HOUSE OF CARDS
Disclaimer: I think we've established by now that I don't own them.
Slow motion.
All she sees is the bullet, so fast but so relentlessly slow, on a straight and almighty path through the air. She follows it with her eyes, follows it to its destination.
Impact. Human flesh ripping, a man staggering, a growing red patch on the back of his shirt.
The sounds amplified, so that they are the only ones she can hear. Gasping. The soft slump of a body to the floor. Her own breath and heartbeat, echoing inside her head, pounding inside her skull. Someone shouting, close by but so far away she doesn't recognise the voice and barely recognises her own name.
Death creeps in.
She lowers her gun, and starts to shake.
To Nick, it all happened within seconds. He had barely seen Sara arrive before she was firing her gun. He saw, for brief, horrible moments, and was glad that Sara could not, the look on the man's face as the bullet ripped through him and he slumped to the floor. The man was just a body now; all that he had been, gone. Nick almost overbalanced and leaned back against the wall, his breath flowing out like a sudden stream, thinking, It's over.
Then he saw Sara, really saw her, and realised that it had only just begun. She was still in a shooting stance, her gun clutched in both hands, and she was shaking visibly. Even as the officers on duty dashed past her to the body in front of Nick she stayed rooted to the spot. Nick forced himself off the wall and walked over to her, fighting to control limbs that seemed to belong to a stranger. All was silent but for his echoing footsteps on the concrete floor, Sara's ragged, too-loud breathing and the voice of one of the officers, calling for an ambulance. Las Vegas seemed to lie asleep outside the walls of the empty warehouse.
He reached out one careful hand and put in gently on both of Sara's, noting the shudder in his own hand and the unreal coldness in hers, and pushed her arms down, before prising the gun from her grasp and letting it clatter to the ground. Sara didn't flinch at Nick's movements, or the sudden metallic crash of gun to floor. Her eyes were still glued to the body of the man she had shot. Nick stepped in front of her, deliberately blocking her view, and put his hands on her shoulders. "Sara..."
She blinked, slowly, and brought her eyes to focus on Nick for all of two seconds before she swallowed sharply, turned, and dashed outside. He followed her slowly, not ungrateful for the excuse to leave the warehouse, and stood back until she'd finished throwing up in a dark corner and turned around again. "I've already processed that bit," she said. "I didn't contaminate the scene."
"Oh, honey," said Nick, unable to think of anything other than a rare term of endearment. Sara's skin was far too pale in the shadows cast by the halogen lamps she'd set up to process the yard. "I wasn't worrying about that."
"I just shot someone, didn't I?" Sara asked in the flat tone of voice that Nick knew meant she was falling apart inside.
"Yes, but he was waving a gun at my head." Nick swallowed. The line didn't lighten the atmosphere. "You saved my life, Sara."
Whether he reached out for her or she for him he never knew; all he remembered was holding her, savouring the feel of her body in his arms when minutes ago he'd thought he'd never see her again. "You saved my life, Sara," he said again, murmuring the words into her hair.
"I couldn't not," she replied, her voice cracking and muffled against his shoulder. "You okay?" she asked, raising her head and looking at him. He noted the unshed tears in her eyes.
"No. Not really." He held her gaze for a few more seconds. "Are you?
"No."
Nick shivered, and closed his eyes in an attempt to block out the harsh glare of the lamps against the dark. This empty yard looked like nothing so much as a kind of industrial hell, a place of death and destruction. The crazed eyes of the gunman assaulted him as suddenly and as brightly as if his mind was a canvas, and he opened his eyes again, because reality wasn't as bad as that. He tried to smile at the top of Sara's head where she'd buried it against his shoulder again. "Maybe we should go back inside. It might not be safe out here."
Sara shuddered, and her scared eyes met his for a moment, but she let him guide her back into the warehouse.
One of the officers was kneeling beside the dead man. The other had secured the weapons - Sara's, and the dead man's. "Can't let you guys touch him," said the first officer, regretfully.
"S'all right," Nick muttered, standing with Sara, their backs to the wall beside the door. His mind was blank now. Every time he had a gun held to his head it was like this - first the overwhelming emotion, then the blankness that came as he tried to comprehend it all, to understand what could have happened. Next came the nightmares, and interminable hours with the departmental counselor. He knew the process now. He'd done it twice already and knew that the feelings raised from having a gun pointed at his head wouldn't diminish for a long time.
An uneasy silence reigned in the warehouse, a silence with a disturbingly edgy quality to it. Every external sound startled each of them, Sara so much so that Nick kept a hand on her arm in a futile attempt to reassure them both. The sound of sirens in the distance was welcome contact with the outside world, but a warehouse buzzing with paramedics and cops, scurrying about like so many attempts, was an obviously unwanted reminder of humanity for Sara. She closed her eyes and Nick felt her body tense beside him.
They were ignored for longer than Nick thought possible. The first person to approach them was Jim Brass, fresh from another crime scene. "You guys will have to come down to PD for a debrief," he told them, in tones that were less gruff than usual. "Standard procedure. Which of you did the shooting?"
"Me," Sara muttered without looking at him.
"I'm your union rep. You're entitled to have me sit in on your interview."
Sara nodded.
"Can we go?" Nick asked, eager to get away from the cops and their curious glances, the blood, and the physical reminder of the night's events.
Brass led them to the warmth and relative comfort of a departmental SUV. The contrast to the sharp, grey, austere surroundings of the warehouse was not lost on Nick, but he preferred to stare out the window and try to erase the image of the gunman from his mind.
TBC