TITLE: Is This What Trying Looks Like?
AUTHOR: Copycat
RATING: PG-13
CLASSIFICATION: Sam/Marlo, Sam/Andy, Romance, Angst
SPOILERS: Through Sam and Marlo's first scene in Under Fire (4x12)
SUMMARY: Guilt is a powerful motivator. (Someone asked why Sam was still with Marlo. This is my take on that.)

Wow. It feels like it's been forever since I wrote anything. It's really hard when you're this out of practice. Hopefully it'll get easier.

My first ever Rookie Blue fanfic. Please be gentle – and constructive, definitely be constructive. I need that.

Sam Swarek was sitting in his truck. Not because it was raining – in fact the weather was really pretty good for the time of year – he just couldn't bring himself to get out.

He rested his forehead on the steering wheel, obstructing the view of the building in front of him. His girlfriend's building. The building in which his girlfriend lived.

His girlfriend.

Sam sighed loudly, sitting back up.

Eight months he had spent pretending and trying and pretending some more, and now here he was. Trapped. Stuck in a relationship he never should have gotten into in the first place, that he lured himself into because it had seemed safe, normal. Easy.

All those things he had realised he was never going to have with Andy.

Except maybe it was just that he was never going to have that, and it really had nothing to do with Andy. It wasn't that he and Andy could never work, it was that any relationship with him in it was going to fail.

After all, Andy's dance with Nick as they continued to get closer and closer seemed pretty damn effortless.

But at least Sam was trying, shouldn't he get some credit for that? Because all he seemed to get for his troubles was, well, more trouble.

Of course he hadn't really expected it to be easy with Marlo. Except in the beginning it had been. McNally had been gone and it had been so very easy to believe that her leaving meant she didn't care. That hadn't even been him trying, that had just come naturally to him.

Even when she came back it was easy to think that. Because there had been the joy of finally seeing her again after so long, that fifth-grader-with-a-crush-butterflies-in-the-stoma ch-feeling that he got when he first looked at her face and time just seemed to stop for a moment; but there was still that voice in the back of his head whispering: She left, she doesn't care. And that's what made it easy to stand in that kitchen and tell Marlo that nothing had changed, because nothing really had. Made it easy to look Andy in the eye, ignore the betrayal reflected in them, and let her walk away. Again. Because he had already said all there was to say six months earlier, and she had gone, so why would he stop her now?

And then she went and told him that he got it wrong, that she still felt the same way, and his carefully constructed house of cards came tumbling down.

He had spents all the months between then and now trying to catch those cards and rebuild his wobbly castle of awkwardly shaped rooms that didn't connect, but it just wouldn't stay up.

Something kept happening to create just the slightest breeze, forcing him to start over. It had become a mantra, repeated with each metaphorical, stupid, fucking card: Be with Marlo, be normal, get over Andy. Until he hated himself.

Because he knew. Of course he did.

And Oliver was right: it wasn't fair on Marlo. It hadn't been fair on her for a very long time. He had just ignored it, because that was what she seemed to do, and he figured as long as no one said there was a problem, then there wasn't a problem.

Simple.

Which was the whole point.

Theirs had not been some epic, explosive, passionate affair, it had just been convenient for both of them. Neither of them had been all that invested in the relationship, and that had suited him just fine.

He did realize, of course, that in time things were going to change, but he had also fully expected his feelings for Andy to dwindle at some point.

Just, that didn't happen.

Sometimes he would think that it had, but then she would smile at him, or crack some joke, or flirt with him a way that was so unbelievably casual but at the same time so familiar that he could never figure out if she was mocking him or opening a door to something more, if only he would follow her through it. That is, of course, until she mentioned Marlo.

That was his penance: Those moments of realization – when Andy promised to save him a dance at Frank and Noelle's wedding, or when she suggested that his girlfriend might know him better than she did – that he was with the wrong person and it was all his own fault.

Because he could have waited. And maybe he should've done, but at the time it simply hadn't been an option. He couldn't open himself up like that and then get nothing in return and just... wait, indefinitely, in case she had something she wanted to say in return.

So he had locked it all up and pretended that it never happened or that at least it didn't matter. He didn't need her, he could just be with someone else.

Ha!

He had been so very determined to make it work, to push through whatever it was he needed to get through, and move on.

But no matter how determined he had been, there was no denying the relief he felt when he finally slipped, or let himself slip, and admitted to Oliver how he really felt. To be able to talk about it, finally, to acknowledge those feelings that he had struggled against for what seemed like an eternity. But most of all, the almost-but-not-quite absolution that came with Oliver's insistence that Marlo was better off without him. He no longer felt that he had to stay with her out of some misguided sense of obligation and consideration for her feelings. Because someone who had been in her place said she was better off without him.

And as shitty as that made him feel, it was a relief.

So he had gone home after that weekend in Oliver's cabin, mentally preparing himself for what he was going to do. Preparing to stop trying to make his relationship with Marlo work and start trying... something else.

But Marlo had been busy and distant, and he hadn't been in any rush to do anything, because everywhere he looked it seemed that all he saw was Andy and Nick smiling and laughing their way into something more than friendship.

And then everything seemed to just explode in his hands with the assault on Kevin Ford and Marlo's obsession with him and her mental health issues, and getting out was no longer an option.

Because you can't leave someone right after you find out they're bipolar. Whatever else is wrong with the relationship, it's always going to look like that's why you left.

Which was why he was parked here now, in front of a building he didn't want to go into, to talk to a girlfriend who had been shutting him out for two weeks, a girlfriend he didn't love.

And when he went in there, he would talk to her, they would sort things out – whatever it was that was bothering her, he'd just have to figure it out and make it better, because he owed her that.

And it wasn't as if there was anywhere else for him to be, now.

When he asked Andy to change Marlo's log he had been telling the truth: He would've done it himself without a second thought, but he just couldn't get there in time. And he was used to counting on her. He had told her once that he was always there when it mattered, and somehow he let himself expect the same of her, even if he didn't have the right to. Because she had been there, from the very beginning, when she had helped him save Emily Starling.

Even if this wasn't something she would do, just because he asked. Not now.

But she had done it, and he knew that he would be paying the price for it.

Somehow he didn't think she'd be saving dances for him at any more weddings, because clearly, she was out.

And there really was nothing that made you realize what you wanted quite as well as the knowledge that you could no longer have it.

So, he had ruined his friendship with Andy, and whatever chance he had pretended there was of that eventually being more than friendship again, because he felt compelled to save Marlo, driven by the guilt he felt over his feelings for Andy.

Everything he did was motivated by a spiral of guilt and heartbreak and now he was finally at the center of the spiral, where all he could do was spin around on the spot and look at the trail of destruction he had left behind.

And then try to fix whatever he could fix.

Right now, that meant Marlo. So whether he wanted to or not, whether she wanted him to or not, he would take care of her. He would help her. He would make her okay.

Because there was nothing else left for him to do now.

Rubbing his face roughly with one hand he took a deep breath, as if bracing himself, before he got out of the truck.

Slamming the door shut loudly behind him he began the short walk up to Marlo's building, to the life he had built for himself around the ruin of a house of cards he no longer wanted to live in.