Notes: Yaaay, adoption!That little moment with them at the end of this episode made me so HAPPY. I would love to see them have a real conversation about it in the next episode, one that doesn't involve dead girls. This story? Is not that conversation.

Two Options

"Do I have to call you Mom?"

Rusty had managed to bring up the adoption stuff casually before, plenty of times. Or, well, a handful of times. They hadn't talked about it in depth yet, but he could tell that Sharon wanted to. She probably wanted to sit him down and discuss every last detail, but she was waiting for him. Rusty knew they'd have to sooner or later—she couldn't just adopt him without them ever talking about it, but it wasn't like she was going to do that tomorrow, either, and he didn't want to have the big discussion until it had sunk in a little more.

So he'd segued into it from conversations about Jack and dead girls who had made him wonder if he would've been them, if Sharon hadn't found him. (Probably.) This strategy had been working out well for him, right up until an adoption-related thought occurred to him while Sharon was working a case that involved no mothers and no children, and she hadn't said anything recently that he could latch onto and try to steer the conversation in the direction he wanted it to go.

If he brought up Jack... he wasn't sure how that would go. Not very well, probably, because Sharon wasn't exactly chatty about her marriage and she was talking even less about her divorce. She hadn't said a word about it to him, but he'd seen the paperwork sitting on her desk, so... that looked like it was definitely still happening, but if she hadn't said anything about it, she probably wouldn't appreciate it if he brought it up.

Rusty sat on it for two days with the hope that a solution would present itself to him, and then gave up and blurted it out over dinner.

They were eating Greek that night. It wasn't Rusty's favorite, but he didn't hate it, either, and it was Sharon's turn to pick where they got the take out from. He guessed that she'd gotten a craving for gyros while at work, because she'd walked through the door with a sandwich combo for each of them and a side of hummus and pita bread.

When he asked, Sharon slowly set down her fork, and held up a finger while she finished swallowing.

"With the adoption thing," he added unnecessarily. Something to fill the silence.

Sharon folded her hands, her fingers lacing themselves tightly together, and gave him a long, serious look, part affection and part worry. He couldn't tell what she was reading into the question. "No," she said finally. "You don't have to."

"Because, um..." Rusty lowered his eyes back to his plate. She'd gotten him fries instead of a salad and he reached for one now, toying with it as he tried to explain. "I know that you'll be my mother. And I'm okay with that."

"Legally speaking, yes."

Sharon reached for her wine. She didn't drink from it, just weighed the glass in her hand while she waited for him to speak again. It was one of those things that she always did when she was thinking or upset, and he wasn't even sure if she knew that she did it. It had annoyed him once. Everything about her had annoyed him, Sharon with all of her stupid habits and her dumb rules, and... really, just everything, including her face and her voice.

Rusty wasn't sure what had changed, but it had probably been him, because Sharon was just as exasperating as she had always been.

She'd signed his community service form the other day. He'd thought that would be the end of it, but then she'd informed him that he was going to work off the remaining fifteen hours that he owed her because he shouldn't have waited until the last minute. He'd really thought that the undercover SIS assignment counted? Well, he should have read the form more carefully then, and if he complained about it again, it would be twenty.

Rusty... wasn't actually sure why any of that had surprised him.

That was Sharon.

He understood now why that TV writer friend of Lieutenant Tao's had taken one look at the pair of them and assumed that Sharon was his mother. She sort of acted it like it all the time.

"Not..." Rusty swallowed dryly, his eyes still fixed firmly on his plate. "It wouldn't be... uh, not just legally."

When he glanced up again, she was giving him a sideways sort of look, her lips pursed like she was afraid to smile too much. She wore that expression around him an awful lot.

He was getting as close as he ever had to saying it.

He wasn't quite there yet.

"Rusty," Sharon said gently, her face settling into something more sober. "I don't want to adopt you so that I can replace your mother."

He knew how she felt about him. It was hard not to know at this point, because she'd told him. She'd always stopped just short of naming herself his mother, but she'd sort of almost called him her child enough times that it was impossible to miss. It turned out that he didn't mind, as long as she understood that she was sharing him with his mother. She did.

He'd finally figured out that loving her and letting her love him didn't mean that he cared about his mother any less. He could do both.

Sharon was all right with that.

His mother probably wouldn't be, if she knew, but it was by her own choice that she wasn't there. If she ever came back, then he'd tell her, and she would have to figure out how to be okay with it.

"I know," he told her. "Like I said, I'm okay with the adoption. But... if you wanted me to call you Mom, I don't know if I can do that. It's kind of weird."

Everything about this was weird, when he thought about it. Orphans weren't supposed to have both parents still alive. Adults weren't supposed to be adopted. Catholic police captains weren't supposed to unconditionally accept the gay hustlers they'd taken in off the streets.

Rusty wasn't really sure how things had worked out for him, but he'd stopped trying to second guess it.

"So... that's, like, okay with you, then?"

Relief softened her face. Rusty wondered what she'd thought he was going to say, but he didn't ask. This was enough emotionally charged conversation for one day.

"The important thing is that we decide that we want to be family," she told him. "What you call me and whether or not we share a name doesn't matter, not to me."

Of course she'd say that. Sharon was still half trying to pretend that the adoption was all for his sake, like she thought that she would scare him away by admitting just how much she wanted him. Which... okay, that wasn't just her worrying for nothing. He'd told her himself that he cut people off when they got too close.

Not her.

That was what he'd been trying to tell her, when he'd said that he knew that she would come looking for him, if his picture ever ended up in a box like that. It wasn't just about that. Oh, but he knew she would do it—she would find him and by the time she was done, he'd be feeling sorry for whoever put him in the box to begin with because she was terrifying when she wanted to be and she had a small army of people to help her, and Rusty was really, really glad that they were on his side.

But that wasn't all.

He'd been trying to tell her that he trusted her, and that he was ready to let himself depend on her.

Sharon loved him. He wasn't sure why, sometimes, but he knew that she did, and she'd also been mad at him plenty of times without ever hitting him, kicking him out, or leaving him at a zoo.

Rusty frowned at his plate.

"I might change my mind someday," he said. "But for now... Mom is her."

Which was kind of ridiculous, too, because Sharon was, like, way better than his mother, and also way better for him than his mother, but he still couldn't stop loving her. Rusty wanted his mother to get better, and he wanted her to be able to love him the way that Sharon did. He wasn't sure when that had happened, either, because he'd spent a lot of time wishing that Sharon were her instead of the other way around.

"Well," she said evenly, and took a sip from the wine glass she was still holding. "I'll be here if you do."

"And, like..." He wanted to be sure. "When I said you could adopt me... you know that it wasn't just because I know you'd look for me, right?"

Sharon allowed herself to smile at him then, the same sort of smile she'd given him when he'd agreed to the adoption. "I do."

"Okay," Rusty said, and returned to his food.