Tension Point
Author's Note: So Heron got hit by related plot bunnies, and they won't let her alone about her L&O SVU ideas. Between sleep deprivation and bingeing on L&O too much lately, well, the ideas are hitting hard and fast. She hopes you don't mind, especially if you are a fan of her anime works and are wondering when she's going to update those. And if you're just someone who likes L&O SVU works, and you don't like the pairing of George Huang and Alex Cabot, well, that's what the back button is for. As always, Heron loves you all (well, not all, but she certainly is fond of many other fictions writers…you know, it's kind of a fellowship, a sense of camaraderie.), and loves reviews, even polite flames, because they tell her what she is doing right and what she is doing wrong. But enough blabber. On with the insanity!
Some people punched walls, others broke mirrors, and still others went to see shrinks to deal with their problems. The problem was, George Huang was the shrink. He had no one to really turn to. And it wasn't as if he would turn to someone for help anyway. It was his job to take on the burdens of others, not the other way around, and he was FBI, which meant he wasn't supposed to let anyone know that he knew how to feel. While Detective Stabler felt perfectly justified in putting his fist into a wall to express his opinion of child molesters and subscribers of kid porn, Huang stood by calmly, gently advising Elliot as to something that would yield better results than hitting a wall would.
Once, maybe twice, his friends and colleagues at SVU had heard him voice frustration out loud, but never at a shout. It was always a soft-spoken exclamation of consternation, and the emotional fits were over almost as soon as they began. Then he was back to being the Huang everyone knew and needed, the one that could pick apart someone's entire psyche in the space of a minute from the other side of the double-sided mirror that made up one wall of every interview room, the one that could coolly and quickly pick up on the personalities and disorders therein of the people he was told to analyze. He fit into whatever mold was needed. He could be a caring friend for the children he had to talk to, a sympathetic shoulder for rape victims to cry on, a skeptic for the narcissists to convince of their skills…the list went on, and never once would he let on that he felt sick when talking to, or even just listening to the criminals that came his way, and the victims. The victims recounted horrors that he wished he'd never heard about, but he was always professional, collected, and calm. No one would ever guess how much he wanted to sprint for the nearest bathroom to unload the contents of his stomach.
Sometimes getting into peoples' heads meant visiting a very ugly, nasty place.
The only other person he'd never head voice a serious complaint was Alex Cabot. He admired her ability to stand strong even after some perpetrator's defense attorney convinced a jury to vote not guilty after tearing her into metaphorical shreds. He wondered how she dealt with it. He'd never seen her go drinking with the detectives, as far as he'd observed she had no one to talk to outside of work… To be subjected to as much daily stress as she was and to deal with it without an outlet, well, now, that was true strength.
It was Thursday. The past two weeks had been spent rounding up child molesters on the internet, and some of the content that Huang had been forced to sift through for a profile had actually made him physically ill, though he'd never let anyone else know that. The office clocks all read eight o'clock, and seeing as they were all three hours slow on the dot, it had to be eleven at night. The detectives were all gone, home, to their families, pets, plants, or just the shadows on their walls, depending on which detective one was referring to. The janitors had come and gone. The only other person still at their desk was Alex.
"Working late?" he asked softly as he leaned in her doorway. She spooked, not having heard him approach, as engrossed as she was staring straight through her paperwork.
"Uh, yeah. Trying to find loopholes in White's defense," she replied as she forced her breathing to slow to a normal pace. "You?"
"Profiling, as usual," he answered listlessly. "But I realized it was getting late, so I thought I'd head out. You want to come with me? Maybe we could find somewhere that sells food at this hour."
Alex smiled wanly, as though it was an expression her face had nearly forgotten. "That sounds nice, if you don't mind listening to a lawyer complain about the courtroom."
"I wouldn't mind at all," he told her honestly. He needed someone to talk to, and, he suspected, so did she. Add to that the fact that neither of them had found time to eat that day, and going for a meal to unload was a mutually beneficial endeavor.
There was a small diner that didn't close until holidays came, one of those twenty-four/seven places that fed mostly working class people, including people who worked nocturnal shifts. The food wasn't half bad either, if one didn't mind heartburn. But for George Huang and Alex Cabot, heartburn wasn't an issue. Their current case had already stirred up some nasty acid reflux.
"Adam White is going to get away with this," Alex moped as they waited for their food to show up. They had taken a table with a very good view out the window of the city lights. "His lawyer has an excuse for every bit of evidence the team was able to dredge up."
"Then go after him as a person. Challenge him, make it seem like covering his tracks like he did was too advanced for someone of his intellect," George replied, tracing a figure eight on the tabletop with an index finger. "He's a self-righteous bastard, he'll rise to it and you'll have enough rope to hang him with when his ego overrides his common sense."
Alex brightened. "I like your thinking. I'll give him a shovel and let him bury himself, that is, if his lawyer doesn't take the shovel from me first. Cynthia Morrison may be new, but she's really, really good. It's almost hard to tell how much she despises having to defend Adam White."
"I don't think anyone wants to see Adam White go free except for Adam White himself," George reasoned. "Even Detective Munch nearly blew up at this guy, and I thought Elliot was going to have a heart attack from prolonged elevated blood pressure."
"He's not the only one," Alex remarked bitterly. The conversation paused as the waitress plunked their meals in front of them with a tired smile, and then left. "People assume that because I'm not a mother that I don't know what it's like… I tried reasoning with Elliot yesterday. He told me to wait until I was a parent, and then see how I felt then. What he doesn't understand is that I don't need to be a parent to hate pedophiles, but I am going to stick by the law no matter how many flaws I think are in the system."
"And that's where your opinions differ. Everyone's got their sensitive topic, I suppose. Olivia is touchy about rapes, Elliot's fuse shortens when he's dealing with pedophiles…"
"What about you, George?" Alex broke in. At first, George wasn't sure whom she was talking to, but then he remembered his own first name. Everyone called him 'Huang' or 'Dr. Huang' so often that he hardly ever responded to hearing his first name spoken aloud. "What cases cut you to the bone?"
"All of them," he responded quietly. "Every case that comes to Sex Crimes makes me feel sick, and angry, and resentful, but I try not to let my emotions spill into my work. My job is to provide profiles and occasionally make victims open up, or perpetrators confess. Blowing up doesn't help me, or the victims and their families, or the detectives."
Alex swallowed the mouthful of the house special that she'd been chewing thoughtfully on as she listened. "That's a very mature train of thought. I shouldn't be surprised, but since I work with people prone to temper tantrums, an outlook like that is a welcome relief. At least I'm not the only one who wants to throw a tantrum but doesn't. Don't get me wrong, I like Elliot a lot, but he takes things too personally and reacts too strongly." Another mouthful of food, and another thoughtful look as their conversation slipped into companionable silence. Then Alex broke the silence suddenly. "You ever feel like all you want to do is break down and cry into your pillow? Make the world go away for a few hours?"
"Yes," George answered. His sentiments exactly, actually. Two weeks he'd spent immersed in the world where children were exploited and abused, two weeks he'd spent watching sick perverts solicit kids for sexual excitement, and this was after he'd had to interview the victim of what was quite possibly the most brutal rape he'd ever seen that had a living victim. "But the world doesn't stop being ugly just because we want it to. The best we can do is put away the people who make the world ugly, and hope that one day it might be enough."
They finished the rest of their meal in silence, split the bill, and then left the diner. Alex stuck her keys into the ignition of her car, but she didn't turn them. George didn't question, merely settling himself more comfortably in the passenger seat. He watched the maelstrom of emotions cross Alex's face, recognizing them as emotions that were tearing him apart as well, though he was a bit better at hiding it. He could feel that tension point now, almost as if it were a physical barrier. It wouldn't take much of a push for either of them before they snapped.
Finally, Alex started the car and pulled out of the diner's parking lot, though instead of driving to any residential area, she drove to a park.
"I'm not getting any sleep tonight, and I doubt you are either," was her explanation. "So, I thought maybe some fresh air would do us both a little good."
"Sounds like a plan," George murmured, unbuckling his seatbelt and climbing out of the car. The park was peaceful, deserted. The air was cold, and oddly clean for a park in the middle of a city. It was a place where someone could pretend that people like Adam White didn't exist, where someone could pretend that the world really was a beautiful place, and evil wasn't real. George seized the opportunity to at least temporarily lift the stains from his soul.
They walked together for a while, relishing the tranquility of the park and the distance it provided between them and all the Adam Whites of the world. But then a bench provided a welcome place to sit, especially for Alex, whose shoes were made for the courtroom and not for walking.
Sitting down, the height difference between them wasn't quite so apparent. George Huang was not a tall man, but Alex Cabot was a tall woman, even when she wasn't wearing her standard high heels. Sitting down, though, they were nearly the same height.
"Thanks," Alex said in a near-whisper, letting her head come to rest on George's shoulder. "Thanks for listening to me, giving me a few ideas on how to win the case, and for being here to talk to."
A corner of George's mouth twitched up into a half-smile. "I could say the same to you."
"But you won't. Wouldn't want to ruin the moment, right?"
He chuckled wryly at her humor. He also counted himself lucky that he had never had the ill fortune to be on the wrong side of her acid sarcasm. When someone provoked Alex into exercising that caustic wit, they were asking for a world of pain. She'd actually made grown men cry before, though they had been asking for it, point blank.
They must have spent three or four hours just chatting, trying to temporarily forget about all the ugliness they were going to face when they went back to work later that morning. They poked innocent fun at some of John Munch's conspiracy theories, talked about the weather, even sports teams for a while. But their peaceful little bubble couldn't last for long.
"We should at least try to get a little sleep," George suggested, yawning. "It's going to be a long day tomorrow, later today, you know…"
"Yeah," agreed Alex. They headed back to her car, and talk was rare for most of the drive, except when George gave the occasional directions to his apartment complex so that Alex could drop him off there. Alex finally pulled into the parking lot, after navigating several confusing intersections. "See you at work later," she said, leaning across to give George a quick kiss on the cheek before he got out of the car.
"Drive safely," he told her, and then he vanished into the shadows of his home building.
His electronic alarm clock told him he had enough time to shower and change before going back to work. Then he'd spend more time trying to profile people so that the detectives could learn what they needed to know about what and who they were dealing with. In the mean time, standing under a stream of hot water sounded like a very comfortable idea.
Or maybe that shower would be a cold one, as it wouldn't do to go into work, distracted by thoughts of just how Alex's lips had felt pressed to his cheek.
Maybe the world wasn't such a bad place after all.
Author's Other Note: Hope you enjoyed the angst and the fluff alike, dear readers. Now, it's your decision. Does this remain a one-shot, or does Heron add more chapters? It all depends on whether or not you want to read more of this. Honestly, heron has no opinion either way on this one, as it is the product of an insomniac relieving her boredom, so, if you want to read more, say so, and Heron will write more. Or, if you don't want to read more, say that too and Heron will mark this as a complete one-shot.
Heron loves her reviewers either way. Later! .