Work Text:
The shot rings in your ears and you reel back, heart threshing against your ribcage so you feel like blacking out.
No amount of target practice at the range, no number of police academy simulations could have prepared you for the visceral horror of actually taking a life. Nausea roils through your system, pitching low, and you struggle to breathe through it, to remember your training.
This was your duty. To serve and protect, to safeguard your well-being and that of your genetic identicals. And you had done both, the body bleeding out before you the sole unblinking witness, except this doesn’t feel like justice.
All you can feel is your insides unraveling as the creeping sense of dread seeps into the cracks and fissures under your skin, and suddenly all your rehearsed bullshit about being overloaded and suffering a momentary glitch in judgment don’t seem so far from the truth.
Her phantom blood coats your hands, warm and viscous, bubbles up from your throat thick and cloying. You rock forward on your heels and empty the contents of your stomach onto the gleaming asphalt.
Then your phone is out of your pocket and in your hands and you’re speed-dialing Art, fingers tripping even though you know the keystrokes by heart. Deep breaths, spanning seconds and lifetimes both, and then the squeal of tires as the cruiser pulls up and Art spills out, concern etched in the deep lines of his face. It’s not hard to convince him you’re in the midst of one of your meds-related breakdowns when your hands are twitching so violently it feels as though your synapses are firing at random.
He covers for you, like he always does – calls it in, glossing over the details – then performs the general responsiveness test on you, checks you over with such care that you feel like you might throw up again.
You manage a weak “thanks, dipshit” as you wipe your mouth on your sleeve and he just sighs.