Fic: Inertia - Part 16 [The Closer]
Title: Inertia - Part 16 [The Closer]
Rating: PG - 13
Ship: Brenda/Sharon
Disclaimer: Not mine; never were! No copyright infringement intended.
Summary: With Fritz gone, and her relationship with Sharon growing more serious, Brenda begins to wonder about just how close she's willing to get to the other woman. Sharon, it seems, has already made that choice for them.
Previous Chapters ( One) ( Two) ( Three) ( Four) ( Five) ( Six) ( Seven) ( Eight) ( 9[a]) ( 9[b]) ( Ten) ( Eleven) ( Twelve) ( Thirteen) ( Fourteen) ( Fifteen)
AN: Oh yeah, melodramatic angst ahead! The rule of Drama is if you bring a gun on stage, you'd damn well better use it. I suppose I've always been a little too literal for my own good!
~
There's nothing to do now but wait.
Brenda looks down at her hands - brown with blood - and smears them down her skirt, trying to get them clean. This always fascinated her, blood and how it went from blue in the veins to red on the pavement to brown when it dried.
Sharon bled a lot. It was a good sign. Bleeding was good, it meant her body was still working, still pumping. That's what she kept telling herself as she watched the blood oozing out past her fingers as she pressed down on the entrance wound. That it was good.
She sat down by the entrance and placed her hands on here knees with purpose. She was not lost. She was here, waiting for Laura to arrive. Waiting for Sharon to wake up. She would wake up. Brenda was sure of it.
She drummed her fingers on her knees and tapped her toes on the formica. She chipped off a dried flake of blood from her nail. She should wash her hands. It would give her something to do. It would be productive. She rose from her seat and found the nearest washroom, and placed her hands under the running water. Turning the hot water did nothing but make it run colder. Still, she scrubbed her hands under the icy stream until she could stand no more. The washroom was out of paper towel. She searched her skirt, trying to find a clean part to dry her hands but couldn't find anything free from dirt or blood. She hitched up the first layer and dried her hands on the lining of her skirt. She didn't think about how this wasn't the first time she had her skirt gathered up around her hips. That had been with Sharon, it was only a few hours away but it felt like days.
She left the washroom - her seat had been taken by a mother with a screaming child. She suddenly felt very claustrophobic and turned away from the waiting room. Everywhere she looks, there's people. She walks straight ahead until she can can feel the afternoon heat hit her like a wall, hard enough to jar her back into focus. A quick glance reveals she's in the ambulance bay, she was here not that long ago. Half-hour? Forty-five minutes? She wraps her arms around herself, shivering in the heat. She moves to the left of the doors and leans against the wall. She's waiting now - for Laura, for the doctor to come back, for something to start making sense again. "Miss?" She turned her head to the voice to her left, some skinny kid in scrubs. "Miss, this isn't really for waiting, maybe you can -" She unclips her badge from her skirt waist and holds it up to him wordlessly. "Oh, sorry. We just get a lot of...well, people hanging out here." She smiles briefly at him then turns back to staring straight ahead and he wanders off to the other side of the door and lights his smoke.
Brenda doesn't know what happened. At least not exactly. She knows what she was able to put together in the moments right after it, while pressing down on Sharon's wound, shouting orders out to the uniforms surrounding them. She should get things straight - it would be productive. F.I.D. would be around soon, funny to think of that department as being bigger than the bossy brunette lying in wait in the hospital. She wondered who'd be there to investigate. Her team - the shooting of a L.A.P.D. officer was considered a major crime - but the discharge of a L.A.P.D. officer's gun mandated the involvement of F.I.D.. And Sharon had been hit with a L.A.P.D. bullet.
Brenda took a breath, leaned her head back flattened her palms against the brick supporting her. From the beginning: Major Crimes had been summoned to a botched robbery of Lawson's Jewelry which had turned into a hostage situation. The take down had been quick, thanks to a stroke of luck in the form of Jonathan Miller, a beat cop on his day off as one of the hostages. Miller was rewarded for his heroism with an on-site interrogation at the hands of F.I.D.. Sharon had, thankfully stayed on her side of the situation, and Brenda had made sure to stay clear on the other side. Will had even commended her on being able to work with Sharon without being reduced to childish name-calling. She had taken a moment to step aside and call her mother - she had to get her out of Sharon's house before the other woman knew what was going on - and that's when the shots rang out. She could still here them, three clean shots. They had purpose, they had direction and two of the three had missed. The third however landed clean in the breast of Sharon Raydor who dived to protect her witness.
She smiled softly, almost hearing Sharon's voice dripping with sarcasm - but you didn't know it hit Captain Raydor, did you Chief Johnson? No, she didn't. She hung up the phone and allowed her training to kick in. She scanned for the source, Brian Fergus, aged 53, formerly employed at Lawson's had been tackled swiftly (in part by Tao, the proud Deputy Chief in her pointed out) and was being secured. Roughly. She then scanned the ground, looking for victims, and there she was, lying on the ground, pinning Jonathan Miller to the ground. He was shouting, she remembers. She can hear him as she runs towards her. "Officer down! Officer down!" She slides in before others crowd and assess the damage. She wished she could say she was thinking like a lover, or a friend - but twenty plus years of training means that for the moment, she's an officer down, a brother in arms and not the woman who held her in her arms just hours earlier when she complained about not wanting to go in to work. She starts barking out commands as she presses both palms down onto the wound, orders an ambulance, something to stop the gawking crowd from watching. Sanchez, who was right behind her appears on the other side of Raydor and wordlessly eases her shoulder and torso up to allow Miller to crawl out from under him. He doesn't ask how bad it is. He can see the same as she can - blood. Brenda's thankful that the woman was in her black suit - she can't see the blood as well against the black material. She can feel its stickiness, its warmth oozing out past her hands, but it soon disappears until it falls down on to her skirt, and the pavement in steady little drops. It's a chest wound. The entry's on the right, a small act of grace - but it doesn't mean anything - no one can say for certain what the trajectory of the bullet was.
By this point, the ambulance had arrived. Brenda rises from her knees and thoughtlessly wipes her hands on the first thing she thinks of - her skirt. She watches, not as they transfer Sharon onto the gurney, but the scene behind her - it is under control. Flynn, in his sunglasses stands beside Will and together the two men direct the human flow of activity. She sees Provenza slapping the back of the black and white carrying Brian Fergus, signaling it drive off. Tao is off with the uniforms looking for casings and marking the path. "Hang on fellas'" She hears herself say, as they ease the gurney up onto the ambulance, "I'm comin' with y'all." They shrug - they know better than to argue with a woman with a gun and a badge. Sanchez appears again, supporting her elbow as she climbs into the back of the bus. "We'll take care of it here, Chief."
"I'm sure you will Detective." She smiles because she knows they will. The door slams shut and they're on their way. The sirens come on. Or were they always on? Brenda is glad she's left - before someone else arrives on scene, starts announcing they have "72 Hours". It's sitting in the back, quietly observing the scene of the paramedics as they moved about around her - checking, compressing, injecting - that she began to realize that this was no ordinary officer. This was her... well, her Sharon. Those limp arms were the same ones that curled around her waist most mornings; those blue lips were the same ones that had kissed her neck, her back, spreading a trail from one shoulder to another. This was her Sharon lying there.
"You ok?" One of the paramedics asked, as she adjusted a knob on a monitor.
"Yes, thank you." Brenda lied.
"You've seen this before, you've been a cop a long time." She stated.
"How can you tell?"
"You're not in a uniform." The other paramedic said, watching out the window.
"We're almost there. Listen," The woman explained, "We're gonna pull in, the doors are gonna open, and it's going to be quick, stay back until they have her." Brenda wasn't going to tell them this certainly wasn't her first ride in a bus - they were trying to be kind. "Oh, and have your badge somewhere handy, otherwise you ain't gettin' any answers."
"Here we go!" Her partner chimed as they quickly undid the stays that held the gurney in place.
It was effortless, within a matter of seconds, the doors flew open and Sharon and her paramedics were engulfed by a swarm of yellow scrubbed staff. Brenda watched as she slowly made her way off the bus and followed them in until the swinging double doors of a trauma room. She watches until they shear the black jacket off of her body. Then she has to turn away. She doesn't want to see it. Soon, a doctor comes out, explains they've wheeled her off to surgery. He says something about the bullet and the tissue - she files the details of it away until she has time to review them calmly. For now all she retains is that it missed the spine, it missed the heart, but it tore up pretty much everything else. Surgery should take 2-3 hours. Afterwards, she'll be in a medically induced coma for the next three days to give her body time to begin healing and recovering from the trauma. He tells her to head up to the waiting room on the 8th floor when she's ready - that's where they'll look for her. He leaves and a nurse hands her a clipboard - pages and pages of paperwork. Her heart sinks and instinctively she wonders why Sharon couldn't be here to fill it out, she loves the mundanity of paperwork. She would file her morning coffee order in triplicate if she could.
Left alone with nothing but a clipboard, Brenda is suddenly thankful for the work. It keeps her mind off of Sharon. On the table. Being cut open and poked and prodded and stitched into working order. She looks down at the board and takes her time, filling in each and every letter and number neatly into the squares and lines provided. She realizes how little she knows about Sharon as she guesses and omits certain answers. They never talked about the past. They also never talked about the future. They just talked about...nothing. They would occasionally discuss work, but more often than not, they chose to ignore it, having learned early on no good ever came of it. They would argue the merits of drunken noodle over pad thai (Brenda fell firmly in the pad thai camp, while Sharon defended the broad noodles to the death). They would argue over the stupid cop shows on television - which was funny because they didn't watch them. They would argue over CNN vs BBC. They would argue over the proper way of making sweet tea (to which Brenda believed her cultural heritage alone gave her every right to make broad sweeping declarations like "You're doin' it wrong!"). But they didn't talk. How much did they really know about each other? Maybe Sharon was right, making that decision - just how far could they go? She knew the basic facts of the other woman's life: Sharon Marie Raydor, 58, daughter of Martha and Paul Raydor, widow of Jamie Stewart, mother of Laura and Ada...
Brenda's heart sank and leapt up, if such a thing was possible. She'd have to call Laura. She didn't want her to get the call from someone else, it might have been too late already to avoid that. She digs her phone out of her purse and stares at the number for a moment before hitting the send button. She wouldn't be surprised if Laura didn't pick up, it seemed she was always calling for something.
"Hey Brenda," Laura answered, "I was going to take your mom out for some dinner - you think you two'll be done soon?"
"Oh, honey, thanks but - can I talk to you?" Brenda asked, her voice low.
"Sure, what's wrong?"
"It's ah..." She can hear the nerves in the other woman's voice. She supposes it's the call every loved one of a cop fears, but prepares for. Sooner or later, it's going to come. "It's you mama. She was at a scene, she was shot."
"Oh."
"She's in surgery now. It missed her spine and it missed her heart."
"But she's in surgery." Laura repeated. "Which hospital?"
Brenda quickly gives her the directions to Good Samaritan and hangs up. She rises up from the chairs and hefted her purse onto her shoulder and starts to walk. She was glad for the size and weight of it, it kept her anchored - it made sure she always remembered who she was, Brenda Leigh Johnson - she'd faced tougher things than this. Perps with guns were no match for Captain Clay Johnson when she'd sneak in home after riding around cars with boys she knew better than to be riding around with. She hands the clip board to the nurse at the admin desk and waits.
There's nothing to do now but wait.
Rating: PG - 13
Ship: Brenda/Sharon
Disclaimer: Not mine; never were! No copyright infringement intended.
Summary: With Fritz gone, and her relationship with Sharon growing more serious, Brenda begins to wonder about just how close she's willing to get to the other woman. Sharon, it seems, has already made that choice for them.
Previous Chapters ( One) ( Two) ( Three) ( Four) ( Five) ( Six) ( Seven) ( Eight) ( 9[a]) ( 9[b]) ( Ten) ( Eleven) ( Twelve) ( Thirteen) ( Fourteen) ( Fifteen)
AN: Oh yeah, melodramatic angst ahead! The rule of Drama is if you bring a gun on stage, you'd damn well better use it. I suppose I've always been a little too literal for my own good!
~
There's nothing to do now but wait.
Brenda looks down at her hands - brown with blood - and smears them down her skirt, trying to get them clean. This always fascinated her, blood and how it went from blue in the veins to red on the pavement to brown when it dried.
Sharon bled a lot. It was a good sign. Bleeding was good, it meant her body was still working, still pumping. That's what she kept telling herself as she watched the blood oozing out past her fingers as she pressed down on the entrance wound. That it was good.
She sat down by the entrance and placed her hands on here knees with purpose. She was not lost. She was here, waiting for Laura to arrive. Waiting for Sharon to wake up. She would wake up. Brenda was sure of it.
She drummed her fingers on her knees and tapped her toes on the formica. She chipped off a dried flake of blood from her nail. She should wash her hands. It would give her something to do. It would be productive. She rose from her seat and found the nearest washroom, and placed her hands under the running water. Turning the hot water did nothing but make it run colder. Still, she scrubbed her hands under the icy stream until she could stand no more. The washroom was out of paper towel. She searched her skirt, trying to find a clean part to dry her hands but couldn't find anything free from dirt or blood. She hitched up the first layer and dried her hands on the lining of her skirt. She didn't think about how this wasn't the first time she had her skirt gathered up around her hips. That had been with Sharon, it was only a few hours away but it felt like days.
She left the washroom - her seat had been taken by a mother with a screaming child. She suddenly felt very claustrophobic and turned away from the waiting room. Everywhere she looks, there's people. She walks straight ahead until she can can feel the afternoon heat hit her like a wall, hard enough to jar her back into focus. A quick glance reveals she's in the ambulance bay, she was here not that long ago. Half-hour? Forty-five minutes? She wraps her arms around herself, shivering in the heat. She moves to the left of the doors and leans against the wall. She's waiting now - for Laura, for the doctor to come back, for something to start making sense again. "Miss?" She turned her head to the voice to her left, some skinny kid in scrubs. "Miss, this isn't really for waiting, maybe you can -" She unclips her badge from her skirt waist and holds it up to him wordlessly. "Oh, sorry. We just get a lot of...well, people hanging out here." She smiles briefly at him then turns back to staring straight ahead and he wanders off to the other side of the door and lights his smoke.
Brenda doesn't know what happened. At least not exactly. She knows what she was able to put together in the moments right after it, while pressing down on Sharon's wound, shouting orders out to the uniforms surrounding them. She should get things straight - it would be productive. F.I.D. would be around soon, funny to think of that department as being bigger than the bossy brunette lying in wait in the hospital. She wondered who'd be there to investigate. Her team - the shooting of a L.A.P.D. officer was considered a major crime - but the discharge of a L.A.P.D. officer's gun mandated the involvement of F.I.D.. And Sharon had been hit with a L.A.P.D. bullet.
Brenda took a breath, leaned her head back flattened her palms against the brick supporting her. From the beginning: Major Crimes had been summoned to a botched robbery of Lawson's Jewelry which had turned into a hostage situation. The take down had been quick, thanks to a stroke of luck in the form of Jonathan Miller, a beat cop on his day off as one of the hostages. Miller was rewarded for his heroism with an on-site interrogation at the hands of F.I.D.. Sharon had, thankfully stayed on her side of the situation, and Brenda had made sure to stay clear on the other side. Will had even commended her on being able to work with Sharon without being reduced to childish name-calling. She had taken a moment to step aside and call her mother - she had to get her out of Sharon's house before the other woman knew what was going on - and that's when the shots rang out. She could still here them, three clean shots. They had purpose, they had direction and two of the three had missed. The third however landed clean in the breast of Sharon Raydor who dived to protect her witness.
She smiled softly, almost hearing Sharon's voice dripping with sarcasm - but you didn't know it hit Captain Raydor, did you Chief Johnson? No, she didn't. She hung up the phone and allowed her training to kick in. She scanned for the source, Brian Fergus, aged 53, formerly employed at Lawson's had been tackled swiftly (in part by Tao, the proud Deputy Chief in her pointed out) and was being secured. Roughly. She then scanned the ground, looking for victims, and there she was, lying on the ground, pinning Jonathan Miller to the ground. He was shouting, she remembers. She can hear him as she runs towards her. "Officer down! Officer down!" She slides in before others crowd and assess the damage. She wished she could say she was thinking like a lover, or a friend - but twenty plus years of training means that for the moment, she's an officer down, a brother in arms and not the woman who held her in her arms just hours earlier when she complained about not wanting to go in to work. She starts barking out commands as she presses both palms down onto the wound, orders an ambulance, something to stop the gawking crowd from watching. Sanchez, who was right behind her appears on the other side of Raydor and wordlessly eases her shoulder and torso up to allow Miller to crawl out from under him. He doesn't ask how bad it is. He can see the same as she can - blood. Brenda's thankful that the woman was in her black suit - she can't see the blood as well against the black material. She can feel its stickiness, its warmth oozing out past her hands, but it soon disappears until it falls down on to her skirt, and the pavement in steady little drops. It's a chest wound. The entry's on the right, a small act of grace - but it doesn't mean anything - no one can say for certain what the trajectory of the bullet was.
By this point, the ambulance had arrived. Brenda rises from her knees and thoughtlessly wipes her hands on the first thing she thinks of - her skirt. She watches, not as they transfer Sharon onto the gurney, but the scene behind her - it is under control. Flynn, in his sunglasses stands beside Will and together the two men direct the human flow of activity. She sees Provenza slapping the back of the black and white carrying Brian Fergus, signaling it drive off. Tao is off with the uniforms looking for casings and marking the path. "Hang on fellas'" She hears herself say, as they ease the gurney up onto the ambulance, "I'm comin' with y'all." They shrug - they know better than to argue with a woman with a gun and a badge. Sanchez appears again, supporting her elbow as she climbs into the back of the bus. "We'll take care of it here, Chief."
"I'm sure you will Detective." She smiles because she knows they will. The door slams shut and they're on their way. The sirens come on. Or were they always on? Brenda is glad she's left - before someone else arrives on scene, starts announcing they have "72 Hours". It's sitting in the back, quietly observing the scene of the paramedics as they moved about around her - checking, compressing, injecting - that she began to realize that this was no ordinary officer. This was her... well, her Sharon. Those limp arms were the same ones that curled around her waist most mornings; those blue lips were the same ones that had kissed her neck, her back, spreading a trail from one shoulder to another. This was her Sharon lying there.
"You ok?" One of the paramedics asked, as she adjusted a knob on a monitor.
"Yes, thank you." Brenda lied.
"You've seen this before, you've been a cop a long time." She stated.
"How can you tell?"
"You're not in a uniform." The other paramedic said, watching out the window.
"We're almost there. Listen," The woman explained, "We're gonna pull in, the doors are gonna open, and it's going to be quick, stay back until they have her." Brenda wasn't going to tell them this certainly wasn't her first ride in a bus - they were trying to be kind. "Oh, and have your badge somewhere handy, otherwise you ain't gettin' any answers."
"Here we go!" Her partner chimed as they quickly undid the stays that held the gurney in place.
It was effortless, within a matter of seconds, the doors flew open and Sharon and her paramedics were engulfed by a swarm of yellow scrubbed staff. Brenda watched as she slowly made her way off the bus and followed them in until the swinging double doors of a trauma room. She watches until they shear the black jacket off of her body. Then she has to turn away. She doesn't want to see it. Soon, a doctor comes out, explains they've wheeled her off to surgery. He says something about the bullet and the tissue - she files the details of it away until she has time to review them calmly. For now all she retains is that it missed the spine, it missed the heart, but it tore up pretty much everything else. Surgery should take 2-3 hours. Afterwards, she'll be in a medically induced coma for the next three days to give her body time to begin healing and recovering from the trauma. He tells her to head up to the waiting room on the 8th floor when she's ready - that's where they'll look for her. He leaves and a nurse hands her a clipboard - pages and pages of paperwork. Her heart sinks and instinctively she wonders why Sharon couldn't be here to fill it out, she loves the mundanity of paperwork. She would file her morning coffee order in triplicate if she could.
Left alone with nothing but a clipboard, Brenda is suddenly thankful for the work. It keeps her mind off of Sharon. On the table. Being cut open and poked and prodded and stitched into working order. She looks down at the board and takes her time, filling in each and every letter and number neatly into the squares and lines provided. She realizes how little she knows about Sharon as she guesses and omits certain answers. They never talked about the past. They also never talked about the future. They just talked about...nothing. They would occasionally discuss work, but more often than not, they chose to ignore it, having learned early on no good ever came of it. They would argue the merits of drunken noodle over pad thai (Brenda fell firmly in the pad thai camp, while Sharon defended the broad noodles to the death). They would argue over the stupid cop shows on television - which was funny because they didn't watch them. They would argue over CNN vs BBC. They would argue over the proper way of making sweet tea (to which Brenda believed her cultural heritage alone gave her every right to make broad sweeping declarations like "You're doin' it wrong!"). But they didn't talk. How much did they really know about each other? Maybe Sharon was right, making that decision - just how far could they go? She knew the basic facts of the other woman's life: Sharon Marie Raydor, 58, daughter of Martha and Paul Raydor, widow of Jamie Stewart, mother of Laura and Ada...
Brenda's heart sank and leapt up, if such a thing was possible. She'd have to call Laura. She didn't want her to get the call from someone else, it might have been too late already to avoid that. She digs her phone out of her purse and stares at the number for a moment before hitting the send button. She wouldn't be surprised if Laura didn't pick up, it seemed she was always calling for something.
"Hey Brenda," Laura answered, "I was going to take your mom out for some dinner - you think you two'll be done soon?"
"Oh, honey, thanks but - can I talk to you?" Brenda asked, her voice low.
"Sure, what's wrong?"
"It's ah..." She can hear the nerves in the other woman's voice. She supposes it's the call every loved one of a cop fears, but prepares for. Sooner or later, it's going to come. "It's you mama. She was at a scene, she was shot."
"Oh."
"She's in surgery now. It missed her spine and it missed her heart."
"But she's in surgery." Laura repeated. "Which hospital?"
Brenda quickly gives her the directions to Good Samaritan and hangs up. She rises up from the chairs and hefted her purse onto her shoulder and starts to walk. She was glad for the size and weight of it, it kept her anchored - it made sure she always remembered who she was, Brenda Leigh Johnson - she'd faced tougher things than this. Perps with guns were no match for Captain Clay Johnson when she'd sneak in home after riding around cars with boys she knew better than to be riding around with. She hands the clip board to the nurse at the admin desk and waits.
There's nothing to do now but wait.