Author's Note: Thankyou thankyou thankyou for the lovely, overwhelmingly warm comments! That's the stuff that keeps me writing, and I'm so happy everyone has enjoyed this story so much. I just wanted to see some more M/S fiction on this page. And no fear for the M/S fans out there-- I am DEFINITELY going in that direction. Big things in the future! More feedback always appreciated. :-D ~syd

Elysium

Chapter Three

In the empty darkness of Danny's apartment, Samantha was cold. There was a minimalistic masculinity to the place; Danny never was one for 'stuff'. He was on the phone with the police department, pacing in the kitchen. She watched him, her eyes going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth like the eternal tennis match it was. She was tired, more so than she was going to let on.

How she wished Martin had answered his phone. She had called once again, right before going outside to take the taxi to Danny's apartment, but he still wasn't there. She didn't want to think about where he could be-- and with whom.

She wasn't scared, really, just feeling really violated. And Danny-- Danny was angry. Danny had two kinds of angry-- the loud angry and the quiet angry. At present, he was the quiet angry. She watched him as he fumed into the phone, trying to get information, trying to get a police officer to go over to her apartment. She knew what they were saying on the other end, that they had to take care of the crimes that had been committed before they could attend to the ones that hadn't been committed yet. She couldn't say she blamed them.

Finally, he got off the phone and he sat down on the sofa next to her, and neither of them said anything. Her injured leg was stretched out in front of her, not elevated like it was supposed to be, but she didn't care. Something had changed inside of her since the shooting, and she couldn't put her finger on it. Maybe it was just that she was thinking more, considering all of the options, looking at all of the open doors, not just the one with the plaque that said 'Jack Malone' on it. Maybe that was it, but maybe it was something else, something less tangible.

She wanted to cry. Not because of the note, and not because of Jack, and not even really because of the shooting. She could handle the first; it had happened to Jack a couple of years back, some whack job. She could handle the second; she had always braced herself for the inevitable end. And the third was just physical, primarily psychological.

How many times had she told herself she was too good for tears, too strong, too unbeatable? And then all it took was one bullet in the leg, and she let her guard down, started to let herself feel again. Her relationship with Jack had simply been mind numbingly obvious; they had slipped into that, sliding all around each other and their colleagues, pretending like no one saw the glances, like no one noticed that Jack always paired her with him, just pretending. They had gotten good at pretending.

She had built up the walls way too high, destroyed the woman she once was. It had been okay, because real feelings weren't allowed to enter into the identity known as 'Jack and Sam'. But now that there was no Jack and Sam, now that she was beginning to have incredibly real feelings-- feelings that had always been there, really-- for someone else, someone who didn't know the make-believe game, she didn't know what to do. And that was why she wanted to cry.

Danny reached out and touched her shoulder briefly with his warm fingertips, and she turned and smiled at him, her eyes completely dry. Now was not the time to cry, she decided. Now was the time to be strong, brave, untouchable Samantha Spade. "It's going to be okay, Sam," he told her, that familiar smile playing at the corner of his lips.

"I know," she replied, nodding. He grinned at her, perhaps not sensing the gravity not of the situation but of her thoughts, and she smiled back. She always could smile with Danny, no matter what-- but there was more to life than Danny's somewhat two-dimensional emotions, anger and humor. She knew him better than that, but she also knew that was why she had turned down his date offer two years ago.

"It's okay if I stay here?" she asked him.

"I wasn't going to let you leave," he told her with a wink.

*

Hilary Frederick Missing: 29 Hours

It was a matter of stamina. Samantha felt sure that she could outlast this crush or whatever it was that she felt for Martin. Simply stamina. It was only a matter of living long enough so that the feelings would fade. Everything ended eventually, anyway, she decided. She just had to outlast it. It had been almost a week since she received the note, almost a week of living in Danny's apartment, sleeping in his bed while he slept on the couch. Martin hadn't said anything to her outside of the typical formalities and colloquialisms that inhabited the workplace.

Once upon a time, there had been a small window of opportunity, and she hadn't gotten through it. She had just gotten her leg stuck inside.

She folded the piece of paper at the table into a paper airplane and tossed it into the basket beside the dry erase board. She sat in the chair at the table, her leg up on another chair. She and the chair were now good friends; Jack wouldn't let her do anything, especially go out into the field. That was his paternal nature coming out, and she didn't appreciate it.

As usual, she stared at the picture on the dry erase board. People were beginning to talk about her and Danny, but she could swear on the Holy Bible that she had never had a sexual relationship with him. It wouldn't come up; her superiors frowned on supervisor-subordinate relationships, but they also understood that the kind of life they all led did not pave an easy road for normal, healthy relationships. The best they could hope for was to be married already or find someone within the unit or the bureau.

She had to refocus, though. There was a girl missing, and they had to find her. Hilary Frederick, age fifteen, disappeared from her Manhattan home, reported missing by her parents when she didn't come home from a friend's house. The time was ticking, and there wasn't a damn thing Samantha could do about it. She wondered if Jack recognized how much it was killing her to not be a part of the team, to sit by as Danny and Martin and Vivian headed out to talk to people, find people, bring people home to their families and loved ones. Was this her punishment? Was this what she deserved for having entered into a relationship with him? Was this her own personalized version of the dog house?

A paper airplane whizzed by her head, landing near hers-- not in the garbage can. She sighed heavily and turned, expecting to see Danny, expecting to reprimand him in her own, special way.

But it wasn't Danny.

It was Martin.

Oh, went her heart. So this is what this feels like. He always caught her by surprise with how handsome he was, but in simple, understated ways. The dimples caught her off-guard, the mole by his eye, the way his eyes crinkled, and how he looked at everyone like they were equal. He could be so expressive, and she didn't think anyone ever noticed that. He seemed so sad sometimes, and she wondered if it had anything to do with his dad, or if it was something else.

Oh, right, her brain told her. Speak. You need to speak now.

He was leaning against the cubicle-like structure, just looking at her, smiling that half-smile she caught herself thinking about when she was falling asleep at night. How had everything changed so quickly? she asked herself. When did I change from calm, cool, collected to unable-to-speak teenybopper?

Gunshot. She remembered. That was when.

"Anything new?" she asked him, breaking the silence.

He didn't reply, not at first, just looked at her, not scrutinizing, just looking. She wondered what it would be like to kiss him, if he was a soft kisser or a hard kisser, if he led with his tongue, if he would let her lead, and then she quickly dismissed the thought. "Are you--" he started, and then he shook his head.

"What?" she asked, unable to stop from smiling.

"I just--" he tried again, but he couldn't seem able to say it.

"You just?" she echoed, gently teasing him, and she smiled more when he smiled back at her.

"This is stupid," he protested, but she wasn't going to let him off. Too many things had gone unsaid, and she wasn't going to let them go unsaid. If he had something to say then, by God, she was going to make him say it.

"Come on," she prodded again, and he sighed and looked away for a minute.

"I was just wondering . . . you and Danny?" he asked, and the last three words, the 'you and Danny', were contemptuous, disbelieving, almost . . . jealous? Her heart trilled at the idea.

She laughed, and it felt good to hear her own laughter. It was the carpooling to work, the late nights when they would go home together. If she hadn't known better, she would have suspected something, too. But the truth of it was that it was Danny.

And not Martin.

As soon as she started laughing, he began to smile, out of relief. That's what it was, she realized. Relief. And then maybe, she realized, that window of opportunity might be closed, but there might be a door opened somewhere.

"What, are you jealous?" she asked him, half-teasing and half needing to know the answer, for her own sanity. She needed to know because she needed to be able to tell him that all she could think about while she was inside that bookstore with Barry Mashburn was that she didn't want to die not knowing if she had a chance with Martin Fitzgerald. But then she had thrown away that thought, because it was childish and idealistic, two things that Samantha Spade once was but no longer could claim to be.

"I--" he started after an infinity of pauses, and then the phone rang.

Don't answer it, she willed him, knowing perfectly well how selfish of a thought that was. He answered it, the black phone on one of the desks, and she turned back to staring at the dry erase board. Anything he might have been willing to admit while in the somber quiet of the office was gone, lost to the rattling noises of the outside world.

*

All she had wanted to do was pick up another pair of jeans and some clean underwear. That had been her purest intention. They had lost the missing girl. She had been found in a dumpster, raped and murdered. Finding the perpetrator of that crime was the job of another team. The Missing Persons Unit didn't deal with dead bodies, not if they could help it.

It was always hard losing someone. Even if it was just a picture on a dry erase board.

She took the elevator up to her apartment, still hobbling a little on her wounded leg, and she went to the door of her apartment. She didn't notice anything was off, which was her first sign that she was letting her head get away from her.

She opened the door and let it slide open along the hardwood floor. It took her a minute before she fully analyzed the damage to the interior of her apartment. She bit her tongue so hard she tasted the coppery bitterness of her own blood; it was better than crying out. Couch cushions were upturned, pots pulled out of cabinets, rugs moved aside. Her kitchen table was overturned, and she walked slowly through her apartment, careful not to touch anything. Fingerprints could always be found.

She found it difficult to breathe. Her chest was incredibly tight, and somewhere in the back of her head, she wondered if she was hyperventilating. Or having a heart attack. She couldn't think clearly. Someone had come into her apartment and done all of this.

She walked back along the wooden floor, her bad leg dragging slightly, and she went to her bedroom. Her hands faltered on the bedroom doorframe. Every drawer of her chest of drawers had been pulled out, dumped out, sheets and comforter pulled off of the bed, and in the middle of the uncovered mattress, there was another piece of paper.

She didn't even look at it. She couldn't. She sank to the floor, her leg folding painfully underneath her, and she reached for her cellphone inside her jacket pocket. With shaking fingers, barely able to hold herself together, breathing heavily, she dialed Danny's number.

It rang and rang and he didn't answer. The cold, creeping, empty feeling in her chest began to grow, ravaging all of her senses of control. And then, without even thinking about it, she dialed Martin's number, hoping against dying hope that he would answer.

Four, five rings went by with no answer. She could fell the tears nearing her eyes, and then there was a click. "Martin Fitzgerald," came his voice over the line, and the tightness in her chest loosened, just the tiniest of fractions, and she found she could breathe a tiny bit better.

"Martin?" she echoed.

"Samantha?" he asked. "Is that you?"

"I need-- I need your help," she said to him, but that didn't even begin to cover it. "I need-- I need someone."

"I'm coming right now," he told her, and there was a click and he was gone.

*

To be continued . . .