[fic] rookie blue | The Gravity of Wound to Fist
Title | The Gravity of Wound to Fist
Fandom | Rookie Blue
Characters/Pairings | Luke Callaghan, Andy McNally, Gail Peck (Luke/Andy, Luke+Gail)
Word Count | 6700
Rating | MA (violent imagery and themes, including domestic violence)
Summary | A future that heads AU around the middle of Bad Moon Rising. Luke and Andy stay together in the aftermath of the shooting, and Luke and Gail develop a reluctant friendship as he struggles with recovery and the not insignificant demons of his past.
Author's Note | Contains italicised references to Swamplandia! by Karen Russell.
Something pops.
Inside his chest. Not structural, not yet. But metaphorically, yes. Something pops.
There’s a stranger inside his house, staring at him blankly, and his gun is not where he’d stupidly dumped it when he’d walked in earlier, and Luke knows, he knows, there’s little more than a split second left of his current life.
Melodramatic, maybe, but this is not his first rodeo.
He’s on the stairs, faced pressed desperately between the railings and peering diagonally through the ground floor of his home. Light footsteps above, getting closer, alert him to the arrival of his little sister, and he pulls back, turns to shush her at the exact moment their mother’s scream shatters the otherwise eerie quiet.
Jessica freezes mid-step, her eyes open so wide in her head that he thinks, just for a beat, that they’re about to drop out, to roll down the three steps still separating them and land, wobbling and bright, bright blue, at the tips of his bare toes.
His mother screams again then, a single word this time and punctuated by an explosion of sorts that echoes and claps and bounces around inside his head like summer-time thunder.
“Run,” she’d said, and Jessica already has. Her eyes still safely in her face where they belong, she’s spun on her heel and on hands and knees scrambled back to the landing above them. Away.
He runs, too. Pushes straight from crouched into a flat out sprint as he crosses the hallway, tripping awkwardly over winter boots left askew from earlier in the day.
“Mom,” he screams, screams, screams. Runs to…
The first bullet knocks out the circuitry in his brain like a fork of lightening through endlessly shifting storm clouds. His chin drops then, and his eyes slow blink open again just in time to watch his body jerk violently before a second bloom of bright red appears, Pollock-like paint spatter across the front of his pale work shirt.
He forces his eyebrows into a deliberate frown, expecting an unfathomable agony but getting little more than ghosted numbness in return as his knees bend of their own accord, send him backwards and down and down and down and down.
The stranger disappears and sound disappears and light disappears and all the empty spaces inside him are replaced by a pulsing, pounding rush.
He coughs wetly, his mouth filling with liquid while the static fades out as suddenly as it arrived, makes way for fear and agony and the familiar burn of white, hot panic.
He coughs again and more blood fills his mouth, coats his tongue, spills over lips parted and panting. He knows enough about gun shot wounds to know that he should move, now. Should call for help, or help himself, or do anything that isn’t just lay here in a rapidly expanding pool of his own diminishing insides. But his arms are heavy, too heavy, paradoxically weighted down by the lack of blood now circulating through them.
And he’s cold. So very cold.
Mom, he’s screaming, again, still. He remembers this part from before.
Maybe he never stopped.
She has blonde hair. They all have blonde hair. His aunt’s always laughing that they could be the family in the photo frames at Canadian Tire or Walmart, picture perfect she calls them; boy, girl, mother, father. All you’re missing is the Golden Retriever, she teases and Luke has to shut his eyes and gulp in really deep breaths and force his brain to take him somewhere else entirely.
Her hair is not so blonde right now and his feet slip a little through the puddles and pools of her blood as it leaks out of her and onto the white kitchen tiles. He lands hard on his knees, puts one hand out, pulls it away again reflexively. The redness is still warm, and it coats his fingers like a glove.
Bees buzz.
His mouth opens and closes, opens and closes.
The bees keep buzzing.
Sometimes there are fragments of sound. Voices he doesn’t recognise speaking words he could never hope to understand.
But it’s fleeting and he spends most of the time desperately searching for clues as to where he is, who he is. Then it’s gone.
Gone.
Gone.
He thinks he’s little more than a whispered spirit, nothing corporeal is left of him now, weightless and voiceless and floating, floating, floating.
“Luke,” he hears, insistent, like it should mean something.
Like it does mean something.
“Luke, Luke, Luke, please, it’s time to wake up now.”
He didn’t know he was asleep.
“Wake up, wake up, wake up…”
He drags the phone from the wall and lies down next to his mother on the floor. Curls his knees up into her side and presses his bloodied fingertips against the buttons to call for help.
Let’s himself pretend for a little while longer that it’s not too late to fix it all. To put her runny insides back where they belong and to drag away all the screams that still echo inside his head and set them loose into the late night.
A sharp voice answers, starts asking him questions, what’s his name, what’s his emergency? His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth and he chokes, panics, pulls himself back together just enough.
“I’m Luke,” he says. Then, stronger now, “I’m Luke. I think my Dad just shot my Mom…”
Her eyes are open he wants to tell them. They’re open but they don’t blink anymore. He wants to ask if he should use his thumb to slide them closed because it hurts when you don’t blink, don’t blink, don’t blink. He forces himself into staring back at her, counts to eleven before his own eyes dry out and the front door is slamming open and the kitchen is suddenly full of people he doesn’t know.
He’s choking, the solid registration of this fact, startling in the total absence of anything else.
Fingers, his own, find his lips, curl loosely around plastic tubing before being forcibly pushed back to where he’s just dragged them from.
He shifts violently, deliberately, every inch of him screaming that he needs to fight back, to fight, to fight.
Someone, something, sets fire to his insides.
And then it’s gone.
And so is he.
In his dreams, Jessica is always five. She’s blowing out birthday candles and clapping her hands together and he’s stuck on the stairs, watching through the rungs, and she looks up and sees him and screams and screams and screams and her eyes drop from her face and roll, like bowling balls now, heavy and loud and fast, across the cracked and cracking tile that separates them. Bright, bright blue through a river of red.
Waking up comes easier this time. There is no tube down his throat when his eyelids make it past slivered slits, and he recognises the lazily floating hummmmm of narcotics in his bloodstream.
Faces peer down at him from above, some of them speaking, some of them crying, some of them just staring, staring, staring.
He wants to tell them all to blink.
Andy.
Andy.
The room spins. He tries to settle his gaze on her, but every time he gets himself oriented in her direction, she shifts, and then shifts, and then shifts, perpetually out of his reach. He squeezes his eyes shut to stop the cycling, twists his fists into the sheet that’s half covering him and waits for it all to stop.
Stop.
Please stop.
“Luke,” she says, and he recognises her voice above all the other voices, seeks it out, uses it. A palm settles softly in the centre of his chest and he dares open his eyes again, finds it, follows the arm that’s attached to it all the way to a shoulder and a neck and a face.
“Andy,” he says, breathless, the act of forming those two syllables akin to crossing the line at the end of a marathon.
She collapses towards him, her forehead on his shoulder as she gasps and sobs and claws her nails desperately into the skin over his thrumming heart.
He knows he did this to her but he can’t yet remember how.
He establishes pretty quickly that his middle has been sliced right open. The cocktail of drugs they have dripping a steady stream into his veins keeps the reality of this at bay, for the most part. For now.
Andy tells him what happened and doctors, plural, tell him what happened, and Sam, Sam, tells him what happened, and Luke likes to let the bees back in then.
Buzz. Buzz.
Buzzzzz.
“Luke?”
He forces himself back with an exhaled, “Hmmmmm?”
“Are you okay?”
He blinks absently. Thinks about answering.
Doesn’t.
You need to eat something, drink something, say something, do something. A litany of instructions that get trampled on and torn up amid the pain, and the pills that make the pain fade away.
Physical therapy is its own kind of torture and he fights against it, against Andy, against them all. Completely and utterly out of control and desperately clawing for something like stable ground.
Myriad tubes still disappear inside his body, while other bits of him are missing, gone, cut out, blown to irreparable smithereens by a bullet and his own bad luck.
He thinks his dignity was shoveled out alongside his spleen, little more than medical waste. Incinerated.
Stop touching me, he wants to scream, wants to spray paint the walls, wants to carve into his own skin.
Stop touching me, stop touching me, stop, stop, stop…
He’s scooped up like he’s a baby still, folded into arms too gentle to be his Dad’s and too alive to be his Mom’s. A warmed up blanket is tucked around him and the shivers that have reached parts of him he didn’t even know could get cold start to slow down again.
His head is heavy and full of empty space.
He breathes and he breathes and he breathes.
He’s developed a tendency to launch from deep, drug-induced sleep, straight into a panicked, sudden wakefulness that threatens to split his stitches and dissolve what little remains of his sanity.
They offer him drugs to counter the drugs and he lets them do what they want. Becomes pliant and hollowed out and waits for them all to leave him alone again.
Frank comes. In full uniform and with his cap tucked formally beneath one arm. He is here on official police business, that much Luke doesn’t need to question in order to confirm. A doctor hovers in the doorway, makes noises about how now is not really the time for this, and Frank apologises before he’s even started.
“There are a couple of things I need to ask you about,” Frank continues, and he doesn’t even try to stop the up and down sound of Frank’s words from dissolving into particles that float off, that disappear into the ceiling vent in the corner of the room.
He doesn’t know what happens after that. By the time the air above him has cleared again, Frank is gone and the hovering doctor is gone and he thinks maybe he is gone, too.
Andy gets a cold the same day he’s moved from ICU into his own room. It’s nothing serious, she tells him over the phone, a sniffle and a sore throat. And he probably did that to her, too.
She’s been told to stay away, that he’s immunocompromised and she could kill him and he wants to laugh at that.
To laugh and laugh and laugh.
Gail comes instead, with a shrug and a heavy collapse into the chair beside his bed.
“You don’t have to…” he starts, doesn’t really know how to finish.
She shrugs again, rationalises, “Well, I’m here now…”
He wakes up, gagging mechanically on his own panicked breaths, and Gail’s still perched by his side, a pale-faced ghost in the corner of his room that gets an access all areas pass to the freak show.
She stands up and steps closer while he works desperately to pull everything back inside of him. She doesn’t touch him. He thinks she’s going to for a beat, everyone else does after all, but she doesn’t touch him and she doesn’t say anything and she just stands there and breathes methodically and he clings onto the sound of her shifting air and copies it, copies it, copies it.
Tunes out the myriad agonies, real and imagined, and fills himself only with the silence of her.
She steps back again when his breathing evens out, gives him space to settle into the residual agony and make a decision about what to do with it. He can accept the narcotics that give him nightmares and make him feel endlessly ill or he can choose a position to lie in and not move for the next four hours and it sometimes seems like this is the full extent of his day.
He drags one hand down his face, over sweat-slicked brow and through several days’ worth of stubble. He’s feverish and disorientated and exhausted through to his carved out core. The infection he’s been fighting since well before he lurched towards consciousness is dogged and clawing and his back is starting to loudly protest the amount of time he’s spending flat on it and there is still a fucking tube jammed through his red raw skin.
He is so incredibly done with all of it.
“The Beginning of the End can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.”
Gail breaks the escalating storm inside his skull with words that mean nothing and everything at the very same time. He doesn’t recognise them, not in the order she presents them.
But he has lived them nonetheless.
“When I was a kid I couldn't see any of these ridges. It was only after Swamplandia!'s fall that time folded into a story with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. If you're short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell.”
She’s reading. Not to him, he doesn’t think, not specifically. Her voice, a low rumble that he has to relax into to hear.
He learns to count the minutes through the turn of each page.
He keeps his eyes resolutely pulled shut. And when she stops, later, he doesn’t speak, feigns sleep for fear of shattering the rare calm that has descended.
“You need to speak to Frank,” she says, quietly. She will not be fooled by him, he thinks; she will not be fooled by anybody.
The sounds of movement, of soft shoes stepping across the clinically spotless linoleum, tell him she is on her way out. He doesn’t acknowledge what she’s just said. Keeps his eyes shut and his inhales even and waits, waits, waits for her to leave.
“Goodnight, Luke,” she finishes from a distance, from somewhere near the doorway perhaps, her voice barely above a sigh, and he wonders if, maybe, he has fooled her after all.
Jessica screams in her sleep, or is it in his sleep?, high pitched wails that have him bolting upright and clawing at his throat, like maybe the sounds have escaped out of him instead.
A physiotherapist encourages him into standing upright with the support of a metal frame while Andy watches on with her lower lip caught between her teeth. The last of the drainage tubes have finally been extricated from his abdomen. His kidneys are no longer threatening to abandon him altogether like his spleen already did and his white blood cell count has stopped doing whatever it was doing earlier in the week and apparently he can go home in two or three days.
Home.
Apparently.
But he has to be mobile before then, he’s been told. One foot in front of the other and all that jazz.
The room spins violently and he fails to bite back a low groan.
“Luke?”
He can’t tell if it’s Andy or the physiotherapist speaking. His eyes are shut to slow the rollercoaster inside his guts and the temperature in the room has dropped to somewhere south of freezing and he’s not sure, suddenly, if he remembers how to breathe.
He wakes up on the floor. Rolled onto his side and with an oxygen mask covering his face, a cuff tightening its grip around his upper arm.
He’s pretty sure that wasn’t meant to happen.
He’s nauseous still, exhausted, lost inside his own head, and when everyone, all of them, the faceless they start talking him through how he’s going to get back up, he flat out refuses to move. The side of his face is pressed against the floor, ice cold and slowly going numb.
“No,” he’s saying, unable to be anymore articulate than that. “No, no, no, no…”
And then Andy is right there on the floor, flat and facing him, her position mirroring his.
“Hey,” she says, and she’s smiling even though he can see that her eyes are over-bright, her face wet and tear-streaked. She brings one hand up, combs her fingers through his hair before pulling closer, pressing a kiss to his forehead.
“It’s okay,” she continues, the words hot against his sweat slick skin, “we’ll stay here for a minute…” and in that moment, they are the only two people to exist.
And he loves her more than he can ever hope to explain.
Gail’s back late the next morning. Bossy and overwhelming and more like the Rookie Peck he remembers from the station, she comes bearing grapes that she proceeds to devour herself.
“Hey,” she says from where she’s leaned against the doorway, the casual greeting wobbling out around a mouthful of half-chewed fruit.
“Hey,” he echoes haltingly, self-conscious for some inexplicable reason.
“So, when are you getting booted?” she asks, hand moving from bag to mouth again before she leans forward to offer him some.
He plucks a grape from the vine they’re still attached to, rolls it between his thumb and finger absently as he answers with a shrug.
“Apparently physical therapy didn’t go so well yesterday,” he adds, shrugs again quickly, like that’s what he’s been told but he doesn’t really know why.
“They didn’t tell you?” she asks, and he contemplates where to from here. Decides on the truth because it’s less effort than a lie.
“I passed out before it really got started, could be that?”
She stops chewing, just for beat or two, before; “Oh.”
Resumes chewing, swallows.
Discharge forms and follow-up appointment timecards and prescriptions for pain pills and endless antibiotics appear at the foot of his bed. He wonders if the bees he can hear brought them in, flapped their wings and buzzed their buzz and dropped pieces of paper, heavy artillery disguised as white, A4 page.
Jessica’s eyes rolled their way into his room in the middle of the night, he’d heard them coming, rumbling through the otherwise silence. They’re together now but crossed askew in the corner, lidless and lash-less and unblinking.
He gives them a cursory nod of acknowledgement.
Andy drives them both home that afternoon. She chatters nervously the entire trip, whole sentences he can’t begin to follow as she jumps without warning from one topic to the next.
Luke spends the thirty-seven minutes it takes them to get from the hospital to their house counting iridescent digits as they click over on the clock built into the stereo system of her car.
This is how he knows it takes them thirty-seven minutes to get from the hospital to their house.
Bending over is still an exercise in controlled restraint. Despite this, he welcomes the fact it takes him just over fifteen minutes to locate and then effectively pull on a pair of sports socks and his trainers and then loop the laces together because it’s fifteen minutes he doesn’t have to spend staring at the ghosted outline of his own bloodstain.
It’s cold outside. Not icy, not yet, but he knows intuitively that the first snowfall of the season is only hours away.
He walks to the corner of their block. Takes it slow, steady, because, yeah, he might be going just a little bit insane but he’s definitely not an idiot and besides, he hasn’t seen Jessica’s eyes since they floated, tumbleweed-like, through his peripheral vision as Andy left for work this morning.
So surely that’s something.
There’s a small park diagonally across the street, and he looks both ways before crossing, up and down the almost deserted street. Imagines, briefly, stepping out in front of a bus, or a blazing fire truck, but neither appear, so…
Later, when Andy asks him about his day, he skips over the part where he sat on a swing at the park for seven hours and didn’t walk home again until his fingers were numb and his knees were dusted white with early snow. Goes straight to where he made them pizza for dinner.
“Pizza?” she says, smiling wide and hopeful, “You made pizza?”
“Well,” he counters back, “Technically, Mr. Ranaldi made the pizza. But I called and asked him to deliver it?”
He’s not sleeping.
Andy is sleeping. He spends most of the night watching her eyelids flutter and her fingers twitch, but she still wakes up exhausted and grey, “Are you okay? Do you need something? Did you sleep? How’s your chest? Your back? Your sanity?” perpetually dropping from the tip of her tongue, little more than instinct now and he answers back with the same degree of automaton.
Yes.
No.
Some.
Fine.
Fine.
Fine.
Andy’s been gone to work for just over an hour when there’s a knock at the front door.
He’s only managed the left sock/shoe/lace combination so far and usually he’d be out of the house by now, walking laps of the park or sitting on the too low swing with his hands folded on his knees, but he’s sluggish and slow today, itchy in a way that has little to do with scar tissue and scabbed over skin.
The fisheye peephole distorts Gail’s head and shoulders into a badly drawn cartoon version of an RCMP officer. He stares at the image for longer than necessary, is startled back to motion when she reaches a gloved hand forward and knocks again, the sound level with the thrumming hum of his heartbeat.
“Gail,” he says, opening the door with a flourish that he thinks is probably the wrong side of enthusiastic.
Like he’s trying too hard. Which he is.
He makes a quick mental note to tone it down, drops his eyes to the carpet and remembers the single sock/shoe/lace combination and gets distracted by his bare toes.
Crap.
“Hey,” she says, even and measured.
“Hey,” he mirrors, thankful. Slows everything inside him down to match her.
She’s come to finalise some details, she tells him, and to finish some of the paperwork required for a hearing that’s coming up; a mental health assessment of sorts.
At first he thinks it’s him being assessed, but then he remembers.
And realises.
Oh.
“I volunteered,” she says, and her voice sounds tight. “I thought it might…”
He guesses she’d been planning to say make it easier or something similar, and he appreciates the sentiment even if it’s no-where near the truth. But she trails off instead, can’t bring herself to finish the sentence, and they make eye contact in the silence that draws out and on and on.
He leads her into the kitchen, props himself on a stool and puts his odd feet flat on the floor. The tiles beneath his bare toes are like ice and he counts the seconds it takes for them to warm to tolerable beneath his skin.
Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen…
“I don’t remember much,” he says, before she can start questioning him. And she nods and says yeah and not surprising and that makes sense, even though none of it actually does.
Jessica screams. When he catches sight of her, there are gaping holes where her eyes should be.
“Luke?” she says, like maybe she’s already said it several times before…
Her hand clamps over his and the screaming cuts to sudden silence, like he can hear or he can feel but he can no longer do both at once. He remembers a time when being touched made his skin crawl. Now he prays that she’ll never let go.
“You want to get out of here?”
They walk to the park. Sit side-by-side on the swings as the minutes tick by, hidden in exhaled clouds and the soft chirp of birds, high in the trees behind them.
“Do you think Andy’s okay?” he asks her after a while. He keeps his eyes forward, watches an older man walking a small, white dog in a red and blue coat on the sidewalk opposite.
All you’re missing is the Golden Retriever, he hears.
“I think she’s okay,” Gail answers, and Luke likes that she sounds sure of her answer, imagines her nodding along with her words. “I think she’s probably worried about you, but that’s to be expected, all things considered.”
“She doesn’t blame herself?” he asks without having planned to, and he senses Gail still beside him, wants to take his words back, to roll them back in and swallow them down.
“No, I don’t think so,” she says, pauses, the silence loaded for a beat. “Do you?”
His timing is all off. It sounds like he pauses, like he’s thinking about his answer, but there are consonants and vowels stuck between his teeth, beneath his tongue, down the back of his throat, and he pauses because he can’t breathe, not because he doesn’t know.
“She is the best thing that has ever happened to me,” he finally manages. “The best person, the best friend, the best part of me…”
He blinks. He might be crying.
The man and his little dog have disappeared.
He’s up early the next day. Swallows antibiotics and Tylenol with a glass of orange juice while Andy is in the shower because they’re not a part of the look he is going for this morning.
“Hey,” he says as she walks into the kitchen, and when his arms wrap her up, tight, her skin is still warm and pink from the hot water and she smells like coconuts or apricots. Or both.
“Hey yourself,” she says without stepping back, her voice rumbling through his ribcage. “You’re up early.”
“Yeah,” he agrees, chickens out of going any further just yet.
She makes coffee. Has slowly slurped away at half of it when he guesses the other shoe drops.
“Hang on a minute,” she says, frowning at him from over the rim of her mug, ”you’re up early.”
“You said that already.” He stalls because it’s all he has left.
She sets her coffee heavily on the counter and stands up.
“Oh, no, no, no…” her head shaking and her finger wagging and her frown… frowning a little more resolutely. “Not happening, buddy.”
“Come on,” he says, “it’s been a week. You can’t leave me here by myself all day again…
As planned, he aims for light, bored, exasperated. Works desperately at hiding the truth beneath several layers of fluff.
Can’t, don’t, please, Andy, please.
Please don’t leave me here…
“There are so many things that have to happen before you can come back to work,” she says, and she seems surprised, like maybe she hasn’t seen this coming. He can’t begin to fathom how, but he is grateful for it nonetheless.
“I’ll do paperwork,” he counters, “monitor the property cage, make coffee, clean the whiteboards…”
She snorts and he stiffens, because he’d been going for joking when he’d come up with those lines, but now he’s panicking and serious and he can’t remember the last time anything was a joke, especially not this.
“Imagine I’m Frank,” she says, crossing her arms and puffing out her chest, like that’s all she needs to pass as an approximate imitation of their boss. “Now, ask me…”
“Ask you what?” He’s confused and sinking and can’t seem to scrabble for the words he needs. The right words. The convincing words.
“Ask me if you can come back to work today, me as Frank,” she clarifies.
In the end, he loses the game. Whatever the game is that they’re playing. And she’s barely five minutes out the door before he’s shifting to a lopsided jog on the sidewalk that circles the park. He does three laps, vomits in the gutter, and then goes home.
Sleeps for nine silent, still hours straight.
The RCMP has a policy that says if you’re injured in the line of duty then you get mandated counselling with a bird-like old guy who wears sweater vests and speaks with a barely detectable Quebecoise accent. He’s not sure if that last part is specified in the text though.
He’s also not so sure what policy says about off-duty near death experiences, but given he took two to the abdomen, from his own gun, in his own living room, he suspects the brass are going to weigh in at some point. He’s been home from hospital almost three weeks now though; no one’s mentioned anything and…
Well, he’s hardly going to bring it up himself.
Andy settles again as the days tick by. He finds the shift in her to be an almost visible entity.
She can laugh without flinching now, and she’s back to digging her fingernails into his skin when they have sex. No more ghosted fingertips and gently, gently, shhhh.
She cooks, sometimes, in nothing but her underwear; sings along, loudly and terribly, to whatever song she’s got vibrating through his metaphorically crumbling walls.
She is the most resilient person he thinks he has ever met and he takes to holding his breath whenever she’s near, lest his own thinly veiled terror re-infect her.
He clings onto her and pushes her away in alternating microbursts. Exists, for the most part, in a perpetual state of blind panic.
Jessica’s disembodied eyeballs find the whole charade hilarious.
He attends follow up medical and physical therapy appointments like a robot. Answers questions on autopilot while gloved fingertips examine the healing wounds across his stomach. Jogs sedately on a treadmill as a cheerful twenty something with a clipboard and a dark ponytail makes notes and smiles encouragement at all the right moments. Pretends like he’s not going to grind out another five, ten, fifteen ks the minute he gets home.
“You’re making excellent progress,” Dark Ponytail says, bobbing up and down enthusiastically in time with the staccato syllables. “You’ll be back to your old self in no time!”
He doesn’t bother laughing at the notion but his rhythm stutters for several beats and betrays him regardless, his feet feel suddenly detached from his ankles. The treadmill slows then and he has to grab the bars to stop from falling.
“That’s probably enough for today, yeah?”
The ponytail hangs, limp and defeated.
Gail busts him three days later.
Which, well, of course she does.
She runs past him at speed, all black Lululemon and iridescent Nike, ears stuffed with the buds from an iPhone he can’t see. She doesn’t seem to recognise him at the time, which makes sense, he supposes, given the context.
Her presence unnerves him though, forces him to ask questions he’s not sure he can answer.
What and why and how and should…?
Like he’s been caught out in a lie.
He completes a quick one-two glance up and down the road before stepping off the sidewalk and crossing to the other side, picks his pace up a gear or two, like going faster and going further will be what saves him in the end.
Half an hour later, as he’s turning on the shower and stripping himself free from a sweat soaked Academy t-shirt and snow damp toque, he gets a text message.
Hey, it says, and he imagines a pause even though the next words continue across the screen without one. Do I have to come over there and kick your dumb ass?
Despite, or perhaps because of, his unorthodox approach to rehab., he passes everything he needs to pass and gets word he’s back on the duty roster at the start of the coming week. Frank calls him personally, and he’s not sure if he imagines the uncertainty laced through the words or if Frank simply knows something everyone else seems oblivious to.
He nods his head along even though Frank can’t see him. Commits to countless promises he can barely remember three minutes after the call is over.
Andy destroys the cork in a bottle of red in her excitement and he can’t help but get caught up in the spell of her.
Giddy and light and unburdened.
Until it all falls apart.
It’s starts innocently enough; three quarters of a bottle of wine and soft cheese and Andy, half naked and working her way along the line of his jaw with her lips. He puddles his jeans on the floor at his feet as they skip the pretense of needing a bed for what comes next.
They fuck right there in the living room instead. Start on their knees before sinking down even further. It’s loud and energetic and, later, he uses both those things as excuses for why he didn’t figure it out until it was too late.
Andy’s movements change. Her hips shift and her elbows lock together behind his head and suddenly she’s not so much grinding against him as she is trying to climb inside his skin.
She’s also sobbing; an unhinged hysteria that fills the deepest, darkest parts of his hollowed out insides.
He thinks he understands without having to ask, but he does so regardless and has to deliberately chase away the bees that threaten when her answers are not the answers he’s expecting.
She’s extricated herself from him and is pressed up against the far wall, shivering and naked and barely able to speak.
He’d hold his breath but they’re too far-gone for that to work now.
Maybe it never did.
He stands and takes shaky steps towards her. Reaches out his hands and doesn’t blink until she reaches back, allows him to drag her to her feet and out of the room.
Contemplates burning the entire house to the ground, haunted as it is by memories and dust.
Afterwards, it’s like a competition to see who can apologise the most times and for the most reasons and in the most abstract of ways.
They finish the bottle of red curled together in the base of the shower, warm water and alcohol that combines to slow the endless shivering.
Even if only for one more night.
His first day back at work evolves precisely into the non-event he’d been hoping for.
Tie tied and shoes polished, he shrugs into his jacket and gets double thumbs up from Andy before she drops her hand to his and gives it a squeeze of solidarity.
“You ready,” she asks, light but sincere.
And he nods and grins and playfully drags her towards the door.
Means it.
He’s back at work barely three weeks when Diaz radios in about a missing persons case he and Epstein had landed earlier that morning. A whole family, up and vanished. Apparently.
In the end, it turns out the truth is far more predictable than that.
He’s using the doorframe to keep him upright at the scene when Frank arrives. He’s got Oliver downstairs and organising the rookies for a knock of the surrounding streets while the tech guys from the coroner’s office finish up photographing the bodies before they can be bagged and removed.
Bodies.
Plural.
The three kids are still in their beds. They could be sleeping if it weren’t for the blood spatter. Eyes closed and dreaming of pirates or ponies or whatever it is that little kids dream about these days.
He doesn’t think he was ever a little kid.
Their mother is in the hallway, her brain matter; abstract wall art against the white paint and wood panelling. If he turns his head he can see her right foot from where he’s standing. It’s covered with a sock, white with a blue band around the ankle. He keeps expecting it to twitch.
It never does.
“Detective Callaghan?”
Frank’s voice drifts past him, a rumble of sound he barely registers, and by the time he’s gathered the air required to voice a response, he’s moved from casual questioning to careful, cautious concern.
“Luke?”
His reply is little more than a distracted noise that hums against the back of his throat.
“Okay, you’re done here. I’ve got Detective Rosarti on her way over; she’s going to head this one up.”
Frank’s got a hand wrapped around his upper arm and is leading him effortlessly back through the house. He protests verbally, but only because he knows he’s meant to, doesn’t bother to resist in any physical kind of way.
“What, why?”
“Luke.”
“No, it’s fine. I’m fine. You don’t-” He runs out of arguments about now, can’t even finish the sentence because he’s got no idea how it ends.
“It’s already done,” Frank continues. “She’ll be here any minute. I’ve already told Oliver to give her a full briefing when she arrives. I want you back at the station.”
“Frank…”
“This isn’t up for debate, Callaghan. You’re with me.”
Back at the Fifteen, he stalks towards his office and righteously pretends to be put out. Roughly opens and shuts draws and manages to spill the half-cup of cold coffee that he’d not had time to finish hours ago.
He’s furiously swiping at the mess with a fistful of Kleenex when a knock at his door stalls him.
“Yes?” he says, and he’s expecting Frank so the tone is clipped and terse and entirely forced.
It’s not Frank.
“I was going to ask if you wanted a coffee,” Gail starts, eyebrows arching as she takes in the chaos on his desktop, “but it looks like you’ve got that sorted already.”
He rolls his eyes and admits defeat then. Tosses the sopping ball of soggy tissue into the trashcan by the door and follows her out through the largely abandoned station floor to the staff kitchen.
“So how’d you draw the short straw?” he asks, the implication of his question obvious despite the lack of elaboration.
“Front desk duty,” she answers with a shrug. “Someone’s gotta be the face of Fifteen.” Punctuates her false cheer with a wide grin that looks more b-grade horror movie than friendly neighbourhood constabulary.
“Right,” he says. “Yep. You’re definitely the right person for that job.”
He’s slowly spinning in a desk chair on the other side of Gail’s desk when he starts down a rabbit hole he hadn’t planned.
“Remember when you came round,” he says, and he keeps the slow spin turning even as he feels her freeze opposite him.
“You wanted to ask me some questions,” he continues, shuts his eyes and spins and spins and spins. “I said I didn’t remember much and then we went to the park and…”
He registers the sound of her mug settling back on the desktop.
“But I do,” he admits now, quiet but sure, voice steady, definite, “I do remember some of it.”
“I remember thinking,” he says, “while I was standing there in my house, looking down the barrel of my own gun, that my life was about to end. And I don’t mean I thought I was going to die, because I don’t think I did. Not dead dead, in the ground, dead. But abstractly? I knew right then, right in that moment, that everything was about to change.”
“And it did,” she confirms for him with a slow nod. “It absolutely did, didn’t it?”
His skin feels too tight around his concrete bones.
“The two-word version of our story?” he recites, pauses, waits for her sudden blink of recognition.
“We fell.”
Fandom | Rookie Blue
Characters/Pairings | Luke Callaghan, Andy McNally, Gail Peck (Luke/Andy, Luke+Gail)
Word Count | 6700
Rating | MA (violent imagery and themes, including domestic violence)
Summary | A future that heads AU around the middle of Bad Moon Rising. Luke and Andy stay together in the aftermath of the shooting, and Luke and Gail develop a reluctant friendship as he struggles with recovery and the not insignificant demons of his past.
Author's Note | Contains italicised references to Swamplandia! by Karen Russell.
Something pops.
Inside his chest. Not structural, not yet. But metaphorically, yes. Something pops.
There’s a stranger inside his house, staring at him blankly, and his gun is not where he’d stupidly dumped it when he’d walked in earlier, and Luke knows, he knows, there’s little more than a split second left of his current life.
Melodramatic, maybe, but this is not his first rodeo.
He’s on the stairs, faced pressed desperately between the railings and peering diagonally through the ground floor of his home. Light footsteps above, getting closer, alert him to the arrival of his little sister, and he pulls back, turns to shush her at the exact moment their mother’s scream shatters the otherwise eerie quiet.
Jessica freezes mid-step, her eyes open so wide in her head that he thinks, just for a beat, that they’re about to drop out, to roll down the three steps still separating them and land, wobbling and bright, bright blue, at the tips of his bare toes.
His mother screams again then, a single word this time and punctuated by an explosion of sorts that echoes and claps and bounces around inside his head like summer-time thunder.
“Run,” she’d said, and Jessica already has. Her eyes still safely in her face where they belong, she’s spun on her heel and on hands and knees scrambled back to the landing above them. Away.
He runs, too. Pushes straight from crouched into a flat out sprint as he crosses the hallway, tripping awkwardly over winter boots left askew from earlier in the day.
“Mom,” he screams, screams, screams. Runs to…
The first bullet knocks out the circuitry in his brain like a fork of lightening through endlessly shifting storm clouds. His chin drops then, and his eyes slow blink open again just in time to watch his body jerk violently before a second bloom of bright red appears, Pollock-like paint spatter across the front of his pale work shirt.
He forces his eyebrows into a deliberate frown, expecting an unfathomable agony but getting little more than ghosted numbness in return as his knees bend of their own accord, send him backwards and down and down and down and down.
The stranger disappears and sound disappears and light disappears and all the empty spaces inside him are replaced by a pulsing, pounding rush.
He coughs wetly, his mouth filling with liquid while the static fades out as suddenly as it arrived, makes way for fear and agony and the familiar burn of white, hot panic.
He coughs again and more blood fills his mouth, coats his tongue, spills over lips parted and panting. He knows enough about gun shot wounds to know that he should move, now. Should call for help, or help himself, or do anything that isn’t just lay here in a rapidly expanding pool of his own diminishing insides. But his arms are heavy, too heavy, paradoxically weighted down by the lack of blood now circulating through them.
And he’s cold. So very cold.
Mom, he’s screaming, again, still. He remembers this part from before.
Maybe he never stopped.
She has blonde hair. They all have blonde hair. His aunt’s always laughing that they could be the family in the photo frames at Canadian Tire or Walmart, picture perfect she calls them; boy, girl, mother, father. All you’re missing is the Golden Retriever, she teases and Luke has to shut his eyes and gulp in really deep breaths and force his brain to take him somewhere else entirely.
Her hair is not so blonde right now and his feet slip a little through the puddles and pools of her blood as it leaks out of her and onto the white kitchen tiles. He lands hard on his knees, puts one hand out, pulls it away again reflexively. The redness is still warm, and it coats his fingers like a glove.
Bees buzz.
His mouth opens and closes, opens and closes.
The bees keep buzzing.
Sometimes there are fragments of sound. Voices he doesn’t recognise speaking words he could never hope to understand.
But it’s fleeting and he spends most of the time desperately searching for clues as to where he is, who he is. Then it’s gone.
Gone.
Gone.
He thinks he’s little more than a whispered spirit, nothing corporeal is left of him now, weightless and voiceless and floating, floating, floating.
“Luke,” he hears, insistent, like it should mean something.
Like it does mean something.
“Luke, Luke, Luke, please, it’s time to wake up now.”
He didn’t know he was asleep.
“Wake up, wake up, wake up…”
He drags the phone from the wall and lies down next to his mother on the floor. Curls his knees up into her side and presses his bloodied fingertips against the buttons to call for help.
Let’s himself pretend for a little while longer that it’s not too late to fix it all. To put her runny insides back where they belong and to drag away all the screams that still echo inside his head and set them loose into the late night.
A sharp voice answers, starts asking him questions, what’s his name, what’s his emergency? His tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth and he chokes, panics, pulls himself back together just enough.
“I’m Luke,” he says. Then, stronger now, “I’m Luke. I think my Dad just shot my Mom…”
Her eyes are open he wants to tell them. They’re open but they don’t blink anymore. He wants to ask if he should use his thumb to slide them closed because it hurts when you don’t blink, don’t blink, don’t blink. He forces himself into staring back at her, counts to eleven before his own eyes dry out and the front door is slamming open and the kitchen is suddenly full of people he doesn’t know.
He’s choking, the solid registration of this fact, startling in the total absence of anything else.
Fingers, his own, find his lips, curl loosely around plastic tubing before being forcibly pushed back to where he’s just dragged them from.
He shifts violently, deliberately, every inch of him screaming that he needs to fight back, to fight, to fight.
Someone, something, sets fire to his insides.
And then it’s gone.
And so is he.
In his dreams, Jessica is always five. She’s blowing out birthday candles and clapping her hands together and he’s stuck on the stairs, watching through the rungs, and she looks up and sees him and screams and screams and screams and her eyes drop from her face and roll, like bowling balls now, heavy and loud and fast, across the cracked and cracking tile that separates them. Bright, bright blue through a river of red.
Waking up comes easier this time. There is no tube down his throat when his eyelids make it past slivered slits, and he recognises the lazily floating hummmmm of narcotics in his bloodstream.
Faces peer down at him from above, some of them speaking, some of them crying, some of them just staring, staring, staring.
He wants to tell them all to blink.
Andy.
Andy.
The room spins. He tries to settle his gaze on her, but every time he gets himself oriented in her direction, she shifts, and then shifts, and then shifts, perpetually out of his reach. He squeezes his eyes shut to stop the cycling, twists his fists into the sheet that’s half covering him and waits for it all to stop.
Stop.
Please stop.
“Luke,” she says, and he recognises her voice above all the other voices, seeks it out, uses it. A palm settles softly in the centre of his chest and he dares open his eyes again, finds it, follows the arm that’s attached to it all the way to a shoulder and a neck and a face.
“Andy,” he says, breathless, the act of forming those two syllables akin to crossing the line at the end of a marathon.
She collapses towards him, her forehead on his shoulder as she gasps and sobs and claws her nails desperately into the skin over his thrumming heart.
He knows he did this to her but he can’t yet remember how.
He establishes pretty quickly that his middle has been sliced right open. The cocktail of drugs they have dripping a steady stream into his veins keeps the reality of this at bay, for the most part. For now.
Andy tells him what happened and doctors, plural, tell him what happened, and Sam, Sam, tells him what happened, and Luke likes to let the bees back in then.
Buzz. Buzz.
Buzzzzz.
“Luke?”
He forces himself back with an exhaled, “Hmmmmm?”
“Are you okay?”
He blinks absently. Thinks about answering.
Doesn’t.
You need to eat something, drink something, say something, do something. A litany of instructions that get trampled on and torn up amid the pain, and the pills that make the pain fade away.
Physical therapy is its own kind of torture and he fights against it, against Andy, against them all. Completely and utterly out of control and desperately clawing for something like stable ground.
Myriad tubes still disappear inside his body, while other bits of him are missing, gone, cut out, blown to irreparable smithereens by a bullet and his own bad luck.
He thinks his dignity was shoveled out alongside his spleen, little more than medical waste. Incinerated.
Stop touching me, he wants to scream, wants to spray paint the walls, wants to carve into his own skin.
Stop touching me, stop touching me, stop, stop, stop…
He’s scooped up like he’s a baby still, folded into arms too gentle to be his Dad’s and too alive to be his Mom’s. A warmed up blanket is tucked around him and the shivers that have reached parts of him he didn’t even know could get cold start to slow down again.
His head is heavy and full of empty space.
He breathes and he breathes and he breathes.
He’s developed a tendency to launch from deep, drug-induced sleep, straight into a panicked, sudden wakefulness that threatens to split his stitches and dissolve what little remains of his sanity.
They offer him drugs to counter the drugs and he lets them do what they want. Becomes pliant and hollowed out and waits for them all to leave him alone again.
Frank comes. In full uniform and with his cap tucked formally beneath one arm. He is here on official police business, that much Luke doesn’t need to question in order to confirm. A doctor hovers in the doorway, makes noises about how now is not really the time for this, and Frank apologises before he’s even started.
“There are a couple of things I need to ask you about,” Frank continues, and he doesn’t even try to stop the up and down sound of Frank’s words from dissolving into particles that float off, that disappear into the ceiling vent in the corner of the room.
He doesn’t know what happens after that. By the time the air above him has cleared again, Frank is gone and the hovering doctor is gone and he thinks maybe he is gone, too.
Andy gets a cold the same day he’s moved from ICU into his own room. It’s nothing serious, she tells him over the phone, a sniffle and a sore throat. And he probably did that to her, too.
She’s been told to stay away, that he’s immunocompromised and she could kill him and he wants to laugh at that.
To laugh and laugh and laugh.
Gail comes instead, with a shrug and a heavy collapse into the chair beside his bed.
“You don’t have to…” he starts, doesn’t really know how to finish.
She shrugs again, rationalises, “Well, I’m here now…”
He wakes up, gagging mechanically on his own panicked breaths, and Gail’s still perched by his side, a pale-faced ghost in the corner of his room that gets an access all areas pass to the freak show.
She stands up and steps closer while he works desperately to pull everything back inside of him. She doesn’t touch him. He thinks she’s going to for a beat, everyone else does after all, but she doesn’t touch him and she doesn’t say anything and she just stands there and breathes methodically and he clings onto the sound of her shifting air and copies it, copies it, copies it.
Tunes out the myriad agonies, real and imagined, and fills himself only with the silence of her.
She steps back again when his breathing evens out, gives him space to settle into the residual agony and make a decision about what to do with it. He can accept the narcotics that give him nightmares and make him feel endlessly ill or he can choose a position to lie in and not move for the next four hours and it sometimes seems like this is the full extent of his day.
He drags one hand down his face, over sweat-slicked brow and through several days’ worth of stubble. He’s feverish and disorientated and exhausted through to his carved out core. The infection he’s been fighting since well before he lurched towards consciousness is dogged and clawing and his back is starting to loudly protest the amount of time he’s spending flat on it and there is still a fucking tube jammed through his red raw skin.
He is so incredibly done with all of it.
“The Beginning of the End can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.”
Gail breaks the escalating storm inside his skull with words that mean nothing and everything at the very same time. He doesn’t recognise them, not in the order she presents them.
But he has lived them nonetheless.
“When I was a kid I couldn't see any of these ridges. It was only after Swamplandia!'s fall that time folded into a story with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. If you're short on time, that would be the two-word version of our story: we fell.”
She’s reading. Not to him, he doesn’t think, not specifically. Her voice, a low rumble that he has to relax into to hear.
He learns to count the minutes through the turn of each page.
He keeps his eyes resolutely pulled shut. And when she stops, later, he doesn’t speak, feigns sleep for fear of shattering the rare calm that has descended.
“You need to speak to Frank,” she says, quietly. She will not be fooled by him, he thinks; she will not be fooled by anybody.
The sounds of movement, of soft shoes stepping across the clinically spotless linoleum, tell him she is on her way out. He doesn’t acknowledge what she’s just said. Keeps his eyes shut and his inhales even and waits, waits, waits for her to leave.
“Goodnight, Luke,” she finishes from a distance, from somewhere near the doorway perhaps, her voice barely above a sigh, and he wonders if, maybe, he has fooled her after all.
Jessica screams in her sleep, or is it in his sleep?, high pitched wails that have him bolting upright and clawing at his throat, like maybe the sounds have escaped out of him instead.
A physiotherapist encourages him into standing upright with the support of a metal frame while Andy watches on with her lower lip caught between her teeth. The last of the drainage tubes have finally been extricated from his abdomen. His kidneys are no longer threatening to abandon him altogether like his spleen already did and his white blood cell count has stopped doing whatever it was doing earlier in the week and apparently he can go home in two or three days.
Home.
Apparently.
But he has to be mobile before then, he’s been told. One foot in front of the other and all that jazz.
The room spins violently and he fails to bite back a low groan.
“Luke?”
He can’t tell if it’s Andy or the physiotherapist speaking. His eyes are shut to slow the rollercoaster inside his guts and the temperature in the room has dropped to somewhere south of freezing and he’s not sure, suddenly, if he remembers how to breathe.
He wakes up on the floor. Rolled onto his side and with an oxygen mask covering his face, a cuff tightening its grip around his upper arm.
He’s pretty sure that wasn’t meant to happen.
He’s nauseous still, exhausted, lost inside his own head, and when everyone, all of them, the faceless they start talking him through how he’s going to get back up, he flat out refuses to move. The side of his face is pressed against the floor, ice cold and slowly going numb.
“No,” he’s saying, unable to be anymore articulate than that. “No, no, no, no…”
And then Andy is right there on the floor, flat and facing him, her position mirroring his.
“Hey,” she says, and she’s smiling even though he can see that her eyes are over-bright, her face wet and tear-streaked. She brings one hand up, combs her fingers through his hair before pulling closer, pressing a kiss to his forehead.
“It’s okay,” she continues, the words hot against his sweat slick skin, “we’ll stay here for a minute…” and in that moment, they are the only two people to exist.
And he loves her more than he can ever hope to explain.
Gail’s back late the next morning. Bossy and overwhelming and more like the Rookie Peck he remembers from the station, she comes bearing grapes that she proceeds to devour herself.
“Hey,” she says from where she’s leaned against the doorway, the casual greeting wobbling out around a mouthful of half-chewed fruit.
“Hey,” he echoes haltingly, self-conscious for some inexplicable reason.
“So, when are you getting booted?” she asks, hand moving from bag to mouth again before she leans forward to offer him some.
He plucks a grape from the vine they’re still attached to, rolls it between his thumb and finger absently as he answers with a shrug.
“Apparently physical therapy didn’t go so well yesterday,” he adds, shrugs again quickly, like that’s what he’s been told but he doesn’t really know why.
“They didn’t tell you?” she asks, and he contemplates where to from here. Decides on the truth because it’s less effort than a lie.
“I passed out before it really got started, could be that?”
She stops chewing, just for beat or two, before; “Oh.”
Resumes chewing, swallows.
Discharge forms and follow-up appointment timecards and prescriptions for pain pills and endless antibiotics appear at the foot of his bed. He wonders if the bees he can hear brought them in, flapped their wings and buzzed their buzz and dropped pieces of paper, heavy artillery disguised as white, A4 page.
Jessica’s eyes rolled their way into his room in the middle of the night, he’d heard them coming, rumbling through the otherwise silence. They’re together now but crossed askew in the corner, lidless and lash-less and unblinking.
He gives them a cursory nod of acknowledgement.
Andy drives them both home that afternoon. She chatters nervously the entire trip, whole sentences he can’t begin to follow as she jumps without warning from one topic to the next.
Luke spends the thirty-seven minutes it takes them to get from the hospital to their house counting iridescent digits as they click over on the clock built into the stereo system of her car.
This is how he knows it takes them thirty-seven minutes to get from the hospital to their house.
Bending over is still an exercise in controlled restraint. Despite this, he welcomes the fact it takes him just over fifteen minutes to locate and then effectively pull on a pair of sports socks and his trainers and then loop the laces together because it’s fifteen minutes he doesn’t have to spend staring at the ghosted outline of his own bloodstain.
It’s cold outside. Not icy, not yet, but he knows intuitively that the first snowfall of the season is only hours away.
He walks to the corner of their block. Takes it slow, steady, because, yeah, he might be going just a little bit insane but he’s definitely not an idiot and besides, he hasn’t seen Jessica’s eyes since they floated, tumbleweed-like, through his peripheral vision as Andy left for work this morning.
So surely that’s something.
There’s a small park diagonally across the street, and he looks both ways before crossing, up and down the almost deserted street. Imagines, briefly, stepping out in front of a bus, or a blazing fire truck, but neither appear, so…
Later, when Andy asks him about his day, he skips over the part where he sat on a swing at the park for seven hours and didn’t walk home again until his fingers were numb and his knees were dusted white with early snow. Goes straight to where he made them pizza for dinner.
“Pizza?” she says, smiling wide and hopeful, “You made pizza?”
“Well,” he counters back, “Technically, Mr. Ranaldi made the pizza. But I called and asked him to deliver it?”
He’s not sleeping.
Andy is sleeping. He spends most of the night watching her eyelids flutter and her fingers twitch, but she still wakes up exhausted and grey, “Are you okay? Do you need something? Did you sleep? How’s your chest? Your back? Your sanity?” perpetually dropping from the tip of her tongue, little more than instinct now and he answers back with the same degree of automaton.
Yes.
No.
Some.
Fine.
Fine.
Fine.
Andy’s been gone to work for just over an hour when there’s a knock at the front door.
He’s only managed the left sock/shoe/lace combination so far and usually he’d be out of the house by now, walking laps of the park or sitting on the too low swing with his hands folded on his knees, but he’s sluggish and slow today, itchy in a way that has little to do with scar tissue and scabbed over skin.
The fisheye peephole distorts Gail’s head and shoulders into a badly drawn cartoon version of an RCMP officer. He stares at the image for longer than necessary, is startled back to motion when she reaches a gloved hand forward and knocks again, the sound level with the thrumming hum of his heartbeat.
“Gail,” he says, opening the door with a flourish that he thinks is probably the wrong side of enthusiastic.
Like he’s trying too hard. Which he is.
He makes a quick mental note to tone it down, drops his eyes to the carpet and remembers the single sock/shoe/lace combination and gets distracted by his bare toes.
Crap.
“Hey,” she says, even and measured.
“Hey,” he mirrors, thankful. Slows everything inside him down to match her.
She’s come to finalise some details, she tells him, and to finish some of the paperwork required for a hearing that’s coming up; a mental health assessment of sorts.
At first he thinks it’s him being assessed, but then he remembers.
And realises.
Oh.
“I volunteered,” she says, and her voice sounds tight. “I thought it might…”
He guesses she’d been planning to say make it easier or something similar, and he appreciates the sentiment even if it’s no-where near the truth. But she trails off instead, can’t bring herself to finish the sentence, and they make eye contact in the silence that draws out and on and on.
He leads her into the kitchen, props himself on a stool and puts his odd feet flat on the floor. The tiles beneath his bare toes are like ice and he counts the seconds it takes for them to warm to tolerable beneath his skin.
Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen…
“I don’t remember much,” he says, before she can start questioning him. And she nods and says yeah and not surprising and that makes sense, even though none of it actually does.
Jessica screams. When he catches sight of her, there are gaping holes where her eyes should be.
“Luke?” she says, like maybe she’s already said it several times before…
Her hand clamps over his and the screaming cuts to sudden silence, like he can hear or he can feel but he can no longer do both at once. He remembers a time when being touched made his skin crawl. Now he prays that she’ll never let go.
“You want to get out of here?”
They walk to the park. Sit side-by-side on the swings as the minutes tick by, hidden in exhaled clouds and the soft chirp of birds, high in the trees behind them.
“Do you think Andy’s okay?” he asks her after a while. He keeps his eyes forward, watches an older man walking a small, white dog in a red and blue coat on the sidewalk opposite.
All you’re missing is the Golden Retriever, he hears.
“I think she’s okay,” Gail answers, and Luke likes that she sounds sure of her answer, imagines her nodding along with her words. “I think she’s probably worried about you, but that’s to be expected, all things considered.”
“She doesn’t blame herself?” he asks without having planned to, and he senses Gail still beside him, wants to take his words back, to roll them back in and swallow them down.
“No, I don’t think so,” she says, pauses, the silence loaded for a beat. “Do you?”
His timing is all off. It sounds like he pauses, like he’s thinking about his answer, but there are consonants and vowels stuck between his teeth, beneath his tongue, down the back of his throat, and he pauses because he can’t breathe, not because he doesn’t know.
“She is the best thing that has ever happened to me,” he finally manages. “The best person, the best friend, the best part of me…”
He blinks. He might be crying.
The man and his little dog have disappeared.
He’s up early the next day. Swallows antibiotics and Tylenol with a glass of orange juice while Andy is in the shower because they’re not a part of the look he is going for this morning.
“Hey,” he says as she walks into the kitchen, and when his arms wrap her up, tight, her skin is still warm and pink from the hot water and she smells like coconuts or apricots. Or both.
“Hey yourself,” she says without stepping back, her voice rumbling through his ribcage. “You’re up early.”
“Yeah,” he agrees, chickens out of going any further just yet.
She makes coffee. Has slowly slurped away at half of it when he guesses the other shoe drops.
“Hang on a minute,” she says, frowning at him from over the rim of her mug, ”you’re up early.”
“You said that already.” He stalls because it’s all he has left.
She sets her coffee heavily on the counter and stands up.
“Oh, no, no, no…” her head shaking and her finger wagging and her frown… frowning a little more resolutely. “Not happening, buddy.”
“Come on,” he says, “it’s been a week. You can’t leave me here by myself all day again…
As planned, he aims for light, bored, exasperated. Works desperately at hiding the truth beneath several layers of fluff.
Can’t, don’t, please, Andy, please.
Please don’t leave me here…
“There are so many things that have to happen before you can come back to work,” she says, and she seems surprised, like maybe she hasn’t seen this coming. He can’t begin to fathom how, but he is grateful for it nonetheless.
“I’ll do paperwork,” he counters, “monitor the property cage, make coffee, clean the whiteboards…”
She snorts and he stiffens, because he’d been going for joking when he’d come up with those lines, but now he’s panicking and serious and he can’t remember the last time anything was a joke, especially not this.
“Imagine I’m Frank,” she says, crossing her arms and puffing out her chest, like that’s all she needs to pass as an approximate imitation of their boss. “Now, ask me…”
“Ask you what?” He’s confused and sinking and can’t seem to scrabble for the words he needs. The right words. The convincing words.
“Ask me if you can come back to work today, me as Frank,” she clarifies.
In the end, he loses the game. Whatever the game is that they’re playing. And she’s barely five minutes out the door before he’s shifting to a lopsided jog on the sidewalk that circles the park. He does three laps, vomits in the gutter, and then goes home.
Sleeps for nine silent, still hours straight.
The RCMP has a policy that says if you’re injured in the line of duty then you get mandated counselling with a bird-like old guy who wears sweater vests and speaks with a barely detectable Quebecoise accent. He’s not sure if that last part is specified in the text though.
He’s also not so sure what policy says about off-duty near death experiences, but given he took two to the abdomen, from his own gun, in his own living room, he suspects the brass are going to weigh in at some point. He’s been home from hospital almost three weeks now though; no one’s mentioned anything and…
Well, he’s hardly going to bring it up himself.
Andy settles again as the days tick by. He finds the shift in her to be an almost visible entity.
She can laugh without flinching now, and she’s back to digging her fingernails into his skin when they have sex. No more ghosted fingertips and gently, gently, shhhh.
She cooks, sometimes, in nothing but her underwear; sings along, loudly and terribly, to whatever song she’s got vibrating through his metaphorically crumbling walls.
She is the most resilient person he thinks he has ever met and he takes to holding his breath whenever she’s near, lest his own thinly veiled terror re-infect her.
He clings onto her and pushes her away in alternating microbursts. Exists, for the most part, in a perpetual state of blind panic.
Jessica’s disembodied eyeballs find the whole charade hilarious.
He attends follow up medical and physical therapy appointments like a robot. Answers questions on autopilot while gloved fingertips examine the healing wounds across his stomach. Jogs sedately on a treadmill as a cheerful twenty something with a clipboard and a dark ponytail makes notes and smiles encouragement at all the right moments. Pretends like he’s not going to grind out another five, ten, fifteen ks the minute he gets home.
“You’re making excellent progress,” Dark Ponytail says, bobbing up and down enthusiastically in time with the staccato syllables. “You’ll be back to your old self in no time!”
He doesn’t bother laughing at the notion but his rhythm stutters for several beats and betrays him regardless, his feet feel suddenly detached from his ankles. The treadmill slows then and he has to grab the bars to stop from falling.
“That’s probably enough for today, yeah?”
The ponytail hangs, limp and defeated.
Gail busts him three days later.
Which, well, of course she does.
She runs past him at speed, all black Lululemon and iridescent Nike, ears stuffed with the buds from an iPhone he can’t see. She doesn’t seem to recognise him at the time, which makes sense, he supposes, given the context.
Her presence unnerves him though, forces him to ask questions he’s not sure he can answer.
What and why and how and should…?
Like he’s been caught out in a lie.
He completes a quick one-two glance up and down the road before stepping off the sidewalk and crossing to the other side, picks his pace up a gear or two, like going faster and going further will be what saves him in the end.
Half an hour later, as he’s turning on the shower and stripping himself free from a sweat soaked Academy t-shirt and snow damp toque, he gets a text message.
Hey, it says, and he imagines a pause even though the next words continue across the screen without one. Do I have to come over there and kick your dumb ass?
Despite, or perhaps because of, his unorthodox approach to rehab., he passes everything he needs to pass and gets word he’s back on the duty roster at the start of the coming week. Frank calls him personally, and he’s not sure if he imagines the uncertainty laced through the words or if Frank simply knows something everyone else seems oblivious to.
He nods his head along even though Frank can’t see him. Commits to countless promises he can barely remember three minutes after the call is over.
Andy destroys the cork in a bottle of red in her excitement and he can’t help but get caught up in the spell of her.
Giddy and light and unburdened.
Until it all falls apart.
It’s starts innocently enough; three quarters of a bottle of wine and soft cheese and Andy, half naked and working her way along the line of his jaw with her lips. He puddles his jeans on the floor at his feet as they skip the pretense of needing a bed for what comes next.
They fuck right there in the living room instead. Start on their knees before sinking down even further. It’s loud and energetic and, later, he uses both those things as excuses for why he didn’t figure it out until it was too late.
Andy’s movements change. Her hips shift and her elbows lock together behind his head and suddenly she’s not so much grinding against him as she is trying to climb inside his skin.
She’s also sobbing; an unhinged hysteria that fills the deepest, darkest parts of his hollowed out insides.
He thinks he understands without having to ask, but he does so regardless and has to deliberately chase away the bees that threaten when her answers are not the answers he’s expecting.
She’s extricated herself from him and is pressed up against the far wall, shivering and naked and barely able to speak.
He’d hold his breath but they’re too far-gone for that to work now.
Maybe it never did.
He stands and takes shaky steps towards her. Reaches out his hands and doesn’t blink until she reaches back, allows him to drag her to her feet and out of the room.
Contemplates burning the entire house to the ground, haunted as it is by memories and dust.
Afterwards, it’s like a competition to see who can apologise the most times and for the most reasons and in the most abstract of ways.
They finish the bottle of red curled together in the base of the shower, warm water and alcohol that combines to slow the endless shivering.
Even if only for one more night.
His first day back at work evolves precisely into the non-event he’d been hoping for.
Tie tied and shoes polished, he shrugs into his jacket and gets double thumbs up from Andy before she drops her hand to his and gives it a squeeze of solidarity.
“You ready,” she asks, light but sincere.
And he nods and grins and playfully drags her towards the door.
Means it.
He’s back at work barely three weeks when Diaz radios in about a missing persons case he and Epstein had landed earlier that morning. A whole family, up and vanished. Apparently.
In the end, it turns out the truth is far more predictable than that.
He’s using the doorframe to keep him upright at the scene when Frank arrives. He’s got Oliver downstairs and organising the rookies for a knock of the surrounding streets while the tech guys from the coroner’s office finish up photographing the bodies before they can be bagged and removed.
Bodies.
Plural.
The three kids are still in their beds. They could be sleeping if it weren’t for the blood spatter. Eyes closed and dreaming of pirates or ponies or whatever it is that little kids dream about these days.
He doesn’t think he was ever a little kid.
Their mother is in the hallway, her brain matter; abstract wall art against the white paint and wood panelling. If he turns his head he can see her right foot from where he’s standing. It’s covered with a sock, white with a blue band around the ankle. He keeps expecting it to twitch.
It never does.
“Detective Callaghan?”
Frank’s voice drifts past him, a rumble of sound he barely registers, and by the time he’s gathered the air required to voice a response, he’s moved from casual questioning to careful, cautious concern.
“Luke?”
His reply is little more than a distracted noise that hums against the back of his throat.
“Okay, you’re done here. I’ve got Detective Rosarti on her way over; she’s going to head this one up.”
Frank’s got a hand wrapped around his upper arm and is leading him effortlessly back through the house. He protests verbally, but only because he knows he’s meant to, doesn’t bother to resist in any physical kind of way.
“What, why?”
“Luke.”
“No, it’s fine. I’m fine. You don’t-” He runs out of arguments about now, can’t even finish the sentence because he’s got no idea how it ends.
“It’s already done,” Frank continues. “She’ll be here any minute. I’ve already told Oliver to give her a full briefing when she arrives. I want you back at the station.”
“Frank…”
“This isn’t up for debate, Callaghan. You’re with me.”
Back at the Fifteen, he stalks towards his office and righteously pretends to be put out. Roughly opens and shuts draws and manages to spill the half-cup of cold coffee that he’d not had time to finish hours ago.
He’s furiously swiping at the mess with a fistful of Kleenex when a knock at his door stalls him.
“Yes?” he says, and he’s expecting Frank so the tone is clipped and terse and entirely forced.
It’s not Frank.
“I was going to ask if you wanted a coffee,” Gail starts, eyebrows arching as she takes in the chaos on his desktop, “but it looks like you’ve got that sorted already.”
He rolls his eyes and admits defeat then. Tosses the sopping ball of soggy tissue into the trashcan by the door and follows her out through the largely abandoned station floor to the staff kitchen.
“So how’d you draw the short straw?” he asks, the implication of his question obvious despite the lack of elaboration.
“Front desk duty,” she answers with a shrug. “Someone’s gotta be the face of Fifteen.” Punctuates her false cheer with a wide grin that looks more b-grade horror movie than friendly neighbourhood constabulary.
“Right,” he says. “Yep. You’re definitely the right person for that job.”
He’s slowly spinning in a desk chair on the other side of Gail’s desk when he starts down a rabbit hole he hadn’t planned.
“Remember when you came round,” he says, and he keeps the slow spin turning even as he feels her freeze opposite him.
“You wanted to ask me some questions,” he continues, shuts his eyes and spins and spins and spins. “I said I didn’t remember much and then we went to the park and…”
He registers the sound of her mug settling back on the desktop.
“But I do,” he admits now, quiet but sure, voice steady, definite, “I do remember some of it.”
“I remember thinking,” he says, “while I was standing there in my house, looking down the barrel of my own gun, that my life was about to end. And I don’t mean I thought I was going to die, because I don’t think I did. Not dead dead, in the ground, dead. But abstractly? I knew right then, right in that moment, that everything was about to change.”
“And it did,” she confirms for him with a slow nod. “It absolutely did, didn’t it?”
His skin feels too tight around his concrete bones.
“The two-word version of our story?” he recites, pauses, waits for her sudden blink of recognition.
“We fell.”