Chapter Text
It's a couple of weeks before she sees any of the Pecks again, though Steve does call her twice to see how she's doing. Trusting him is easy--it always was--and Holly falls back into the familiar comfort of his friendship without a thought. Really, it's good to have a friend in town--most of her college friends are still in Boston, and she was too busy trying to survive in med school to make any there.
Still, for the most part, she only sees him at work, in her professional capacity. It's not that he doesn't ask her to join him outside the precinct, outside their interactions in the morgue, but she always begs off. Cops, she knows, are a tight-knit group, and going out for drinks always means heading to the same bar with the same people.
It always means a higher chance of running into Gail.
And, as much as Steve says to trust him, to have patience, Holly knows that if they run into each other at the bar, after a few drinks have loosened their tongues, she and Gail will never reconcile. She'll try to apologize, Gail will go hard and cold, even more so than usual.
It's certainly what had happens when she runs into Gail at a crime scene.
An icy shoulder, a stony glare to cover the buried hurt in those clear blue eyes so well that even Holly herself almost misses it. It doesn’t help that they’re both been taken surprise by each other’s sudden presence, the unexpected meeting in the middle of nowhere.
~
When she gets the call about the body in the woods, Holly doesn't think anything of it, just packs her bag and slips on her jacket and heads out to the scene. It's a pleasant-enough day, if one doesn't take the presence of a possible murder victim into it, and she's actually looking forward to getting out of the lab and into the field.
By the time she gets to the scene, a couple of cops have set up a perimeter, and she can see at least two officers milling around by the bright yellow line of tape down near the bottom of the ravine. The doctor just tugs up the collar of her warm green jacket to better protect her neck from the cold wind blustering through the last of the year’s leaves on the trees, and hitches the strap of her kit over her shoulder before she starts to make her way down.
But the layers of leaves on the ground are slippery with frost, and it’s hard for Holly to keep her balance as she hikes down the sharp hill. When she slips, there’s nothing to grab at, no rail or tree to save her from sliding down the last few feet and into the back of the cop below.
“Hey, watch it with the lunchbox,” the officer says, surly, and whips around to confront whomever had the audacity to walk into her, into her crime scene. Her eyes are wide with surprise that quickly morphs into cold disdain when she sees who’s steadying herself against her arm.
But Holly knows whose body is pressed against hers even before she sees the platinum blonde hairs peeking out from under the smart police cap, before she hears the familiar voice and sees the startling flash of bright blue eyes. Suddenly the years between then and now collapse, and she’s a child again. So young and so innocently ignorant. Full of wanting and absolutely certain that what she was feeling couldn’t be right, had to be wrong.
The police officer jerks herself out of Holly’s grip, the only crack in her facade the slight wobble as she steps back blindly.
“Gail,” Holly says softly, but already the woman has dismissed her.
“Geeks are here, Detective Swarek,” the blonde calls out to the tall man standing over the exposed grave, and turns back to her post.
The detective is jumpy and excitable, leaping to conclusions long before Holly is ready to give her official opinion, and it annoys her. But she allows herself a small smile when he tells his two subordinates--Gail and another woman that Holly doesn’t know--that he needs one of them to stick around and do interviews and the other to stay with the body. Officer Cruz beats Gail by just a second, declaring loudly that she’ll stay on the scene.
“How about it, Peck, care to learn a little about medical jurisprudence?” Detective Swarek throws a grin over at the officer who’s doing her best not to grimace. “It won’t kill you, I swear,” he adds when he sees her face.
Gail doesn’t bother to respond.
~
Their time together in the lab is quiet, and the air in the office takes on a decidedly frigid quality. Which, for a morgue, is saying something.
Holly makes up for the silence by narrating her every step and Gail, despite her best efforts to the contrary, can’t hide the interest that keeps creeping over her features. She’d always been a curious kid. Always wanting--needing--to know what was going on around her. She never did anything with the information, just collected it.
Apparently little has changed in the intervening years.
Identifying the remains from the woods actually turns out to be less complicated than Holly had anticipated, and when the name comes through--Robbie Roberts, 18 years old, white male, missing for at least a decade--the doctor is actually disappointed.
Because for as long as the bones on her table were another John Doe, Gail was stuck with her, forced to stay and wait and relay Holly’s findings on to her superior. But now, now there’s no reason for her to stay, and Holly feels the need to say something--to apologize, to explain, to ask for forgiveness, maybe--growing stronger as the minutes she has left tick away.
This may be her only chance.
“Gail,” she starts to say after Detective Swarek runs off with her results, but the shorter woman holds up a hand to stop her.
“Don’t. Just don’t say anything,” Gail says in a cold, flat voice, “I get it, I was a stupid kid with a stupid crush and I creeped you out so bad you had to move away. I appreciate you not telling anyone about it, and you don’t have to worry about it anymore. I got over it.”
But her body betrays her words, her voice hitching as she struggled to spit out the final words of her declaration, her tone high and thick with tears Gail won’t--can’t--let fall.
The police officer all but runs out of the lab, jaw clenched but trembling with the effort not to break down right there.
Holly can do nothing but stand in silent shock as Gail pushes past her to get out, mind whirling with the realization of the burden the younger woman’s carried all these years.
“Oh, honey--oh, no,” she whispers to her empty lab when she can finally think, finally form words again.
And then she does the only thing she can think to do.
She calls Steve.