Breathless

Author's Note: This is one is for Lilynette, who requested this particular scenario. I hope I did you proud! Thanks for being such a cool online friend. :) It's worth mentioning that I am not a police officer and have absolutely no law enforcement experience, so I hope I got procedure at least sort-of right in this story. If I didn't, please accept my version as a creative liberty that made this story possible. Also, I wrote this while listening to an exclusive mix of Frank Sinatra's "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" and Boyce Avenue's "No Air." Highly recommended! Merry Christmas and happy holidays to you all, and I hope you enjoy this latest adventure for our favorite NYPD family.

Jamie Reagan had made the decision to become a cop on a crisp day in September, when he stood in a funeral home in Greenwich Village and looked into his brother's face for the last time. He hadn't told anyone about it until almost a month later, and it hadn't gone so well when he did. He had been in a Starbucks, of all places, slumped at a little table with a lovely view of the Upper East Side but staring down into his frappuccino instead, while his best friend Will Morgan stared at him. "You do realize that you could get a job at any firm you want, right? Dickstein, Baker and McKenzie, Orrick... didn't Vinson and Elkins call you again yesterday?"

"Yeah."

"Vinson and Elkins doesn't call anybody, Jamie. Let alone twice."

"I know."

"But you, you're going to ignore them and go to the police academy instead." Will sat back, his own iced latte forgotten. He had just started as a first-year at Dorsey & Whitney and looked the part, cutting a sharp figure in a black Gieves suit and with his dark hair properly coifed. Dressed in jeans and a hoodie, Jamie sank a bit deeper into his own seat. "Jamier, seriously... you're throwing it all away."

"I'm not throwing anything away."

"Are you kidding me? Four years at Harvard? Three years of law school? Your parents paid for that so you could go to the police academy?"

Jamie shifted uncomfortably. "I'm not joining the circus, Will."

"Hey, there's nothing wrong with becoming a cop, believe me. I like cops," Will added, pressing his hands to his chest with such an earnest expression that Jamie might have laughed in another circumstance. "But most cops don't take a seven-year detour, especially to Harvard and law school. I think you're a little too far down this road to change your mind."

"No, I'm not. And my parents didn't pay for much. Most of those loans are mine."

"All the more reason for you to get your head on straight and your career started," Will insisted, shaking his head. "Jamie, think about everything you've invested. You can't-"

"I always wanted to be a cop," he interrupted flatly. "My mom didn't want it for me. I never thought it was a big deal - lawyer, cop, whatever - but... I need to do this. You know how it is in my family anyway. My grandfather, my dad, Danny, Joe-" His throat involuntarily closed around his older brother's name, and the grief swelled, hot and desperate, in his chest.

"Hey," Will said, his voice gentling, and Jamie didn't dare look up for fear of seeing the pity in his eyes. "Listen. I know how hard this has been on you, man."

Jamie shook his head fiercely. "It's not that, either. I've been thinking about this for a while, really. And now... there's just no choice, Will. I think about what my grandpa and dad did out there, and about my brothers... it just makes me sick to think of being a lawyer. I have to be out there, you know? I need to be out there."

Will looked down at himself, then up at Jamie. "Dude, you just need to give it some time, you know?"

"You don't understand."

"You're right. I don't." Will leaned forward on the table, looking Jamie in the eye. "You spent seven years of your life, and God knows how much money, to become a lawyer, and now you're going to make thirty-five thousand dollars a year to get yelled at, spit on, and shot at? Do you know what an average cop's day is even like? Ten hours of boredom, half an hour of getting verbally assaulted by the people you're trying to help, twenty-five minutes of walking around covered in other people's bodily fluids, and five minutes of sheer terror while you're in danger of your life. That what you're looking for?"

Jamie traced a finger around the lid of his coffee cup. "I've spent my life around the force. It may not always be black and white, but it's about helping people. It's always been about helping people."

Will sat back, shaking his head. "You can't help people in a courtroom?"

He tried to smile, but had forgotten how. "Where's the fun in that?"

And though Will had eventually gotten used to the idea of seeing his law school buddy in uniform with a gun at his side, for his part Jamie had never forgotten Will's words. Some days, sitting in Washington Square Park watching Renzulli eat pastries or walking beside him over block after block of New York City pavement, they seemed almost prophetic. "Don't worry about it, kid," Renzulli had said to him once with a saucy smile. "Those moments of sheer terror your friend talked about more than make up for the down time. Pass me a napkin, would ya?"

As it turned out, Renzulli was right.

...

The call came in at 11:26 p.m. as a squatter complaint. It was on 17th Street just west of Avenue of the Americas, in a squat, empty two-story brick building just behind a T-Mobile store. Jamie had already been on several of these calls, and he hated them. On the off chance they actually did find someone, it was almost always a shabbily dressed man or woman with a small, carefully guarded pile of possessions, and their gaunt faces and bleary, pleading eyes cut him to the bone. Even when they found no one, the lingering odors of decay and stale urine in the empty buildings were overwhelming, and he would cough into the crook of his arm and remind himself once again that yes, this was exactly what he wanted to be doing.

Jamie stepped out of the squad car and closed the door behind him, shivering in the cold evening air. "This timing kinda sucks," he observed, peering up at the rundown building. Its upstairs windows were inched open, and the heavy, windowless door that served as the only street entrance was open a crack.

"Whadaya mean?" Renzulli whipped out his flashlight as he spoke, running the light across a graffiti-covered mailbox before shining it carefully over the door. The streetlamp across the street provided only weak light, and shadows danced in the beam Renzulli cast.

"It's Christmas," Jamie shrugged. "You just hate to run people out on a holiday, you know?"

Renzulli observed him skeptically. "Three things," he said, tucking his flashlight under his arm as he dug in his coat pocket for his gloves. "Number one? Crime knows no holiday, and squatting is a crime. I mean, we ain't gonna give 'em twenty years, but they're still trespassing, like it or not. Number two, there's a Salvation Army two blocks from here that can actually give these homeless guys a cot and a warm meal. We're doing 'em a favor."

"And number three?"

"Number three, it ain't Christmas. Get your days straight."

"It's December twenty-third," Jamie protested. "And it'll be Christmas Eve soon enough. It probably already is."

"Yeah," Renzulli begrudgingly allowed, nodding as Jamie switched on his own flashlight. "How I got stuck with this shift I have no idea. I can see a boot like you having to work it, but I'm supposed to be beyond this kind of crap."

"The holiday pay's not bad."

"Sure, but I could be home right now with a beer and my feet up." He paused; grimaced. "And the wife's homemade eggnog. Yeah, you're right, Reagan. This is better."

Jamie snorted and approached the building carefully, taking his cue from Renzulli. "Just like before?"

He nodded. "Follow my lead," he said, and knocked heavily on the wooden door. "Police!" he shouted, his deep voice booming into the building's darkness. "Anybody home?" He expertly got the door open and swept his flashlight across the room, taser in hand but held surreptitiously at his side. Jamie followed obediently, using his own light to coax out the corners of the room, peering carefully around stacks of dusty boxes and a few banged-up, neglected pieces of furniture. Their initial sweep turned up nothing more interesting than a stack of newspapers from 2008, and Renzulli sighed, flashing his beam of light up the staircase. "I think we got nothing down here, kid. I'm gonna check the upstairs. Why don't you take another peek in the back, make sure those windows are secure?"

"Yeah." Jamie remained sharp, his senses cranked a twist tighter than usual, keeping his flashlight firm in his left hand and weapon in his right. "You don't want me to come with?"

"I'll holler if I need ya," he replied with an easy grin. "You do the same."

Jamie nodded, remaining by the cracked banister until Renzulli had successfully cleared the landing, his voice bouncing off the torn drywall. Jamie took another quick look around himself before moving back down the hallway, side-stepping a broken light fixture as he returned to the quiet pair of storage rooms at the back of the building.

He hesitated in the doorway, taking another look across the small, dark room as he holstered his weapon. Weak light filtered in from the high, small windows, and a few piles of unidentifiable junk, their edges muddled by the dimness, hunkered down in far corners by the wall. Jamie moved quietly across the still room, avoiding the piles, his eyes lifted up to focus on the small metal fasteners at the base of the dirty glass windows.

His first and only warning was a sudden blur of motion as something flashed past his eyes, from above to below; something thin, dark and moving fast. He jerked his arms up toward his face instinctively, but there was no time. Half a second, only enough time to blink, and he was startled and only beginning to toe the line of oh shit when his breath was gone and a cord, strong and vicious, was digging deeply into his throat.

Panic flared in a single, brilliant burst, but he hadn't spent week after week getting his butt kicked in hand-to-hand training (and years and years getting turned ass-over-teakettle by Joe's and Danny's roughhousing) to let it take over. His training and instinct kicked in, and he jerked hard to the right, twisting and dropping his shoulder, trying to wrestle out of the strangling grip. Intellectually, he knew the first few moments were the most critical. He'd heard it over and over through the years, but now, now that he couldn't breathe at all, not in and not out, his throat twisted closed like a faucet, it was all suddenly much more real.

He lurched backwards, shoulders colliding with a broad, muscled chest. His senses leapt into overdrive and he was suddenly hyper-aware of his attacker's huge, looming presence behind him (how the hell did I not hear this guy?). The man grunted with the effort as he jerked back harshly on the cord, yanking it tighter and nearly lifting Jamie off his feet.

Jamie could see nothing, hear nothing. He felt only the rapid thunder of his own heartbeat as he struggled for air that would not come, and felt the crushing power in his attacker's grip. The man was trembling with exertion as he pulled back, back, back, his cord digging ever deeper. And Jamie couldn't make a sound; there was no way to let the Sarge, wherever he was, know what was happening. He was alone in the dark with two hundred pounds of muscle, every fiber of which seemed dead-set on strangling him to death and he just couldn't breathe.

He'd been snagged in chokeholds before, and once he'd choked on a piece of candy as a kid. But he had never felt anything like this. The burning pain of the cord's sinking bite into his neck was distant and not nearly so worrisome as his awful, all-consuming desperation for air. His lungs were crackling for it, and his mind was turning inside out, swelling and bleeding against the inside of his skull. He couldn't even think, but a last gasp of instinct served him well, funneling energy to his arm so he could drive his right elbow back powerfully, once, twice, three times into the man's stomach.

Nothing. His attacker didn't give. He didn't flinch. If anything, his grip tightened.

Jamie scrabbled for his own throat, striking against one of the man's bulging, straining forearms as he did. He tried desperately to hook his fingers around the cord, nails tearing into his own skin. He clawed with the strength he had left.

His head was heavy, stuffed with wet rags.

Sparks of color were flaring at the edges of his wavering vision, pricking the darkness like fireflies.

His hands and feet were tingling; he was losing feeling.

He could not die like this.

But his world had narrowed to nothing but the explosion in his head and the desperation for air that would not come, and it occurred to him in some tiny, quiet, reflective sliver of his mind that he was, in fact, dying like this.

His attacker was speaking now, hissing words in Jamie's ear, but he was past being able to understand them. His vision was hot and black. He heard only the pounding of blood in his ears, growing louder and increasingly frantic, and his head felt like it was swelling to twice its normal size. He had to breathe and he couldn't breathe, and his body was going limp, loose, turning itself over to the darkness.

Something was happening behind him, but he couldn't comprehend what.

The pressure on his neck tightened suddenly, cranking a notch deeper, but the sensation and resulting pain was removed. Distant. Happening to somebody else.

Then the pressure was gone, and while he would never remember dropping to the ground, he was unexpectedly hit with a wash of pain so brilliant that he he thought for a second that his throat was slashed, and suddenly he could breathe again. His throat was cut glass and he was inhaling fire in tiny, fractured gasps-

-but he could breathe.

...

Later, Renzulli would lie awake and wonder what might have happened if he'd walked into that room only a minute later than he did.

It was the surest way to drive himself crazy; he knew that for sure. But he couldn't help but think of how easily he had walked down that staircase, relaxed, unhurried, his guard down, and what would have happened if he hadn't heard that strange, rough voice from the dark rooms deep within the first floor.

But heard it he did, and as concern ratcheted up and his steps quickened, he realized that what he did not hear was his rookie partner.

A moment later, he knew why.

Renzulli stepped into the doorway, flashlight in one hand and taser in the other, and the powerful beam painted across the back of a muscled man in a heavy dark coat, his hair shorn close to the scalp in a military cut, sweat beading along the pale skin of his neck. The muscles of his back and shoulders were bulging with an effort that Renzulli couldn't see. "Police!" he barked. "Get your hands in the air!"

The man turned a little, both his body and head pivoting.

And that was when Renzulli saw Jamie caught up against the man's chest, limp as a rag doll, a black electrical cord pulled taut across his throat.

Renzulli's heart lurched, eyes widening in horror, and his hands tightened around the taser. "Drop him!" he ordered.

The man only moved to twist away. His grip was punishing, and all the torque was resting right across the front of his partner's neck.

Renzulli didn't think. He didn't need to think.

He aimed and he fired.

The probes landed true, and the man seized when the electricity struck him, freezing him in place. Renzulli released the trigger, and they fell in tandem - the burly man to the ground in a heap, still twitching, and Jamie dropping beside him, loose and unresponsive.

Renzulli lurched forward, dropping the taser and snatching his handcuffs from his belt. He dug a knee into the attacker's back as the man coughed on the ground, groaning from the effects of the electricity through his body. "Reagan," Renzulli said sharply, giving the man only a cursory frisk for weapons. "Kid, you all right?"

There was no response, and Renzulli swore as he snapped the cuffs home and scrambled over the perp's sprawled body. "Jamie," he said, and grabbed the kid's shoulders from where he lay, twisted up, on the ground. He could barely see him in the darkness. Please, God, don't let him be dead. "Jamie?"

The cough that followed, so weak it might have been a sigh, was music to his ears. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, just breathe, kid. I got ya." Keeping one hand on Jamie's shoulder, he keyed his shoulder mike. "Twelve-sergeant, 10-13 at Seventeenth and Sixth. I've got an officer down, suspect in custody." He ignored dispatch's quick response and the sudden, cutting tones that followed over the radio, a signal to all officers and emergency personnel in the area to drop what they were doing and get to Renzulli's side. The only thing in the world that mattered to him right now was right in front of him, his partner, lying still in the darkness. "Kid," he said again, and gently turned Jamie onto his back. "Can you give me a sign here?"

The kid was still breathing; he heard the whistling sound of his crushed, strangled breaths. Leaning over, Renzulli snagged his flashlight from where it had rolled to a stop a short distance away, and he caught Jamie's face in part of the glow, careful to not blind him with it. Jamie's eyes were closed, but his chest was heaving. The cord had fallen away across his shoulder, and the impression mark was an angry red line, cut clean across the front of his throat. "Jesus," Renzulli muttered. "Kid, I've got help on the way. Are you okay?"

Jamie's eyes fluttered open, and the expression in them was pained and exhausted.

"Don't try to talk," Renzulli warned quickly.

Jamie's mouth quirked up in a half-smile, but it faded quickly when he coughed, dry and scratchy. He twisted onto his side and reached for his throat.

"Hey, uh-uh," Renzulli said, grabbing his partner's wrist. "Don't touch it, kid. Just keep breathing. EMT's are a couple minutes out."

Jamie managed a nod of understanding, and Renzulli's seized heart relaxed a fraction. "You know you scared me to death."

The kid's eyes flicked over to him drolly. Yeah, scared me a little too, was written on his face.

"Trying to steal my stuff!" the suspect screamed suddenly, overly loud and with a sharpness that made them both jump. "Nobody else gonna steal my stuff!"

"Shut up!" Renzulli ordered, edging himself over to put his own body between the suspect's and Jamie's. "Jeez, kid, you hear this crackhead?"

Jamie nodded again. Renzulli still had hold of Jamie's wrist but Jamie reached for his battered throat with the other, and since his eyes were clear Renzulli didn't stop him. Instead, he watched in pained sympathy as Jamie's fingers prodded cautiously at the deep, bruising line seared across his windpipe. "Still breathing okay, kid?"

He nodded. He knew better than to try making a sound.

"Just stay where you are," Renzulli said, and let his grip slip from Jamie's wrist to his hand, squeezing it reassuringly. "I've got this guy. And help's on the way, huh?"

For his part, Jamie's world had narrowed to the brand of fire across his throat and the acid spill of air in and out of his lungs, but he felt that grip on his hand and he squeezed back, closing his eyes. He didn't care about help and he cared even less about the suspect. All that mattered was breathing, and the fact that he could do it, as much as it hurt, as much as his head swam and his vision along with it. God, he would never undervalue air again. It was the sweetest thing in the world.

"Your brother's going to kill me for this," Renzulli said above him, and Jamie cracked open an eye to take in his crumbling expression. "And your father. God."

Jamie tightened his hand around Renzulli's again, smirking.

"I shouldn't have left you," he muttered. "You're a rookie, kid. I left you alone down here and look what happened."

Jamie frowned and put what strength he had left into his grip. "I'm okay," he tried to whisper. Not a sound came out, but his lips moved.

Renzulli saw, and from the expression on his face, he understood. "Yeah," he said. "Jesus. Thank God for that."

Multiple sirens were wailing in the distance, growing louder with each passing moment. Hearing them - thank God, he could hear again - Jamie rested his head back against the ground, letting his eyes slip closed, focused only on moving air.

Renzulli was hovering. Jamie could feel the concern rolling off him in waves. "Kid? Kid?"

He tightened his hand one more time. Okay.

At times like this, it might have been easy to picture himself in his very own Gieves suit, owning a courtroom or striding down Fifth Avenue like he owned the city itself. But even now, with his throat a torn mess and Renzulli crouched protectively over him and the sirens ever louder in his ears, he was a cop.

Just like his grandfather. Just like his dad, and Danny, and Joe.

And peering down at his partner, Renzulli had no idea why he was suddenly smiling.

P.S. - Reviews = love? :)