[rookie blue] advent fic | Your Secrets Become My Truth (Luke/Gail)
Title: Your Secrets Become My Truth
Fandom: Rookie Blue
Characters: Luke, Gail (ex Luke/Andy, ex Luke/Jo, ex Gail/Chris)
Word Count: 1800
Rating: M
Warning: Minor character death
♥: catteo. No Katherine in this, but only just…!! Fingers crossed it’s okay without her!
Summary The flashing of diamonds, plural, and the wide-eyed grins to match, morph mid-afternoon into lights and sirens and radio calls that static the space inside his skull.
Jo is gunned down in the line of duty on the same day Andy and Sam announce their engagement.
The flashing of diamonds, plural, and the wide-eyed grins to match, morphing mid-afternoon into lights and sirens and radio calls that static the space inside his skull.
It was a drug sting gone bad, and really, isn't it always? She'd been reassigned to a plain clothes unit in a station on the opposite side of the city. Little more than cursory nods at crime scenes exchanged between them since she'd left all those weeks and months ago. He'd known where she'd been working and, vaguely, what she'd been working on. He knew very little else these days and it's a fact he comes to realise with an earth-shifting shudder.
“Callaghan?”
The voice calling his name seems insistent, cautious, concerned. All three in the space of several stuttered syllables.
“Luke?” Softer this time, gentle in a way that grates at all his unravelling edges. “Are you okay?”
He laughs and the sound vibrates the tile beneath his shoes. He looks at them, looks to see if the ground is shaking as much as he think it just might be. Notices a dark scuff mark on his toe-tip and panics suddenly. Wonders if maybe it's blood. Her blood.
There'd been so much of it after all. So much black, copper-red tracked throughout the room after the first shot that had carved a ragged path through her insides failed to kill her and she'd fought valiantly to live.
Fought and then failed nonetheless.
He thinks he might know the feeling all too well.
Familiar blue and white crime scene tape cordons off the inner city property. One loose end flapping its protest wildly in the early December wind. Wet snow is falling, clouding vision that is already blurring out in his periphery. He has a vague awareness of the cold. Biting at his lips and freezing his lungs with every hurried inhale. Exhale.
In and out and cold. And cold. And cold.
Fingers close around his wrist. Tight. Black leather gloves that grip more solidly than they have any right to. He thinks he might float away if they loosen. Isn't sure, in that moment, whether he's pleased or disappointed when the strong-hold remains.
“... so messy... what a complete... shouldn't be here...”
The voice that he's convinced belongs to the same person as the gloved fingers rises and falls with the wind. Loud and soft with words he can't bring himself to listen to.
He has no right to feel like the bottom of the entire world has just dissolved out from underneath him. They weren't together. Hadn't been for so long he thinks he'd started to forget what she sounded like when she laughed. When she shouted at him. When she cried.
And somehow he thinks that the distance only serves to make it all that much worse. Wraps itself around the guilt that he feels might just be about to drown him, and threatens to send him heavily to his knees.
Lifting his eyes from the snow-wet pavement beneath his scuffed shoes, he catches a glimpse of the harried activity playing out, movie scene-like, in his immediate surrounds. Can't help but think, wryly, that now would be a good time to rob a bank. The inconspicuous red brick apartment block teeming with more law enforcement officials than he thought Toronto could ever dread to need.
“Hey, Homicide, you back with me or what?”
The candour of the sentence startles him. Blood red lips that round their way around the consonants and vowels that comprise the words. Her head is tilted a inch or so to the left. Universal for something's not right here... He feels his own mouth open, prepare to reassure her that he's fine. That everything's fine. That they both just need to do their jobs.
But the front door opens then. And the medical examiner rolls a blue, tarp covered gurney down the snow frosted path to the awaiting ambulance. Doesn't bother with lights and sirens as the vehicle rounds the corner at the end of the street and is pulled out into the mid-afternoon traffic.
It is too late for urgency, after all.
He bends double. Retches into the gutter. Feels hot tears scald a path of least resistance to his chin before he can reach a trembling hand in their direction in an attempt to swipe them into oblivion.
The hand around his wrist drops away. He feels light as a feather suddenly. Loose and lost in anti-gravity.
He's pushed gently to seated. Hears voices shouting for a medic as he's suddenly ninety degrees to the right of vertical. Manages to offer up an adamant "please, no..." that has the request being rescinded as quickly and as completely as it had been made.
Her fingers shift insistently across his shoulder blades. Up and back and up again. He's not convinced she knows she's doing it, and he wants to scream obscenities into her face so she'll stop touching him, but the suffocating fear that she might listen, might actually do as he asks, means his lips stay locked tight around the words. Keep them in and swallowed down, whole.
Choking.
She drags him blindly to what he can only assume is a squad car. A soft seat settles underneath him and a bottle of water is pressed into the palm of a hand he can barely control. He thinks all his internal organs have shifted; are lodged high in the back of his throat. Dragging air in and around them is fast becoming impossible.
He can't decide if he cares.
He was shot once. Twice. He runs his fingertips over his lips to see if he's still here...
He is.
Damn...
“Drink the water...” She's ordering him insistently. Gail. Not Jo. They have the same authoritative air when it comes to telling him what to do and their voices keep getting twisted up and tangled in his head.
He drinks so she'll shut up and the noise will stop.
It gets dark. Which is almost funny. The world keeps turning, that's what they say. Trite condolences in the face of unimaginable tragedy. Daylight becomes moonlight becomes midnight before it all starts again.
Ready or not.
He's sitting on his front steps when she arrives. Not-Jo. He's cold through to his hollowed out marrow but his bones have forgotten how to shiver. She stops in front of him. Her breath billowing, white clouds of fog that match the viscous air inside his skull. She disappears out behind it on every exhale and he forgets she's there for a beat before it fades on the breeze and she reappears.
Magic.
“Oh, Luke...”
And the instant pity becomes a tangible entity that props itself on the pavement between them. He wants it gone.
“I can't find my key...”
He doesn't know if that's the truth. Can't remember looking for it. Just knows his hands were too heavy to reach the height of the lock anyhow. Dead weights, curled into his lap. He blinks down at them, almost surprised to find that they're still there. Still attached.
He could be convinced they'd been torn from his shoulder-blades and tossed into the winter wind. Buried under snow drifts and frozen for safe-keeping. For the spring, when he might want them back again.
He has no use for them right now.
She shifts him like he's dough. Wrests at his jacket until she finds what it is she's looking for. He thinks it might be his heart and lungs.
And then there's light spilling over his shoulders. Illuminating the snowflakes that dance and drift in celebration of something he can't begin to fathom.
She's back to speaking then, saying his name so many times it loses all manner of meaning...
“Luke, Luke, Luke.”
He follows her because it's easier than the alternative.
“Gail, Gail, Gail.”
Not-Jo, Not-Jo, Not-Jo.
She drags him through his own house. He wants to stop and show her the spot where all his blood leaked out, but she's turning lights on and off as they go and not slowing down long enough for him to vocalise much of anything beyond, oh.
When she pushes him into the bathroom and then follows in behind, he thinks she might be lost. But then she's tearing his clothes off and puddling them on the floor by his feet and turning on the taps in the shower as he stands there and tries to figure out why his jaw aches all the way through to his eye-balls.
And how it is that her lips are always the brightest part of his day.
He imagines kissing them. Shuts his eyes and slides his back down the water slick tile and lets the sudden heat fill all the emptied out spaces where little pieces of him have chipped away and disappeared, swirling.
Her arms are wrapped around him, holding him together fiercely by the seams. She's still got her jeans on and the absurdity of the moment is profound.
He thinks he might be crying, but he might also be dead. Or dying. Or not there at all. And so he doesn't dwell on the possibility for too long.
She disappears for an eternity then...
Comes back wearing his clothes, matter of fact, as though the transformation were a common occurence that required no explanation.
And maybe it doesn't.
There's a lamp on in his bedroom. He never uses it, can't even remember buying it, and he wonders, absently, whether it might actually be Andy's. Its light is casting elongated shadows on the back wall and he watches her silhouette as she moves through the room.
She's so sure of herself. So confident and in control and getting things done. He makes a mental note to ask her how she does it later and then fills in the rest of the page with white noise and static.
“You should try and get some sleep,” she says. And he nods because, instinctively, he knows that it's what she wants.
She nods back and he's pleased he got something right.
He knows he needs to thank her. To reassure her. To make some kind of sound that isn't the screeching of his breath as it whistles past his teeth. She hands him a t-shirt and he follows her gaze down to his lap. Watches as she lingers over the angry scarring on his chest.
She runs her fingers lightly over the raised skin before dragging her hand up to his face. Cupping her palm around his cheek and tilting his chin back up in her direction.
“Are you going to be okay?”
He opens his mouth to answer but doesn't have the energy required to lie.
“Can you stay?” His voice sounds foreign as it bounces around the room. Barely more than a whisper.
He can see her hesitate, a sudden movement that gives her uncertainty away in a stammered beat.
“Please?” Please, please...
She nods then, slowly. And he breathes.
It feels like the first time he's done so in decades.
Fandom: Rookie Blue
Characters: Luke, Gail (ex Luke/Andy, ex Luke/Jo, ex Gail/Chris)
Word Count: 1800
Rating: M
Warning: Minor character death
♥: catteo. No Katherine in this, but only just…!! Fingers crossed it’s okay without her!
Summary The flashing of diamonds, plural, and the wide-eyed grins to match, morph mid-afternoon into lights and sirens and radio calls that static the space inside his skull.
Jo is gunned down in the line of duty on the same day Andy and Sam announce their engagement.
The flashing of diamonds, plural, and the wide-eyed grins to match, morphing mid-afternoon into lights and sirens and radio calls that static the space inside his skull.
It was a drug sting gone bad, and really, isn't it always? She'd been reassigned to a plain clothes unit in a station on the opposite side of the city. Little more than cursory nods at crime scenes exchanged between them since she'd left all those weeks and months ago. He'd known where she'd been working and, vaguely, what she'd been working on. He knew very little else these days and it's a fact he comes to realise with an earth-shifting shudder.
“Callaghan?”
The voice calling his name seems insistent, cautious, concerned. All three in the space of several stuttered syllables.
“Luke?” Softer this time, gentle in a way that grates at all his unravelling edges. “Are you okay?”
He laughs and the sound vibrates the tile beneath his shoes. He looks at them, looks to see if the ground is shaking as much as he think it just might be. Notices a dark scuff mark on his toe-tip and panics suddenly. Wonders if maybe it's blood. Her blood.
There'd been so much of it after all. So much black, copper-red tracked throughout the room after the first shot that had carved a ragged path through her insides failed to kill her and she'd fought valiantly to live.
Fought and then failed nonetheless.
He thinks he might know the feeling all too well.
Familiar blue and white crime scene tape cordons off the inner city property. One loose end flapping its protest wildly in the early December wind. Wet snow is falling, clouding vision that is already blurring out in his periphery. He has a vague awareness of the cold. Biting at his lips and freezing his lungs with every hurried inhale. Exhale.
In and out and cold. And cold. And cold.
Fingers close around his wrist. Tight. Black leather gloves that grip more solidly than they have any right to. He thinks he might float away if they loosen. Isn't sure, in that moment, whether he's pleased or disappointed when the strong-hold remains.
“... so messy... what a complete... shouldn't be here...”
The voice that he's convinced belongs to the same person as the gloved fingers rises and falls with the wind. Loud and soft with words he can't bring himself to listen to.
He has no right to feel like the bottom of the entire world has just dissolved out from underneath him. They weren't together. Hadn't been for so long he thinks he'd started to forget what she sounded like when she laughed. When she shouted at him. When she cried.
And somehow he thinks that the distance only serves to make it all that much worse. Wraps itself around the guilt that he feels might just be about to drown him, and threatens to send him heavily to his knees.
Lifting his eyes from the snow-wet pavement beneath his scuffed shoes, he catches a glimpse of the harried activity playing out, movie scene-like, in his immediate surrounds. Can't help but think, wryly, that now would be a good time to rob a bank. The inconspicuous red brick apartment block teeming with more law enforcement officials than he thought Toronto could ever dread to need.
“Hey, Homicide, you back with me or what?”
The candour of the sentence startles him. Blood red lips that round their way around the consonants and vowels that comprise the words. Her head is tilted a inch or so to the left. Universal for something's not right here... He feels his own mouth open, prepare to reassure her that he's fine. That everything's fine. That they both just need to do their jobs.
But the front door opens then. And the medical examiner rolls a blue, tarp covered gurney down the snow frosted path to the awaiting ambulance. Doesn't bother with lights and sirens as the vehicle rounds the corner at the end of the street and is pulled out into the mid-afternoon traffic.
It is too late for urgency, after all.
He bends double. Retches into the gutter. Feels hot tears scald a path of least resistance to his chin before he can reach a trembling hand in their direction in an attempt to swipe them into oblivion.
The hand around his wrist drops away. He feels light as a feather suddenly. Loose and lost in anti-gravity.
He's pushed gently to seated. Hears voices shouting for a medic as he's suddenly ninety degrees to the right of vertical. Manages to offer up an adamant "please, no..." that has the request being rescinded as quickly and as completely as it had been made.
Her fingers shift insistently across his shoulder blades. Up and back and up again. He's not convinced she knows she's doing it, and he wants to scream obscenities into her face so she'll stop touching him, but the suffocating fear that she might listen, might actually do as he asks, means his lips stay locked tight around the words. Keep them in and swallowed down, whole.
Choking.
She drags him blindly to what he can only assume is a squad car. A soft seat settles underneath him and a bottle of water is pressed into the palm of a hand he can barely control. He thinks all his internal organs have shifted; are lodged high in the back of his throat. Dragging air in and around them is fast becoming impossible.
He can't decide if he cares.
He was shot once. Twice. He runs his fingertips over his lips to see if he's still here...
He is.
Damn...
“Drink the water...” She's ordering him insistently. Gail. Not Jo. They have the same authoritative air when it comes to telling him what to do and their voices keep getting twisted up and tangled in his head.
He drinks so she'll shut up and the noise will stop.
It gets dark. Which is almost funny. The world keeps turning, that's what they say. Trite condolences in the face of unimaginable tragedy. Daylight becomes moonlight becomes midnight before it all starts again.
Ready or not.
He's sitting on his front steps when she arrives. Not-Jo. He's cold through to his hollowed out marrow but his bones have forgotten how to shiver. She stops in front of him. Her breath billowing, white clouds of fog that match the viscous air inside his skull. She disappears out behind it on every exhale and he forgets she's there for a beat before it fades on the breeze and she reappears.
Magic.
“Oh, Luke...”
And the instant pity becomes a tangible entity that props itself on the pavement between them. He wants it gone.
“I can't find my key...”
He doesn't know if that's the truth. Can't remember looking for it. Just knows his hands were too heavy to reach the height of the lock anyhow. Dead weights, curled into his lap. He blinks down at them, almost surprised to find that they're still there. Still attached.
He could be convinced they'd been torn from his shoulder-blades and tossed into the winter wind. Buried under snow drifts and frozen for safe-keeping. For the spring, when he might want them back again.
He has no use for them right now.
She shifts him like he's dough. Wrests at his jacket until she finds what it is she's looking for. He thinks it might be his heart and lungs.
And then there's light spilling over his shoulders. Illuminating the snowflakes that dance and drift in celebration of something he can't begin to fathom.
She's back to speaking then, saying his name so many times it loses all manner of meaning...
“Luke, Luke, Luke.”
He follows her because it's easier than the alternative.
“Gail, Gail, Gail.”
Not-Jo, Not-Jo, Not-Jo.
She drags him through his own house. He wants to stop and show her the spot where all his blood leaked out, but she's turning lights on and off as they go and not slowing down long enough for him to vocalise much of anything beyond, oh.
When she pushes him into the bathroom and then follows in behind, he thinks she might be lost. But then she's tearing his clothes off and puddling them on the floor by his feet and turning on the taps in the shower as he stands there and tries to figure out why his jaw aches all the way through to his eye-balls.
And how it is that her lips are always the brightest part of his day.
He imagines kissing them. Shuts his eyes and slides his back down the water slick tile and lets the sudden heat fill all the emptied out spaces where little pieces of him have chipped away and disappeared, swirling.
Her arms are wrapped around him, holding him together fiercely by the seams. She's still got her jeans on and the absurdity of the moment is profound.
He thinks he might be crying, but he might also be dead. Or dying. Or not there at all. And so he doesn't dwell on the possibility for too long.
She disappears for an eternity then...
Comes back wearing his clothes, matter of fact, as though the transformation were a common occurence that required no explanation.
And maybe it doesn't.
There's a lamp on in his bedroom. He never uses it, can't even remember buying it, and he wonders, absently, whether it might actually be Andy's. Its light is casting elongated shadows on the back wall and he watches her silhouette as she moves through the room.
She's so sure of herself. So confident and in control and getting things done. He makes a mental note to ask her how she does it later and then fills in the rest of the page with white noise and static.
“You should try and get some sleep,” she says. And he nods because, instinctively, he knows that it's what she wants.
She nods back and he's pleased he got something right.
He knows he needs to thank her. To reassure her. To make some kind of sound that isn't the screeching of his breath as it whistles past his teeth. She hands him a t-shirt and he follows her gaze down to his lap. Watches as she lingers over the angry scarring on his chest.
She runs her fingers lightly over the raised skin before dragging her hand up to his face. Cupping her palm around his cheek and tilting his chin back up in her direction.
“Are you going to be okay?”
He opens his mouth to answer but doesn't have the energy required to lie.
“Can you stay?” His voice sounds foreign as it bounces around the room. Barely more than a whisper.
He can see her hesitate, a sudden movement that gives her uncertainty away in a stammered beat.
“Please?” Please, please...
She nods then, slowly. And he breathes.
It feels like the first time he's done so in decades.