Thank you for your kind words. Really happy to see that I'm not alone in wanting to see Andy and Sharon have a happy ending.

That being said, I don't know where my muse went but it completely escaped me hence this weird chapter. I never thought I would write something with Tao as the narrator but here we go, apparently. I wrote the last one too (not with Tao in it lol) and I'll post it tomorrow. Hope you'll have as much fun as I had writing it ahah

Mike Tao felt the heat coming to his cheeks as he entered the room, following Rusty, and saw the sleeping pair. Years later, he still felt like an intruder when witnessing the close relationship between his former coworker and their ex boss. He smiled, they looked so happy and still so very much in love. He could tell Rusty was not as amused as him but did not take notice. He would not like to see his parents like that either. It was innocent enough though. They were both lying on the sofa, Andy on his back with his wife on his side, pillowed against the sofa and his shoulder, their joined hands resting against his belly. They were wearing clothes, casual homey clothes but still were fully covered except for their feet. He noticed how the commander's hair had grown during the past year and how pale it was now. He wondered if she dyed it gray or if it grew incredibly fast. Only the tips still held some color but much more paler than what he was used to. She sighed in her sleep and snuggled even more into her husband's embrace. It brought back memories of a year ago, when her health was much more precarious. He was glad that everything turned out ok for them. He couldn't believe everything that happened in such a small amount of time. It sometimes felt like being the hero of a bad cop show and he chucked at that thought.

A year ago:

Mike looked through the ICU glass door at the small figure in the bed and felt his heart constrict at the sight. Fragile was not a word he ever associated with his boss, Sharon Raydor. Now, though.. Lying on her side, the hospital gown too big on her small frame, Andy's big hands engulfing her tiny ones, she was not the strength figure he grew to love. He hesitated another moment, not wanting to disturb her peace. She really needed her rest. He was still shocked to learn that she hid her disease from all them. He marveled at her strength, coming to work, running Major Crimes with such a bad prognostic and everything that it included. He played again with the brand new Iphone he had set up for her, its smooth glass back cool under his fingers. He smiled a second, he'll have to scold her a bit. As their boss, she should know better and have a more complex password than "Sharon3Andy" for her Icloud account. The good thing was, he was able to restore everything she had on the one that broke earlier.

Then he remembered what Andy said a few hours ago, when he had gathered his strength and came into the room for the first time, asking his friend if he knew her password. "Can you believe that Madam LevelHead here believes that her phone fucks with her heart device? You can save yourself some trouble Mike, she rarely uses it those days." He looked again at the couple and the wheels started to spin in his head. Andy was right in his wife's assessment. The Commander was nothing if not sensible, reasonable and rational. Maybe she relied on her instincts but if she felt something was off with her phone, it surely was. He took her old battered one out of his pocket. The screen was badly damaged but it was still working. He wondered if it was the right move, pondered it for a few seconds. With trembling fingers, he turned it on. He kept his eyes glued on her cardiac monitor. After her malaise in her office, which had led to a short but still very frightening cardiac arrest when she arrived at the hospital, she was under constant observation. He remembered Provenza's weak attempt at a joke suddenly: "She must really hate her doc. The second he entered her hospital room, her heart stopped beating." Mike had found it strange too but believed it to be due to the massive rhythm disorder she had experienced minutes ago, her heart must have grown weak, another arrhythmia must have appeared… And there was the fact that she got miraculously better the moment she went to OR. Andy had told them the medical team did not even touch her there, her heart went back into track by itself, which was odd but a good sign as per her doctor. Suddenly Mike remembered an article he read a few years ago in the newspaper about St Leo's. Suspecting that cell phones electromagnetic waves disrupted their cardiac monitor, they had implanted some sort of Faraday cage to block them and would conduct a study over the next few years to see if it was myth or reality. He was about to ask a nurse if she knew if cellphones worked in the OR when a loud ringing caught his attention. The commander's monitor was blinking red lights and all alarms went out. A bunch of nurses came running in the room, waking the couple. He looked at her broken phone and turned it down immediately. A few seconds later, the alarms stopped.

What happened next is seen only in Hollywood movies. The next night, they broke Sharon out of the hospital and flew her to Seattle, then to Dallas, Chicago, Montreal and finally back to Salt Lake City. Each time, they changed her and Andy's identity, making them fly on separate flights a few times to cover their tracks. They took care of sending Rusty to Europe before shipping him back to Canada, where his sister was. With them safe, the squad focused on finding the cause of their Commander's illness. They did not like what they found. Not at all. Stroh, of course, was behind some of it. When Sharon really contracted a bad virus that caused her myocarditis, he exploited her weakness by frakking first with her test results, making her doc believe her disease was far more progressed than what it really was. Then he managed to hack into her cellphone… He toyed with her defibrillator, nearly killing her several times. He recorded hours of her private conversations with her husband and family. And, what still made Toa sick to his stomach, but it was how they managed to track him: he filmed them. When the two lovers thought they were alone and happy in a secluded cottage, enjoying a weekend of tenderness and passion between two loving consensual adults, Stroh managed to place dozens of cameras and stole their most intimate moments. The moment they started to corner him, he released those abject videos into the LAPD intranet. He may have thought he had the upper hand or at least that he was messing enough with him. Frankly, they followed the video's path, not sure what and where it would send them. It led them to his hide. He was living in that secluded cottage. Mike will never completely be rid of the image of Provenza shooting Stroh when he was not an imminent threat but his peace came knowing that he was permanently incapacitated. Mike smiled, there was some kind of divine grace knowing that the old coot managed to shoot him in the groin, while sectionting his spinal cord.

Now, a year later, they were all back in LA. Mike never thought he'd see the day where his old time friend, or their boss, would retire but they did. And they seemed to have adjusted to their new life pretty easily if finding the couple napping in the middle of the afternoon, when they had invited the whole squad for a housewarming party, was any indication. Rusty told them the Commander was nearly back to normal and he was so very glad for that. Maybe he'll ask them for the rights so he could incorporate their story into a few Badge of Justice episodes…