Author's Note – This is why I don't write long stories. I mean, here I am, trying to work on my longer piece (called "Absalom" for those of you playing at home – check it out, I could use the feedback) and this story starts whining to be written. I guess I'd be a terrible parent because I gave in. I don't know if it's any good or not, but at this point I'm kind of glad to be rid of it. (PS – Still don't own the characters. Never will.)
You can't truly defeat something if you don't understand it. You can squash it into a speck invisible to the eye. You can belittle it to the point that it becomes seemingly inconsequential. You can even push it aside until it's nearly forgotten – but you can never defeat it without an understanding of how it works and why it exists in the first place.
James Deakins knows this to be true, but he doesn't think that Nicole Wallace does. In fact, he's counting on her ignorance on the matter.
"Innocent on all counts."
That's the news he delivered to Bobby Goren today, the news that made the usually unflappable detective throw his hands in the air and turn violently around to collect his emotions, body shaking visibly for a moment before he regained control.
Those words told him that Nicole Wallace is free. She's free to walk the streets like a normal citizen, free to pretend that Bobby's accusations and the proof he found against her were lies – and free to come after Bobby to exact revenge for his attempt to put her away in the first place.
Nicole understands Bobby in the sadistic way that a leopard understands the behavior of its prey. She knows things about him – things he doesn't want anyone else to know and thought he had hidden away - and moreover, she knows how to use that information against him. She delights in it, in fact. The twisting and shredding of his psyche is a game to her, one that she's very good at.
Still, James Deakins knows that for all of her research and all of the dark secrets she's dredged up from Bobby's past, she doesn't know as much about him as she thinks she does. Sure she knows about his mother's condition, his father's abandonment, and his fears of becoming anything like either of his parents. That's easy enough to find out if you know where to look – and Nicole certainly does. She also knows how impart this information at exactly the right time so as to completely jumble his thoughts and render him angry and ineffectual. But there's one thing she doesn't know about, one thing that isn't recorded anywhere for her discovery.
Nicole doesn't know about Alex Eames.
Well, Nicole knows about Alex, of course. But her knowledge is rather limited; she's only privy to the information that is on file with the department and the outward signs of their friendship that are visible to any casual observer: they're partners, they work closely together in well-practiced balance, and they do their job very well. To Nicole, however, Alex is merely Watson to Bobby's Sherlock Holmes – in short, a prop with lines and therefore no threat to any plot that she might concoct.
But James Deakins knows better than that. He knows that Alex Eames is a formidable woman and that to underestimate her under any circumstance is a fatal error. What's more, Deakins is one of the few people who can see the hidden currents and meanings beneath her interactions with Bobby and he's one of the few who truly understands that his most talked-about and revered detective would be an erratic crackpot without Alex to help him shine. Deakins knows that it's Alex who feeds the right information to Bobby at the right time so he can make his dazzling insights in such a way as to make them sound spontaneous. He also knows that she is an expert at checking and molding Bobby's off-the-wall behavior so that he manages to be both wildly unpredictable and yet brilliantly controlled at the same time. In short, Deakins knows that if Bobby Goren is the burning bush, Alex Eames is the oxygen that sustains the fire.
But Nicole Wallace doesn't know any of that.
Nicole doesn't understand the strength of their partnership and depth of their affection for one another. In fact, she'll never understand it because she doesn't know what it's like to be part of a true friendship. She knows how to manipulate people, how to use them to achieve her own ends, and how to make them feel worthless and pathetic. Friendship – real friendship – eludes her. Certainly the argument could be made that it isn't entirely her fault because no one ever taught her how to be a friend in her troubled childhood; instead she learned hate and distrust. But Bobby's childhood wasn't pleasant either and he's not a sadistic murderer like Nicole – which Deakins attributes to the military, his ties to his mother, and Alex. In fact, he thinks it's mostly Alex. Somehow she manages to chase away whatever demons come after him – demons like Nicole Wallace.
She'll go after Bobby again, Deakins knows, and she'll attack his childhood memories and adult fears but she won't beat him because she hasn't factored in Alex Eames. She hasn't taken into account the fact that no matter how far over the edge she manages to push Bobby, Alex will pull him back up. She always has and she always will because the partners are joined by a thread so strong it's almost tangible, a thread of mutual respect and trust that's found only in the truest of friendships.
But Nicole Wallace doesn't understand the meaning of true friendship and therefore she can't understand what Bobby and Alex have.
And James Deakins knows that you can't truly defeat what you don't understand.