The Best of Both Worlds?
A/N: What if Joss made another choice? Speculative fic that loosely follows an event in The Other Guy.
The usual disclaimers: nothing you recognize belongs to me.
She married him six months after the shooting at the luncheon.
As the first bullet hit her, going clear through her shoulder, she thought, 'That's not so bad', as she threw herself at the assailant. It was the second, entering her lung as she wrestled him to the ground that really hurt. But it was the look on her son's face as she lay in a hospital bed that hurt worst of all.
The Mayor was saved, and she was a hero. Her photo was in all the newspapers and the PR branch of the police department booked her on a dizzying array of television shows. She received letters, emails, gifts and well wishes from all over the world. The President called her. And several men proposed marriage, including one who hired a plane to trail a banner with his marriage proposal across the sky.
Any anonymity was gone. When she made her first return to the police department, accompanied by cameras and reporters at PR's insistence, she knew she would never work there again. She also knew that the other work she did, with a tall, dark haired man and his reclusive partner, was over, too.
And so, with her son's blessing, she accepted the proposal of the man that she had been seeing for several months.
The media went wild – it's not every day that a hero cop marries a multi-millionaire, the police department breathed a sigh of relief at her departure and she had a brief awkward conversation with the dark haired man and his reclusive friend when she announced her engagement.
Her new husband is wrong about one thing – she doesn't work. She gets to know his young daughter, who has strawberry blonde hair like her father, and who falls in love immediately with her son. She forms a partnership of sorts with his cool, reserved former wife as they discuss schedules and negotiate holidays. She redecorates his home, adding warmth and hominess. And she takes his vast wealth and her understanding of the city and parlays it into a number of charitable endeavors, lauded for their practicality and immediate application to the city's ills.
She's home, every night, when her husband enters their apartment. "Safe and sound," he murmurs, his fingers grazing the scars on her shoulder as he kisses her.
Her son is settled and happy and her step-daughter opens herself up to her a little more every day.
She lets her gun license expire, and when a high fashion magazine contacts her for an article on Second Chapters, depicting women who've made significant changes in their lives, she accepts, after her husband urges her to do it. The look on his face, arms around her son and step-daughter at the reception celebrating the release of the issue, lets her know it was worth it.
"Sweet dreams, Jocelyn," her husband says, every night when they go to bed. He pulls her into his arms, her back to his chest as he falls asleep.
She lays there for a long while and then she gets up and slips out onto the balcony. She waits for a shadow across the street in the park. Sometimes the shadow is only there for a moment, sometimes it's there for a long time. She waits until the shadow is gone and then she slips back into bed with her husband.
She's not sure what finally draws her across the street. Perhaps it was the invitation to another foundation meeting or coffee with her former partner where he filled her in on department gossip. Or perhaps it was the news of the release of a kidnapping victim, and the capture of the kidnappers, who had somehow locked themselves in a storage room. She doesn't know, but she slips on her robe, a pair of soft-sole slippers and she goes into the park.
The shadow pulls her into his arms. Wordlessly their bodies join in the darkness, and she feels free – for the first time in a long time.
Two nights later, she responds to her husband's touch with a passion that leaves them both breathless.
She meets her lover when she can, in rooms across the city. Sometimes they just hold each other. Other times she tends his wounds. He tells her about his partner's latest idiosyncrasy and she tells him that she thinks her son has a girlfriend.
They don't talk about her husband.
They still meet in the park. One night they hear a noise and they realize someone might be watching them, but they are so far gone, they don't care. So perhaps it is with the thrill of possibly being discovered that makes her movements shaky when she walks back into the bedroom. She jostles her bedside table lamp, almost tipping it over, the clunking sound as it hits the wall too loud to ignore.
Her husband sits up, looks at her.
She realizes he knows, perhaps he's always known.
She slips into bed and he puts his arms around her, her back to his chest. "Sweet dreams, Jocelyn," he whispers in her ear. She turns around, looks into his eyes and she kisses him, deeply.
They fall asleep with their arms around each other.
A/N: I had fun thinking of Joss as the ultimate Desperate Housewife having a torrid affair with Reese – perhaps a future AU story.