Lanie

"How did you do it?" Alexis asks, reaching for Lanie's scalpel as she stares a little too intently at the corpse of the former Erick Hendrickson. Gunshot wound to the stomach; took him half an hour to bleed out in Central Park. Messy.

"Watch it," Lanie says, jerking the scalpel away from Alexis' hand.

"Oh, sorry, sorry," Alexis says, her cheeks flushing bright, and she briefly takes her eyes off the corpse so that she can receive the scalpel more carefully. Alexis hates it when she makes mistakes, more even than Lanie would expect out of a perfectionist - she seems to sense how many strings Lanie had to pull to get the kid down in the morgue with her, let alone at crime scenes. Her eyes fix back on the gunshot wound once the scalpel's on the tray.

"Do what?" Lanie asks, suddenly certain that she doesn't actually want to have this talk.

"With Esposito," Alexis says.

Oh, she definitely does not want to be having this conversation. "Yes?" Lanie prompts after Alexis doesn't seem inclined to continue. The girl swallows and Lanie thinks she probably could have taken some of the edge out of her tone.

"Sending someone you lo - someone you cared about - into that job every day. How did you do it?"

Lanie can't help the sad smile that she know quirks across her lips. "Well - I guess I didn't."

"I don't know how anyone can," Alexis says, miserably, still starting at the small wound the bullet made as it tore through Hendrickson's left transverse abdominis.

Lanie suddenly wants to send the kid home - ideally, she'd take her out for a coffee, but she still has another body to do and she wants to wrap up with some of her night left.

"It's been three years," Alexis continues. "And I didn't mind at first. At first, I thought it was kind of cool. Like his novels in real life. She trails off, bites her lower lip.

"You don't think that anymore," Lanie prompts.

"I was an idiot," Alexis whispers harshly. "And it took watching Detective Beckett almost dying in that cemetery, watching my dad try to take a bullet for her, to realize that. It's not cool, and it's not good for him. It could get him killed, it puts him in danger every day, and sometimes I wake up at night sweating and all I can remember from my dreams is the sound of a gunshot."

Lanie takes one deep breath, then another. The words are a little too close, the dreams a little too near hers. There's a reason she prefers her patients on the cold steel slab of a morgue table. She hates it, hates the slick slide of blood under her palms, hates the pulse and rush of a life draining away beneath her fingertips. "I know," she whispers. Except when she wakes up she's left with an image instead of a sound, her friend's face lying on one of her tables. Sometimes Javier's face, if she'd had a run-in with him during the day. It makes her do things like snap irrationally, swings her emotions through too many poles to count.

"Three years is enough," Alexis says. "Don't you think?"

"For your dad to be following Detective Beckett around?"

"No," the girl sighs, handing Lanie the heavy rib cutters, fingers properly away from sharp edges this time. "For a grown person not to know what they want."

At that, Lanie has to laugh. "Oh baby, I hate to disappoint you," she answers. "But to be completely honest? You pretty much never grow out of that."

Author: CartographicalConspiracy