A/N: Yay! I've finished my exams! And I should really be working on Crosswords right now. However, this just popped into my brain, practically fully formed. Well, there are still a few kinks which need to be smoothed out but eh, it'll all pan out.

If you read the summary, you will already know that this is an AU. It's mid Season 5. It is definitely B/A with quite a smattering of M/C.

In this story, Goren became an ADA, not a detective. He does, however, still have a crappy past, a schizophrenic mother, and a loser brother.

Eames is a defence attorney (fanfiction, guys) yet still a smart-ass. She was married to Joe Dutton and he did die.

Deakins is still Captain.

Ron Carver still exists, may even make an appearance, but he isn't quite so thoroughly attached to MCS as he is in the show.

Logan and Barek are, as in the show, fairly recent partners. They still work for MCS, Barek still talks to herself, etc.

Disclaimer: Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another. The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others and it becomes the property of all. – Voltaire

Please review, especially if you feel I have not quite captured the voice of any particular character, though there will be some differences due to the fact that this AU. Criticism is at least as helpful as praise.

And yes, the title of this chapter was shamelessly stolen from the song Drops of Jupiter by Train. "She checks out Mozart while she does tae-bo/Reminds me that there's room to grow"

Chapter 1 – There's Room to Grow

There were twelve relatively normal people out there, leading relatively normal lives, who would never forget the day they watched an ADA throw his foot up on the prosecution's desk and ask the defendant what size shoe he himself wore. Twelve more, even more normal people, who would always remember how that same ADA played with a priceless bronze relic (People's 19) to goad a witness into delivering her testimony. There were endless dozens of people who had convicted those he prosecuted, had accepted their roles as a jury, but who would forever remember the slightly crazy prosecutor, the oddball of the DA's department. Robert Goren was well aware of this.

He knew that he was disliked by most – if not all – of his colleagues. He knew that, were it not for his win/loss ratio, he would have been shunted to traffic court a very long time ago. As it was, he got a closet-sized office in the far recesses of the Manhattan District Attorney's Office and all the cases for which conviction was thought to be impossible. He didn't mind, he found the cases he got to be much more interesting than your average homicide.

At that moment in time, 4:30 on a Thursday afternoon, he was seated in the aforementioned office reading the most current file on the murder of Sean Carlisle. Carlisle had been one of the big-wigs of New York High Society. Having made a fortune before the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, he had since turned his attention towards other, more frivolous pursuits. These were extensive and various, but mainly consisted of having lunch with important people such as the mayor and getting married to women less than half his age.

A week and half ago, on February 15th, Carlisle was found dead in the decadent Upper East Side apartment he called home. He had been shot once, in the forehead. A rose stem had been stuffed down his throat post-mortem.

The case was being handled by Detectives Logan and Barek at Major Case. However, the complete dearth of physical evidence combined with the fact that practically anyone who had gotten within a foot of the deceased had a plausible motive – Carlisle was not the most pleasant of people – meant that he was the prosecutor of choice. Bobby didn't mind. Unlike many of their fellow officers, neither of the detectives in question had a problem with Bobby's somewhat idiosyncratic methods, and Carolyn Barek's profiling background meant that she could usually keep up with him when he went off on some esoteric tangent about a suspect's psychopathology.

He finished reading through the evidence, which didn't take long, and pulled his leather binder towards him to start making his own notes. The victim's younger brother Richard was currently at the top of the suspect list, but there were a few inconsistencies in the case which left shreds of doubt in Bobby's mind.

Bobby continued to work on the case, putting it in order in his mind, for the remainder of the afternoon. He was startled out of his thoughts by the ringing of his cell. He leaned forward, rubbing his neck to ease a few cramps – apparently he had been sitting with his head cocked for longer than he thought – while he answered the phone.

"Goren"

"Hey Goren, it's Logan. Barek and I were gonna go grab a slice. We were thinking maybe you could join, we could put our heads together about the Carlisle case?"

"What's the matter Logan?" Bobby laughed, "Need me to solve another case for you?"

"In your dreams Goren. I was actually hoping you could give me some rest from my partner, she's been on my ass all day." He lowered his voice to a stage-whisper, "I think it's 'that time of the month' again." Bobby grinned at the subsequent yelp Logan emitted; obviously the guy had not yet figured out that the correct time to say such things about a woman was out of earshot.

"Bobby," now it was Carolyn's voice on the phone. "If you don't join us, Logan's going to stick his obscenely large foot in his mouth one too many times and I won't be able to stop myself from shooting him."

"Well, it sounds as though I am truly needed. Where are you headed?"

"Fratelli's, on Oliver Street."

"Sound good. Be there in twenty?" Carolyn agreed, and with that Bobby closed his phone and began to pack up. To be frank, he was looking forward to hanging out with the two detectives. Over the past few months since they had begun working Major Case, he had handled a number of their cases. He and Logan had experienced some initial difficulties, but a few games of one-on-one tackle football had lead to a casual but sincere friendship. Carolyn was always glad to spend time with him; she claimed it was because Logan was the only male non-relative she ever spent time with outside of the office and she was in dire need of a break.

It was nice to have some simple, straight-forward relationships in his life. It was much more constructive than the time-honoured tradition of "your place or mine", but definitely less stressful than his family. Neither Logan nor Barek was struggling with mental illness or addiction, though a case could be made for Logan for the former... Bobby shook his head, smiling. It sure as hell beat sitting at home with a case of beer and his Smithsonian magazine. And at least he'd have a legitimate excuse to give to the new temp in the front office, who had apparently already worked her way through every other eligible male in the building and was now focusing all of her attention on Bobby. He couldn't remember her name, but for once he didn't feel guilty about it; she seemed to have just as much trouble remembering the meaning of the word 'no'. Apparently not all the gossip surrounding him centered on what an idiotic whack-job he was.

"So then I turn to the witness – and the jury, they just can't keep their eyes off of me – and I turn to the witness and he's looking all confused and anxious and I know, I just know that he's gonna give it all up. So I ask the same question, see, that I asked just five minutes earlier and suddenly – BAM – he gives a different answer! Naturally, I win the case. I mean, what else would you expect from someone who made senior partner in Miller, Jackson & Hall by the age of 32?"

Alexandra Eames wondered – not for the first time that evening – whether or not it was possible to be literally suffocated by someone else's ego. Granted, Kevin Hall was an attractive and successful man, but she was beginning to feel as though they should have set another place.

"I mean, that promotion may have been almost a decade ago but I haven't lost my touch." He said to Alex, self-consciously touching his carefully died and styled hair and speaking in what she would have sworn was the exact same tone her older sister used. "I mean, do I look 41? That was rhetorical by the way." He leaned towards her and said in an even more condescending tone than he'd used the rest of the evening "I have to clarify. Sometimes people find it hard to tell when I'm using sarcasm."

It was thanks to twelve years of carefully schooling her expressions to maintain a cool front for a jury that Alex managed to refrain from snorting into her pretentious pinot noir. Barely. As it was, she let out a sort of half cough and excused herself to the restroom.

Once safely ensconced in the glass-and-porcelain sanctuary she finally allowed herself to relax. Smirking at her reflection, she wondered, not for the first time, why the hell she dated defence attorneys. Then the raised-by-a-cop-and-so-ridiculously-practical side of her caught up. She quickly remembered that being a defence attorney herself, there were four types of people she met in her everyday life. The first was criminals, because even if they weren't convicted by a jury of their peers, she knew most of her clients had probably done that which they had been accused of doing. This was closely followed by cops, and she wasn't about to make that mistake again – she stopped herself in that train of thought immediately. Because, quite frankly, standing in the restroom of a restaurant, thinking about your dead husband while on a date, was just pathetic. The third type of people she saw on a regular basis was prosecutors. She had a few issues with dating prosecutors, including the fact that most of the ones she worked with were women – and Alex wasn't about to give up broad shoulders and facial hair anytime soon – they tended to have some complex about saving the world, and as much as she wasn't enjoying herself tonight, her date could at least afford to take her somewhere more upscale than Yin Liu's Chinese Emporium. This, of course, left other defence attorneys as her only choice. This was the option she stuck with, mainly because it was slightly safer than walking into a bar and going home with the first guy who bought her a drink and could string more than two words together to form a cohesive sentence.

It was at this point that Alex realized she was still standing in the washroom, and her date was probably giving a soliloquy to her cutlery. She tucked her hair behind her ears and put on another coat of lipstick – to show that she hadn't just spent an inordinate amount of time in the washroom defending her choice of date to herself.

When she returned to the table, Kevin was surreptitiously checking his reflection in his knife. It was at that point that Alex vowed to never again go out with a guy who spent more time on her hair in the mornings than she did. Which, the absurdly cop-like side of her brain pointed out, further diminished her choice of potential dates to pretty much zero.