Title: Rest in Peace (Book 4 from 'Cat and Mouse')
Author: Jayde
Rating: PG-13 for stuff
Summary: The final book in this series.
Disclaimer: I do not own the turtles, Casey, April, or Splinter. I do own several pairs of knitting needles.
"Hey Kid … Do wishes count at all
Can you give me a sign … give me anything I won't tell a soul you told
Hey Kid … Will you hold me while I sleep
Will you find me when the tide decides that I got to leave
Something inside me is breaking
Something inside says there's somewhere better than this"
Five for Fighting – "If God Made You"
Chapter 4:
He found her just after 11 p.m. sitting on the grass at the foot of a fresh grave. The headstone was old, though, with new engraving on the left side. The name on the right was 'Margaret', but drifts of old flowers obscured the years.
Don sat down carefully beside her, and observed her profile. There was enough light here from the street to make out her pale face and the red lines marring her eyes. In her too big clothes, with her knees curled to her chest, she looked painfully young.
"You shouldn't be here," she said, her voice raspy and tired. "You should go away before you die too." She turned her head, and looked at him. Her expression was cold and distant. "I kill everyone, eventually. My mother, my brother, my partner, my career, Juliet's ex, my father …" She stumbled in her list, and turned back to the raw earth.
"This is not your fault," Don admonished gently.
"Isn't it?" she questioned bitterly. Sam scrubbed at her face with one of her hands.
"Sam …"
"It's a bout of self-pity, okay? Strangely, I think I'm allowed just now," she snapped.
He kept his peace for a few moments, letting her calm down. "What are you going to do?" he questioned after some minutes had passed.
She leaned her head back and looked up at the sky through the tree branches that arched overhead. "Dan offered to help me get in with the NYPD." Don nodded. "He also said I could stay with them … until I can get my own place."
Don flinched, but remained silent.
"I'm sorry," Sam whispered. "For the things I said, I'm sorry. I didn't …" They were only inches apart, but Sam felt like there was a distance greater than the physical between them now. "I should not have tried to hurt you."
"Did you mean any of it?" Don asked. Sam squeezed her eyes shut, and lowered her head to rest it on her bent knees.
"No," she confessed. "But it doesn't change anything. I … I feel like I've been hit by thirteen trains, and I don't know how to get up and get it together."
"I'm here, Sam," Don offered, reaching out to touch her hair.
"No," Sam replied in a strangled voice, and Don froze, his hand in midair. "It would be easy," she said, raising her head. He removed his hand, and tried to quiet the squeezing pain inside. "It would be very easy to just let you carry me," she admitted. "But eventually we'd start to hate each other. You would hate that I had become a burden, and I would hate that you kept me from dealing with any of this."
Don swallowed thickly, and looked away. The hurt went deeper than he would admit at this moment. "Will you come back … just for tonight?"
She shook her head fiercely. "I don't want to keep disappointing you." There was such self-loathing in her voice.
Don stood up abruptly. Sam dragged herself to her feet as well, and theystood awkwardly together.
"Will I …" Don stopped his words with effort. He could not keep pinning his hopes on something that was, indeed, hopeless. Sam extended a hand, and laid it on his bicep. He was stiff and unyielding, but she didn't let that stop her. She moved into him and pressed her face to his neck.
Don wrapped his arms around her, and rested his cheek against her hair. Above them, a gust of wind shook the trees, and water left behind by the rains pattered down around them.
After Don left, melting away into the darkness, Sam remained staring at her father's final resting place.
Alone with the dead.
Five months later …
Murder scenes are actually social occasions. Uniforms and plain clothes detectives milled about as the crime scene investigators took pictures. Sam, a steaming cup of coffee in her gloved hands, nodded at her new partner's thoughts on the crime as she watched the work commencing. It was a small city park, and the body was splayed across the jogging path.
She was back.
Dan, true to his word, had taken her to meet the right people in the department. She had found her way into the Homicide division, and she was back to investigating the evils of humanity. It felt damn good. She sipped her coffee to ward off the early winter chill. She had moved back into her old building a couple of months ago – she had been anxious to get out of Dan's house. His wife, Beth, was a sweetheart, but she was always trying to fix Sam up with someone. It was irritating as hell.
She hadn't seen Don since the night at her father's grave.
It had been her choice to cut contact. She couldn't keep on hurting him the way she had been. She couldn't keep seeing him – it wouldn't have been fair.
And she wasn't ready, yet.
She was healing, but it was a slow process. The grief was still alive and well inside of her – the ghosts still lived all around, and until she could let it go a little more she had to leave Don alone.
And hope he would still be there when she was ready. There was one thing she had meant to say, that she had wound up keeping to herself. When it was time, she hoped he would still be willing to hear it. She smiled a little, her lips pressed to the rim of her takeout cup.
"Hey, Gallagher, you plan on workin' any tonight?" her partner called. Sam put away her thoughts, and switched to her most sarcastic expression.
"What, you wanna solve this or something Taylor?"
"I thought it might be nice for the victim's family," Taylor retorted. "Go get some of the uniforms knockin' on doors. Maybe we'll get lucky with a witness." Sam nodded, and wandered out to the street that fronted the small park. On the sidewalk, she started prodding the officers to the task at hand. On impulse, she turned her head and looked down the street. Her eyes widened as a familiar silhouette appeared on a rooftop, bo staff in hand.
Sam raised her hand briefly, and the figure disappeared from sight. Sam smiled, suddenly more confident than before. He was still watching over her.
She turned away, and headed for a small store across the street. The proprietor may have heard or seen something. That brief glimpse had given her something to sustain her through the long night ahead. A fool's hope, perhaps, but she would take it anyway.
The end
Author's Notes: This has, more or less, followed the outline I wrote months ago. This is the way the end was always intended to go, and it hurt me, too. I grew attached to Sam while writing her. She is a complex character, and that means she doesn't get the easy road.
As promised … the stuff that changed from outline to writing:
Would you believe that in the original outline it was Leo and Sam, not Don and Sam? And it was far less, um, deep than the relationship turned out to be.
It would have resulted in screams of horror – Juliet was the one who was supposed to be shot at the end of book 3 … and she was originally slated to die. This altered book 4 considerably, since I chose to end with something happier.
Russell was originally younger, but that didn't seem to work with his personality and his plot line.
Sam was originally a DEA agent tracking a nefarious drug lord in the first book.
The whole thing started with me writing the fight scene between Raph and Sam on the rooftop. That was the very first thing written – the rest of the story was actually created from there.
Someone said something about a sequel … Okay, I won't keep you in suspense. You guys talked me into it. There will be a sequel. It's not going to come out right away, because I do still want a little break from Samantha. She's draining to write. The outline is partly done, and the title is 'Moth and Flame'.