A/N Welcome one and all! I thought it was about time I had a go at writing some Rookie Blue Fiction. Hope you all enjoy!

A heavy pressure thudded through Andy's head. Everything was black, like she was standing in a room with no light, but she could recognise the dullness of coming into consciousness. Light began to reveal itself, images and shapes came into sharp focus. Andy moved, but was restricted. She'd never felt this lethargic waking up from sleep, even with a hangover. She'd never felt so claustrophobic. She tried moving again, isolating the discomfort she felt, to her wrists. Wriggling them again, she registered them as being bound with a cold, pinching hardness that felt like hand cuffs. Focussing on what she saw before her, she looked around. Her neck was stiff and her back sore. She was sitting on a wooden chair, her feet bound with duct tape to each splintering leg.

Panic was flooding through her as the haziness of sleep faded away. She wished she could go back under that warm pocket of unawareness. She blinked hard, trying to make out the details of the room she was in. Dark and dank; the air was moist and smelled of mould. A dull light outlined what appeared to be a door in front of her. She slowly turned her head side to side and saw nothing but aluminium shelves pushed against both walls, a lump of plastic occupying the lowest shelf to her left side. The room couldn't have been more than eight feet long, by about 6 feet wide. Leaning forward slightly, Andy realised the light was only coming in because the door was cracked open. No way to know what time it was, or for how long she'd been here.

This had to be something to do with a case, she reasoned, trying to grasp onto some stability of thought. Logic seemed to comfort her at that moment. Sifting through her patchy memory, Andy tried to deduce the last thing she remembered. But it wasn't enough. Trying to remember left her with a sensation of swimming through thick, murky water; there was nothing to focus on, nothing to pinpoint.

She realised she wasn't in uniform. Her clothes were somewhat casual, but not what she usually bummed around the house in after work; an emerald green blouse, with a fitted black jacket, and her most expensive pair of jeans. The ones she bought with Traci the weekend they spent comfort-shopping on Queens Street after Traci's ex, Dex, found out about her indiscretions with Detective Barber.

She thought of Traci, and the possibility that she'd been out with her…

What was I doing? She clenched her fists, willing the memories to erupt from her subconscious.

She must not have been at work. Either she'd been off shift, was on her way to work, or on her way home from work.

Two of those scenarios could mean that nobody was looking for her.

Nobody knew she was even gone.

Two Weeks Earlier

Andy rummaged through a dusty box of files, flipping through the faded yellow folders inside with her thumb. Her legs were beginning to cramp as she crouched in the silent office space, searching for evidence.

Gail was on the other side of the room, sitting in one of the swivel chairs with her feet propped up on the oak desk in front of her, reading through more old files. She looked too relaxed in this environment, executing a search on a suspicious dwelling.

Gail always looked so indifferent about things, sounded bored and careless. But Andy had known her long enough to understand the meticulousness Gail put into her stand-offish attitude, along with her acidic quips. Sometimes Andy envied her, other times she wondered how hard it must be not to so much emotion at all.

"I don't hear any flipping," Gail sung, noticing the sudden quiet from Andy's direction.

"I thought we weren't rookies anymore." Andy said, ignoring Gail's comment. "Why do they still send us on these meaningless errands?"

Gail dropped her stack of files on the table, a cloud of dust rising into the air from the impact.

"Well, the only new rook is Nick, and according to Frank, he has as much experience as we do, so we'll be stuck with this crap until a new wave of newbies float through the door to suck our asses for once." She dropped her feet from the desk and onto the floor with a loud thump.

Andy sighed, her eyes going watery from all the dirt and debris floating through the air. The room was dark and musty, possessing an unused feeling, like it had been forgotten and neglected for years.

"So you and Nick—"Andy began.

"Over my dead body, McNally." Gail retorted immediately.

Andy dropped the lid back onto the box she was sorting through and looked over her shoulder.

"What? I was just curious; you guys seem to have a history."

"Yeah, well, you wanna talk about Swarek if we're in that department?" she raised an eyebrow in challenge and Andy frowned.

"Nothing is going on. He's a T.O." and as she said the words, they felt like lies.

Gail knew it, too.

"Sure." She laughed. "Like that's ever stopped anybody before."

Andy still shook her head in denial as Gail yawned and stretched like a pale blonde, lip-sticked feline.

Their radios buzzed with voices, echoing in the wide room. It felt like a basement to Andy.

"I don't know about you but this place is kinda screaming 'silence of the lambs', so if you don't mind I'd like to get outta here." Gail said, echoing Andy's thoughts.

The office was inside a large warehouse. Abandoned almost a decade ago, the place used to be a slaughter house. Some of the old meat hooks still hung from the ceiling like macabre chandeliers. Normally the building was occupied by squatters, homeless people desperate enough to brave the winter chilled metal fixtures and the icy cement floor just to have a roof over their heads. Otherwise, it was used to facilitate other activities.

Andy sighed, disappointed with their findings. She'd wanted to find something to do today, some big case to crack. They'd been sent there to search through papers and anything with writing on it to link it back to a ten year old case on a drug trafficking ring. The ring consisted of three main men; Howard Gordon, Ripley Fields, and Phillip Couperet. They were otherwise known as, The Rouge Brothers. Ironic, given that none of them were related.

They only knew about this place because of an informant. They'd provided the police with a list of people and places the group had anything to do with. If they accidentally bumped into a person on the street, that person's name was on the list. This place was at the bottom of that list.

Andy thought finding any solid evidence was beyond searching one of the old "outlets" for the shady business. It was highly unlikely they'd kept any kind of legitimate records outside the cover business they ran the drugs through. All the files they looked at now, were invoices left over from the meat processing business.

Gail must have noticed Andy's frustration.

"Face it, we'll probably always be rookies until the T.O.'s all retire, or drop from their perches."

This forced a smile out of Andy as she shook her head, running her hand over her head and tugging on her ponytail.

"Yeah, well, sometimes I think they're always gonna be there."

The snow was thick and powdery on the ground, stained black and brown on the roads, compacted into a hard shiny surface by car tyres. Toronto was facing some pretty unpleasant arctic winds, making the snow and slush just that much worse.

Andy favoured warmer weather, feeling she belonged in California or something, but then she thought back to the summers she spent in Ohio with her parents before her mother left, and remembered how she'd missed the brisk weather of the north.

Although Andy's gradual loathing of those Summers could be attributed to the bitter taste the memories left in her mouth after her mother's abandonment. Sometimes she was terrified of leaving the city, scared that she might feel reminiscent of those days and what she had lost.

Andy caught herself sulking and straightened up in her car seat, turning the heat down and planting her eyes on the road.

The radio crackled-

We've got a 35 year old woman standing on the side of Key Street, she's hysterical, couldn't understand her when she called in, assumed to be mentally ill.

There was a pause.

Unit twenty-three, fifteen, are you available to respond?

Andy picked up the radio and replied.

Twenty-Three Fifteen, Ten-Four.

Andy shoved the radio back into its holder as Gail made a U-turn, heading back towards Key Street.

The trees lining the road had no leaves, everything was skeletal and bare. So when a woman, the one that had reported the body, Andy assumed, jumped out onto the road with a screech, it made the atmosphere all the more creepy.

Gail swore and slammed on the brakes, their bodies leaning forward with the inertia. Andy flew out of the car as the woman started to walk back in the direction she came.

"Ma'am!" she yelled. "Ma'am, we're the police, we just want to talk to you."

The woman had disappeared down the embankment on the shoulder of the road. Covered with dense shrubbery, Andy grunted in distaste and followed the woman, begging the mercy of the Gods that it wasn't just a hoax.

The shrubbery thinned out slightly much to Andy's welcome. She heard Gail coming in from the back, yelling out to the woman, except in a slightly more Gail-ish fashion.

"Lady, get your ass out here before we arrest you."

Andy pushed an icy branch out of her way and was visited with a small clearing. The wind was blisteringly cold and the rain had pooled with the snow in the ditch, making soupy ice puddles that Andy sank into up to the top of her boots.

The woman appeared then, standing stock still by an oak tree only ten feet away. Andy brushed the debris off herself and trudged forward.

"Are you okay, ma'am? Do you need medical attention?"

The woman turned to face her, eyes bright and bloodshot from crying. She shook her head. She looked to be in her fifties, but dressed in work-out gear, a fluorescent pink sweat band around her head. She didn't look dressed to be the crazy kind that calls the cops for no reason.

She was staring at something partially obscured by mud, and dead leaves.

A body.

The road had to be blocked off, one lane of traffic left open which Chris and Traci were left assigned to take care of.

A forensic tech trailed yellow tape between short plastic poles placed along the road, and towards the ditch.

Andy watched as he wound it around a tree branch, and continued down the slope towards the crime scene.

Sam came into view before her then, a keen interest in his eyes: a concern. He didn't voice it.

"What did the woman say when you found her?"

Andy crossed her arms and leaned back against her cruiser.

"Nothing," she shrugged, glad she could what happened to Sam. It gave her more confidence. "She just made noises—"

"What kind of noises?" he pressed gently, inclining his head toward her.

She shrugged again.

"Just…scared noises, I guess. She jumped in the middle of the road and then took off down there," she pointed towards the trail of officers making their way through the shrubs.

"What was she doing there anyway? Isn't it a little off the beaten track?" Sam asked, eyebrows rising.

Andy shook her head and looked over at the woman, sitting in the back of an ambulance with an oxygen mask over her mouth.

"She said she was going for a jog. There's a track just a few feet off of where we found the body. Says she got a little lost." Andy explained.

Sam hummed, not in acceptance, but in suspicion. Andy had to voice her doubts.

"I don't think she's involved."

Sam raised his brow in question, a small smile quirking his lips.

"Look," she chuckled, knowing he was about to tease her about finally listening to her instincts like he'd taught her. "I know her type. She's not gonna go off and dump a body, especially that big of a one, and then call the cops while she's in running gear. It doesn't work like that."

Sam inclined his head from side to side, weighing her opinion.

"What do you mean you know her type?"

Andy pulled the empty liquor flask from her jacket and handed it to her training officer.

"She was two weeks off the bottle," Andy explained, remembering how the woman had sobbed into her shoulder as Andy had taken her away from the scene and posited her in the cruiser to calm down.

"Started going for runs to keep her mind off of it. She'd been an alcoholic for three years."

Sam's eyes flickered in understanding and sometimes Andy hated that look. The one that told her everybody knew about her father's addiction and the dirty mark it left on her badge.

She sighed.

"Her son went missing about five years ago."

Sam looked back at the woman, eyes wide.

"You think the body's her son?"

Andy shook her head again.

"No. She found her son three years ago. Had an O.D. in a park downtown."

Sam looked over at Janice Forester again, her lined face, and her drawn expression.

"She's just relived her son's death all over again."

Sam was contemplative, weighing the metal flask in his hands as if it held Janice's innocence inside. He bit his lip and looked back up at her. He held that same look of concern he always did. She gave him a sad smile, a reassurance, an unspoken way of saying 'This is our job. We have to deal with it.'

Sam exhaled loudly, his breath making clouds in the air as he turned and leaned back against the car beside her.

She watched him turn the flask over and over in his hands. She noticed he tended to fidget a lot when he was thinking hard.

"Listen, I know you've seen this stuff before. But you've never gone in blind. You had no idea this was a dead body. If you're not dealing with this…"

Andy shook her head.

"It's okay, Sam. I'm okay."

He grimaced and let out a humourless chuckle, recognising her lie.

They both knew what it felt like to find a body now. Andy remembered Sam telling her his first dead body. He'd been left by his training officer to visit a residence who'd been dealt with a noise complaint. A man had beaten his wife to death and smothered her screams with a pillow. He had fled before Sam arrived, leaving a bludgeoned body in his wake.

Sam told Andy he would never forget. Not the sight of her, the sound of a lawn mower next door, or the smell. There was something about the metallic smell of blood and the stench of an aging corpse left in an empty house. It left a permanent imprint on the senses.

Andy went home that night with the dead boy's eyes burned into her memory.

Andy met Traci in the locker room the next morning and Traci handed her another drawing from her son Leo.

"Aww, thank you." She smiled, and it genuinely warmed her.

"You're welcome, Aunt Andy." Traci joked, tucking her shirt into her pants. "He says the one on the left is you, the next one is me, the third is Jerry, and the last is Dex."

Andy raised her eyebrows, prepared to brush off the awkwardness of that realisation when Traci groaned.

"I know. Awkward." She exhaled, her hands clinging to her belt.

"Well at least he's drawing both of them. That's good, right?" Andy tried to reassure her. "He's adjusting. He probably enjoys having them both around. Besides, don't feel bad if it makes Dex, or Jerry feel uncomfortable. It's not about them; it's about your kid."

Traci grinned and nodded her head in agreement.

"You're very sexy when you shrink my life, McNally."

Andy laughed and it soothed her mind after the day she had yesterday.

She watched Traci with a fondness only reserved for her closest of friends. She'd do anything for Traci, and suddenly realised she wished her own mother had been as concerned about her as Traci was about Leo. It was strange to be envious of a six year old.

Andy's words had obviously helped put her friend back into a good mood, as Traci practically bounced out of the locker room. Andy followed at a more subdued pace.

Her shift started soon so she thought she would raid the vending machine before Sam and Oliver got to it. She had been staring off into space thinking about the case yesterday when Dov tapped her on the shoulder.

"Parade," he called out as he passed, pointing ahead of himself.

She pushed the flap at the bottom of the machine, reaching for her can of soda and fumbling around with the change that spat out. Looking into the parade room, Andy was confused. All the training officers on shift were there. The white boards they usually stole out of the D's office for a big case were positioned behind Frank's podium. A heavily pregnant Noelle was tacking crime scene photos up as Andy walked in behind Dov.

"What's going on?" she whispered into Sam's ear.

He jumped slightly, smiled and then seemed to collect himself, getting into a more serious expression.

Sam was standing at the back of the room; all of the seats behind the desks were taken, so Andy squeezed next to him to make room for more people entering through the door. The back of his hand brushed her hip as he crossed his arms over her chest.

She glanced at him and saw his jaw clench, his eyes blindly focussed on the empty podium at the front of the room.

"Sam?" she nudged his arm with her fist. "What's happening? Have they got an I.D. on our body?"

He seemed to become animated again, like he had just woken from a stupor.

"Yeah, his name is—"

"Eric Jorgenson." Frank bellowed into the room, gaining everyone's immediate attention.

"McNally and Peck followed up on a distress call yesterday and found a deceased John Doe. No I.D. was found on the person; however, D.N.A matched that of Eric Jorgenson. The coroner ruled it a homicide." Frank looked to Noelle beside him.

Noelle pointed to the picture of Eric. It looked like a school photograph; neat clothes, plain painted backdrop and a fake smile plastered on his face.

"Eric Jorgensen's priors consisted of petty theft, and possession. However, before now we were aware of his ties to the Couperet, Gordon, and Fields drug trafficking case."

Andy's eyes grew wide and she looked at Sam as if to corroborate what was being said. He nodded in acknowledgment.

"Holy shit, this just keeps getting better…" she hissed under her breath.

"Jorgenson was not reported missing, but after interviewing his mother, Claire Jorgenson, we found out that they were estranged and she had no knowledge of any other family he'd had connections with. Nobody knew he was even gone."

Frank turned back to look at his audience of keen officers with straight backs and wide eyes. Sometimes the amount of glory given to the person that solved a case made Andy uncomfortable. They all looked like rabid dogs as they listened intently to Frank's debrief, not like they wanted the truth, but the rewards they could reap from finding it.

But she couldn't say she was innocent of finding solace in recognition. Andy knew what it was like putting in the hard work and having people notice. The only problem working with other cops is when they put their own goals in front of their peers. It's something Gail used to do when they first started, but Andy knew she only stole the glory to prove she wasn't privileged by her parents' statuses in the system.

It sort of sounded contradictory, but Andy knew what it was like trying to prove your worth and individuality when your suffocating under a blanket of your parents' legacies. Unfortunately, Tommy McNally didn't pose a question of Andy's deserving of her job, just her integrity.

"Teams are scouring the surrounding areas of the scene for evidence today before the weather gets bad." Frank continued. "But we need an entire team effort on this front, okay guys? Don't ignore your general duties, but whenever you have a second to spare, get stuck into helping us out. We're short staffed and overworked but—"

Andy jumped as a body nudged her as they came into the room. She moved closer to Sam to get out of the way.

"But you've got me to pick up the slack, huh, Frank?" the voice boomed from the door way.

Andy visibly flinched at Luke Callaghan's voice, and turned to look at him, shocked. She hadn't seen him since he abruptly left for a confidential task force assignment about seven months ago. He glanced at her before addressing the whole room. He looked different. Not just that he grew a ghastly looking beard and kept a groomed Abercrombie and Fitch-esque haircut, but it was the indifference and lack of warmth in his eyes that stunned Andy the most.

Not that he should be dealt with anything but disdain from her perspective, but it was kind of disconcerting to see a completely different person take the old Luke's place.

When she overcame her initial surprise, she registered Sam's rigid pose behind her as she leaned against him. She thought she'd made him uncomfortable with her proximity, and ignored the fact that she got goose bumps with his breath against the back of her neck, but realised as she glanced over her shoulder at him that he was staring at Luke with a strange look of contempt.

"…all know this is a big case." Luke said.

Andy finally tuned back into the speech as Luke was wrapping it up.

"And we also know that the drug ring leaders are big suspects. But you cannot, I repeat cannot dive in head first with these guys. You find anything out on your own and you contact either Frank, Jerry, or me, before you make a move. We cannot risk blowing this case."

Luke tossed the ball to Frank again.

"Everybody welcome Detective Callaghan back to fifteen!" he started clapping.

Luke smiled modestly and nodded.

Andy's hands numbly followed suit as she stared at him unabashedly until Noelle finally piped up in her usual enthusiasm.

"Okay, everybody get to work!"