Déjà Vu

A/N:OK everybody; this is my first post-Pay Up fic so bear with me! I hope you all like it, and if you do please, please, please review! I love reviews- love, love, love them!

Disclaimer: Sadly, I do not own CSI:NY or any of the characters or plotlines… If I did, I would never have killed off Angell. (For those of you who liked Aiden, I liked her too, but if she had never left, then Lindsay probably wouldn't have come, and then there would be no D/L… So I can forgive the writers for that one!)

Anyway, enough rambling and on with the story…

Love,

Ciara

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It was happening all over again.

The hospital. The scream of ambulance sirens. The blood on his hands that wasn't his own. The nurses scurrying out with updates. The cold felling of helplessness spreading through him. The sobbing all around him. The questions. The monosyllabic answers. The lump in his throat. The stench of death. The waking nightmares springing to life every time he blinked. It was all the same.

"Don?" Stella's voice was far away, stuffy and adenoidal like she had a bad head cold. "Don, you've cut your head pretty bad. You should get it cleaned up, it looks like you need stitches…" She trailed off, knowing that he wouldn't. Knowing that he couldn't care less about some stupid gash on his head, not when their friend could be dead…

He looked up as a pale-skinned doctor with flaming red hair strode through the double doors. She wore wine-coloured scrubs and a grim expression. What little hope he'd had left was extinguished in a flash. That expression said it all.

For the second time in as many days, Don Flack's world fell apart.

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"OK, I'm going to try my best not to make anybody cry. Could everybody raise their glass?" Stella asked. Don did so, and the rest of the group complied as Mac joined them. "Jessica Angell was one of those rare people who touched each of our lives, the kind who reaffirm your faith in humanity. I am honoured to have known her, and while NYPD has lost one of it's brightest stars, I know she will live on forever in the minds of everyone who cared about her. To Jessica, a true angel in every sense of the word."

"Jessica," they murmured, knocking back the whiskey. Don wasn't sure how he had come to feel this way. He had thought it would hurt even more to do this, to finally confirm that she was gone. But it didn't. For the first time since Jess had been taken from him, he felt like he might be able to move on with his life. All of his friends surrounded him, helping him when he needed them the most. They were there for him. They cared. They understood. They missed her too.

They were all saying such sweet things about her, remembering her the way she would want to be remembered. They were laughing, even as tears sparkled in their eyes. Don liked it. Jess would never have wanted them all moping around. She would have told them to remember the good times and quit being so soft. This was what she would have wanted. This was exactly right.

Out of the corner of his eye, Don noticed a sleek car, almost a dull gold in colour, slowing down outside the bar. The back window rolled down slowly and the cold, metallic form of a machine gun appeared, protruding from the car's interior. For a single moment, everything was suspended, frozen in time. Nobody moved.

Then the first shot was fired.

Chaos erupted. As Don dived for cover, he could hear screaming and sobbing in equal measure all around him. People were calling out to their loved ones, the uninjured attempting to flee the destruction. Don pressed his cheek to the floor, not moving even as he heard the squeal of burning rubber as the assailants disappeared into the inky New York night. Then something sharp hit his temple, and he was overcome by darkness…

He couldn't have been unconscious very long. When he woke up, he could hear people stirring in the wreckage of Sullivan's bar. Shakily, he sat up. Nothing seemed to be wrong with him, nothing at all apart from a couple of superficial cuts. Then he remembered the others.

He rose unsteadily from the detritus, shaking shards of glass and splinters of wood from his clothes. His eyes wheeled about madly in his head, searching for someone, anyone to tell him it was all alright.

"Mac? Stella? Anyone?" He didn't care that his voice was a high-pitched squeak of fear.

"We're fine Don," Mac grunted to his right. He was pulling Stella into a sitting position, pinching the bridge of his nose, which looked to have been broken as he threw himself out of the line of fire. Stella's pretty features were contorted with pain, and she was cradling her right arm I her left.

"Stel?" Don called. "Stella, what happened?"

"We're fine," Mac repeated, smoothing Stella's brown curls back from her face. "It looks like she landed awkwardly on her arm, that's all. It might be broken, but she's OK. Go check on the others."

Don nodded weakly and stumbled over an upturned barstool to where Sid, Adam and Sheldon were huddled in a small group. Sid was pale and breathless, but otherwise unscathed. Hawkes' glasses were dangling from his nose, shattered beyond repair and a piece of broken glass seemed to be embedded in his arm.

"Get someone to look at that as soon as the paramedics get here," ordered Don. "You hear me Sheldon?"

But Hawkes was too busy working over Adam's fallen figure to worry about his own injuries. The lab tech lay sprawled in the remains of the bar, eyes half-open. Only a sliver of white eyeball was visible. Don's stomach swooped unpleasantly, like the feeling you get when you miss a step on the stairs, as he saw the blood flowing freely from a wound to Adam's left shoulder.

"Hawkes, is he…"

"He'll be fine," Sheldon replied, attempting to staunch the blood flow with a strip of fabric from his own shirt. "Took a bullet to the shoulder, but it's not life-threatening. He's just fainted from the shock, but he'll be alright once we get him to hospital."

Don breathed a shaky sigh of relief. That had been a scare. But it was alright. Everything was alright. Adam wasn't going to die. Everything was absolutely fine. He leaned weakly against the chipped counter.

And then he heard the scream.

It was a scream of pain, but not physical pain. It sounded like how Don had wanted to scream when he found Jess lying on the floor of that diner. The sound ripped him apart from the inside as he hurtled toward its source.

Lindsay sat on the floor, tears streaming uncontrollably down her face in jagged, meandering rivers. She looked up as Don came towards her, and her face was that of a person being tortured.

"Help, help, I can't wake him up! I-it's all my fault, he p-pushed me down, he didn't have time to get out of the w-way…"

Danny Messer lay in her arms.

His eyes were completely shut. He looked peaceful, more peaceful than Don had ever seen him. He could have been asleep, had it not been for the dark blood congealing in his blonde-brown hair…

"Sid" Don yelled. "Take Lindsay!"

He was vaguely aware of the medical examiner hauling the hysterical woman away as he checked for Danny's pulse and frantically began compressions.

"Come on Messer, don't do this," he muttered wildly, working desperately over the body. He tried and tried, as hard as he possibly could.

But by the time the wailing of sirens filled the air, he still hadn't gotten a heartbeat.

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A/N:So that's chapter one! Please review, tell me what directions you'd like this to go and give me any ideas you have! Please press that button down there…