Fic: Lie Down In Darkness
Title: Lie Down In Darkness
Pairing: Brenda/Sharon (if you squint really hard, mentions of Brenda/Andy and Sharon/Andy)
Fandom: The Closer
Rating: PG-13 (Warning: Major Character Death. Also blood)
Word Count: 2,193
Summary: Sharon watches Brenda die. My attempt at turning this drabble into a full-length fic.
Disclaimer: Not mine
A/N: This fic features someone dying from a gunshot. If you're queasy about that, or if you prefer not to read it, then by all means don't.
A/N 2: That being said, any comments would be lovely.
Sharon barely has time to think before she squeezes the trigger and he slumps to the ground, her bullet having pierced through his chest straight into his heart, but Sharon has stopped looking at him. She’s running, her heels clicking on the asphalt. She doesn’t notice the man falling to the ground, his blood pooling around him, staining the sidewalk. All she sees is Brenda, lying on her side, unmoving, her blond curls a stark contrast with the black of the street.
Her gun clatters to the ground as she kneels down beside the Chief. She knew it had gone horribly when she heard the first gunshot, the sound of it still resonating in her ears, and Brenda had fallen. Somewhere she had hoped that it could have been a minor injury, an abdominal wound with no major organs hit, but her breath is brutally knocked out of her lungs when she sees the cruel reality. Blood being absorbed in the fabric of her floral dress as it seeps out of the small hole in Brenda’s chest.
She’s known for being cold, distant, analytical in situations that require it, but right now, Sharon can’t think of a sensible thing to do or say. She’s frozen, her bare knees already aching from being on the asphalt. She shouldn’t have worn a skirt today. She shouldn’t have shot and killed a man. She shouldn’t even be here right now.
But she is. She’s here, watching Brenda as she bleeds out.
Her hands tremble when she snaps into action, carefully rolling Brenda onto her back and placing her hands on the wound. She’s surprised at how warm the blood feels against her palms, how easily it flows between her fingers. It’s such a large contrast, the deep crimson of Brenda’s blood against her pale skin. It would be eerily beautiful if this weren’t someone she knew, someone she cares about a lot more than she should. A lot more than Brenda’s marital status allows for.
“Don’t die on me,” she whispers, her voice hoarse as if she shouted before. Maybe she did. She can feel Brenda’s heartbeat slow down as the blood is being pumped out of her body in a smaller quantities. Not that it matters. The amount of blood that has been spilled is already so enormous, it’s going to require a miracle to save her. Even though miracles have always been a bit of stretch to Sharon, she does have faith and right now she is praying to God or whatever deity will listen, to not let this happen. Not today.
Her heart skips a beat when Brenda coughs, the action shaking her entire body. Sharon can feel the blood spatters landing on her face, her chest, her glasses. Coughing up blood can only mean that the bullet has pierced her lung. Sharon feels a sliver of the already barely existing hope she’s clinging to being chipped away. None of this is good and she can do absolutely nothing to stop it.
None of this is supposed to be happening.
She isn’t supposed to be sitting kneeling on a road she has never even heard off, blood on her clothes, her skin, trying to stop the bleeding of what she knows to be a fatal chest wound and watching the life slip out of the woman she has been fucking for the past five months. She isn’t supposed to feel as if the ground has been pulled out from under her feet. She isn’t supposed to be hoping that Brenda will open her eyes so she can look her in the eye and lie and tell her that everything is going to be alright.
Brenda’s breath is shallow and ragged. She looks so small and it doesn’t fit with whom Sharon has come to know Brenda is. This isn’t her Brenda. Brenda doesn’t do anything in small measures, she doesn’t knock or carefully push open the door, she bursts in knocking the door off its hinges and waltzes into your life with her kitten heels and a floral skirt that would make anyone with a half a fashion-sense cringe and a never ending supply of cardigans, and she continues to overthrow everything you know, everything you’re familiar with until there is a space large enough to accommodate Brenda Leigh Johnson. Sharon had almost forgotten how little space she actually takes up.
If she weren’t so terrified for what was going to happen next, what the consequences would be of removing her hands from the bullet wound, Sharon would get Brenda off the street, wrap her arms around her fragile body and hold her. She didn’t want her to die so undignified, on the asphalt. It was so cold, so unloved. But she doesn’t dare to move, even when the bleeding has practically stopped and her breathing is nearly imperceptible.
Sharon wants to shake her, slap her, anything to snap Brenda back into this reality instead halfway in the next one. She wants to scream at her, yell until her throat is raw. She wants to tell Brenda that she isn’t ready to see her go. That they aren’t ready yet, they’re not done. She wants to tell her that the quick fuck they had in her office during lunch can’t be the last time. She never dared to picture their last time, but it can’t be as seedy as that. It just can’t.
In the distance Sharon can hear sirens, ambulance, police and she wonders who called them. It wasn’t her, though she probably should have. Not that it would have mattered. Although Pope and the Chief of Police will have her ass for failing to call in a fatal shooting. It is more than possible that her practically spotless career is over. She’ll worry about that later. This isn’t the time to selfishly think about her life when one is slipping away right in front of her eyes.
She blinks and to her shock realizes that tears are rolling down her face. She watches them land on the colorful fabric of Brenda’s dress, mixing with her blood. She’s crying for a woman who barely respects her, much less likes her. They either make each other’s lives miserable or they fuck, there’s no in between. And here she is crying for a woman who wouldn’t do the same for her if the roles were reversed.
She’s crying for a woman she never loved, a woman she doesn’t even love now. A woman she could have loved, given enough time. Brenda is a lot of flaws and mistakes held together by a wonderfully complicated personality and Sharon could have hopelessly, dangerously, fallen in love with her. And that thought becomes infinitely worse knowing that even if Brenda had been able to love her back, she would never have been hers.
When Brenda’s eyes flutter open, Sharon has the feeling the world around her has stopped moving. She has no idea if it’s a second, a minute or an hour, but for a moment she can look into Brenda’s eyes and it does absolutely nothing to lessen the pain. When words fail her, ‘I love you’ would be a lie and ‘everything is going to be alright’ would be an even bigger lie, one, now that the moment is there, she cannot bring herself to say, Sharon forces herself to give Brenda a weak excuse for a smile.
Brenda looks up at her, her usually clear eyes already turning a dull shade of brown, as if she isn’t really there anymore, and the corners of her mouth curl up and despite the crimson blood stains on the deadly pale skin of her face, Sharon knows that this is Brenda’s way of telling her that it is alright. She knows what’s happening to her and she has made her peace with it. She isn’t fighting it, she’s just letting it happen to her.
And it enrages Sharon.
Brenda is still young, in the middle of her life, she still has so much to offer and here she is, lying on a street of Los Angeles, just giving up on life. But instead of telling Brenda to hold on, that help is on its way, Sharon smiles through her tears, ignoring the way it feels as if someone is gripping her heart so tightly it’s becoming hard to breathe, while Brenda’s heart slows down until Sharon can’t feel it beating anymore.
Brenda’s blood is still warm against her hands, her face still looks the same and Sharon is sure that if she were to reach out and brush away an errant lock of hair, she would still feel the same, but she knows that Brenda is gone, mercilessly killed in the line of duty and yet the truth won’t settle in yet, even as Brenda’s lifeless eyes continue to stare at her. Sharon knows it to be true, but the irrational part of her brain refuses to accept it.
She cries out in protest when a pair of hands grabs her upper arms and forcefully pulls her away from Brenda’s body. She can’t leave her alone, not now. She has to stay with her and not leave her behind on the street, lying in her own blood. But the grip on her arms is strong and her heels fail to find purchase on the asphalt. Even struggling, she can’t stop whoever is dragging her away. She’s helpless.
It isn’t until she sees paramedics rushing towards Brenda that she stops fighting. She hadn’t even noticed that help had arrived yet. Suddenly her sense are flooded with the glaring light and shrill sound of sirens. She sees police officers, paramedics, bystanders. They’re too late anyway, it doesn’t matter anymore. She closes her eyes and turns her head away. It’s over.
Sharon notices herself being turned around and she finds herself wrapped in Andy Flynn’s arms, her head resting against his shoulder as one of his hands tangles in her hair while the other holds on the her waist in a bruising grip. She grabs his vest, holding it tightly, staining it beyond saving with Brenda’s blood.
She can feel him trembling, shaking, and she realizes he’s crying and that his painful hold on her isn’t to comfort her. It’s to comfort him, to keep him grounded as the paramedics confirm what Sharon already knows. She hears their voices and feels Andy’s knees buckle and suddenly she is the one holding him up, barely able to keep him from collapsing. The sound of his sobs reaches her ears and it’s one of the most gut-wrenching things she has ever heard.
He loved her. She knew it the first time she saw them interact. Brenda didn’t know, would never know now. He was head over heels in love with Brenda and yet Sharon had been the one Brenda had chosen to cheat on her husband with. It was a cruel twist of fate. He had known about them, he had to, the way he is clutching her as if she is the only living reminder he has of the woman lying dead on the street.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers to him, so softly, she wonders if he even heard her. “I’m so sorry.” Her voice is remarkably steady. She isn’t sure what she’s apologizing for, but she can’t think of anything else to say to him. It wouldn’t matter. Nothing can comfort a man with a broken heart. She looks up at him, his hand moving to cup her cheek. She has never seen such bereaved expression before. He has aged ten years since she last saw him earlier that day.
“I know,” he replies weakly, his grief shining through even in his voice. His thumbs brush over her cheekbones, wiping away her tears, smudging the blood spatters. She wonders what they must look like together. The hothead of the LAPD reduced to a crying mess and FID’s wicked witch, covered in blood, faring not much better than Andy, standing only a few feet away from the lifeless body of Brenda Leigh Johnson. It is surreal in the most macabre way.
Her legs feel like chewing gum when she takes a step away from him, releasing his vest, leaving bloodied handprints behind. This isn’t the time to mourn Brenda. This is the time to let her professional mask slip back into place, no matter how hard that is. She can’t allow all the officers surrounding them to see how devastated she truly is, how she feels as if she is going to collapse any second now from her sudden exhaustion, from a pain that is far from physical.
Later she will have the time to truly break down, to let all of the emotions wash over her, to come to terms with what happened, to punch a wall, to break plates and cry until she can’t anymore. Later she is going to stop Andy from drowning his sorrows with alcohol and stop herself from giving in to that same temptation. Later. Now, she thinks as she glances at Brenda’s body, her gun discarded beside it, she has a job to do.
Pairing: Brenda/Sharon (if you squint really hard, mentions of Brenda/Andy and Sharon/Andy)
Fandom: The Closer
Rating: PG-13 (Warning: Major Character Death. Also blood)
Word Count: 2,193
Summary: Sharon watches Brenda die. My attempt at turning this drabble into a full-length fic.
Disclaimer: Not mine
A/N: This fic features someone dying from a gunshot. If you're queasy about that, or if you prefer not to read it, then by all means don't.
A/N 2: That being said, any comments would be lovely.
Sharon barely has time to think before she squeezes the trigger and he slumps to the ground, her bullet having pierced through his chest straight into his heart, but Sharon has stopped looking at him. She’s running, her heels clicking on the asphalt. She doesn’t notice the man falling to the ground, his blood pooling around him, staining the sidewalk. All she sees is Brenda, lying on her side, unmoving, her blond curls a stark contrast with the black of the street.
Her gun clatters to the ground as she kneels down beside the Chief. She knew it had gone horribly when she heard the first gunshot, the sound of it still resonating in her ears, and Brenda had fallen. Somewhere she had hoped that it could have been a minor injury, an abdominal wound with no major organs hit, but her breath is brutally knocked out of her lungs when she sees the cruel reality. Blood being absorbed in the fabric of her floral dress as it seeps out of the small hole in Brenda’s chest.
She’s known for being cold, distant, analytical in situations that require it, but right now, Sharon can’t think of a sensible thing to do or say. She’s frozen, her bare knees already aching from being on the asphalt. She shouldn’t have worn a skirt today. She shouldn’t have shot and killed a man. She shouldn’t even be here right now.
But she is. She’s here, watching Brenda as she bleeds out.
Her hands tremble when she snaps into action, carefully rolling Brenda onto her back and placing her hands on the wound. She’s surprised at how warm the blood feels against her palms, how easily it flows between her fingers. It’s such a large contrast, the deep crimson of Brenda’s blood against her pale skin. It would be eerily beautiful if this weren’t someone she knew, someone she cares about a lot more than she should. A lot more than Brenda’s marital status allows for.
“Don’t die on me,” she whispers, her voice hoarse as if she shouted before. Maybe she did. She can feel Brenda’s heartbeat slow down as the blood is being pumped out of her body in a smaller quantities. Not that it matters. The amount of blood that has been spilled is already so enormous, it’s going to require a miracle to save her. Even though miracles have always been a bit of stretch to Sharon, she does have faith and right now she is praying to God or whatever deity will listen, to not let this happen. Not today.
Her heart skips a beat when Brenda coughs, the action shaking her entire body. Sharon can feel the blood spatters landing on her face, her chest, her glasses. Coughing up blood can only mean that the bullet has pierced her lung. Sharon feels a sliver of the already barely existing hope she’s clinging to being chipped away. None of this is good and she can do absolutely nothing to stop it.
None of this is supposed to be happening.
She isn’t supposed to be sitting kneeling on a road she has never even heard off, blood on her clothes, her skin, trying to stop the bleeding of what she knows to be a fatal chest wound and watching the life slip out of the woman she has been fucking for the past five months. She isn’t supposed to feel as if the ground has been pulled out from under her feet. She isn’t supposed to be hoping that Brenda will open her eyes so she can look her in the eye and lie and tell her that everything is going to be alright.
Brenda’s breath is shallow and ragged. She looks so small and it doesn’t fit with whom Sharon has come to know Brenda is. This isn’t her Brenda. Brenda doesn’t do anything in small measures, she doesn’t knock or carefully push open the door, she bursts in knocking the door off its hinges and waltzes into your life with her kitten heels and a floral skirt that would make anyone with a half a fashion-sense cringe and a never ending supply of cardigans, and she continues to overthrow everything you know, everything you’re familiar with until there is a space large enough to accommodate Brenda Leigh Johnson. Sharon had almost forgotten how little space she actually takes up.
If she weren’t so terrified for what was going to happen next, what the consequences would be of removing her hands from the bullet wound, Sharon would get Brenda off the street, wrap her arms around her fragile body and hold her. She didn’t want her to die so undignified, on the asphalt. It was so cold, so unloved. But she doesn’t dare to move, even when the bleeding has practically stopped and her breathing is nearly imperceptible.
Sharon wants to shake her, slap her, anything to snap Brenda back into this reality instead halfway in the next one. She wants to scream at her, yell until her throat is raw. She wants to tell Brenda that she isn’t ready to see her go. That they aren’t ready yet, they’re not done. She wants to tell her that the quick fuck they had in her office during lunch can’t be the last time. She never dared to picture their last time, but it can’t be as seedy as that. It just can’t.
In the distance Sharon can hear sirens, ambulance, police and she wonders who called them. It wasn’t her, though she probably should have. Not that it would have mattered. Although Pope and the Chief of Police will have her ass for failing to call in a fatal shooting. It is more than possible that her practically spotless career is over. She’ll worry about that later. This isn’t the time to selfishly think about her life when one is slipping away right in front of her eyes.
She blinks and to her shock realizes that tears are rolling down her face. She watches them land on the colorful fabric of Brenda’s dress, mixing with her blood. She’s crying for a woman who barely respects her, much less likes her. They either make each other’s lives miserable or they fuck, there’s no in between. And here she is crying for a woman who wouldn’t do the same for her if the roles were reversed.
She’s crying for a woman she never loved, a woman she doesn’t even love now. A woman she could have loved, given enough time. Brenda is a lot of flaws and mistakes held together by a wonderfully complicated personality and Sharon could have hopelessly, dangerously, fallen in love with her. And that thought becomes infinitely worse knowing that even if Brenda had been able to love her back, she would never have been hers.
When Brenda’s eyes flutter open, Sharon has the feeling the world around her has stopped moving. She has no idea if it’s a second, a minute or an hour, but for a moment she can look into Brenda’s eyes and it does absolutely nothing to lessen the pain. When words fail her, ‘I love you’ would be a lie and ‘everything is going to be alright’ would be an even bigger lie, one, now that the moment is there, she cannot bring herself to say, Sharon forces herself to give Brenda a weak excuse for a smile.
Brenda looks up at her, her usually clear eyes already turning a dull shade of brown, as if she isn’t really there anymore, and the corners of her mouth curl up and despite the crimson blood stains on the deadly pale skin of her face, Sharon knows that this is Brenda’s way of telling her that it is alright. She knows what’s happening to her and she has made her peace with it. She isn’t fighting it, she’s just letting it happen to her.
And it enrages Sharon.
Brenda is still young, in the middle of her life, she still has so much to offer and here she is, lying on a street of Los Angeles, just giving up on life. But instead of telling Brenda to hold on, that help is on its way, Sharon smiles through her tears, ignoring the way it feels as if someone is gripping her heart so tightly it’s becoming hard to breathe, while Brenda’s heart slows down until Sharon can’t feel it beating anymore.
Brenda’s blood is still warm against her hands, her face still looks the same and Sharon is sure that if she were to reach out and brush away an errant lock of hair, she would still feel the same, but she knows that Brenda is gone, mercilessly killed in the line of duty and yet the truth won’t settle in yet, even as Brenda’s lifeless eyes continue to stare at her. Sharon knows it to be true, but the irrational part of her brain refuses to accept it.
She cries out in protest when a pair of hands grabs her upper arms and forcefully pulls her away from Brenda’s body. She can’t leave her alone, not now. She has to stay with her and not leave her behind on the street, lying in her own blood. But the grip on her arms is strong and her heels fail to find purchase on the asphalt. Even struggling, she can’t stop whoever is dragging her away. She’s helpless.
It isn’t until she sees paramedics rushing towards Brenda that she stops fighting. She hadn’t even noticed that help had arrived yet. Suddenly her sense are flooded with the glaring light and shrill sound of sirens. She sees police officers, paramedics, bystanders. They’re too late anyway, it doesn’t matter anymore. She closes her eyes and turns her head away. It’s over.
Sharon notices herself being turned around and she finds herself wrapped in Andy Flynn’s arms, her head resting against his shoulder as one of his hands tangles in her hair while the other holds on the her waist in a bruising grip. She grabs his vest, holding it tightly, staining it beyond saving with Brenda’s blood.
She can feel him trembling, shaking, and she realizes he’s crying and that his painful hold on her isn’t to comfort her. It’s to comfort him, to keep him grounded as the paramedics confirm what Sharon already knows. She hears their voices and feels Andy’s knees buckle and suddenly she is the one holding him up, barely able to keep him from collapsing. The sound of his sobs reaches her ears and it’s one of the most gut-wrenching things she has ever heard.
He loved her. She knew it the first time she saw them interact. Brenda didn’t know, would never know now. He was head over heels in love with Brenda and yet Sharon had been the one Brenda had chosen to cheat on her husband with. It was a cruel twist of fate. He had known about them, he had to, the way he is clutching her as if she is the only living reminder he has of the woman lying dead on the street.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers to him, so softly, she wonders if he even heard her. “I’m so sorry.” Her voice is remarkably steady. She isn’t sure what she’s apologizing for, but she can’t think of anything else to say to him. It wouldn’t matter. Nothing can comfort a man with a broken heart. She looks up at him, his hand moving to cup her cheek. She has never seen such bereaved expression before. He has aged ten years since she last saw him earlier that day.
“I know,” he replies weakly, his grief shining through even in his voice. His thumbs brush over her cheekbones, wiping away her tears, smudging the blood spatters. She wonders what they must look like together. The hothead of the LAPD reduced to a crying mess and FID’s wicked witch, covered in blood, faring not much better than Andy, standing only a few feet away from the lifeless body of Brenda Leigh Johnson. It is surreal in the most macabre way.
Her legs feel like chewing gum when she takes a step away from him, releasing his vest, leaving bloodied handprints behind. This isn’t the time to mourn Brenda. This is the time to let her professional mask slip back into place, no matter how hard that is. She can’t allow all the officers surrounding them to see how devastated she truly is, how she feels as if she is going to collapse any second now from her sudden exhaustion, from a pain that is far from physical.
Later she will have the time to truly break down, to let all of the emotions wash over her, to come to terms with what happened, to punch a wall, to break plates and cry until she can’t anymore. Later she is going to stop Andy from drowning his sorrows with alcohol and stop herself from giving in to that same temptation. Later. Now, she thinks as she glances at Brenda’s body, her gun discarded beside it, she has a job to do.