Bomb calls have rules. Rules about things you can and can't do, about who can and can't do them (one man down range, always shouted as a reminder – sometimes Winnie needs the reminder too).
This is a team built on steady-hands, on keeping calm in a crisis, on knowing what to do before you have to do it but Winnie doesn't have to know how to keep an MP5 straight without her muscles trembling, doesn't have to know how to speak with her hands and her mouth to save someone from getting their brains splashed out all over the asphalt, doesn't have to know how to disarm a bomb she's never even seen before.
It's not like she isn't listening, she is, waiting for someone to ask her for something she can actually give them. But she's not really hearing much, feels like she's still back in time by about forty-five minutes, Spike and Sam finding what they were looking for, the PATH jam-packed with people at lunch time.
She's back in that moment where Spike very quietly and calmly told Sam to get out.
Winnie's got traffic cams on her screens, is looking for a match, scared to shit that this will be one of those times when they're not fast enough (when she's not fast enough).
She knows Sam leaves, she knows that, knows Unis have been dispatched to evacuate civilians immediately (she sent them out herself). And then Sam goes back and Spike yells at him until he leaves, something about rulebooks and specific things that aren't worth risking. She thinks her breath hitches at that.
The rest of the team is arguing with each other over the headsets, Ed and Jules trying to reason the bomber's motivations out while Boss shouts at the Unis to keep it moving, keep it moving.
Winnie can hear the worry in all the things Spike isn't saying, can still hear that scream when Lew-
She keeps trying to tell herself that this is different, that what happened to Lew was a freak accident and that Spike knows what he's doing. He's the best, never forgets the things he reads, reads a lot about bombs, she knows he does. She has to push away the thought of him kneeling alone on a tile floor so that she can do her job.
"Guys, I think I've got him! Subject's car spotted, traveling west on Wellington, just east of York." She's nearly made herself cross eyed looking for a blue sedan, plates ending in AN9 but she knows what's she's seen, just a flash at the top of one of the screens.
Ed and Sam are talking about where to cut him off, if he might book it down a one way, but it's Spike who says, "Win, can we get a roadblock at Wellington and Bay? He'll make a loop. Guys, he's going to want to stay in the area, probably wants to watch."
"You got it." She's trying to be professional, trying to pretend that it does nothing to her whatsoever to hear his voice that calm, is trying to do her job but she keeps thinking about Lew. He knew what he was doing too. She thinks about that call Ed made, how sometimes the right call can feel totally fucking wrong. She's watching the clock at the corner of the screen, has it down to milliseconds, thinks that if there's anyone who can do this, it's Spike, and that if he can't-
If he can't-
Her hands are hovering over the keyboard, she's waiting for instructions but her stomach and her heart and all her other organs are somewhere near her throat and her fingers are clenching and unclenching.
She wonders what it says about her that she wishes it was someone else kneeling on that floor.
It just feels like if this is one of those times when they're not fast enough, if this is one of those calls that ends in a bad shift – she just doesn't know how she's going to get up and do this all again tomorrow, is all.
Dimly, she hears Sam and Jules apprehending their bomb-maker, Sam a little heavy handed with him (she would be too, is the thing, because someone on her team is sitting there trying to dismantle them all at the same time so that the entire fucking block doesn't collapse, Spike is sitting there trying to dismantle them) but it's Jules who talks to him until he tells her that she can't stop the timer, can't stop the inevitable.
Jules keeps talking to him, nice and easy, doing all those things that she's supposed to do exactly the way she's supposed to do them. He tells her he lost a child. A wife. His job. That he'd never been a good enough father or husband. That they took everything from him, some small company on the twenty-third floor of the Scotia Plaza. Winnie wants to bury her face in her hands, thinks that she's heard this a hundred times before and every time, she just can't-
He also tells her that he buried all his prototypes, didn't destroy them.
She gets them the address before anyone even has to ask for it.
Leah is breaking every single traffic law there is and Sarge keeps going, "Spike? You still with us, buddy?"
And Spike keeps answering, "Yeah, Boss, still here," super patiently, like he's chilling on a beach somewhere, drink in hand, instead of in a small bathroom in the PATH trying to take apart three bombs before one of them detonates and explodes, takes all the office workers who haven't gotten out yet with it, takes the whole block with it.
Takes him with it.
Winnie holds her breath as Leah says she's digging, as Spike tells her to be careful because god knows what she's going to find and the last thing they need is-
Leah strikes gold, talks as fast as she can, explains what she's seeing but she's not their demolitions expert and she's trying to give him something that he can actually use and even though her voice is cool and as placid as ever, there's an undercurrent of fear, and Winnie is holding her breath as the timer moves closer and closer to zero.
Spike is still calm and she can almost picture his hands, composed and steady, telling them all what he's doing like they can possibly understand the intricacy, the puzzle, the way he sees everything pieced together so that he can break it all apart.
Sarge goes, "Can't you just cut the wires?"
Winnie thinks every single one of them nods at that.
Spike very patiently says, "No, Boss. Doesn't really work that way." And then he's back to explaining, all sorts of things Winnie can't actually even picture seeing, his words bleeding into each other in her head. She hopes she gets the chance to ask him to teach her, show her. It's a specific thing she wants, all of a sudden, something she didn't realize she needed before right now, right this second.
Her fear for Spike's life is actually out-weighing all the fear she walks around with the rest of the time, the things she keeps thinking will go wrong, all the ways she's not going to be able to follow through on the things she wants. She thinks that she wants him to drop this bomb and just come home, walk in the doors from the garage, smile at her, make her laugh, offer her a ride, all those things that he usually does.
She thinks that right now, right in this second, she wants everything, no more halves.
Spike's still talking, faster now and Winnie's looking at the corner of her screen, this sudden clear thought that she wants him to kiss her and she wants to kiss him and she doesn't want to go the rest of her life without knowing what that would be like.
He counts down the ones left, "One disarmed, two to go", "Two down, one left", "Bombs disarmed," and Winnie hears the whole team inhale right after that, one single being.
She can't though. She's still firmly perched back in time, still seeing the seconds that are left, still hearing Spike telling Sam to get out, still hearing Lew say that everything is going to be-
Several minutes later, when Winnie thinks she can breathe again, she mutes her headset, buries her face in her lap and tries to take deep breaths, holds in her air and lets it out slowly. She feels hopeless during calls like that, like all she can do is listen and sometimes it just-
Her mouth feels dry, like she's been dry-swallowing dirt and she suddenly has the thought of what her life would be like without the SRU in it, without calls like this, without people dying and being too late and always catching people at their very worst moments.
Then she thinks about mornings and nights without Spike making her laugh, without Spike period, about not making any difference in the world whatsoever, about some other dispatcher watching over her teams.
His eyes meet hers when Team One walks inside from the garage, all of them boxing him in like they can keep him safe if he's surrounded. She doesn't know what expression is on her face and for the first time she can remember, he walks past her without saying anything, eyes on hers until the door to the briefing room closes. She wants to ask him if he was scared, as scared as she was but it's like she already knows the answer, knows that it would have been a different kind of fear, that he is braver every single day than she's ever been in her whole life.
Her shift was over thirty-five minutes ago and she's still in her chair, getting in Pete's way. He read the transcripts when he got there though, hasn't said a word, just patted her on the shoulder once, is navigating around her.
"Sorry. I'll move." The words feel like they're sticking somewhere below her throat.
"Take your time, Win. That was intense eh? Looks like Spike was awesome. Again. What do you think the other teams do without one of him?"
Winnie just looks at him, doesn't answer. Has no idea what her answer would be if she could get the words out. She gets up, smiles tightly and heads to the locker room. Stumbles onto the bench and sits down, thinks about all the things she wants and all the things she hides and all the things she doesn't want to lose.
She's come to rely on him, is the thing, on his face and his hands on her desk first thing in the morning, on his thoughtfulness, on silly jokes and messages that make her smile. His smile. And when she thinks about how close she just came to losing all of it-
When she thinks about Lew's funeral and the fact that they just came so close to-
It takes her several minutes to steady her legs enough that she can open her locker and change. Takes her several more to figure out the button on her jeans. She packs up her things, adrenaline still in her system, still making her hands shake a little, even though all she had to do was sit there. It's not like she just had to dig through pounds of soil looking for explosives, or interrogate a suspect and cajole him into telling her everything. Not like she just had to sit on a tiled floor all alone.
She looks at the closed door of the briefing room before she nods at Pete. "Have a good shift." Her voice sounds gravelly, hoarse, like she's been sobbing for days even though she hasn't shed a tear.
He smiles at her sympathetically, tells her to get some sleep.
She walks home like a robot, actually looks around in confusion when she gets to her apartment, can't remember the walk there. She puts her bag away, hangs her coat on the back of a chair, takes a shower, washes her hair. Her stomach is still in knots, that feeling like she's running late even though she knows she has nowhere to go.
She gets dressed, towel dries her hair and the whole time, she thinks about the way Spike looked at her as he walked past her desk, the way he looks at her every time she sees him, like he's genuinely happy to see her, like she's something.
Her hands are still shaking.
She fills the kettle, sets it on the stove, doesn't turn the stove on. She keeps imagining the day going the other way, keeps hearing phantom screams in her head and she knows no one let out any of those sounds but-
He could have been gone. He could have been gone and she would never have known what it was like to take a chance.
Winnie stares out her window, looks at the city without seeing it, thinks that small stones can make big ripples, that you can drown in three feet of water, that people can die before you're ready to let them go.
She thinks that being brave can mean different things, that it can mean leaving and staying in the same moment, that being a coward can mean you stayed when you should have left and left when you should have stayed but that never taking a chance, well that makes you a coward, no matter how you look at it.
It's enough.
She's had enough. Enough of fighting what she already feels, enough of trying to stop the inevitable, enough of wanting what she thinks she shouldn't. She thinks it's time to start trying not to be afraid.
She picks up her keys, jams her metropass into the back pocket of her jeans and races out the door. Doesn't wait for the elevator.
Her hair's still wet.
'This is stupid,' is what she thinks the entire way there, winter air freezing the ends of her hair. Feels like it's even stupider when he doesn't answer his doorbell.
Feels even stupider than that when she takes a seat on his front steps and waits, her fingers tapping out a rhythm she doesn't know on her thighs. She pulls her coat tighter around her, wishes she had a scarf. They're probably at The Goose, if she knows anything about her team at all, probably being glad that they're all together, all still alive, compensating for earlier by being loud and raucous. The thought alone makes her smile.
She thinks it'll be Ed who gets the first round, thinks it'll probably be the only round they end up getting. He'll call Sophie, tell her it's good to hear her voice, she'll pass the phone to Clark. Sarge will call Dean, maybe Marina. Just let them speak, won't say a word. Sam and Jules will sit together, hands barely touching but every time one of them moves, the other will mirror the change. Leah will call her family, keep ducking out so that she can hear them. They'll all see her through the glass, all white teeth, big smile.
The funny thing is that she can't see Spike. Not in this little vision she's having. She knows he's there (he's always there, in the things, the future, she thinks about), but she can't see who he'll call.
Wonders if, in another life, another time, it could have been her.
And then she thinks that maybe it's not too late for that possibility.
All those feelings of stupidity go out the window when she sees his car pull up and park, when she sees the headlights turn off. She feels progressively less and less stupid when she sees him open the door and get out, start walking towards his front door, when she sees the moment that he sees her, how he stops dead and just stares.
Has he always looked at her like that? She doesn't know, doesn't remember. It makes her mouth dry. Like he's seeing something great, like she's his future and his past and everything in between. She doesn't feel stupid at all when he looks at her like that.
He walks up to her slowly, gives her this cautious smile.
Winnie gets to her feet, ignores how hard her heart is beating, how fast, thinks about her rules, about her life, opens her mouth to say hi and instead says, "Do you want to go to dinner with me some time?"
The smile that spreads across his face?
It's worth it.
.
.
.
A/N: When I first envisioned this story, I saw this as the end (if you're interested, this is the first chapter I ever finished – so I always knew that eventually, this is where we would get to). I am so grateful to anyone who has done anything whatsoever in that little white box below and hope those who were just here to read have enjoyed it.
I feel like I've asked you to come pretty far with me here, into the point of view and the life of a secondary character, and so I'm hoping that you'll be willing to come a little bit further (as an aside, I kind of feel like Andy Dufresne right now).
Because a couple of chapters into this story, I realized that it couldn't end here, that there was still a journey for these two to go on, still things that had to be brought up and dealt with. I don't feel like I'm quite done with these two in this setting - actually, I know I'm not because there are some more chapters in progress.
So, I hope you'll stick with me. And if not, thank you for reading this far!
