Spoiler Alert: Spoilers for Seasons 2 & 3, up to and including "Silent Night".
A/N: As always thanks to those who review, and those who push me to think even further – I appreciate the impetus to take this deeper than I had planned. Of course, now you realize this fic may never end!
Disclaimer: No infringement of copyright is intended. All characters originated with CSI:NY; all song lyrics are from The Beatles.
It's A Long Journey Home
Chapter 37: A Day in the Life
Woke up, got out of bed
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup
And looking up, I noticed I was late
Danny opened his eyes slowly, praying that his senses were mistaken, that it wasn't Lindsay's scent he was surrounded by.
"Shit."
He closed his eyes against the sun pouring in through the pink flowered curtains, and pulled the quilt up over his shoulders reflexively, then stopped and looked down.
"Shit!"
He dropped his head wearily on the pillow. Lindsay's pillow. He was in Lindsay Monroe's bedroom, in her bed. In the Monroes' house.
"SHIT!!"
Not that in one way, this wasn't a dream come true. With his eyes closed, he could pretend for one minute that he belonged here, that Lindsay would climb in with him, surrounding him with the warmth that she seemed to exude, taking the kisses she had pressed on him before he left her the night before one step further.
Except that Lindsay was not going to come walking in through the door. She was lying in a hospital bed nearly an hour away in Bozeman, trying to recover as quickly as possible from a hit and run, then a drug overdose. Someone really wanted to make sure she didn't remember whatever it was she had forgotten or ignored all those years ago.
And her mother or father were likely to walk in, particularly if one of them went looking for him in Jamie's room, where Diane had graciously made up a bed and invited him to stay. He groaned.
"Nice way to repay a kindness, Messer." The voice was back: that relentless, badgering voice that had been keeping him awake and uncertain for days – for years – now.
"Maybe you should check the bed for biologicals before you sneak out. Wouldn't that be a nice welcome home for the girl? I wonder if her parents know what you did to her?"
"Shut up." Danny muttered it under his breath, knowing that talking to one's self was the first step, but actually answering the voices was a long way down the road to madness.
He looked around the room, seeing pictures of Lindsay and packs of giggling girls on one wall, surrounding a signed poster of Shania Twain. There was a huge team picture alone on one wall; looking at it more closely, he realized that it needed to be huge. It was a picture of an equestrian drill team, and Lindsay was in the centre, sitting on a large gray horse, carrying a flag and smiling her trade-mark Big Sky Country smile. Another wall was covered in ribbons and belt buckles. When he looked at them more closely, he saw most of them were for barrel-racing.
His brow wrinkled in confusion; then he shrugged and turned to look at her bookshelf. There was a whole row of tightly-packed paperback mystery novels, mostly British ones from the 30s and 40s, obviously well-read. There was another shelf of police procedurals, some British and some American, many of which actually had slips of paper in them; Danny pulled one off the shelf and opened the book at the marker. On the page was a description of a test for arsenic. Lindsay had written corrections regarding proper procedure in the margin.
He grinned and put the book back where it belonged.
On the bottom shelf, he found her high school yearbook from 1995. It was pushed back into a corner, and when Danny picked it up, it looked like it had never been opened. There were no autographs on the pages, no little notes from girlfriends about embarrassing moments, no teasing or flirtatious comments from wanna-be boyfriends. He flipped through to the M's section, and found Lindsay, warm smile glowing on the page, then flipped beyond to some pages outlined in black.
The title was "In God's Hands" and it was a memorial page. Eight of Lindsay's schoolmates had died that year: four in car accidents, and the four killed by Justin Forbes. Danny stared into the eyes of Cameron, Lindsay's high school sweetheart, and said under his breath. "Thanks for trying to keep her safe, man. I'll take over from here."
He tidied the room as best he could, folding the quilt and putting it back on the chair where he had noticed it last night. He knew that he had laid down – "Just for a minute" – without any covers, so Diane knew he had slept in Lindsay's room, in her bed.
Carefully, carrying Lindsay's yearbook, he opened the door and snuck back to Jamie's room, feeling like a teenager.
"Huh! When you were a teenager, Messer, you'd have gone out through the window, and you wouldn't 'a been alone in the bed!" That voice again.
Quickly, he showered and changed into the only other set of clothes he had. He was going to have to do something about that; Diane had already put together a bag for Lindsay, but he had come out to Montana with nothing but the overnight bag he took on cases. Damn. Shopping had to be on his list of "most boring activities devised by mankind" but at least in New York he knew where to go.
He looked at himself in the mirror, steeling himself for the confrontation he was sure he would be having with Diane and, if he wasn't mistaken, Ted, whose truck had pulled into the driveway when Danny was in the shower.
"Okay, take it like a man. He's got the right." In spite of the pep talk, Danny flinched when he heard Diane's voice at the bottom of the stairs.
"Danny, do you want some breakfast?" she called up.
"The condemned man ate a hearty breakfast of crow and humble pie before being put to death," Danny thought morbidly.
He ran down the stairs lightly. In spite of everything, he felt better for having slept, and no matter what problems Lindsay's parents may have with him, he had woken up still feeling her kisses on his mouth. He would be with her again; keeping her safe would become his sole responsibility.
"Yeah, you're a champ," the voice spoke again, stopping him dead at the bottom of the stairs. "You didn't stop someone from opening her drip, did you? As if you aren't the person most likely to hurt her, anyway."
When Diane came around the corner to see what was keeping Danny, she saw him clinging to the banister, eyes closed as if in pain, face pale.
"Danny, are you all right?" She put an arm around him and helped him sit down on the bottom stair.
"Yeah. Yeah, a'course. I just – guess I'm just hungry." Danny shook his head. That had been weird. He had almost felt the world move under him.
Diane helped him up with a gentle hand, and led him to the kitchen, anything she had planned to say earlier driven out of her head. She sat him down and put a plate covered in scrambled eggs, back bacon, home-cured sausages, toast, and fried potatoes in front of him. A cup of coffee sat at his place, along with a glass of orange juice and another of milk, while a basket full of home made biscuits covered by a cloth was in the middle of the table. He looked up at her, a little stunned.
"Is it enough?" she asked worriedly. "I could fry you up some steak, if you like?"
Ted laughed at the look of absolute panic on Danny's face at the thought of any more food being added to the mountain in front of him. "Let him get on the outside of that lot first, woman, before you worry about adding to it. Tuck in boy; that's a working man's breakfast, that is."
"That's a coronary waiting to happen," Danny thought in alarm. "Perhaps this is how they're going to get their revenge: feed me to death!" He took a tentative bite of the eggs, and nearly moaned at they melted on his tongue. Diane must cook daily with more butter than Danny had used in his entire life, but suddenly cholesterol was a four-letter word, and Danny 'tucked in' with a vengeance.
He looked up about halfway through cleaning his plate with some embarrassment as he realized he hadn't yet said a word to his hosts.
Diane was already washing dishes, but nodded approvingly. "Finish eating, and then we'll talk."
Danny smiled at her, but turned to Ted, "How is Lindsay this morning?"
Ted sat back, looking into the coffee cup in his hand as if it were a crystal ball, "She slept through the night for the most part. Kept waking up with nightmares though. Chris says that was partly pain; the stuff she's on isn't quite strong enough to control it, but he didn't dare give her more after the overdose." He rubbed his hand over his face. "She never complained though," he continued, his voice low. "Just chipped at John about corruption in the FBI, and told Jamie not to plant wheat in the corner field, and told Mick to marry Joanna and get on with things."
Diane snorted with laughter as she wiped down the counters, "Minding her own business, hey? That girl! She promised no fighting with John!"
Ted grabbed Diane's hand as she passed and pulled her into the chair beside him. "To give her credit, Di, he did start it by asking what a girl like her was doing in New York City." He glanced at Danny, and Danny's heart sank. Here it came.
"She's a good officer, sir. One of the best in the lab, and fearless in the field. Sometimes a little too fearless." Danny knew that she had not told her family about the undercover operation, and he burned to let them know that she had saved a young girl's life at great risk to her own. But it was not his story to tell.
Ted sighed, "You can't tell me anything about her bravery, son. But I would like you to tell us a little something about your relationship with her."
"Ted," Diane sighed, shaking her head.
Danny could hear Stella's voice in his head, "Lindsay told her mother she was a more than willing participant." Diane definitely knew about them; hell, she probably knew more about them than Danny did, if Lindsay had talked to her.
"I'm sorry, Diane, I know you wanted me to stay out of it, but if I'm going to let this man take off with my daughter, I think I have a right to know something about his feelings for her." Ted's quiet voice was determined, and Danny could hear echoes of John's FBI voice.
He pushed away his now empty plate and took a drink of milk to settle his stomach. Then he looked up, leaning against the table, matching the steady stare of Ted's gray eyes with his own.
"I can only tell you my side of this, sir. Lindsay is my partner. Every day at work I put my life in her hands, and she does the same with me. I made a commitment to protect her life with my own the day I first went out on the job with her." He sighed and looked down at his hands, tightly wrapped around each other. "Aside from the job, though, I care for Lindsay very deeply. I wouldn't hesitate to do anything I had to in order to keep her safe."
"What about happy?" Diane sat forward, looking at him intently. "What would you do to make her happy?"
"I don't know. We haven't had a chance to talk about what would make her happy." Danny could see that this answer had not satisfied either of Lindsay's parents. He shook his head and tried again.
"Look, I can't explain this properly, and I'm not sure if I am being fair to Lindsay by even trying. When she left New York the first time," Danny swallowed hard and looked out the window, " I was prepared to let her go if that's what she needed to do."
His eyes dropped to his hands again, knuckles white and fingers strained. "Then she came back. And I realized that letting her go was not going to be an option again."
He looked at Lindsay's mother, haunted eyes begging her to understand. "So if she could only be happy by not being with me, I don't know if I could do that."