a/n - Well, I'm back from my holiday and you can finally read the second chapter of Steve's visit. I hope you like it!

Two – Steve Arnott

She's been sitting, staring at the wall opposite her, listening to the chorus of insults that are being aimed at her through the prison walls, for a good half an hour now. The prison officers will do nothing about it, they never do. Prison officers don't like bent coppers either. No one does.

Lindsay curls up in a ball on her bed, screwing her eyes tight shut, trying to zone out of the yelling and the cursing, trying to ignore it. It's too hard and she snaps, springing up and launching onto her feet. She's about to pound her fist on the wall in reply, ready to yell anything she can think of back, ready to give them a taste of their own medicine, when she stops short. It won't do any good. Fighting back won't do anything.

She lets her fist trail down the rough wall, her skin grazing and scratching as it gets further down and she presses her hand harder. When she takes her fist away to look at it, the skin is scraped and bleeding slightly. The sight of the blood surprises her, making her actually consider what she has just done. She wipes the blood away and crosses the room back to the bed, her hand stinging and she feels so stupid for doing it do herself.

She is just so tired of this place and the yelling and the days that all seem to merge into one. Lindsay wants so much to sleep in her own bed, – even if she hated that dank little place she only bought out of necessity – she wants she breathe fresh air and walk in the park watching the ducks, she wants to have a life that's going somewhere, not a life that's stuttering and starting and falling apart as she watches.

She sighs again, slumping to ground next to the bed, with its itchy blankets and impersonal sheets that smell so strongly of prison that she can barely fall asleep at night. Lindsay never thought she'd end up in prison, least of all with a life sentence drifting out in front of her. Fifteen years. What can you do in fifteen years? She could have met someone, had the wedding she had always dreamed of as a child, had a baby, flesh and blood who would love her no matter what.

In this dream universe, in fifteen years, she would be happy, with a husband who loved her and she loved back, with one or two children who looked up to their mummy with wide-eyed pride and joy. She'd be coming up to her retirement from the police, from the job she loved dearly, looking forward to a retirement where she might take up gardening or learn to knit.

No, instead, she's spending the next decade and a half– or fourteen years and three months, as it is now – in an cramped, small room, every night having to endure the yells and cries of insults coming through the walls. She's never going to get married, have kids; she's never going to get to retire. She could have. If only she'd-

Lindsay stops her thoughts in their tracks. What's the point of imagining what could have been? She blew it and it will never happen. She can't live in the past or in some pretend future, she has to live in the now – the now she had engineered.

She sighs, her mind turning to what Steve told her the day before. Carly isn't dead or at least it's looking that way. She feels so happy that somewhere out there, Carly may be safe and happy, with a bright future ahead of her. The young girl she met in that bathroom, the girl who told her that her necklace looked pretty, is out there somewhere, alive, thriving.

Lindsay thinks about that meeting, about Carly - an abandoned girl, whose mother never gave her anything, had complemented a lonely, childless woman and had unintentionally set into motion a chain of events that had led to this very moment, to Lindsay sitting in a dark cell, contemplating the future of girl she's never had a proper conversation with.

Lindsay thinks back to the question Steve had levelled at her during their meeting. Why does she care so much about Carly Kirk? She sighs.

When you're dealing with missing persons, sometimes, you just feel a connection. Sometimes it's an old granny with Alzheimer's who wandered off on the walk to the shops, or it could be a kid, like Carly, who's run away or been taken by a monster. Sometimes, you just can't ignore them, when their faces stare up at you from the pages - so many of them, so many missing people - and one just jumps out at you and you just can't turn past their file without imagining where they are or what's happening to them, if their scared and alone or perfectly happy not being found. Sometimes you just can't let go of a stranger you've never met. They're not machines. She's not a machine. She feels things.

Lindsay finds it odd that she's repeating words said to her by Kate Fleming. Kate had told her that they're not machines - that they're allowed to feel things - that day at the train station, her last proper day of freedom before she was returned to custody. But she'd been speaking the truth. People aren't machines. They feel and they can't stop feeling when they want. You can't just switch them off – Lindsay knows firsthand, she's tried time and time again. It's part of the human condition to feel and to make mistakes.

If everyone was perfect, never putting a foot out of line, where would that leave us, Lindsay thinks to herself. How would we be different from robots, unfeeling, unmoveable robots? How would we learn? How would we get better at the things that life throws at us if we never made a misstep?

People are only human, and humans do things that are wrong.

Lindsay's only human and she did something that was wrong.

She sighs again and leans her head back on the metal bar at the bottom of the bed. She thinks about Steve again. Lindsay remembers his face when she mentioned Georgia, the officer who died. She could see the anger written all over his features, something that had surprised her. From what she gathered, Georgia had only been a recent addition to the AC-12 team, so it must have been her first case - and her last...

She'd been so young, Lindsay remembers, sadly. She'd only met the other woman once and Georgia had seemed...nice.

It had been such a waste of a life. Such a waste...

Once again, Lindsay wonders why Steve came to visit her yesterday. It wasn't because he wanted to tell her about Carly, because what right or reason does she have for discovering what happened to her? She is nothing to Carly Kirk and if they were to meet again, the girl wouldn't even blink, but Lindsay would stare at her, because even though she means nothing to Carly, the opposite is true to Lindsay. Carly means something to her. Carly is one of the reasons she's here. If she and Carly hadn't crossed paths, then Lindsay wouldn't have ever heard the name Jayne Akers.

And she wouldn't be in prison.

But she is.

Her mind turns back to Steve. Why did he come? Lindsay doesn't know and she doesn't think she'll ever know. Maybe it was a sense of guilt? No, that doesn't make sense. Steve thought she was guilty, so why would he feel culpable for putting the bad guy in prison? She sighs again, her mind starting to go into overdrive, about Steve, about Helen Dryden and about Carly Kirk.

But before she can blink, Lindsay is fast asleep.

...

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