Disclaimer: No characters belong to me, the thoughts, however are mine alone. No profit made. No harm intended.
Title: Tempered Glass
Author: kneipho
Beta: 101 (Any errors you unearth are mine, not his.)
Rating: (M) ® Contains liberal use of bad language
Fandom: Law and Order: Criminal Intent
Character/Pairing Codes: B/A
Spoiler Alert: Amends and Smile (minor ref. to A Person of Interest and Semi-Detached)
Warning: An out-of the-box characterization of poor "Mrs. Eames" (so I've been told). :)
Thank you, Heather and Christine.
Disclaimer: No characters belong to me, the thoughts, however are mine alone. No profit made. No harm intended.
Bobby's upset with me. Something I said at the arrest. I was pissed off and couldn't help myself. He pissed me off, I let him know, and now he's sulking. Prick. He keeps looking over his desk at me while I try to finish up my report. Staring. I can feel it. Big round eyes teeming with uncertainty, cupie-doll mouth turned down, slightly. He looks so fucking lost.
Now, I can't concentrate. It isn't fair. He makes me feel so guilty.
His mom died not too long ago and I am sorry about that. Truly. I lost my husband nine years back and I know how much that kind of trauma can change you. It hurts like hell and it sucks. But part of me wonders if Mrs. Goren's passing isn't for the best. For Bobby, I mean. His life hasn't been any easy one. Growing up in a house with someone suffering a chronic mental illness is a huge part of the reason why. So much, of who he is –was … for the longest time defined by his capacity as her emotional caretaker. Now, all that's changed. I get that. The whole personal identity thing. Before my husband died, a huge part of how I characterized myself was determined by my role as Joe Dutton's better half. An independent being, a good police officer in my own right, a confident modern woman –and yet, I thought of myself on some weird level, as Mrs. Joseph Dutton, cop's wife, first and foremost. Sounds ridiculous in this day and age, I know. You'll never catch me admitting it out loud. Still, that's the way it was.
After a loss, we get up, we redefine ourselves, and we move on. It broke my heart to be involved in the re-investigation of Joe's murder, but I never could have handled it were it not the truth.
Maybe, Bobby just came back to work too soon. Should I blame myself for that? I don't know.
Great. Now, Captain Ross is staring at me, too. Through that obscenely large partition making up the wall separating his office from the rest of the squad. A hungry shark separated from his dinner by a see-through layer of tempered glass at the Human Police Aquarium. He's a stickler for timely paperwork and looks as if he's about to have an apoplectic fit. Okay, maybe it's not that bad. Once I feed him this report, he'll stop glaring and probably swim away.
I can tell he remains leery about Bobby on the whole. He thinks of my partner as some kind of notional logician and I'm not sure that's entirely a good thing. It's obvious Captain Ross admires "The Goren Ability" to solve cases, but it's also obvious he believes Bobby may be living on the nervous verge. It's awful, but sometimes I wonder if he's right.
We used have so much fun. Bobby and Me. With ADA Carver and Captain Deakins. So much damn fun it was almost painful. There were days I could hardly wait to get to work. To play. To see what twisted method, Bobby would come up with to get a suspect to give it up, to confess. His hoggy interrogation tactics never injured my pride; it was such a gas to watch his brilliance at work, a joy, really. I'm the senior partner, but I've learned a whole helluva a lot at the side of this perceptive, twitchy, awkward, odd hulking of a man. He can get inside the head of a Perp faster and more effectively than any other investigator I've ever known. It's practically obscene. Not that it wasn't hard to get used to. It took time. We eventually learned how to work in tandem with each other. I learned to trust him with my life, as all good partners learn to do.
But I'm not sure that I trust him with his own. Not anymore.
Today, when that murderer, Lezard, walked into our trap, everything felt almost all right again. Detective Robert Goren, the quirky super-sleuth I've missed so much, seemed to come alive again, a little more, in the old way. She flailed about, an animal tangled in the ropes of her own lies, and I had my partner back. Case Closed. Slightly tarnished and imperfect, but hung up on the wall in plain view for everyone to see.
Then she got him. I don't know why he let her do it. He jumped down and opened up the door, himself. Opened the door just a crack by responding to her comments about the files. He let another crazy woman grab him by the balls and to get him with a few desperate well-placed words about her take on what she read in his official file, and in mine –about her take on how his behavior might affect me and my career. I got angry. It made me angry, so damn angry, his reaction. Like I should care what some murdering brat has to say. Like he should care. It was imbecilic. Frankly, it was all I could do to walk away. Now, as I calm down, I realize that I wasn't angry so much as scared.
I'm really scared.
Bobby needs my support these days. I know that and I'm trying. He turned to me to support him in a brief flash of weakness, and I couldn't do it. I was just too damn scared.
He's still staring at me. Ross, too. I want to tell them both to go to Hell. Tell Bobby to go home. Get away from me. Everything he's feeling, everything he's thinking right now is written across his scruffy, insanely illustrative face: a pain filled weeping wound that just won't close.
I love Bobby. He's my partner, my living, breathing other half now. And I can't stand to think he's slipping. If I lose him, I'll go on, but I don't know what I'm going to do.