Title: Each Life
Author: amazonqueenkate
Claim: Jacqui Franco
Fandom: CSI: Vegas
Theme: (Set 2; #47, life)
Rating: PG-13
Summary: There's a rise and fall for each life. This is Jacqui's.
Author's Notes: Written on a plane a month ago. Revised several times. Ignored. Angsted over. And now posted. A bit dark, definitely depressing, and kind of weird.

Jacqui Franco is thirty-seven years old – thirty seven years, six months, three weeks, two days, and an hour and a half old, actually – when she decides it's time.

She stands in the living room doorway and watches Don sleep, pretending she isn’t chilled to the very bone by the cold, dull weight of the handgun in her hand, its mass weighing down her entire arm. Good old Don, hunter, fisherman, and wanna-be ballistics flunky. Good old Don, the firearms enthusiast who invites Bobby Dawson to every barbeque, picnic, and family function just in hopes of being able to blather at the other man about his damn guns.

(“It kinda makes me uncomfortable,” Bobby told her once, shifting his weight. He looked so guilty for admitting how he felt. “I don’t like mixin’ fun with work, y’know?”)

It’s a management skill for their lives, Jacqui understands, and never judges him for it even when he starts avoiding Don’s backyard gatherings. In their line of work, there are two options: either you come home like Bobby does (kiss your kids and ignore the life you have between the hours of sunset and sunrise), or you become like Sidle (and the job eats you alive until you do not know, interact with, or love anyone outside of work and spend your mornings listening to police scanners instead of the radio). It’s a delicate balance, one that Don never really understood. Jacqui never blamed him, but she wonders now if a little blame would have been a healthy change from the alternative.

(Jacqui personally considers herself Bobby’s coping contemporary, or at least closer to his method than Sara’s. She doesn’t mind the job – a paycheck is a paycheck no matter where it comes from – and the kids long ago ended her dreams of returning to graduate school. She’d always hoped to teach chemistry at the college level, presenting long lectures and penning stunning papers. Instead, she lifts dust and ridges off inanimate objects and comes home to take Ben and Paulie to the dentist.)

There’s nothing wrong with Don other than that, though, or so she thinks to herself. She rounds his armchair slowly and studies his prone form with careful eyes. His hand still holds a half-full beer and his pants barely hold his beer belly, but that’s just how Don Franco is. He’s more hair than man, really, and his fur tufts out of his collar, down his arms, and onto wide knuckles. Don’s pretty much a good man, a contractor with a love of beer, golf, wild game, and wild cards in poker. Jacqui figures he’d age well, or at least better, if he’d just leave the beer and the cigars at the door.

(He’d been handsome when he’d barged into her graduate school apartment fourteen years earlier, an overzealous apprentice who’d assumed the corner unit was vacant during a string of renovations. Of course, she’d been thinner, prettier, and just out of the shower with only a towel to cover her better features. She’d cursed at him. He’d blushed and walked right out the door.)

She disengages the safety on the gun. It feels like a leaden extension of her arm. Of her self.

The boys are sleeping by now, she reasons, and settles comfortably onto the expensive couch Don had insisted upon. They’re spending the night at her sister’s – a fun time with the cousins – and Margie is nothing if not a stickler for bedtime. Her boys stay up until ten o’clock at the latest, with the occasional ten-thirty on very special occasions. Paulie and Ben are hardly a special occasion, and Jacqui watches as the clock on the VCR introduces 11:04 p.m. into the world.

She can’t help thinking about the boys, both such good kids. Ben will be 13 in the fall and Paulie just turned 10. Ben hates school like every other red-blooded seventh grade ball of hormones, but baseball is a different story. Baseball is a passion, even though he has no talent at it, not with the Granger build and the Franco knees. Paulie, meanwhile, struggles with passion the way his brother struggles at baseball. But then, he strugges with everything else – grades, manners, friendships, health. Paulie’s a quiet boy, almost withdrawn at times, but he’s Mommy’s sweetheart. Mommy’s little prince, or so Don often snickers before cuffing him around the ear.

(Margie always chides her kid sister, reminds her that Paulie is spoiled rotten. But then, Margie’s three boys live in constant, unerring fear of the day that she finally snaps, and Ben has recently taken to calling her “Aunt Adolf” under his breath. The last name of Hilton does not help matters.)

Jacqui sighs softly and pulls the slide of the gun back. It snaps forward, hard enough to jostle her hand.

This is her life, she realizes as she glances around the room. No baritone voice is bringing familiar people in to coddle her and share memories, but this mess is her life. Video game controllers strewn across the floor, baseball cards spread in the corner like a second carpet, two empty beer cans on the coffee table next to stained sweat rings from cans past. This is the way she lives, these rooms mingling only in her mind with the rooms of the lab. Hodges’ chemicals, Bobby’s accent, Greg’s coffee in the pot. Familiarity, all of it, heavy as a brick in her mind, her heart, and her stomach.

(Grissom never asks why Jacqui asks for time off, just scratches his name across the forms. No glancing up, no Gilbrow™, no dubious expression. The simple reality of a mother of two having something better to do. Nothing out of the ordinary, much like the rest of her life.)

The gun is still cool in her palm as raises her hand from the couch cushion and positions it slowly. She feels no fear, no nervousness, no dread. No regret, oddly enough. Just the cold metal in her hand and the steady beat of her heart, a foxtrot in her chest. Ba-dum. The back drumbeats in a good pop song. Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum.

(“Ba-dum-dum,” Don says, and mimics a rimshot on the kitchen table. Ben rolls his eyes, Paulie says nothing. “No, don’t you get it? C’mon, that one was a classic.” He glances at Jacqui. “At least you got it, right honeybun?”

Jacqui just offers Ben more peas.)

Her index finger finds the trigger and applies the first milligram of pressure. Every life has a rise and a fall, she figures. Every moment is followed by another. Whether it’s thirty days, thirty weeks, or thirty-seven years (and change) later, every moment has to give way to the next.

The gunshot cracks for a half-second, and then, there’s nothing.