Cadavre Exquis - Team Gen!
Hello there!
Finally, it's here! The Cadavre Exquis Challenge is finally posted today! This is the story written by Team Gen!
Pretties for the participants coming next week. Enjoy!
Team: Gen
Characters: Sam, the team
Rating: PG-13.
Spoilers: “Mommy!” It’s a deafening scream that almost drowns out the next shot.
Disclaimer: The authors do not own Flashpoint.
Authors: hope_tang, paranoid_woman, justicerocks_ff.
Part 1 by hope_tang (Category: Action)
“Mommy!”
The child’s hysterical shrieks are right next to his ear, but that is nothing compared to the harsh bark of sniper fire barking through the open courtyard. He tightens his grip on the squirming little girl, ignoring a voice on the radio ordering him to take cover take cover damnit, searching for non-existent safe cover among the decorative flowerbeds and low stone benches. He’s a little occupied right now.
“Mommy!” It’s a deafening scream that almost drowns out the next shot. He jerks away from the ricochet. The child wails in terror.
The other voices in his ear are calmly frantic, professional with a hint of frustration; they can’t neutralize the other sniper, something about angles and sights that he ignores. He trusts his team. They trust him. He needs to find cover. Now.
There. The bench. To his left. He swerves and avoids another bullet. Right angle. Adequate height to shield him and the girl. Tight fit. He dives.
A force slams into his lower back, throws off his trajectory and he lands awkwardly. The kid squawks underneath him. Automatically, he tries to shift his weight off of her, but his arms tremble at the slight movement. His breathing stutters, like a band tightening around his chest. The voices escalate in alarm.
He blocks them out to focus on the child, the bundle of pink and white he’s been tasked to protect. Wide brown eyes stare back at him, scared beyond measure as her little fingers curl into the straps of his vest. He checks her over, dimly noticing that the sun has vanished behind the clouds.
Blood stains her cute jumper and sweater. Horror floods his veins. She’s crying and he’s babbling reassurances mixed in with panicked ohgodohgod and he can’t find where she’s been shot because the sun’s suddenly- Someone’s bellowing in his ear:
“Officer down! I repeat, OFFICER DOWN!”
Five Hours Previous…
“Ready?” Jules’ wide smile is light and teasing as she tests the harness again. He looks at her dubiously before he finishes up his last equipment check.
“What?” She bounces on the edge of the rooftop. “Are you afraid of heights?”
He shakes his head, “No.”
She makes a noise of skepticism, “So you didn’t turn pale this morning when Serge mentioned the obstacle course?”
“Hey, I got through it last time just fine,” he protests, taking a step closer to the edge and hoping that she’ll pass off his nerves as just the byproduct of walking around on a rooftop on a sunny, but windy day. He’s not afraid of heights. He’s…just got a very healthy concern about gravity, and what happens to a falling object when it comes to an abrupt stop.
She frowns a little, concern touching her eyes, as she asks, “Are you sure about this? Because if you don’t want to…”
“I have to,” he says, maybe a little too quickly. His hands are shaking wildly now on the rope, but he takes a deep breath and steadies himself. He trusts the equipment not to fail. He trusts his skills not to let him down. He’s not going to end up as a human-sized smear on the pavement five stories below him.
“Maybe this is a little soon…” He can tell Jules is definitely rethinking this little stunt, but he doesn’t want or need her compassion-in fact, he needs her to push him to the edge (maybe even literally, if she has to). What he wants is her trust in him, even as she watches his back. He needs to confront this (not) irrational fear, and she’s probably the only one who can support him through this without it becoming Awkward.
It’s been over four months since his safety line snapped during a training exercise and he almost fell to his death, but he’s one lucky bastard. He still isn’t clear exactly how he survived-just that he caught a ledge and someone hauled his ass back into the building before he passed out. Since then, his childhood fear of heights has reached new heights and he needs to deal with that before he can say that his life is back to normal.
He doesn’t know what expression she sees on his face, but she studies him for a moment before she nods firmly, “All right. Ready?”
He nods back, hands steady and sure on the rope, testing his weight on the harness, “Ready.”
They jump together.
Part 2 by paranoid_woman (Category: Romance)
It is right to conquer his fears, because without doing that, how could he survive his job? He is supposed to take risks, he is supposed to save people. It is not possible to do that while being afraid of heights.
But just when he thinks he’s got it all covered, it happens. There’s a hot call and surprise, the case hits Sam close to home. He’s the first one to be asked to be on the field, but it’s an automatic reaction - he manages to act like a jerk, and with that, he ears getting picked to stay inside the SUV with the Sarge.
Not that that’s some sort of magic solutions to his problems.
This particular courtyard is a complicated scenario. There are benches, and happy flowerbeds -nothing that can be used to cover oneself up- and there’s a child in the middle of the fight between two angry parents who don’t know how to handle the situation of a failed marriage. They are so caught up in their rage, their accusations and the lies that have destroyed their relationship, that they don’t realize how much they’re hurting their kid.
Watching people fight like that on screen is an agony Sam always finds hard to handle. He knows there are snipers already surrounding them in strategic spots in the courtyard, but he also knows that this might not end up well anyway.
The mother holds the little kid tight, not letting her go, while the father tries to make her come to her senses without success.
“She’s my kid too!” he claims, opening his arms.
His wife refuses to listen and shakes her head. “She’s not, she’s Jerry’s!”
“Don’t say that. I’ve taken care of her since she was two, you can’t tell me that I’m not his father now.”
The mother’s eyes show an anger Sam can barely take. “You should have thought about it before deciding having your little affair with that slut!”
“Andrea!” the father calls her, and suddenly he starts talking to the little girl in the woman’s arms. “Sweetie, Mommy is joking, okay?” he says. “We’re just having a little discussion, nothing important.”
But the child is smart and doesn’t buy it. She starts talking and that makes it all worse. Sam can feel the tension in the air, and he can hear the Sarge’s heavy breathing as he caresses his chin with worry. Jules has already tried to talk to the parents, but that hasn’t helped.
Ed comes into the SUV. “This is getting nowhere. They just don’t want to listen. These people don’t know where to stop, they’re gonna get their kid killed.”
The idea of it makes Sam uncomfortable to many levels. He remembers the snap of his safety line during his traning, the feeling of falling, of almost dying. And Sam knows that this has happened before. Being a child hadn’t been easy for him. Many times he’d seen his parents fight, his dad being the idiot he is today, his mother trying to save him.
And he also remembers the day of turning seventeen, when his father had told him that he was going to follow his path in the Academia no matter what, and that he doesn’t have the right to make a choice for himself. Sam had climbed to the roof and played about letting himself fall and disappearing forever, until it’d stopped being a game.
Yeah, Sam knows that there’s a connection between his childhood, his first attempt of suicide and the ones that had followed after seeing many of his friends die in Afghanistan. He’s never talked about this with anyone, now even with Jules. He can’t take the embarrassment and to be honest, he can’t take giving explanations either.
The scream of the little girl in the courtyard interrupts his train of thought, and he turns to the screen.
“For the love of God, Martin, she knows all about it already. She knows you’re not her dad! the mother yells, out of control. “Don’t treat her like she’s five, the way you’ve treated me for the last three years!”
“She is five and she shouldn’t have to listen to all of this. This is between you and me, leave her alone.”
“You have no right to see her anymore!”
Sam feels like his heart’s gonna come out of his chest. Romance between the two parents is definitely over, and if the SRU doesn’t intervene, that kid’s gonna die. “Subject’s escalating, and fast,” the Sarge mutters. “Ed?”
“On my way.” One second and Ed’s already opening the door of the SUV. Until Sam steps up.
“I want to go.” There is no way in he’s staying in the vehicle.
The Sarge is not convinced. “Sam…”
“I know what I said earlier, but I need to do this.” Sam takes a deep breath, and while looking right into the Sarge’s eyes, he tells him, “I’m not gonna let this kid die.”
He shares a long look with the Sarge and finally he gets approval. “Okay.”
“Thanks.”
“Sam… be careful.”
Sam nods and follows Ed. They get to the courtyard fast.
“Sierra two, what’s your status?” Ed wants to know.
“All set.” Jules says, and Sam can see her in a corner, rifle in hand, ready to shoot to the mother. “It’s your call, Ed.”
The fight’s not getting any better.
“Christina, let her go,” the father claims, but his wife doesn’t listen, and she takes a gun out of nowhere too fast for anyone to react fast.
“No. You come and get her if you want,” she says, and the hand that has the gun is shaking.
This is gonna be a disaster.
“Scorpio,” Ed mutters, “Scorpio. Now, now, now,” and there’s a shot.
But it doesn’t end there. The father also has a gun, and he knows very well how to use it. Once his wife is down, he starts screaming, and he starts shooting too. To the very snipers that took the life of Christina.
If only his daughter wasn’t still there. The kid’s crying, and she tries to cover herself -poor little creature in the middle of chaos- but she’s not gonna make it if no one helps her. Sam doesn’t think twice. He runs into the courtyard, not caring if he gets shot, and he grabs the girl in his arms, ready to be her shield until they find a safe ground. It’s not easy to get out of there with bullets coming in and out of the courtyard. Damn, he doesn’t know where to go.
Until he spots a bench that it’s a little higher than the rest, and that’s it, he’s gotta get there no matter what. And he does. But the little girl’s fingers are on his vest, and there’s blood on her jumper and she’s looking right at him with scared eyes, crying. This can’t be happening.
“Oh my God… Oh, no…” he says, but he doesn’t find enough light to check where she’s been shot, and there’s someone screaming in his ear that there’s an officer down. Sam turns to the child again and brings her tighter against him, hearing her sobs. “Sweetie, you’re gonna be all right. Mommy and Daddy still love you. I promise.”
He doesn’t believe his own lies.
Part 3 by justicerocks_ff (Category: Angst)
The hospital waiting room is silent as Team One tries to digest the horrible news they had just received. Jules had been shot and she had died instantly her body still weak from her last injury. Her family is on their way but they’re not going to be able to see her alive, nobody will anymore she died and as Sam sits alone in the corner away from his teammates he has to come to that realization that Jules died trying to save a little girls life, but in the end she didn’t.
The young girl died as well and nothing mattered to Sam anymore. The love of his life dying was the last straw he’d seen way to much death and not enough living, he’d seen way to many innocent children die and not enough of them living. He’d seen starvation and torture and had been to funerals for too many of his friends and seen families crying and mourning. He was threw with life and threw with suffering. He was just done so he stood up and avoided his teammate’s eyes as he left their sight for the very last time; he would never know the suffering they would endure and he didn’t know what his parents would do he didn’t know what the world would be like without him. The only thing he knew was that he wanted, needed to be with his friends and Jules because without them he was nothing and with nothing his life was not worth living.
The End.
Finally, it's here! The Cadavre Exquis Challenge is finally posted today! This is the story written by Team Gen!
Pretties for the participants coming next week. Enjoy!
Team: Gen
Characters: Sam, the team
Rating: PG-13.
Spoilers: “Mommy!” It’s a deafening scream that almost drowns out the next shot.
Disclaimer: The authors do not own Flashpoint.
Authors: hope_tang, paranoid_woman, justicerocks_ff.
Part 1 by hope_tang (Category: Action)
“Mommy!”
The child’s hysterical shrieks are right next to his ear, but that is nothing compared to the harsh bark of sniper fire barking through the open courtyard. He tightens his grip on the squirming little girl, ignoring a voice on the radio ordering him to take cover take cover damnit, searching for non-existent safe cover among the decorative flowerbeds and low stone benches. He’s a little occupied right now.
“Mommy!” It’s a deafening scream that almost drowns out the next shot. He jerks away from the ricochet. The child wails in terror.
The other voices in his ear are calmly frantic, professional with a hint of frustration; they can’t neutralize the other sniper, something about angles and sights that he ignores. He trusts his team. They trust him. He needs to find cover. Now.
There. The bench. To his left. He swerves and avoids another bullet. Right angle. Adequate height to shield him and the girl. Tight fit. He dives.
A force slams into his lower back, throws off his trajectory and he lands awkwardly. The kid squawks underneath him. Automatically, he tries to shift his weight off of her, but his arms tremble at the slight movement. His breathing stutters, like a band tightening around his chest. The voices escalate in alarm.
He blocks them out to focus on the child, the bundle of pink and white he’s been tasked to protect. Wide brown eyes stare back at him, scared beyond measure as her little fingers curl into the straps of his vest. He checks her over, dimly noticing that the sun has vanished behind the clouds.
Blood stains her cute jumper and sweater. Horror floods his veins. She’s crying and he’s babbling reassurances mixed in with panicked ohgodohgod and he can’t find where she’s been shot because the sun’s suddenly- Someone’s bellowing in his ear:
“Officer down! I repeat, OFFICER DOWN!”
Five Hours Previous…
“Ready?” Jules’ wide smile is light and teasing as she tests the harness again. He looks at her dubiously before he finishes up his last equipment check.
“What?” She bounces on the edge of the rooftop. “Are you afraid of heights?”
He shakes his head, “No.”
She makes a noise of skepticism, “So you didn’t turn pale this morning when Serge mentioned the obstacle course?”
“Hey, I got through it last time just fine,” he protests, taking a step closer to the edge and hoping that she’ll pass off his nerves as just the byproduct of walking around on a rooftop on a sunny, but windy day. He’s not afraid of heights. He’s…just got a very healthy concern about gravity, and what happens to a falling object when it comes to an abrupt stop.
She frowns a little, concern touching her eyes, as she asks, “Are you sure about this? Because if you don’t want to…”
“I have to,” he says, maybe a little too quickly. His hands are shaking wildly now on the rope, but he takes a deep breath and steadies himself. He trusts the equipment not to fail. He trusts his skills not to let him down. He’s not going to end up as a human-sized smear on the pavement five stories below him.
“Maybe this is a little soon…” He can tell Jules is definitely rethinking this little stunt, but he doesn’t want or need her compassion-in fact, he needs her to push him to the edge (maybe even literally, if she has to). What he wants is her trust in him, even as she watches his back. He needs to confront this (not) irrational fear, and she’s probably the only one who can support him through this without it becoming Awkward.
It’s been over four months since his safety line snapped during a training exercise and he almost fell to his death, but he’s one lucky bastard. He still isn’t clear exactly how he survived-just that he caught a ledge and someone hauled his ass back into the building before he passed out. Since then, his childhood fear of heights has reached new heights and he needs to deal with that before he can say that his life is back to normal.
He doesn’t know what expression she sees on his face, but she studies him for a moment before she nods firmly, “All right. Ready?”
He nods back, hands steady and sure on the rope, testing his weight on the harness, “Ready.”
They jump together.
Part 2 by paranoid_woman (Category: Romance)
It is right to conquer his fears, because without doing that, how could he survive his job? He is supposed to take risks, he is supposed to save people. It is not possible to do that while being afraid of heights.
But just when he thinks he’s got it all covered, it happens. There’s a hot call and surprise, the case hits Sam close to home. He’s the first one to be asked to be on the field, but it’s an automatic reaction - he manages to act like a jerk, and with that, he ears getting picked to stay inside the SUV with the Sarge.
Not that that’s some sort of magic solutions to his problems.
This particular courtyard is a complicated scenario. There are benches, and happy flowerbeds -nothing that can be used to cover oneself up- and there’s a child in the middle of the fight between two angry parents who don’t know how to handle the situation of a failed marriage. They are so caught up in their rage, their accusations and the lies that have destroyed their relationship, that they don’t realize how much they’re hurting their kid.
Watching people fight like that on screen is an agony Sam always finds hard to handle. He knows there are snipers already surrounding them in strategic spots in the courtyard, but he also knows that this might not end up well anyway.
The mother holds the little kid tight, not letting her go, while the father tries to make her come to her senses without success.
“She’s my kid too!” he claims, opening his arms.
His wife refuses to listen and shakes her head. “She’s not, she’s Jerry’s!”
“Don’t say that. I’ve taken care of her since she was two, you can’t tell me that I’m not his father now.”
The mother’s eyes show an anger Sam can barely take. “You should have thought about it before deciding having your little affair with that slut!”
“Andrea!” the father calls her, and suddenly he starts talking to the little girl in the woman’s arms. “Sweetie, Mommy is joking, okay?” he says. “We’re just having a little discussion, nothing important.”
But the child is smart and doesn’t buy it. She starts talking and that makes it all worse. Sam can feel the tension in the air, and he can hear the Sarge’s heavy breathing as he caresses his chin with worry. Jules has already tried to talk to the parents, but that hasn’t helped.
Ed comes into the SUV. “This is getting nowhere. They just don’t want to listen. These people don’t know where to stop, they’re gonna get their kid killed.”
The idea of it makes Sam uncomfortable to many levels. He remembers the snap of his safety line during his traning, the feeling of falling, of almost dying. And Sam knows that this has happened before. Being a child hadn’t been easy for him. Many times he’d seen his parents fight, his dad being the idiot he is today, his mother trying to save him.
And he also remembers the day of turning seventeen, when his father had told him that he was going to follow his path in the Academia no matter what, and that he doesn’t have the right to make a choice for himself. Sam had climbed to the roof and played about letting himself fall and disappearing forever, until it’d stopped being a game.
Yeah, Sam knows that there’s a connection between his childhood, his first attempt of suicide and the ones that had followed after seeing many of his friends die in Afghanistan. He’s never talked about this with anyone, now even with Jules. He can’t take the embarrassment and to be honest, he can’t take giving explanations either.
The scream of the little girl in the courtyard interrupts his train of thought, and he turns to the screen.
“For the love of God, Martin, she knows all about it already. She knows you’re not her dad! the mother yells, out of control. “Don’t treat her like she’s five, the way you’ve treated me for the last three years!”
“She is five and she shouldn’t have to listen to all of this. This is between you and me, leave her alone.”
“You have no right to see her anymore!”
Sam feels like his heart’s gonna come out of his chest. Romance between the two parents is definitely over, and if the SRU doesn’t intervene, that kid’s gonna die. “Subject’s escalating, and fast,” the Sarge mutters. “Ed?”
“On my way.” One second and Ed’s already opening the door of the SUV. Until Sam steps up.
“I want to go.” There is no way in he’s staying in the vehicle.
The Sarge is not convinced. “Sam…”
“I know what I said earlier, but I need to do this.” Sam takes a deep breath, and while looking right into the Sarge’s eyes, he tells him, “I’m not gonna let this kid die.”
He shares a long look with the Sarge and finally he gets approval. “Okay.”
“Thanks.”
“Sam… be careful.”
Sam nods and follows Ed. They get to the courtyard fast.
“Sierra two, what’s your status?” Ed wants to know.
“All set.” Jules says, and Sam can see her in a corner, rifle in hand, ready to shoot to the mother. “It’s your call, Ed.”
The fight’s not getting any better.
“Christina, let her go,” the father claims, but his wife doesn’t listen, and she takes a gun out of nowhere too fast for anyone to react fast.
“No. You come and get her if you want,” she says, and the hand that has the gun is shaking.
This is gonna be a disaster.
“Scorpio,” Ed mutters, “Scorpio. Now, now, now,” and there’s a shot.
But it doesn’t end there. The father also has a gun, and he knows very well how to use it. Once his wife is down, he starts screaming, and he starts shooting too. To the very snipers that took the life of Christina.
If only his daughter wasn’t still there. The kid’s crying, and she tries to cover herself -poor little creature in the middle of chaos- but she’s not gonna make it if no one helps her. Sam doesn’t think twice. He runs into the courtyard, not caring if he gets shot, and he grabs the girl in his arms, ready to be her shield until they find a safe ground. It’s not easy to get out of there with bullets coming in and out of the courtyard. Damn, he doesn’t know where to go.
Until he spots a bench that it’s a little higher than the rest, and that’s it, he’s gotta get there no matter what. And he does. But the little girl’s fingers are on his vest, and there’s blood on her jumper and she’s looking right at him with scared eyes, crying. This can’t be happening.
“Oh my God… Oh, no…” he says, but he doesn’t find enough light to check where she’s been shot, and there’s someone screaming in his ear that there’s an officer down. Sam turns to the child again and brings her tighter against him, hearing her sobs. “Sweetie, you’re gonna be all right. Mommy and Daddy still love you. I promise.”
He doesn’t believe his own lies.
Part 3 by justicerocks_ff (Category: Angst)
The hospital waiting room is silent as Team One tries to digest the horrible news they had just received. Jules had been shot and she had died instantly her body still weak from her last injury. Her family is on their way but they’re not going to be able to see her alive, nobody will anymore she died and as Sam sits alone in the corner away from his teammates he has to come to that realization that Jules died trying to save a little girls life, but in the end she didn’t.
The young girl died as well and nothing mattered to Sam anymore. The love of his life dying was the last straw he’d seen way to much death and not enough living, he’d seen way to many innocent children die and not enough of them living. He’d seen starvation and torture and had been to funerals for too many of his friends and seen families crying and mourning. He was threw with life and threw with suffering. He was just done so he stood up and avoided his teammate’s eyes as he left their sight for the very last time; he would never know the suffering they would endure and he didn’t know what his parents would do he didn’t know what the world would be like without him. The only thing he knew was that he wanted, needed to be with his friends and Jules because without them he was nothing and with nothing his life was not worth living.
The End.