fic: God Bless Your Graceless Heart
Title: God Bless Your Graceless Heart
Author: poeelektra
Fandom/ Pairing: Rookie Blue, Swarek/McNally
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2122
Summary: A quick check told her everyone was still clothed, and her mouth didn’t taste like she threw up at any point, so-okay. As long as she had pants on, she could do this.
Author's Note: The ‘morning after’ follow-up to this guy right here. Consider this one my official and completely shameless request for ‘Sam and Andy stuck with a kid’ fic. leigh57 and adrenalin211 pulled beta duties-ponies for you guys!
*
Andy swam towards consciousness in fits and starts. After checking in with her head (still on her neck, a reluctant party in the waking plan) and her bladder (the insistent force behind same plan), she became aware of the warm and sturdy flesh her face was smashed in to. It was several more beats before memories of the night drifted within her grasp, and as she sorted through them with increasing dismay, she registered two things simultaneously: a smell that she would recognize anywhere as Sam’s (gun oil and soap and clean sweat-she’d spent too many hours in the car and on the mats with him not to know it); and movement under her . . . face. The subtle shifting and flex of his thigh muscles told her that he was awake, too, and trying not to disturb her. And shit, she wasn’t done reviewing the proceedings of the previous evening, but a quick check told her everyone was still clothed, and her mouth didn’t taste like she threw up at any point, so-okay. As long as she had pants on, she could do this.
While she was psyching herself up for some sort of drastic movement-like sitting up-Sam was apparently doing a pretty good job of careful extraction, because the next thing she knew, her head was on the leather of the couch instead of a living pillow. It was a double-bonus, she thought as she watched him walk toward the stairs. She didn’t have to face him just yet, and even in her decrepit state, she could appreciate the view he presented in departure. The dopamine spike his jeans-clad ass induced didn’t totally counteract the effects of her ill-advised bender (and shit, oh shit, she was at Shaw’s place, fucking rookie move, McNally, way to keep up the family tradition)-but it certainly didn’t hurt.
Andy listened to him climb the stairs, heard the rush of noise when he opened the door -kitchen clatter, children talking over one another, a tv or radio in the background-and expected it to recede again when he closed it behind him. Instead what she heard, on top of the rest of it, was:
“Up and at ‘em, McNally. We’ve got pancakes up here.”
*
It took some doing, but Andy managed to resist the temptation to remain on the couch until it swallowed her up or until she slithered back in to blissful unconsciousness, whichever mercy came first.
There was no mirror in the small, unfinished basement bathroom, so she made do with a splash of water on her face and a few swish-and-spits to make sure she didn’t outright repel anyone who crossed within a few feet of her mouth, which currently tasted like something had crawled in there and died.
Eight beers in two hours is what crawled in there, genius.
She paused at the top of the stairs with her hand on the doorknob for one final girding of her loins, then opened it with her best morning-attempt at a smile pasted on.
A bright burbling from the radio in one corner permeated the room, and Shaw’s youngest kid, Mia-Andy vaguely remembered from the introduction last night-was bopping around, ostensibly to the beat, in a pair of threadbare pajamas with a tutu pulled overtop. Shaw’s wife was at the table, browbeating a teenager in to putting down the phone. Cartoon noises filtered in from the other room, and Oliver was at the stove in civvies and bare feet, pouring batter in to a pan. Amidst the scene of baffling domesticity sat Sam, placidly drinking a cup of coffee and perusing the paper.
It was immediately clear to Andy that couch repose might have been the better, if more cowardly, course of action.
The kitchen’s occupants seemed to notice her all at once.
“Heeee, she’s awake, she’s awake, she’s awake!” Mia seemed to interpret this fact as tacit permission to increase her decibel level, and began shouting along to the Beach Boys song now gracing the airwaves.
Zoe moved swiftly, approached Andy with a sympathetic smile and pressed a hot mug in to her hands.
“You’ll probably be needing this-drink up. And have a seat. Izzy, move your crap off the table.”
The older girl huffed and rolled her eyes, but shifted a backpack and pile of notebooks a foot in one direction, clearing an extra space at a table lined with colorful cloth placemats and solid ceramic plates.
“McNally, welcome to the land of the living,” was Oliver’s careless contribution to the collective assault.
Sam tossed her an inflection-free greeting-“Morning, Sunshine.”-but his face made it clear how much he was enjoying this tableau from the cheap seats.
Andy hesitated, then decided her multi-layered discomfort was best endured with a firm piece of furniture under her, and lowered tentatively in to the offered chair. The coffee, which smelled like manna from heaven, wasn’t halfway to her lips before Mia was upon her, demolishing her personal space in that innocuous way only a child could.
“Did you and Sam have a sleepover? I asked him but he wouldn’t tell me. He gave me gum though.” Mia flashed her tongue and the noteworthy glob of chewing gum, seemingly without pausing. “Daddy sleeps down there sometimes. Did you use my Nemo pillow? It’s okay if you did, because Izzy doesn’t like to but I know how to share.”
Mia pranced away on that last sentence, apparently happy to take her answers on-the-go, and Andy marveled that someone as reserved as Oliver could produce someone so utterly . . . not. Delaying the need for a reply, Andy took a long pull from her mug, tried not to moan in relief as the bitterness bathed her tongue and the caffeine shocked her system. A second swallow followed post-haste, and on the third, she opened her eyes to see Sam smirking at her over the rim of his cup.
Andy narrowed a glare at him, then remembered in a quick flash of images-her nasty behaviour, the kiss she’d been just drunk enough to lay on him, his quiet murmurs and how she hadn’t gotten down to that couch of her own volition-that maybe she was still pissed at him, but she also owed him something (and didn’t that burn). So she aborted the glare with an eyeroll, the preferred mode of communication for the over 7 and under 30 in this room.
“Thanks for letting me use your Nemo pillow,” Andy said in selective response to Mia’s onslaught of questions, clearing her throat to abolish the rustiness in her voice that the liquid stimulant hadn’t. “That was pretty cool of you.”
Mia giggled and shimmied up to Sam, half-climbing his lap to whisper something in his ear. The radio rolled over into the weekend forecast and Oliver plopped two irregularly shaped pancakes on the plate in front of her without a word.
Sam had his head cocked and lips pursed in exaggerated curiosity, but his eyes danced with true mirth, the likes of which Andy could remember seeing in him only rarely. They made quite the picture, this clean, pale-skinned little girl bumping faces with her partner, the dark shadow of morning stubble along his jaw lending him a rougher and more rogue appearance than usual.
When Mia had finished imparting secrets from behind her tiny cupped hand, Sam tilted his mouth toward her ear and whispered something back that elicited a giggle. Then he straightened back up to look at Andy.
“Mia wants to know if you’ll be her babysitter, too, sometime.”
Sam’s voice held the hints of humor and challenge it did when he was trying to incite her to fight; he wasn’t acting like what he’d just said was completely preposterous. Andy’s eyes darted about, a bit desperately. Oliver’s back was a silent presence at the stove. Zoe was leaning casually back in her seat, legs tucked up and arms wrapped around her knees, looking faintly bemused but not particularly inclined to step in and help Andy out.
“Um.” This was, it seemed to Andy, worse than talking to the kid with the gun on her first day. “You know, I bet you’re loads of fun to play with. Who usually babysits you?”
Mia was approximating stillness now, standing rather than seated, but focused on consuming with one hand the pancake her father had made in to a sloppily-rendered ‘M.’
“Usually Stephanie or Grandma Millie. But Sam is the best babysitter.”
Andy couldn’t prevent the raise of her brows, and she stole a glance at Sam. But he was looking at Mia, not her, his face a study in indulgent affection. Andy’s stomach twisted in a manner that had nothing to do with the liquor no doubt still sitting there, waiting for the log jam in her liver to clear out. Oliver interjected without turning from where he was using a spatula to drizzle batter in to some curvilinear pattern-a ‘Z,’ maybe, but if it was an ‘S,’ Andy was getting more out of this hangover than she ever could have hoped.
“Hey Sammy, we still on for tonight?”
This appeared to Andy to be an abrupt conversational lane change, a confusion cleared up not at all when Sam replied:
“Brother, next time you won’t get so lucky. I advise you to live it up with your lovely wife while you can. Next month you’re a--. Your caboose is mine.”
He punctuated his PG-rated word choice with a playful swat to Mia’s behind that had her squealing and dancing backwards away from him.
“Sam lost a bet,” Zoe offered Andy by way of explanation. “Ollie and I get a month of Saturday night baby-sitting.”
Mia was bouncing again, and Andy wondered whether being responsible for a kid entailed making sure she remained still long enough for her food to stay put.
“And your big sisters have plans tonight, so it’s just you and me, Short Stack.”
Sam shoveled a bite of pancakes enthusiastically in to his mouth, then redirected his attention toward Andy. Maybe it was something in his gaze-that ‘all hands on deck’ focus-or maybe it was nothing at all that finally tripped her up.
When the memory came, when the cheap cubicle dividers in her brain collapsed under the weight of it, Andy experienced it like an aftershock, an electric echo. She had thought she’d pieced most of the night back together: from the first beer she’d slammed to quiet her jittering sort of-anger at Sam, to her final drunken stumble in to the Shaw house in search of a flat surface to rest on, or maybe a trash can. But then there it was, that lost piece that came later, in a vivid Technicolor that threatened to nudge her toward the whirlpool of nausea she’d been skirting since she woke:
Darkness, and everything grey and blue and shadows; Sam’s arms under her, around her, and Sam’s face, close up and inscrutable as ever.
“What the hell’s got in to you, McNally?”
Then the world-tilting moment when everything felt wobbly except Sam, his touch a solid press on that ache in her that never went away, and the truth slipped right out her lips.
“You.”
Of course.
“What do you say, McNally? Up for a little pipsqueak wrangling later? Pancake repayment?”
He gestured with his fork and Andy, jerked back to the present by his voice, looked down at the untouched contents of her plate and tried to steady the internal rocking. A litany of excuses ran through her brain-wanting to pick up an extra shift, fake plans with Traci, needing to scrub her toilets-but Sam was doing it again, that thing where he made your average, run-of-the-mill sentence sound like a dare.
Andy had never had a childhood pet. She killed houseplants, and was probably the last living soul to whom a person should entrust a child.
But this was Sam. Sam who was goading her, who she’d kissed last night (again), who turned the dangerous into the effortless with something like a sleight of hand, who knew the facts of her and kept coming back with his aggravating shrugs and sardonic face, so-
“Sure.”
Oliver turned from the stove and Sam’s expression registered surprise, then turned speculative in that way that always made her slightly uncomfortable, an itch under her skin. Andy shoved back at the trepidation, forced the nerve in to her voice and a smile on to her face even as her heart rabbited in her chest. She’d faced things more terrifying than a pint-sized Shaw and Sam’s affections.
“Yeah, why not. I’m game. Bring it on.”
*
end
Author: poeelektra
Fandom/ Pairing: Rookie Blue, Swarek/McNally
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2122
Summary: A quick check told her everyone was still clothed, and her mouth didn’t taste like she threw up at any point, so-okay. As long as she had pants on, she could do this.
Author's Note: The ‘morning after’ follow-up to this guy right here. Consider this one my official and completely shameless request for ‘Sam and Andy stuck with a kid’ fic. leigh57 and adrenalin211 pulled beta duties-ponies for you guys!
*
Andy swam towards consciousness in fits and starts. After checking in with her head (still on her neck, a reluctant party in the waking plan) and her bladder (the insistent force behind same plan), she became aware of the warm and sturdy flesh her face was smashed in to. It was several more beats before memories of the night drifted within her grasp, and as she sorted through them with increasing dismay, she registered two things simultaneously: a smell that she would recognize anywhere as Sam’s (gun oil and soap and clean sweat-she’d spent too many hours in the car and on the mats with him not to know it); and movement under her . . . face. The subtle shifting and flex of his thigh muscles told her that he was awake, too, and trying not to disturb her. And shit, she wasn’t done reviewing the proceedings of the previous evening, but a quick check told her everyone was still clothed, and her mouth didn’t taste like she threw up at any point, so-okay. As long as she had pants on, she could do this.
While she was psyching herself up for some sort of drastic movement-like sitting up-Sam was apparently doing a pretty good job of careful extraction, because the next thing she knew, her head was on the leather of the couch instead of a living pillow. It was a double-bonus, she thought as she watched him walk toward the stairs. She didn’t have to face him just yet, and even in her decrepit state, she could appreciate the view he presented in departure. The dopamine spike his jeans-clad ass induced didn’t totally counteract the effects of her ill-advised bender (and shit, oh shit, she was at Shaw’s place, fucking rookie move, McNally, way to keep up the family tradition)-but it certainly didn’t hurt.
Andy listened to him climb the stairs, heard the rush of noise when he opened the door -kitchen clatter, children talking over one another, a tv or radio in the background-and expected it to recede again when he closed it behind him. Instead what she heard, on top of the rest of it, was:
“Up and at ‘em, McNally. We’ve got pancakes up here.”
*
It took some doing, but Andy managed to resist the temptation to remain on the couch until it swallowed her up or until she slithered back in to blissful unconsciousness, whichever mercy came first.
There was no mirror in the small, unfinished basement bathroom, so she made do with a splash of water on her face and a few swish-and-spits to make sure she didn’t outright repel anyone who crossed within a few feet of her mouth, which currently tasted like something had crawled in there and died.
Eight beers in two hours is what crawled in there, genius.
She paused at the top of the stairs with her hand on the doorknob for one final girding of her loins, then opened it with her best morning-attempt at a smile pasted on.
A bright burbling from the radio in one corner permeated the room, and Shaw’s youngest kid, Mia-Andy vaguely remembered from the introduction last night-was bopping around, ostensibly to the beat, in a pair of threadbare pajamas with a tutu pulled overtop. Shaw’s wife was at the table, browbeating a teenager in to putting down the phone. Cartoon noises filtered in from the other room, and Oliver was at the stove in civvies and bare feet, pouring batter in to a pan. Amidst the scene of baffling domesticity sat Sam, placidly drinking a cup of coffee and perusing the paper.
It was immediately clear to Andy that couch repose might have been the better, if more cowardly, course of action.
The kitchen’s occupants seemed to notice her all at once.
“Heeee, she’s awake, she’s awake, she’s awake!” Mia seemed to interpret this fact as tacit permission to increase her decibel level, and began shouting along to the Beach Boys song now gracing the airwaves.
Zoe moved swiftly, approached Andy with a sympathetic smile and pressed a hot mug in to her hands.
“You’ll probably be needing this-drink up. And have a seat. Izzy, move your crap off the table.”
The older girl huffed and rolled her eyes, but shifted a backpack and pile of notebooks a foot in one direction, clearing an extra space at a table lined with colorful cloth placemats and solid ceramic plates.
“McNally, welcome to the land of the living,” was Oliver’s careless contribution to the collective assault.
Sam tossed her an inflection-free greeting-“Morning, Sunshine.”-but his face made it clear how much he was enjoying this tableau from the cheap seats.
Andy hesitated, then decided her multi-layered discomfort was best endured with a firm piece of furniture under her, and lowered tentatively in to the offered chair. The coffee, which smelled like manna from heaven, wasn’t halfway to her lips before Mia was upon her, demolishing her personal space in that innocuous way only a child could.
“Did you and Sam have a sleepover? I asked him but he wouldn’t tell me. He gave me gum though.” Mia flashed her tongue and the noteworthy glob of chewing gum, seemingly without pausing. “Daddy sleeps down there sometimes. Did you use my Nemo pillow? It’s okay if you did, because Izzy doesn’t like to but I know how to share.”
Mia pranced away on that last sentence, apparently happy to take her answers on-the-go, and Andy marveled that someone as reserved as Oliver could produce someone so utterly . . . not. Delaying the need for a reply, Andy took a long pull from her mug, tried not to moan in relief as the bitterness bathed her tongue and the caffeine shocked her system. A second swallow followed post-haste, and on the third, she opened her eyes to see Sam smirking at her over the rim of his cup.
Andy narrowed a glare at him, then remembered in a quick flash of images-her nasty behaviour, the kiss she’d been just drunk enough to lay on him, his quiet murmurs and how she hadn’t gotten down to that couch of her own volition-that maybe she was still pissed at him, but she also owed him something (and didn’t that burn). So she aborted the glare with an eyeroll, the preferred mode of communication for the over 7 and under 30 in this room.
“Thanks for letting me use your Nemo pillow,” Andy said in selective response to Mia’s onslaught of questions, clearing her throat to abolish the rustiness in her voice that the liquid stimulant hadn’t. “That was pretty cool of you.”
Mia giggled and shimmied up to Sam, half-climbing his lap to whisper something in his ear. The radio rolled over into the weekend forecast and Oliver plopped two irregularly shaped pancakes on the plate in front of her without a word.
Sam had his head cocked and lips pursed in exaggerated curiosity, but his eyes danced with true mirth, the likes of which Andy could remember seeing in him only rarely. They made quite the picture, this clean, pale-skinned little girl bumping faces with her partner, the dark shadow of morning stubble along his jaw lending him a rougher and more rogue appearance than usual.
When Mia had finished imparting secrets from behind her tiny cupped hand, Sam tilted his mouth toward her ear and whispered something back that elicited a giggle. Then he straightened back up to look at Andy.
“Mia wants to know if you’ll be her babysitter, too, sometime.”
Sam’s voice held the hints of humor and challenge it did when he was trying to incite her to fight; he wasn’t acting like what he’d just said was completely preposterous. Andy’s eyes darted about, a bit desperately. Oliver’s back was a silent presence at the stove. Zoe was leaning casually back in her seat, legs tucked up and arms wrapped around her knees, looking faintly bemused but not particularly inclined to step in and help Andy out.
“Um.” This was, it seemed to Andy, worse than talking to the kid with the gun on her first day. “You know, I bet you’re loads of fun to play with. Who usually babysits you?”
Mia was approximating stillness now, standing rather than seated, but focused on consuming with one hand the pancake her father had made in to a sloppily-rendered ‘M.’
“Usually Stephanie or Grandma Millie. But Sam is the best babysitter.”
Andy couldn’t prevent the raise of her brows, and she stole a glance at Sam. But he was looking at Mia, not her, his face a study in indulgent affection. Andy’s stomach twisted in a manner that had nothing to do with the liquor no doubt still sitting there, waiting for the log jam in her liver to clear out. Oliver interjected without turning from where he was using a spatula to drizzle batter in to some curvilinear pattern-a ‘Z,’ maybe, but if it was an ‘S,’ Andy was getting more out of this hangover than she ever could have hoped.
“Hey Sammy, we still on for tonight?”
This appeared to Andy to be an abrupt conversational lane change, a confusion cleared up not at all when Sam replied:
“Brother, next time you won’t get so lucky. I advise you to live it up with your lovely wife while you can. Next month you’re a--. Your caboose is mine.”
He punctuated his PG-rated word choice with a playful swat to Mia’s behind that had her squealing and dancing backwards away from him.
“Sam lost a bet,” Zoe offered Andy by way of explanation. “Ollie and I get a month of Saturday night baby-sitting.”
Mia was bouncing again, and Andy wondered whether being responsible for a kid entailed making sure she remained still long enough for her food to stay put.
“And your big sisters have plans tonight, so it’s just you and me, Short Stack.”
Sam shoveled a bite of pancakes enthusiastically in to his mouth, then redirected his attention toward Andy. Maybe it was something in his gaze-that ‘all hands on deck’ focus-or maybe it was nothing at all that finally tripped her up.
When the memory came, when the cheap cubicle dividers in her brain collapsed under the weight of it, Andy experienced it like an aftershock, an electric echo. She had thought she’d pieced most of the night back together: from the first beer she’d slammed to quiet her jittering sort of-anger at Sam, to her final drunken stumble in to the Shaw house in search of a flat surface to rest on, or maybe a trash can. But then there it was, that lost piece that came later, in a vivid Technicolor that threatened to nudge her toward the whirlpool of nausea she’d been skirting since she woke:
Darkness, and everything grey and blue and shadows; Sam’s arms under her, around her, and Sam’s face, close up and inscrutable as ever.
“What the hell’s got in to you, McNally?”
Then the world-tilting moment when everything felt wobbly except Sam, his touch a solid press on that ache in her that never went away, and the truth slipped right out her lips.
“You.”
Of course.
“What do you say, McNally? Up for a little pipsqueak wrangling later? Pancake repayment?”
He gestured with his fork and Andy, jerked back to the present by his voice, looked down at the untouched contents of her plate and tried to steady the internal rocking. A litany of excuses ran through her brain-wanting to pick up an extra shift, fake plans with Traci, needing to scrub her toilets-but Sam was doing it again, that thing where he made your average, run-of-the-mill sentence sound like a dare.
Andy had never had a childhood pet. She killed houseplants, and was probably the last living soul to whom a person should entrust a child.
But this was Sam. Sam who was goading her, who she’d kissed last night (again), who turned the dangerous into the effortless with something like a sleight of hand, who knew the facts of her and kept coming back with his aggravating shrugs and sardonic face, so-
“Sure.”
Oliver turned from the stove and Sam’s expression registered surprise, then turned speculative in that way that always made her slightly uncomfortable, an itch under her skin. Andy shoved back at the trepidation, forced the nerve in to her voice and a smile on to her face even as her heart rabbited in her chest. She’d faced things more terrifying than a pint-sized Shaw and Sam’s affections.
“Yeah, why not. I’m game. Bring it on.”
*
end