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Title: The Class Reunion and Full Confession of Rebecca Flack Nee Stanhope(1/2)
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
laguera25
Fandom(s): CSI:NY/HP
Rating: FRMAO
Pairings: Don Flack/OFC
Warnings: Graphic violence
Disclaimer(s): All recognizable characters, places, and events in the HPverse are the property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only. Rebecca Stanhope Flack is my own invention.
All recognizable characters, places, and events in the CSI:NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertaiment only.
"I see a bad moon risin'," is a lyric from Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Bad Moon Risin'.
A/N: This story contains on OFC. If OFCs offend thee, please stay in your lane and exit to the rear. There is no need to pee in my pool. Concrit is appreciated. Flames are not.
This story was the natural result of a "what-if" scenario that popped into my head as I was writing Through a Glass Darkly, Come Ye Home Again and demanded to be written. It has no bearing on the TAGD arc, however. In essence, it's crackfic AU of a crackfic AU.
"No," said his wife quietly when the man with the gun said he'd kill her. "You won't."
Don Flack still wasn't sure how this had happened, or even what had happened. It had been a blitzkrieg attack. One minute, he had been sitting at his desk in the bullpen, splitting a grinder with Rebecca in lieu of a proper anniversary dinner, and the next, he and the entire 14th precinct had been staring down the barrel of a Colt .45. He still had a dribble of mustard on his chin from the last bite he'd taken before the doors had blown open to admit the devil and the cold winter air, and the aftertaste of onions was hot and sweet on his tongue as he looked at the barrel pointed at his wife's rounded, pregnant belly.
There were four months of unborn child in her belly, seeded there by a lazy tryst in the back of a departmental Chevy Avalanche down by the Hudson River. He'd taken her there because she said she'd never necked in a car before, and as her husband, he'd counted it his duty to see that she wanted for nothing with which he could reasonably provide her, even teenaged memories created fifteen years too late. So, he'd whisked her away to the river with a bottle of red wine and a cooler full of sliced fruits and cold cuts. He'd folded down the backseat, and they'd talked and fed each other bites of melon and listened to the radio, and sometime between the Beach Boys' "Kokomo" and Otis Redding's "Sittin'(On the Dock of the Bay)," he'd created a tangible reminder of that night.
She'd told him the day after Thanksgiving, come to him white-faced and trembling and clutching the pregnancy test in one small hand. He hadn't realized what it was at first, had wondered, in fact, why she was trying to hand him a tampon in the middle of the Knicks game. Then his brain had caught up with his eyes, and he'd turned the slender stem of the test over and over in his disbelieving hands, studied the parallel blue lines from every angle. She hadn't said a word, just sat with her hands in her lap, fingers worrying the hem of the Yankees t-shirt she was wearing as a nightshirt. Now and then, she'd paused in her endless fretting to swipe irritably at her streaming eyes.
"Hey, why are you cryin', doll," he'd asked, shaken from his sloe-eyed stupor by the sight of a tear streaming down her cheek.
"It's positive."
"Yeah, I didn't think you were comin' out here to show me some abstract art," he had replied, and then he'd snagged the footrest of her chair and closed the distance between them. "Is that a problem?" he'd asked gently. "'Cause if it is, I'll, uh, I'll support… I'll understand."
It had been a lie, but one he had been willing to tell for the love of her. He loved her too much to risk losing her for any reason, and if that meant accompanying her to the clinic and holding her hand while modern medicine obliterated an ancient miracle, then he would. He would close his eyes and grit his teeth against the protests of his Roman Catholic soul, and when it was over, he would bring her home and pretend it had never happened.
"No. I mean, I don't know," she'd said thickly. "It's not that I don't want- How could I not? It's yours. Ours. I just-," She'd trailed off, and her Adam's apple had bobbed. "Are we ready for this?"
He'd patted the couch. "C'mere, doll."
She'd set the brakes, opened the footrests, and pivoted onto the couch without a word and snuggled against him, disheveled and feverish from suppressed weeping. He'd pressed a butterfly kiss to the sensitive shell of her ear.
"What do you want?" He'd caught a strand of her hair and wound it lazily around his fingertips.
She'd rested her hand on his chest. "I've thought about this, but to tell the truth, I never thought it would happen."
A soft snort of amusement. "I don't see why not. Accordin' to Mrs. Petrinski, we're like fuckin' rabbits, and no, I won't pardon the pun. Even I gotta admit I can't keep my hands off you."
She'd chuckled. "Yeah, I know. I guess I just figured my body would never sustain a pregnancy."
"The doctors tell you that you wouldn't?"
"No, but they've been wrong before. They told my mother I'd be a vegetable."
"Yeah? Well, fuck 'em," he'd said fiercely, and rested her head on his chest. "I'm damn proud of my turnip lovin'."
She'd laughed at that, hard and long, and he'd reveled in the sound and the shuddering vibration of her angular body against his toned, muscled one. He loved to make her laugh, to see her eyes light up with unexpected pleasure. When she threw back her head and exposed the pale stem of her throat and the uneven ivory of her teeth to the light, the taint of the city and the festering, virulent hate of its denizens left him, and the air he drew into his lungs was not so sour.
"This turnip loves you," she'd murmured when the laughter had tapered to watery, hiccoughing giggles.
"We can do this, you know. The department has good insurance, and what it doesn't cover, Medicare will. If that don't work, I can take out a loan."
"It's not the bills I worry about. What if I can't? What if something happens, and I lose it? It would be all my fault, and-," Her mouth had worked, and her fingers had tightened convulsively in the fabric of his t-shirt.
"Hey, ssshhh." He'd pressed three fingers to her trembling lips. "Listen to me. You're not gonna lose nothin', all right? You're too stubborn to let this baby go now that it's inside you. As a matter of fact, I pity the poor son of a bitch doctor who tries to tell you to push if you don't wanna when the time comes." He'd brushed his lips over the crown of her head.
"But-,"
"But nothin'. Crack whores and junkies have babies every day, and so can you. If you don't want this baby 'cause you aren't ready or 'cause you aren't willing to shoulder the responsibility, I can respect that. But don't you fuckin' dare drop your balls on me."
Another snicker. "Babe, I never had any balls to begin with. Those were your department."
"Smartass," he'd grumbled amiably.
Her brow had furrowed. "But what if-?"
"You miscarry?" he'd finished for her. "Everybody runs that risk, doll. My aunt on my Pop's side had four before she had her daughter, and she never had so much as indigestion. If it happens, there's nothin' we can do about it, and if you don't wanna try again, then I'll go down and get myself clipped."
She'd gaped at him. "You will not.
"Why not?" he'd countered. "It's my equipment."
"Because what if I die and you marry again?"
"There isn't gonna be anybody else, doll," he'd said flatly. "Not ever."
She'd opened her mouth to protest, then decided against it. They had spent the next few minutes in companionable silence, listening to the rhythm of heartbeats and breaths. He had watched the Knicks fuddle their way to another spectacular loss on the jagged shoulders of string beans and gangly praying mantises, and she had snaked her hand beneath his shirt to tease the coarse hairs of his chest.
"Are you ready for this?" he'd asked as a Knick had lobbed an airball toward the visitors' basket.
"No." She'd kissed his chin. "I'm not."
She was right. Neither of them had been remotely prepared. Not for the nausea that sent her scrambling for the bathroom or the nearest wastebasket and often jolted him from a dead sleep with its ferocity. Not for her red face as she hunched over the cool porcelain bowl and heaved her guts. Not for the back pain or the fatigue or the loss of concentration, and most assuredly not for the giddy fear that waylaid him every time he saw her steadily expanding stomach or felt the unexpected firmness of it beneath his hands.
They had both been blindsided, but it was Rebecca who had landed on her feet first. Standing behind his desk and watching the sleek barrel of the gun sniff blindly for his sleeping child, he could recall with absolute clarity the moment in which she had regained her faltering equilibrium.
She was on that table with her bladder full of water and nothing between the ultrasound tech and her morning glory but a flimsy paper smock. Fear and spasticity made her rigid, and she fought the ultrasound wand and whimpered and twisted from its cold, clinical touch, so unlike your passionate heat. She pressed her lips together and clutched the sides of the table, and you felt like such a treacherous bastard prying her knees apart. The tech offered to bring in restraints, but that was an indignity you would not sanction, and with soft words and softer hands, you convinced her to submit.
She turned her face away from the hinterlands underneath the smock and looked instead at your face and the hideous art deco painting on the far wall. She cried out when it was done, a sharp, furious cry of surprise and resigned hurt that twisted your heart inside your chest because the last thing you ever wanted to do was cause her pain. You knew he was only doing his job, but you were tempted to slap the tech for his cavalier attitude all the same, pain for pain and tears for tears.
And then there it was, impossibly tiny, nestled inside her with the miniscule stubs of its forming arms tucked and twitching against its castor-bean body. The picture was grainy and indistinct, but you saw its movements as it dreamed and heard God's voice as His unseen hands gave it form. And even if you'd been blind, there was still the heartbeat, rapid as a sparrow's. Your jaw tightened, and your eyes burned, and as you stared at the rest of your life, you were possessed of a single, all-consuming thought:
Mine. That's what you thought, sitting in that chair with the fingers of one hand entwined with Rebecca's and the other hand brushing her forehead. A single syllable of absolute possessiveness, primitive and unapologetic. That life on the screen was yours and hers and God's and no one else's, and you resolved right then that anyone who interfered with it would never see another daylight. You wanted to take her off the examination table and spirit her away where nothing could hurt either of them. The tech had no right to bear witness to this private miracle, job be damned, and your tongue cramped and prickled with the desire to lash and sting and drive him out.
You might have done it, too, but then Rebecca, spraddle-legged and uncomfortable with modern medicine's prick lodged rudely between her thighs, lifted her head beneath your petting hand and studied the screen intently.
Is that the baby? she asked quietly, propped on her elbows with her chin tucked to her chest.
Got it in one, the tech replied amiably, and gently shifted the wand for a better angle.
It happened in an instant, the shifting of sunlight on a cloudy day. The diffuse, undefined fear that had plagued her since she rolled into the living room with an EPT in her hand disappeared, and in its place was a serene determination. She lifted your hand to her mouth and kissed it, and her eyes never left that wriggling shape on the screen. She was taking the measure of her responsibility then, giving face to the unknown.
Her eyes still hold the sheen of unshed tears as she retches into the toilet or the wastebasket beside the bed, and she still flinches from the prick of the needle. There are still nights when she shambles out of the bedroom to curl beside you on the couch and doze fitfully, overwhelmed by the path that lies before her, but there is no more despair, no more flailing panic. She has seen the beginning and knows there is an end, and she is bound to see it through. Her stoicism in the face of the uncertain inevitable both reassures and terrifies you, and you love her for it.
Ironically, the day Rebecca had rediscovered her equilibrium had been the day he'd lost his. He'd taken her home on the subway, his badge on prominent display to deter thieves, muggers, and unwashed perverts, and when he'd made sure she was comfortable at home, with water and the phone within easy reach, he'd retreated to the street and the stinging, breath-stealing cold of December.
He'd walked to the precinct with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his leather overcoat and snow crunching beneath his shoes. The parts of his face unprotected by the muffler he wore stung with the cold, prickled and grew numb, but he was absurdly grateful for the numbness. It had cooled his burning skin and slowed his frantic train of thought, the better to grasp them in clumsy, unsteady hands. He'd breathed in the smells and tastes of New York winter-the acrid smoke of burning rubber in rusting barrels, car exhaust, bundled bodies, fresh snow, and freezing piss. It was familiar and soothing, and he'd drawn it all deeply into his lungs and held it there, as though their mere presence would be enough to stave off the changes on the horizon.
The ultrasound had made it real. Until he had seen the proof of it with his own eyes, the idea that he was soon to be a father had been an abstract dream, a faraway probability that could not touch him. It had been a child's painting, done in awkward, bold strokes and vivid colors, the reds, whites, yellows, and blues of the Candyland game he had sometimes played as a kid with his baby sister. The colors of Tomorrow and Not Soon.
But reality was in black and white, stark and unforgiving, and it had told him that in seven months' time, his life of carefree autonomy would be over. He would be responsible for a life he had created. There would be pain and tears and bills, and every bullet meant for him now would have the potential to destroy three lives. If he died tomorrow, Rebecca would be not just a devastated widow with grief stamped on her face and smeared on her hands in red, white, and blue, but a single mother with a ramshackle, recalcitrant body and the condescending scrutiny of the world on her shoulders. She'd be fending off well-intended well-wishers by day and wrestling her demons by night, and there would be none to grant her safe harbor.
Not to mention your mother, a voice inside his head had pointed out with savage glee. She never approved of the broken girl you brought home with such pride. That was the most awkward, painful night of your life, and you never asked Rebecca to go back, though she has for your sake. Your mother is just as tough as your father, but far less principled when it comes to what is hers. She won't hesitate to wrest the living legacy of her sainted, dead son from his inferior widow in the name of doing what is best for the baby. She will steal that baby from its mother's very breast if she can manage it. Your father might put up a token protest, but a token is all it will be. When it comes to Familia Flack, Ana Flack has always ruled the roost.
Even if the worst doesn't happen, and you successfully dodge bullets and your family history of heart disease for the next twenty years, how the hell can you hope to raise a functional child? You're a fuck-up, pure and simple. You let your sister die when you were sixteen, and now you've gone and gotten your physically fragile wife pregnant.
What if she can't handle it? What if you come home one night and find her on the bathroom floor in a puddle of blood, legs spread and your baby's premature head slipped through the umbilical cord like a noose? Suppose she makes it to term. She could always die on the table, bleeding out in the stirrups while the nurses tend to your screaming child, who bought its first breath by dint of her last. Can you live with that? Can you stand to visit two graves at Christmas instead of one, sleeping baby in a sling tucked against your chest?
He had seen it all with terrible clarity, and as he'd walked, the city had begun to blur on the periphery of his vision, until all he could see were Rebecca's blood-smeared thighs and her agonized face, contorted with the ruthless pangs of childbirth.
She'll die, the voice had whispered. She'll die and leave you just like Diana did. It'll be déjà vu all over again. You'll sit in the front of the church and stare at the ebony casket on its polished steel runners and the spray of roses arranged so artfully on the lid. You'll stare at them with raw, dry eyes and wonder what sweet, screaming retard bought roses when everyone knows Rebecca loved sunflowers, with their enormous, nodding heads, thick stems, and bright yellow leaves that reminded her of the Florida sunshine she left behind. Your suit will fit this time, but the anguish will be the same as it was all those years ago. You'll sit with the baby in your lap, and it will shriek for the comfort of a breast whose milk has curdled.
You'll go home to your empty apartment and wander through the rooms, opening the drawers and closets and running your chapped fingers over her clothes in weary reverence. You'll pull out her favorite shirt or a pair of her underclothes and press them to your nose until all scent is leached from it. You'll feed your squalling child a bottle of thin formula, and then you'll sleep on the sofa because the bed is too big without her in it. The narrow couch will remind you of the narrow, eternal bed in which she sleeps, and as long as you keep her underwear fisted in your fingers, you'll keep the nightmares at bay.
You'll spend the rest of your life caught between your dead sister's rosary and your child, souvenirs of your most grievous failures.
The images conjured by the poison-tongued voice had come so quickly and so furiously that it had dizzied and nauseated him. He'd wound up staggering to a nearby news kiosk and buying a copy of the first paper upon which his hand had fallen. He'd carried it to a nearby stoop and sat down hard with it clutched in his fumbling hands. He'd opened it under the pretense of reading, but his hands had been trembling so badly that the pages had rattled and rustled noisily in his grip. In the end, he'd sat with the paper folded haphazardly on his lap and mentally recited the starting lineup of the Rangers until the world came back into focus.
Never in his most feverish and lurid imaginings of her end had he thought it would come here. By all rights, this should have been the safest place in the city for her, surrounded as she was by a wall of blue and her husband, who was armed with 9mms at hip and shoulder and a service pistol taped to one ankle. She should have been untouched and untouchable, and yet there she sat, a gun pointed at her undefended belly while her supercop husband stood behind his desk with a smear of mustard on his chin.
She wouldn't be here if it weren't for you, pointed out the gleeful, capering demon that had plagued him since childhood. It's your fifth wedding anniversary, and she should be celebrating with sunflowers and foot rubs and a sirloin cooked medium-rare. She would be, if you hadn't called her with fours hours to go before your dinner reservation and canceled in the name of justice. A freshman at NYU was strangled with her own panties and raped with a table lamp, and one look at her mother's anguished face assured that there would be neither time nor place for romance tonight.
Rebecca's tongue told you it would be all right, but you heard the false notes beneath her forced gaiety, the forlorn, brittle hurt beneath the platitudes she has learned by rote and the remembrances of anniversaries already missed. Like your third, which you spent in an interrogation room with a perp who had raped, beaten, and stabbed a twelve-year-old girl. You got the confession, but not until February second had passed into February third, and when you walked through the door at two o'clock in the morning, Rebecca had long since been in bed. You crawled in beside her without even bothering to shower, and you were too tired to give her so much as a consolation fuck. Happy anniversary, doll, and I'm sorry to smell like blood and tears.
The next morning, you were coherent enough to notice the present sitting on the kitchen table. Red foil and white satin ribbon. You picked it up and examined it while you sipped your coffee, turned the small, square box in your hand. It had your name on the front, written in her painfully crabbed handwriting, and so you set your coffee cup on the table and opened the box.
You stared at the contents of the box in silence and dropped it to the table with a graceless thump. It wasn't a shaver or a set of dress socks or a tie as she'd gotten for special occasions past. It was worse, because she had put her thought and heart into it. You turned the box upside down so you wouldn't have to see the pair of New York Rangers tickets with last night's date on them and went into the bedroom.
She was in front of the bedroom mirror, combing conditioner into her still-damp hair. The air was humid with steam and smelled of Pert Plus, heather, and honeysuckle soap. She saw your reflection in the mirror and smiled.
Heya, babe, she said. Rough night last night? Cheerful, as though she had not spent her evening watching the hours tick inexorably away to the wan glow of the television set.
Yeah. Yeah, it was. Some sicko raped and murdered a little girl.
Oh. Just that. Nothing more. Her face did not soften, and her eyes did not darken with sympathetic horror. Her fingers pulled the plastic teeth of the comb through the blonde mat of her hair with stubborn implacability.
You stood beside the bed in your rumpled boxer shorts and rubbed your nape, paper scraping paper in the silence of the room. I, uh, I saw the present in there on the table.
Did you? Her voice was even, but the comb faltered for the briefest instant.
How'd you get 'em? That game's been sold out for three days.
I bought them three weeks ago. Her voice was still even, but the comb was flying now.
Three weeks? You been thinkin' about it that long?
She looked at you as if you'd asked why she breathed. Of course. I actually started thinking about it two months ago. Hard not to, you know. Best day of my life, and in between lectures and papers, I've got all the time in the world. Maybe it's just a girl thing. She wasn't looking at you anymore, and she was talking too quickly, free hand flitting futilely over the assorted bottles and baubles on the dresser.
You wanted to tell her that it wasn't just a "girl thing", that that day had meant as much to you as it did to her, that while you were scarfing a dog on the steps of the precinct with your elbow propped on the vendor cart and your notebook in one hand, you were wishing like hell that she was with you. But instead, you opened your mouth and said, I'm sorry I didn't get to enjoy them.
Me, too, babe. I even laid out your manky old Messier jersey and your long joh- But it…it doesn't matter. It doesn't; you had more important things to worry about. There'll be more games, right? The smile on her face was too wide, and her eyes were too bright, and she was moving without purpose, picking up barettes and cleansing cloths and setting them down again. If you closed your eyes, you'd hear the scream behind the chatter.
You padded across the room and wrapped your arms around her from behind to still the frantic, jerky movements of her arms before she knocked the bottles of perfume onto the floor. You felt her trembling despite the padded back of her chair, a jittery thrum of harnessed adrenaline, and self-loathing was bitter inside your mouth. You knew what she was doing because you'd spent a lifetime performing the same tired magic on your father every time he blew off a Little League game or a trip to Coney Island. It was the gospel of Nothing To See Here and Everything's Fine, and you used it to pack the wounds he inflicted and insulate yourself against further damage.
You'd sworn never to give your own children a reason to need that old and terrible magic, and to see your wife employ it twisted a salted dagger in your gut. You also knew there was nothing you could say to ease the sting of her unspoken disappointment, so you lifted her hair from her nape and pressed cool kisses to the pale flesh you found and murmured nonsense syllables of apology and comfort.
Don't. Don't, you whispered, and trailed your lips over the sharp, bony curve of her shoulder. Don't. It's all right.
She didn't move. She sat, rigid and unyielding, in your arms. Then her head fell back against your chest. I missed you, she said in a small voice. Her eyes were closed, and moisture glistened in her eyelashes like condensation.
I-, you began, suddenly keenly aware of how fragile she was within the solid circle of your arms, but you could not apologize for doing your duty, for being who and what you had always been, would not. Three years ago yesterday was a damn fine day. A-1A, as a matter of fucking fact, and as soon as I get a fuckin' day off, I'm gonna prove it. You nipped her neck and sucked the delicate skin between your teeth, and you prayed that your clumsy gesture of atonement would be enough.
Just A-1A? she grumbled, but she smiled, however faintly, and craned her neck to peck the stubble on your chin.
Hey, that's high praise comin' from me. Messer told me I was doomin' myself to the old ball and chain.
Yeah, well, Messer can just go right on strokin' it to the staples in the goddamned Playboy centerfold, she muttered peevishly.
Trust me, doll, he's got no problem pullin' chicks.
She snorted. He'll have plenty of problems when the day before taxes are due rolls around and I won't do his taxes. I'll have a mortgage on his balls for the next thirty years.
You laughed until you cried, not because it was the height of hilarity, but because it was the Rebecca to whom you were accustomed and with whom you were desperately in love, sarcastic and bitter as smoked anise and full of devilish mischief. You guffawed and snorted and rocked to and fro with her, relieved because the wound was not mortal. It was fixable, and you vowed to soothe it the minute you got the chance.
For once, you were as good as your unspoken word. You picked her up from her office at NYU and took her to a Thai restaurant Hammerbeck had mentioned earlier in the week. The lights were low and the food was plentiful and excellent, spicy and succulent and exotic on the tongue. You talked and she listened, chin propped on her interlaced hands, and you listened in turn. You had no idea what a Krieds algorithm was, nor did you particularly care, but it was glorious to discuss a subject other than blood and bodies and blunt force trauma. Besides, she clearly reveled in your undivided, if befuddled, attention, and it amused you to watch her growing excitement as she tried to explain it. She was giddy and demonstrative, and when you pulled her to you for a kiss outside the restaurant, her heartbeat was a rapid flutter beneath her blouse.
You took her home and gave her a massage, and when she was boneless and malleable beneath your hands, you put the leftovers from the restaurant to good use and ate them from her shivering body as slowly and thoroughly as you could, careful to keep the spiced food from tender flesh. She writhed and twisted and whimpered beneath you, and near the end, when the air was thick and redolent with the musky scent of sex and sweat and ringing with the staccato beat of Mrs. Petrinski's broom handle against the adjacent wall, she whispered things into your ear not heard on a longshoreman's sea-brined tongue.
You'd fixed the damage then, and ever since, you have been mindful of the day. People still kill and die on the second of February, and you still answer the call to the hunt, but you make sure to call her and remind her that February second is still the best day of your life. Those two minutes on the phone are the best you've ever spent, and even if you come home with the rising of the sun, her eyes are peaceful with the knowledge that she is loved. So when you heard that brittle disappointment in her voice, you told her to meet you at the precinct in an hour, and you had the hoagie waiting when she rolled into the bullpen. It wasn't much, but it was an anniversary dinner, and the way her face lit up made you feel like a million bucks.
Now she's sitting here with a gun at her distended belly and a whackjob at the trigger.
For someone being confronted with her own mortality, his wife was remarkably sedate. She sat with her hands folded loosely in her lap. A sardonic smile danced in the corners of her mouth, and her eyes were alive and vibrant inside her face, cobalt blue and snapping with energy.
"Hey, buddy," Flack said slowly. "Just take it easy. Nobody's gonna hurt you in here. Why don't you just put the gun down, and we can talk about this?"
"Shut up, Muggle filth!" the man shrieked, and the gun twitched spasmodically in his grip.
Not my wife; not my baby. "Okay, okay. You don't wanna put the gun down, that's fine. Just point it at me, then."
"You will leave the gun precisely where it is," Rebecca said coolly, each word enunciated with cutting exactitude, as though she were addressing an unruly student.
"Ma'am, I need you to be quiet and let the police handle this," he told her.
"Mmm," she said dismissively. "A smashing job they've done so far."
Dammit, Rebecca, this isn't a game or some made-for-TV movie where I get a second take if he pulls the trigger. If that happens, I lose you both. Be quiet. Just shut the fuck up until I get you out of here. Once I get this asshole under control, you can talk all you want. You can talk me to sleep with your mouth and your caressing, gesticulating hands, and I'll listen. I swear. I will listen to every word you have to say for the rest of my life.
"Ma'am, with all due respect, I need you to shut the fuck up," he snapped, and she gave a nigh-imperceptible flinch.
"Your concern is duly noted, Detective." Cold. "But I'm afraid you'll have to go fuck yourself." Wounded anger.
"Shut up, both of you," the man snarled, and ran a filthy, blackened-nailed hand through long, unkempt, impossibly blond hair.
"Why don't you just let her go? Whatever your beef is, this lady's got nothin' to do with it. You gotta roomful of cops here as hostages. You don't need her."
The man snorted and tightened his grip on the gun. "On the contrary, you blubbering twit, she has everything to do with why I'm here. And drop the bloody charade, why don't you? I know she's your wife. We've been watching for years."
"Of course you have. Since the day I left, like as not." Rebecca shifted in her chair, and the gun followed her movement.
The man rolled his eyes. "Don't flatter yourself. We had more pressing matters on hand back then. Like exterminating the Mudblood filth and getting rid of Harry bloody Potter."
Rebecca snorted. "From the looks of you, Malfoy, I gather neither objective met with rousing success."
Flack watched the exchange in mute bewilderment. The language was English, and yet he found that he could not understand any of it. In all the colorful vernacular of the Five Boroughs, he had never heard of Muggles or Mudbloods. Rebecca, however, was unfazed by the bizarre terminology if her expression was any indication. It was wistful, longing, as though recalling people and places she had once loved, but had thought never to see again.
Should old acquaintance be forgot, he thought, and his mouth went dry. "You know this guy?" he asked helplessly.
"He's…an old schoolmate."
He blinked. "From that place in St. Augustine?"
A single shake of her head. "Not that one, babe. The one in Scotland. The one you can't find in your databases, no matter how hard you look."
"You knew-,"
"Of course I did, sweetheart." It was gentle. "You're a cop. It's what you do."
You've wondered about the blank space in her life since the day you married her, the unblemished tabula rasa of the three years between fifteen and seventeen. She's plied you with scraps and tantalizing fragments when your curiosity has grown too insistent, shown you fleeting, distorted glimpses into her private River Lethe, but she has never revealed the entire picture. She deflects your prying fingers with kisses and declarations of love and sly asides, and by the time you feel the urge to ask her again, all the ground you have gained with your patient chiseling has been lost.
Now all your questions are about to be answered on the point of a gun, the truth hidden beneath a transient's layer of dirt. Are you sure you want to know?
He wanted to sit down, but he wasn't certain the chair was still directly behind his ass anymore, and besides, to sit would be a sign of weakness he could ill afford. If he sat, this Malfoy nutjob might take the opportunity to put a bullet into Rebecca's abdomen and his baby's brain. So he pressed his palms against the cluttered surface of his desk, bit his tongue until warm copper flooded his mouth, and willed his feet and knees to hold him up.
"You haven't told him?" Malfoy asked incredulously, and capered from foot to foot in a jig of glee. "He doesn't know what you are?"
"No," Rebecca replied through gritted teeth. "I didn't. He was a Muggle and a police officer besides, and I didn't think it prudent."
"Bollocks, Stanhope. You didn't tell him because you were afraid he'd leave if he knew what you were, what you'd done."
"Your Legilimency is rusty, Malfoy," Rebecca retorted, but her pale face had grown paler still, and her hands had curled into fists in her lap.
"Oh, no, Stanhope," Malfoy purred. "No, I don't think it is. One abomination, he could stomach, but not two. Maybe he could ignore your twisted limbs and ugly face long enough to implant that rotting Squib in your belly, but if he'd known you were a heretic from which his cherished Muggle sensibilities flee, if he'd smelled the sour taint of magic coursing through your veins, you'd still be a spinster, hoarding your worthless maidenhead and stroking your wet, aching cunt between institutional bed covers." The muzzle of the gun nuzzled her belly like an affectionate pet, and her skin retreated from the contact with a visible ripple.
It's touching my baby, Flack thought, and was possessed of a rage so complete that it stopped his breath. His fingers throbbed with the need to throttle and crush and break and longed for the fluttering softness of Malfoy's throat. He wanted to hear the snap of bone and watch the light ebb from those bloodshot, grey eyes. He slipped a hand off his desk and reached for the gun at his hip.
Malfoy cocked the hammer of the gun. "I wouldn't if I were you," he said breezily. "My finger might slip."
Flack froze, hand hovering over the butt of his gun.
Don't risk it, son, the voice of his father counseled. He'll open her up and splatter her guts to the four corners before you get off a round. Let him talk. Sooner or later, he'll get cocky or distracted, and you can blow his brains to Kingdom Come and wear his balls as a souvenir.
He forced himself to relax and returned his hand to the desk. "What are you talkin' about?" he asked to distract himself from the impotent rage that cramped his gut and tinted the world red around the edges. "What do you mean, 'what she is.'"
"She's a witch and a merry murderess, to boot," Malfoy announced gaily. "She led fourteen of her friends to die on the Curse-blasted moors of Scotland. She wheedled and manipulated and cajoled, and one by one, they all fell down. When they were dead, she went back to the castle with blood and brains and bits of bone in her hair and called it victory. She lied and stole and tortured, uttered Unforgivables with relish. She framed a teacher for assault upon a student at fifteen, and at sixteen, she tortured a teacher into insanity. At seventeen, she fled the field of battle and licked her wounds in the Colonies, where she added Muggle-fucking harlot to her list of dubious accomplishments."
"You're fucking crazy," Flack said flatly.
It was the only plausible explanation, and one he would have come up with much sooner had he not been out of his mind with fear for his fledgling family. Now that he got a good look at the man in front of him, it was obvious that he was in the grips of a hardcore drug addiction. He was emaciated, and his spindly, fleshless arms were riddled with fading bruises and the angry, red weals of fresh track marks. His eyes were ringed with exhaustion and muddied with the opiate haze of smack. His clothes were tattered rags. They might once have been black, but life on the streets had dulled them to a filthy, tumorous gray. He stank of garbage and piss and rancid desperation.
If he's just bugfuck crazy, his father mused, then why does Rebecca understand him? She's a rational woman, Donnie boy, a keeper of numbers and inarguable absolutes. You've sat on the couch and watched her excoriate a grad student for building his hypothesis out of whole cloth and wishful thinking. She has no time for fairy tales, but she hasn't batted an eyelash at any of this. In fact, she seems oddly relieved, as if this is a reckoning a long time coming. If it's lunacy that moves him, it's a shared madness.
"Rebecca?" he said uncertainly. "Rebecca?" Pleading.
She closed her eyes, then, and a single tear rolled down her cheek. Despite his best intentions to remain upright, his knees unhinged with an audible creak, and he sat in his chair with an undignified, graceless thump. He felt dizzy and sick, and the roast beef and tomato he'd eaten earlier burned in the back of his throat. He closed his eyes to shut out the familiar room that had suddenly warped and twisted into torturous, alien angles.
"Oh, fuck," he moaned, and cupped his head in his hands.
"What do you want, Malfoy?" Rebecca asked. Her voice was rough and weary, and her shoulders were slumped.
"I should think that would be obvious, Stanhope. I need your Arithmantic skill."
"I've no interest in helping you, Malfoy, and even if the world had upended on its axis and softened my brain to custard, why would you need me? I thought the Dark Lord had a cadre of skilled Arithmancers at his beck and call."
"Mmm, he did," Malfoy conceded. "Imperius was quite useful in that regard. But after so many years, we've discovered that brains subjected to twelve consecutive years of forceful persuasion at the tip of a wand must eventually disintegrate into organic porridge. Our last Arithmancer succumbed a fortnight ago. Most unpleasant. She gouged out her eyes with the nib of her quill and smeared them over the walls in a futile attempt to see."
"And you want an Arithmancer who can be pressed into voluntary service, or what passes for it."
"Precisely. Apparently, gobbling Muggle cock has not yet destroyed your critical faculties."
"Fuck you," Rebecca spat.
"I might have done before you fouled yourself with this idiot Muggle. You're repulsive, yes, but the power you possess in that misbegotten body of yours would almost have been worth it. Besides, closing one's eyes and thinking of England is not the sole province of a hard-done-by witch." He offered her a smug, humorless smile.
"You're a bastard," Flack said, incredulous and repulsed.
Malfoy did not look at him. "I assure you that my parents were properly married, which is more than I can say for the unfortunate souls who spawned you," he said haughtily. "And there is no shame in admitting you close your eyes and think of someone else. No sensible man wouldn't."
"I don't."
"Thus proving my point," Malfoy muttered drily. "Much as I would thrill to the discussion of Muggle sexual degeneracy-,"
"Why do you need me, Malfoy?" Rebecca interrupted. "When I left wizarding Britain, there was no shortage of reprobate souls willing to compromise their souls for a Galleon."
"Yes, well, war has a nasty habit of eroding available resources, and the Dark Lord has never been known for his generosity."
"And?" Rebecca said shrewdly.
"And no one else can do what you do," he snapped.
Rebecca's expression remained impassive, but Flack had studied her for the past seven years, had traced the lines of her face with tender fingers and warm lips. He had watched her in the bright, sodium lights of the CSI labs and the sickly, yellow light of the café on 34th Street. He'd seen her in the phantasmagoric, washed-out light of the television and the warm flicker of candlelight. He'd seen her face hard with fury and flushed with pleasure. He knew the subtle shifts of her moods, had catalogued them with loving avidity, and when he saw the fleeting narrowing of her eyes, his heart thumped painfully against his ribcage.
I see a bad moon risin', he thought nonsensically, and blinked.
"Voldemort is dead, isn't he?" she said slowly. "Harry and the Headmaster killed him."
"The Dark Lord is not dead," Malfoy snapped. "He was immortal. That which is immortal cannot die."
"Well, not all your schooling was a waste, then," Rebecca replied blandly, and Malfoy flushed an alarming puce.
"I don't need your cheek, you stupid bint, I need your mind, and if you don't dispense with the former and offer the latter, I'm going to blow a hole in your husband's skull," he shouted, and swung the gun from her belly to his forehead.
Thank God, Flack thought numbly, and the relief was so sweet that he felt the urge to laugh.
"Point the gun at me, Malfoy," Rebecca exclaimed sharply. "At me, you son of a bitch. He's got nothing to do with this." Furious and frantic.
"Leave the gun where it is, Malfoy," Flack countered. To Rebecca, he said, "Calm down, doll. It's gonna be fine. You just breathe and relax and take care of the baby." Rebecca blinked at the mention of the baby, as though she had temporarily forgotten that it rested beneath the swell of her belly. Her hand curled protectively around it. "That's my girl," he murmured.
"I don't take orders from you, Muggle!" Malfoy shrieked, and the gun jittered in his grasp.
"Malfoy, stop!" Rebecca pleaded, and Flack's heart twisted at the fear and tears in her voice. "Stop, please!"
I'm gonna get you, you fuckin' bastard, Flack thought savagely. I've never taken advantage of the unspoken free-shot rule that's lived within these walls since the first willing Paddy pinned a badge to his chest, but you bet your ass I'm gonna. I get your ass in that holdin' cell, even Sheldon won't be able to glue you together again. And if SWAT blows your head off and ends up squeegeeing your brains off the station house floor, I'm gonna piss on your corpse.
"Humility always did suit you better." Malfoy dipped the gun in a jaunty salute.
"I don't understand what you want." Rebecca was crying openly now, and a tear dangled from the end of her chin. Flack's fingers itched to wipe it away. "If Voldemort is dead, you need Necromancy, not Arithmancy, and I can't help you."
Malfoy smirked. "Don't tell me you've never been tempted." Then his voice hardened. "And if you fucking play stupid with me again, you'll be scooping your beloved Muggle's brains from the carpet."
"All right! All right! Just- You want me to unthread Potter's victory," she said dully.
"Quite. A mere turning of the tables is all I ask. Once the Dark Lord has been restored and his victory assured, you can return to your life and your beloved Muggle."
"If I change the past so drastically in the wizarding world, there's no guarantee it won't affect this one. I could come back to find that I never met my husband and he married someone else."
Malfoy rolled his eyes. "Your marital bliss is hardly my concern. Besides, it's equally probable that your life will be unaffected."
"I won't risk losing him. I won't do it."
Malfoy shrugged. "Then you'll lose him now." He leveled the gun at Flack's forehead.
Flack closed his eyes.
"No! No, no, God, no. All right. I'll do it. I'll-," Rebecca shrieked, and began to sob.
He would remember that shriek and the sob that followed it for the rest of his life, and it would keep him with her even after she told him the truth in their bedroom with both hands folded over her belly as though the confession pained her. It was raw and honest and wholly undignified, and it testified with brutal eloquence to the cruel vulnerability of love. He had never heard her shriek that way before, not even when he had pushed into her on his narrow, bachelor's bed one sticky August night. Malfoy and his gun had laid her bare, and he knew that she would shriek that way for no one else.
"How very Gryffindor of you," Malfoy gloated. "And disappointingly predictable." He gestured toward the door with a flick of his gun. "Let's go."
"Not until you let me say goodbye to my husband."
"You're in no position to make demands. Let's go."
Rebecca stiffened. "Either you let me say goodbye to my husband, or you shoot us both and get nothing before every cop in here unloads his magazine into you."
Malfoy and Rebecca regarded one another in silence, and Flack could see them circling each other in wary contemplation. Rebecca's eyes were hard as flint, and Malfoy's gaze was aloof and coolly amused.
They've done this before, his father said, gruff and incredulous. They're old partners in this dance, and even though it's been a long time, their feet remember the steps their minds have forgotten. Around and around they go, treadin' patterns no one else can follow or understand. Neither of them is afraid. In fact, they both look exhilarated by it. Rebecca's been lookin' haggard with all the pukin' and wakin' up in the middle'a the night to pee, but you wouldn't know it now. She's been revitalized.
His old man was right. Despite her red eyes and wet, blotchy cheeks, Rebecca was radiant, and more alert than she had been in the past three months. She sat ramrod-straight in her chair, and her eyes darted rapidly to and fro in their sockets as if she were wrangling with a particularly challenging proof.
She looks like Riki Tiki Tavi, he thought absurdly. A mongoose lookin' for the cobra's soft underbelly.
Malfoy finally spoke. "You have one minute. Never let it be said I wasn't a generous man."
Rebecca snorted and backed her chair behind the desk, feet scraping his shins. She reached for him and cupped his face in her hands, blessedly cool against his burning cheeks. He heaved a shuddering sigh at the contact and wrapped his hands around the delicate bones of her wrists.
"Rebecca, don't go. Stay here with me," he murmured. He almost added, Where it's safe, but the realist in him understood the ridiculous irony of the statement and held his tongue.
A soundless huff of laughter, warm against his cheek and nose. "I don't have much choice. I can't lose you."
"If you walk outta here, I'm gonna lose you. You and Junior both."
Another huff, and her fingers danced over the ridge of his cheekbones and tickled his throbbing temples. "Junior now, is it?"
One hand drifted to her belly and rested there. "Yeah, well, a guy can dream, can't he?" There was no danger in admitting the secret fantasy of his heart now that it was being snatched away.
"Yes, he can, babe," she said softly. Then, "Do you trust me?"
Malfoy's words came back to him, then, harsh and bitter as a curse uttered on hallowed ground. She's a witch and a merry murderess, to boot. She led fourteen of her friends to die on the Curse-blasted moors of Scotland. She wheedled and manipulated and cajoled, and one by one, they all fell down. When they were dead, she went back to the castle with blood and brains and bits of bone in her hair and called it victory.
He tried to picture it in his mind, but the images were flat and lifeless, cardboard cutouts moving across a rickety stage, a paper doll wearing his wife's face. It was false and illusory, but this Rebecca, the one with her forehead pressed to his and her hands pressed to either side of his face, was real. He could taste her and smell her and feel her, and he had trusted her enough to give her his name and his future.
He brushed his lips against hers, hand cupped protectively around her belly. Yes.
He felt rather than heard her response, a moist I love you mouthed against his lips.
"Time's up," Malfoy called.
And then Rebecca smiled at him, a feral, sharp-toothed smile he had never seen before, teeth white and glistening and eyes dead as damped embers. She sat up, but she did not move away from him.
"Now, Stanhope. Your Gryffindor sentimentality does you no favors."
The smile widened further still, and Flack fought the urge to push away from her. It was cold and cruel and not quite sane.
"You're forgetting something, Malfoy," she said.
"Oh? What is that? Your staggering thickness?"
She cocked her head and pursed her lips. "I was never officially a Gryffindor," she replied ruefully, and her right hand shot from beneath the desk. "Sectumsempra!"
The voice that emerged from his tiny wife was impossible. It was commanding and unapologetic and pitiless, freighted with the timbre of absolute conviction. It was a voice from the bones and sinews, drawn up from her curling toes and hurled from her mouth with the force of law. It was drill sergeants and Mac Taylor and the trumpeting of gods, and he could only stare in stunned stupefaction.
The world flashed red, blood and retribution, and when he could see again, Rebecca was moving toward Malfoy, who was sprawled in front of the desk in a boneless, shuddering heap. She pointed two fingers of her right hand at the gun still lying in his twitching hand, and it squirted from his lax grasp and skidded to a halt against the toe of Flack's shoe.
She never touched it, his rational mind gibbered. It moved on its own. My wife's a fuckin' Jedi. He found himself giggling at the absurdity of it as he crouched to pick up the gun between his thumb and forefinger.
The giggling stopped abruptly when Rebecca leaned over the side of her chair and seized a handful of Malfoy's clothes. "You're right, Malfoy," she hissed. "I did lie and steal and manipulate." She punctuated each confession with a shake that made Malfoy's head loll and bob bonelessly on his neck. "I talked my fourteen friends onto that field, knowing none of them would come back, and I watched them all die. Jackson Decklan met his Maker facedown in the bloody mud with a worthless chunk of rock in his hand, and I loved him best. If I would sacrifice my friends for the sake of a man who considered me a means to an end and who tossed me aside when I had served my purpose, what did you think I would do for a man who loves me?" She shook him continuously now, a terrier with a rat in its jaws. The hand fisted in his clothes was slathered in blood from the gaping wound in Malfoy's throat.
She's gonna have a miscarriage if she keeps carryin' on like that. There's too much adrenaline, and it's not natural to be bent that way.
"Rebecca." He set the gun on his desk and started for her. "Rebecca, it's okay now."
Rebecca gave no sign that she had heard him. Her gaze was fixed on the ruin of Malfoy's throat and the blood trickling sluggishly from the wound.
"You threatened what is mine," she spat, and her eyes blazed inside her face.
"Rebecca," he snapped. "That enough, goddammit."
She flinched, startled, and then looked at him. Her eyes were wild and unfocused, and there was no recognition in them. Then her shoulders slumped, and she released what was left of Malfoy. She looked at her blood-slicked hand, flexed the fingers as though she couldn't quite believe they were hers, and began to cry, slowly and softly at first, but gaining in volume and intensity until she was rocking and wailing in her chair, hand fisted against the hard bone of her sternum like a perverse Roman salute.
He enfolded her in his arms and rested his chin atop her head, and his heart ached as he listened to her choke and snuffle and sob against his neck. "'S all right, doll. You done good. Deep breaths for me, mm?" He winnowed his fingers through her hair and cradled the back of her head in his palm. "Right now, you're suckin' wind like a Hoover, and it's gonna make you dizzy." He shifted his weight from his toes to his heels in his crouch and called to a rookie uniform who was gaping at the scene in queasy incredulity.
"Call a bus." Not that it mattered; Malfoy was dead as shit and sheetrock, but best to do it by the book.
"Don't bother," Rebecca muttered from the hollow of his neck. "In twenty minutes, nobody will remember this."
"Honey, I don't see how anyone could forget it."
She only offered him a sad, weary smile and retreated to the hollow of his neck again.
Continued in Part II
Author:
laguera25Fandom(s): CSI:NY/HP
Rating: FRMAO
Pairings: Don Flack/OFC
Warnings: Graphic violence
Disclaimer(s): All recognizable characters, places, and events in the HPverse are the property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only. Rebecca Stanhope Flack is my own invention.
All recognizable characters, places, and events in the CSI:NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertaiment only.
"I see a bad moon risin'," is a lyric from Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Bad Moon Risin'.
A/N: This story contains on OFC. If OFCs offend thee, please stay in your lane and exit to the rear. There is no need to pee in my pool. Concrit is appreciated. Flames are not.
This story was the natural result of a "what-if" scenario that popped into my head as I was writing Through a Glass Darkly, Come Ye Home Again and demanded to be written. It has no bearing on the TAGD arc, however. In essence, it's crackfic AU of a crackfic AU.
"No," said his wife quietly when the man with the gun said he'd kill her. "You won't."
Don Flack still wasn't sure how this had happened, or even what had happened. It had been a blitzkrieg attack. One minute, he had been sitting at his desk in the bullpen, splitting a grinder with Rebecca in lieu of a proper anniversary dinner, and the next, he and the entire 14th precinct had been staring down the barrel of a Colt .45. He still had a dribble of mustard on his chin from the last bite he'd taken before the doors had blown open to admit the devil and the cold winter air, and the aftertaste of onions was hot and sweet on his tongue as he looked at the barrel pointed at his wife's rounded, pregnant belly.
There were four months of unborn child in her belly, seeded there by a lazy tryst in the back of a departmental Chevy Avalanche down by the Hudson River. He'd taken her there because she said she'd never necked in a car before, and as her husband, he'd counted it his duty to see that she wanted for nothing with which he could reasonably provide her, even teenaged memories created fifteen years too late. So, he'd whisked her away to the river with a bottle of red wine and a cooler full of sliced fruits and cold cuts. He'd folded down the backseat, and they'd talked and fed each other bites of melon and listened to the radio, and sometime between the Beach Boys' "Kokomo" and Otis Redding's "Sittin'(On the Dock of the Bay)," he'd created a tangible reminder of that night.
She'd told him the day after Thanksgiving, come to him white-faced and trembling and clutching the pregnancy test in one small hand. He hadn't realized what it was at first, had wondered, in fact, why she was trying to hand him a tampon in the middle of the Knicks game. Then his brain had caught up with his eyes, and he'd turned the slender stem of the test over and over in his disbelieving hands, studied the parallel blue lines from every angle. She hadn't said a word, just sat with her hands in her lap, fingers worrying the hem of the Yankees t-shirt she was wearing as a nightshirt. Now and then, she'd paused in her endless fretting to swipe irritably at her streaming eyes.
"Hey, why are you cryin', doll," he'd asked, shaken from his sloe-eyed stupor by the sight of a tear streaming down her cheek.
"It's positive."
"Yeah, I didn't think you were comin' out here to show me some abstract art," he had replied, and then he'd snagged the footrest of her chair and closed the distance between them. "Is that a problem?" he'd asked gently. "'Cause if it is, I'll, uh, I'll support… I'll understand."
It had been a lie, but one he had been willing to tell for the love of her. He loved her too much to risk losing her for any reason, and if that meant accompanying her to the clinic and holding her hand while modern medicine obliterated an ancient miracle, then he would. He would close his eyes and grit his teeth against the protests of his Roman Catholic soul, and when it was over, he would bring her home and pretend it had never happened.
"No. I mean, I don't know," she'd said thickly. "It's not that I don't want- How could I not? It's yours. Ours. I just-," She'd trailed off, and her Adam's apple had bobbed. "Are we ready for this?"
He'd patted the couch. "C'mere, doll."
She'd set the brakes, opened the footrests, and pivoted onto the couch without a word and snuggled against him, disheveled and feverish from suppressed weeping. He'd pressed a butterfly kiss to the sensitive shell of her ear.
"What do you want?" He'd caught a strand of her hair and wound it lazily around his fingertips.
She'd rested her hand on his chest. "I've thought about this, but to tell the truth, I never thought it would happen."
A soft snort of amusement. "I don't see why not. Accordin' to Mrs. Petrinski, we're like fuckin' rabbits, and no, I won't pardon the pun. Even I gotta admit I can't keep my hands off you."
She'd chuckled. "Yeah, I know. I guess I just figured my body would never sustain a pregnancy."
"The doctors tell you that you wouldn't?"
"No, but they've been wrong before. They told my mother I'd be a vegetable."
"Yeah? Well, fuck 'em," he'd said fiercely, and rested her head on his chest. "I'm damn proud of my turnip lovin'."
She'd laughed at that, hard and long, and he'd reveled in the sound and the shuddering vibration of her angular body against his toned, muscled one. He loved to make her laugh, to see her eyes light up with unexpected pleasure. When she threw back her head and exposed the pale stem of her throat and the uneven ivory of her teeth to the light, the taint of the city and the festering, virulent hate of its denizens left him, and the air he drew into his lungs was not so sour.
"This turnip loves you," she'd murmured when the laughter had tapered to watery, hiccoughing giggles.
"We can do this, you know. The department has good insurance, and what it doesn't cover, Medicare will. If that don't work, I can take out a loan."
"It's not the bills I worry about. What if I can't? What if something happens, and I lose it? It would be all my fault, and-," Her mouth had worked, and her fingers had tightened convulsively in the fabric of his t-shirt.
"Hey, ssshhh." He'd pressed three fingers to her trembling lips. "Listen to me. You're not gonna lose nothin', all right? You're too stubborn to let this baby go now that it's inside you. As a matter of fact, I pity the poor son of a bitch doctor who tries to tell you to push if you don't wanna when the time comes." He'd brushed his lips over the crown of her head.
"But-,"
"But nothin'. Crack whores and junkies have babies every day, and so can you. If you don't want this baby 'cause you aren't ready or 'cause you aren't willing to shoulder the responsibility, I can respect that. But don't you fuckin' dare drop your balls on me."
Another snicker. "Babe, I never had any balls to begin with. Those were your department."
"Smartass," he'd grumbled amiably.
Her brow had furrowed. "But what if-?"
"You miscarry?" he'd finished for her. "Everybody runs that risk, doll. My aunt on my Pop's side had four before she had her daughter, and she never had so much as indigestion. If it happens, there's nothin' we can do about it, and if you don't wanna try again, then I'll go down and get myself clipped."
She'd gaped at him. "You will not.
"Why not?" he'd countered. "It's my equipment."
"Because what if I die and you marry again?"
"There isn't gonna be anybody else, doll," he'd said flatly. "Not ever."
She'd opened her mouth to protest, then decided against it. They had spent the next few minutes in companionable silence, listening to the rhythm of heartbeats and breaths. He had watched the Knicks fuddle their way to another spectacular loss on the jagged shoulders of string beans and gangly praying mantises, and she had snaked her hand beneath his shirt to tease the coarse hairs of his chest.
"Are you ready for this?" he'd asked as a Knick had lobbed an airball toward the visitors' basket.
"No." She'd kissed his chin. "I'm not."
She was right. Neither of them had been remotely prepared. Not for the nausea that sent her scrambling for the bathroom or the nearest wastebasket and often jolted him from a dead sleep with its ferocity. Not for her red face as she hunched over the cool porcelain bowl and heaved her guts. Not for the back pain or the fatigue or the loss of concentration, and most assuredly not for the giddy fear that waylaid him every time he saw her steadily expanding stomach or felt the unexpected firmness of it beneath his hands.
They had both been blindsided, but it was Rebecca who had landed on her feet first. Standing behind his desk and watching the sleek barrel of the gun sniff blindly for his sleeping child, he could recall with absolute clarity the moment in which she had regained her faltering equilibrium.
She was on that table with her bladder full of water and nothing between the ultrasound tech and her morning glory but a flimsy paper smock. Fear and spasticity made her rigid, and she fought the ultrasound wand and whimpered and twisted from its cold, clinical touch, so unlike your passionate heat. She pressed her lips together and clutched the sides of the table, and you felt like such a treacherous bastard prying her knees apart. The tech offered to bring in restraints, but that was an indignity you would not sanction, and with soft words and softer hands, you convinced her to submit.
She turned her face away from the hinterlands underneath the smock and looked instead at your face and the hideous art deco painting on the far wall. She cried out when it was done, a sharp, furious cry of surprise and resigned hurt that twisted your heart inside your chest because the last thing you ever wanted to do was cause her pain. You knew he was only doing his job, but you were tempted to slap the tech for his cavalier attitude all the same, pain for pain and tears for tears.
And then there it was, impossibly tiny, nestled inside her with the miniscule stubs of its forming arms tucked and twitching against its castor-bean body. The picture was grainy and indistinct, but you saw its movements as it dreamed and heard God's voice as His unseen hands gave it form. And even if you'd been blind, there was still the heartbeat, rapid as a sparrow's. Your jaw tightened, and your eyes burned, and as you stared at the rest of your life, you were possessed of a single, all-consuming thought:
Mine. That's what you thought, sitting in that chair with the fingers of one hand entwined with Rebecca's and the other hand brushing her forehead. A single syllable of absolute possessiveness, primitive and unapologetic. That life on the screen was yours and hers and God's and no one else's, and you resolved right then that anyone who interfered with it would never see another daylight. You wanted to take her off the examination table and spirit her away where nothing could hurt either of them. The tech had no right to bear witness to this private miracle, job be damned, and your tongue cramped and prickled with the desire to lash and sting and drive him out.
You might have done it, too, but then Rebecca, spraddle-legged and uncomfortable with modern medicine's prick lodged rudely between her thighs, lifted her head beneath your petting hand and studied the screen intently.
Is that the baby? she asked quietly, propped on her elbows with her chin tucked to her chest.
Got it in one, the tech replied amiably, and gently shifted the wand for a better angle.
It happened in an instant, the shifting of sunlight on a cloudy day. The diffuse, undefined fear that had plagued her since she rolled into the living room with an EPT in her hand disappeared, and in its place was a serene determination. She lifted your hand to her mouth and kissed it, and her eyes never left that wriggling shape on the screen. She was taking the measure of her responsibility then, giving face to the unknown.
Her eyes still hold the sheen of unshed tears as she retches into the toilet or the wastebasket beside the bed, and she still flinches from the prick of the needle. There are still nights when she shambles out of the bedroom to curl beside you on the couch and doze fitfully, overwhelmed by the path that lies before her, but there is no more despair, no more flailing panic. She has seen the beginning and knows there is an end, and she is bound to see it through. Her stoicism in the face of the uncertain inevitable both reassures and terrifies you, and you love her for it.
Ironically, the day Rebecca had rediscovered her equilibrium had been the day he'd lost his. He'd taken her home on the subway, his badge on prominent display to deter thieves, muggers, and unwashed perverts, and when he'd made sure she was comfortable at home, with water and the phone within easy reach, he'd retreated to the street and the stinging, breath-stealing cold of December.
He'd walked to the precinct with his hands stuffed into the pockets of his leather overcoat and snow crunching beneath his shoes. The parts of his face unprotected by the muffler he wore stung with the cold, prickled and grew numb, but he was absurdly grateful for the numbness. It had cooled his burning skin and slowed his frantic train of thought, the better to grasp them in clumsy, unsteady hands. He'd breathed in the smells and tastes of New York winter-the acrid smoke of burning rubber in rusting barrels, car exhaust, bundled bodies, fresh snow, and freezing piss. It was familiar and soothing, and he'd drawn it all deeply into his lungs and held it there, as though their mere presence would be enough to stave off the changes on the horizon.
The ultrasound had made it real. Until he had seen the proof of it with his own eyes, the idea that he was soon to be a father had been an abstract dream, a faraway probability that could not touch him. It had been a child's painting, done in awkward, bold strokes and vivid colors, the reds, whites, yellows, and blues of the Candyland game he had sometimes played as a kid with his baby sister. The colors of Tomorrow and Not Soon.
But reality was in black and white, stark and unforgiving, and it had told him that in seven months' time, his life of carefree autonomy would be over. He would be responsible for a life he had created. There would be pain and tears and bills, and every bullet meant for him now would have the potential to destroy three lives. If he died tomorrow, Rebecca would be not just a devastated widow with grief stamped on her face and smeared on her hands in red, white, and blue, but a single mother with a ramshackle, recalcitrant body and the condescending scrutiny of the world on her shoulders. She'd be fending off well-intended well-wishers by day and wrestling her demons by night, and there would be none to grant her safe harbor.
Not to mention your mother, a voice inside his head had pointed out with savage glee. She never approved of the broken girl you brought home with such pride. That was the most awkward, painful night of your life, and you never asked Rebecca to go back, though she has for your sake. Your mother is just as tough as your father, but far less principled when it comes to what is hers. She won't hesitate to wrest the living legacy of her sainted, dead son from his inferior widow in the name of doing what is best for the baby. She will steal that baby from its mother's very breast if she can manage it. Your father might put up a token protest, but a token is all it will be. When it comes to Familia Flack, Ana Flack has always ruled the roost.
Even if the worst doesn't happen, and you successfully dodge bullets and your family history of heart disease for the next twenty years, how the hell can you hope to raise a functional child? You're a fuck-up, pure and simple. You let your sister die when you were sixteen, and now you've gone and gotten your physically fragile wife pregnant.
What if she can't handle it? What if you come home one night and find her on the bathroom floor in a puddle of blood, legs spread and your baby's premature head slipped through the umbilical cord like a noose? Suppose she makes it to term. She could always die on the table, bleeding out in the stirrups while the nurses tend to your screaming child, who bought its first breath by dint of her last. Can you live with that? Can you stand to visit two graves at Christmas instead of one, sleeping baby in a sling tucked against your chest?
He had seen it all with terrible clarity, and as he'd walked, the city had begun to blur on the periphery of his vision, until all he could see were Rebecca's blood-smeared thighs and her agonized face, contorted with the ruthless pangs of childbirth.
She'll die, the voice had whispered. She'll die and leave you just like Diana did. It'll be déjà vu all over again. You'll sit in the front of the church and stare at the ebony casket on its polished steel runners and the spray of roses arranged so artfully on the lid. You'll stare at them with raw, dry eyes and wonder what sweet, screaming retard bought roses when everyone knows Rebecca loved sunflowers, with their enormous, nodding heads, thick stems, and bright yellow leaves that reminded her of the Florida sunshine she left behind. Your suit will fit this time, but the anguish will be the same as it was all those years ago. You'll sit with the baby in your lap, and it will shriek for the comfort of a breast whose milk has curdled.
You'll go home to your empty apartment and wander through the rooms, opening the drawers and closets and running your chapped fingers over her clothes in weary reverence. You'll pull out her favorite shirt or a pair of her underclothes and press them to your nose until all scent is leached from it. You'll feed your squalling child a bottle of thin formula, and then you'll sleep on the sofa because the bed is too big without her in it. The narrow couch will remind you of the narrow, eternal bed in which she sleeps, and as long as you keep her underwear fisted in your fingers, you'll keep the nightmares at bay.
You'll spend the rest of your life caught between your dead sister's rosary and your child, souvenirs of your most grievous failures.
The images conjured by the poison-tongued voice had come so quickly and so furiously that it had dizzied and nauseated him. He'd wound up staggering to a nearby news kiosk and buying a copy of the first paper upon which his hand had fallen. He'd carried it to a nearby stoop and sat down hard with it clutched in his fumbling hands. He'd opened it under the pretense of reading, but his hands had been trembling so badly that the pages had rattled and rustled noisily in his grip. In the end, he'd sat with the paper folded haphazardly on his lap and mentally recited the starting lineup of the Rangers until the world came back into focus.
Never in his most feverish and lurid imaginings of her end had he thought it would come here. By all rights, this should have been the safest place in the city for her, surrounded as she was by a wall of blue and her husband, who was armed with 9mms at hip and shoulder and a service pistol taped to one ankle. She should have been untouched and untouchable, and yet there she sat, a gun pointed at her undefended belly while her supercop husband stood behind his desk with a smear of mustard on his chin.
She wouldn't be here if it weren't for you, pointed out the gleeful, capering demon that had plagued him since childhood. It's your fifth wedding anniversary, and she should be celebrating with sunflowers and foot rubs and a sirloin cooked medium-rare. She would be, if you hadn't called her with fours hours to go before your dinner reservation and canceled in the name of justice. A freshman at NYU was strangled with her own panties and raped with a table lamp, and one look at her mother's anguished face assured that there would be neither time nor place for romance tonight.
Rebecca's tongue told you it would be all right, but you heard the false notes beneath her forced gaiety, the forlorn, brittle hurt beneath the platitudes she has learned by rote and the remembrances of anniversaries already missed. Like your third, which you spent in an interrogation room with a perp who had raped, beaten, and stabbed a twelve-year-old girl. You got the confession, but not until February second had passed into February third, and when you walked through the door at two o'clock in the morning, Rebecca had long since been in bed. You crawled in beside her without even bothering to shower, and you were too tired to give her so much as a consolation fuck. Happy anniversary, doll, and I'm sorry to smell like blood and tears.
The next morning, you were coherent enough to notice the present sitting on the kitchen table. Red foil and white satin ribbon. You picked it up and examined it while you sipped your coffee, turned the small, square box in your hand. It had your name on the front, written in her painfully crabbed handwriting, and so you set your coffee cup on the table and opened the box.
You stared at the contents of the box in silence and dropped it to the table with a graceless thump. It wasn't a shaver or a set of dress socks or a tie as she'd gotten for special occasions past. It was worse, because she had put her thought and heart into it. You turned the box upside down so you wouldn't have to see the pair of New York Rangers tickets with last night's date on them and went into the bedroom.
She was in front of the bedroom mirror, combing conditioner into her still-damp hair. The air was humid with steam and smelled of Pert Plus, heather, and honeysuckle soap. She saw your reflection in the mirror and smiled.
Heya, babe, she said. Rough night last night? Cheerful, as though she had not spent her evening watching the hours tick inexorably away to the wan glow of the television set.
Yeah. Yeah, it was. Some sicko raped and murdered a little girl.
Oh. Just that. Nothing more. Her face did not soften, and her eyes did not darken with sympathetic horror. Her fingers pulled the plastic teeth of the comb through the blonde mat of her hair with stubborn implacability.
You stood beside the bed in your rumpled boxer shorts and rubbed your nape, paper scraping paper in the silence of the room. I, uh, I saw the present in there on the table.
Did you? Her voice was even, but the comb faltered for the briefest instant.
How'd you get 'em? That game's been sold out for three days.
I bought them three weeks ago. Her voice was still even, but the comb was flying now.
Three weeks? You been thinkin' about it that long?
She looked at you as if you'd asked why she breathed. Of course. I actually started thinking about it two months ago. Hard not to, you know. Best day of my life, and in between lectures and papers, I've got all the time in the world. Maybe it's just a girl thing. She wasn't looking at you anymore, and she was talking too quickly, free hand flitting futilely over the assorted bottles and baubles on the dresser.
You wanted to tell her that it wasn't just a "girl thing", that that day had meant as much to you as it did to her, that while you were scarfing a dog on the steps of the precinct with your elbow propped on the vendor cart and your notebook in one hand, you were wishing like hell that she was with you. But instead, you opened your mouth and said, I'm sorry I didn't get to enjoy them.
Me, too, babe. I even laid out your manky old Messier jersey and your long joh- But it…it doesn't matter. It doesn't; you had more important things to worry about. There'll be more games, right? The smile on her face was too wide, and her eyes were too bright, and she was moving without purpose, picking up barettes and cleansing cloths and setting them down again. If you closed your eyes, you'd hear the scream behind the chatter.
You padded across the room and wrapped your arms around her from behind to still the frantic, jerky movements of her arms before she knocked the bottles of perfume onto the floor. You felt her trembling despite the padded back of her chair, a jittery thrum of harnessed adrenaline, and self-loathing was bitter inside your mouth. You knew what she was doing because you'd spent a lifetime performing the same tired magic on your father every time he blew off a Little League game or a trip to Coney Island. It was the gospel of Nothing To See Here and Everything's Fine, and you used it to pack the wounds he inflicted and insulate yourself against further damage.
You'd sworn never to give your own children a reason to need that old and terrible magic, and to see your wife employ it twisted a salted dagger in your gut. You also knew there was nothing you could say to ease the sting of her unspoken disappointment, so you lifted her hair from her nape and pressed cool kisses to the pale flesh you found and murmured nonsense syllables of apology and comfort.
Don't. Don't, you whispered, and trailed your lips over the sharp, bony curve of her shoulder. Don't. It's all right.
She didn't move. She sat, rigid and unyielding, in your arms. Then her head fell back against your chest. I missed you, she said in a small voice. Her eyes were closed, and moisture glistened in her eyelashes like condensation.
I-, you began, suddenly keenly aware of how fragile she was within the solid circle of your arms, but you could not apologize for doing your duty, for being who and what you had always been, would not. Three years ago yesterday was a damn fine day. A-1A, as a matter of fucking fact, and as soon as I get a fuckin' day off, I'm gonna prove it. You nipped her neck and sucked the delicate skin between your teeth, and you prayed that your clumsy gesture of atonement would be enough.
Just A-1A? she grumbled, but she smiled, however faintly, and craned her neck to peck the stubble on your chin.
Hey, that's high praise comin' from me. Messer told me I was doomin' myself to the old ball and chain.
Yeah, well, Messer can just go right on strokin' it to the staples in the goddamned Playboy centerfold, she muttered peevishly.
Trust me, doll, he's got no problem pullin' chicks.
She snorted. He'll have plenty of problems when the day before taxes are due rolls around and I won't do his taxes. I'll have a mortgage on his balls for the next thirty years.
You laughed until you cried, not because it was the height of hilarity, but because it was the Rebecca to whom you were accustomed and with whom you were desperately in love, sarcastic and bitter as smoked anise and full of devilish mischief. You guffawed and snorted and rocked to and fro with her, relieved because the wound was not mortal. It was fixable, and you vowed to soothe it the minute you got the chance.
For once, you were as good as your unspoken word. You picked her up from her office at NYU and took her to a Thai restaurant Hammerbeck had mentioned earlier in the week. The lights were low and the food was plentiful and excellent, spicy and succulent and exotic on the tongue. You talked and she listened, chin propped on her interlaced hands, and you listened in turn. You had no idea what a Krieds algorithm was, nor did you particularly care, but it was glorious to discuss a subject other than blood and bodies and blunt force trauma. Besides, she clearly reveled in your undivided, if befuddled, attention, and it amused you to watch her growing excitement as she tried to explain it. She was giddy and demonstrative, and when you pulled her to you for a kiss outside the restaurant, her heartbeat was a rapid flutter beneath her blouse.
You took her home and gave her a massage, and when she was boneless and malleable beneath your hands, you put the leftovers from the restaurant to good use and ate them from her shivering body as slowly and thoroughly as you could, careful to keep the spiced food from tender flesh. She writhed and twisted and whimpered beneath you, and near the end, when the air was thick and redolent with the musky scent of sex and sweat and ringing with the staccato beat of Mrs. Petrinski's broom handle against the adjacent wall, she whispered things into your ear not heard on a longshoreman's sea-brined tongue.
You'd fixed the damage then, and ever since, you have been mindful of the day. People still kill and die on the second of February, and you still answer the call to the hunt, but you make sure to call her and remind her that February second is still the best day of your life. Those two minutes on the phone are the best you've ever spent, and even if you come home with the rising of the sun, her eyes are peaceful with the knowledge that she is loved. So when you heard that brittle disappointment in her voice, you told her to meet you at the precinct in an hour, and you had the hoagie waiting when she rolled into the bullpen. It wasn't much, but it was an anniversary dinner, and the way her face lit up made you feel like a million bucks.
Now she's sitting here with a gun at her distended belly and a whackjob at the trigger.
For someone being confronted with her own mortality, his wife was remarkably sedate. She sat with her hands folded loosely in her lap. A sardonic smile danced in the corners of her mouth, and her eyes were alive and vibrant inside her face, cobalt blue and snapping with energy.
"Hey, buddy," Flack said slowly. "Just take it easy. Nobody's gonna hurt you in here. Why don't you just put the gun down, and we can talk about this?"
"Shut up, Muggle filth!" the man shrieked, and the gun twitched spasmodically in his grip.
Not my wife; not my baby. "Okay, okay. You don't wanna put the gun down, that's fine. Just point it at me, then."
"You will leave the gun precisely where it is," Rebecca said coolly, each word enunciated with cutting exactitude, as though she were addressing an unruly student.
"Ma'am, I need you to be quiet and let the police handle this," he told her.
"Mmm," she said dismissively. "A smashing job they've done so far."
Dammit, Rebecca, this isn't a game or some made-for-TV movie where I get a second take if he pulls the trigger. If that happens, I lose you both. Be quiet. Just shut the fuck up until I get you out of here. Once I get this asshole under control, you can talk all you want. You can talk me to sleep with your mouth and your caressing, gesticulating hands, and I'll listen. I swear. I will listen to every word you have to say for the rest of my life.
"Ma'am, with all due respect, I need you to shut the fuck up," he snapped, and she gave a nigh-imperceptible flinch.
"Your concern is duly noted, Detective." Cold. "But I'm afraid you'll have to go fuck yourself." Wounded anger.
"Shut up, both of you," the man snarled, and ran a filthy, blackened-nailed hand through long, unkempt, impossibly blond hair.
"Why don't you just let her go? Whatever your beef is, this lady's got nothin' to do with it. You gotta roomful of cops here as hostages. You don't need her."
The man snorted and tightened his grip on the gun. "On the contrary, you blubbering twit, she has everything to do with why I'm here. And drop the bloody charade, why don't you? I know she's your wife. We've been watching for years."
"Of course you have. Since the day I left, like as not." Rebecca shifted in her chair, and the gun followed her movement.
The man rolled his eyes. "Don't flatter yourself. We had more pressing matters on hand back then. Like exterminating the Mudblood filth and getting rid of Harry bloody Potter."
Rebecca snorted. "From the looks of you, Malfoy, I gather neither objective met with rousing success."
Flack watched the exchange in mute bewilderment. The language was English, and yet he found that he could not understand any of it. In all the colorful vernacular of the Five Boroughs, he had never heard of Muggles or Mudbloods. Rebecca, however, was unfazed by the bizarre terminology if her expression was any indication. It was wistful, longing, as though recalling people and places she had once loved, but had thought never to see again.
Should old acquaintance be forgot, he thought, and his mouth went dry. "You know this guy?" he asked helplessly.
"He's…an old schoolmate."
He blinked. "From that place in St. Augustine?"
A single shake of her head. "Not that one, babe. The one in Scotland. The one you can't find in your databases, no matter how hard you look."
"You knew-,"
"Of course I did, sweetheart." It was gentle. "You're a cop. It's what you do."
You've wondered about the blank space in her life since the day you married her, the unblemished tabula rasa of the three years between fifteen and seventeen. She's plied you with scraps and tantalizing fragments when your curiosity has grown too insistent, shown you fleeting, distorted glimpses into her private River Lethe, but she has never revealed the entire picture. She deflects your prying fingers with kisses and declarations of love and sly asides, and by the time you feel the urge to ask her again, all the ground you have gained with your patient chiseling has been lost.
Now all your questions are about to be answered on the point of a gun, the truth hidden beneath a transient's layer of dirt. Are you sure you want to know?
He wanted to sit down, but he wasn't certain the chair was still directly behind his ass anymore, and besides, to sit would be a sign of weakness he could ill afford. If he sat, this Malfoy nutjob might take the opportunity to put a bullet into Rebecca's abdomen and his baby's brain. So he pressed his palms against the cluttered surface of his desk, bit his tongue until warm copper flooded his mouth, and willed his feet and knees to hold him up.
"You haven't told him?" Malfoy asked incredulously, and capered from foot to foot in a jig of glee. "He doesn't know what you are?"
"No," Rebecca replied through gritted teeth. "I didn't. He was a Muggle and a police officer besides, and I didn't think it prudent."
"Bollocks, Stanhope. You didn't tell him because you were afraid he'd leave if he knew what you were, what you'd done."
"Your Legilimency is rusty, Malfoy," Rebecca retorted, but her pale face had grown paler still, and her hands had curled into fists in her lap.
"Oh, no, Stanhope," Malfoy purred. "No, I don't think it is. One abomination, he could stomach, but not two. Maybe he could ignore your twisted limbs and ugly face long enough to implant that rotting Squib in your belly, but if he'd known you were a heretic from which his cherished Muggle sensibilities flee, if he'd smelled the sour taint of magic coursing through your veins, you'd still be a spinster, hoarding your worthless maidenhead and stroking your wet, aching cunt between institutional bed covers." The muzzle of the gun nuzzled her belly like an affectionate pet, and her skin retreated from the contact with a visible ripple.
It's touching my baby, Flack thought, and was possessed of a rage so complete that it stopped his breath. His fingers throbbed with the need to throttle and crush and break and longed for the fluttering softness of Malfoy's throat. He wanted to hear the snap of bone and watch the light ebb from those bloodshot, grey eyes. He slipped a hand off his desk and reached for the gun at his hip.
Malfoy cocked the hammer of the gun. "I wouldn't if I were you," he said breezily. "My finger might slip."
Flack froze, hand hovering over the butt of his gun.
Don't risk it, son, the voice of his father counseled. He'll open her up and splatter her guts to the four corners before you get off a round. Let him talk. Sooner or later, he'll get cocky or distracted, and you can blow his brains to Kingdom Come and wear his balls as a souvenir.
He forced himself to relax and returned his hand to the desk. "What are you talkin' about?" he asked to distract himself from the impotent rage that cramped his gut and tinted the world red around the edges. "What do you mean, 'what she is.'"
"She's a witch and a merry murderess, to boot," Malfoy announced gaily. "She led fourteen of her friends to die on the Curse-blasted moors of Scotland. She wheedled and manipulated and cajoled, and one by one, they all fell down. When they were dead, she went back to the castle with blood and brains and bits of bone in her hair and called it victory. She lied and stole and tortured, uttered Unforgivables with relish. She framed a teacher for assault upon a student at fifteen, and at sixteen, she tortured a teacher into insanity. At seventeen, she fled the field of battle and licked her wounds in the Colonies, where she added Muggle-fucking harlot to her list of dubious accomplishments."
"You're fucking crazy," Flack said flatly.
It was the only plausible explanation, and one he would have come up with much sooner had he not been out of his mind with fear for his fledgling family. Now that he got a good look at the man in front of him, it was obvious that he was in the grips of a hardcore drug addiction. He was emaciated, and his spindly, fleshless arms were riddled with fading bruises and the angry, red weals of fresh track marks. His eyes were ringed with exhaustion and muddied with the opiate haze of smack. His clothes were tattered rags. They might once have been black, but life on the streets had dulled them to a filthy, tumorous gray. He stank of garbage and piss and rancid desperation.
If he's just bugfuck crazy, his father mused, then why does Rebecca understand him? She's a rational woman, Donnie boy, a keeper of numbers and inarguable absolutes. You've sat on the couch and watched her excoriate a grad student for building his hypothesis out of whole cloth and wishful thinking. She has no time for fairy tales, but she hasn't batted an eyelash at any of this. In fact, she seems oddly relieved, as if this is a reckoning a long time coming. If it's lunacy that moves him, it's a shared madness.
"Rebecca?" he said uncertainly. "Rebecca?" Pleading.
She closed her eyes, then, and a single tear rolled down her cheek. Despite his best intentions to remain upright, his knees unhinged with an audible creak, and he sat in his chair with an undignified, graceless thump. He felt dizzy and sick, and the roast beef and tomato he'd eaten earlier burned in the back of his throat. He closed his eyes to shut out the familiar room that had suddenly warped and twisted into torturous, alien angles.
"Oh, fuck," he moaned, and cupped his head in his hands.
"What do you want, Malfoy?" Rebecca asked. Her voice was rough and weary, and her shoulders were slumped.
"I should think that would be obvious, Stanhope. I need your Arithmantic skill."
"I've no interest in helping you, Malfoy, and even if the world had upended on its axis and softened my brain to custard, why would you need me? I thought the Dark Lord had a cadre of skilled Arithmancers at his beck and call."
"Mmm, he did," Malfoy conceded. "Imperius was quite useful in that regard. But after so many years, we've discovered that brains subjected to twelve consecutive years of forceful persuasion at the tip of a wand must eventually disintegrate into organic porridge. Our last Arithmancer succumbed a fortnight ago. Most unpleasant. She gouged out her eyes with the nib of her quill and smeared them over the walls in a futile attempt to see."
"And you want an Arithmancer who can be pressed into voluntary service, or what passes for it."
"Precisely. Apparently, gobbling Muggle cock has not yet destroyed your critical faculties."
"Fuck you," Rebecca spat.
"I might have done before you fouled yourself with this idiot Muggle. You're repulsive, yes, but the power you possess in that misbegotten body of yours would almost have been worth it. Besides, closing one's eyes and thinking of England is not the sole province of a hard-done-by witch." He offered her a smug, humorless smile.
"You're a bastard," Flack said, incredulous and repulsed.
Malfoy did not look at him. "I assure you that my parents were properly married, which is more than I can say for the unfortunate souls who spawned you," he said haughtily. "And there is no shame in admitting you close your eyes and think of someone else. No sensible man wouldn't."
"I don't."
"Thus proving my point," Malfoy muttered drily. "Much as I would thrill to the discussion of Muggle sexual degeneracy-,"
"Why do you need me, Malfoy?" Rebecca interrupted. "When I left wizarding Britain, there was no shortage of reprobate souls willing to compromise their souls for a Galleon."
"Yes, well, war has a nasty habit of eroding available resources, and the Dark Lord has never been known for his generosity."
"And?" Rebecca said shrewdly.
"And no one else can do what you do," he snapped.
Rebecca's expression remained impassive, but Flack had studied her for the past seven years, had traced the lines of her face with tender fingers and warm lips. He had watched her in the bright, sodium lights of the CSI labs and the sickly, yellow light of the café on 34th Street. He'd seen her in the phantasmagoric, washed-out light of the television and the warm flicker of candlelight. He'd seen her face hard with fury and flushed with pleasure. He knew the subtle shifts of her moods, had catalogued them with loving avidity, and when he saw the fleeting narrowing of her eyes, his heart thumped painfully against his ribcage.
I see a bad moon risin', he thought nonsensically, and blinked.
"Voldemort is dead, isn't he?" she said slowly. "Harry and the Headmaster killed him."
"The Dark Lord is not dead," Malfoy snapped. "He was immortal. That which is immortal cannot die."
"Well, not all your schooling was a waste, then," Rebecca replied blandly, and Malfoy flushed an alarming puce.
"I don't need your cheek, you stupid bint, I need your mind, and if you don't dispense with the former and offer the latter, I'm going to blow a hole in your husband's skull," he shouted, and swung the gun from her belly to his forehead.
Thank God, Flack thought numbly, and the relief was so sweet that he felt the urge to laugh.
"Point the gun at me, Malfoy," Rebecca exclaimed sharply. "At me, you son of a bitch. He's got nothing to do with this." Furious and frantic.
"Leave the gun where it is, Malfoy," Flack countered. To Rebecca, he said, "Calm down, doll. It's gonna be fine. You just breathe and relax and take care of the baby." Rebecca blinked at the mention of the baby, as though she had temporarily forgotten that it rested beneath the swell of her belly. Her hand curled protectively around it. "That's my girl," he murmured.
"I don't take orders from you, Muggle!" Malfoy shrieked, and the gun jittered in his grasp.
"Malfoy, stop!" Rebecca pleaded, and Flack's heart twisted at the fear and tears in her voice. "Stop, please!"
I'm gonna get you, you fuckin' bastard, Flack thought savagely. I've never taken advantage of the unspoken free-shot rule that's lived within these walls since the first willing Paddy pinned a badge to his chest, but you bet your ass I'm gonna. I get your ass in that holdin' cell, even Sheldon won't be able to glue you together again. And if SWAT blows your head off and ends up squeegeeing your brains off the station house floor, I'm gonna piss on your corpse.
"Humility always did suit you better." Malfoy dipped the gun in a jaunty salute.
"I don't understand what you want." Rebecca was crying openly now, and a tear dangled from the end of her chin. Flack's fingers itched to wipe it away. "If Voldemort is dead, you need Necromancy, not Arithmancy, and I can't help you."
Malfoy smirked. "Don't tell me you've never been tempted." Then his voice hardened. "And if you fucking play stupid with me again, you'll be scooping your beloved Muggle's brains from the carpet."
"All right! All right! Just- You want me to unthread Potter's victory," she said dully.
"Quite. A mere turning of the tables is all I ask. Once the Dark Lord has been restored and his victory assured, you can return to your life and your beloved Muggle."
"If I change the past so drastically in the wizarding world, there's no guarantee it won't affect this one. I could come back to find that I never met my husband and he married someone else."
Malfoy rolled his eyes. "Your marital bliss is hardly my concern. Besides, it's equally probable that your life will be unaffected."
"I won't risk losing him. I won't do it."
Malfoy shrugged. "Then you'll lose him now." He leveled the gun at Flack's forehead.
Flack closed his eyes.
"No! No, no, God, no. All right. I'll do it. I'll-," Rebecca shrieked, and began to sob.
He would remember that shriek and the sob that followed it for the rest of his life, and it would keep him with her even after she told him the truth in their bedroom with both hands folded over her belly as though the confession pained her. It was raw and honest and wholly undignified, and it testified with brutal eloquence to the cruel vulnerability of love. He had never heard her shriek that way before, not even when he had pushed into her on his narrow, bachelor's bed one sticky August night. Malfoy and his gun had laid her bare, and he knew that she would shriek that way for no one else.
"How very Gryffindor of you," Malfoy gloated. "And disappointingly predictable." He gestured toward the door with a flick of his gun. "Let's go."
"Not until you let me say goodbye to my husband."
"You're in no position to make demands. Let's go."
Rebecca stiffened. "Either you let me say goodbye to my husband, or you shoot us both and get nothing before every cop in here unloads his magazine into you."
Malfoy and Rebecca regarded one another in silence, and Flack could see them circling each other in wary contemplation. Rebecca's eyes were hard as flint, and Malfoy's gaze was aloof and coolly amused.
They've done this before, his father said, gruff and incredulous. They're old partners in this dance, and even though it's been a long time, their feet remember the steps their minds have forgotten. Around and around they go, treadin' patterns no one else can follow or understand. Neither of them is afraid. In fact, they both look exhilarated by it. Rebecca's been lookin' haggard with all the pukin' and wakin' up in the middle'a the night to pee, but you wouldn't know it now. She's been revitalized.
His old man was right. Despite her red eyes and wet, blotchy cheeks, Rebecca was radiant, and more alert than she had been in the past three months. She sat ramrod-straight in her chair, and her eyes darted rapidly to and fro in their sockets as if she were wrangling with a particularly challenging proof.
She looks like Riki Tiki Tavi, he thought absurdly. A mongoose lookin' for the cobra's soft underbelly.
Malfoy finally spoke. "You have one minute. Never let it be said I wasn't a generous man."
Rebecca snorted and backed her chair behind the desk, feet scraping his shins. She reached for him and cupped his face in her hands, blessedly cool against his burning cheeks. He heaved a shuddering sigh at the contact and wrapped his hands around the delicate bones of her wrists.
"Rebecca, don't go. Stay here with me," he murmured. He almost added, Where it's safe, but the realist in him understood the ridiculous irony of the statement and held his tongue.
A soundless huff of laughter, warm against his cheek and nose. "I don't have much choice. I can't lose you."
"If you walk outta here, I'm gonna lose you. You and Junior both."
Another huff, and her fingers danced over the ridge of his cheekbones and tickled his throbbing temples. "Junior now, is it?"
One hand drifted to her belly and rested there. "Yeah, well, a guy can dream, can't he?" There was no danger in admitting the secret fantasy of his heart now that it was being snatched away.
"Yes, he can, babe," she said softly. Then, "Do you trust me?"
Malfoy's words came back to him, then, harsh and bitter as a curse uttered on hallowed ground. She's a witch and a merry murderess, to boot. She led fourteen of her friends to die on the Curse-blasted moors of Scotland. She wheedled and manipulated and cajoled, and one by one, they all fell down. When they were dead, she went back to the castle with blood and brains and bits of bone in her hair and called it victory.
He tried to picture it in his mind, but the images were flat and lifeless, cardboard cutouts moving across a rickety stage, a paper doll wearing his wife's face. It was false and illusory, but this Rebecca, the one with her forehead pressed to his and her hands pressed to either side of his face, was real. He could taste her and smell her and feel her, and he had trusted her enough to give her his name and his future.
He brushed his lips against hers, hand cupped protectively around her belly. Yes.
He felt rather than heard her response, a moist I love you mouthed against his lips.
"Time's up," Malfoy called.
And then Rebecca smiled at him, a feral, sharp-toothed smile he had never seen before, teeth white and glistening and eyes dead as damped embers. She sat up, but she did not move away from him.
"Now, Stanhope. Your Gryffindor sentimentality does you no favors."
The smile widened further still, and Flack fought the urge to push away from her. It was cold and cruel and not quite sane.
"You're forgetting something, Malfoy," she said.
"Oh? What is that? Your staggering thickness?"
She cocked her head and pursed her lips. "I was never officially a Gryffindor," she replied ruefully, and her right hand shot from beneath the desk. "Sectumsempra!"
The voice that emerged from his tiny wife was impossible. It was commanding and unapologetic and pitiless, freighted with the timbre of absolute conviction. It was a voice from the bones and sinews, drawn up from her curling toes and hurled from her mouth with the force of law. It was drill sergeants and Mac Taylor and the trumpeting of gods, and he could only stare in stunned stupefaction.
The world flashed red, blood and retribution, and when he could see again, Rebecca was moving toward Malfoy, who was sprawled in front of the desk in a boneless, shuddering heap. She pointed two fingers of her right hand at the gun still lying in his twitching hand, and it squirted from his lax grasp and skidded to a halt against the toe of Flack's shoe.
She never touched it, his rational mind gibbered. It moved on its own. My wife's a fuckin' Jedi. He found himself giggling at the absurdity of it as he crouched to pick up the gun between his thumb and forefinger.
The giggling stopped abruptly when Rebecca leaned over the side of her chair and seized a handful of Malfoy's clothes. "You're right, Malfoy," she hissed. "I did lie and steal and manipulate." She punctuated each confession with a shake that made Malfoy's head loll and bob bonelessly on his neck. "I talked my fourteen friends onto that field, knowing none of them would come back, and I watched them all die. Jackson Decklan met his Maker facedown in the bloody mud with a worthless chunk of rock in his hand, and I loved him best. If I would sacrifice my friends for the sake of a man who considered me a means to an end and who tossed me aside when I had served my purpose, what did you think I would do for a man who loves me?" She shook him continuously now, a terrier with a rat in its jaws. The hand fisted in his clothes was slathered in blood from the gaping wound in Malfoy's throat.
She's gonna have a miscarriage if she keeps carryin' on like that. There's too much adrenaline, and it's not natural to be bent that way.
"Rebecca." He set the gun on his desk and started for her. "Rebecca, it's okay now."
Rebecca gave no sign that she had heard him. Her gaze was fixed on the ruin of Malfoy's throat and the blood trickling sluggishly from the wound.
"You threatened what is mine," she spat, and her eyes blazed inside her face.
"Rebecca," he snapped. "That enough, goddammit."
She flinched, startled, and then looked at him. Her eyes were wild and unfocused, and there was no recognition in them. Then her shoulders slumped, and she released what was left of Malfoy. She looked at her blood-slicked hand, flexed the fingers as though she couldn't quite believe they were hers, and began to cry, slowly and softly at first, but gaining in volume and intensity until she was rocking and wailing in her chair, hand fisted against the hard bone of her sternum like a perverse Roman salute.
He enfolded her in his arms and rested his chin atop her head, and his heart ached as he listened to her choke and snuffle and sob against his neck. "'S all right, doll. You done good. Deep breaths for me, mm?" He winnowed his fingers through her hair and cradled the back of her head in his palm. "Right now, you're suckin' wind like a Hoover, and it's gonna make you dizzy." He shifted his weight from his toes to his heels in his crouch and called to a rookie uniform who was gaping at the scene in queasy incredulity.
"Call a bus." Not that it mattered; Malfoy was dead as shit and sheetrock, but best to do it by the book.
"Don't bother," Rebecca muttered from the hollow of his neck. "In twenty minutes, nobody will remember this."
"Honey, I don't see how anyone could forget it."
She only offered him a sad, weary smile and retreated to the hollow of his neck again.
Continued in Part II