Spoilers for "Child's Play" and "All in the Family".

Disclaimer: All characters belong to CBS and their creators at CSI:NY.

A/N: This story deals with very difficult issues, and is aimed at a mature audience.

Summary:In the wake of Rikki Sandoval's devastating actions, Lindsay Monroe faces the most difficult decision of her life. And she has to face it on her own.

Quick Follow Me

Come mama, come, quick follow me

And step on the leaves of the waterlily.

Henry Lawson

Chapter 1

"Hey, Linds. Are you okay?" Stella's green eyes were filled with sympathy as the younger woman bolted into the women's washroom to stand heaving over the sink. After a few seconds of deep breathing, Lindsay ran cold water and splashed it over her face, looking at Stella in the mirror.

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm okay. Maybe I should have taken your advice and stopped eating food from street vendors." She flashed a pale grin at her supervisor.

Stella smiled back teasingly, "Or you should have listened to Mac and stayed away from Danny when he had the 'flu!"

Lindsay laughed and went into a stall, where she closed her eyes guiltily, waiting until she heard Stella leave.

One little lie. How many ways was that going to come back and bite her on the ass?

She couldn't have done anything else, she argued with herself. He was her friend, her partner, aside from anything else, and that was what partners did for each other. If she hadn't stepped in, Danny would have been reprimanded, and if even half of what Flack had told her about their day chasing after Rikki and Ollie was true (and she was very well aware he had not told her all of it), Danny had been within a breath of throwing away his career.

And her along with it.

Lindsay turned and threw up into the toilet. Nothing came out but a thin yellow bile. She hadn't been able to keep more than a few mouthfuls down for two days now.

Stella had noticed – had ended up sending her home the day before, where Lindsay had curled up under her warm duvet and watched soap operas until she had fallen into a restless and frustrating dream-state it was hard to call sleep: walking the streets of New York for hours, circling the downtown core, searching for something that stayed tantalizingly out of reach.

Didn't take an analyst to figure that one out.

When she wasn't wandering through the city maze, she was trying to find a room in which she had to take a test. She couldn't find the room, she didn't know what the test was for, but she knew failing it would be disastrous.

Again, not really hard to recognize the under-lying worry in that one either. Somehow, though, knowing what the problem was didn't make the problem any easier to solve, and knowing why she was stressed and anxious didn't take the anxiety away.

Mac had asked her that morning if she wanted to go back home. She had refused politely, and he had ordered her, after a sharp look, to stay in the lab. Hawkes had brought her a cup of tea with sugar but no milk and written her a script for anti-nausea pills, "If this doesn't go away, Lindsay, you need to go get checked out."

She had thanked him, sipped at the hot tea, and dropped the pills into her bag.

Flack had checked on her twice that day already, once to tell her Danny had crashed at his place the night before, but was on his way in, and once to see if she had any results from residue found at a crime scene. Both times he had asked her if she was feeling all right. Both times she had lied; the second time she used the street vendor excuse and felt badly when Flack turned green and tossed his half-full coffee cup in the garbage.

Lindsay washed her face again and went back to the lab. As long as she was dealing with grit and chemicals, she would be fine. Anything 'gooshy' she would turn over to one of the techs.

Her shift was nearly over before she caught more than a glimpse of Danny. He had passed the lab a few times, but always at a run, head down, reading a file or arguing with Adam. She had stopped hoping he would come and see her, had stopped looking up every time someone paused by the door. She was tidying up her station and logging all the evidence back in when she was interrupted by the clearing of a throat.

"Montana."

She tried, but could not keep the shiver from passing through her body. How was it possible, she wondered crossly, that one word, drawled in that husky accent, could control her like that?

"Hi, Danny." She refused to turn around, refused to let him see her face. He would know instantly that something was wrong, and wouldn't let it go until she told him. And she couldn't tell him.

"Or worse," a vicious little voice deep inside her churning gut whispered, "Worse. He won't notice a thing. Because he doesn't see you at all. Hasn't for days."

Lindsay closed her eyes, desperate to keep her stomach under control.

"Your shift over?" His voice sounded almost normal, just tired.

She moved away from him, taking off her lab coat and reaching for her jacket. She stilled when his hands gently covered hers, helping her put it on.

"Like the well-brought up boy he is," she thought, her pleasure oddly tinged with bitterness.

"I'm off too - shortened shift. Want to go get something to eat?" It was said so casually that Lindsay shot him a suspicious look, wondering who had been talking to him, which oh-so-helpful friend had pushed him in here. But when she turned to look at him, there was no hint that his offer was anything but genuine. And although he looked tired, he did not look like "crashing at Flack's" had been a euphemism for "going on a bender and having to sleep on a floor."

He put out a hand, "Come on, Linds. Come and eat with me. You look like you haven't eaten in days."

"I'm not very hungry, Danny. I think I'll just go home, if you don't mind." She dropped her gaze; she couldn't look him in the eye.

His hand stayed where it was, half-stretched out in ... entreaty? Apology? She couldn't tell, and she couldn't let it make a difference.

"You okay?"

"Yeah. My stomach is just a bit upset - maybe that flu that was going 'round this week." She knew from the slight wince that he had taken that as a slam.

Perhaps she had meant him to.

"Let me take you home." His hand finally dropped to his side, where it hung, clenched in a whitening fist.

She looked him in the eyes and spoke as firmly as possible while her stomach rolled over in slow waves, "It's okay, Danny. You don't have to. I'm just going to go home and sleep for about 24 hours straight anyway. You look beat. You should go home too."

His shoulders slumped, and he unconsciously rubbed his left hand with his right as if massaging pain out of it. "How are you getting home?" It was a concession of sorts.

"I'll take a cab. I promise." She tried to smile at him, but could feel the failure slip on her lips.

"Lindsay..." His voice failed.

She reached out and squeezed his arm briefly, "It's okay, Danny. Call me tomorrow, okay? Before my shift? I'm on at noon."

He nodded, and she left the room as quickly as she could without running, feeling his eyes on her long after she had left the building and was on the street.

She could still feel his eyes on her when she sat on a bench hours later, huddled in her coat, staring across the street at a Women's Health clinic, open 24 hours for the busy and the desperate.

She was trying to figure out which she was.

She wasn't stupid. She knew what excessive tiredness, nausea, tenderness in the breasts, and missing her period the week before spelled. She knew that even taking precautions, people got pregnant. And Danny and she had not been particularly careful; after all, they had been together for several months, since last spring. They had been circling the idea of moving in together - nothing definite, no plans set, but every so often one would make a comment and the other would cap it and then the discussion would be laid to rest.

If they sometimes forgot the condom... If she sometimes didn't use her diaphragm... If they were not always as careful as they could have been...

It wasn't supposed to matter. They were a couple. They should have been able to deal with things together, like two rational adults: discuss options, talk about plans, make decisions. Something like this should have been theirs to work out.

But then Ruben had been shot. And Danny, who had seemed okay at first, had drifted further and further away. He had shown up at her apartment, had stood beside her at work, had talked to her as if nothing was happening, and all the time, she watched, helplessly, as the wall was being erected, brick by brick, between them.

If Ruben hadn't been shot, she had planned to tell him. As soon as her period hadn't shown up on schedule. If she was pregnant - and she knew it was only a remote possibility - but if she was, he was the father. He had every right to know about it, to be part of the discussion she had been having over and over and over again in her own head. This was not the kind of thing she could have ever imagined keeping from him for even a moment.

But Ruben had been shot. And when Danny realized that Rikki, Ruben's mother, had come to his apartment to steal his gun, to go after the man she blamed for her son's death, he had not hesitated. He had gone to find her, to make things right, to fix what could never be repaired.

He had not once, not for one minute, thought of phoning Lindsay. Or of calling Flack. Had not asked for help or for back-up or even for support. Even after he had brought Rikki in to face the consequences of her grief-driven actions, he had not called Lindsay, had not spoken to her until the next day, when he had contented himself with thanking her for covering for him, and then told her off for asking Flack to look out for him.

Lindsay sank deeper into her warm coat, pushing her hands further into the pockets and spreading her fingers over her belly. She hardly blinked, staring at the clinic's sign as if it held the answers to life's mysteries.

She understood guilt. None better. She had spent years dealing with it. Survivor's guilt. The idea that you somehow owed the people who died in your place. As if it had been your choice.

And she knew that for Danny, the guilt was as real as that little boy had been. Ruben had been one of the close-guarded secrets of his life, a pure joy untouched by the ugliness of the job he faced every day. Lindsay had not even known how close they were until after the child's death.

A death Danny blamed himself for. Reluctantly, Flack had relayed what Danny had said to the child's mother as he had inched himself in between the gun held in her shaking hand and the man she was threatening, a man who did not even understand, or care, why she was trying to kill him.

"If I would have stayed with Ruben and made sure he got home, he'd be alive. That's all I had to do. So if you want to shoot someone…"

Tears streamed down Lindsay's cheeks, but she didn't move. She could hear her Danny saying it. But worse, she could feel him believing it.

And how was she to go to him, to this man who lost everything he loved to the job - friends and family - and tell him she could replace that child? That she could give him a child of his own blood, of his own making. As if one child could take the place of another. As if offering him a baby could somehow compensate for the loss of a bright, loving little boy.

Maybe one day. Please God. Maybe one day she could tell him they were going to be parents and see nothing but unclouded joy in his eyes.

But that day was not this day.

Lindsay took in a deep breath and held it until her sight went dark. Then she pushed herself wearily off the bench, and walked across the street. She hesitated once more as her hand reached out for the clinic door. Then she straightened her shoulders, and pushed through them.