone?"

Then again, things didn't seem to go her way this evening.

"Weddings." At his incredulous look she felt obliged to add, "I always get into a mood at weddings. Never mind me, Rusty".

She flapped her hand dismissively, pulled a thin smile on her face and hoped that would be the extent of the conversation he wanted to have.

"Well, shouldn't you get your phone at least?"

This was a little harder to wiggle out of, but never say that Sharon Raydor didn't try.

"It's not work and I'm really not in a mood to have extended conversations." Realising that it sounded like she didn't want to talk to him (though it was the truth but not in the way it sounded — or whatever, her mind wasn't really working right now, or was it 'working right right now'?, she wasn't sure) she quietly added "I'll return the call tomorrow".

If ever Rusty had a face that conveyed utter suspicion, this might have been it. If he had stared at her unmoving even a moment longer she would have blurted out something she would have regretted almost instantly. Good thing Rusty hadn't mastered the basic interrogation techniques. Hopefully anyone wouldn't teach him any time soon.

"Okay. Well, I was off to bed. Good night."

"Good night, Rusty."

She watched him retreat to his room before she returned to her previous position and closed her eyes. Where was she?

Oh yes. What the hell was she thinking? How can she be that stupid? She really had made a mess of things. And what the hell for?

Because you wanted to, her traitorous mind instantly piped up.

Sharon snapped her head back up and her eyes opened wide. If there was any truth to the old adage of not twisting your face unless you wanted it to stick that way, or whatever the old wives tale said, her eyes might sport that deer in the headlights look permanently after this night.

She had told herself she had wanted to kiss him.

Oh no. No, no, no, no, no. No.

Yes. Yes you did. You thought about it already at the reception.

Not true.

Very true. You couldn't get enough of him tonight.

Well that might be an overstatement.

Alright, possibly yes. But still, that kiss might have been an accident, but a welcome one. You waited long enough.

At that she hadn't the intelligence to form a response. Great, her mind was — no, she couldn't finish even that comment properly. She rubbed her temples with her thumb and pinky and told her subconscious to shut up and stop helping.

Her phone buzzed again on her lap. She sighed. This too. As if there wasn't enough things to feel rotten about. However, the calls and texts weren't going to go away.

Three more missed calls. All from Andy.

One new text. She closed her eyes for a second before reading the two he had sent.

'Don't panic. Everything's OK. I had a great night. Talk to me.'

'It's alright, Sharon. Let's talk when you're ready. Goodnight.'

Kind of sweet really. He might really know how her mind worked. Even if he sort of over-reacts with the million calls. But the texts helped. Things like these were why she had been and was warming up to him.

Or at least they helped until Sharon read the messages again and noticed the bold letters spelling out 'Lt. Flynn'. That on the sender line was horrible enough to make her feel colder towards him than the Winters in Canada.

Actually, it's 'should make her feel colder towards him', her subconscious helped her again. There's a big difference in doings and shoulds.