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bedlamsbardSaw Fantastic Four today. Have new favorite superhero movie (category previously held by X2 and Daredevil. Yes, I am a Marvel girl, why do you ask?). Chris Evans is hot. Literally. Mmmm.
Also, Omerta 16, which I am very happy with, although I'm not sure if it makes any sense at all. But I'm happy with it. And it's long. Alas, no porn. Give me a couple chapters, though.
He wasn’t smart, not the way Danny or Stella or Hawkes or Aiden or, much as he hated to admit it, Mac, was, but he wasn’t dumb either. Maybe he wasn’t a CSI, but he was a NYPD detective, and that had to count for something.
He’d heard the rumors after he got promoted – still heard them, actually, hissed with biting acid when no one could find a suitable insult or all the others had been exhausted without effect. This was the one that always made him flinch, though, the one that made him curl his fists and draw in his shoulders and tighten up for a fight. Not because this one wasn’t true, but because this was the one that might be true and the one he least wanted to be.
He was a NYPD detective, and he didn’t know himself whether he’d gotten the badge because of his blood or because of his deeds. Rookies, officers fresh out of the Academy, greenies barely old enough to drink, don’t make detective in four and a half years, no matter what the circumstance, not unless someone was pulling the strings, and they sure as hell don’t go straight from Patrol to Homicide no matter who their patron is. He liked to think his blood had nothing to do with it, that the brass promoted him and gave him a gold badge based solely on his record and his collars, and that his blood wasn’t even a matter of question. He knew better, though, and when the homicide detectives turned their backs on him and the patrol officers looked at him and murmured poison like wine, he fingered his badge and thought about throwing it in the Hudson, letting it sink to rest with the corpses and the fish and the debris of generation upon generation of New York, New Amsterdam, whatever the fuck it had been before the Europeans set their ironclad feet upon the land. The thing that stopped him, though, kept him wth his back straight and his chin up and his eyes set ahead, was the satisfaction of it. The cuffs in his hands, the thrill of the chase, the look on a perp’s face when he knew he was done for – that was it. That was why. That, and the fuck you he could throw at other detectives when he closed his cases dead, when he got to sit in court and see justice done, because the crime lab knew what the fuck they were doing, which was more than he could say for some precincts.
Maybe he only made detective because of whose son he was, maybe the brass kicked him to the crime lab because having a green as spring grass rookie on the loose with a gold badge and a gun was a scary thought, but he’d like to see anyone doubt he didn’t know what was what now. That he could interrogate suspects and chase down the ins and outs of a case with the best of them. Only problem was, they still did, and nothing he did or said, no one he collared or case he closed, could change that.
Flack wasn’t smart, not like Danny, so that he could touch and name the bones of the curve of a neck, the warmth of a thigh, the arch of a foot, or tell whether blood spatter led away from a scene or toward it, but he noticed things, and that was what made him more than just Mac Taylor’s lackey. He noticed, he guessed, he followed up on the hunch with evidence in plain black and white, and sometimes he acted on what he found. Sometimes, if the time was right and the evidence was in order and the stars were in conjunction. Other times, it was easier to file the facts away because the truth was too hard to face and maybe the evidence wasn’t really necessary to get that conviction anyway. Sometimes, secrets needed to be kept.
And other times they needed to be told. Flack hovered by the door of Stella’s office, hands full of computer printouts, half-hoping she wouldn’t be back till after he’d already left for home. They’d been out all day. There was a chance she and Mac would go straight home. Not together, but the whole team had pulled all-nighters; Flack was the only one who’d gotten any sleep at all and he wasn’t quite sure two nightmare-ridden hours counted. It wasn’t like he’d gotten any rest, and he wished he’d just stayed up at the Empire State Building with the sweeper team instead. Would have been more relaxing.
He twitched his weight from foot to foot. She’s not going to come she’s not going to come just go home it’s late it doesn’t matter she doesn’t need to know she doesn’t need to know it’ll only hurt her don’t hurt your partner –
Thoughts running in circles. Did she need to know? He’d want to, if it were him, and Stella was always the most like him, barring the female orphan part. He’d want to know. Didn’t mean she would. Too bad he couldn’t just ask her.
He heard, rather than saw, the main doors to the lab bang open. Stella was laughing, heels clicking on the floor, and Flack knew his people well enough to guess that Mac was probably offering her a dazed half-smile, more or less genuine depending on what Stella she had said. His fists clenched, and paper rumpled under his hands. She’s happy. She won’t be once she knows. Don’t tell her.
I’d want to know.
“Flack?” Stella gave him an odd look as she came down the hall. Her hair was mussed, make up smeared slightly, but he didn’t want to ask, or wonder what had happened. Maybe she’d been shot at again, but no, he’d have heard over the police scanner. “You all right? Is something wrong?” She flashed a worried glance at him as she dug in her pocket for the key to her office. “Are Danny and Aiden –”
“They’re over at the Empire State Building, interviewing suspects,” Flack said. They’d offered to take him; he’d refused, to distracted to think about more than one mystery at the same time. He looked over at Mac, who’d followed Stella down the hall and was watching them with a confused expression on his face. “Stella – can I – can I talk to you in private?”
She shouldered the door open. “Sure. Mac –”
“I think I’ll go see if Dr. Giles has the DNA results done,” Mac said, and smiled sheepishly at her before walking back down the hall. Stella watched him go with a slight smile on her face, then turned to Flack. “What’s up?”
He followed her into her office, glancing around as she closed the door behind them. It was smaller than Danny and Aiden’s office, but seemed bigger by virtue of the single fact she didn’t have to share it with anyone. Plain enough – prints of the city on the walls, focus blurry enough on some of them that he guessed she’d taken them herself, pictures on her desk, the back of her computer monitor dented where she’d punched it two years ago, file cabinets along one wall and a fish tank along the top of two of the half-height ones. Flack looked at it. “What, you got tired of looking at Mac’s office everyday, thought you needed to spice it up?”
Stella snorted and sank down into her ratty office chair. “I kill my goldfish,” she said. “I’d hate for that to happen to Mac because I forgot to feed him.”
“Yeah, that might be a little hard to explain to the brass.” Flack looked over at the fact again. “Those aren’t –”
“Goldfish, no. I’m not sure what they are. Mac gave them to me. Supposedly they can eat each other if they get too hungry. Speaking of which –” She dug in her desk and came out with a canister of fish food. She tossed it to him. “Feed ‘em, will you? Two pinches on the top. Or maybe it’s three. Better give them four, just in case.”
Flack obeyed, watching the multi-colored tropical fish swarm to the top, nipping delicately at the flakes of fish food. “My, what big eyes you got, grandmother,” he murmured, as one swam past the glass wall of the tank, turning its luminous orbs on him.
Stella held up her hand for the fish food, and Flack tossed it back to her. “They’re kind of soothing,” she said. “You know, to look at when a case is in the hole and going nowhere, fast. Animals simplify things, because they don’t kill each other for no reason. Just food. Or to be top cat, but you don’t have to worry about that with fish.”
“Wish things were that simple with humans,” Flack said. He stared down at the papers he was slowly crumpling in one fist.
Stella leaned forward suddenly. “Sit down, Flack,” she said. “What’s up? You seem kind of – distracted, and you don’t usually get worked up over cases. Not even –” She stopped abruptly.
Flack stared out the window. “Gavin,” he said. He folded himself carefully into the chair in front of her desk. “We were interviewing a suspect today,” he said jerkily. “A guy named Mordecai Giovinazzo, mobbed up.”
She blinked a little. “Think I met his brother,” she said, and Flack raised his eyebrows. She made a slight carry on gesture with one hand. “And?”
“And – there was a guy with him.” He stared down at the scuffed wood of her desk. She doesn’t need to know. Yes, she does. “His name’s Bonasera,” he said in scuffle of words and accent slathered syllables.
Stella’s breath caught suddenly in her throat, and her mouth worked silently for a moment. “Bonasera?” she finally croaked, hope and despair caught up in those four syllables.
“Nick Bonasera.” He spun the papers across the desk before he destroyed them anymore than he already had. “He’s – he’s a –”
Stella put her hands down on the pages without looking down at them. The line of her throat shook for a moment. “Are you sure?” she whispered.
Flack nodded. “I asked him. He said – he said he had two daughters, Stella and Astra, and he didn’t know – they’d ended up in an orphanage, that’s what he said, and it’s not a common name or anything so I thought – anyway – I did a little – a little checking.”
Stella’s hands stretched wide as though to block the black and white of the words out. “Thirty years,” she said, voice choked. “Thirty years – where the fuck has he been for thirty years? Did he not want –” She stopped abruptly, throat working. “I –”
He had to tell her. She’d find out anyway. “He was in jail, Stella,” Flack said before he could change his mind. Her face went whiter than it had already been and she put her head in her hands. “Oh Jesus. Oh Christ. I should have – God, I’m such a fucking idiot.”
He didn’t know why she was blaming herself, why she thought she should have known. Flack reached a tentative hand out for her. “Stella –”
She didn’t bother looking up at him. “Get out, Flack,” she said, voice muffled. “Just – get out, okay?”
There was nothing he could say to that, so he left, and closed the door behind him, wandered the halls until he finally found his desk in the almost-empty squad room. A few detectives working late shifts nodded to him, barely glancing up from their murder books, he nodded back after they’d already lowered their heads.
The thought flickered fleeting across the front of his mind – I should have an office in there. At least a desk. The crime lab wouldn’t have him, though – he wasn’t a criminalist. The detectives looked like him like he was a stranger. I’m not who I thought I was. Guess I’m not what you wanted me to be either, huh, Pop?
He remembered how proud Donald Flack had been when he’d made detective. Detective Donald Flack, Jr., and doesn’t that sound good! He’d wanted to correct him, still in shock, correct him and say no, I’m not I’m not junior anything, just Don Flack, cop. He’d gotten his dad’s old service revolver, a badge holder, all the cop goodies he could ever have wanted, and all he could think was was it me, or was it you? Did I get this because of meritorious circumstances, or because you stuck your nose in and told the brass you wanted a detective in the family. Officer, lieutenant, sergeant, the only title you were missing was detective. So pull strings for the next generation instead of letting him get their on his own.
If he’d had his choice in the matter – he might have stayed on Patrol. Hadn’t really thought about making detective. Cop’s a cop. Detective’s a detective. They don’t overlap. He knew better now, but back then he’d still been stuck in the fantasy of them and us.
Maybe Lieutenant Donald Flack, Sr., hadn’t pulled strings. He’d bitched and moaned enough about Flack making detective later. Fucking pussies don’t do any fucking work, haven’t been around the block enough to be real policemen. If you wanna do this, Don, you should at least fucking work for it, not just make one collar and have done with it. And you shouldn’t want this.
Flack pulled out his cell phone, flipped through missed calls. Gavin, Dad, Gavin, Gavin, Gavin, Dad, Danny, Gavin, Danny – that was the time he’d left dirty messages on Flack’s cell, and he checked his voice mail while on the way to a decomp in Brooklyn and nearly driven off the road and taken out a woman and twenty dogs – Gavin, Gavin, Stella, Aiden, Dad, Gavin, Mac, Mac, Mac, Gavin.
He hadn’t talked to Gavin since…the Incident. Hadn’t beared to, when all he could think about when he closed his eyes was Curly Sassone’s face and hands and voice, saying over and over again Donny Flack, Danny’s little boytoy, Donny Donny Donny, Gavin’s secret name, until he couldn’t bear the sound of his name anymore. I’m not him. He’s dead.
Maybe Donny had died when Curly shot him.
The cell phone slipped from his shaking hands and clattered to the floor. The detectives on the other side of the room raised their heads to glare at him, and Flack raised one hand in apology as he bent down. I’m sorry, Gavin, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean – I shouldn’t have –
Another reason the patrol officers hated him. Hard to like someone who brought down a cop, who brought down their partner, and he’d thought he’d gotten around the problem when he’d let Gavin follow him down without the cuffs, in uniform, but rumors and truth spread like spilled blood and lies in the precinct, from this one to that, until officers he’d never met stared at him in hate. This is the man who fell. This is the man who turned, and who never looked back.
He looked back. He couldn’t change the past, and he did his job. Always his job.
I’m sorry, Gavin.
Hadn’t talked to him. Hadn’t been sure he could, not when the only things he could say he couldn’t. When Curly had twisted his name to suit his own purposes, and even the sound of it on Gavin’s mouth through the crackle of the answering machine was enough to make him sick. He doesn’t know, sick and gasping, like regret, because Flack hadn’t told him anything. All he’d heard was rumor, nothing from Flack’s mouth. What he might have heard. He needs to know.
Late was better than never. That was what the cold cases detectives said. They talked to him, but the cold cases squad was fucking insane. Almost as bad as the crime lab.
His fingers slipped on the keys, and he hit send before he could change his mind. A lot of judgment going on here. Half-wished Gavin wouldn’t answer.
“Donny?”
He flinched. “Yeah. Gav. It’s – it’s me.”
“I know. Are you all right?”
Flack swallowed. “I’m sorry,” he said, and before his old partner could reply, “I could use a drink. Are you –”
“It’s all right, Donny,” Gavin said. “Whatever it is, it’s all right. The Black Emerald, half an hour? In the Bronx?”
It was the bar where he’d gotten drunk and spilled half his family secrets to a room full of cops, and the one where Gavin had kissed him slow and careful in the back alley. Half the patrol cops in the Bronx hung out there, and he’d be sure to get his ass kicked if he walked in with a detective’s badge on his hip.
Good. He could use a fight.
Also, Omerta 16, which I am very happy with, although I'm not sure if it makes any sense at all. But I'm happy with it. And it's long. Alas, no porn. Give me a couple chapters, though.
He wasn’t smart, not the way Danny or Stella or Hawkes or Aiden or, much as he hated to admit it, Mac, was, but he wasn’t dumb either. Maybe he wasn’t a CSI, but he was a NYPD detective, and that had to count for something.
He’d heard the rumors after he got promoted – still heard them, actually, hissed with biting acid when no one could find a suitable insult or all the others had been exhausted without effect. This was the one that always made him flinch, though, the one that made him curl his fists and draw in his shoulders and tighten up for a fight. Not because this one wasn’t true, but because this was the one that might be true and the one he least wanted to be.
He was a NYPD detective, and he didn’t know himself whether he’d gotten the badge because of his blood or because of his deeds. Rookies, officers fresh out of the Academy, greenies barely old enough to drink, don’t make detective in four and a half years, no matter what the circumstance, not unless someone was pulling the strings, and they sure as hell don’t go straight from Patrol to Homicide no matter who their patron is. He liked to think his blood had nothing to do with it, that the brass promoted him and gave him a gold badge based solely on his record and his collars, and that his blood wasn’t even a matter of question. He knew better, though, and when the homicide detectives turned their backs on him and the patrol officers looked at him and murmured poison like wine, he fingered his badge and thought about throwing it in the Hudson, letting it sink to rest with the corpses and the fish and the debris of generation upon generation of New York, New Amsterdam, whatever the fuck it had been before the Europeans set their ironclad feet upon the land. The thing that stopped him, though, kept him wth his back straight and his chin up and his eyes set ahead, was the satisfaction of it. The cuffs in his hands, the thrill of the chase, the look on a perp’s face when he knew he was done for – that was it. That was why. That, and the fuck you he could throw at other detectives when he closed his cases dead, when he got to sit in court and see justice done, because the crime lab knew what the fuck they were doing, which was more than he could say for some precincts.
Maybe he only made detective because of whose son he was, maybe the brass kicked him to the crime lab because having a green as spring grass rookie on the loose with a gold badge and a gun was a scary thought, but he’d like to see anyone doubt he didn’t know what was what now. That he could interrogate suspects and chase down the ins and outs of a case with the best of them. Only problem was, they still did, and nothing he did or said, no one he collared or case he closed, could change that.
Flack wasn’t smart, not like Danny, so that he could touch and name the bones of the curve of a neck, the warmth of a thigh, the arch of a foot, or tell whether blood spatter led away from a scene or toward it, but he noticed things, and that was what made him more than just Mac Taylor’s lackey. He noticed, he guessed, he followed up on the hunch with evidence in plain black and white, and sometimes he acted on what he found. Sometimes, if the time was right and the evidence was in order and the stars were in conjunction. Other times, it was easier to file the facts away because the truth was too hard to face and maybe the evidence wasn’t really necessary to get that conviction anyway. Sometimes, secrets needed to be kept.
And other times they needed to be told. Flack hovered by the door of Stella’s office, hands full of computer printouts, half-hoping she wouldn’t be back till after he’d already left for home. They’d been out all day. There was a chance she and Mac would go straight home. Not together, but the whole team had pulled all-nighters; Flack was the only one who’d gotten any sleep at all and he wasn’t quite sure two nightmare-ridden hours counted. It wasn’t like he’d gotten any rest, and he wished he’d just stayed up at the Empire State Building with the sweeper team instead. Would have been more relaxing.
He twitched his weight from foot to foot. She’s not going to come she’s not going to come just go home it’s late it doesn’t matter she doesn’t need to know she doesn’t need to know it’ll only hurt her don’t hurt your partner –
Thoughts running in circles. Did she need to know? He’d want to, if it were him, and Stella was always the most like him, barring the female orphan part. He’d want to know. Didn’t mean she would. Too bad he couldn’t just ask her.
He heard, rather than saw, the main doors to the lab bang open. Stella was laughing, heels clicking on the floor, and Flack knew his people well enough to guess that Mac was probably offering her a dazed half-smile, more or less genuine depending on what Stella she had said. His fists clenched, and paper rumpled under his hands. She’s happy. She won’t be once she knows. Don’t tell her.
I’d want to know.
“Flack?” Stella gave him an odd look as she came down the hall. Her hair was mussed, make up smeared slightly, but he didn’t want to ask, or wonder what had happened. Maybe she’d been shot at again, but no, he’d have heard over the police scanner. “You all right? Is something wrong?” She flashed a worried glance at him as she dug in her pocket for the key to her office. “Are Danny and Aiden –”
“They’re over at the Empire State Building, interviewing suspects,” Flack said. They’d offered to take him; he’d refused, to distracted to think about more than one mystery at the same time. He looked over at Mac, who’d followed Stella down the hall and was watching them with a confused expression on his face. “Stella – can I – can I talk to you in private?”
She shouldered the door open. “Sure. Mac –”
“I think I’ll go see if Dr. Giles has the DNA results done,” Mac said, and smiled sheepishly at her before walking back down the hall. Stella watched him go with a slight smile on her face, then turned to Flack. “What’s up?”
He followed her into her office, glancing around as she closed the door behind them. It was smaller than Danny and Aiden’s office, but seemed bigger by virtue of the single fact she didn’t have to share it with anyone. Plain enough – prints of the city on the walls, focus blurry enough on some of them that he guessed she’d taken them herself, pictures on her desk, the back of her computer monitor dented where she’d punched it two years ago, file cabinets along one wall and a fish tank along the top of two of the half-height ones. Flack looked at it. “What, you got tired of looking at Mac’s office everyday, thought you needed to spice it up?”
Stella snorted and sank down into her ratty office chair. “I kill my goldfish,” she said. “I’d hate for that to happen to Mac because I forgot to feed him.”
“Yeah, that might be a little hard to explain to the brass.” Flack looked over at the fact again. “Those aren’t –”
“Goldfish, no. I’m not sure what they are. Mac gave them to me. Supposedly they can eat each other if they get too hungry. Speaking of which –” She dug in her desk and came out with a canister of fish food. She tossed it to him. “Feed ‘em, will you? Two pinches on the top. Or maybe it’s three. Better give them four, just in case.”
Flack obeyed, watching the multi-colored tropical fish swarm to the top, nipping delicately at the flakes of fish food. “My, what big eyes you got, grandmother,” he murmured, as one swam past the glass wall of the tank, turning its luminous orbs on him.
Stella held up her hand for the fish food, and Flack tossed it back to her. “They’re kind of soothing,” she said. “You know, to look at when a case is in the hole and going nowhere, fast. Animals simplify things, because they don’t kill each other for no reason. Just food. Or to be top cat, but you don’t have to worry about that with fish.”
“Wish things were that simple with humans,” Flack said. He stared down at the papers he was slowly crumpling in one fist.
Stella leaned forward suddenly. “Sit down, Flack,” she said. “What’s up? You seem kind of – distracted, and you don’t usually get worked up over cases. Not even –” She stopped abruptly.
Flack stared out the window. “Gavin,” he said. He folded himself carefully into the chair in front of her desk. “We were interviewing a suspect today,” he said jerkily. “A guy named Mordecai Giovinazzo, mobbed up.”
She blinked a little. “Think I met his brother,” she said, and Flack raised his eyebrows. She made a slight carry on gesture with one hand. “And?”
“And – there was a guy with him.” He stared down at the scuffed wood of her desk. She doesn’t need to know. Yes, she does. “His name’s Bonasera,” he said in scuffle of words and accent slathered syllables.
Stella’s breath caught suddenly in her throat, and her mouth worked silently for a moment. “Bonasera?” she finally croaked, hope and despair caught up in those four syllables.
“Nick Bonasera.” He spun the papers across the desk before he destroyed them anymore than he already had. “He’s – he’s a –”
Stella put her hands down on the pages without looking down at them. The line of her throat shook for a moment. “Are you sure?” she whispered.
Flack nodded. “I asked him. He said – he said he had two daughters, Stella and Astra, and he didn’t know – they’d ended up in an orphanage, that’s what he said, and it’s not a common name or anything so I thought – anyway – I did a little – a little checking.”
Stella’s hands stretched wide as though to block the black and white of the words out. “Thirty years,” she said, voice choked. “Thirty years – where the fuck has he been for thirty years? Did he not want –” She stopped abruptly, throat working. “I –”
He had to tell her. She’d find out anyway. “He was in jail, Stella,” Flack said before he could change his mind. Her face went whiter than it had already been and she put her head in her hands. “Oh Jesus. Oh Christ. I should have – God, I’m such a fucking idiot.”
He didn’t know why she was blaming herself, why she thought she should have known. Flack reached a tentative hand out for her. “Stella –”
She didn’t bother looking up at him. “Get out, Flack,” she said, voice muffled. “Just – get out, okay?”
There was nothing he could say to that, so he left, and closed the door behind him, wandered the halls until he finally found his desk in the almost-empty squad room. A few detectives working late shifts nodded to him, barely glancing up from their murder books, he nodded back after they’d already lowered their heads.
The thought flickered fleeting across the front of his mind – I should have an office in there. At least a desk. The crime lab wouldn’t have him, though – he wasn’t a criminalist. The detectives looked like him like he was a stranger. I’m not who I thought I was. Guess I’m not what you wanted me to be either, huh, Pop?
He remembered how proud Donald Flack had been when he’d made detective. Detective Donald Flack, Jr., and doesn’t that sound good! He’d wanted to correct him, still in shock, correct him and say no, I’m not I’m not junior anything, just Don Flack, cop. He’d gotten his dad’s old service revolver, a badge holder, all the cop goodies he could ever have wanted, and all he could think was was it me, or was it you? Did I get this because of meritorious circumstances, or because you stuck your nose in and told the brass you wanted a detective in the family. Officer, lieutenant, sergeant, the only title you were missing was detective. So pull strings for the next generation instead of letting him get their on his own.
If he’d had his choice in the matter – he might have stayed on Patrol. Hadn’t really thought about making detective. Cop’s a cop. Detective’s a detective. They don’t overlap. He knew better now, but back then he’d still been stuck in the fantasy of them and us.
Maybe Lieutenant Donald Flack, Sr., hadn’t pulled strings. He’d bitched and moaned enough about Flack making detective later. Fucking pussies don’t do any fucking work, haven’t been around the block enough to be real policemen. If you wanna do this, Don, you should at least fucking work for it, not just make one collar and have done with it. And you shouldn’t want this.
Flack pulled out his cell phone, flipped through missed calls. Gavin, Dad, Gavin, Gavin, Gavin, Dad, Danny, Gavin, Danny – that was the time he’d left dirty messages on Flack’s cell, and he checked his voice mail while on the way to a decomp in Brooklyn and nearly driven off the road and taken out a woman and twenty dogs – Gavin, Gavin, Stella, Aiden, Dad, Gavin, Mac, Mac, Mac, Gavin.
He hadn’t talked to Gavin since…the Incident. Hadn’t beared to, when all he could think about when he closed his eyes was Curly Sassone’s face and hands and voice, saying over and over again Donny Flack, Danny’s little boytoy, Donny Donny Donny, Gavin’s secret name, until he couldn’t bear the sound of his name anymore. I’m not him. He’s dead.
Maybe Donny had died when Curly shot him.
The cell phone slipped from his shaking hands and clattered to the floor. The detectives on the other side of the room raised their heads to glare at him, and Flack raised one hand in apology as he bent down. I’m sorry, Gavin, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean – I shouldn’t have –
Another reason the patrol officers hated him. Hard to like someone who brought down a cop, who brought down their partner, and he’d thought he’d gotten around the problem when he’d let Gavin follow him down without the cuffs, in uniform, but rumors and truth spread like spilled blood and lies in the precinct, from this one to that, until officers he’d never met stared at him in hate. This is the man who fell. This is the man who turned, and who never looked back.
He looked back. He couldn’t change the past, and he did his job. Always his job.
I’m sorry, Gavin.
Hadn’t talked to him. Hadn’t been sure he could, not when the only things he could say he couldn’t. When Curly had twisted his name to suit his own purposes, and even the sound of it on Gavin’s mouth through the crackle of the answering machine was enough to make him sick. He doesn’t know, sick and gasping, like regret, because Flack hadn’t told him anything. All he’d heard was rumor, nothing from Flack’s mouth. What he might have heard. He needs to know.
Late was better than never. That was what the cold cases detectives said. They talked to him, but the cold cases squad was fucking insane. Almost as bad as the crime lab.
His fingers slipped on the keys, and he hit send before he could change his mind. A lot of judgment going on here. Half-wished Gavin wouldn’t answer.
“Donny?”
He flinched. “Yeah. Gav. It’s – it’s me.”
“I know. Are you all right?”
Flack swallowed. “I’m sorry,” he said, and before his old partner could reply, “I could use a drink. Are you –”
“It’s all right, Donny,” Gavin said. “Whatever it is, it’s all right. The Black Emerald, half an hour? In the Bronx?”
It was the bar where he’d gotten drunk and spilled half his family secrets to a room full of cops, and the one where Gavin had kissed him slow and careful in the back alley. Half the patrol cops in the Bronx hung out there, and he’d be sure to get his ass kicked if he walked in with a detective’s badge on his hip.
Good. He could use a fight.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-03 12:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-03 01:29 am (UTC)Your description in Flack's voice, about becoming a detective so fast-- those entire first paragraphs-- are absolutely visceral and flooring.
I think it's the not-knowing which gets Flack the most. He's a detectve, he's supposed to figure out things, but how he can uncover a stranger's past if he can't even uncover his own? Not that he'd really be able to deal with being given his badge by his father's influence (which he probably wasn't, since his father didn't want him to be a detective), but he doesn't know. And everyone else thinks he got his badge only because of who his father was. The Crime Lab doesn't care, obviously, since some of them probably only got their badges because of "Yay, CSI!" but the Crime Lab's kind of disconnected from the rest of the department as a whole, so their opinions don't really matter. And as much as Flack tells himself he doesn't care and it doesn't matter - he can obviously do his job now - he does and it does. And it gnaws at him.
And his conversation with Stella you've pulled off in total character-- it's flat out, and painful though no one wants it to be, and both react as *them*.
I'm glad the characterization came through, because that was mainly what I was worried about. (God, the next chapter's not going to go well for anybody.
Mac takes Stella home and doesn't even get laid.) Because I have no real idea how anyone would react to something like that, let alone Stella.And his calling Gavin, and the last line fucking kills me. Because it's so *him*, the whole thing is.
Right, and that's a conversation that's really going to go well. Not really a conversation so much as a realization that not all beat cops hate him. Of course, he meets Eddie Messer, Jr., and a couple of old-timers that he knew back in the day that crack jokes about him making detective, but it's a nice realization. Plus he gets to go home to Danny and sex.
I was worried the thing with Gavin came out of nowhere, but it was supposed to be a subplot back in Snafu...which obviously never came about...and then again in New York Minute...which again, obviously never came about.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-03 01:49 am (UTC)Funny how that works, isn't it? *grins* I so know the feeling.
I think it's the not-knowing which gets Flack the most. He's a detective, he's supposed to figure out things, but how he can uncover a stranger's past if he can't even uncover his own?
And again we have that over-arching theme of this fic and series, of family and more deeply of *identity*. Who you are, who you become. Identity is so much *more* than family, even if family can feel like the everything. And it ties in well with having to tell Stella where *she* comes from.
Not that he'd really be able to deal with being given his badge by his father's influence (which he probably wasn't, since his father didn't want him to be a detective), but he doesn't know. And everyone else thinks he got his badge only because of who his father was.
Heh, if the department is a brotherhood, a family, then maybe it's as if a sibling was thinking to curry favor with one of the grownups by being nice to the little one. And, no, he would not be able to deal well with it. It *isn't* fair, and his whole ideals are based on fairness and justice-- and justice, and the police, are supposed to be all impartial and whatnot. To be able to see both sides for what they are, not what they want them to be.
(God, the next chapter's not going to go well for anybody. Mac takes Stella home and doesn't even get laid.)
Ayyy, poor Mac. And poor Stella. For being in Mac's apartment. The both of them. Poor bastards.
Because I have no real idea how anyone would react to something like that, let alone Stella.
I think the ... not non-reaction, but the kicked-in-the-chest reaction is very effective. What she might feel like she's being told is, essentially, your blood is criminal. And you are your history.
Plus he gets to go home to Danny and sex.
Yayporn! *ahem*
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-03 02:18 am (UTC)Right, exactly.
Which means I should probably tackle Aiden now, huh?Stella doesn't know, so she can tell herself whatever she wants. Anything from that her parents are dead to her parents are a king and queen in a far off country that had to give her up. When you don't know, you can make it anything you want. Like...this one ep of Numb3rs? The cat in the box. It's either alive or dead, but until you open the box, you don't know, so in a way it's both alive and dead. Which is Stella's world, up until now, and then you open the box and you know for sure. (Also, the next chapter deals with Stella and Mac and Nick. Like she tells Mac - "I need to know. I don't know what, but I need to know.")Heh, if the department is a brotherhood, a family, then maybe it's as if a sibling was thinking to curry favor with one of the grownups by being nice to the little one. And, no, he would not be able to deal well with it. It *isn't* fair, and his whole ideals are based on fairness and justice-- and justice, and the police, are supposed to be all impartial and whatnot. To be able to see both sides for what they are, not what they want them to be.
Right, exactly. And Flack's overexaggerating things a little bit, but at this point in time - he never really had a chance to fit in anywhere, y'know? Not in Patrol, not with the detectives, not with the CSIs. And he's finding his niche, but it's still one that straddles worlds. He's not entirely in the crime lab, but he's not entirely in the detective world either. And the way his mind is wired...
Ayyy, poor Mac. And poor Stella. For being in Mac's apartment. The both of them. Poor bastards.
Well, Stella's passed out. And Mac doesn't actually know where she lives, so he just takes her to his apartment. And that's going to be a fun morning after, I swear.
See, originally they were supposed to have sex, but Mac's too noble to take advantage of Stella when she's drunk. And then she passes out, so...maybe in the morning. *prods*I think the ... not non-reaction, but the kicked-in-the-chest reaction is very effective. What she might feel like she's being told is, essentially, your blood is criminal. And you are your history.
You are what you eat. Ahem. And then Mac comes in and tells her exactly the same thing, only he has DNA, which doesn't lie. You know, I'm pretty much quoting the whole next chapter, only a fourth of which I've written. But, yeah, it's like being hit over the head with a board. While hungover. Utter shock. Because she's gone her whole life without knowing, and then suddenly, now.
Yayporn! *ahem*
I've been waiting to write this scene for weeks. Of course, knowing me, it'll either get scrapped or not written, but Flack must get laid, dammit. And Danny, too.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-03 02:24 am (UTC)Oh, yep. Shroedinger's (I know I'm spelling that wrong) cat. The old conundrum. Don't tell Mac, he'll launch into a lecture. But yeah, that's exctly what it is. And it's like we talked about, making yourself someone from nothing, which is almost easier because you can take pieces from all the boxes in the world, instead of one.
And Mac doesn't actually know where she lives, so he just takes her to his apartment. And that's going to be a fun morning after, I swear.
Dear Mac: be a good boy and gather every single painkiller you can find, and don't say a damned thing when she takes a dose of each. At the same time. Oh, and like two gallons of water.
I've been waiting to write this scene for weeks. Of course, knowing me, it'll either get scrapped or not written, but Flack must get laid, dammit. And Danny, too.
A-fucking-men to that. Get 'em *laid*. Please. *puppyeyes*