The Spaces In-Between

Thirty-Three Years Later

Y/N was furiously typing on her computer. She was so irritated she could not even begin to verbalize how irritated she was in that moment. Her entire project had disappeared on her desktop and she could almost scream. She had spent hours on it and now she was having to redo the entire thing.

"Whoa, Tonto, what are you working on?" Her friend Todd said as he sauntered in with a cup of coffee and his police shirt tossed over his shoulder. "You sound like you're beating those keys."

"Damn thing made my entire spreadsheet disappear. It took me a week to piece all of that information together and now I have to start over!"

"Type as fast as you want, it's still going to take you a week to get back in order."

Y/N narrowed her E/C eyes on him. He might be her best friend but he knew just what buttons to push to get her ranting. She secretly thought he enjoyed watching her blow a gasket. She took her stress ball in hand and chunked it at his head.

He swatted it away and she watched as it sailed across the room to slam into her boss' chest who had just walked into the room from his office. The white haired ex-Army Captain stared hard at the two of them with his ice blue eyes.

"You two are like a couple of children," he muttered before taking a drink of his coffee. He then gave Todd a hard stare, "Don't you have some streets to patrol?"

"In fifteen minutes," Todd responded after checking the time.

He rolled his eyes then looked at her. "What is this about the spreadsheet disappearing?" She explained it to him and he waved her away from the computer. A few seconds later her work reappeared. "And you're my secretary how?"

Todd howled with laughter and Y/N looked for something else to throw at him. Y/N had spent the last twenty years working in Law Enforcement. Before that she worked in the legal field in a prosecutor's office. It was no big leap to know why she had been drawn to the field of work. She had spent years recovering from her trauma. She smiled slightly as she thought about the fantastical world she had created in her mind to help cope with the horrors of life. She knew now as an adult it wasn't real, any of it. She loved the person she had created in her mind to get through it all but after that last dream, she never saw him again. She had started the long progress of healing afterwards.

She should have gone to therapy but it was the eighties and not the standard course of action for kids back in those days. Instead, she had put all of her anger, rage, and despair at the Dojo. She knew without a doubt that she could kick both men's asses if she really wanted to but she had affection for both. She had considered being a police officer herself at one point in time but she really didn't want to see what they saw. She had enough horrible memories to last a life time and did not want to add to it. So instead, she provided support for the agency. It was a good balance for her.

True to her word, though, she didn't date and didn't have anything to do with men outside of work and of course, the knucklehead Todd and his wife. She never wanted to be in that kind of position as her mother and since she knew, psychologically, women drifted towards men that were like their fathers she was taking no chances. She didn't really care anymore. She had built walls so high that it would take an atomic bomb to break through.

She had no communication with her natural father, step-mother, or siblings. As soon as she turned eighteen she was gone and never looked back. They never came looking either. She wasn't even sure where they lived anymore.

Todd suddenly snapped his fingers, "Oh yeah, I just remembered something." He jumped up and sprinted out of the office. A minute later, he came back in with a box of... DVD's? He thumped them down in front of her. "I told you I'd bring you something you needed to watch."