Emily (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
iluvroadrunner6) wrote2007-12-07 01:58 pm
iluvroadrunner6) wrote2007-12-07 01:58 pm
Flack - Smells Like the Lab
Fandom: CSI:NY
Title: Smells Like the Lab
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
iluvroadrunner6
Rating: FRT
Characters: Don Flack, mentions of Stella Bonasera, Aiden Burn, Danny Messer
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
csi50 Prompt: 043. Dark
theatrical_muse Prompt: #208
fic_variations Prompt: work (#2)
Content Warning: Spoilers for "All Access," "Heroes," "Run Silent, Run Deep," "Charge of this Post."
Summary: Flack sits awake in the hospital and doesn't do some thinking.
Author's Note: I don't know how this got to be as long as it is, but I'm kind of proud of it. So there.
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters of CSI:NY. They're owned by CBS. However, any and all original characters are mine, so please do not use them without my permission.
The hospital smelled like the lab.
And not in that good nostalgic way that usually came with things smelling like other things, but in that antiseptic, nauseating way that made him want to gag every time he woke up. And waking up happened fairly often, unfortunately. He’d never been good at sleeping on his back, but as per doctor’s orders, he wasn’t allowed to shift around without them worrying about him ripping his stitches. And since he doesn’t want to rip his stitches any more than they want him to rip his stitches, he stays on his back, staring up at the ceiling into the dark, contemplating how the hospital smells like the lab.
Which is good, that he’s thinking about how the hospital smells like the lab, because if he wasn’t thinking about that he would be thinking about how these past few months have sucked for all of them, some of them more than most. Not to discount Lindsay or anything—she was fitting in alright, but there were some things she just wasn’t going to get. She hadn’t been with them long enough to. She had to learn most of the things that Aiden just already knew, and while he didn’t have a problem with that—he didn’t mind her learning—her learning just wasn’t helping him right about now. Because when this whole domino effect of events went down, people needed someone who already knew to pull them back together again. And Aiden would have done that.
Provided she hadn’t been one of them.
His chest still hurt when he thought about it. The end result should never be someone dying. There are other ways to get someone behind bars that doesn’t involve the officer on the job having to die for it. It just didn’t compute in his head, because to him, the job was simple. Bad guy does bad thing. Cops find the evidence, catch the bad guy. Jury convicts him, he goes away for a long ass time. It ends with justice being served, not one of their own being served up as a vehicle for that. Even though Mac had fired her, Flack still considered her one of their own. She was NYPD till the last breath she took, badge or no badge, and when DJ Pratt got that needle in his arm, if Flack didn’t think he’d be sick all over the viewing room, he’d want to be there to see the slimy bastard take his very last breath.
But his chest wasn’t hurting from that particular thought, at the moment, because he wasn’t thinking about it. Definitely not.
He wasn’t thinking about Danny either, and about how his friend kept rolling with the punches, every time he was hit, but Flack was afraid that there was going to be a point where Danny just wasn’t going to roll anymore. There are only so many times that people can be taken from you before you just don’t feel it and go numb. He could see Danny standing on the edge, getting ready to teeter over the edge, and all Flack wanted to do was grab him and pull him back, but he wasn’t sure that he could. Fate was hitting Danny hard this year, first with his brother, and then Aiden, and then even Flack himself, and while Danny hadn’t been the most stellar friend when this all went down—barely sticking around in the hospital—Flack could understand the reasons why. Danny was just barely holding it together as it was. Flack wasn’t going to ask him to do anything that was going to make it worse. The little visits were enough. The little visits were all he could ask for really.
Not that Flack was asking. Because Flack wasn’t thinking about it.
He wasn’t thinking about Stella either, and everything that went down with Frankie. He wasn’t thinking about the anger that bubbled in his chest every time he heard the name, or the look in Stella’s eyes as they sat in the hospital room and went through every horrific detail, as he made her relive everything all over again. He didn’t want to—God, if anything he’d do his best to help her forget—but he had to do his job, and she understood. She knew the job just as well as he did. And she was getting better—he could see it in her smile, and in the conversations they had. Things were picking up for her, and he was glad. But he didn’t miss the little things either. Like the way her hand shook when she slipped her Glock into its holster when they went out to talk to a suspect, or the distant look her eyes would get when something was mentioned off the cuff, but it would somehow bring her back to those hours trapped in her own apartment. He wasn’t thinking about how him being in the hospital himself took him back to those hours where they sat and went through everything, and he had to keep himself from getting upset or losing it, because he was on the job.
And he most certainly wasn’t thinking about himself. About the days he lost after the bombing, slipping in and out of consciousness because his brain hadn’t been able to process what had happened. He wasn’t thinking about the gaping hole that had been blown into his side by and psych case who was convinced that we were no safer now than we were back before the towers fell. He wasn’t thinking about the hours of physical therapy he was going to have to go through, or the months of days he was going to miss from work. He definitely wasn’t thinking about how alone he was going to feel, sitting in his apartment all day, nothing to watch but daytime soaps and bad movies.
He wasn’t dwelling on any of that. Flack didn’t dwell. It wasn’t how he worked.
Dwelling on that would mean something was wrong. What kind of idiot sits in a dark hospital room, replaying the last four sucker punches life had dealt him while he was trying to go to sleep? Even if not all of them had been dealt to him, he felt them all the same. Because that’s what the job was. The job wasn’t just the job, it was a family, and when one member of a family was hurting, they all felt it. It wasn’t a matter of who was there, or how it was felt, or why—the team was a collective. They leaned on him and he leaned on them. And that was all that mattered. So no, Flack was not thinking about how 2006 had been a bad year so far for that end of his family, or how life could be a twisted sonuvabitch when he wanted to be.
No—he was thinking about how the hospital smelled like the lab, and how it really sucked that he couldn’t go back to work.
Title: Smells Like the Lab
Author:
iluvroadrunner6Rating: FRT
Characters: Don Flack, mentions of Stella Bonasera, Aiden Burn, Danny Messer
csi50 Prompt: 043. Darktheatrical_muse Prompt: #208fic_variations Prompt: work (#2)Content Warning: Spoilers for "All Access," "Heroes," "Run Silent, Run Deep," "Charge of this Post."
Summary: Flack sits awake in the hospital and doesn't do some thinking.
Author's Note: I don't know how this got to be as long as it is, but I'm kind of proud of it. So there.
Disclaimer: I do not own the characters of CSI:NY. They're owned by CBS. However, any and all original characters are mine, so please do not use them without my permission.
The hospital smelled like the lab.
And not in that good nostalgic way that usually came with things smelling like other things, but in that antiseptic, nauseating way that made him want to gag every time he woke up. And waking up happened fairly often, unfortunately. He’d never been good at sleeping on his back, but as per doctor’s orders, he wasn’t allowed to shift around without them worrying about him ripping his stitches. And since he doesn’t want to rip his stitches any more than they want him to rip his stitches, he stays on his back, staring up at the ceiling into the dark, contemplating how the hospital smells like the lab.
Which is good, that he’s thinking about how the hospital smells like the lab, because if he wasn’t thinking about that he would be thinking about how these past few months have sucked for all of them, some of them more than most. Not to discount Lindsay or anything—she was fitting in alright, but there were some things she just wasn’t going to get. She hadn’t been with them long enough to. She had to learn most of the things that Aiden just already knew, and while he didn’t have a problem with that—he didn’t mind her learning—her learning just wasn’t helping him right about now. Because when this whole domino effect of events went down, people needed someone who already knew to pull them back together again. And Aiden would have done that.
Provided she hadn’t been one of them.
His chest still hurt when he thought about it. The end result should never be someone dying. There are other ways to get someone behind bars that doesn’t involve the officer on the job having to die for it. It just didn’t compute in his head, because to him, the job was simple. Bad guy does bad thing. Cops find the evidence, catch the bad guy. Jury convicts him, he goes away for a long ass time. It ends with justice being served, not one of their own being served up as a vehicle for that. Even though Mac had fired her, Flack still considered her one of their own. She was NYPD till the last breath she took, badge or no badge, and when DJ Pratt got that needle in his arm, if Flack didn’t think he’d be sick all over the viewing room, he’d want to be there to see the slimy bastard take his very last breath.
But his chest wasn’t hurting from that particular thought, at the moment, because he wasn’t thinking about it. Definitely not.
He wasn’t thinking about Danny either, and about how his friend kept rolling with the punches, every time he was hit, but Flack was afraid that there was going to be a point where Danny just wasn’t going to roll anymore. There are only so many times that people can be taken from you before you just don’t feel it and go numb. He could see Danny standing on the edge, getting ready to teeter over the edge, and all Flack wanted to do was grab him and pull him back, but he wasn’t sure that he could. Fate was hitting Danny hard this year, first with his brother, and then Aiden, and then even Flack himself, and while Danny hadn’t been the most stellar friend when this all went down—barely sticking around in the hospital—Flack could understand the reasons why. Danny was just barely holding it together as it was. Flack wasn’t going to ask him to do anything that was going to make it worse. The little visits were enough. The little visits were all he could ask for really.
Not that Flack was asking. Because Flack wasn’t thinking about it.
He wasn’t thinking about Stella either, and everything that went down with Frankie. He wasn’t thinking about the anger that bubbled in his chest every time he heard the name, or the look in Stella’s eyes as they sat in the hospital room and went through every horrific detail, as he made her relive everything all over again. He didn’t want to—God, if anything he’d do his best to help her forget—but he had to do his job, and she understood. She knew the job just as well as he did. And she was getting better—he could see it in her smile, and in the conversations they had. Things were picking up for her, and he was glad. But he didn’t miss the little things either. Like the way her hand shook when she slipped her Glock into its holster when they went out to talk to a suspect, or the distant look her eyes would get when something was mentioned off the cuff, but it would somehow bring her back to those hours trapped in her own apartment. He wasn’t thinking about how him being in the hospital himself took him back to those hours where they sat and went through everything, and he had to keep himself from getting upset or losing it, because he was on the job.
And he most certainly wasn’t thinking about himself. About the days he lost after the bombing, slipping in and out of consciousness because his brain hadn’t been able to process what had happened. He wasn’t thinking about the gaping hole that had been blown into his side by and psych case who was convinced that we were no safer now than we were back before the towers fell. He wasn’t thinking about the hours of physical therapy he was going to have to go through, or the months of days he was going to miss from work. He definitely wasn’t thinking about how alone he was going to feel, sitting in his apartment all day, nothing to watch but daytime soaps and bad movies.
He wasn’t dwelling on any of that. Flack didn’t dwell. It wasn’t how he worked.
Dwelling on that would mean something was wrong. What kind of idiot sits in a dark hospital room, replaying the last four sucker punches life had dealt him while he was trying to go to sleep? Even if not all of them had been dealt to him, he felt them all the same. Because that’s what the job was. The job wasn’t just the job, it was a family, and when one member of a family was hurting, they all felt it. It wasn’t a matter of who was there, or how it was felt, or why—the team was a collective. They leaned on him and he leaned on them. And that was all that mattered. So no, Flack was not thinking about how 2006 had been a bad year so far for that end of his family, or how life could be a twisted sonuvabitch when he wanted to be.
No—he was thinking about how the hospital smelled like the lab, and how it really sucked that he couldn’t go back to work.
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I'm glad you liked it.
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I wish we'd gotten to see just a little of what was going through Flack's mind after being injured, but this little glimpse makes up a little for it.
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I wish that too, but -- *sigh* -- the writers decided otherwise. I'm glad you liked it.
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I'm glad you liked it.
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