Note: This is for foolcklw, who sort of challenged me, perhaps unintentionally. So if this is wretched beyond all possible belief, blame her! – No, not really. But don't blame me, either. Blame Raydor. Because hey, everyone else does, right?
A Pound of Flesh
Sharon Raydor had intensely green eyes – more clear, cold, mountain-stream-sluicing-over-a-mossy-riverbed than soft, misty morning. The discovery came as a bit of a surprise. Did her glasses really make that much of a difference, provide that much of a barrier? It seemed unlikely. More probably it was an effect of the emergency lights that had clicked on minutes after the elevator car had jerked to an inauspicious halt – they were low and inefficient, the dim glow inappropriately atmospheric, as if the occupants of the stalled car had wandered onto a film noir set.
Raydor could fit right in. Despite – or no, in part because of – her perfectly, expensively tailored pen-striped suit, there was something of the femme fatale about her. She'd be the type to smoke Lucky Strikes in a long, elegant holder, something bejeweled. Her nails would be varnished that deep, flat crimson that seemed to have winked out of existence with the Eisenhower administration.
The impulse to check was sudden and impossible to resist. Perfectly manicured, not too long – that would've been ridiculous in their line of work, and while Raydor was many things, ridiculous was adamantly not one of them – and a translucent, natural color.
Under the circumstances – crammed together in an unpleasantly warm, confined elevator lodged between the sixth and seventh floors of the awful new LAPD headquarters – most people would have found it odd, perhaps rude, to maintain complete silence. Not Captain Raydor, evidently.
Her companion was more susceptible. "Well."
"Hmm," Raydor murmured at length, in what could have been agreement. Her expression didn't alter an iota as she made a quick survey of the floor covered in gray utility carpet, and then sat down, crooking her legs to the side in a long, continuous movement. "It's too bad I left my reading glasses upstairs. I could make a start on these forms." Her lips actually quirked the tiniest bit. "They're in triplicate," she elaborated conspiratorially.
So that was what occupied her thoughts, then? Paperwork? Not, perhaps, even a fleeting suspicion that underneath it all, despite their less-than-cordial (but always highly – oh, highly professional) interactions, they were probably more similar than different? That they had many of the same values, same fears, same quirks – quite a number of things in common, really?
Raydor removed a file from her bag, flipped it open, squinted for a moment in the half-light, and then laid it aside with a low sigh of disgust. "It's too dark anyway."
There was the answer, then: paperwork indeed.
In triplicate, he reminded himself, and smirked.
Fritz shifted, loosening his tie and unbuttoning the top button of his wilted blue dress shirt. It helped, but only slightly. The agent could blame only part of his discomfort on the stultifying closeness of the atmosphere, hermetically sealed to keep fresh air out, and the general hassle of spending what was supposed to be his lunch hour stuck in a damn elevator. No; it had at least as much to do with the elevator's other occupant.
Which begged the question of why. He had no need to exploit the realm of fantasy, or even improbability, to come up with a list of worse companions with whom he could be sharing this experience. Will Pope, of course, hovered near the top of that list. Or Provenza, who would undoubtedly spew forth a constant stream of chatter about his quasi-fictitious sexual exploits – or, oh Jesus, Tao, who was a really nice guy, but…
But instead it was Raydor, quiet as a mouse. But instead it was Raydor, quiet as a mouse. She tipped her head back slightly to rest against the wall and closed her eyes, almost as if she were meditating. The shuttering of that green gaze made the FBI agent slightly less ill at ease.
A mouse? Quiet as a tigress lying in wait, stalking its prey. Part of Raydor's job, he supposed, was to make people uncomfortable.
Fritz didn't dislike the captain, really. She seemed like a good cop, exceptionally dedicated to her job and the maintenance of the highest professional standards. "I don't like you because my wife thinks you're mean" didn't strike him as particularly defensible reasoning. Besides, the captain certainly hadn't been "mean" to Brenda lately. The blonde chief might refuse to admit it, but from what Fritz had seen, Raydor had been busting her ass to save Brenda from herself.
It was a process he knew well: long, arduous, frustrating, and with few tangible rewards – especially for someone who wasn't having sex with the deputy chief. Of course, Raydor didn't have to scrape the residue of leftover take-out from her dishes, drop off her dry-cleaning, and continually find the DVR remote for her, either. Agent Howard shook his head sharply at the mental tangent. For the past several months, this had essentially been Raydor's day job, with his beloved Brenda doing her best to stick her head in the sand like a shapely ostrich and thwart the other woman at every turn. When the captain opened her mouth, Brenda's countenance took on a pained, mulish expression; sometimes she even went the extra step and jerked her chin up at a sharp angle. At those moments, she was a hairsbreadth away from being a little girl with her fingers shoved into her ears, sing-songing, "La-la-la, I can't hear you."
And yet somehow, eventually, Raydor made her listen, if not agree. Fritz wasn't always so successful; but then, he didn't have a "federal mandate," direct access to Pope (not that he'd want that), or that complete, terrifying mastery of the monotone as an art form.
What did Raydor get out of it? Captains didn't make all that much. Either the woman was a complete masochist, or she had the self-control of a saint.
Fritz actually chuckled, drawing a brief, sharp look from the object of his thoughts. Somehow he didn't think Raydor had a martyr complex.
Her eyebrows crept toward her hairline as she nailed him with that unwavering gaze. "Well, I'm certainly glad someone is deriving enjoyment from this situation, Agent Howard," she said with absolutely no inflection.
Nope. Definitely not a martyr.
Fritz didn't dislike Sharon Raydor. How could he? He didn't know her. It was odd to think that in a sense he and this virtual stranger had been counterparts, working in tandem to ride herd on Brenda and, by extension, the entire Major Crimes unit, through the biggest crisis of the deputy chief's career.
And the job wasn't over. Did Raydor know about the new lawsuit?
He took in the set of her shoulders beneath her jacket – unbuttoned as a small concession to the heat, although she didn't even appear to be perspiring, while Fritz was sweating buckets – and somehow felt sure of the answer to his question. She knew. Who had told her? Pope? Brenda? Goldman himself, who was the worst kind of fanatic – a sharp, earnest one?
If Fritz were in Raydor's shoes, he'd resign.
His gaze automatically flicked downward to one classical black stiletto. If Fritz were in Raydor's shoes, he wouldn't have to resign, because he'd break his neck and wind up on disability anyway.
Maybe she just really, really got off on enforcing the rules. Hell, he didn't know. Maybe she'd been that kid in grade school who'd always wanted to be library monitor because she loved going around shushing everyone.
Wasn't that what most people within the police department thought, that Sharon had the world's longest stick – broomstick – up her ass? And since there weren't many really powerful women in the police department, she was inevitably compared to Brenda. From the perspective of Major Crimes, at least, she was black to Brenda's white, brunette tresses to Brenda's bouncy golden curls, the Wicked Witch to Brenda's Glenda the Good. Everyone hated FID. A visit from Sharon and her crew was as joyously anticipated as a root canal without benefit of novacaine.
Brenda was no Glenda, though, so Fritz doubted Sharon Raydor commanded a squad of rogue flying monkeys or was in any imminent danger of having a house fall upon her, either. Fritz was his wife's greatest advocate, but his sincere appreciation of her most infuriating characteristics – stubbornness, single-mindedness, bossiness, entitlement, arrogance, to make a start – meant he was capable of appreciating those same characteristics elsewhere. In Captain Raydor, for instance. The captain might have many things in common with Fritz, but her similarities to Deputy Chief Brenda Leigh Johnson were glaringly, laughably obvious.
He somehow had the idea that Raydor knew that. Not only knew it, but accepted it – something that Brenda would not do. Maybe that acceptance was the determining factor, the thing that, despite many seeming defeats, allowed the captain to get her way eventually, when it really mattered. With the Gavin thing, for instance, or with the settlement agreement that Brenda had signed. Brenda didn't have to say so for Fritz to know perfectly well that what really riled her up when it came to dealing with Raydor was the frequency with which she had to resort to pulling rank. Rank was rank, and it worked, but wielding it that way would always feel like fighting a little dirty, like your opponent only went down because you hit below the belt.
Masochism, martyrdom – of course, he supposed there was one other possibility, another explanation for what made the indefatigable Raydor take a lickin' and keep on tickin', at least where his wife was concerned.
First of all, Fritz wasn't all that convinced that Raydor actually loathed Brenda – certainly not now, anyway – and he wasn't too besotted with his Georgia peach to realize that most people would have moved in the opposite direction since this mess with the Baylor family had begun. Rather than a spring thaw, by rights they should've been experiencing a new ice age. And yet Fritz had the evidence of his own eyes: he'd seen the look of immense relief on Raydor's face when the judge had dismissed the civil suit. Relieved? She'd been elated. And somehow he didn't think her primary concern in that instant had been the LAPD's reputation or its budget. That had been the look less of someone who cared what happened to Brenda Leigh because she was a deputy chief, and more the look of someone who cared what happened to Brenda Leigh because she was Brenda Leigh.
Another thing Agent Howard and Captain Raydor had in common, then.
No: the smoldering animosity that threatened to blaze into white-hot flame when the two women clashed wasn't the sort of dynamic that led the combatants to want to trade it in for being bosom buddies, braiding each other's hair and singing "Kumbaya."
It was something else altogether.
He didn't think it was all in his imagination, the result of the usual amount of time teenage boys spent watching blue movies prominently featuring what was eloquently referred to as "girl on girl action." He really didn't.
Fritz instinctively began a visual appraisal of the brunette, sizing her up as if she were standing – well, sitting – before him for questioning. The perfectly put-together attire, the calf muscles that stood out in sharp relief, accentuated by the dark lines of her skirt and heels, the classically beautiful features – and that profusion of thick, lustrous hair that beckoned you to tangle your fingers in it and reminded you that she'd grown up watching Charlie's Angels… Add to that the superior little smirk that told you she'd think nothing of whipping her Glock out and shooting you between the eyes if you had the temerity to try, and Sharon Raydor made an extremely attractive, completely terrifying package.
He made his way up to her eyes again and found them wide open and focused on him. His face immediately flushed. She'd think he'd been checking her out, he realized instantly, mortified. And she wouldn't be wrong; it just wasn't for the reasons she'd think. However, something told him "I'm trying to determine whether or not Brenda would like you to fuck her" wouldn't quite exonerate him.
Raydor smirked. "I have been hoping for an opportunity to speak to you alone, Agent Howard," she stated calmly. "About the matter of Gavin's legal fees. In an unexpected but entirely justified display of generosity, the city opened its coffers after all, so you will be fully reimbursed for what you paid out of pocket."
Fritz stared. He understood what Raydor wasn't saying: she'd made herself such an enormous pain in the posterior of someone at city hall that she'd gotten her way, on Brenda's behalf – on his behalf. It was a tactic with which he was intimately familiar. "I – That's… that's very good news, Captain. Thank you."
She smiled very faintly and nodded a single time. "My name is Sharon."
"Sharon," Fritz repeated, and grinned. Her smile widened, the fine skin crinkling at the corners of her eyes and mouth. Paradoxically, it made her look younger. "And you can call me –"
"I'll call you Agent Howard." The smile stayed firmly in place. "But we might as well get to know one another a bit better. I suspect we'll be seeing a good deal of each other during the next few months."
He nodded grimly. Yeah, she knew about the new lawsuit.
And she was right: he'd likely be seeing quite a bit of Sharon Raydor during the coming months. Which meant Brenda would be seeing even more of her.
And that, in turn, made Fritz uneasy on a plane he didn't even want to acknowledge. Not because he was pretty sure Sharon was attracted to Brenda, but because he was also pretty sure that Brenda knew that – the woman was a crack detective, head of the LAPD's most prestigious division, after all; she didn't miss much.
Although it was a source of perpetual annoyance, he and Brenda acknowledged and joked about Pope's on-again, off-again desire for her. Their past relationship didn't thrill Fritz, but it didn't seriously perturb him, either, because it was a completely open secret. Brenda would never consider hooking up with Pope again. She wouldn't casually mention his awkward silences and occasional bursts of jealousy if there was even the slightest possibility that she was interested in the chief.
Brenda had never so much as dropped a hint about that woman, Sharon Raydor. So might that mean…?
The overhead lights suddenly blinked back on, and the elevator whooshed into motion as if it had never so much as paused. Raydor looked immensely pleased with herself as she rose to her feet, as if she'd willed the elevator to move. "It's about time," she said. "I need to get back to work. I don't particularly relish the idea of spending the night here, pleasant though my new office is."
Fritz smiled tightly. All of thirty seconds later, he gestured for the captain to precede him into the air-conditioned corridor of the tenth floor. Her hips swayed slightly beneath the wool of her skirt; she held her spine perfectly straight.
"Fritzi?" The unmistakable voice rang out cheerfully, and he relaxed as Brenda rounded the corner to greet him. He was able to see the instant when she registered the other woman's presence. Her smile dimmed, and her voice was flat, as if in immitation of Raydor's, when she said, "And Captain Raydor," her features tightening with displeasure.
"Chief," the older woman returned with a cursory nod.
The FBI agent casually looped an arm around his wife's shoulders as they headed down the hall toward the murder room and Raydor went her own way, striding briskly. Nothing, Fritz reassured himself, feeling foolish. That Brenda hadn't mentioned the captain's possible interest in her meant absolutely nothing other than the fact that even FBI agents sometimes suffered from overactive imaginations.
A/N: Okay, kids, this is my first foray into this fandom, so be gentle, but reviews make the world go 'round. Do you like it as a one-shot? Should I turn it into a series? Or should I swear on my Provenza bobble-head that I will never, ever write another Closer story?