Disclaimer: I don't own the situations or characters portrayed herein. I'm just playing with them for a while.
You Only Die Twice
As a rule, Lee didn't discuss emotions. He showed them sometimes — more often now — but he didn't talk about them. She had certainly never heard him say anything about what he had been feeling.
Fear, sorrow, disappointment, panic, shock, happiness, or hope — they were all emotions Francine was sure he felt, but he never explored them aloud.
Except this time, he volunteered the information.
"I almost dropped my teeth when I saw the dead woman's name," he said grimly, putting the paper down on Billy's desk with unnecessary force.
It was a humorous way of putting it, but the fact that he felt the need to talk about it alarmed her. It meant that he was still feeling the aftershocks of the news. He was still reeling a little. He was definitely still processing.
Supposing Amanda had been the woman who had been killed, how would that change things? Francine could only begin to imagine the depths of the depression Lee would enter. His life would seem so much darker to him, with the sudden removal of its only source of pure and genuine light.
She wondered how long he would keep fighting to survive, without Amanda. Probably not very long. He didn't realize it, but her steady admiration of him was shaping him slowly into a better man as he strove to meet her expectations of him. Without her, he would sink back into his old patterns of misery and self-destruction, and Francine wouldn't be able to pull him out.
The death of his partner a few years ago had rendered him almost unreachable by anyone at the agency. She could only imagine that the death of the one person who had been able to reach him in his despair would send him into a death spiral.
"I'm sorry, Billy," she said, but while she sympathized with Billy over the death of his friend, she was selfish enough to be relieved that they had all escaped something much worse.
She was doing some investigation into the whole mess, watching Lee and Amanda through the blinds in Billy's office window. Amanda was pacing. Billy was trying to remain civil on the phone. Lee was watching Amanda.
His lips moved, and she stopped short, then sat down as if he had gently chastened her. They spoke a little, with Amanda looking irritated, Lee looking amused.
It was a shame that Amanda wasn't looking at Lee, Francine thought suddenly. Her view of only his profile told her that he was looking at Amanda with an almost completely unguarded admiration and contentment — something that had never once been directed at anyone else.
She watched as he dipped the helicopter, almost dancing with it in the air above the Teldar car, pulling up at the last moment every time.
She couldn't see his face, but she could imagine the grim determination and burning anger he felt at the men who had kidnapped and tried to kill his Amanda.
Finally, the helicopter stilled. It hovered, inches above the ground, just at the edge of the cliff. Surely, surely he would land, would jump out of the helicopter and apprehend the two men.
Surely he wasn't… he couldn't be… playing chicken with them! But he had to know that if the car came toward the helicopter, it would plunge over the edge.
He did know. The helicopter pulled up sharply and suddenly, and the car sped underneath and flew over the edge.
It flew in a wide arc, then pointed sharply downward. The hood and engine crumpled into the car's interior as it hit the ground, and if the two men weren't dead from that, they were definitely dead when the car exploded.
Did it count as self-defense? Lee had given them multiple chances to surrender or flee, and they kept pursuing.
Or did it count as murder? He knew they had too much at stake to come quietly or run away, and he had steered them, purposefully and inexorably, to the cliff edge. He had baited them and taunted them until they felt justified in trying to run down a helicopter in a car.
It didn't matter, of course. She would maintain that it was self-defense to her dying day, even if she herself had her doubts.