Author's note: For those who are expecting updates to 'Redemption', sorry, I'll get back on track with that story soon. My muse decided to take a hard right off the beaten path and struck out for parts unknown, taking me along for the ride. I watched the POI epsode with the John/Iris kiss and I thought it was great that they were going to do some more character development with him. Then I saw the reactions folks werre having online to the pairing and couldn't figure it out. Yeah, the writers for the show could have done a little more to introduce the pairing so watchers could be invested in the relationship, but the wonderful thing about it is that us fanfic writers can now take a shot at filling in the blanks the producers leave. So here's my version of how John and Iris got to that kiss in her office.
Chapter 1: Invisible
She was, as usual, invisible.
For her, there were no 'good morning' wishes; no 'hey, how was your weekend?' on Monday mornings as she walked in. Not like there were for other officers; in fact, Harry Morgan and the front desk sergeant were having a spirited discussion about some TV show they'd both watched last night.
But there was none of that for Dr. Iris Campbell.
Not that she really minded. You had to expect a certain amount of isolation when you were a police department's psych consultant. No one wanted to be seen talking to the headshrinker, whether professionally or in private; no one wanted to appear as though they needed her services or were patients. Just one of the things that seemed to run in common through that thin blue line. And really, that isolation helped; the more you tended to disappear into the background, the more people seemed to forget you were even there—and when that happened they tended to act as they would if they weren't being watched. Harry Morgan, for instance, would pick his nose when he didn't think anyone was watching—and apparently he didn't think Dr. Iris Campbell was 'anyone' when he wasn't inside her office facing her on a professional level. So she didn't mind too much.
It still would have been nice to have someone at least say hello.
She accessed her schedule on her phone as she headed for the elevator that would take her to her office on the fourth floor of the precinct. As the departmental psych consultant for all of Manhattan South's precincts, there was a psych office in each of Manhattan South's precincts; today, however, her schedule brought her to her home office at Manhattan South Homicide's Oh-Eight. Two recurring patients were on her schedule for today; one, a uniform named Jeff Morris, would be her last consult; he'd been involved in a high-speed car chase (or as high-speed as one could get in Manhattan traffic) and had deliberately crashed his cruiser into the suspect's car to bring the chase to an end. As he'd been on administrative desk duty while his broken leg healed, he'd been ordered to see Iris simply as a matter of routine. She'd found him to be dedicated, and his purpose in crashing his cruiser hadn't been anything more complex than simply wanting to get the chase done and suspect in custody. Four consults had been mandated, today's would be the fourth and final one.
The other was also routine—Rookie Officer Tom Becker, fresh out of the Academy. He and his partner had been called out to a domestic disturbance his first day on the job, and had been confronted with a double homicide—a man and woman had argued, the man had pulled a gun and fired. Unfortunately the couple's four year old child had gotten between the mother and father and when the father fired, he'd killed his little girl. Then he'd promptly put the gun into his own mouth and splattered his own brains across the couple's kitchen wall. By the time Becker and Keiser had gotten to the scene, the mother had been hysterical and nearly ready to shoot herself. It had been a hell of an incident for a rookie, and Becker had reacted predictably. He'd thrown up at the scene, and his ramblings to her now mainly consisted of shame that he had done so in front of all the seasoned officers, interspersed with doubts that he could indeed do this job. All perfectly ordinary reactions, which she was helping him through. He'd been sent to her for six mandatory sessions with an optional six session continuance covered by the NYPD's insurance if he needed it or wanted to continue the psych consults.
But as she scrolled down her schedule she saw the two new patients. One she'd met already; yesterday, in the Homicide squadroom when she'd stopped in to tell him he'd been scheduled for mandatory sessions with her. Detective John Riley, involved in a police-shooting—mandatory six sessions with an optional continuance of another six; that had surprised her when she'd first gotten the orders from Internal Affairs. Someone must be worried about this Detective, or he must have special circumstances that made the Department want a full psych eval. He was her first consult of the day at ten AM—she was already a little late, but most cops were rarely ever on time for these things, so it wasn't a big deal. She'd skimmed John Riley's file already. Ex-military, four years deep cover in a Narcotics operation, recent transferee to Manhattan South Homicide after the murder of Detective Jocelyn Carter and the uncovering of the secret HR organization within the Department, reaching up into the mayor's office, of all places. Manhattan South Homicide had been the nucleus of the HR activity and when that organization went down, Homicide had gotten extremely short-handed. John Riley, fresh off a four-year deep-cover Narcotics sting operation conducted in conjunction with the DEA, ATF, and Homeland Security, had needed something to do and the Department had transferred him to Homicide. She couldn't find many details on the operation itself, or what he'd been doing during that time—not surprising, since it seemed like a Federally-run operation.
She got on the elevator, still scrolling down her schedule, and now she frowned. Detective Andy Bowers. She'd heard that name already, though she hadn't met him yet; whispers and rumors and gossip had abounded in the precinct about him. It looked like the Department had finally gotten wind of those rumors and decided they had to do something; having one of their decorated detectives splashed across the front pages of the newspapers and tabloids because he'd killed his wife in a domestic dispute wouldn't look good for the department at all. No, he hadn't killed his wife yet, but even Iris, as isolated as she was from the rest of the goings-on in the precinct, had heard he was escalating. While uniforms had indeed been called out to his house a few times in the last five years since he'd joined the Department, in the last three months alone they'd been called out four times; the last time had been only two days ago. He was escalating and she had to find out why before he killed his wife. The Department also must have realized this because they had put him on desk duty until she signed off on his psych eval.
Six year veteran of the NYPD, five of that with Homicide. Married to his current wife for four years, previous wife for six, first wife for only two. No children with any of them, which made Iris sigh with relief. It wasn't any of her business, really, but she hated seeing children in the middle of these domestic violence cases.
She finished off her coffee in the elevator, dropped the cup in the hallway wastebasket as she got off, then glanced at her watch. Ten-oh-five, John Riley's appointment was at ten. No one's sitting in the chairs outside my office, so he must not be here yet. She decided to take a quick detour to the ladies' room, checked to make sure those last few wisps of her red hair was tucked neatly back into the tight, oh-so-professional bun she always kept it in, then headed back to the office. And as she opened the door, she smelled something she shouldn't be smelling. What the hell—coffee? And then she walked fully into her office and saw a tall, slender man at the far end, looking at the few small items she kept on her desk—the photo she kept of her cat was in his hand at the moment.
And sitting on her desk was a steaming cup of fresh coffee.
Ex-military. I will have to remember that when I'm dealing with him. It was still very evident in the way he moved. She'd seen that when he turned as she came in, and she met a pair of incredibly blue eyes above a charming smile and what she could tell was a deceptively easy-going manner. Under the neat suit he wore, his body was hard, coiled, tense. He kept himself in shape, and his reflexes were sharp. Her heart skipped a beat at those blue eyes, which made her wonder at herself.
Military intelligence. I will bet my pension he was in military intelligence. Must be why he was picked for a deepcover, federally-funded sting operation. His voice was pleasant, a mid-range baritone, and he seemed to be completely open—but as he spoke more, and she was able to read more of his body language, she could see signs of deception. He was trying to charm her into signing off on his eval, as so many other cops would have, but he was going about it…in a completely different way.
It intrigued her even as she informed him coolly that she was well aware he was trying to manipulate her, and dressed him down firmly for trying those tactics on her. She had to resist the urge to smile at his charm, a part of her mind warning her that it was just another facet of his get-out-of-the-shrink's-office strategy even while another part of her insisted that some of this, at least, must be genuine.
She learned a great deal about him from what he didn't say in the next hour. And by the end of that session she wondered what he was doing in the Department at all. He wasn't a cop, she was sure of it. Not in the way she understood cops; not like her family was, not like almost every person who walked into her door. It started with the fact that, though he was well in his mid-forties, instead of giving in to middle age spread like almost all cops she knew, including her own father, he'd kept himself in shape and looked like he worked hard to keep himself there. He had the same deep-seated urge to help, serve, protect that ran deep in every cop; but there was a harder edge in him, one that she'd seen in cops who routinely went for their guns first and asked questions later. A quality she'd seen in the mavericks, the rogues, the ones who ended up getting drummed out of the Force for mental issues or on trial (and sometimes eventually in jail) for unjustified shootings. And yes, while she was sure that would eventually have happened to him if he was a real cop, she was now sure he wasn't. As he walked out the door at the end of their hour session, she had a deeper insight into his character but no less clarity on what he was actually doing in Manhattan South Homicide. Seeing as how the upper echelons of the Department here at Manhattan South were so deeply implicated in the whole HR mess, I would not at all be surprised if he's been placed here by the Feds to keep an eye on the unit, see if anyone else might secretly still be working for HR or trying to resurrect the organization. No, I wouldn't be surprised at all.
But she had other patients to see, and half an hour later after she'd finished recording her initial session notes and findings from John Riley's session into her voice recorder for transcribing later, Andy Bowers walked in. And there was no mystery, no intrigue, as there had been with John. Andy Bowers was exactly the kind of person she had expected she would see—belligerent, narcissistic, egotistic, with a hard edge of anger in him. John Riley, too, had that hard edge of anger in him, she'd seen that much; but he controlled it, subsumed it, redirected it. Andy Bowers didn't have that; he made no attempt to tone down his anger at having thus been ordered into 'some little redhaired bitch's office to get my head examined', as he so bluntly put it. She had heard all of these things before, and more, so this didn't ruffle her outer calm, but inside she knew she disliked him, instantly, very much indeed.
"I don't need my head shrunk," he declared indignantly. "Nothin' wrong with my head."
"No one is saying there's anything wrong with your head, Andy, but there has to be something wrong with the way you control yourself since your wife has ended up in the hospital four times in the last three months," she said with some asperity. "I'm not part of the rank and file officers, but even I've heard the gossip about her injuries."
"So you're the reason I'm in here!"
"No, Andy, I'm not. As you well know, you were ordered by your superiors to come talk to me. I'd like to help you mend your relations with your wife, and I'm sure your wife would like to stop ending up in the hospital every two weeks, but that's certainly not going to happen if you don't start acknowledging you have a problem controlling your temper—and take steps to controlling it."
But he refused to listen to her, and the rest of that first session was wholly unproductive. He seemed to have latched onto her earlier words and translated them somewhere in his mind to an understanding that she had heard about his wife's frequent trips to the ER and had somehow managed to convince the higher-ups in the Department that Andy needed to see her. "Hey, for all I know, maybe you're the kind that likes this stuff," he drawled. "Maybe you want a piece of me?" his chest puffed expansively; he broke into a smile.
Iris just barely managed to repress a shudder. I'll take John Riley over you. Any day of the week ending in y. Anybody would be better than you. I wonder what your wives saw in you, that they'd voluntarily choose to marry you. She couldn't help a sigh as the door of her office closed behind Bowers. Although the session had been frustratingly unproductive, she was glad it was over. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, she thought to herself. And as she sat down, her eyes fell on the cup of cooling coffee sitting forgotten on her desk. Or…could drive you to drink. She couldn't help the grin that crossed her face as she picked up the cup, regarded it thoughtfully for a moment before lifting off the lid. It was no longer hot, but still warm, and a faint curl of steam carried a whiff of caramel creamer to her nose.
What the hell. She raised it to her lips and took a swallow as she turned to her computer to record her notes. Thanks, John.