A/N: This one has been a LONG time coming. Everything I've ever carried about Brenda's exit from TC and her and Sharon and her and Rusty and Brenda's later impact on the events of MC will be explored in this 2 chapter work. Expect canon divergence (or implied divergence) in the next and final chapter. Crossposted under both MC and TC. I own nothing except the words below and I'm not making money here. Hope you all enjoy!

"Do you hate her," Rusty asked suddenly late one night, or perhaps early in the morning. Sharon couldn't be sure exactly, given the frequency that she and Rusty seemed to be meeting up in the living room at all hours of darkness since Stroh's escape. They could deny it all they wanted by the light of day, but the darkness was harder to fool. Without fail, one of them would wander sleeplessly to the living room for some sort of reprieve or comfort in the midst of racing thoughts and persistent anxiety and stumble upon the other already sitting up, often brooding, eyes full not with sleep but a myriad of other things. Regret. Worry. Sadness. Fear.

"Hate who?" That was the nice thing about the darkness, Sharon reflected as she waited for Rusty to clarify. She didn't have to put on airs here. While she'd always be Rusty's guardian and protector and his mother, most of all his mother, here in the dark, she got to be Sharon, too. And the Sharon of the darkness didn't always have the answer to everything.

"Brenda," Rusty said, his tone suggesting that Sharon should have had some idea. How many "hers" did Sharon think he had in his life, or that the two of them had mutual relationships with, to warrant further questioning? But Sharon was stunned into silence. How long had it been since she's heard her distinctive Atlanta drawl, heard the telltale click of her heels on the murder room floor?

Brenda.

"I did once," she offered when she could finally speak. She found that she relished the honesty of her words as they left her lips, for she did, and she had. There was a period of time that she hated Brenda Leigh Johnson with such a passion that her parish priest knew her by name and rank and probably even badge number. But what had followed was more complex, and she realized too late that Rusy was perceptive enough, particularly with her own nuances, to be able to navigate her sidestepping.

"Once? But not now? Even after everything that's happened?" Rusty, who was no shrinking violet in the light of day, seemed to be especially emboldened during their nighttime musings. "Don't you ever wish that she had just killed him?"

Sharon let her head fall a bit forward so that her hair would cover her face. Even in the darkness, she didn't trust that Rusty wouldn't see the conflict in her eyes or the troubled expression that she was sure had crossed her features. How simple it would have been, she thought, and not for the first time, if her hate toward the Deputy Chief had simply persisted instead of growing into something else entirely.

The scene at the Chief's house was chaotic to say the least. Under normal circumstances, the activity and the commotion, the noise and the barely disguised panic hovering below the surface would have simply annoyed Sharon. Sharon, the ruler of all things Internal Affairs, overseer of Force Investigation, and generally a stickler who insisted on well-run, carefully executed crime scenes with little drama or discussion or discord. Unless, of course, Chief Johnson was involved, and once the anarchy that seemed to follow her like a persistent stray was out of the bag, it was especially hard to force it all back in.

Tonight Sharon felt the anarchy to be so palpable that she wouldn't have been surprised to find fingerprints on her skin - claw marks, even, on her throat - once she finally dragged herself back home and attempted to shower off the absolute wreck that her professional life had become.

She ran into Andy Flynn of all people on the front lawn. He looked as dazed and jarred as she probably felt. Sharon approached him cautiously. "Lieutenant," she greeted carefully, expecting a slew of complaints that she'd dare show her face here.

But Flynn was surprisingly accommodating. "Captain," he answered, and his tone was so open and without its usual bravado that Sharon nearly took a step back from the shock of it all. "She didn't shoot him. Can you believe it? After all of this, everything she went through, everything we went through. She didn't do it."

Sharon had surmised as much from the scattered conversations and radio chatter, but to hear it from Flynn's lips put it into black and white like she'd never expected. "I...I don't know what to say," she finally said, hating the uncertainty in her voice. Flynn eyed her curiously. "I never expected that. Truly."

Flynn's eyes softened for so brief a second that Sharon was sure she imagined it. "Me either," he confessed. "And I wouldn't have blamed her if she had. None of us would have." And suddenly there was a challenge staring back at her where there had been kindness a moment before.

This wasn't the time nor the place for debates on ethics or morality or leaks in the Division or the overall distrust that seemed to hang in the atmosphere in Brenda's murder room these days. "I think that Chief Johnson had about all that she could take," Sharon offered instead, angling her body to show that she intended to head inside. "And given these last few months, I can hardly blame her for that."

Flynn shook his head. "She didn't kill him, Sharon. And for the life of me, I'll never understand why." He shot Sharon a significant look and swept away, seemingly unaware of Sharon's unintended startle at the use of her first name or the shiver that went down her spine as the entire conversation hit her fully. None of this was good, Sharon realized. She just wasn't in deep enough yet to grasp just how much it all had gone wrong.

"Chief Johnson had some things going on," Sharon explained delicately, her mind still half on the conversation she and Andy had exchanged on Brenda's lawn all that time ago. It seemed like another lifetime now. She was never sure how much Rusty had really picked up on in his earliest days as a witness, when Major Crimes was Brenda's arena and Sharon was just a frequent and barely tolerated visitor. "When you came into the case, into our lives, things hadn't been good or easy for her for a long time."

"Because of Stroh?"

"Not entirely. There were a lot of complicated things that were happening at work, and I think at home, too, that by the time you were in the picture, the Chief Johnson you knew was a little different than how she had been. She'd lost a part of herself, I think, with all that happened."

"And it's personal?" Sharon nodded, then hummed in affirmation when she realized that Rusty likely couldn't make out her movement in the dark. "So you aren't going to tell me?"

"It's not my story to tell," Sharon said simply. "And to be honest, I didn't really know her. I still don't. So I can't fully say or explain who she was or what was happening to her. But I did have sympathy for her, especially in the end. Chief Johnson...she went through a lot. It changed her."

"And that's why she didn't shoot Stroh?"

Sharon made her way inside, aware that her heart was pounding to such an extent that it was nearly painful. When was the last time she was filled with this much dread at a crime scene? But when had she ever been present for something like this? When had any of them?

She nearly ran into Provenza in the hallway as he led a caravan of paramedics toward the door. The boy - Rusty Beck - was on a stretcher with a bloody leg looking rather worse for the wear, and Sharon felt her heart tug. He was only a kid, a troubled, lost one at that, and now here he was wrapped up in more personal and professional drama than even a grown adult could comfortably handle. The boy was clutching at his leg and ranting - nearly shouting - about not wanting to leave Brenda as Provenza tried to hurry the whole thing along.

"Captain, this certainly isn't what I'd call a typical crime scene, but we might be able to navigate things a bit easier if you moved out of the way," he hissed impatiently, and Sharon tore her eyes off the injured boy to shoot him a well-deserved glare.

"I'm going to sit with the Chief," she told him, loud enough for Rusty to hear and quiet down.

Provenza looked surprised. "One of your people already took her statement. She's not injured, and we can't make her go downtown, exactly. She wants to wait for her husband."

"Then I'll wait with her," Sharon said decidedly, sweeping around Provenza to give him the space he'd been angling for. She chanced a look backward and had to stifle an inappropriate smile; even with the melee before them, somehow Sharon had managed to shock the Lieutenant to such an extent that now he was the one blocking up the very hallway he'd tried to clear. But she sobered as she considered what awaited her.

"I don't know for sure why she didn't shoot Stroh," Sharon answered slowly, aware that her tone was maddening, but still forcing herself to keep it slow and steady. That has always been her strategy with Brenda - Chief Johnson - slow and steady. The Chief was a hurricane; flying floral skirts and clacking heels, her black bag swinging aggressively beside her as she chattered commands and observations at warp speed. Without even consciously trying to, Sharon had found herself filling the role of Brenda's foil, enunciating her words and slowing her movements and making sure her tone was even and careful, all things that Sharon was good at but didn't feel defined by, wasn't defined by, until Brenda came along and Sharon somehow was tasked with balancing out the chaos. Ying and yang. Measured and frantic. Calm day and storming night. Professional power suits and outrageous hues and busy florals. Brunette and blonde. Reasonable and emotional. And - this one that Sharon had come to resent most of all - reliable rule follower and loose cannon liability. She hadn't asked for any of this either, Sharon thought and not for the first time. She hadn't asked to become the example to which Brenda had been compared, or to have been named the leader of the witch hunt that had divided her division and broken Brenda beyond repair. Torn her down even further than she'd already fallen herself.

Rusty's impatience tore Sharon out of her musings. "But you can take a guess, though," he suggested, with Sharon noting the forcefulness of his tone. 'It's not like this is a case or anything."

Sharon sighed. She'd always suspected that someday this would all come to a head - this strange way that she and Rusty and Brenda had all become intertwined, bound together by a past tinged with regret and turmoil with a sadistic serial killer to boot. "Chief Johnson never told me why she didn't kill Stoh," Sharon offered, trying to speak a bit more freely this time. "Although I don't think I ever asked her directly."

"What did she say to you that night anyway?"

Sharon wished she could play dumb, but her second of hesitation was enough for Rusty to pounce.

"I remember that you were going to sit with her. That's what you said when I was being taken out on the stretcher."

"And that's what I did." Sharon narrowed her eyes suddenly as a part of the story that she'd never heard nor asked made itself apparent. "Who rode with you to the hospital? Lieutenant Provenza?" She wondered briefly if that was part of how Rusty had, even in the beginning, managed to connect with the often grumpy older man.

"Actually, Lieutenant Flynn rode with me. I didn't really know why, but now I guess it was because Lieutenant Provenza was probably in charge with Brenda...with you. Lieutenant Flynn was nice to me." Rusty's tone turned thoughtful. "I guess I haven't thought about all of this in awhile. But he was. He kept talking to me and calming me down, but he wasn't like talking about calm things or all condescending, you know? But he distracted me while they were working on my leg and he stayed with me the entire time in the ER. And then he bought me candy out of the vending machine when we were waiting for Detective Sanchez to pull the car around after he came to get us."

Sharon felt a warmth spread through her and melt away some of the tension that seemed to always accompany Brenda Leigh Johnson even in conversation. "I never knew that," she said softly, trying not to reveal how tender it all made her feel. Andy, who was beginning to become something that she could barely acknowledge let alone name, for all of the complicated feelings it brought out in her, taking care of the boy who would become her son. She had to swallow against the lump in her throat. Sharon suddenly wished that Andy was standing in front of her so that she could hug him tightly and even better, to feel the certainty that came with Andy holding her against him in return.

Rusty's eye roll was evident even in the near blackout of the room. "Moving on past Lieutenant Flynn - well, for now, anyway, because let's be honest Sharon, that is definitely not over with yet…"

"You want to know what Chief Johnson and I talked about." Sharon tried hard to keep her tone flat and unbothered even as the memory flooded in.

Sharon tried not to let her nerves get the best of her as she knocked gently on the Chief's half-open bedroom door. "Chief," she called softly, taking note of the blonde head that seemed to be leaning up against the far side of the bed. "May I come in?"

The blonde hair moved a little, enough to tell Sharon that Brenda had sat up a little and straightened her head, but also to propel Sharon forward with mild concern even though permission still hadn't come. Sharon rounded the bed, mindful of her pace and careful not to seem too uncertain nor too overconfident. She wasn't sure how Brenda would respond to either extreme, so Sharon followed her instincts and turned briskly but not abruptly to face the Chief before lowering herself gracefully to the floor. She'd sit here, with her back to the wall, as Brenda sat across from her with her back against her bed. And now that she'd sat, Sharon allowed herself to look at Brenda full on, taking in her bent knees and clasped hands, her casual clothes and cascading golden tendrils, and the cat that had curled up beside her that Brenda seemed to be stroking with willful calmness.

"Chief," Sharon said again, in what she hoped was a gentle but not babying tone. "Can I get you something? Is there anything, anything at all, that you need?"

Brenda raised her eyes to Sharon's, and had Sharon been standing, she would have taken a step back, so caught off guard she was at the vulnerability she saw there. "Honestly, Captain, I wouldn't even know where to start. But for the moment, no. But thank you."

"Agent Howard is on his way?" Sharon suddenly was desperate to keep her talking but was uncharacteristically panicked at the thought of having nothing to say. What did one say to a woman whose life was essentially in shambles? Sharon was a mother - a good one, she thought, most days - but even this seemed beyond her wheelhouse.

"Yes," Brenda answered, unaware of Sharon's internal struggle. "He's in the air now, from what I hear, so he should be home soon." Brenda suddenly seemed to focus on some spot on the carpet.

"I hope someone told him the whole thing," she mused. "I...the thought of Fritz being on a plane not knowing if I'm alive or dead or what had happened…"

"Someone must have told him," Sharon cut in smoothly, eagerly taking the offered topic. "I can't imagine they wouldn't have said that you are okay."

Brenda chuckled drily. "I suppose that's debatable these days anyway. But as long as Fritz knows I'm alive, the rest of it can just be dealt with when it has to be."

Sharon sensed the turn toward something much deeper and more painful and it simultaneously made her want to run away and move toward it. She and Brenda were far from friends, but they'd become allies of sorts. Sharon felt genuine empathy for a great deal of Brenda's burdens of late - her mother's death and Pope's scapegoating and the marring of what had been a pretty fine record of service - but she still felt like she and Brenda were magnets of sorts. They continually repelled each other further away even though there was that unexplainable pull below the surface that seemed to suggest that, just maybe, if they could manage it, the attraction to connect would overpower the tendency to keep pushing further back.

"I can go check with someone," she offered, eager for something to do and an out to offer while also testing a bit to see if such an out was needed. "Make sure he gets a clear message about what happened."

"No." Brenda's reply was decidedly firm, shocking Sharon to her core. "Thank you, but no. I...I'd like to not be alone."

"You were alone when I walked in," Sharon commented, wondering if Brenda would pick up on the subtext. She had had every member of her division here and yet had chosen to sit alone in her bedroom in silence, until her barely tolerated professional shadow and personal ethics coach invited herself into Brenda's solitude. Make it make sense, Sharon thought.

Brenda smiled what seemed to be a small, but genuine smile, and Sharon was nearly knocked out by the sincerity of it. And the rarity. "You make a good point, Captain. And I don't really know why, but...I'm glad you're here. And if you wouldn't mind staying with me until Fritz gets home, I'd like that a lot."

Sharon could only nod. "I think we're a bit beyond Captain now, don't you think," she answered easily as she took what Brenda was offering. "Unless, of course, you'd prefer I still call you Chief."

Brenda laughed her dry, humorous laugh once more. "Sharon, you and I both know that I'm not going to wear that title for much longer. So you might as well get used to Brenda in the meantime."

Sharon raised an eyebrow but offered no comment. This was not the time. "Okay, Brenda," she replied, keeping her tone light. "I can work with that."

Brenda smiled again but this time it seemed to vanish as quickly as it appeared. "So, are you going to ask me?" Her tone was almost teasing but her eyes were sharp as they watched Sharon's carefully. "About Stroh?"

Sharon shifted to mirror Brenda's stance, hugging her knees and bringing herself within arms reach of Brenda. "Do you want me to?"

"Everyone else wants to. But no one has. I figured that's why you came. To hear it directly from the source."

There was a time, maybe even a day ago, that Sharon would have loved to know the answer to the question that Brenda was so obviously dangling before her like a prize. Brenda was desperate to tell someone, Sharon realized, but almost at the same moment, it dawned on her that she didn't need to hear it. Nor should she. That was, perhaps, where Fritz Howard needed to come into all of this.

"I came here to see if you were okay," Sharon said softly, honestly, seeking Brenda's eyes and finding them. "Not to pump you for information. You've been through enough."

Brenda's expression was unreadable. "I'm not the victim here," she said a bit defiantly. "Rusty...what he did to that boy. And all of those girls. It's...it doesn't compare."

Sharon reached for Brenda's hand and was both surprised and elated when Brenda met her halfway. "I wasn't talking about Philip Stroh," she told Brenda earnestly. And she watched as the Brenda Leigh Johnson she had known or thought she knew for so long crumpled before her.

Sharon didn't try to hug her or hold her or anything physical that Brenda probably couldn't handle, but she held Brenda's hand tight as Brenda finally let go. Sharon kept quiet as Brenda cried freely but softly, occasionally squeezing their joined hands and running her free hand soothingly on Brenda's knee.

"I never thought of it that way," Brenda said finally, when she was able to speak again, and Sharon let her own sadness drift over her. She'd had to watch - contribute in some ways, even - as this woman had been vilified and alienated and beaten down, by people she had trusted and called her own. The same woman who had very nearly been Chief of Police and boss of them all. The same woman who lost her mother suddenly, tragically, as everything else in her life was falling apart around her. The same woman who had given up her career for the chance to finally bring down the man who would later try to kill her in her own home. Sharon didn't deal much with direct victims these days, but from where she sat, Brenda Leigh Johnson looked to be in a class all her own.

"But if you're telling me that - if you believe that", she continued, finally meeting Sharon's gaze fully. "Then I really don't have to tell you why I didn't shoot Stroh tonight. You...you seem to have put it all together without me having to say a word."

"And unlike your cases, I don't need to hear it." Sharon was surprised to see Brenda's eyes shutter for a moment at her quip before returning to normal. What had that been?

"Have you ever considered a division change, Captain Raydor," Brenda teased slightly, although to Sharon it seemed just a tiny bit forced. What had she accidentally brushed against, she wondered? "You might be suited for Major Crimes after all."

Now it was Sharon's turn to chuckle. "I don't see that going over well with your people."

"They'd get used to it. I don't think it would be so bad." Brenda leaned forward a bit more and adjusted to hold Sharon's hand in both of hers. "It's a shame, really."

Sharon didn't follow. "What is?"

"This might be the beginning of a beautiful friendship," Brenda's eyes twinkled a bit before sobering. "It's too bad that it came now. At the end."

Even from a chair over, Sharon could tell that Rusty was aghast. "She didn't tell you? And you didn't ask? Sharon, that is, like...so unlike you."

Despite herself, Sharon smiled. "Is it though," she asked pointedly. "Do I pry into everything with you that you may or may not want to tell me?"

"That's different. I'm your kid. I was always basically your kid in some way. Brenda was a grown woman. And weren't you in charge of, like, watching her?"

Sharon was just now starting to feel the full effects of the can of worms that this all was. "And that was part of the problem," she said impatiently. "Chief Johnson - Brenda - and I were at odds for so long, and then I was in a position with her that I really wasn't happy about, and it just never worked out. Brenda and me."

"So now she's Brenda all of a sudden? You've been calling her Chief Johnson all night. What...what happened to her? To both of you?"

Sharon tilted her head back on the chair for the quickest of seconds before straightening again. "Brenda...everything she knew fell out from under her. Some of it over time, some of it very quickly. And once the dust settled, she was out of a job that she loved, that she was truly good at, and I was there in her place. It was a lot, for both of us."

"I thought she chose to leave? Like, no one fired her or anything."

"Brenda chose to leave, yes, but the circumstances that sparked that decision were out of her control. Most of them, anyway. And there was no going back to how things were."

"Maybe that's why she said what she said to Stroh. When she wouldn't shoot him that night."

Sharon straightened even further. She had never heard this before either. "What did she say?" Her voice was more breathless than she would have preferred.

"Stroh said he'd confess. That he'd tell her everything. But Brenda said she didn't want to hear it." Rusty was so unbothered in his retelling of what had become one of the most pivotal nights of Sharon's life that Sharon was sure he had no idea how gobsmacked she felt at this new revelation. That certainly explained her reaction to Sharon's comment that fateful night. "I never understood why she wouldn't have wanted to hear it."

"Because she was done," Sharon answered swiftly, trying to cover the sudden torrent of emotions. "She had been so beat down and demoralized and torn apart that everything had lost its meaning. And I think that Brenda had convinced herself for so long that getting Stroh would somehow make it all better or make it all worth it. But by the time it happened, it wouldn't have changed anything. Everything she went through in the department, losing her mother. Nothing, no confession, was ever going to fix what she had lost."

"What at the department?" Sharon waved him off with enough gusto that Rusty caught it, even in the dark, and recalibrated. "So she realized, like, too late that she'd messed up her life?"

"That might be too strong a phrase. But, yes, I think Brenda realized that some things can't be undone. And shooting Stroh, listening to his confessions even, would only put her further on a path that she was desperate to get off."

"But isn't it ironic, though," Rusty pressed, and Sharon felt herself tense up. Here it was. "If Brenda hadn't been so...beaten down, like you said, she would have killed Stroh. And this all would be over."

"I would be lying to you if I told you that I haven't thought about that every day," Sharon said, her voice shaking for the first time all night. She'd known that this moment would come as soon as Brenda's name had crossed Rusty's lips. But Sharon steadied herself. "But if Brenda had killed Stroh, you wouldn't have been a material witness and you wouldn't have gone into my custody. You'd probably have gone to foster care. And.."

"And I wouldn't be your son." Now Rusty's voice was thick. "You...you wouldn't be my mom. My other mom."

"No, I wouldn't," Sharon said simply. "And for that, Rusty, no matter what, I will always be grateful that Brenda didn't shoot Stroh. I...I wouldn't have you if it wasn't for her. And I think about that every day, too."

Suddenly, Rusty was standing before her. "I do, too."

Sharon rose and pulled Rusty into her arms. "Brenda was many, many things," she told him softly as she held him tight. "But she brought you to me. And I will always, always remember that. And thank her for that."

It was a testament to how far they'd come in just a few years that Rusty was hugging her just as tightly. "Me, too, Sharon. Me, too."