A/N: A warning. Some potentially upsetting stuff in here. Please, read with care.
This is still my work of fiction. It has nothing to do with Mr. Wolf's ideas about these characters. I am infringing, but no harm intended. Big thanks to everyone who is sticking with me as I work my way through this slowly-unfolding yarn. Questions are always welcome. Send me a pm.
Family holidays, feasts, and gatherings. Birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, funerals. Graduations. Camping at the lake. Grandma and Grandpa's. Everything she loved.
He was always there.
She and Joe had been married as civilians. The whole extended family would have needed to be invited to a wedding of uniformed officers, and she was damned if she was going to. Joe saw that fierce look and never asked. Just joked about looking like a waiter. Joe was like that.
She remembered what it was like before it started. Lizzie didn't seem to remember anything at all, but she remembered what a normal life felt like. She and Lizzie being in matching shorts-and-tee-shirt sets. Having red sandals because red haired girls should have red sandles, Mom said. She remembered running fast and trying her hardest to keep up with the great pack of running boys that included her brothers and her cousins. Always making sure to take care of her little sister, too.
The grown-ups played games two or three times a week. They sat at the table with their cigarette contraptions and paper tubes and tins of tobacco. Mom and Auntie Betty played cards or Scrabble or dominoes and drank whisky and lemon, and dad and Uncle Don hung around outside and smoked their stinky cigars. And eventually joined the women at the table and a new game would start - maybe bridge. Or gin rummy.
When the grown-ups sent them to bed, their kisses good-night were boozy and sloppy, and the boys would troop downstairs to their domain. And she and Liz would head upstairs to the room they shared. And he'd say,
"I'll read the girls a bedtime story."
And everyone would say what a responsible young man he was, what a real chip off the old block he was. Was going to be a great cop. That's what they'd say.
"Long time no see," he'd say. And giggle, like it was so funny. She would put herself between him and her sister.
"You shouldn't be here. We have to go to sleep now. You have to leave us alone."
"You have to be quiet, or I'll tell your mom."
"Get out of our bedroom!" Fearsome Alex Eames would tell him.
"Who's gonna make me?" Denny Moran would smirk back.
For reasons she did not understand, it seemed incredibly important that her parents not find out.
And he was older - almost a grown man. She believed him. At first, she believed him.
//
//
She made him stop. All by herself. (With the help of her father's loaded Smith and Wesson .38 Special snubnose revolver, which she'd taken with shaking hands from his bedside table earlier in the evening.) The sound of the gun being cocked surely did stop him right in his tracks, big man that he was now in his dark blue uniform.
"If you touch my sister ever again I'll kill you," she told him. Matter-of-fact. And he must have believed her. He slid back the way he came, letting the veneer slip aside just once more, letting her see his real face. Then he was gone.
He never tried to get into their room again. He never bothered Liz again, either.
He never bothered Liz again.
//
//
Senior year. Early summer. There were eight or so of them at the picnic tables by the basketball courts and they were drinking white wine. She was world-was-spinning drunk. They all hushed when the little car pulled up, and she just knew.
He came out with his big department issue flashlight, the beam in their faces. He was wearing his uniform.
"You kids get out of here. Get home," he told them all. "Alexandra, get in the car. I'll take you home myself. Your father is going to hear about this from me."
As her friends slunk off into the darkness, grateful for not being the ones escorted home by some uncle or cousin or brother, she thought she heard somebody murmur something about it being a raw deal, growing in a cop family … .
//
//
This is how life turns on a dime.
(took care of what needed to be taken care of herself. and she never told anyone.)
Then found that she was being dogged by questions that had taken root somewhere, maybe in the torn space in her soul that was the aftermath of the awful thing. That they were being broadcast repeatedly in a rhythmic pattern, like a heartbeat.
What is me?
What am I for?
Will I be forgiven?
Who forgives God?
