85A/N. I have revised all three chapters posted so far. Some more than others. Also, I forgot to include the disclaimer. I do not own the rights to the characters or shows. I'm only a fan.
Pete Malloy possessed the sure belief that sometimes everyone in a person's life was hell-bent to make you miserable. Today was one of those days. In retrospect he should have seen the early morning call from his mother for the evil omen it was. If he had, he would have hidden in his apartment and ignored all phone calls, knocks on the door and telepathic communications. Instead, he answered her call and set off a chain of events.
He sat at the watch commanders desk and realized that he had no idea what the reports he had finished reading said. This was not a good sign. He was only three hours into the bottom half of a double shift. A quick glance at the clock told him that it wasn't Friday anymore. According to the clock it was 3:05 am Saturday morning. Saturday was supposed to be his day off, but then, so was Friday. He used the last report he read to help stiffle a yawn before attemting to read it again.
Sleep. That's what he desperately needed; all because of his mother. Normally, his mother obeyed his rule about no phone calls before noon, but at 7am on the dot Friday morning the phone rang. If he had been awake, he could have easily ignored her call. When she called him she used a signal: three rings, hang-up and call again. This quirk of his mother's started after Jim had been held captive in a bank, before being rescued by Pete. For days afterward, his phone kept ringing with calls from the press wanting an interview with the hero, so he stopped answering it.
Despite repeated attempts to convince her that she could simply call him without the code, she persisted. Her assertion being that he might start ignoring calls again and then she couldn't get in touch with him. The fact that she called so early in the morning was actually his fault. He had been ignoring her calls for about a month. She had gone so far as to call not only the station, but had also called Judy several times with messages to call her. It wasn't that he didn't want to talk to his mother, well, it was, but not because he didn't love her. He was trying to avoid telling her something that would make her angry and cause her to yell at him, again.
His mother had met Judy and latched on as only the mother of a bachelor could. She saw Judy as the path to grandmother-hood and conspired with her to get Pete to the altar. As they hinted and planned, Pete grew more and more uneasy. Judy had been very supportive after he was shot during that narco raid. That is, before he told her that he was not going to quit the force. She urged him to resign and take a job, any job. She even suggested he go to work in her friend's hardware store. He couldn't imagine a more boring job.
While she stopped the constant pressure, she didn't give up on convincing him to resign. As a result, Pete was concerned that she didn't have what it takes to be a policeman's wife.
It was during one of their fights over his job when he began to realize that there was more about him than his job that she wanted to change. First, if was "Please don't swear around David", like he really swore all that much. Then it was, "Did you have to drink so much at the picnic?". Since when was two beers over an afternoon considered excessive drinking? She began complaining about the time he spent coaching his basketball team, saying he should spend the time with David. However, taking the boy along to practice didn't stop the complaints. Bowling, poker, division softball games were all added to her list of things she didn't like. He finally came to the decision that he didn't like being lectured like one of her second graders. In addition, he felt that if he changed everything she objected to, he would lose himself and become the martyr she once accused him of wanting to be.
So, he broke it off with her and his mother yelled at him for twenty minutes. It was not a good start on the day...