Polish Hostage

Title: "Polish Hostage"
Author: Jimbo
Fandom: 'S.W.A.T.'
Pairing: Gamble/Street (Jeremy Renner, Colin Farrell), Jim/Lara (Colin Farrell, Ashley Scott)
Date: July 30, 2005
Disclaimer: I don't own the characters -- just borrowing them for the fun of it.
Warnings: Het sex, some language.
Notes: Okay, I'm writing from the female POV here, but give me a break. Women slash writers do it all the time! Just trying to get at some of the issues between Gamble and Street and understand their relationship, and I'm using Jim's old girlfriend to do it, just like he ends up doing the same. I chose her POV because I don't want to be inside Street's head for this one.

She could feel his presence before she looked up and actually saw him. There he stood, looking awkward, his face a little battered, a bandage wrapped around his right hand. He was wearing a black t-shirt and fatigue pants, as though he had just come from a S.W.A.T. training exercise. He smiled a little when they made eye contact, and she smiled back. Then she remembered that her brother had been in the hospital for nearly 48 hours and this was his first appearance and her expression changed.

"Were you waiting to make sure he wouldn't die before you bothered to come?" she asked in a shaky voice.

"Lara--"

He sat down next to her and seemed about to take her hand. She stood up quickly to avoid any contact, wanting to lash out.

"Boxer almost died, and you were there!"

He acted pained and somehow vulnerable. She was used to the pained look, but not the other. Surprised that he still moved her, she worked to stay angry.

"Lara, we had a job to do. He would have wanted us to finish it."

"Don't act like he's dead, Jim! He's not."

Shaking his head, he said, "I didn't mean to. I'm so thankful he pulled through."

She sighed and sat down. "He still has a long way to go."

"How is he?"

Lara Boxer looked at the face of the man beside her. Jim Street. Her ex-lover, her brother's S.W.A.T. teammate. He had been in the car with Boxer when he was shot. In fact, it had been his former partner and best friend who shot Boxer.

She frowned, remembering Brian Gamble. She had never much liked him, despite their respective roles in Jim's life. He was always trying too hard, working at being witty and edgy and cool, she thought, influencing Jim to stay out late and leave her home some weekends. She supposed she had been jealous of him, knowing he was somehow closer to Jim, more important to him. That was borne out when Gamble split from the partnership and the force and Jim Street suddenly became a stranger.

What had he asked?

"He lost a lot of blood," she said, her mind snapping back to the present. "And at first they thought he might have brain damage. But he's moving and talking normally, and he remembers everything up to last week, which the doctors say is pretty good. Still, he'll have to be here for a while."

Jim looked relieved. "Jesus. I thought he was dead. I was yelling for help, but I was cuffed to the car. I thought he was fucking dead."

She was surprised at how fragile he seemed, and she couldn't help the wave of sympathy that washed away her animosity. This was someone she had loved once, and it must have been horrifying for him to be helpless to avert the attack on her brother. She reached out her hand and lightly touched his arm with her fingertips.

"Jim, it's okay. Really."

"Can I see him?"

She shook her head. "Only family."

"I thought they let Hondo in," he said, referring to the team's sergeant. He glanced around the deserted waiting room nervously, and she imagined he was concerned about being confronted by her parents. Her mom, in particular, thought Jim Street was a terrible shit, but she knew her dad admired him, both for his physical prowess and his mental tenacity. Her dad was a cop, and, unlike her mother, he liked the idea of his daughter married to one, especially a S.W.A.T. officer like his son. It had taken months for Jim to work his way back to S.W.A.T. after he and Gamble were disgraced in a public rescue gone wrong. Gamble had given up, but Jim Street never gave up. Except on her, of course.

"Oh, yeah. I guess they considered Hondo family," she said, realizing that a year earlier Jim would have been 'family.'

"Oh." He nodded and looked away, biting his lip.

Jesus, he's darling, she thought, hating her own weakness. From the first time they met, she had always had such a strong physical reaction to him, and she felt it even now, months after their breakup.

"Are you okay?" she asked, pointing to his hand.

"Oh. Yeah. It's nothing."

"Sure," she said, a touch of sarcasm in her voice.

He met her eyes and seemed to relent. "I mean, I was stabbed, but it will be okay. There's nothing much they can do for it except keep it clean, and I have to work it to keep too much scar tissue from building up."

She looked at the bandage and tried not to think of what that hand was capable of doing to her, sure he could read her thoughts. She felt herself blushing.

"Shit," she said, getting up.

"Lara--"

"I've got to get something to eat. I haven't had anything all day."

He cleared his throat. "Let me take you."

"That's not a good idea, Jim," she said, giving him a long look. His dark eyes looked pained and pitiful and pleading.

So, naturally, they ended up in bed.

He clutched at her so tightly, she couldn't breath, and there was no time for the necking and making out that had added so much milk and honey to their love life. He was stiff and hot enough to use as a curling iron, and he pushed her hand away quickly and parted her legs with his knees.

"Jim--"

He entered her with such force she cried out.

"Oh, god," she said, remembering the feel of him inside her and fighting the need to compare what it had once been like with what was happening this very minute. His strokes were more like blows, and his penis had no give, no affection, no mercy. She was being pummeled, and yet, he still fit inside her perfectly, and the sounds he made were the sounds she had loved, albeit more desperate and violent.

He thrust and thrust, and she gripped his shoulders and neck like a bronco buster riding bareback, careening between fear and ecstasy. Jim had never been so carried away with her, so completely oblivious of her altogether, so concentrated and lost in his own rigid urgency. It was somehow rough without being painful, and before he had finished, Lara lost count of how many times she came.

Her smooth belly and thighs were slick with his sweat, and his bandaged hand stroked her wet flesh as he lowered himself next to her. His face was blank, eyes closed and feelings closed off, and she felt a sudden resentment at the realization she had been used to work out his own anger and fear.

He had never been like this before. Had he never felt the same need, or had he used another outlet to express it?

The mattress next to her shook, and she heard his desperate, choking gasps. Was he having some kind of spell? It took a moment to recognize he was doing something he had never done in his life, to her knowledge. He was crying.

"Jim--"

She tried to take him in her arms, but he resisted.

"It's all my fault!" he said, wheezing. "Boxer! And T.J.!"

T.J. McCabe, one of her brother's longtime friends and teammates, had evidently gone bad and betrayed the team. He had ended up wounded and cornered, and he had taken the easy way out. He had killed himself. They hadn't told Boxer yet, and she didn't know when they would. T.J. had been the first person Boxer had asked about when he regained consciousness, after Jim Street, that is.

"Jim. It wasn't you. It was Gamble!"

Brian Gamble's cheerful face had appeared above the fold on the cover of the L.A. Times that very morning. He looked clean-cut and earnest, dressed in his police uniform on the day he and Jim Street had been sworn in together. "Bad Cop," the headline screamed, the reporter using several column inches to describe the rise and fall of a former hero, hashing out in great detail how he had shot through a hostage in a downtown bank and quoting the hostage's remarks after the incident about how she "thought she must be dying and that the gunman must have killed her," before she learned she had been wounded by an elite S.W.A.T. officer.

Lara herself had been quoted, admitting she had known Gamble once and was surprised to hear he had tried to kill her brother. Her dad had been interviewed at length, recounting his son's many heroic actions and those of the other officers, including Jim Street.

She wouldn't allow a guilty Street to take responsibility for what had happened. She was too furious at Brian Gamble.

"That bastard was the one who shot Boxer and caused T.J.'s death! You weren't to blame." She pulled Jim close to her, despite his efforts to prevent it. As she wrapped her arms around him, he started to shake even harder.

He said something unintelligible against her neck.

"What, baby? What did you say?"

He pulled away, gulping, sounding ready to heave. "I killed Brian!" he said, his face crumpling. "Brian's dead!"

"Oh, Jim."

She held him close and rocked him, murmuring "It's okay, baby," over and over in a soothing mantra. He cried for a long time, and she realized it was unlikely she would be able to console him.

"It wasn't your fault about Brian, Jim. He wasn't the person you thought he was," she finally said, choosing her words carefully.

He had stopped shaking and sobbing, but his breathing was still rough and uneven. "Yeah, he was. I just forgot about how he was. How dramatic. How self-centered. I should have just told him to get the fuck over it, and ignored his bullshit. I should have kept him in my life and not let him get mixed up in all the crap. I was the one who always kept him out of trouble! He was lost without me."

"He was the one who always dragged you into trouble," she reminded him gently. "Like when you were kicked off S.W.A.T."

He shook his head. "I put the badge before Brian, just like he said I did. And I was all he had, Lara."

"He should have had other friends or a girlfriend or something," she said. "That wasn't your fault, either."

His brown eyes bore into her, his dark brows drawn close together. "Lara, Brian didn't care about friends or girlfriends."

She stared at him, not sure she understood.

"He loved me. He thought I'd do anything for him, and I let him down."

"You guys acted more like a couple than like partners," Lara said, brushing her hand against his wet cheek. "Your breakup from Brian was more emotional than your breakup with me."

A furrow appeared in the center of Jim's forehead. "I'm sorry," he said, and she stared at him for a while before she said anything.

"You don't need to be sorry that you loved Brian more than me, Jim. But you should have told me you were fucking him, don't you think?"

The fingers of his left hand played with a damp lock of hair sticking to her forehead, working it loose. He nodded, confirming her suspicions. "I should have done a lot of things different. I'd do anything if I could just go back."

"I wish you could, too, Jim," she said softly. "I wish we all could."

"I don't think I can live through this." His eyes suddenly looked far away, and she could sense his emotions shutting off again.

"You will," she insisted. "We'll all help you."

"I have to make sure he gets a decent burial," he said. "They want to burn him in effigy and dump his ashes down a sewer."

"People are angry."

Jim took a deep breath. "He was just a grown-up kid, Lara. He didn't think about the consequences of his actions. He never did. I bet he thought it was some kind of game between him and me, like when we were in Special Ops overseas. He was actually enjoying it, right up to the last."

His face went blank and she could see he was remembering. And she knew he wasn't ready to remember the horrors of Brian Gamble's last moments.

She interrupted his thoughts. "He was crazy, Jim, if he didn't know what he was doing."

He nodded. "Yeah, in a way he was always crazy. But it was a good kind of crazy, until he shot Boxer."

She started to speak, then stopped, dreading his reaction. But she had to tell him something, if he didn't know it already. "They think he was the one who took out that helicopter, Jim," she said, referring to the L.A. chopper that had been destroyed with two officers aboard. "They found a .50 caliber rifle at his house."

"He was always a crack shot," Jim admitted.

"He hurt you," she said, touching his bandaged hand. "He would have killed you."

"No," he said, shaking his head. "He had plenty of chances and he didn't. He was like a Polish hostage."

"A Polish hostage?"

"He was mostly dangerous to himself."

"How could that be, Jim? He tried to free that French guy. He tried to kill Boxer!"

Jim's breathing was picking up steam, as though he might be getting angry. "He just wanted my attention, Lara! He wanted me to kill him. He always let me be the one."

"What 'one,' Jim?"

He stirred, stretching his legs and groaning. "You wouldn't understand, Lara."

But even with inches separating them, she could feel the heat from his lower body, and one glance confirmed his renewed excitement. "I wouldn't?"

He made a guttural sound when she wrapped her fingers around him and pulled on his foreskin. "Go ahead and do it again, Jim, the way you want to."

Then giving him a quick kiss and proving she did understand, she rolled over on her stomach.

The End