TITLE: THE ONE CONSTANT
AUTHOR: MINN
DISCLAIMER: I don't own nothin' - mores the pity - just playing. No character was really harmed during the typing of this nonsense. The creators of Third Watch are, of course, gods. And so are the actors who portray the characters!
CHEERS! To all the kind folks who said such nice things about my maiden outing "Grace", and about the follow-up-story-that-isn't-really, "The Replacement".
EXPLAINATION: This here tale gets into the nuts and bolts of how Gracie came to be. If you have no idea who Gracie is, it might pay you to have a wee looksee at my other stories "Grace" and "The Replacement", which basically lead up to this here offering.
FORGIVE ME!: Everything I write I can guarantee is the work of my own sick and twisted little mind - but if anything I write does resemble something that's gone before I can assure you it's pure coincidence - (hangs head in shame) because I don't actually READ much fic (sorry to all the wonderful authors on this site!) But I have had occasion to catch up with a few stories recommended by others and have enjoyed them immensely. (Can I stop greasing now?) Also, if you see a phrase or a word that seems a bit odd it's because I'M FOREIGN!!! New Zealand English is a WHOLE different animal - but I've tried to be careful.
SOMETHING ELSE TO NOTE: Season Four of Third Watch hasn't started screening in New Zealand yet so I haven't actually seen the 'new improved' Fr*d or The Anti Cruz. I promise I will do rewrites the MINUTE I do get the opportunity to see them, but in the meantime I beg your collective indulgence on this - if these two characters sound a little "off" in this fic, don't worry - I'll fix the blighters eventually! And so on with the show...
********
THE ONE CONSTANT
Part 7
"Teenagers experiment, Faith."
Faith stared at her husband, her face thunderous.
"What? You don't remember what we were getting up to at her age?" he said defensively.
"Hypocrite," Emily pouted. Faith silenced her with a look.
"You want her to end up like us?" Faith demanded.
A look of deep hurt crossed Fred's face. "What's wrong with us?"
"For godssake Fred!" Faith exclaimed. "She was in a sleazy bar dressed like something I've had occasion to arrest for soliciting! And you're not even a bit concerned?"
Fred regarded Emily fondly. "I'm concerned, sure, but I have faith that..."
"DON'T!" Faith snapped, surprising herself as well as Fred and Emily with the sharpness of her tone. "Enough already! I don't wanna hear it."
The look of hurt on Fred's face deepened.
"Faith, I know it's..."
"Just stop talkin' Fred, OK?" Faith snarled irritably. She took a deep breath in. "Seein' as you don't seem to be able to grasp how bad this is, it looks like it's up to me to deal with it."
Emily jumped immediately to her father's defence. "Don't speak to him like that!"
"Emily leave it," Fred said gently. "It's OK. Your mom's just upset."
"It's not OK!" Emily yelled. "She doesn't have any right to talk to you like that!"
Faith's already ominous expression intensified. "No RIGHT?"
Fred stepped between them and faced his wife earnestly. "Maybe raging at Emily isn't the answer here Faith."
"So what is the answer Fred?" she demanded. "Send her on her way with a pat on the head and a prayer?"
Fred placed his hands on his wife's shoulders. "I know you're upset and I can understand why, but would you leave this with me? Please?" he pleaded.
Faith felt her tough stance begin to soften a little at the sight of the caring and compassion in her husband's eyes. But when she saw of the look of triumph gracing Emily's face it nearly sent her into orbit.
Storming to the kitchen she snatched a garbage bag from the drawer.
"What are you doing?" Fred asked, following in his wife's considerable wake as she made her way to Emily's room.
"As long as she's under the roof I'M workin' my ass off to pay for, she's gonna live by MY rules!" Faith raged.
"What are you doing?!" Emily yelped, watching as her make-up and all but the most sedate items of her clothing were scooped into the bag.
"Seein' as you can't be trusted to use good judgement on how to dress and how to conduct yourself, I'm gonna be makin' those choices for you from now on," Faith growled.
"Dad!" Emily implored, "Stop her!"
"Faith, come on, we've gotta talk this through..."
"I've had enough talkin', Fred! I've had enough of bein' told God's gonna make it all better! We do it my way now."
She didn't see the already hurt expression Fred wore slip quietly towards a look of anguish.
Faith began rifling through a pile of boxes at the back of the closet. Emily uttered a sharp expletive and suddenly lunged forward, but Faith blocked her and with one hand swiped the entire pile onto the floor. A three-quarters empty bottle spilled out of one of the boxes and skittered to a stop right in front of Emily.
With an expression of teenage defiance fighting a look of little girl contrition Emily watched as her mother bent down and retrieved the evidence.
"Whisky?" Fred murmured quietly, staring at his daughter in disbelief and disappointment.
The bottle joined the rest of Emily's belongings.
"You're grounded," Faith bellowed. "Forever!"
A look of venomous defiance crossed the teenager's face, but she said nothing. Emily knew better than to challenge her mother, especially when Faith had her "I'm not takin' any shit from you!" face on and was wearing the gun to back it up.
----
Bosco heard the trunk of the squad open and slam shut again.
The look on Faith's face when she got back into the car told him the situation needed a good leaving alone. He said nothing.
After a moment of serious fuming Faith spoke.
"Whisky."
"Whisky?"
"A bottle of it. Hidden in a box in the closet."
"Kids experiment..."
"Don't you start!" she snapped.
Bosco raised his hands in surrender.
"Whisky," she said again. "Dammit!"
"You ground her?"
"Forever."
Bosco nodded. "So, you gonna chain her to her bed till she's 21?"
Faith glared at him.
"What? I just remember how it was when I was Em's age - mom grounding me didn't mean squat."
"It's different."
"No it ain't," Bosco murmured.
"OK, so who died and made you the expert on kids?"
Bosco raised his hands in submission again.
"Fred's probably gonna sweet talk her now anyway," Faith grumbled after a while. "She'll listen to him. I'm just the bitch that happens to live there too."
Bosco eyed his partner cautiously. "Isn't it a good thing he's got that sort of rapport with Em'? I mean, maybe he can talk a bit of sense into her." He flinched as Faith glared at him. "All you're doing is butting heads with her Faith. Trust me, that's a recipe for disaster."
"So speaks the expert," Faith grumbled, clearly unimpressed.
"Just speaking from my own experience with my father, alright?" Bosco responded sourly as he started the car up. "I know that doesn't mean shit to you..."
"Oh, hold on while I get the violins out..."
Bosco shook his head. "Oh that's right, I forgot. I'm just the jerk who doesn't know anything and you know all there is to know about everything," he muttered.
"Just shut up and drive," she snapped, in no mood listen to anyone's reason.
The rest of the shift was spent in tense silence, apart from the times when speaking to each other as part of the job proved an absolute necessity.
----
Home life was strained.
Emily refused to speak to or even acknowledge her mother for weeks after her grounding but during that time made every obvious effort to be the perfect daughter for her father. It irritated Faith to the core.
That irritation made it difficult for Faith to recognise what an intolerable situation the impasse between them created for Fred, caught as he was between wanting to be supportive of his wife and wanting to be there for his daughter as well.
It was Bosco that bore the brunt of Faith's sometimes not so generous moods, but to her surprise he took it all in his stride, only reacting when her grousing and bitching became too unreasonable or unfair. It didn't escape her notice, however, that he greeted another opportunity to work with Anti Crime with great enthusiasm. Try as she might to reason with herself, Faith couldn't help but take that a little personally.
A sense of disquiet had long plagued Faith when it came to Bosco working with the ACU. After a stint with Anti Crime his edges always seemed harder, his attitudes harsher and it became difficult for Faith to imagine any human vulnerability existed beneath the swaggering belligerence Bosco presented to the world. More than anything though, Faith objected strongly to the kind of man Bosco became around the ACU's hot-shot Sgt.
Faith didn't like Cruz. More importantly, she didn't trust her. But what troubled Faith most was her conviction that Bosco did not have the skills, or the maturity, to make a sound judgement about the woman.
Sound judgement? the voice in her head queried. You mean, any judgement that just happens to agree with yours, hmmm?...
Faith sat opposite her partner, watching as Bosco juggled his own paperwork as she worked on a report.
"More homework from Cruz?" Faith inquired lightly.
He didn't look up. "Somethin' like that."
Faith watched him some more. It was their first shift together since his latest stint with ACU and things between them had been a little awkward. Bosco clearly hadn't forgotten her mood of the previous weeks.
"Look, Bos, I'm sorry for the way I behaved the last time we worked together," Faith said when she had finally had enough of the uncomfortable silence between them. "You know, with the way things were at home for me...I shouldn't have taken it all out on you. You didn't deserve it."
Bosco shrugged and didn't say a word.
"What, so now I get the silent treatment?"
In utter exasperation Bosco dropped his pen and sat back heavily. "What do you want me to say, Faith? That I forgive you? Well OK, I forgive you. You've had it tough lately, you've used me as a punch-bag and now you're sorry. Fine. Whatever. It's not like I'm not used to people doing that."
He returned his attention back to the page in front of him and didn't see the look of hurt in Faith's eyes.
"I'm sorry," she murmured.
Bosco stopped writing. He considered the page before him for some time, snatching fleeting glances at Faith every so often.
"Are things better at home?" he asked eventually.
"A little tense still," she answered.
"Em behavin'?"
"So far. Fred seems to have gotten through to her. But I'm still persona non grata."
"Persona what?"
"Somethin' she's stepped in," Faith translated with a smile.
He nodded, letting a small smile tug at the corners of his own mouth. After a while he began writing again.
"What are you workin' on?" she asked.
"A report," he replied.
"ACU stuff?"
He nodded.
For a moment the swaggering bravado he had tortured everyone at the precinct with all afternoon dropped away. "Cruz reckons she's gonna make me rewrite every report I do seven times till I get it 'looking like a grown up wrote it'" he said sheepishly.
Faith had to resist the temptation to offer to help him, or offer up her opinion on the Cruz woman again. Bosco seemed taken with Cruz, and Faith found that disturbing on all sorts of surprising levels. Cruz was a bad influence on Bosco - Faith had witnessed evidence of that already. The woman was trouble, and Bosco didn't need trouble. He needed steady, dependable, caring...
Mommy to the rescue, teased the little voice in her head.
"Would you read this and tell me if it makes sense?" Bosco asked, a slight hesitancy apparent in his voice. He seemed embarrassed to be asking for her help and wouldn't meet her eyes.
As Faith reached for the report he was handing her, her mind wandered. She couldn't begin to reconcile the reality of her interaction with Bosco against the passionate fantasies that on occasion still tracked through her dreams.
Fantasies, she told herself. That's all they were; inventions of a mind that was a little confused and overwhelmed, and yes, a little unhappy. Everything just lately had been too much, too difficult, too strange. It was no wonder fantasies of passion had caught her imagination. But why Bosco of all people? She still had no acceptable answer to that question.
She looked up at him. He was staring at the desk in front of him, nervously toying with the pen. The vulnerability had returned, if only briefly.
Watching him Faith realised that beneath the act was someone she would have liked to get to know better. That man, however, was locked away out of her reach. When all was said and done it wasn't her place to be the one to draw that side of him out. Only someone who could give a guarantee to be there for him, come hell or high water, would have the privilege of getting to know that other Bosco, the one Faith had had the rare privilege of glimpsing but who seemed forever held at gunpoint by his angry outward persona.
Bosco is just the man I work with sometimes, she told herself. That's all. That has to be all.
Bosco's eyes suddenly, unexpectedly, met hers. Faith felt her breath catch sharply in her throat as their gazes locked, felt the all too familiar tingling on her skin. The breathtaking intensity that had haunted her dreams now held her fast and to her dismay she found the moment as electric as anything her imagination could invent.
Dragging her focus away from those intense blue eyes and back to the report, Faith realised that she was colouring up furiously.
His eyes never left her.
The shrill tones of her mobile phone made her jump.
Fred's voice was calm, but there was an edge to it that chilled her. "Fred what's wrong?" she asked.
There was a small, agonised pause before he spoke again.
"Emily's gone."
+++++++++++++
TBC - I know, I know, I promised warm fuzzies. We'll get there, I swear!
AUTHOR: MINN
DISCLAIMER: I don't own nothin' - mores the pity - just playing. No character was really harmed during the typing of this nonsense. The creators of Third Watch are, of course, gods. And so are the actors who portray the characters!
CHEERS! To all the kind folks who said such nice things about my maiden outing "Grace", and about the follow-up-story-that-isn't-really, "The Replacement".
EXPLAINATION: This here tale gets into the nuts and bolts of how Gracie came to be. If you have no idea who Gracie is, it might pay you to have a wee looksee at my other stories "Grace" and "The Replacement", which basically lead up to this here offering.
FORGIVE ME!: Everything I write I can guarantee is the work of my own sick and twisted little mind - but if anything I write does resemble something that's gone before I can assure you it's pure coincidence - (hangs head in shame) because I don't actually READ much fic (sorry to all the wonderful authors on this site!) But I have had occasion to catch up with a few stories recommended by others and have enjoyed them immensely. (Can I stop greasing now?) Also, if you see a phrase or a word that seems a bit odd it's because I'M FOREIGN!!! New Zealand English is a WHOLE different animal - but I've tried to be careful.
SOMETHING ELSE TO NOTE: Season Four of Third Watch hasn't started screening in New Zealand yet so I haven't actually seen the 'new improved' Fr*d or The Anti Cruz. I promise I will do rewrites the MINUTE I do get the opportunity to see them, but in the meantime I beg your collective indulgence on this - if these two characters sound a little "off" in this fic, don't worry - I'll fix the blighters eventually! And so on with the show...
********
THE ONE CONSTANT
Part 7
"Teenagers experiment, Faith."
Faith stared at her husband, her face thunderous.
"What? You don't remember what we were getting up to at her age?" he said defensively.
"Hypocrite," Emily pouted. Faith silenced her with a look.
"You want her to end up like us?" Faith demanded.
A look of deep hurt crossed Fred's face. "What's wrong with us?"
"For godssake Fred!" Faith exclaimed. "She was in a sleazy bar dressed like something I've had occasion to arrest for soliciting! And you're not even a bit concerned?"
Fred regarded Emily fondly. "I'm concerned, sure, but I have faith that..."
"DON'T!" Faith snapped, surprising herself as well as Fred and Emily with the sharpness of her tone. "Enough already! I don't wanna hear it."
The look of hurt on Fred's face deepened.
"Faith, I know it's..."
"Just stop talkin' Fred, OK?" Faith snarled irritably. She took a deep breath in. "Seein' as you don't seem to be able to grasp how bad this is, it looks like it's up to me to deal with it."
Emily jumped immediately to her father's defence. "Don't speak to him like that!"
"Emily leave it," Fred said gently. "It's OK. Your mom's just upset."
"It's not OK!" Emily yelled. "She doesn't have any right to talk to you like that!"
Faith's already ominous expression intensified. "No RIGHT?"
Fred stepped between them and faced his wife earnestly. "Maybe raging at Emily isn't the answer here Faith."
"So what is the answer Fred?" she demanded. "Send her on her way with a pat on the head and a prayer?"
Fred placed his hands on his wife's shoulders. "I know you're upset and I can understand why, but would you leave this with me? Please?" he pleaded.
Faith felt her tough stance begin to soften a little at the sight of the caring and compassion in her husband's eyes. But when she saw of the look of triumph gracing Emily's face it nearly sent her into orbit.
Storming to the kitchen she snatched a garbage bag from the drawer.
"What are you doing?" Fred asked, following in his wife's considerable wake as she made her way to Emily's room.
"As long as she's under the roof I'M workin' my ass off to pay for, she's gonna live by MY rules!" Faith raged.
"What are you doing?!" Emily yelped, watching as her make-up and all but the most sedate items of her clothing were scooped into the bag.
"Seein' as you can't be trusted to use good judgement on how to dress and how to conduct yourself, I'm gonna be makin' those choices for you from now on," Faith growled.
"Dad!" Emily implored, "Stop her!"
"Faith, come on, we've gotta talk this through..."
"I've had enough talkin', Fred! I've had enough of bein' told God's gonna make it all better! We do it my way now."
She didn't see the already hurt expression Fred wore slip quietly towards a look of anguish.
Faith began rifling through a pile of boxes at the back of the closet. Emily uttered a sharp expletive and suddenly lunged forward, but Faith blocked her and with one hand swiped the entire pile onto the floor. A three-quarters empty bottle spilled out of one of the boxes and skittered to a stop right in front of Emily.
With an expression of teenage defiance fighting a look of little girl contrition Emily watched as her mother bent down and retrieved the evidence.
"Whisky?" Fred murmured quietly, staring at his daughter in disbelief and disappointment.
The bottle joined the rest of Emily's belongings.
"You're grounded," Faith bellowed. "Forever!"
A look of venomous defiance crossed the teenager's face, but she said nothing. Emily knew better than to challenge her mother, especially when Faith had her "I'm not takin' any shit from you!" face on and was wearing the gun to back it up.
----
Bosco heard the trunk of the squad open and slam shut again.
The look on Faith's face when she got back into the car told him the situation needed a good leaving alone. He said nothing.
After a moment of serious fuming Faith spoke.
"Whisky."
"Whisky?"
"A bottle of it. Hidden in a box in the closet."
"Kids experiment..."
"Don't you start!" she snapped.
Bosco raised his hands in surrender.
"Whisky," she said again. "Dammit!"
"You ground her?"
"Forever."
Bosco nodded. "So, you gonna chain her to her bed till she's 21?"
Faith glared at him.
"What? I just remember how it was when I was Em's age - mom grounding me didn't mean squat."
"It's different."
"No it ain't," Bosco murmured.
"OK, so who died and made you the expert on kids?"
Bosco raised his hands in submission again.
"Fred's probably gonna sweet talk her now anyway," Faith grumbled after a while. "She'll listen to him. I'm just the bitch that happens to live there too."
Bosco eyed his partner cautiously. "Isn't it a good thing he's got that sort of rapport with Em'? I mean, maybe he can talk a bit of sense into her." He flinched as Faith glared at him. "All you're doing is butting heads with her Faith. Trust me, that's a recipe for disaster."
"So speaks the expert," Faith grumbled, clearly unimpressed.
"Just speaking from my own experience with my father, alright?" Bosco responded sourly as he started the car up. "I know that doesn't mean shit to you..."
"Oh, hold on while I get the violins out..."
Bosco shook his head. "Oh that's right, I forgot. I'm just the jerk who doesn't know anything and you know all there is to know about everything," he muttered.
"Just shut up and drive," she snapped, in no mood listen to anyone's reason.
The rest of the shift was spent in tense silence, apart from the times when speaking to each other as part of the job proved an absolute necessity.
----
Home life was strained.
Emily refused to speak to or even acknowledge her mother for weeks after her grounding but during that time made every obvious effort to be the perfect daughter for her father. It irritated Faith to the core.
That irritation made it difficult for Faith to recognise what an intolerable situation the impasse between them created for Fred, caught as he was between wanting to be supportive of his wife and wanting to be there for his daughter as well.
It was Bosco that bore the brunt of Faith's sometimes not so generous moods, but to her surprise he took it all in his stride, only reacting when her grousing and bitching became too unreasonable or unfair. It didn't escape her notice, however, that he greeted another opportunity to work with Anti Crime with great enthusiasm. Try as she might to reason with herself, Faith couldn't help but take that a little personally.
A sense of disquiet had long plagued Faith when it came to Bosco working with the ACU. After a stint with Anti Crime his edges always seemed harder, his attitudes harsher and it became difficult for Faith to imagine any human vulnerability existed beneath the swaggering belligerence Bosco presented to the world. More than anything though, Faith objected strongly to the kind of man Bosco became around the ACU's hot-shot Sgt.
Faith didn't like Cruz. More importantly, she didn't trust her. But what troubled Faith most was her conviction that Bosco did not have the skills, or the maturity, to make a sound judgement about the woman.
Sound judgement? the voice in her head queried. You mean, any judgement that just happens to agree with yours, hmmm?...
Faith sat opposite her partner, watching as Bosco juggled his own paperwork as she worked on a report.
"More homework from Cruz?" Faith inquired lightly.
He didn't look up. "Somethin' like that."
Faith watched him some more. It was their first shift together since his latest stint with ACU and things between them had been a little awkward. Bosco clearly hadn't forgotten her mood of the previous weeks.
"Look, Bos, I'm sorry for the way I behaved the last time we worked together," Faith said when she had finally had enough of the uncomfortable silence between them. "You know, with the way things were at home for me...I shouldn't have taken it all out on you. You didn't deserve it."
Bosco shrugged and didn't say a word.
"What, so now I get the silent treatment?"
In utter exasperation Bosco dropped his pen and sat back heavily. "What do you want me to say, Faith? That I forgive you? Well OK, I forgive you. You've had it tough lately, you've used me as a punch-bag and now you're sorry. Fine. Whatever. It's not like I'm not used to people doing that."
He returned his attention back to the page in front of him and didn't see the look of hurt in Faith's eyes.
"I'm sorry," she murmured.
Bosco stopped writing. He considered the page before him for some time, snatching fleeting glances at Faith every so often.
"Are things better at home?" he asked eventually.
"A little tense still," she answered.
"Em behavin'?"
"So far. Fred seems to have gotten through to her. But I'm still persona non grata."
"Persona what?"
"Somethin' she's stepped in," Faith translated with a smile.
He nodded, letting a small smile tug at the corners of his own mouth. After a while he began writing again.
"What are you workin' on?" she asked.
"A report," he replied.
"ACU stuff?"
He nodded.
For a moment the swaggering bravado he had tortured everyone at the precinct with all afternoon dropped away. "Cruz reckons she's gonna make me rewrite every report I do seven times till I get it 'looking like a grown up wrote it'" he said sheepishly.
Faith had to resist the temptation to offer to help him, or offer up her opinion on the Cruz woman again. Bosco seemed taken with Cruz, and Faith found that disturbing on all sorts of surprising levels. Cruz was a bad influence on Bosco - Faith had witnessed evidence of that already. The woman was trouble, and Bosco didn't need trouble. He needed steady, dependable, caring...
Mommy to the rescue, teased the little voice in her head.
"Would you read this and tell me if it makes sense?" Bosco asked, a slight hesitancy apparent in his voice. He seemed embarrassed to be asking for her help and wouldn't meet her eyes.
As Faith reached for the report he was handing her, her mind wandered. She couldn't begin to reconcile the reality of her interaction with Bosco against the passionate fantasies that on occasion still tracked through her dreams.
Fantasies, she told herself. That's all they were; inventions of a mind that was a little confused and overwhelmed, and yes, a little unhappy. Everything just lately had been too much, too difficult, too strange. It was no wonder fantasies of passion had caught her imagination. But why Bosco of all people? She still had no acceptable answer to that question.
She looked up at him. He was staring at the desk in front of him, nervously toying with the pen. The vulnerability had returned, if only briefly.
Watching him Faith realised that beneath the act was someone she would have liked to get to know better. That man, however, was locked away out of her reach. When all was said and done it wasn't her place to be the one to draw that side of him out. Only someone who could give a guarantee to be there for him, come hell or high water, would have the privilege of getting to know that other Bosco, the one Faith had had the rare privilege of glimpsing but who seemed forever held at gunpoint by his angry outward persona.
Bosco is just the man I work with sometimes, she told herself. That's all. That has to be all.
Bosco's eyes suddenly, unexpectedly, met hers. Faith felt her breath catch sharply in her throat as their gazes locked, felt the all too familiar tingling on her skin. The breathtaking intensity that had haunted her dreams now held her fast and to her dismay she found the moment as electric as anything her imagination could invent.
Dragging her focus away from those intense blue eyes and back to the report, Faith realised that she was colouring up furiously.
His eyes never left her.
The shrill tones of her mobile phone made her jump.
Fred's voice was calm, but there was an edge to it that chilled her. "Fred what's wrong?" she asked.
There was a small, agonised pause before he spoke again.
"Emily's gone."
+++++++++++++
TBC - I know, I know, I promised warm fuzzies. We'll get there, I swear!