#cpdfic

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addendum: a series of oneshots expanding upon and exploring the events of each episode in season three

Waking Up Today (3x01) • Just Like That (3x02) • Say Before You Falter (3x03) • Know This (3x04) • Form and Function (3x05) • Ready For This (3x06) • A Lot of Maybes (3x07) • Bone to Pick (3x08) • Could Have Said (3x09) • Brothers in Trout (3x10) • Cathartic Cap (3x11) • One, Two, Jab (3x12) • Gotta Be Professional (3x13) • Fine (3x14) • Lost (3x14/3x15) • Got the Munchies (3x15) • Talk About It (3x16) • Somebody Waiting (3x17) • Kasual Motherhood (3x18) • Hard Not Easy (3x19) • Glad You Weren’t As Bad a Mom (3x20) • Not All Cops (3x21) • Twenty-Nine In a Day (3x22) • Those Left Behind (3x23) • Coming and Going (3x23/4x01)

[youremyfamilyalways]

Someone read this cpd fic Im writing PLS

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Addendum, Part Twenty-Five (Chicago P.D.)

Title: Addendum

Chapter: Coming and Going (Part Twenty-Five)

Fandom: Chicago P.D.

Rating: T/PG-13

Author’s Note: This chapter is set directly before the first scene with Erin and Jay in bed in “The Silos” (4x01), and it is an attempt to bridge the gap between the two seasons. I thought Erin’s headspace about Hank going into the fourth season was pretty clear, and I was intrigued by the way she was and wasn’t leaning on Jay (i.e. inviting him over to her place to sleep, presumably telling him that she was meeting with Crowley given their “How’d it go?” conversation yet keeping him handcuffed on how to help her). So I decided to explore how much Jay might have known about where Erin went after she hung up on him, how he felt about the traps being sprung for her and Voight by Crowley, and how might have come to decide that moving in together was the best solution for what she was going through.

Before the chapter begins, though, I wanted to offer a huge thank you to those of you who stuck with this story after I took a year long hiatus from writing it and those who picked it up in the last few months . I’d love to hear any final feedback on this story that you may have.

The relentless rain beats against the windshield; a torrential downpour rather than a pitter-patter that has turned the streets into rivers and cleared the sidewalks around the city as people seek refuge inside their homes. Occasionally, a lone individual with the lapels of their trench coat pulled up to their ears or a couple huddled under a shared umbrella hurry past his parked car, past the Mom and Pop stores flipping over to chain coffee shops and clothing retailers thanks to the shiny, new high-rise forming above.

But, for the most part, the sidewalk remains deserted, and he only has to give each person a passing glance to ascertain if they’re waiting for him or not. Waiting to show off the high-rise building looming over the street, to talk square footage and amenities with him.  

The spec sheet the realtor sent over two nights ago is pulled up on his phone, and he glances down at it. Lets his eyes skim over words about how the place has two bedrooms and underground parking and access to a gym as he tries to figure out what she would say about the place. If she would be willing to overlook the lack of  “real” Chicago character for a place where she doesn’t have to shovel out her car in the morning or wake up early to get across town to Antonio’s.

Yet the early hours haven’t seem to affect her over the last few days. He’s awoken twice now to the feeling of her slipping out of his bed and once to the sound of the front door of her apartment clicking shut behind her. Spent three nights wondering how she is and what she’s up to until the wee hours of the morning when she didn’t answer her phone, and two other nights when she did answer her phone, when she showed up at his place or told him to come over feeling like she’d rather he go.

Feeling like she’d rather he leave her alone as he reclines on her couch beside her nursing a beer and not talking about Justin. As he sits across the bullpen from her and doesn’t acknowledge that the photographs and notes pulled from the unit’s whiteboard and handed over to Commander Crowley are just a bunch of dead ends now. As he slips under the sheets beside her and doesn’t ask about the ball of wet clothes left in the corner of her bedroom.

At least, this place -- with its gentrifying neighborhood and ubiquitous appearance -- has a washer and dryer in a unit. Offers him the chance to lander those clothes, to remove the reminders of where she went when he told her that Voight wasn’t at the house with him or the rest of the unit without it becoming obvious what he’s doing. Without implicating what he knows -- or, at least, thinks he knows -- about the hour and a half gap between his phone call to her and the 300 arriving back in the District’s parking lot by doing a load of laundry at her place instead of his own.

By completing a silent yet physical omission that he thinks there is something to that pile beyond those being the clothes she was wearing when she and Voight found Justin. That the evidence Crowley is going to be looking for when the team she has assigned to Justin’s case finds only dead ends in the folders and evidence boxes he and Dawson handed over is actually laying in the corner of Erin’s bedroom.

The thought causes him to sigh, causes the knot in his stomach that has been there since he heard her voice over the radio calling out for an ambulance to tighten because this played out in both a way he expected  -- with Voight possibly getting a moment alone with their main suspect -- and a way he didn’t with her possibly getting snagged up while the rest of the team was offered plausible deniability.

Possibly because he doesn’t know. Only has theories and suspicious and three years of knowing what Voight meants to her. That Voight, in Erin’s eyes, is the reason why she’s here today. Why he has gotten to know her rather than her becoming an unknown face in a file cabinet of unsolved homicides and overdoses.

But Jay also knows that he -- with his decision to drive rather than ride shotgun beside her, with his phone call to her rather than directly to Voight -- helped the hunt for who killed Justin Voight play out in a way that might have ensnared her. And he can’t stand the idea of of the traps that are bound to set for Voight pulling her down another hole, of watching her come and go out of his apartment and his life -- inside and outside of work -- because of what he did and what he hasn’t managed to do since.

And, so, he is here on a rainy Tuesday night waiting to check out an apartment that he hopes she’ll like, that she’ll maybe want to spend more than a few hours at with him. That will maybe feel like home, like a place that can keep her grounded through the loss of the guy who was like her brother and the home that Voight offered her.

Except he’s pretty sure she’s not going to like this place. Can already hear her incredulous voice about how he’ll need to pick up multiple Violence Reduction shifts and pull in extra overtime in order to afford a small latte at the residents-only coffee lounge the spec sheet boosts about. Can already hear her knowing hum and see her suggestive smirk in response to him saying that he’d only drink the stuff in the breakroom, if it meant getting a place with one of those waterfall showerheads and a jetted tub.

He thought the place he emailed her about this morning -- the condo located on the second floor of a brownstone -- would catch her eye. Would, at least, warrant a text back or an acknowledgement as she came and went out of the District today while the rest of the team pushed paper and kept their mouths shut and their eyes averted from the elephant in the room. But she hadn’t said anything, and he hadn’t been able to find a moment in the breakroom after awakening to an empty bed for the second night in a row to ask her about it. To tell her about his appointment to see this place tonight.

So the headlights shining into his rear windshield from the car pulling up behind him aren’t from her sedan, and the woman with the light brown hair who steps out of the vehicle and hurries over to stand under the flat, metal awning over the entrance of the high-rise condominium isn’t her. And Jay takes a moment to squint through the heavy rainfall to watch her, to double check her identity before pushing open the driver’s side door of his car. Slips his cell phone and his keys into the front pockets of his jeans as he hurries through the rain to meet her.

“Mr. Halstead?” The woman calls out as he comes towards her, as she thrusts her hand out for him to shake. And he grasps it with a nod of his head as she introduces herself as Sarah Murphy, the realtor working with the developer of this site.

“Will it just be you tonight?” Sarah inquires, although the unspoken addition to her question is evident in the way she glances at his left hand. And the question causes him to pause for a moment because somehow his search for a place to call his own, to put down roots had become a search done with her -- her opinion, her presence -- in mind, but she had gone from the District this evening and hadn’t come with him. Hadn’t returned his text inquiring what she was up to or if she wanted to grab dinner; hadn’t really talked to him since the night she showed up at his place after shrugging off his attention and being noncommittal about whether or not he’d see her later that night at Justin’s funeral.

“Yeah, uh, my girlfriend couldn’t make it,” he says telling himself that it’s not entirely a lie. That if this was a normal week, she would have been here to offer her opinions on what is too intimate and too ridiculous for a place that he’ll call home for, at least, the lifespan of his mortgage.

“Oh, that’s too bad,” Sarah counters glancing up at the sky and the steady rain before returning her gaze back to him. “I’d be happy set up another time for her to come see it. Perhaps when the weather is better so she can really see the view.”

“Yeah,” Jay replies soft because maybe the weather will get better. Maybe the dark cloud hanging over her life will dissipate and he’ll figured out how to help her get through this beyond trying to distract her with real estate listings and showing up when and where she wants him to. But, right now, the storm is still raging, and he has no idea where she’s at.

So, instead, he stands alone outside of a high-rise apartment building listening to the relator tell him about the security system installed throughout the building as she fishes out a badge from her purse. About how residents can get in twenty-four/seven with a plastic badge and visitors can be let in by the front desk when it's staffed from nine to five.

And Jay keeps his mouth shut about how he’s seen the system she’s bragging about in more than one burglary-homicide during his years on the force. Tries not to give away how much more he likes the fresh paint and clean lines of this place over the linoleum and rusty mailboxes in the entryway of his apartment building as he follows her through the lobby to the elevator.

“So the unit we’ll be seeing has two bedrooms,” the realtor reminds him as they step into the elevator and she pushes the button for the eleventh floor. The doors shut behind them without the horrific clanking noise that comes from the elevator at his place on the rare occasion that it’s actually working, and Jay jams his hands in the pockets of his black coat as Sarah points to the button for the fourth floor explaining that they’ll stop and check out the gym and club lounge after seeing the unit.

“Gym access is included, right?” Jay questions, and the realtor launches into a list of what is and isn’t included in the purchase price and the condo’s co-op fees -- unlimited gym access for homeowners is included while more than two coffees a month at the club and day passes for guests aren’t -- as the elevator inches closer and closer to the eleventh floor.

“Uh, washer and dryer in unit,” Sarah informs him when they reach the eleventh floor, when she fumbles with the keys to unlock the front door of unit number eleven-oh-four. And she steps aside when she finally unlocks the door, gestures for him to step into the apartment first, offers him the first look at the hardwood floors running from the front door through the open-concept living room and kitchen to the wall of windows on the other side. The wall of windows that look a lot like the ones at Erin’s.

And that realization causes him the smile because maybe he can turn these windows and their view of a stormy sky instead of the brick wall of the apartment across the street into a selling point for her. Can maybe finally end her complaints that his current place with its small windows and close proximity to another building is like living inside a tomb.

“All appliances are included,” Sarah announces dragging his attention away from the wall of windows towards the kitchen with its gleaming white cabinets, granite countertops, and stainless steel appliances. It is about three times the size of his current kitchen -- bigger than Erin’s, too -- and he can’t help but imagine how much easier it would be to cook them dinner now and then without having to step around her. Can’t help but feel a little crestfallen at her not touching him -- eyes sparkling and mouth smirking in such a way that they give her feigned innocence -- under the excuse of cramped spaces.

And he turns on his heels to look at the rest of the space; his eyes settling on the large, blank walls running the length of the room. There’s no fireplace, but there’s plenty of room for a sixty-inch plasma TV mounted to the wall and storage space in the second bedroom for all the blankets she has insisted on needing at his current, fireplace-less apartment.

“Unit comes with one spot in the underground parking garage,” Sarah informs him, and he pauses for a second as he moves towards the hallway leading off from the right of the kitchen. As he realizes that someone will still end up circling the block looking for parking and digging their car out when the city turns into Chiberia, that those loops around the block and attempts to dislodge the car from a snowbank will be the only times he gets to drive.

“But,” the relator jumps in when she catches the look on his face, “a second one can be allocated to the unit with a little negot--”

The caveat is interrupted by the crash of thunder and lighting outside, by the trilling sound of Jay’s phone ringing in his pocket. A sound that causes the knot in his stomach to tighten and then sends his hand scrambling into the pocket of his jeans. A sound that causes him to throw the relator an apologetic look and then furrow his brows as he sees her name written across the screen.

“Hey,” he greets after clicking the green button on screen and raising the phone to his ear. Jay’s voice sounds rough, panicked. Nothing like the flat, monotone voice that greets him on the other end of the line. But there’s an edge to it -- an edge he hasn’t been able to figure out, an edge he hasn’t been able to decide if he wants to fall over -- as she asks if he can come over to her place.

And he doesn’t hesitate to say that he’ll be right over. Offers an apology to Sarah about needing to go and barely notices the way she panics over losing out on a commission as he leads them both to the elevator. Barely absorbs her sputtered words about how he hasn’t checked out the bedrooms or the bathroom or the resident’s club on the fourth floor as they ride down to ground level in the elevator. Barely notices the rain falling overhead as he promises to be in touch about the place and jobs over to his car.

The high-rise is further from her place than his current apartment, and he arrives outfront to find dark windows and not a single light on in her apartment. At least, none visible from the street. But the phone his tossed on his passenger seat is lit up with a text informing him that she left the front door unlocked for him, and he climbs three flights of stairs to find that to be true. Pokes his head into the darkened apartment and calls out her name because only idiots sneak into apartments and homes owned by cops.

“In the bedroom,” she calls out in a gravelly voice from the bedroom and only then -- with the sound of her voice, with the reminder that she really wants him her -- does the knot in his stomach loosen and his shoulders relax. He takes just a moment to slip off his coat and boots, to add the coat to the hooks by the door and straighten the jumbled mess of shoes by the door, to lock the door behind him.

Only then does he pad through the dark apartment to her bedroom, round around the corner to find her laying in bed with the covers pulled up and her back towards him. And as his eyes adjust to the low-light conditions, his gaze drifts from her to the corner of her bedroom, to the spot where her wet clothes from that night lay.

Laid, it turns out. Because, now, the pile is gone. The last remnant of it -- her green trench coat -- is wrapped in the plastic the dry cleaner sent it home in and draped over the chair to his left. The sight causes him to pause long enough that Erin seems to notice, that she rolls over on her back and stares at him with eyes that seem to both challenge him to ask and beg him not to.

And another long pause follows as he tries to decide what to say or what to do, but the decision is made for him by her reaching out to pull back the covers, by her silently asking him to lay down beside her. A request he answers by yanking his damp t-shirt over his head and dropping it onto the floor where her wet clothes used to sit, by fumbling with his belt and sliding his jeans and his socks off so he slips into bed beside her with nothing by a pair of boxers on.

And unlike the last few days when she’s come and gone, when she’s pulled away from him, she rolls into his grasp, curls her body up against his, and places her head in the crook between his arm and his torso. Lets one -- no, two -- hot tears fall down her cheeks and onto his chest as his arm wraps around her, as his thumb traces patterns on the soft bit of skin peeking out from between the hem of her off-white t-shirt.

“Crowley wants to see me tomorrow,” she informs him, and the confession causes his hand to still because he knows what that means. Knows that the cloud of suspicion hanging over their unit right now is narrowing over her, that someone outside the unit has finally noticed the gap in her and Voight and the rest of the unit’s timelines and whereabouts.

“Erin,” he starts, but she cuts him off. Handcuffs him and all his possible reactions by pressing her face further into the crook between his arm and his torso and telling him that she doesn’t want to talk about it. That she just wants to lay her with her boyfriend.

And he agrees because she asked him to come here, because her arm is tightening around his chest as though she needs an anchor right now and he wants to be that for her. Wants to help keep her head above water as she tries to work through her loss and keep her and her career on solid footing as the Ivory Tower starts picking up on rumors and hearsay and unspoken understandings of what happens when a cop’s son is killed.

When Hank Voight’s son is killed.

Somewhere in the middle of the night, she’ll pull away from him. She’ll end up on her side of the bed and he’ll end up on his. Close enough physically that she’ll smack him with the back of her hand when her nightmare wakes him up; far enough mentally and emotionally that she’ll brush off his concern and run out the door. But, right now, she’s not coming and going, and twelve hours of stability, of laying in bed beside her as her boyfriend has to be good enough.

For now.

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Addendum, Part Twenty-Four (Chicago P.D.)

Title: Addendum

Chapter: Those Left Behind (Part Twenty-Four)

Fandom: Chicago P.D.

Rating: T/PG-13

Author’s Note: I always hated that we never saw Jay comfort Erin in “Start Digging” (3x23) so this scene is set between Hank telling Erin to get everyone back to the District from Med and Hank interrupting Antonio telling the rest of the unit to let him know if they aren’t comfortable working the case now that Justin is a victim. (In that particular scene, you can see Jay standing behind Erin and the two of them off to the side from the rest of the unit, which I guess was supposed to be the hint of him comforting her.) This is the penultimate chapter to this series. There will be one more to bridge the final scene of the season three finale and the start of “The Silos” (4x01).

The sound of the side door to the garage opening causes him to shift his gaze from the oil stain on the concrete floor to the grimace on Antonio’s face. The grimace is difficult to read, and the small shake of Dawson’s head when the two men make eye contact across the garage is even harder to decipher. To gauge whether or not Dawson is telling him that Justin is gone, that Erin and Voight are now two more people who have been left behind and must be faced.

The knot in his stomach from hearing her call number and the frantic request for an ambulance over the radio tightens at the realization that he’ll never escape this. That for all Olinsky’s suggestion that they start drawing straws on notifications, Jay will always be the one standing in front of the mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, wives and children left behind and trying to tell them that their sacrifice was worth it.

Except he doesn’t know if that was the case here. This isn’t a training accident on base or a fight against terrorism in Afghanistan or an effort to bring freedom and democracy -- whatever that looked like after thirteen years of combat -- to Iraq. This is a single mother and, now, a married serviceman with a baby caught up in something -- a dealing with the cartel, a crossed path with the Russians -- that ended with one stuffed in the trunk of her car with her throat slashed and the other being found by his father and the woman who is basically his sister in need an ambulance.

A married serviceman with a baby who Erin swore up and down was turning his life around, was finding the rhythm needed to be a good dad and a good father and a good Signal Corps officer. A married serviceman with a baby who was placing multiple phone calls to their female victim and, presumably, sneaking off to Chicago to see with Voight or Erin or his wife’s knowledge.

His posture straightens as Antonio comes closer towards where he stands waiting near the door to the back staircase; his shoulders square as he silently waits for the older detective to fill him in. And he keeps that rigid posture as Dawson explains that he doesn’t know much, that Voight had demanded Lindsay get them all back to the District before he could get more information from the doctors or nurses at Med.

“Atwater went to check on Justin’s car. Make sure it’s being towed to Twenty-One,” Dawson informs him, and the statement clues him in on how this is going to played out. That his suspicion when Mouse brought him the phone records in a hushed whisper that the case will be handled by Intelligence rather than handed over to Area Homicide as the Ivory Tower’s rule book still holds true.

“And Erin?” Jay questions because he hasn’t heard from her since her voice cracked across the radio. Since Dawson had grabbed Atwater and announced the two of them would met Voight and Lindsay at the hospital, directed Halstead and Ruzek and Olinsky to sit tight and wait in case backup was needed. The instructions had ticked him off at the time, and the part of him still simmering over that is evident in the clipped tone of his voice.

But the answer to his question comes from the sound of the side door to the garage opening rather than from Dawson, and Jay careens his neck to the right at the audible intrusion to see her walking into the garage. Steps to the right in what ends up being a silent dismissal of Dawson so he can walk towards her, so he look into the face of a family member who was left behind.

And there is a moment where she refuses to make eye contact with him, where her posture remains rigid as though she is unaffected or trying to remain professional given the place and the audience. But his left hand reaches out to touch her shoulder, and the facade she’s being trying to maintain gives way. Heavy, gasping sobs released as he pulls her into a tight hug, as he tries to keep his own posture firm and rooted in order to offer support while she crumbles.

“He was shot,” she murmurs against his chest, and he wraps his arms around her even tighter as her voice cracks with another cry. The tears fall against his black t-shirt -- the salty water causing the color the darken -- as she presses her face into his chest, as her body gasps and shudders with another cry. “I just saw him last night for Daniel’s--”

The reminder of why she pulled up at the crime scene with Voight last night, why she blew off drinks with the guys with a smirk and a comment about spending the night with her favorite guy causes her tears to flow harder and his posture to soften. His head dipping down, his lips skimming against the top of her head in a silent apology because this wasn’t how things were supposed to go.

Because her biggest concern was supposed to be whether or not Daniel liked the present she bought him for his first birthday. A present she had picked out after three weeks of agonizing over the choices, of letting him drive so she could thumb through Amazon and Toys ‘R Us on her phone trying  to find something that was educational enough for Olive’s granola views on parenting and fun enough for Justin’s and age-appropriate enough for a child she couldn’t believe was already one and sturdy enough for the destructive nature of a Voight.

That last caveat had come from him. Earned him a roll of the eyes along with muttered words about how he and Will had probably been just as destructive as Justin growing up followed by a jab to the spot between his vest and the waistband of his jeans when he clarified that he meant her and the messes she left behind in his bathroom. Earned him a scoff and a sassed reminder that maybe it was good thing the last place her showed didn’t even have a bathroom.

“He was doing so good. Making Camille proud,” she cries against his chest, and the hands gripping his forearms become fists. Pound against his chest with one, two jabs because her pain is twisting over into anger. “And--and--”

Her voice trails off, and her fist become open palms that are pressed against his biceps. That give him a squeeze and then push him away so she can step out of his embrace. And there is a moment where he resist her efforts, where her tries to keep his hands on her upper arms for comfort and support -- for her, mostly -- in case she’s started to feel as though the hug has become oppressive, but his grip releases when it becomes clear she needs her space. Needs the opportunity to comfort herself the way she has all her life -- alone with arms wrapped around her chest and tears stuck to the rim of her eyelids rather than rolling down her cheeks.

“What did the doctor say?” Jay questions when she’s pulled herself apart from him to find the space to put herself back together because Dawson didn’t have much to share. Because he’s trying to comfort her without knowing all the facts, and there are enough questions -- whos, whats, wheres, and whens -- in this case already.

“I don’t know,” she says as her body shakes, as she gasps in air as though her lungs are getting enough oxygen. “They were speaking so fast, and Hank -- he, he told me to come back here before Goodwin could ex--”

The crack in her voice as she informs him that Voight sent her away without answers, without a word from Goodwin on whether or not she found the murdered and dumped body of someone she loves again causes anger to surge within him. A surge that straightens his posture and distracts his attention away from her until her voice cracks again. Until she lifts her chin and lets him see the fresh round of tears gathering in her eyes as she says that she heard something about neuro and a CT.

“I’ll give Will a call,” Jay promises. He has no idea if Will is working today, if his brother has managed to make it two weeks as the ED’s newest attending without Goodwin revoking some of his privileges. Again. But he’ll get the information for her somehow. Offer her support however she needs it. Today. Tomorrow. A year from now. Twenty years from now.

A promise he tries to reiterate for her by taking a step towards her, by reaching out to grasp her hand in his and give it a squeeze. A promise that is interrupted by a throat being cleared behind them, by the way she pulls her hand from his when they turn to see Ruzek standing in the doorway leading to the back staircase.

“Uh,” Ruzek stutters out lifting his gaze from where their hands had been clasped together for just a moment to look them both in the eyes. And his gaze reverts solely to look at Jay as he jerks his thumb backwards pointing over his shoulder, as he announces that Dawson wants to see everyone up in the bullpen.

Ruzek’s announcement is answered with the nod of Erin’s head, with the sound of her boots on the concrete floor moving to follow his retreating form back up the stairs to the bullpen. But the knot in Jay’s stomach is still lose enough for him to turn quickly on his heel to catch her, to call out her name in the hopes that she’ll turn in face him.

“Whatever you need, however you want to play this,” he promises softly when she turns to face him, when his softened gaze connects with her tear-filled eyes, “you let me know.”

And there is a long pause where she studies him, where he waits for her to take in what he is promising given how that they both know there are really only two directions this case can now go. What he is  -- or isn’t -- saying about the roles of interferer or collaborator that he is willing to take on despite his own moral compasses and codes of conduct. Yet the conversation is ended with words, without her telling him what she wants.

At least, not verbally because he can read the look in her eyes -- the hope that they will find the guy responsible without crossing from the gray into the black -- and that is the hope he also carries with him as he follows her up the stairs to the bullpen while tapping out a request for information about Justin’s condition from Will. As he ignores the five sets of eyes that follow him and her as he perches himself behind her desk. As he bites his tongue while his tongue while Antonio instructs them all to say something if they aren’t ready to cross a line.

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Ideal (Chicago P.D.)

Title: Ideal

Fandom: Chicago P.D.

Rating: T/PG-13

Author's Note: I probably watched one too many romantic dramas this weekend, but I was trying to make myself feel better after the announcement about Sophia's departure. To me, the best case scenario we can hope for after 4x23 (and given Sophia may be coming back for a few episodes in S5) is a follow-up to Erin and Jay's conversation in 4x21 about ideal living situations so this is what I came up with.

She will never get used to the hustle and bustle of this city - the constant honking of car horns, the way people push past each other on crowded sidewalks without the apology that comes with Midwestern nicety, the thin crust pizza being hawked by the slice at the same cart selling skinny hot dogs that don't deserve to be called sausage or bratwurst, the turf wars among precincts over which borough they serve, or the tunnel vision the highrises create making it is impossible to see city landmarks.

That last change was - is - probably the hardest to adapt to because it used to be she walk down the back steps of the District or swing by Firehouse 51 or chase down a suspect and be able to see Sears Tower standing up straight. Offering orientation as she floored the 300 or the Sierra or as she hopped over a fence in a foot chase. Now? Now she orients herself by the number of blocks to the FBI's headquarters, by the coffee shops and hole in the way restaurants that Lieutenant Benson pointed out to her the night she arrived in New York City with Hank's admonishment not to look back still ringing in her ears.

Advice Hank himself hadn't followed given that Benson was waiting for her at baggage claim, that the first person she saw upon arrival was someone from her past. It had been Benson who helped her find a place - one that was smaller than her condo in Chicago and without the floor to ceiling windows or the fireplace, but in a neighborhood that didn't feel quite so sterile or gentrified as the place the FBI set her up with. It had been Benson who took her out to the coffee shop around the corner from her new apartment and offered her a position in her own unit. Offered to open up doors for her at the NYPD that would let her out of a life spent in starched, white blouses and pantsuits.

But she had to pass, had to take Hank's advice that she not look back because she couldn't imagine facing the kind of monsters like Yates every single day. Couldn't handle the mental mindfuck that would come every time a woman was brutalized that way Nadia had been. And she had to keep the deal she made five months ago. Five months, eleven days, and six hours ago.

So much for not looking back.

"What can I get started for you, ma'am?" The questions startles her slightly as she had been mindlessly moving forward in line at the coffee shop. It is the same coffee shop that Benson had taken her to about two months after she arrived in the city, after it became obvious that the homesickness for Chicago wasn't abating with time.

The same, but different because it has been more crowded now, more inundated with tourists and the yuppies who bought the overpriced condos built on top of the hotel down the block. And now the barista moves down the line asking for orders before the customer can reach the cash register and pay.

"Can I get a large, black coffee and, uh, a large latte?" Erin questions glancing from the barista's smiling face to the board and back again when she sees the milk options listed on the righthand side. "Almond milk for the latte."

"Ok, I've got a large, black coffee and a large latte with almond milk. Anything else?" The barista questions nodding her head in reply when Erin replies in the negative as she scribbles the order on a paper cup. "Can I get an name for the order?"

"Lindsay?"

The callout of her last name comes not from Erin but from a voice - a male voice - further in front of her in the line, and both Erin and the barista turn to spot the speaker standing in front of the cash register. To see a redhead wearing a suit craning his head around the line to stare at her, to offer her a small, hesitant smile. And she offers him one in return as she tells the barista that Lindsay is the name for the order.

"Here you go, sir," another barista interrupts handing a coffee cup to the redhead. The grin on her face, the way she giggles over his charm causes Erin to roll her eyes because it appears that nothing has changed in the five months since she's been gone. That the eldest Halstead hasn't lost the charm that always got him in trouble, that always meant she had to listen to the youngest Halstead rail about how his brother needed to get his act together. Needed to focus on his career in New York and, then, in Chicago; needed to choose Nina or Natalie.

But he doesn't really offer her that boyish, charming grin as he moves to join her in line, as the two of them awkwardly dance around the question of whether or not they should hug because that's what they used to do. Quick hugs and/or warm smiles at Molly's when he'd join them for a drink after work or at their place - her place - when the game would end and they weren't so subtle about telling him that it was time to go.

Now, though, they skip the hug, and she finds herself curling her wrists upward so she can tug on the sleeves of her starched blouse under her black jacket. So she can silently address the discomfort she feels as he explains that he didn't expect to run into her here, as she wonders how much he knows about what's transpired in the five months since she last saw Will Halstead.

The lanyard around his neck announcing his name and his hospital affiliation explains why he's in New York rather than at work in Chicago, but Erin asks about the conference anyways. Listens to him explain that Goodwin has either started to trust him, or she just wants a week where he isn't around to give her more grey hairs.

The laughter Erin offers in reply clearly isn't the answer that Will was going for because the smile on his face doesn't reach his eyes. Because he's still staring at her with the stoic impression that Erin is convinced is hereditary as she inquires how everyone else at Med is doing while handing over a waded up twenty to the barista working the cash register. Because his eyes flash with anger when one of the four baristas working today interrupts the exchange of change and the exchange of niceties to hand her two coffees.

The flash of anger dissipates, though, as his gaze darts from to the two coffees in her hand to her face, and the anger is replaced with resigned sadness so quickly that Erin doesn't have time to really register what he's thinking. To say anything in her own defense as he mumbles about it being good to see her before turning away and striding towards the door. To even say his name before he's turned back around and moved towards her, before his proximity and his gaze makes it feel like they are the only two in the coffee shop.

"He was gonna propose to you. Told me that he knew he blew it, but that you were all he thought about. Had me get Mom's ring out of the safety deposit box cause you were the right girl," Will informs her, and the knowledge causes her to stumble backwards a bit. To lose her footing on the high heels that she's never really enjoyed wearing because it is too difficult to stand up right after such a blow. "And you - you really hurt him, Erin."

Despite all the years she spent learning how to suppress her emotions, how to make sure no one ever saw her weaknesses, the tears still spring to her eyes. Leave her vision a cloudy mess and a lump in her throat so she can't find her voice when Will tries to explain that he doesn't mean to hurt her. That he just wants her to know how much his brother cared - cares- about her.

Except she does know. Knew with every look and touch; knew with the five missed calls on the night she left and the smattering of texts after that. And she manages to find her voice not to tell Will that, not to tell Will that Jay is all she thinks about, but to wish him luck with his conference and make a break for the door.

Her visions is still cloudy as she makes her way down the crowded sidewalk towards her apartment, and the coffee cups slosh in her hands as people bump into her left and right. But the lump in her throat has grown and her heart is racing too much to take on the New Yorker tactic of scowling, to do anything other than focus on getting to her apartment.

Apartment not home. Because this is New York not Chicago. Because this is where she's biding her time rather than living her life. Because it is hard to move forward when you're still looking back at your past.

It takes some maneuvering with the coffee cups to open the front door of her building - almond milk latte spilling on the stoop on her building - and then to unlock the front door of her apartment. Takes further maneuvering around the half-unpacked boxes stacked in the hallway and the living room to find her past looking back at her from the closet-sized kitchen.

To find her past wearing sweatpants hung low on his hips and bare back muscles flexing as he runs the spatula across the frying pan, as he announces that he couldn't find the waffle maker in any of the boxes labeled kitchen so scrambled eggs will have to do.

"You were going to propose?" The question comes out more strangled and weaker sounding than she meant it to be, and the tone clearly catches him off guard because his head snaps around so he can stare at her. So she can see those bright eyes dim with a tiny bit of sadness as he nods his head eyes.

"You were going to propose," she repeats again. This time the question is more of a statement. This time he reaches to turn off the stove, moves the skillet off the burner, and spins around to face her. To rub his fingers against the hairline along his forehead and refuse to meet her gaze as he verbally confirms what he had planned to do five months, ten days, and roughly twelve and a half hours ago.

"You were going to propose, and I just left," Erin says as though he needs the reminder of what exactly happened that night. Of waiting for her at Molly's with the ring box in his pocket; of calling her repeatedly and driving by the apartment they used to share wondering where she was. Of dragging himself into work the next morning hoping to see her sitting at her desk and being told by Voight that she was working with the FBI. Effectively immediately.

"And you came back," he interjects because maybe she needs the reminder of what happened three months ago. Of sitting at Molly's staring at his fourth drink of the night wondering if he should finally let himself fall over the edge; of ignoring the sound of the door opening and shutting behind him because the rest of the unit wasn't really into drinking with a guy who wouldn't even try to be the life of the party. Of hearing a 'hey' in her voice beside him and wondering if he'd lost count of his drinks already until he felt her hand on his bicep.

They had ended up back at his place, at the apartment he officially shared with Will but unofficially had to himself because his brother spent all his time with Natalie. They ended up with her pantsuit on his floor and her nail marks on his back and not a lot of words spoken between them in the next three hours. The touches and kisses and caresses saying what they both felt even when they were in between rounds. And then, in the morning, he took her out to breakfast at her favorite diner, let her steal bites of his egg white omelete to balance out the unhealthiness of her double stack of pancakes, and asked if she was back.

She wasn't. And it had nearly killed her to see the way his face fell, to see the mask she thought he was trying to break down fall back in place as she explained that she was in town just for the night. That she had to get back to New York. That she wanted to stay so badly; that she felt her resolve to leave weakening with every passing moment.

She hadn't said the last part, but she had texted him as soon as she landed in New York. Texted him multiple times a day. Texted him so much that he'd stopped replying for a few hours and then come back with an excuse that his new partner, Al, had become annoyed with all the texting. Had taken away his phone and locked it in the glove compartment of that police-issued car he wasn't allowed to drive. And then texts had become calls. Short chats on the nights they both worked late and could barely keep their eyes open; lengthy ones on the days when she found herself looking up one way flights to Chicago.

So much for not looking back.

And, apparently, he had been doing the same during those phone calls because he's standing in her kitchen cooking her scrambled eggs and she's buying him a latte with almond milk. His ticket is round trip; Chicago is still his - their - home. But he's here to drown her in kisses at night and mock her pantsuit in the morning and, apparently, there was a time when he was going to propose.

"Are you still plan-" She forces the question to die on her lips because she doesn't want to know. What they're doing right now - the showing up on each other's doorsteps, the sneaking around dad's back - is complicated and confusing and undefined enough as it is without throwing the ultimate definition of a relationship out there. Without asking him to tell her if she's wrecked things enough that he's no longer considering asking her; without asking her to tell him if he's blew it so badly that she no longer wants to be asked.

"Do you remember me telling you about that couple? The ones that lived in separate houses, but were together for like, forty-two years?"

She remembers, of course. Remembers wondering where exactly he was going with that story when he first told it to her and then wondering how they went from him asking her to move in together to him telling her the ideal situation was him coming over for dinner and sex and then going back to his own place to sleep and work on the motorcycle she wasn't - isn't - thrilled about him wanting. Remembers him correcting her and saying that it wasn't ideal.

"I'd rather have that with you then nothing at all," he informs her and she finds herself shaking her head. Reminding him that they live in separate states rather than houses across the road from one another.

"Yeah," he agrees folding his arms across his chest and leaning back against the counter. His stare is unwavering much like his posture as he continues, "it's not ideal. But unless you're ready to stop protecting Bunny and come home-"

"Jay," she warns with the shake her head because they've had this agreement. Over text. Over the phone. And she doesn't want to rehash it all over again when he's standing in front of her and, according to his brother, may or may not have a ring in his pocket.

"So," he interjects with a sigh of frustration, "separate houses, separate states sounds like the best option right now cause, Erin, not being with you is far less ideal than cramming myself into those tiny seats on Spirit for a two hour flight."

There's a long, pregnant pause where she mulls it over. Where she wonders how they went from living together to being apart to him planning to propose to now contemplating long distance for foreseeable future. And then she finds herself nodding her head, offering him a whispered okay that she knows he heard because he breaks out in a wide, boyish, and charming grin. One that makes his brother's seem small in comparison. One that she sort of emulates - dimples appearing - as he crosses the room, as he pulls the coffee cups from her hands and places them on the table by the couch, as he plants a kiss on her lips and mumbles how he loves her.

Because, yeah, living in New York isn't ideal. Being an agent with the FBI rather than a detective with the Chicago Police Department isn't ideal. But the last five months and the weeks before that have shown her that not being with him also isn't ideal. And that's one thing that she can change right now, can let herself keep from her past even as she sacrifices for another portion of it.

"Do me one thing," she murmurs when the second - or, maybe third - kiss breaks, and she feels him pull away slightly from her. Watches her run her hand against his chest before tipping her head up to look at him, to offer him a stern look that clashes with the dimples she can't make disappear. "Don't propose to me. Not yet, anyways. I don't want it to be a rushed thing, okay?"

His gaze softens at the comment, and she knows it's because a part of him sees it as a dig, as a pointed comment about his past and how he made it to the altar the first time around. And there's a part of her that means it that way. That can't stand the idea of him ever describing them as a joke or a twenty-four hour thing or of their relationship being cobbled together in panic the way their decision to move in together last year maybe was.

"You know that I support you one hundred percent, right?" Jay asks, and the comment causes Erin's brow to furrow because, of course, she knows that. Has known that since their first ride along as partners, since he put on a suit and went to her high school reunion with her, since he waited for her to tell him about her past, since he pulled her back onto the force when she was falling down a hole, since he held her together when her world was falling apart, since he offered advice and support even when she didn't want. And when she tells him that, of course, she knows, he nods his head and says, "Then I can wait to propose when it's more ideal."

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Addendum, Part Twenty (Chicago P.D.)

Title: Addendum

Chapter: Hard Not Easy (Part Twenty)

Fandom: Chicago P.D.

Rating: M/R

Author’s Note: This chapter is set at the end of “If We Were Normal” (3x19). Please note that the rating jumps to M for this chapter.

Her lips press against his collarbone; her nose nuzzles against the soft patch of skin where his neck slopes down to meet his shoulder bone. And his hips move rhythmically against hers one last time as unintelligent mumblings slip past his lips, as he reaches the logical conclusion of what she started back at Molly’s when she mentioned an unopened box at home.

She plants another kiss -- her lips savoring the salty taste of his skin -- and waits for him to move away. To roll to the right and slump backwards into the mattress rather than slumping down on her because he never lets her hold him that way. Never lets his weight press her into the mattress or her hands spread across his back for longer than necessary.

Always pulls away to take a moment to catch his breath and clean up the mess he’s made before returning to her, before letting his hand curl around her waist and her head rest against his chest as they drift off to sleep.  Always pulls away before turning to cuddle.

And so she doesn’t bother trying to dig her fingers into his back or employing some other tactic to get him to stay. Merely presses another kiss against his skin -- this time, against the line delineating his muscles of his chest -- when he pushes up on his left hand and slides his right down -- fingers ghosting over her skin -- to where they are joined. Curls his fingers around himself to make sure the condom comes out with him -- the least sexiest move in his repertoire and yet one of those that makes her feel the safest.

One that reminds Erin that the trust she places in Jay -- on the job, at home, in the bedroom -- is well founded and deserved. One that shows her how his diligence says more about him and his protection of their relationship than any kind of commentary about her and the bad news of her past that her mind might dredge up because he always punctuates it with a kiss to her lips and words whispered against the skin of her lips and her cheek about how he’ll be right back.

And, truth be told, she doesn’t mind the view as she watches him walk out of her bedroom. As she stretches out her legs and surveys the damage done. The metallic tank top and the two pair of jeans tossed on the floor; the pile of pillows congregating over by the window thanks to the bounce of her body against the mattress and the swipe of her hand as she searched blindly for the headboard.

There is the tiniest twinge of a muscle spasm as she slides her legs over the edge of the bed, as she moves to stand up and retrieve some of those pillows, but it’s the good kind of twinge. The kind that brings a blissful smile to her face as she bends down to gather up the jeans and the tank top and toss them onto the chair near the open-aired entry to her bedroom. As she walks around the bed to gather four of the pillows laying on the floor to her chest in order to hide them in the closet.

Her plan to hide her crazy concluded with the rattling slide of the folding door to her closet and the sound of Jay’s footsteps on the hardwood floor behind her, and she turns to see him stepping across the threshold of her bedroom with boxers she didn’t know he retrieved from the floor slung low on his hips. Her arms instinctively move to cross over her breasts, and his left eyebrow pitches upward in a questioning reply as he moves across the room to join her. Slides his hands around her waist and then across her backside so her arms have no choice but to fall, to release and rest against his as her hands move to grip his shoulders and her feet lift ever so slightly onto their tiptoes.

“So,” he draws out in a breathless voice glancing at the shut closet door behind her before snapping his attention back to her face, her neck, her naked breasts, “are you gonna show me that new outfit?”

“Hmm,” Erin murmurs quipping on eyebrow up and twisting her smile into a smirk as her gaze darts down to look at the non-tented portion of his boxers. “I suppose we need something to do while you’re in between rounds.”

A tiny squeal escapes when he pulls her closer to him, when his right hand slides down from the small of her back to playful swat against her ass as he growls something about showing her what they can do while in between rounds. But Erin uses the leverage afforded her by the placement of her hands around his shoulders to push Jay backwards, to extradite herself from his grasp and watch surprise, rejection, and then excitement flicker across his face as she tells him to go wait out in the living room.

The box is stashed away on the top shelf of her other closet -- the one closest to the bed -- and her rummaging around for it is echoed by the sound of him rummaging around in her fridge. The squeaky groan of the bifolding door masked by the sound of the refrigerator door slamming shut; the straining gasp as she moves to her tiptoes to grab the box off the top shelf covered up by the clink of a beer bottle cap hitting her granite countertops. And the box is deposited on the mussed sheets of her bed right as she figures Jay is dropping himself into a seated position on her couch because, some days, she thinks he loves that couch more than she does.

The white, unassuming box doesn’t bear the label of the expensive, lingerie store she found herself in one Monday afternoon when their case closed quickly and she was the only one in the unit who didn’t have a mound of paperwork to sort though. The store where her right fingers ran over a myriad of colors and fabrics before stopping on a piece of white lace -- muscle memory recalling other memories -- and her left fingers went slipping into her back pocket to retrieve her credit card.

Tonight, the lace feels cool and surprisingly soft against her still flushed skin and still firing nerve endings as she pulls it up her legs, as she settles the waistband low on her hips. Far lower than the cotton panties she chooses for her day to day -- because the last thing she needs when chasing a suspect is chaffing -- normally sit. Far more intricately cut than the lace sets she keeps in her dresser drawers to wear under pantsuits at the courthouse or dresses while undercover or dress blue for appearances at the Ivory Tower or for showing up at Jay’s apartment when they don’t -- and do -- work together

“Is this is an outfit or an outfit outfit?” Jay calls out from the living room as she’s pulling the bra top over her head, and Erin shakes her head side to side because he’s terrible with surprises. Terrible at planning them for her and at letting others plan them for him. Always wants a hint or a clue; always such a detective.  

“Think you decided what’s what when you rushed us out of Molly’s before I finished my beer,” she pointedly reminds him  as she reaches behind her back to fashion the last clasp. And she ignores his frustrated sigh, his request for a small hint as she moves around the bed to examine herself in the full length mirror. Runs a hand over the taut skin of her belly and turns around to check the back, to make sure the straps crisscrossing her back are laying flat against her skin.

And only when she’s satisfied, when she’s torn the tags off the outfit with her bare hands does she step out of the bedroom and into the living room. As she watches Jay be fully surprised by her appearance -- eyes widening, beer dribbling unsexily down his chin because he’s stopped keeping his lips pressed against the raised bottleneck.

“That --” Jay sputters as the beer bottle falls from his lips to rest against his knee, as his eyes widen further like he’s trying to soak in every aspect of the outfit. Trying to get his brain to  register what his eyes are seeing -- the tiny scrap of fabric masquerading as a full pair of panties, the white lace up top that is playing peekaboo with her nipples. “That’s not an outfit.”

“Nope,” she replies with a shake of her head and the pop of ‘p’ before she steps towards him, before she moves to stand in front of the couch within an arm reach of him.

Erin isn’t surprised when she feels his right hand ghosting over the fabric situated just below her hip bone nor is she surprised when he begins tugging her downward. Her legs more instinctively to straddle him, to press her knees against the cushions of the couch while her hands slide up his arms to his shoulders to cradle his head. And the cold beer bottle is pressed against her back -- a shiver running down her spine -- for the briefest of moments as Jay passes it from one hand to the next and then blindly places it on the table beside her couch.

Yet another shiver runs down her spine when Jay begins feathering kisses down the valley between her breasts, when his hot mouth encircles the right nipple as it peeps out from behind the lacey overlay. And she momentarily doesn’t register what he’s saying when he pulls away and colder air hits her heated skin sending another shiver down her spine.

“Huh?” She questions inquiring more about why he pulled away than what he was trying to tell her, and she frowns when his only reply for a moment is a chuckle and the feeling of his left hand leaving her hip.

“You were right,” he informs her, and her eyelids flutter open immediately so she can look down at him. So she can soak in a moment where he admits something that he often tries to deny. “If you had told me about this outfit--”

She shifts ever so slight against him, against the spot that currently isn’t tented but soon will be, and her movements effectively cut him off. Cause the words to die on his lips so that his only response for a moment comes as the trace off his fingertips over the lace pattern on her right breast.

“Christ, Erin,” Jay groans. “This--this is not professional.”

“No,” she agrees shifting again in attempt to get his fingers to move closer to her nipple. Yet all she manages is another groan from his lips and a reminder that he may no longer be in between rounds. Because the heat radiating from between her legs isn’t just coming from her; because she brushed up against something hard with the shift of her weight from one knee to the other.

“But--” Her comment falters when his lips wrap back around her chilled, raised nipple. The fog that fills her brain so all she can think about is him and her and trying to reach some kind of release together starting to encroach. Dissipates for the briefest of seconds when his mouth leaves her so she can continue, “But Burgess thinks we are. Says she forgets that we’re dating because we make it look so easy.”

“Hmm,” he murmurs as he moves to feather tiny bites against the smooth skin near the shoulder strap of her new outfit. Her gasp becoming amplified as he flexes his hips upward into her so she can feel him. “Not easy. Hard.”

The double innuendo causes her to roll her eyes -- or, maybe the roll comes from the fact that he’s slipped his right hand under the band of her panties and his fingers are sliding downward to touch her -- but she finds herself muttering some kind of agreement because there’s nothing easy about this.

Hard to remain professional at work while being so personally invested; hard to keep from making the suggestive comments one could make if they weren’t riding around in a car or sitting across the bullpen from one another. Harder still to be the voice of reason -- because it truly is insane to date your partner -- when it means she gets to go home with a man who gets excited over something as simple as white lace. A man who makes her feel safe and appreciated and respected -- on the job, in the bedroom, on the couch -- because he wants to know the one thing that’s hard about dating your partner so he can address it. Because he’ll take a second round out here, but end the night cuddling her close and pressing sleepy kisses to the top of her head as they fall asleep.

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Addendum, Part Twenty-Two (Chicago P.D.)

Title: Addendum

Chapter: Not All Cops (Part Twenty-Two)

Fandom: Chicago P.D.

Rating: T/PG-13

Author’s Note: This scene is set immediately after ADA Stone confronts Burgess with the video of her and Roman touching during “Justice” (3x21).

He reaches for the hand towel tossed over his shoulder at the sound of the knock on his front door; wipes the small slivers of red onion from his fingers onto the red and white checkered cloth at the the sound of the front door being pushed open and her voice softly calling out his name. His kitchen is small enough that she has nearly traversed its linoleum floor -- boots still on rather than lined up neatly by the front door -- in the amount of time it takes him to announce where he is.

Her hand slides across the small of his back when she reaches him -- the sound of the refrigerator door being yanked open cutting off the final syllable of her name as it rolls off his tongue -- and he slides his gaze from the chopped yellow onion and the unchopped green bell pepper and zucchini on the cutting board in front of him to watch her head disappear into the depths of his fridge out his peripheral vision.

“Wine is over by the microwave for you,” he announces watching the bounce of her hair as she turns her head to look out over her shoulder, eyeing the flash of skin over the waistband of her jeans before she straightens.

“I’m getting you wine glasses for your birthday,” she informs him after slamming the fridge shut, and he doesn’t bother to glance over at the microwave where nearly half a bottle of Merlot -- leftover from Olinsky’s visit after Jay’s foray into private security -- has been poured out into two round bottom, whisky glasses. Merely grumbles something about his glasses working just fine as he picks the knife up in his right hand once more while her boots tread less than lightly on the linoleum as she moves across the small kitchen to retrieve the glasses.

One of the glasses is deposited on the counter in front him; left amid the assortment of spices and oils assembled in order to make their dinner. The other glass is clutched in her left hand and ends up pushed against his shoulder blade through the fabric of his dark blue Henley as she presses her body into his in an attempt to peer over his shoulder and ascertain what exactly is for dinner.

“Tuscan sausage linguine,” he announces before she can ask, before she can stop him from making quick work of chopping up the zucchini with the suggestion that they go out and grab a burger or something else.

He’s a better cook than she is. Better at following a simple recipe than she is at following the instructions on the frozen, so-called healthy meals she keeps in her freezer; better at sneaking fresh vegetables and whole grains into her diet than she’d like. Occasionally, Erin will try to weasel out of having these healthy dinners in favor of a combo or takeout Chinese or wings and beers at Molly’s, saying she needs more sustenance and calories for later with her house husband than his limited repertoire of home cooked meals can provide.

But after these last few weeks -- after their fellow cop was shot point blank in his squad car, after Stone and the rest of the city they swore to protect and serve suggested that cop’s partner should be charged -- he needs to be home tonight. Needs to eat something that he won’t have to burn off with an early morning session at Antonio’s gym; needs to spend the night in a place where he won’t be confronted with signs proclaiming Ellis’ innocence and Burgess’ guilt.

And Erin seems to get that tonight -- or, at least, knows that this pasta dish is one of her favorites from what he’s cooked for her -- because her right hand gives his right bicep a squeeze and a kiss is pressed to the skin just below his earlobe after she whispers words about it smelling good directly into his ear. Her body extracts from his, and her back falls against the closed refrigerator door with a sigh, with the lift of the makeshift wine glass to her lips.

“Burgess doing okay?” Jay questions as he scrapes his knife along the cutting board and pushes the zucchini into a smaller pile in order to create space for him to chop up the green pepper.

He had hoped to avoid the topics of Burgess and Roman and Black Lives Matter for one night --  the kitchen already a tight squeeze with him and her without adding in the baggage of Burgess-Roman-Ruzek and the mixed emotions about a chant setting the city on fire -- but he’s started to pick up on the visual and audio clues of when she wants to talk and when she doesn’t. So he asks; listens to her noncommittal hum and then her committal, verbal response in the negative as he works at slicing the bell pepper into small slivers.

“Stone called her down to the DA’s office today.”

“She take her FOP rep with her?” Jay inquires because he knows how this goes, knows how quickly the District Attorney and the Ivory Tower will move to jam up a good cop who has been cast under a suspicious cloud in order to keep public opinion on their side.

And Burgess, so far, has gotten a good deal -- a fair deal, a deal that wasn’t offered to him when he was suspected of murdering Lonnie Rodiger -- from the union. Stripped of her badge and her gun, but set up to ride a desk in a semi-civilian, semi-police administrative position with full pay and full pension accrual until the DA gets his verdict on two counts of attempted murder on a police officer.

But that deal could change with her speaking to Stone or anyone on his team without her FOP rep at hand, with her putting herself in yet another position where it is her word against someone else’s. A fact that Jay has tried to stress to Burgess through Erin; advice he knows the now former patrolman isn’t taking by the way Erin skips over his question in her reply.

“Stone’s got video of her and Roman and the shooting,” Erin informs him and, for a split second, he thinks this may be good news. Thinks that maybe Ellis’ face is visible on the footage, which would place him at the scene with the gun and seal his conviction.

But the twinge of frustration in Erin’s gravelly voice, the way she slipped into his apartment and is slouched over against his fridge sipping down wine tells him this isn’t a moment of jubilation. A moment where he and the rest of the CPD don’t sound like naive fools for working under the banner chant of ‘Not All Cops’.

And so he doesn’t bother to ask if Ellis is shown clear as day on the footage; continues to finish up his slicing work with the knife as Erin explains that Burgess said the video showed her and Roman expressing affection for one another. He only stops, only sets the knife aside and turns to stare at her when her voice becomes low and full of disgust when she explains that Stone asked if Burgess was thinking like a cop or thinking with her crotch.

“Was she?” The question causes all the fire in her voice to move to her gaze, to move to the eyes that shift from a spot on the living room wall just beyond the kitchen in order to stare at him. To make it clear that this is not the time for him to get stupid on her or become one of those old timers who think women are too weak and too focused on finding a man to wear the badge.

Which isn’t at all what he means to suggest with his question and, frankly, isn’t anywhere near as bad as what any half-decent defense attorney will suggest when the case makes it to trial. But there is some truth to Stone’s statement.

Truth he tried to point out to her weeks ago at Molly’s when Erin said Burgess was interested in her partner yet insisted a Burgess-Roman-Ruzek triangle would be PG-13 at worse rather than the horror movie. Truth she had to accept when the rumor mill infiltrated the bullpen upstairs and they all learned that Ruzek went off on Roman about wanting to date Burgess when asked about a laptop. Truth Erin, clearly, doesn’t want to give credence to tonight.

“She and Roman were ambushed,” Erin snaps back in reply. “You said it yourself, in those conditions -- forty yards, low light -- she made a nice shot.”

“She did,” he agrees without hesitation because what he told Burgess at the scene of the crime was true. Because he was impressed by her ability to take down the suspect in those conditions with only her service weapon. Because he thought maybe in that moment she needed a reminder that she did good, that she protected her partner and herself.

But he knows that toeing the line of professionalism day in and day out is hard, that focusing on an empty stretch of road late at night is difficult when your partner -- the one you go home with at the end of the day -- is sitting right next to you. And he also knows -- thanks to Erin’s tidbits of information over drinks at Molly’s, thanks to his own eyes and ears and razor sharp mind -- that carrying on that level of professionalism is hard for Burgess and Ruzek and Roman. That no one in the district can honestly say that they forget who Burgess is dating the same way they forget about Lindsay and Halstead.  

“But it’s not gonna look good for her if she and Roman were making out in the--”

“They weren’t making out,” Erin interrupts pushing herself away from the fridge -- away from him -- and stopping over towards the small stand where the microwave sits near the entryway to his kitchen. For a brief second, he thinks that maybe she’s planning on leaving, planning on forging his cooking and his company for a combo and some silence.

Yet, Erin stops just short of the exit to the kitchen and swipes the bottle of wine from the rack on the second shelf below the microwave. Pops the cork off and refills her half-full glass while grumbling about how Burgess only reached out to touch Roman’s cheek, how that’s far more chaste than what she does to Jay in the 300 when they think no one is looking.

That comment, though, causes his right eyebrow to pitch upward, and he rolls his hip against the counter until his back is pressed up against it. Until the cut up vegetables and the diced tomatoes simmering in a pot on the stove are forgotten as he crosses his arms, as he challenges her on the falseness of her statement.

“I keep it professional,” he rebukes. “I may make a comment or two in the car or in the break room, but I don’t kiss you or touch you or--”

“Don’t I know it,” she sasses, and it takes him a moment to realize that she’s trying to defuse the situation. That she is trying to make a joke, to make him forget about the accusation that she lobbed at the two of them with a smirk half-hidden behind her makeshift wine glass.

There’s a moment where he considers giving into the shift in the conversation, considers letting the teasing comment replace the accusation that neither of them can afford to have anyone charge at them. Because, right now, they’ve got Voight turning a blind eye and, according to Burgess, the rest of the district forgetting they’re together, which keeps the Ivory Tower out of their personal business, but if this video, if this horror movie sinks the case against a suspected cop killer? He’ll be lucky if the union can snag him an administrative position following his ejection from Intelligence.

There is a heavy sigh as Erin takes in the look on his face and the tightening biceps of his folded arms, as he watches the realization that she’s struck a nerve that cannot be soothed by suggestive comments register on her face. And another heavy sigh comes as the nearly empty wine  bottle is placed on top of the microwave, as Erin darts her gaze from him to the floor to the glass in her hand with a small shrug of her shoulders.

“Burgess is a good cop,” Erin states, and Jay offers verbal agreement in reply because he’s seen the beat cop in action, seen her comeback from taking a shotgun blast to the head and neck, and he has no reason to doubt the validity of Erin’s statement. Doesn’t feel any need to go looking for one; doesn’t want to be just another guy looking for a way to jam her up like Jefferies and Stone.  “She apprehended her suspect just as she was trained to do. She probably saved Roman’s life. Again.”

There’s a long pause where the ‘but’ to her statement lingers in the air, where Jay finds himself reaching out blindly beside him to turn off the stove because this isn’t going to be some quick and easy conversation that’ll end before he needs to stir the tomatoes. And eventually it comes with a flash of anger in Erin’s eyes and a rough edge to her voice.

“But she’s also a female cop, and there are people out there -- her fellow cops, DAs, the public -- who will say she shouldn’t be out there. That she’s too busy being a Badge Bunny to protect and serve this city. That she killed an innocent, unarmed black kid because her emotions got the best of her.”

There a parts of her statements that he could correct because they have video showing that unarmed black kid tossing a gun and they have years of experience as detectives telling them that innocent black kid tried to murder two cops sitting in their cop car. But there are other parts of statements that he cannot correct because they are true.

Because he’s served along side guys in the Gang Unit who saw female police officers as nothing more than tail to chase; because he’s already heard whisperings about Burgess and Roman and Ruzek in the locker room. Whisperings that grew louder after Ruzek’s blow up in front of Platt’s desk when asked about a misplaced laptop.

“Yeah,” he agrees after a short pause, “people are going to say that about her and that sucks. But, Erin, you aren’t Burgess.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Erin corrects with a shake of head. “One lady cop represents all lady cops.”

Deep down, he knows there is some validity to her assertion. That as much as he and every other cop tries to assert that not all cops are racist or hold little value for black lives, a perception of all rather than a few still permeates the force when it comes female police officers. That Erin may be the toughest cop he knows and Burgess may have all sorts of commendations, but some of the guys from his old unit still offered condolences when they heard the gender of his partner when he first moved over to Intelligence.

But he also doesn’t know how to change that perception beyond making sure that he keeps it professional, that he doesn’t act around Erin the way Ruzek or Roman act around Burgess, that he tries not to give anyone any reason to see Erin as less than equal to him. And all his statements to that effect manage only to bring a small, sad smile to her lips and a soft acknowledgment of how she knows that because him and his approach to their relationship is why she couldn’t tell Burgess not to date her partner.

There is a lull in the conversation -- silence rapidly filling small kitchen -- as he struggles to find the right words to respond to that statement. As his brain refuses to settle on whether or not he should be trying to absolve her from any guilt she may be feeling by saying he would have given Burgess the same answer for the same reason. But his opportunity to decide is taken by rather sudden inquiry on her part into how long until dinner is ready.

“Uh,” Jay replies glancing over his shoulder at the pot of tomatoes cooling to room temperature on the unlit stove and the assemblage of half-prepped ingredients on the counter behind him. “Thirty, thirty-five minutes.”

“Ok,” Erin murmurs as she takes a sip of her wine. The glass joins the bottle on top of the microwave after a second swig, and her free hand slips into her pocket to retrieve her phone from the back pocket of her jeans. And she holds it up, offers him a nod of her head towards the clock on the stove as she announces that she’s going to give Platt a call. “I think it would be good if she and I drove Burgess to the courthouse when she’s called to testify. Show her some solidarity.”

“Yeah,” he agrees with the nod of his own head, and Erin offers him yet another small smile in reply when he informs her that he and the rest of the unit will be there, too. That he and Mouse, Voight and Dawson, Atwater and Ruzek all plan to be seated in the first two rows behind the prosecutor when that day comes.

He waits a moment after she’s walked out of the kitchen and into the living room before turning around, before reigniting the stove and reaching for the spoon in the top drawer beside the stove in order to stir the tomatoes. But the sound of Erin’s boots hitting the linoleum again causes him to turn around, to watch hesitation spread across Erin’s features as she says his name in a cautious tone.

“Maybe don’t tell Ruzek about the video? Burgess doesn’t need another unprofessional blow up right now.”

Her request is a crazy, stupid idea because they both know the video will be entered into evidence. That Ellis’ attorney will try to use it against Burgess and the State’s case the same way Stone tried to use it against Burgess today. But he agrees because this -- him and her standing in his kitchen while he makes them dinner -- is their unprofessional life, and here he can offer support to his partner in the illogical way she needs it.

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Addendum, Part Eighteen (Chicago P.D.)

Title: Addendum

Chapter: Somebody Waiting (Part Eighteen)

Fandom: Chicago P.D.

Rating: T/PG-13

Author’s Note: I know a number of people complained about Erin not being in the locker room with Jay during his break down in “Forty Caliber Breadcrumb” (3x17), but I believe that scene is perfect as is for the kind of person Jay is. (At least, in that moment.) Instead, I decided to slot my addendum to the episode in between Jay’s fight scene with the suspect, his final conversation with Brianna, and the funeral and examine the someone that Jay says he’s got waiting for him.

The sun had already started to peek through the gaps between the homes lining the street by the time she pulled up in the 300. Her bureaucratic nightmare of calling over to the county to let them city cops would be operating on their turf had ended with the slam of the phone on the receiver when static had come over the airways, when Al’s voice requested an ambo be rolled to Intelligence’s location. Because it was the second time that week the request had come over the radio for assistance to place where her partner was operating without backup -- her backup -- and she hadn’t waited around for clarification as to whom the ambulance was for. Had grabbed her coat and her keys and hit the gas pedal so hard that Platt would be complaining about skid marks in the District’s parking lot for weeks.

Patrolmen from other districts along with those from the county were cordoning off the street with yellow tape and keeping neighbors and gawkers from interfering too much, and it took the flash of her badge to allow them to let her through. To let her slip under the crime scene tape while her eyes scanned the area for the rest of her team, for Olinsky or Ruzek or Voight or someone to give her the nod that meant everything was okay.

Yet none of them seemed to be on hand -- at least, not during her initial scan of the area -- and the stomach that had jumped into her throat at the sound of Al’s voice over the airways does so again when she spots an ambulance -- lights still flashing -- parked at the other end of the street. The positioning isn’t great -- she can only see that the ambo’s back doors are wide open -- and she tries to tell herself that she would have heard a 10-1 call, if the ambo was here for someone other than their suspects. Tries to tell herself --

“Erin.” The sound of his voice cuts through it all, and her attention is pulled away from the ambo ahead of her to the open, passenger door of the marked police car parked at her right. A haggard sigh of relief slips past her lips when she spots him sitting in the front seat -- his body positioned so his long legs stretch out under the open door -- but quick intake of breath follows when she spots the bloody gauze in his right hand being held up to his cheek.

“I’m okay,” he promises before she can even get to him, before she can place her right hand over his and insist on pulling back to gauze to check the damage. She does so, anyways. Let’s the words she has heard repeated over and over again fall on deaf ears as she gingerly assesses the cut. As she presses her fingers along its edges and wonders aloud if she should take him over to Med to have it checked out.

“I’m ok--”

“It could leave a scar,” she interrupts in retort removing her fingers from their tracing exploration of his cheekbone and letting them fall down to press against his chest. To trace the lettering stitched over his Kevlar vest in silence as he murmurs something about how a scar is better than the alternative because she knows that he’s falling into the trap of guilt that ensnared them both before. The one that says they aren’t allowed to be happy, to be scarfree when someone has taken a bullet or a beating or worse for them.

“Detective?” A voice cuts in, and she steps aside. Drops her fingers and her affection in favor of professionalism as a paramedic she doesn’t recognize -- not that she should given how far out of the boundaries of  Firehouse Fifty-One they are -- holds up her kit and offers to take a look at the cut.

And when Jay hesitates, when he starts letting that guilt snare him, she abandons the mask of professionalism once more to shoot him a look. To let the lift of her eyebrows and the sharpness of her eyes push him into allowing the paramedic look him over.  To run her gloved fingers where Erin’s had just been; to tell him that she can put some salve on it to stop the bleeding long enough for him to finish up here before heading over to Med.

“Lindsay,” Olinsky greets sidling up to the patrol car as the paramedic finishes applying the salve to Jay’s face. “He good?”

The question is direct at Erin given the way his eyes shift to her as he waits for an answer, but he takes the paramedic’s assurance that he’ll live and Jay’s mutterings about being okay without waiting for hers. Announces that Voight wants him and Halstead to circle back to the District, get their stories straight about the rebar to their suspect’s leg before the Ivory Tower starts calling.

And Jay is clambering out of the car before Erin can ask about the story for herself and making his own announcements about how it’ll have to be quick because he needs to run by the dispensary before Terry’s funeral. Adds the caveat that he just wants to hand in his key and his resignation in a frustrated huff when he spots the way Olinsky has arched his eyebrow in question, in judgement.

But Erin isn’t focused on Jay wanting to go over to the dispensary one last time, isn’t arching her eyebrow in a told-you-so manner like she she did when Brianna’s soon-to-be ex-husband announced that Jay’s new boss wanted to sleep with him. Instead, her lips purse together into a frown over the fact that Terry’s funeral is today and somehow she didn’t know that. Somehow she wasn’t clued in on where Jay planned to be later today. And that knowledge causes her to step forward, to call after Jay even though he and Al have started to retreat towards the unmarked vehicles clustered in front of their suspect’s house.

Al, for his part, keeps walking as Jay turns back around to face her, as she moves silently towards him with an expression that makes his shoulders slump ever so slightly. Shoulders that slump further when she asks, “Terry’s funeral is today?”

“Yeah,” he replies softly, and his gaze softens, as well. His eyes shifting downwards as he names the time and the place of the funeral for her.

“Do you want me to meet you there, or--” she begins to question in a soft, gravelly tone that causes his gaze to lift for a split second. To give her a once glance with eyes filled with an amount of hesitation that she isn’t accustomed to seeing when it comes to her and him. To them. To their partnership.

But her question is cut off wit the bark of her name, and they both turn to see Voight watching them from the front porch of the suspect’s house. To see him glare when Erin gives him a dismissive flick of her wrist and a signal that she’ll be there in a minute.

“I can meet you there,” she reiterates drawing his attention back to her, “or, since you’ll need to change, I can meet you at your place.”

There is a long pause where he mulls over her offer, where he grits his teeth and locks his jaw and tries to decide if she’s asking him if he wants her there or if she’s telling him that she’ll meet him at home or at the funeral. Either way, she smiles slightly when he nods his head, when he prefaces that she could be waiting awhile but that he’ll leave his apartment key on her desk at the district.

“I don’t mind waiting for you,” she promises wishing she could reach out and touch him, wishing that she didn’t have Voight staring them down and questioning their professionalism. But the promises has the desired effect -- the corners of his mouth lifting into a small smile as he nods his head before turning around and moving to rejoin Olinsky -- and manages to bolster her as she joins Hank on the porch, as she endures the slightly judgemental looks that question her and her partner and where exactly they’re at in light of this case that she refuses to dignify with a response longer than an announcement that she’s taking some personal time later this afternoon.

The hours until work ends, until her personal time kicks in are long and tedious. Crime scenes are secured, timelines and stories are straightened, and paperwork is nearly finished when she decides to give up. To take an extra hour as she snatches Jay’s keys off his desk, as she stops in the parking lot to grab the black suit she picked up from her place on her way back to the District out the 300 and transfer it to her own car.

It is an easy drive over to Jay’s place -- the terribleness of the apartment’s wall colors made up for by its proximity to work -- and she is grateful for that fact because it means she doesn’t have a lot of time to contemplate how little she has seen him in the last four days. How trying to solve this case has seemingly kept him afloat, but kept them from dropping the mantra of professionalism for more than a few stolen seconds.

Except she ends up turning that fact over and over in her head when she gets inside his apartment because she does, in fact, end up waiting for him like he said might. Contemplates how they have to carve out time to see one another after work because they keep separate apartments, because her black suit doesn’t hang in a closet next to his.

A fact she is reminded of when she goes searching for his after she has pulled on the one she brought with her, when she rifles through his closet to find the one nice suit he owns hanging neatly towards the back of his closet. And she drapes it across the neatly made bed, carefully avoids snagging the hospital corners with the buttons lining the wrists before returning to the closet to find one of his dress shirts to go with it.

She slides past the black dress shirt and the blue one that makes his eyes pop, and then her hand hesitates on the white one because his dry cleaned, Chicago Police dress blues hanging beside it in a clear, plastic bag. And then, just beyond that, is another clear, plastic bag. One that she has to push the white shirt and the uniform she also wears with aside in order to see.

The coloring immediately tips her off as to what is contained inside the bag; she doesn’t need his name tag still pinned to the left side of the jacket to tell her that this is Jay’s Army uniform. That this is what he wore when he was a Ranger, when he came home and attended the funerals of men he’s never told her about beyond passing words about how hard loss can be, how you gotta get out ahead of it before you start taking things out on those who don’t deserve it.

And her fingers reach out to touch the badges and the pins and the cords and the emblems through the plastic bag as she wonders what each of them mean because she hasn’t seen Justin in his dress uniform enough times to know beyond the obvious shoulder patch marking Jay as a Ranger. As she wonders if Jay will ever tell her because she doesn’t know how to ask, how to get him to open up about his time before his stint in Gangs or as a patrolman trying to solve Ben Corson’s murder beyond the fact that he and Mouse served together.

Will had tried to tell her months ago, but they had been interrupted and she hadn’t followed up. Had wanted to respect that Jay hadn’t told her yet, that the animosity between brothers probably existed for a reason she needed to respect. Or, more truthfully, was too busy trying to climb out of her own hole to take on that challenge, too.

And so she had waited. Waited until she found herself standing in his bedroom wondering about things she didn’t know, about things that clearly affected him today. Not just with Terry’s murder, but with him defaulting to a state where he shouldered it all alone. Where he didn’t even tell her about Terry’s funeral.

With a sigh and the downward twist of her lips, she gathers the contents of the plastic bag, lifts it off the hanging bar, and carries it over to the bed. Leaves the contents in the bag, but makes sure there are no wrinkles or crinkles causes by its placement on the bed. Stands back and wonders if she should return the black suit to the closet, if she’s overstepped a line by pulling out the military uniform when she hears the front door to Jay’s apartment open.

The place is small -- claustrophobic, really -- so he’s standing in the doorway of the partially opened pocket doors before she can change her mind and can dash and hidaway the military uniform from his gaze. And so she ends up turning around on the heel of her black boots to face him, to let him focus on something other than her flagrant disregard for his rules about shoes in spaces other than the front hallway of his apartment. Hears the audible catch of air in his throat, but watches it be suppressed behind hardened features.

“I wasn’t sure what you’d want to wear.”

“It’s a military funeral,” he reminds her. “I should wear--”

His voice sort of tapers off, but she nods anyways. Moves to scope up the suit and return it to the closet as he steps forward, as he brings his right hand up to unzip and remove the plastic bag. The movement, which she catches out of the corner of her eye, causes the gash on his face to glisten. The low, dim lights of the apartment failing to cast a shadow and hide it from her gaze.

“I stopped at Med before going over to the dispensary,” he tells her as though he can read the question on her mind. Can anticipate what she wants to ask as she pulls the folding, closet door shut. “Saw Choi. No stitches. Should heal on its own.”

“Good,” she replies softly as she turns around to face him and watch him fumble with the buttons on his button-up shirt. His gaze remains fixated on the red and white motorcycle painting above his bed -- the one that makes her worry he’ll buy one, do something reckless, and end up being the next guy splattered across the pavement that the patrolmen downstairs get called out to do notifications for -- but he proceeds to tell her about how he quit his job at the dispensary. How he handed in his key and promised to provide Brianna with a list of names for cops to work her security detail.

Which she knows he’ll do because he’s Jay and her partner isn’t the kind of guy to back out of a promise, but which she also wonders if he’ll have a hard time doing. If the guilt of what happened will make him hesitate to approach others at the District looking to make some extra money.

And when he’s managed to change shirts, when the black button-up comes off and is replaced with the Army green, she steps forward to press her hand against his chest. To gaze up at him -- because there’s still a height difference despite the heels on her boots -- and tell him, “I’m so sorry about Terry, Jay.”

His eyes waver for just a moment, for just long enough that she manages to catch sight of it, and then they’re back to the stoicism that came with his assertions that he was okay in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy.

“Yeah,” he manages to reply, “me, too”.

She offers him a sad smile at that and then offers to duck out of the room, to let him finish getting dressed in peace. An offer he accepts with a single bob of his head and a gaze that lingers on her after she’s slipped out between the cracked, sliding doors. And she waits for him just outside his bedroom leaning against the wall he pushed her up against -- or, maybe, she backed up against -- during their first time and wondering what she can do to help take away his pain. To keep him from falling into the guilt trap like she did; the pull him out of it like he did for her.

The scrap of the pocket doors against the hardwood floor interrupts her muses, though, and she turns her head to see him standing before her in a uniform that she doesn’t share. Not in the physical sense. Not in the emotional sense, either.

And neither one of them says anything for a moment as her gaze sweeps over him, as his eyes watch the pattern of hers. But, eventually, she asks if they should get going, reaches for the purse and the coat she left draped over the back of his black couch, and begins moving to the door. Pauses only when she feels Jay’s hand brush against hers; his fingers tangling around hers and giving them a tight squeeze that causes her eyes to lift up and meet his.

“Thank you for, uh, waiting and for, uh, being here,” he murmurs as the ream of red around the bottom lid of his eyes deepens, and Erin finds herself nodding and murmuring something about always because she can’t imagine where else she’d be other than right here. A fact she tries to impress upon him by adjusting the angle of her hand so she’s holding his and by refusing to let go from then until the final twenty-one gun salute at Terry’s funeral.

[varietyofwords]

Addendum, Part Sixteen (Chicago P.D.)

Title: Addendum

Chapter: Got the Munchies (Part Sixteen)

Fandom: Chicago P.D.

Rating: T/PG-13

Author's Note: This oneshot picks up at the end of "A Night Owl" (3x15).

The ringing ceases with an audible click, and then her gravelly, giggly voice filters through the speaker and into his ear. The sound of it tugs his lips upward into a smile; the question contained within it causes his own chuckle to burst forth because, yeah, he kind of does have the munchies now.

"Starving," he tells her, and his smile deepens as her laughter cuts through the phone, as he follows her instructions to hold on and listens to muffled words as she tells someone not to leave something anywhere. He has no idea who the someone or what the something might be, but his attention is pulled from what he overheard to the silent mimicry of the last two people exiting the store.

The former Marine who cracked jokes about a pot shop being his stepping stone out of rehab stands silently by the front door; his military training evident in the way he positions his body and keeps his eyes scanning the horizon as his boss - their boss - works on locking up for the night. Jay's brow furrows when he spots Brianna patting the guy's chest as she says her goodbyes for the night, when he notices how the gesture causes the guy's eyes to widen slightly and his jaw to lock tighter.

Yet the furrow in his brow releases when he hears he say his name, and Jay shifts slightly in the driver's seat of his car as he drags his attention back to the woman on the other end of the line. Gives a small nod in farewell when he catches Terry's attention as the former Marine watches Brianna dart across the parking lot to her car, as his new coworker eventually follows her lead and heads to his own pickup truck parked three spots down from Jay's car.

"Are you done for the night?" The voice in his ear questions, and Jay offers a hum in response before asking if Erin still wants to grab dinner. "Yeah, I gave Burgess her toothbrush so I'm good for dinner."

"Her toothbrush?" Jay questions because he has no idea how a toothbrush became a part of getting drinks with Burgess and some of the women from Med or Firehouse 51. But Erin's soft chuckle accompanies instructions not to worry about it, and she shifts the conversation to be about when and where they want to meet for dinner.

"I'm beat. Can we just do takeout at my place?"

"Hmm," Erin hums, and the sound of music, laughter, and clinking beers downs out the sound of her voice for a moment as she pretends to consider his offer. Or, at least, he hopes it is pretending because while he'd happily take her out wherever she wants to go or cook her something at home, he also thinks curling up on his couch and fighting over the last egg roll sounds like a better way to end a day where he worked back-to-back shifts. "Better idea. We get takeout at my place."

He scoffs at bit at her suggestion - his eyes fluttering shut as his lips twitch into a smile - because he should have known that her objection would be centered around his apartment. He can count on one hand the number of times she's stayed there overnight since they went official back in October. Can't count on one hand the number of times she's complained about the lack of windows, the smallness of his couch, or the minimal number of pillows on his bed. All complaints that, if he's been honest, he's started to consider in his decision to start looking for a new place.

New apartments - whether rented or owned - cost money, though, and that's why he's ended up spending his night working security at a pot shot. Setting aside his reservations about putting more drugs on the street - even if it is just pot - and agreed to stay on his feet for a couple more hours a day instead of spending his downtime on Erin's couch. Getting in that form and function.

"Your place, it is," he agrees after a moment, and he glances down at the clock to try and come up with an accurate ETA. "Want me to pick you up at Molly's? I can be there in twenty."

"No," she replies explaining that he'd have to drive past her place to get there and, besides, she and Burgess drove over seperately so she needs to get her car home anyways. "I'll head out now and meet you there. Is Chinese good? I call and order our usuals."

"Yeah, that sounds great. I'll see you in a bit," Jay says ending the call when Erin says she'll see him soon. He toss the phone onto the passenger seat beside him, shifts forward in his own seat, and reaches for the key in the ignition to turn the car over. His eyes scan over the empty parking lot once more before he shifts the car into reverse and heads towards Erin's place.

Traffic is heavier than he anticipated for this time of night, and the smell of takeout Chinese food already permeates the hallway by the time he finds a parking spot and makes his way inside Erin's building. Figures that means almost all the eggrolls have found a new home in Erin's stomach as he raps lightly on the door to her apartment.

"Hey, babe," she says when the door swings open, and the repetition of her earlier greeting causes him to smile because who knew Erin Lindsay was so into pet names? And before he can stop himself, before his stomach can tell his brain that he is far too hungry to start this right now, his arm is snaking around her waist and pulling her into him. His head dips down, and his lips find hers. Capture the words she was going to say, the question on her lips in a series of hungry kisses as he backs them both into the hallway of her apartment.

The door slams shut behind them thanks to the kick of his boot against it, and he slips his hand under her blue jean shirt and her black tank top to rest it against the bare skin of the small of her back. Presses another kiss against her lips until he feels her hand press against his chest, until he feels her pushing him ever so slightly away. And his head rears back to give her some space, to take in the slightly stunned look on her face.

"Okay," Erin says in that same joking tone she used less than an hour ago when she answered the phone and poked fun at his new job. "Aren't you supposed to be too mellow to do anything but eat?"

And he tries to laugh at her joke, tries to come back with a suggestive comment about what exactly he wants to eat tonight, but the fingers on his chest switch from holding him back to softly tracing circles onto his skin through the fabric of his jacket and she's looking at him in a such a way that makes it clear those kind of jokes aren't going to fly tonight. Makes it clear that she knows something happened.

"Did she hit on you?" Erin questions as her eyes narrow, as her laughing mirth becomes twinged with a bit of jealousy. Jealousy that deepens as he stumbles through a convoluted reply of denial and then acquiescence of the possibility followed by assurance that he's not interested.

"I'd tear up her phone number," he promises, "but I kind of need it for when I have to call out sick."

"Thought you didn't get sick?" Erin sass back.

"I don't," he assures her, and his features twist into a smirk. "I just like having you take care of me. Nothing cures all ailments like undiluted soup out of a can."

The comment earns him a roll of the eyes and a light smack of her hand against his chest because she forgot to add a cup of water one time and he's never let her live it down. Yet the fingers that smacked him still as the smirk on his face droops, as her eyes search his for an answer that he's not sure he has to give.

Seven years ago, he would have been drawing too many similarities between Terry and himself and Mouse and the other members of his unit who made it home with limbs and demons attached. And he's not sure how to tell her about that, to let her know about the part of his life that he's tried to put behind him. How to explain that he was too weak to face the third tour that Terry managed, that he ended up falling down a similar hole to the one the Marine is trying to crawl out of.

But he's not that guy. Not anymore. So, instead, he reminds her that six months ago, the two of them would have been running an op to bust up the place that now employs him.

"Well, the brass says this will clear up resources. Let us go after the big fish moving the heavy stuff rather than the backyard growers or those with a couple of plants in their garage like Al," she offers with a shrug and a small smile. The smile falls, though, as she looks up at him, as she sees the way his jaw has become locked. "If you really need the money, Jay, I'm sure something could be-"

"No," he interrupts because his dad's mantra of an honest wage for an honest day's work still screams in his brain despite the years of silence between them. Because he doesn't want to work something out with Voight or the Outfit or whoever helped her cover the down payment on this place. His desire to move, to put down firmer roots in Chicago can wait until he's got the cash in the bank, and he can pick up a couple of shifts protecting weed rather than taking it off the street to make that happen.

"It's not so bad. There are some good folks there. Former military guys."

"Oh,yeah?" Erin questions as she steps out of his embrace, as she jerks her head to the side in a gesture for him to follow her the rest of the way into the apartment. "Anyone you need to buy a toothbrush for? I've got extras."

"A toothbrush?" He questions because he still has no idea what a toothbrush has to do with how they both spent their after-work hours tonight, and the befuddled look on his face was clearly what she was going for because she laughs. Promises to tell him all about it over dinner as she heads back into the apartment towards the living room and he follows to find the food assembled on the coffee table in front of the couch. The cartons of fried rice, lo mein, and kung pao chicken open and plopped next to two bottles of beer and small, empty take away container that he would be willing to bet today's paycheck used to contain egg rolls.

"You ate all the egg rolls?" Jay asks in an exasperated tone as he peels off his coat and drapes it over the side chair.

"Hey, you're the one with the extra paycheck," Erin replies with an unapologetic smirk on her face as she grabs the carton of fried rice - a pair of chopsticks already haphazardly sticking out of the carton - and falls back onto the couch. "You can spring for the extra egg rolls when you've got the munchies."

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Addendum, Part Twenty-One (Chicago P.D.)

Title: Addendum

Chapter: Glad You Weren’t As Bad a Mom (Part Twenty-One)

Fandom: Chicago P.D.

Rating: T/PG-13

Author’s Note: My biggest complain about this episode was the brief moment out on the sidewalk in front of their suspect’s house where Erin tells Jay that parents like the ones they just interviewed make her want to send a greeting card to Bunny. His reply about there being a whole section called “Glad You Weren’t As Bad of a Mom As I Thought” took me by surprise because Bunny is pretty high up on the bad list to me, and I thought Jay, at least, would be in agreement on that. So, I tried to explore why both he and Erin might feel that way given what we know about Bunny and yet don’t know about Jay’s parents as well as explain why they were missing from so many full unit scenes in this episode. This addendum is set immediately before they give Tana Meyer’s parents a visit during “In a Duffel Bag” (3x20).

The long, skinny French fry falls back onto the red, plastic tray as she pushes the small bite she managed to take into her cheek and tries to suppress a distasteful look from flicking across her face. She’s barely managed to pick at her food this afternoon, to swallow small bites of the burger and fries set out on the table before her because she should be out there. Should be chasing  leads and tracking down each person in their new suspect’s sexual history in order to check alibis and run DNA tests.

But Hank had told them to sit tight, to use the brief lull in the case to grab something to eat while he went at their suspect. Tried to ascertain why a guy from Rockford would care for a baby -- his daughter -- for two weeks only to dump her out by the Chicago lakefront; tried to ascertain why a guy from Rockford would deny knowing about the existence of his child.

“He may not have known,” her partner replies. His words startle her slightly because she hadn’t meant to utter her musings out loud, and her gaze darts up from the red, plastic tray in front of her to look at him. To take in the fact that Jay has barely touched the hamburger he ordered because, like her, he’s been too busy mulling over the few facts they have about this case.

Or, more likely, too busy mulling over how much this case has her on edge. The look that passed between Voight and him when she returned from talking to Platt about the Wisconsin Dells and the status of their victim, the decision that she and Halstead would be the first to grab lunch today while Al and Ruzek brought in their suspect was pretty much a dead giveaway about the two of them being in cahoots.

And that fact would normally piss her off, would have her insisting that she was fine and needed to stick around for when their suspect came in, but she decided to adopt Platt’s attitude of stopping while she’s ahead and take a break from sitting in a chair with photos of duffle bags and pink blankets tapped up over her left shoulder. A break from reminders that a child can be loved and well-cared for and tenderly wrapped up in a blanket one day and end up clinging to life at Chicago Med the next.

“You’d know if you had a baby,” she retorts knowing how ridiculous her words sound the moment they leave her mouth. But it’s too late for her to take them back, and Jay’s already raising one eyebrow at her and drawing out a long ‘o’ in the first word of his rebuttal.

“No, you’d know,” he pointedly reminds her with a shake of his head and a hand reaching out to pick up the fork on the right-hand side of his  tray. “There’s no sign that would tell him, hey, that girl you hooked up with, she’s pregnant.”

“There is if you don’t use a condom,” she bites back -- her tone far harsher than she intended for this conversation -- as she watches her almond milk drinking partner stab at the pitiful pieces of lettuce he ordered instead of fries.

His eyes flicker upward to meet hers at her words, and the way he looks at her is a nonverbally reminder of how he knows that. How they’ve been monogamous for months now but each still keeps condoms on their shopping list because neither one of them is ready to add a baby into this partnership. Not right now. Not when they both know Daniel will run her ragged after just a few hours when Justin and Olive bring the baby up to visit Hank later this week.

“He’d still need her to tell him,” Jay replies before popping the fork and the lettuce attached to it into his mouth. He takes a moment to chew, to let her mull over his words before forcing himself to swallow and racing to elaborate on what he means. To cut her off before this conversation -- one centered on the case, but quickly becoming more abstract -- can turn into an argument that attracts the attention of those few patrons who aren’t already openly staring at the star badges clipped to their belts. “And maybe she had a reason not to. Wanted to protect her baby from him.”

His comment causes her to pause because she knows what he���s trying to get at, knows from the sort of teasing and sort of serious look on his face that he’s thinking of the hot date she blew him off for two nights ago. Although, sitting in the stands with only watery hot chocolate and Annie’s body pressed up against her while they watched Travis’ team get their asses handed to them by a wealthier team from the other side of town doesn’t exactly count as hot in her book.

And Annie had kept Travis’ existence a secret for years in order to protect herself, her best friend, and her son from his father. A secret that Erin, in hindsight, should have kept as well for all the interest and good Charlie has taken or done in Travis’ life.

But, if that was their mystery mother’s aim here, then she was clearly keeping the wrong person in the dark because their suspect was adamant that he didn’t know and that tiny, two-week-old baby -- his daughter -- still ended up in a duffle bag with no signs of life.

“Some people just aren’t meant to be parents,” Jay adds after a long pause, and she finds herself nodding along in agreement almost immediately because he’s not wrong.

Because there are parents like Annie and Olive who rise to the occasion and get themselves and their children out of bad situations. Parents like Hank and Camille who see their children -- biological or not -- as something worth sacrificing for and are brave and kind and unselfish in all the years it takes to raise them. And then are also parents like Bunny who are sober and then aren’t, who run thorough men and  lose track of their kids in the wake of an unstable home life.

Parents who, she finds herself conceding, are shitty and selfish and weak, but don’t purposefully leave their two-week-old baby out in the cold to die. And she opens her mouth to vocalize that, to let Jay know that for all the shit her mother put her and Teddy through as they were growing about, Bunny wasn’t as bad as Baby Doe’s mother.

But the rebuttal dies on her lips because Jay’s eyes have narrowed, because he’s looking at her with that mixture of pity and frustration and concern that she sees every time Bunny comes up. A look that she has grown to loathe because she knows it means he has adopted Hank’s view about Bunny being a cancer in her, knows this conversation will end with her reminding Jay that Bunny is her mom and Jay reminding her that Bunny will never change. That the best thing she can do is cut Bunny out of her life, which is, apparently, the position he’s taken with his dad.

Not that she’s learned that information from Jay. Rather, all she’s had to go on is hints and clues and overheard chastisements from Will that are cut off mid-sentence when she approaches his and Jay’s table at Molly’s leaving her with little understanding as to the whys and the whens as they pertain to Jay’s relationship with his father.

The whys and the whens that clearly serve as the foundation of his belief that people cannot change despite the evidence they see in this job -- rarely, but enough -- showing otherwise. Despite the fact that he rides around with her -- an addict, a woman who was once a fifteen-year-old headed down a path where she was likely to end up dead or with a kid or two calling her mom before she turned eighteen -- all day and sleeps next to her at night and relies on her to have his back twenty-four seven.

“I doubt your mom and dad would have dumped a baby out by the Lake,” Erin retorts. She allows herself to push against a topic that’s been off-limits, to use today’s nightmare scenario in defense of both a parent she knows and parents she doesn’t.

There’s a long pause while she waits for his answer. One that leaves her wondering if she’s pressed on a nerve she didn’t know existed, if it’s possible that things in Canaryville were worse than those on her side of town. But Jay eventually hums out his agreement telling her that his parents would never have been as bad as their current suspect or Baby Doe’s unidentified mother. Words that she barely catches over the sound of the ringing phone in her pocket.

The flash of Dawson’s name on the screen causes her to sigh because maybe that was an opening with Jay, but the way his features smooth out and then harden as she answers the call and the way he begins to gather up their trays without waiting for to answer the phone tells her that door or window or whatever she wants to call it into Jay’s past wasn’t really open.

And so, instead, she focuses on the update -- that Baby Does’ mother has been identified as an eighteen-year-old named Tana Meyer -- and the instructions to check in with the baby’s grandparents that Dawson is giving her. Gathers up the car keys and prepares to confront the kind of parents who helped their daughter care for her infant for two weeks yet turned a blind eye when -- or worse, helped -- their daughter put their granddaughter in a duffel bag and dumped that baby like a piece of garbage. The kind of parents who are than Bunny and Jay’s parents; the kind of parents that don’t deserve to walk free while their granddaughter clings to life.

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Addendum, Part Nineteen (Chicago P.D.)

Title: Addendum

Chapter: Kasual Motherhood (Part Nineteen)

Fandom: Chicago P.D.

Rating: T/PG-13

Author’s Note: I couldn’t think of a new scene for “Kasual with a K” (3x18) beyond something that is entirely AU to the rest of the episode (let alone the rest of the series) so I decided to take Erin and Jay’s final scene and expand it a bit with additional dialogue and some thoughts on Jay’s part about what Erin is sharing with him and why his reaction is to pour Erin a drink.

The sound of her voice causes him to whirl around, to twist his neck and stare at her because he hadn’t expected to see her at Molly’s tonight. Had expected to park himself on a stool making idle chitchat with Doctor Rhodes about their shared victim while he internally stewed on the piece of information she shared about herself with their other victim. Information that he didn’t know about despite the fact that he’s seen what Bunny does to her, that he knows she went to live with Voight as a teenager, that he’s read her file.

“Leave the bottle,” she instructs, and the smirking laughter provided by Connor in responses causes Jay to draw his hand to his mouth. To pull at the stubble on his lip with his thumb and his index finger as he wonders if her having access to a whole bottle paid for by someone else’s tab is such a good idea. If her adrenaline isn’t still at a level where she should be sidelined.  

And so he turns to face her, to let his eyes glance up and down in appraisal as she moves to join him on the barstool to his right. But the tongue pressed to the inside of his cheek -- pressed so hard to dimples pop along the left side of his mouth -- falls to keep his questions in, and the fact that she never told him that she stayed in a shelter comes tumbling out.

He knows immediately that he should have tried harder to keep the question masquerading as a comment to himself because she leans back away from him. Because her mouth gapes and her hands clap and she can’t seem to manage more than a ‘yeah’ in confirmation.

“We don’t have to talk about it,” he promises because he doesn’t want to push her, doesn’t want to crowd into the space she afforded him last month when Terry was murdered and Voight sidelined him for a week. A week where she’d stop by his place after work with takeout and the two of them would eat in silence on his couch. A week where he couldn’t find the words to answer the questions he knew she had.

But she had shared this piece of information about their with their victim to get her to talk, and now he trails off with a ‘but’ in the hopes that she’ll talk. Because he’s been turning it over in his head ever since wondering if her stint in the shelter is why she stands on the other side of the room when they fight. Wondering if Erin letting Bunny back into her life today is because there is still an eleven-year-old inside of her who thinks if she loved her mother more, then she -- Bunny or Erin -- wouldn’t be so-called bad news.

“No, not, it’s not a thing. It’s not like a bad memory,” she promises and yet the sweep of her eyes up to the ceiling clues him in that her statement may not be entirely true. That this is a memory she has to search her brain for because she’s kept it locked away for some time.

“Um, it was summer. Air conditioner rattled a lot. It was, like, right next to my bed,” she adds with a sad shake of her head. With a long pause that allows his brain to jump to its own conclusions, to remember. one night last year when they were sneaking around as a heat wave swept through Chicago.

A night where she had taken one look at the creaky, old window air conditioning unit he keeps in the bottom of his closet during the off-season and insisted on them going back to her place. How she had given him a tight smile -- a smirk, he thought at the time -- when he made fun of her for springing for central air conditioning for the two months a year the heat became unbearable. How he had been coy about having his own place to cool down when she’d commented on hearing him complain about the heat in the 300 last summer because he was already thinking about Wisconsin in August with her.

“Bunny forgot my first day of school,” she informs him, and this time her gaze darts over to him. Gives him a small nod and an upward gesture of her hands because, honestly, it is not like this bit of information is surprising to either of them. And then her gaze sweeps upward -- the smallest smile on her face -- as she continues, “So the lady that ran the place, she walked me all the way there. She held my hand the whole way.”

The comment causes his frown to deepen because that shouldn’t have been a one-off for her. Because no matter how bad things got with his dad, he always had his mom to walk him and Will to school on their first day of school. To clutch onto their hands long after it stopped being cool -- a moment he remembers hitting way before turning eleven -- so they were consigned with the label of ‘Mama’s Boy’ by schoolyard bullies. By their dad, too, when he’d come downstairs to find their mom had made blueberry pancakes and smoked trout -- Will and his favorites, respectively -- instead of Pat Halstead’s standard biscuits and gravy for breakfast in honor of their first day of school.

“Actually drove by there a couple weeks ago,” Erin says interrupting his thoughts, and he watches as she keeps her gaze fixated on the bar counter. Watches a smile slip across her face as his own deepens further into a frown and his eyebrows pitch upward in surprise. “And I saw her and she was walking another little girl to school.”

“She recognize you?”

Once again, the question comes tumbling out because despite how many years he’s been on his job and how many victims and their families that’s he has dealt with and how unlikely it is that anyone in this field of work can remember everyone, he hopes that she did. That this woman who offered Erin a safe haven for three months, who was likely the first -- and, likely only -- person to walk her to school still remembers Erin as fondly as Erin does her.

“I don’t know. I didn’t stop.”

The reply causes his head to nod, to move slowly because he thinks he gets it. Understands not wanting to ruin a good memory with the possibility of rejection. And he finds himself reaching for the bottle of alcohol and pouring her a shot despite his earlier uncertainty because he gets that, too. Understands -- as a cop -- the desire to forget a shitty day where the case hit too close to home with a drink and understands -- as a person -- the desire to forget a shitty memory that you’ve just been forced to share with a drink.

And all Erin does in reply is raise her eyebrow, lift her hands up in a gesture that seems to say it is what it is as she watches him set the bottle aside. As she holds his gaze and waits for him to take another swig from his beer bottle before lifting the shot to her lips and taking a sip rather than knocking it back. An action that surprises him, that causes him to set the beer bottle aside because maybe the conversation about this part of her life isn’t entirely over.

“Did Voight’s wife ever walk you to school?”

“Camille?” Erin questions and this time a smile -- a real one that causes her dimples to pop -- appears on her face as she sets the three-quarters full shot glass back down on the bar.

“Yeah,” Jay replies before offering his own smile, before dropping his voice into a teasing tone as he questions if she was too busy playing undercover for that. And if the fact that he remembers their first real conversation about her past where she told him about her ruse for the bitchy rich girls at her school surprises her, she doesn’t show it as she shakes her head side to side.

“Voight drove me for the first couple of months. Camille, she, uh, she wasn’t too thrilled about me moving in at first. Had her hands full with Justin and then I came along,” Erin replies with a small shake of her head. “But, uh, for my first day back after Christmas break, she made me a special breakfast. Pancakes -- blueberry and apple -- waffles, eggs, bacon, and sausage because she didn’t know what I liked best.”

“You must have given her some Christmas present,” he says, and she nods ever so slightly. Takes another sip of her shot and keeps it clutched in her hand even after she’s set it back down on the bar as she explains how it was actually Camille who gave her the Christmas present. How she had come home after school -- breaking dress code, of course -- to find Camille sitting in the living room with a dress from Marshall Fields.

“She used her Christmas money to buy me that dress,” Erin says softly before knocking back the remaining alcohol in her shot glass, and he finds himself reaching out to curl his hand around her left hand when the empty shot glass makes it way back to the bar.

And the touch causes Erin to turn towards him, to shift her gaze to meet his again because they’re still figuring out how to manage the professional and the personal at a place frequented by their coworkers and their colleagues. But she doesn’t pull away when he gives her hand a squeeze. A fact his is grateful story because while he didn’t know the dress part of her story, he gets this loss. Understands what it is like to lose a mom who uses her Christmas money to buy something special for her kids to cancer.

“My mom used to make us blueberry pancakes for our first day, and she’d get us trout from Calumet’s.”

The second part of his comment causes her to wrinkle her nose in disgust because his attempt to introduce her to his favorite food at one of his favorite places in Chicago hadn’t gone well. About the only part of that dinner she had enjoyed were all the childhood stories Will shared with her.

“Thank god, Camille, didn’t do that. It was apple pancakes for my first day until I graduated from the Academy,” she informs him with that real smile again, and he can’t help but mimic her. To smile over the fact that Erin had someone in her life to hold her hand and walk her to school and someone else to make her something special on her first day of school. That Erin had people who weren’t Bunny, who were more than merely casual about their role as Mom in her life. And that is a fact he decides he can drink to as he takes advantage of Rhodes’ open tab and pours them both a shot.

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Addendum, Part Fifteen (Chicago P.D.)

Title: Addendum

Chapter: Lost (Part Fifteen)

Fandom: Chicago P.D.

Rating: T/PG-13

Author’s Note: Apologies for the severe delay in updating. I tried to get back into the mindset needed to finish this fic; I’m not sure if I’ve been successful. This is the second addendum (or, oneshot) to 3x14, “The Song of Greg William Yates”. This one is set after the episode and is an attempt to bridge the gap between what we saw between Linstead in 3x14 and Erin talking about love in 3x15.

The robotic voice chirps instructing her to take a left turn on yet another nonexistent road, and she lets out a frustrated groan as she presses her foot against the brake. Gravel crunches under the tires as the 300 slows to a painful crawl, and Erin’s eyes scan across the windshield trying to find this road the Garmin mounted on the dashboard keeps trying to send her down.

“Make a U-turn,” the electronic box chirps before changing its computerized mind about which why they should go. “Drive three hundred feet and turn right. Turn -- lost satellites.”

Another frustrated sigh passes over Erin’s lips as the Garmin repeats what it has been announcing since it told them to take the next exit off US-51 about an hour ago. As she glances out of the corner of her eye to see her partner sitting with his right arm pressed up against the passenger side door -- his knuckles pushed into the side of his face in an attempt to hold his head up -- and the paper map of Wisconsin Hank tossed at them on their way out of the bullpen this morning draped unopened across his left knee.

“I thought the Army taught you how to read a map,” She snaps shifting in her seat slightly so she can get a better look at him, so she can catch the way his eyebrows pitch upward even as his gaze remains fixated on the sea of brown grass and white snow bisected by a gravel road ahead of them.

“I thought you didn’t want me to talk,” he sasses back without missing a beat, and she shakes her head as she glances from him to the Garmin mounted on the dash. He isn’t entirely wrong; she had told him to stop asking if she was okay, to stop hovering over her like she was some damsel in distress. And when it was all over, when Yates ended up with a bullet between the eyes, she may have told him something to that effect again.

Because she was willing to admit that she wasn’t sure how she was when he asked for the umpteenth time how she was doing, but she had taken Voight and Benson's eyes on them as out and had used their mantra of professionalism as a way to dismiss him and his concern from behind her desk so she could go home and crash. So she could look at the picture of Nadia pinned to the fridge and tell herself that it was over. That no other woman who have to go through the nightmare that Nadia did.

Yet when the bullpen empty, when she no longer felt Jay’s concerned gaze on her from the desk across the aisle because his paperwork was done and Voight had told the rest of the team to get out of there, Voight and Benson had run interception. Refused to let her go home until after she agreed to grab a drink at Molly’s at Benson, until after she sat on a bar stool and was too far down a glass of whisky and a bunch of advice to pay attention to the buzz of her cell phone with texts asking if she wanted to grab a drink, if she wanted to crash at his place, if she was okay.

Silence had begotten silence, apparently, because his eyes had remained downcast when she walked into the bullpen the next morning, when Voight came out of his office to tell her that she needed to follow protocol for a fatal police shooting. Needed to talk to one of the shrinks employed by the Ivory Tower before he could let her off desk duty. And while his heavy footsteps behind her as she exited the bullpen down the back entrance hadn’t exactly been silent, the words on his lips had died when she told him that she didn’t need to talk about it with a shrink or with Benson or with him because she was fine and it was over.

All he had done then was nod, and all he has done since is nod. Nodded when she returned to the bullpen this morning with her papers certifying she’d spoken about the shooting with someone down at the Ivory Tower. Nodded when Voight announced that Halstead and Lindsay were going to pick up a suspect being held by the one-man police department in some town outside of Wisconsin’s Flambeau River State Forest while the rest of the team chased another lead. Nodded when she snatched the keys to the 300 off his desk and announced she was driving as they exited the bullpen.

And, even now, she thinks she catches sight of a little nod as she throws the car in reverse, as she drapes her arm over the back of his seat and watches out the back window of the 300 while stopping on the accelerator. There is no way she could pull off a three-point turn on this narrow, gravel road. Not without dumping the 300 into a ditch or getting them stuck perpendicular to the flow of the nonexistent traffic. And so she settles on backing up until there is a place they can turn around, until --

The Chrysler jolts as the rear tires roll backwards, and the two of them are tossed upwards in their seats for the split second it takes for Erin’s foot to move from the accelerator to the break. Panic flitters across both of their faces, and Jay’s head tears away from where it rests of his fist as he twists around to glance out the rearview window. Twists again to glance at the side mirror in an attempt to see what she might have hit.

They had both gone through training in the academy about all the dangers a cop needs to look out for while driving -- the kids riding their bikes in the neighborhood, the cats that dart out into the road, the old ladies who forget to wear their hearing aids and don’t hear the sirens approaching an intersection -- and worst case scenarios rom Chicago plus those unique to Wisconsin -- the dairy cows crossing the country road, the eagles picking at road kill -- are rushing to the forefronts of their minds as Erin pulls on the parking break, as they both fumble to exit the car.

He reaches the back wheel first thanks to his long legs and possession of the passenger seat, and she barely has an opportunity to peer at him over the hood of the car before he’s shaking his head at her. Before his lips are tugged upward into a half-smile as he explains that she must have run over some sharp cheese curds or a really big mosquito because the 300 has a flat.

“I’ll call,” she starts to say, but the chirp of the Garmin announcing once again that it has lost satellite reception cuts her off. No satellite service means there isn’t likely to be any cell service, and she has no idea where the tell the tow truck to come get them anyways.

So, instead, she reaches into the car to shift the gear into park, cut the engine, flips on the hazard lights, and pop to the trunk. Pulls her beanie down over her head a bit more to ward off the February chill as she slams the front door shut and moves around to the back of the 300. Jay is already rooting around for the jack and the socket set, and he doesn’t bat an eye when she starts yanking out the spare tire.

“Should be enough to get us to Winter,” he announces leaning down to give the spare a squeeze before he steps around her and moves towards the flat tire. The assurance, the enunciated capitalization of a season gives her pause, and Erin abandons the tire up against the back bumper of the 300 so she can follow after him.

“Do you know where we are?” The incredulity seeps into her voice, twists her features, and heightens further when Jay merely nods in reply because they’ve been lost for the last hour listening to the stupid Garmin tell them to take a jumbled series of turns and he never said anything. Never told her if the right turn down that narrow dirt road was right; never told her if taking the exit off US-51 was even correct.

“You’ve known this whole time?” She questions as he crouches down next to the wrecked tire and begins wrenching on the first lug nut. He merely nods in reply choosing instead to focus on removing the lug nut, on getting them back on the road, but her frustration has bubbled over and her next few words are spat out at him. “You never said anything. You just let me listen to the stupid GPS and get us lost for the last hour.”

At that, his eyes snap up to look at her and there is an uncomfortable moment where her hardened gaze meets his soft one. Meets the same eyes that tried to inquire if she was okay a mere three days ago, that followed her nearly every move from the moment she returned from New York with a banged up knee and an unwavering determination to find Yates before he hurt anyone else.

“I’d never let you get lost on purpose,” he replies. The cold February wind nearly carries away his words, but they still manage to reach her ears. Probably would have anyways because she knows from the way he’s looking at her that he’d never let her get lost in Wisconsin or slip on a banana peel and fall down a hole. Knows from experience that he’d chase after her when she does.

And then it is her turn to nod, to remain silent as Jay states that he didn’t say anything because she was, actually, going the right way. Explains how the road they were headed down before she decided to throw the 300 in reverse cuts through the forest and loops back to reach Winter while the the road she was returning to runs around the state forest, but also leads to Winter.

“It’s about eleven miles from Winter to where we need to go,” Jay informs her, and then his lips twitch upward into a bit of a smile as he adds that the cabin -- the one his grandfather had moved by mules, the one he once said he wanted them both to retire to -- is another fifty miles or so up the road from Winter in the opposite direction.

“Guess I should have let you drive,” she acquiesces when Jay returns to working on the removing the lug nuts, and she braces herself for him to merely nod. Yet, this time, he shrugs and mouths off something about how she should have taken advantage of his razor-sharp mind back at the Illinois-Wisconsin border instead of telling him to shut up and turn on the GPS unit. Lets it go unsaid but understood that she should have let him talk.

“I know I don’t always listen to you,” she says after a moment, after he’s managed to remove the first two lug nuts and placed them into her hand for safekeeping, and she waits for the scoff or the roll of the eyes or the muttering about how that’s an understatement to come because it wouldn’t be an inaccurate reaction. Because she heard when he said her name and told her not to as she opened the mysterious box. Because she heard the concern in his voice when he asked about her knee. Because she knew she was chasing after Yates alone only a few weeks after promising him that she’d never go in without backup again.

But this -- her need to find Yates, to get Yates without or without backup -- was about Nadia and had nothing to do with their partnership. And she hopes he understands that. Thinks that maybe he does because he remains silent as he continues to work on removing the third lug nut from the wheel, as she as she tries to find a way to formulate the ‘but’ part of her statement without scaring him off. Without using words that she’s not sure she knows how to say to anyone but Camille Voight.

“I get it,” he adds after a long moment of her shifting from one foot to the next as she tries to keep her extremities warm while her mind races. “You loved -- love -- Nadia, and love makes us do crazy things.”

“Like go in without backup,” Erin offers up as an example, and she sighs when Jay nods his head. Finds herself copying his movement when he looks up at her and offers his own examples of badgering your girlfriend about how she’s doing when she just wants you to back off or driving by her apartment to make sure she’s okay because she hasn’t had time to change her locks yet.

“Or walking away after she tells you how she’s really doing because you know that means she needs space,” Erin interjects onto his list. “And then keeping quiet until she’s ready to talk to you.”

“Something like that,” he replies as he finishes removing the fourth lug nut, as he moves to drop it into her outstretched hand without looking up at her. And she only hesitates for a moment before she reaches out with her free hand -- the one empty of lug nuts -- to brush against his back, to get him to look up at her.

“I know I don’t always listen to you,” she repeats again, and her voice grows even more gravelly as she settles on the words that will follow the ‘but’ to that sentence. “But I do know that I’m glad I have you as my partner. Both professionally and unprofessionally.”

And, this time, the nod of Jay’s head doesn’t piss her off because it is accompanied with a smile that makes her own lips twist upward in reply.  Because it is accompanied with a surefooted ‘ditto’ and a long pause where his eyes linger on hers before he moves on to instructing her to grab the spare tire and bring it over.

“So,” she drawls out as she rolls the fat donut spare over to him, “if we’re so close to where we need to be, think we’ve got time for you to drive us up to the cabin for a bit?”

She offers the question with a smirk, but it melts right of her face when he replies with a quick ‘no’. And she wonders briefly if he’s letting the need for professionalism extend too far outside of Chicago or if the conversation they just had still hasn’t ended the silence between them. But then Jay glances up at her -- the serious look on his face betrayed by the look in his eyes -- and says, “If I take you to the cabin in the middle of winter -- no bald eagles, no fish in the river, and snow up to the windowsills-- I’ll never get you up there again.”

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Addendum, Part Seventeen (Chicago P.D.)

Title: Addendum

Chapter: Talk About It (Part Seventeen)

Fandom: Chicago P.D.

Rating: T/PG-13

Author’s Note: This oneshot was written to be inserted in between Jay leading Antonio out of the interrogation room and Atwater informing the victim’s father about the status of the case in “The Cases That Need To Be Solved” (3x16).

The hallway leading from the interrogation room to the bullpen feels longer, narrower than it normally does. The number of doors and, therefore, exits becoming more obvious with every step. And his right hand instinctively curls tighter around Dawson’s shoulder. Tries to keep his fellow detective from ducking into a room with a lock or from making a break back towards the interrogation room where the suspect sits mouthing off about how six-year-olds should be targeted. Tries to keep himself from turning around and busting in on Voight’s interrogation, from laying into their suspect until he understands that killing a six-year-old -- that even witnessing the death of a six-year-old --.changes you in a way you can’t undo.

So he keeps a tight grip as the two of them step into the bullpen, as he guides Antonio past the desk with pictures of his son, Diego, and past the desk without any pictures towards the breakroom. Hs hold is tossed off with a shake of Dawson’s shoulder as he steps through the open door to the break room; his eyes widen with concern as Antonio moves over towards the windows crossing his arms over his chest and refusing to face him.

“You don’t kill a six-year-old,” Antonio spits out in anger at the windows. Yet his words reach Jay’s ears as more of a low, anguished moan, and Jay’s eyes immediately slide downward and his chest constricts at the similarity because he’s heard this cry before. Heard the cry of a father mourning the fact that he once held a little six-year-old boy’s hand in his and marveled at all the promise of the future. Heard the cry of a community mourning the fact that another one was taken from them.

“No matter what, you don’t kill a six-year-old,” Antonio repeats again and, this time, the anger sharpens his voice. Causes Jay to lift his head as he nods in agreement, as he leans up against the side of the fridge and stares at the at the back of Antonio’s head.

And he wonders what he can say to help him out as Antonio begins to move around the room -- arms folded across his chest as he stares at the windows and then the sink. What exactly he can say to calm him down and keep him focused on the fact that they got the guy and will be able to get justice for a life snuffed out too early. An outcome that doesn’t always happen in the world let alone in the city of Chicago.

“We got the guy.”

The words formulating this reminder are clearly the wrong ones because there is a ripple of anger visible in the way Antonio’s hand releases its grip on his folded arms  to toss up backwards towards him. To offer the back of his hand in a silent pronouncement that Jay should cease talking, cease trying to make a shitty situation okay.

The dismissal is taken with a nod of his head and a shaky exhale of breath, and Jay exits the break room without a backwards glance. His determined strides back to the viewing room with its one way glass stop short at Atwater’s desk when he sees Olinsky, Atwater, and Erin moving down that long hallway towards him, and he waits for each of them to pass him by.

Shakes his head side to side when he catches the look in Al’s eyes and the nod of his head towards the break room. Feels a ripple of anger tear through him when Atwater informs him that their suspect is pinning the murder on his twelve-year-old brother. And his face takes on the same look of disgust plaguing Erin’s as Atwater sinks down into his desk chair and mutters something about how their suspect claims to be strong enough to put out a hit on a kid, but is too weak and scared to face twenty-five to life without parole

“Voight sent Ruzek to pick up the brother with some patrolmen,” Erin says after a moment where Jay’s eyes meet hers, where the desire to be professional falters at the sight of the tears rimming around the bottom of her eyes. “Uh, he wants us to ride out and inform the parents about the arrests.”

“Uh, actually, Lindsay,” Atwater interrupts clearing his voice before he lifts his gaze up to stare at the two detectives hovering over his desk. “I’d like to be the one who tells Noah’s father.”

There’s no hesitation on Erin’s part when it comes to agreeing because they had all seen the rapport build up between Brian Johnson and Atwater over the time it took to solve this case, but Atwater is already standing with his coat in hand before she can find the words to agree. And the two of them watch him slip out the back entrance to the bullpen before letting their gazes linger on Dawson staring out the window, Olinsky sitting on the couch, and the now shut door to the break room.

Or, at least, that is where Jay’s gaze lingers because his head snaps back around at the sound of Erin’s voice to find her staring at the picture of Noah Johnson -- big smile, sparkling eyes -- taped in the middle of whiteboard. Taped right above the photographs of his murder and right between photographs of the man misidentified as his father and the man who actually was.

“Six-years-old and now a twelve-year-old will go down for his murder,” Erin says in a low, gravelly whisper as her gaze remains fixated on the board. And his hand moves to touch her elbow, the offer her the kind of support he tried to give to Dawson a few moments ago, and she responds with fingers that slide down along her crossed arms to touch his. To tangle together for a few seconds so she can find the strength to move forward, to take a step away from him and towards her desk to gather coat and her keys and her courage to tell a family the only good news possible in a shitty situation like this.

And he turns on his heels to watch her, to let his gaze linger on her rather than on the board with its photographs and the reminders its triggers in his head. But those reminders cause him to hesitate when she asks if he’s ready, cause his head to turn slightly so he can peer at the empty desk with its collection of monitors and computers situated between the hallway to the interrogation room and the main staircase.

“Uh,” he drawls out as his head turns back around, as he jerks a thumb over his shoulder to point at the desk behind him, “I need to talk to Mouse real quick.”

Her features falter -- her eyebrows knitting together in confusion -- at his announcement, and he quickly interjects that he’ll catch up with her out front in a few. That this conversation shouldn’t take too long.

He leaves the elaboration as to how he knows this conversation will be short -- how he’s not interested in hashing out what happened in Landigal, how he just wants to make sure Mouse is still out in front of whatever Noah Johnson’s school photo triggered for him inside his head right now -- out his affirmation that he’ll be down in a bit. Keeps his gaze neutral as she slips past him and heads towards the stairs, as he hears Al’s low voice seeping through the crack under the break room door, as he moves in the opposite direction to grab his coat and head down to the tech lab down in the garage.

The motion activated fluorescent lights overhead flicker on as he steps into the garage, as he carefully moves around the torched SUV that Evidence and Recovered Property haven’t come to collect just yet despite him filling out the paperwork as soon as the thing was towed over to the district last night. Chain of command requires a cop to sit with car -- in the locked garage or not -- and Jay’s gaze scans the room to make sure someone is here with it, to make sure Jordan Lockett’s lawyer won’t be able to get him or his brother off on a technicality.

The beat cop -- one of Platt’s newest recruits to the District -- seems to have, at least, noticed the flickering of the lights because a guy wearing blues -- fresh face and bright eyes marking him as fresh out of the Academy -- peeps around the corner from where a second break room with vending machines and a table is assembled around the corner and across from the cage. Glances at the badge fixed to Jay’s hip before asking if he can help the plain clothes detective with something.

“The tech guy in?” Jay questions gesturing with the hand holding his coat towards the tech lab, towards the area jokingly known upstairs as the mouse hole.

“Uh, no, he split maybe ten, fifteen minutes ago,” the officer replies with a frown that deepens when he realizes that Jay isn’t going to ask him to help with more than watching the burnt car because the detective has already started to move towards the door leading outside. Mutters a half-hearted thanks and lets the door slam shut behind him before the officer can ask if he needs anything else.

It takes him only a few steps to make his way around the building to the parking lot where the 300 was left earlier in the way and, thus, he is offoreded only a few moments to pull his cell phone out of his pocket and debate what to say.

But he doesn’t know what to say. Or, more accurately, he doesn’t want to try to find the words to say. And he hopes his attempt at outreach -- the squeeze of his hand on Mouse’s shoulder earlier -- is enough to let his brother in arms know that he gets it. That a six-year-old shot in the head simply because a war raged around him in Chicago is gonna bring up those memories for him, too.

But he also needs the memories of what happened in Landigal to remain behind him so he can do this job. So he can catch those who murder six-year-olds in this portion of the world. And, so, he shoves his cell phone back in his pocket as he wrenches open the passenger door to the 300, as he plops down in the seat and prepares to set out to do his job here after doing his job over there.

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Tiptoe (Chicago P.D.)

Title: Tiptoe

Fandom: Chicago P.D.

Rating: T/PG-13

Author’s Note: I’ll refrain from writing a diatribe about how angry I am a scene with Jay talking about his PTSD was cut, and instead offer up this (quick) drabble-ish fic I wrote up that attempts to fill in the obvious gap in the break room scene between Erin and Jay at the end of 4x18. I couldn’t find specifics on where PTSD support groups meet in Chicago so I used the locations of Veteran Service Officers from the Illinois Warrior Assistance Program’s website as a proxy.

“Thank God for the job, though, right? I mean, every day you get to meet somebody who’s problems are bigger than yours.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” he replies with a nod of his head because she’s right. The job keeps him grounded; the job keeps him focused and tethered to the here and now.

Yet the words still feel heavy and wrong as she explains how she’s gone above and beyond to help today’s somebody, as she provides herself with an out to leave him in the breakroom. And his gaze immediately shifts to the floor; his head tilting downward so he doesn’t have to look at the small smile she offers him as she moves to tiptoe past him.

“Erin,” he softly calls out, and he can hear her boots scuff on the linoleum floor as she skids to a stop long before he’s fully turned around to face her. “I—”

“I, uh,” he says pausing to swallow the lump in his throat. Her back is still turned to him; her body nearly halfway out the door. And — despite all their conversations in here, despite the fact that he followed her in her and initiated this — the break room isn’t exactly where he imagined himself telling her about this. Telling her about something he’s spent most of the last eight years trying to tiptoe around.

Yet he spent Monday night’s meeting listening to an artillery field officer named Jon talk about how he tiptoed around things until he tried something stupid and this afternoon listening to Voight tell him to he’ll be out of the unit if he doesn’t stop tiptoeing around what’s going on. So he squares his shoulders, lifts his head, and forces himself to find the words to tell her that, in fact, some days somebody else’s problems don’t seem all that bigger than his.

“I’ve been going to a, uh, support group for veterans with, um, PTSD,” Jay confesses, and the pause that follows is accompanied by the loosened rigidity of her posture. By the scuffing of her boot against the linoleum once more as she turns around to face him, as those eyes wide with compassion normally reserved for their victims land on him.

He flinches at the look of pity because that’s the last thing he wants to see from her. From anyone, really. He doesn’t need people tiptoeing around him. Doesn’t need to be reminded that he isn’t living his life in a way that honors the sacrifice of those in his unit who didn’t make it home.

Because he already knows that Petey and Spaulding and Clark would have some smartass, probably inappropriate comment about what kind of man turns down sleeping next to a woman like Erin. Knows that he’s hurt her by keeping things bottled for so long, by tiptoeing around the shit from his past instead of giving her warnings and outs for time apart until it all came to head.

“Is it helping?” Erin asks softly, and he keeps his gaze off over her shoulder at the empty bullpen as he shrugs his shoulders. Because, truthfully, he doesn’t know. It seems like a never ending dance of one step forward and two steps back.

But he’s trying to take the advice he gave her back after Nadia died. Trying to stop tiptoeing around the stuff he’s got going on upstairs; trying to face it head on in the basement of a building on West 87th Street with seven other vets and someone from the Illinois Warrior Assistance Program.

“I don’t know,” he finally verbalizes shifting his gaze to look at her. The tears are starting to gather in his eyes, and he does his best to blink them back as he explains, “Mouse, uh, he took me — he and I went to the IWAP a few years back and—”

His voice tapers off, and his shoulders shrug once more. It worked last time. Or, at least, he thought it did. Enough that he could stop going about a year after Mouse finally got him there. But, seven years later, he’s still spending his evenings off clutching cups of stale coffee — coffee that is somehow worse than the swill in the break room — and trying to get up the courage to speak. To start vocalizing how he’s feeling instead of tiptoeing around it.

“It takes time,” she concludes for him before offering him a sad smile, and he slowly nods his head. Shifts his jaw slightly from side to side as he tries to find more words to explain, to make sure she understands that this and the time he needs to focus on it has nothing to do with how feels about her.

But “it’s not you, it’s me” is a cliché he can’t bring himself to say and, instead, he tries to look her directly in the eye. To let the way he looks at her say what he cannot verbalize; to let the tears gathering in the corner of his eyes tell her that he doesn’t want to tiptoe around his PTSD in the same way he doesn’t want to tiptoe around her at work.

“It’s okay,” Erin replies as she takes a small step forward and, for a brief second, he wonders if she’ll try to touch him. If she’ll place her palm against his chest or his shoulder or his cheek or his back like she has before when they’ve let their private lives seep into their professional moments. And he’s not sure he’d be able to handle that. Took all the strength he had to let her go with a whispered apology last week.

Yet there are no further scuffs against the linoleum as her feet remain planted, as she tightens her grip around the coffee mug in her hand.

“Take your time,” she tells him. The compassionate look in her eyes deepens; the hints of the way she feels about him and, thus, how he let her down causes the lump in his throat to grow and the tears in his eyes to fog over his vision. “We won’t tiptoe around each other here, okay?”

He nods his head because he can’t find the words to provide verbal affirmation, and she offers him one last supportive smile before turning away and stepping out into the bullpen. Leaves him to watch her retrieve her keys and coat from her desk and move towards the interrogation room where Sarah waits through the slatted blinds of the break room’s window. Leaves him to hold back his tears alone as he glances at his wrist watch, as he tells himself that if he leaves now, he can still make the support group meeting over on South Halsted Street.

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Cause I Never Wanted (Chicago P.D.)

Title: Cause I Never Wanted

Fandom: Chicago P.D.

Rating: T/PG-13

Author’s Note: This is set in the immediate aftermath of 4x17. 

A neatly folded quilt is pressed into his arms, and he tries to offer the blonde woman standing before a grateful smile. Tries to convey his appreciation for her letting him crash here, for her putting out freshly fluffed pillows and neatly ironed sheets on the couch despite the assumptions she’s making about why he’s here. Assumptions that cause her reminder about the bathroom being just down the hall to sound clipped and short thanks to the anger and solidarity she’s failing to suppress.

And, yet, he still tries to convey his appreciation. Tries to repress the thoughts in his head – the dark ones, the kind that sneak up on him when he least expects it – long enough to make the corner of his lips pull upward and mumble words of thanks because he knows his brother probably sprung this on her. Knows he doesn’t deserve Nine Shore making sure he has ironed sheets and enough blankets or offering him a sad smile as she reassures him that she’s sure he and Erin will work it out.

“An apology does wonders,” she offers with her characteristically bright smile. Any other night and he’d have to bite his tongue to keep from telling her to run. To stop pinning her hopes and dreams on a guy like his brother because women who smile as she does, who see the world as glass half full deserve more.

Tonight, though, his tongue sits loosely in his mouth and his hands remain empty of any proverbial stones he might cast. And yet his head still nods slightly even as he casts his gaze downward because he hopes she’s right, hopes that the woman in his life believes in that, too.  

“Thanks, Nina,” his brother pipes up. The words, the interruption forces his gaze from the flowery pattern on the blanket in his hand to the other side of the room where his brother leans lazily against the door jam. Forces him to watch as Nina crosses the room, gratefully takes one of the three open beer bottles in Will’s hands, and leaves the two of them alone in the living room.

“So,” Will draws out as he moves over towards the made-up couch, “Erin figured out who Abby was and kicked you out, huh?”

The assumption is accompanied with an extended hand offering a bottle of beer, and he ends up staring at it for a moment. Watches a bead of perspiration roll down the bottle as another bead of perspiration rolls down his back, as he sweats the small stuff and the big stuff and the stuff he still doesn’t know how to articulate.

“No,” Jay finally forces out just as he forces himself to turn away from the bottle, as he concentrates on setting down the blanket in such a way that doesn’t mess the sheets. His ears don’t miss the sound of the bottle clinking as Will sets it down on the coffee table, and his peripheral vision doesn't miss the quizzical look on his brother’s face as he sinks down into one of the empty armchairs.

Because he already gave his brother evasive answers when he called him up asking for a place to crash. When the tone of his voice, the cracks in his voice said it wasn’t a request.

“So, you told her and she kicked you out,” Will replies with a knowing nod of his head before tipping back his beer bottle and taking a long swig. But there must have been something about the look on Jay’s face, about how the last two years have let the two of them repair their relationship that tips him off about his erroneous assumption.

The beer bottle falls from his lips, and the quick narrowing of his eyes is pushed aside with a small snort of disbelieving laughter. It’s the quick one-two step kind of reaction only a cop with years of experiencing – or a brother who’s been through years of bullshit from their sibling – would catch.

“You haven’t told her and now you’re hiding out here,” Will announces with the shake of his head and a mouth that cracks into an almost joking kind of smile. “Take it from me, you’ve gotta go way further than twenty blocks north to hide out.”

“Yeah,” Jay trails off as he continues to fiddle with the corners of the quilt and their arrangement against the cushions of the couch. His voice sounds noncommittal, but there’s a part of him that knows hiding out is exactly what he’s doing.

Hiding out until he can sort out how to get a divorce – for real, this time – and put things behind him so he won’t need sleep on the couch at his brother’s apartment. Hiding out until he can figure out whatever it is so maybe Erin can help him handle it, so the only wall between them is the six pillows she sleeps with every night.

“I’ve still got a contact over at Doctors without Borders. They’re always looking for security personnel,” Will quips over the lip of his beer bottle as he tips it back for one more drink, as he continues on with a joke that his younger brother doesn’t find funny. “Yemen. Myanmar. Sudan. Timbuktu. And with your experience…”

This time it is Will’s voice who trails off, and Jay’s face burns with the realization that his brother has caught on. The sudden rigidity of Jay’s posture being echoed in the rigidity of Will’s gaze, and he forces himself to stand up. To try to infuse some kind of relaxed appearance into his stance or his face or something. Yet his hand drifts upward to rub his fingertips against his hairline before he can stop himself, before he can force his arms to cross defensively across his chest as he meets his brother’s gaze.

It is Will who breaks first, who looks down at the beer bottle in his lap and proceeds to pick at the wrapper as silence fills the apartment. As Jay begins to wonder if he should shun the ironed sheets and Nina’s hospitality in favor of checking into a hotel or grabbing some Zzzs on the couch in the break room down at the District, instead.

“Hearing Abby’s in town must have drudged up some memories,” Will says in a low, even tone after a long, pregnant pause. His gaze remains fixated on the beer label as his fingers deftly peel it from the bottle.

Yet every so often his eyes dart up to look at his brother. To see that Jay’s gaze has become fixated on the spot on Nina’s rug where one of the brothers – Will claiming it was Jay, Jay blaming Will – had knocked over a bottle of beer the last time they sat on this couch together. To realize that two years of repairing their relationship through consultations on cases and nights watch the game hasn’t fully repaired their past.

“Uh, I know,” Will begins before pausing to clear his throat, to adjust his seat. “I know I wasn’t there, uh, before, but, with Mouse gone, if you need someone to talk to…”

The rest of the Will’s offer goes unspoken because they both know it's not the psychiatrist who Erin met with or the third-year resident with combat experience who Will works with that his older brother is offering up as people to take Mouse’s role in all this. And they both know what Jay’s answer is going to be long before he bends down to pick up the duffle bag he showed up on Will’s doorstep with.

He repeats his words about not needing to talk before making his way towards the bathroom, and the lie rolls almost as easily off his tongue as it did this morning. The sole difference, of course, being that it hadn’t felt like much of a lie then because there wasn’t anything important to talk about. A twenty-four hour total joke of a marriage, a cliché outcome from a weekend in Vegas wasn’t important because it meant nothing. Because it was from the time before – before he got his shit together, before he stopped being a guy he didn’t even like – and because it wasn’t part of his present or his future.

But now it is. Has been for eight years, apparently. And now he’s back to being that guy. The one who can’t sleep at night cause the memories of what he saw and did won’t leave him. The one who thinks he can take the easy way out, can ignore what he needs to face on. The one who takes things out on those who don’t deserve it.

Which is why he’s standing in his brother’s apartment instead of being home with her. Because she shouldn’t have to let that guy – the one who got blackout drunk and so fucked up that he married some girl in a piss poor attempt to fix things – into her life. Because she doesn’t deserve to be that guy’s mis–

He can’t bring himself to finish that thought, that word. It turns his stomach just as rapidly as it did earlier tonight when he was pushing his way out of the bar past all the happy and unhappy couples. Had taken all his strength not to be sick on the concrete sidewalk outside when he realized what Abby’s refusal to sign the papers really meant.

Because the look on her face when he told her, when she figured out that he hadn’t planned on telling her had been hard enough to see. To know he caused that pain to appear on the face of the woman he loves. And that had been back when he genuinely thought it was nothing, when it wasn’t something he had thought about in eight years because he wasn’t that guy anymore.

Except he is, and that’s all he could see when he caught his reflection in the rearview mirror. All he could see reflected in the mirror hanging beside the table where he leaves his keys each time he walks in their apartment or in the mirror above the dresser in their bedroom as he pulled out his clothes. All he could see in her face as he tried to find the words that didn’t have the finality of goodbye.

And, because it’s all he could see, he purposefully avoids looking in the mirror as he ducks into the bathroom. As he drops his duffel bag at his feet and lets the door shutting behind him support him as his knees give out. As he sinks down backwards against the door until he’s nearly sitting ass-down against the floor.

The angle of his body forces the phone out of his back pocket, though, and it hits the tile floor with a sickening clatter. And he can’t bring himself to flip it over. To take the chance of seeing a missed called or a missed text from Abby blazoned across the picture of him and Erin that he’s got set as his iPhone’s lock screen. To take the chance of seeing what he thought was in his past touching his present or his future any more than it already has.

So the phone remains on the floor as he forces himself take some shaky breaths, as he forces the tears gathering at the corners of his eyes to go away for the second – or was it the third? – time that night. As he forces himself to recall all those sessions and meetings – the private ones with a PTSD specialist, the semi-anonymous ones with other veterans – Mouse dragged him off to nearly eight years ago told him to do. How he needed to focus on the things he can change and accept the things he cannot.

He cannot change who he used to be. He cannot change the fact that he still made a mistake one night in Vegas, that he chose to pretend it never happened rather than being upfront with her about it. He cannot change how that guy managed to affect the life he’s got now.

What he can change are the things he told her. He can change how much of that guy she has to see by taking himself out of their home. He can change the fact that he never made sure the mistakes that guy made were rectified by sorting out his marital status, by asking Will for the name of the law firm he hired a while back for his malpractice suit. He can change the fact that he doesn’t know whatever it is that she wants to handle for him and with him.

At least, he hopes he can do that as he forces himself to rise back up to standing. As he pulls a t-shirt and sweatpants out of his duffel bag and works on changing out of his street clothes. Because he’s not proud of the guy he was back then nor is he proud of the guy he is today, but he’s trying to take steps to make sure he won’t see either guy reflected back at him – in the mirror of the Sierra, in the TV of their living room, in the dark spots of her eyes – again.

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Heartbeat, Epilogue (Chicago P.D.)

Title: Heartbeat

Chapter: Epilogue

Fandom: Chicago P.D.

Rating: T/PG-13

The jab of a sharp fingernail into his eye jolts him away, but it’s the trailing of wet, sticky fingers from closed eyelid down his cheek and across his nose that causes his eyes to fly open. The heavy blanket of sleep being shaken off quickly as his eyes adjust to the darkness of the room; the deadpan look on his face morphing into a smile as those sticky fingers are softly patted against his cheek.

“Boo,” he announces with overly exaggerating wide eyes, and the owner of those little fingers reward him with a giggle and another smash of sticky fingers against his cheek. This has become the little boy’s favorite game over the past few days, and he’s taken to demanding the two of them play it at every turn. Peeking around the porch railing while his father and uncle shoot the breeze, twisting his head around while he eats dinner at the counter in anticipation of being snuck up on, and, now, sneaking into bedrooms trying to get one more round of the game in.

“Jah!” The little boy squeals as he drops back down off his tiptoes and lets his gaze level with the blue sheets covering the mattress. Leaves the man lying in the bad staring at the cowlick of red hair atop the ittle boy’s head for the briefest of moments before he pops back up and screams, “Oooh!”

The older man’s eyes widen in mock surprise once again, and he rolls slightly backwards onto his shoulder. Throws his hand against his naked chest as though he’s clutching his heart while proclaiming that the little boy got him good. That he was so surprised to see the little boy standing there.

It’s not a complete lie, the man recons as he reaches over to scoop the little boy up. Merely a reordering of events because was surprised to find the little boy standing beside his bed this morning, surprised that the eighteen-month-old has mastered opening antique doorknobs in the last three days. His admiration of the little boy’s skills and intelligence is short lived, though, as he rolls onto his back and notices the door is propped wide open.

There’s no way the little boy could have managed that. The time-warped door far too noisy for someone without any practice at being stealthy to be able to push open without him noticing; the river stone used to prop it open far too heavy for someone below the age of five to be able to move into place.

“Who you let you in here? Huh, Sammy?” he questions as he moves to plop the little boy onto the bed beside him. Short, stubby legs rest against the twisted blue sheets and the multicolored quilt for only a moment as the little boy twists his head side to side to survey the new vantage point afforded to him. But the attention span of a goldfish that he inherited from his father eventually kicks in, and Sammy rolls onto his hands, starts inching his way towards the edge of the bed.

“Bye-bye, Jah,” the little boy says as he reaches his destination and begins to tip head first over the side of the bed, and any residual sleepiness blanketing his uncle’s reflexes are tossed aside in the lightening fast way that Jay’s fingers reach out to hook his index finger around the belt loop of the little boy’s khaki shorts.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” Jay replies over the little boy’s protests as he pulls Sammy back towards him. The little boy’s limbs flail in protest as Jay turns him around, as he slides his hands under the little boy’s armpits and lifts him up so the two of them can look eye-to-eye. “Your old man busted his chin on these floors. You don’t want an ugly scar like his, do you?”

“No, you want to have a razor sharp mind and rugged good looks like your Uncle Jay,” Jay answers on behalf of the little boy before bending his head to blow a raspberry against the patch of exposed skin peeking out between Sammy’s shorts and his Sox’s t-shirt. He takes the shriek of laughter as his answer; blows one last raspberry against the boy’s stomach before he lets his feet slide out from under the warm covers and hit the cold, bare hardwood floors.

It takes a little bit of jostling and maneuvering to adjust the low-slung waistband of his sweatpants, to toss some of the pillows on the floor back onto the bed, and to hold onto his squirming nephew, but he somehow manages. Barely gives a thought to the t-shirt lying haphazardly on the chair in the corner as he steps out of the bedroom and into the hallway, as he begins to question his nephew on what the little boy has made for breakfast to justify waking him up.

The floorboards squeak with each step, and Jay is careful to avoid the sagging one in the middle that’s needed to be replaced since the eighties. Careful, too, to avoid stepping the green, plastic Army men set up in a less than precise formation in the middle of the hallway.

He probably should have taken the time to talk Owen through some of his formations, to advise his oldest nephew on the exact way his biological father would have lined up in the Army. But there had been some daggers from his sister-in-law and some sharp words barely muttered under her breath when Owen found the old box in the closet of the bunkroom, and Jay wasn’t about to willingly walk right onto that landmine. And, besides, the formations weren’t wholly wrong – the calvary and the heavily artillery should be switched in order to avoid firing cannons on one’s own troops – and some of the soldiers look like they’d fallen in battle to big feet and annoying little brothers  more so than to the violent imagination of a nearly eight-year-old kid.

Small scale carnage compared to the state of the kitchen, Jay decides as he rounds the corner. A half-packed cooler sits on the counter surrounded by an assortment of juice boxes and lunch meats, suitcases are precariously stacked by the front door of the cabin, and dirty dishes remain spread across the wooden table. A large dollop of strawberry jam probably about an hour away from leaving its mark on his grandma’s custom made table.

“Your parents are pigs,” Jay informs the little boy as his gaze sweeps across the room towards the series of windows above the sink overlooking the riverfront property. Except, today, a big, black SUV blocks his view of the river and the bald eagles and the hammock perfectly positioned for optimal viewing of two of the things that draw him to this remote corner of Wisconsin. That convinced his grandfather to hire a team of mules and haul the whole cabin over five miles to sit in this spot.

Instead, it is commotion around the SUV’s open doors that offer unplugged, off the grid entertainment, and Jay’s lips quirk into a laugh as he watches his brother struggle to cram a large, red rolling suitcase into his tetris game of a trunk. Two tours overseas with Doctors with Borders and his brother has still never mastered the art of packing light and stacking efficiently. And Jay gives his nephew a sad shake of his head when the whole mess comes collapsing down out of the SUV and onto the dirt path in front off the cabin.

The log walls may have survived over a hundred years of Wisconsin winters, but voices still manage to float through, and Jay listens as his brother tells his wife that he should have started with the larger suitcases still the house. Watches Will clomp his way back into the cabin, and greets the opening of the squeaky screen door with raised eyebrows.

“Forgetting someone?” Jay quips with the upward jostle of his nephew that seems to startle both Sammy and Will. The oldest man in the room does a quick take; his gaze jerking from the stack of suitcases by the door to look over where Jay stands by the kitchen sink.

“Nat knew where he was,” Will smoothly replies, but the shift in his gaze is less than subtle and Jay knows that he brother isn’t entirely confident about what he’s claiming. It had been that way most of the weekend; Will and Natalie yelling back and forth across the property asking who had Owen or Sam or Emily. Three kids – two born nearly close enough to be qualify as the Irish twins that dominated Will and Jay’s neighborhood growing up – outnumbering and outmaneuvering their parents.

“She’s got Emmy and Owen out in the car, if you want to say bye,” Will says with a jerk of his head before struggling to lift up two of the three suitcases stacked by the door. There’s a wheeze of air from Will – three kids and a job working as an attending in the ED making it difficult for him to squeeze in time at the gym – and Jay contemplates whether he should put down Sam and help him. Whether he even needs to put down the kid and, instead, can carry one of the suitcases with one hand. “Grab that cooler, will you?”

“Sure,” Jay replies, but his words are muffled by the slam of the screen door behind his brother. It takes him a moment to toss the juice boxes, pre-packed sandwiches, and a couple apples off the bowl on the counter into the cooler. Gives his brother and sister-in-law time to stack at least three suitcases into the back of the SUV before he steps out onto the porch.

Jay’s watch still sits on the nightstand in his bedroom – unless Emily got ahold of it again – and the clock on the stove in the kitchen stopped being accurate back in the late nineties so Jay relies on the warmth of the morning air skimming across his bare chest to help establish a rough estimate of the time. It’s later than he normally sleeps, but still earlier than he thought his brother and his family would be heading out, and he can’t help but inquire about the hastiness of their exit.

“Maggie called,” Natalie replies as she steps forward to take her youngest son from him. And, as tight as he and Sammy are, the boy leans away from Jay and towards his mother with arms outstretched because he’s yet another youngest Halstead boy who’s an unapologetic Mama’s boy. “Schedules got mixed up and she needs us back in the ED tonight rather than tomorrow morning.”

“Hmm,” Jay hums out in reply before silently holding up the cooler to enquire where he should put it.

“Just stick in the front passenger’s seat,” Natalie replies pointing unnecessarily over in that direction. “Owen and Emily are on that side, too.”

“You need some help with that?” Jay questions when Natalie has stepped over towards the back door of the SVU leaving Jay to watch his brother struggle to cram that same red suitcase from before into the trunk.

“You put a shirt on and maybe I’ll consider it,” Will breathlessly quips as he finally manages to shove the heavy bag into place. “No one needs your muscles flexing in their face.”

“Speak for yourself,” Natalie cheekily quips from the backseat of the car where she’s trying to buckle Sam into his carseat, and Jay barely manages to suppress his laughter as Will throws his wife an exasperated look. Their teasing argument about Will having enough muscles , thank you very much, grows fainter as Jay rounds the car. His gaze and, therefore, his attention settles on the Adirondack chairs  out on the dock and the hammock swaying gently in the breeze down by the river drowning out the last bit of Will and Nat’s bickering.

There’s a couple of beer bottles still cluttered around one of the Adirondack chairs, and Jay figures that Will must not have grabbed all the ones he drowned before the two of them retired late last night. But all the toys – the ones more at home on a beach in Florida than a riverbank in Wisconsin – have been picked up, and the children’s swimsuits left to air dry on the line have been pulled down. Presumably packed away in one of those suitcases his brother is audibly struggling with, Jay decides as he yanks open the passenger door and hears Will’s mutterings once more.

Jay quickly drops the cooler into Natalie’s seat; he’ll let her figure out how best to position it amongst her stack of medicine journals and overflowing bag of diapers and wipes. And he instinctively makes sure to shut the door in order to keep the mosquitos out. To keep those bird-sized bloodsuckers from terrorizing his sister-in-law long after she’s crossed over the Wisconsin border.

The baby, for her part, seems unfazed by the large welt on her right cheek where one of those insects managed to get ahold of her yesterday, and she offers her uncle a large, toothy grin when he yanks open the car door and stares down at her. When he skims his fingers against the top of her forehead under the auspicious of saying goodbye and lets the headband encircling her bald skull to hook onto his fingers and be dragged backwards. He doesn’t understand why Will and Natalie keep forcing these flowery headbands on her; she doesn’t look that much like Will.

“Hey, Owen,” Jay calls out trying to get the seven-year-old’s attention. It’s hard to compete with video games, particularly if long car rides back to Chicago are the only time one gets free rein with them, but Owen manages to drag his gaze away long enough to give his uncle’s fist a pound. “See you for the Cubs game next Saturday?”

Will had managed to get ahold of some tickets that a patient of his had gifted in a likely less than kosher transaction, but Jay hadn’t really questioned it when Owen called asking if he wanted to come with. Played more into teasing the kid about the Halsteads being Sox fans and whether or not they can even step foot into Wrigley than worrying about whether or not his brother would be reamed out by Goodwin come Monday morning. Continues to cling to the truce that he and Will had settled upon after he and Will had caught a Blackhawks game last winter and Will refused to believe Jay hadn’t scammed the center ice tickets using his badge.

“Uh huh,” Owen replies ducking his gaze and, therefore, his attention back to the game console in his hand. And Jay takes the dismissal in stride; leans over Emily’s carseat to bump his fist against Sam’s. Offers the little boy one last round of ‘Boo!’ before he says goodbye and slams the car door shut, before he rounds around the car to help his brother and Natalie shove the last suitcase into the car.

“Thanks for letting us crash your weekend,” Natalie says once the trunk has been slammed shut, and she steps forward to offer her brother-in-law a warm hug goodbye. “We’ll see you back in Chicago.”

“Did you say bye?” Jay replies with a jerk of his head towards the river as Natalie slides out of his grasp, and his sister-in-law bites her lip as she nods her head yes and then explains that the whole family did so in between bites of breakfast this morning.

“See you Saturday, man,” Will interjects as he steps forward with his arm outstretched. Jay takes it, pulls his brother in for a quick hug, and then releases him when Will winces at the touch of Jay’s palm against his back.

“Make sure you wear sunscreen,” Jay quips with a smirk as he takes in the splotches of red across his brother’s face, “and a shirt.”

“Eh,” Will draws out glancing up to the sun hovering overhead, “it’s Chicago. It’ll probably be snowing by then.”

The younger of the two Halstead brothers grimaces, and the older takes that as his cue to leave. Offers his brother one last wave before rounding around the SUV, climbing into the driver’s seat, turning over the ignition, and slowly driving off down the dirt road to the county roads that will, eventually, lead them back to the highway.

The car, of course, moves too quickly for Jay to catch up to it when he spots a stuffed bear left sitting on the porch swing or when he realizes the family of five drove off without taking care of their breakfast dishes. He’ll give the bear a lift back to Chicago and, with a glance towards the cabin, decides to deal with the dishes later. Decides to forgo seeing if the coffee pot is empty or grabbing a t-shirt to protect him against the sun or the mosquitoes as the noise of the engine eventually fades so that all Jay can hear is the rustle of the wind through the leaves and the babble of water over rocks in the river.

His bare feet are tickled by well-trampled grass as he makes his way over to the river’s edge, and he stops to wipe some of the morning dew now clinging to his feet on the leg of his sweatpants. Stops to admire the tuff of dirty blonde hair being blown side to side with the sway of the hammock before padding the rest of the way over to it.

“Pretty sure you could have hung around and gotten a goodbye hug or two,” Jay announces as he reaches the hammock, as it swings right into his thigh. He watches as her eyelids flicker in acknowledgment of his voice, as her lips quirk upward into a smile at the reminder of how she needed a hug all those years ago to say a proper goodbye to him.

“Already did,” Erin replies without opening her eyes. “Your nephews and I were out here fishing at daybreak. I’ve got the mosquito bites to prove it.”

Her hand moves quickly with that comment to smack against the patch of skin left uncovered by her flannel shirt or the black orthopedic braces around her wrists, and his gaze immediately snaps to watch for a twinge of pain to flicker across her face. Nothing comes, though, and he feels the tension in his shoulder muscles immediately relax as he questions the validity of her statement in a disbelieving tone. As her eyes open and that smirk of hers that he loves so much is thrown back at him.

“Why? You angling to count them?”

“Thought I did I pretty thorough job of that last night,” Jay quips, and he reaches out to stop the hammock before it can slam into his thigh once more.

“Hmm,” she noncommittally hums in reply. Neither of them bothers to count, to offering a numerical warning that he’s about to collapse onto the hammock beside her and risk tossing them both out onto the grass. And yet somehow they managed to do so fluidly, to do so without a wince of pain on her side as she pushes one palm down against the fabric of the hammock and curls the fingers of her other hand around the edge to brace herself. To roll towards each other so his arm ends up looped behind her back with his left hand resting on her hipbone and her head ends up resting on his chest with her left hand resting on his chest opposite her gaze.

They both know she’s not wearing the falsie. The way her body curves into his and the way the pocket of her flannel shirt rests askew against chest are all telltale signs. And Jay immediately bends down to press a kiss against the top of her head, to feel the wisps of slowly growing hair graze against his lips because he knows  the forging it in front of their family after forging it in front of him last night takes a lot of courage.

Or, maybe, this is just one another example of one of fucks she claims she doesn’t have to give anymore. Because neither he nor their family give one about whether or not she wears it. So long as she’s here and she’s healthy and she’s willing to stomach sticking worms on a hook and shoot them all daggers over calling her a girl about something far less gross than some of crime scenes she’s been to.

“Hank and Danny get on the road okay?” He questions when her cheek nuzzles  against his bare chest, and she hums out her reply once again. Eventually elaborates that Hank’s already back in Chicago and plans to get Daniel back to his mom and stepdad in St. Louis by dinner time, which means that Hank either set a speed record on I-41 or it’s later in the day than Jay figured.

“Thanks for letting them crash this weekend,” Erin murmurs as she flexes her fingers against his chest and rolls her head up to look at him.

“They’re family. They should be here,” he replies catching that flicker of something – thankfulness? excitement? understanding? – in Erin’s eyes before she stretches upward to press a kiss against the line of his jaw. If it’s thankfulness, she doesn’t need to feel that way.

Because, if the last ten years of being her partner have taught him anything, it’s that Hank Voight is her father and Justin Voight’s son is her nephew. If the last seven years of  being her boyfriend, fiance, and then husband have taught him anything, it’s that Hank Voight is his family, too. And he’s the one that should feel thankful for that.

But, if it’s excitement in her eyes, he’s gonna have a problem with that. Not exactly the reaction one would expect to having your dad crash the celebration of your one year wedding anniversary and your six months of being in remission. The latter celebration, of course, being the reason why her dad and nephew and his brother, sister-in-law, nephews, and niece were eventually offered invitations to this weekend getaway.

“You’re amazing,” she replies as she settles back down against his chest, as her fingers beings to trace light circles on his chest and the sunlight pouring between the leaves of the trees bounces off the gold band on her ring finger.

“Yeah, I know,” Jay responds with a cocky grin that’s rewarded with the roll of her eyes and the smack of her hand against his chest. It stings for just a moment, but it’s the good kind of sting. The kind that tells him that despite the chemo damaging her carpal tunnel and despite the wrist braces, she’s still gonna keep him and anyone else who crosses her path in line.

“You’re just wearing those so you can really kick my ass later at the gun range, aren’t you?”

“Oh, yeah,” Erin replies. The addition of the braces had been a breakthrough after two consecutive pisspoor showings at the gun range back in Chicago. Wearing them had put her score just barely below his; wearing them and then taking them off had given her a modicum of hope that she’d one day get back to where she was before all this. It had also given her a C-Note and bragging rights over dinner at the Purple Pig.

She still had a few months before she’d have to prove she could put in a fifteen hour day without the braces or risk riding a desk for the rest of her career, and he’d do whatever he could to help get her back out on the job. To get them both to the point where his transfer papers would be put through because Voight and Platt and the Ivory Tower weren’t going to look the other way while he rode shotgun like a house husband with his actual wife.

“So kicking your ass at the gun range, trout dinner,” Jay interjects after a long pause. “Anything else you want to do on our last day alone in paradise?”

She snorts at his use of the word paradise, and he can’t help but smile because he knows that it’s all for show. Knows that despite the massive mosquitoes and the way the smell of cheese curds lingers at the only restaurant for twenty miles, she actually does enjoy coming up here. Enjoys playing with his and her nephews in the river; enjoys sitting by the fireplace inside with him at night without the glow of a flatscreen TV or the threat of a cell phone ringing with the announcement that they’ve caught a case.

“Go back to bed,” she answers, and his eyebrows immediately pitch upward as his lips twitch into a suggestive pitch. But she doesn’t bother to look at him as she moves to swat away a mosquito buzzing near her face, as she tells him that they already did that enough last night and she didn’t get to sleep in afterwards.

“Is that why you sent Sammy in to wake me up?”

“Nope,” Erin replies popping the ‘p’ with exaggeration. “He must have a tracking device on you. Finds you all on his own.”

The second part of her statement isn’t a total exaggeration; Sam does seem to possess an uncanny ability to locate his uncle any time, any place. Which is fun up until he’s hitting the head and the kid is standing outside the door banging on it.

“You’re a good uncle,” she informs him, and her voice cracks as an emotion that has no place encroaching on this weekend sneaks in. “I’m glad you have him and Owen and Emily.”

The rest of her meaning – that it’s been months, that Irish twins probably aren’t gonna happen for them – hanging in unspoken words between them, but he refuses to let his rebuttal go unspoken or misconstrued. Lifts his right hand up so he can gently tip back her jaw and hold her gaze.

“I’m glad I’ve got you. Everything else is just…icing on the cake, okay? You and me? In Wisconsin? That’s all I’ve wanted since twenty-fourteen.”

“Twenty-fourteen?” She questions with a single, pitched eyebrow and a laugh. “I’m pretty sure you’d been in love with me for at least a year before you brought up Wisconsin.”

“Yeah, well,” he murmurs, “had to make sure you weren’t just using me for my rugged good looks and razor sharp mind.”

“Uh huh,” she replies with a roll of her eyes before reaching out to run her thumb against the cluster of gray hairs sprouting near his ear. The ones that had appeared when she took a turn for the worst nearly a year ago to the day; the ones that had appeared when he hit forty last December.  “Good thing ‘cause those certainly aren’t gonna be around once we retire.”

Despite the dig, he can’t stop his mouth from stretching out into that same grin he gave her when he first told her out this place or stop himself from leaning down and pressing a kiss against her lips. Because she’s here with him; because she’s looking to the future with him.

Because her heart is thudding through the light fabric of her flannel and he can feel it beating against his thumb after he moves his hand upward to help steady her as she moves to straddle him. As she lifts her right leg to join her left on the other side of his body and informs him that she loves him, but there’s no way she’s going to risk mosquito bites in certain places because he’s too old and decrepit to make it back to the cabin.

Fin.