Work Text:
They had tracked their suspect to an old, dilapidated warehouse. It should have been an easy arrest.
It wasn't.
The shot came from the dark. One clean crack that was followed by heat punching through Casey's upper chest.
The world narrowed to a sudden, violent hitch in his lungs. For one strange, suspended moment, he couldn't seem to remember how breathing worked. Then came the taste of copper, sudden and overwhelming, flooding the back of his throat, and he staggered, one of his hands falling from his gun to clamp over the center of his chest. With every desperate inhale, a sickening, wet whistling sound escaped the wound, and blood pulsed between his fingers, hot against the cold rain falling through the gaps in the roof above.
"I don't need a vest, Anderson," he'd told her back at the car. "It's a guy selling a truckload of stolen radios, not the mafia, for Christ's sake."
She'd worn hers, of course.
She was already moving, gun up, her silhouette sharp against the glare of the streetlights bleeding through the broken windows. He looked up at her, and his voice came out as nothing more than a ragged, airy wheeze, almost lost under the rain.
"…Anderson?"
His legs quit. He folded, his knees striking the soaked concrete before the rest of him followed. The impact shook a cough loose from somewhere deep in his chest, and blood spattered the puddle under his chin. It kept coming. Every breath dragged more of it up into his throat.
Their suspect was gone. Anderson was falling to her knees beside him, her hands landing over his, pressing down against the wound, her voice almost buried under the static filling his head. "Casey," she said. "Casey, look at me." It was his name, but right now it sounded like it belonged to someone else. He tried to sit up, and the wound answered with a shriek of agonizing heat tearing through him. He tried to answer, and got only pink, bloodied froth. It ran warm down his jaw, and the rain thinned it until the water under him looked black.
What a stupid fucking way to go.
That damned fictional detective he shared a name with would have had a line for this. Something about the universe's bad jokes and the punchline always landing in an alley. But Casey didn't have one. He just had the copper taste in his mouth and the useless weight of his own gun in a hand that wouldn't close around it. The details of the case were already slipping away - names, faces, what exactly had led him and Anderson to this warehouse in the first place.
The rain kept falling. Somewhere distant a siren began its long climb. Casey coughed again, harder, blood spraying from his lips to spatter across Anderson's cheek, and the darkness surrounding them leaned closer, her features fading even as he tried to keep focus.
He kept his eyes on her as long as he could.