Disclaimer: All images, characters, settings, etc. from Law and Order: Criminal Intent are the property of NBC and Wolf Productions. This is a work of fiction done purely for non-profit reasons.
A/N: I've never written any L&O until now. This is my first, very tentative, foray (more a character exploration than anything). So please, please, let me know if this is off, on, or somewhere in between. Thanks!
The Way It Is
She doesn't cry in front of him. Not for any reason. Since she's met him, there's occasionally been that which makes the tears gather, but she doesn't let even one fall. Not when the case they're working on strikes very close to home and brings up old ghosts. Not when she's forced into revealing to a roomful of people who don't matter, and one who does, that she once had serious reservations about his judgement. And not even when he's betrayed their mutual trust by leaving her out of the loop and endangering his life.
She gets stern, she gets caustic, she gets brittle. She goes cold and silent. But she never cries.
He doesn't maneuver her. Never sits across from her and subtly grills her for insights into her motives, her psyche. He could manipulate her into opening up, but he doesn't. Not during the case they're working when he knows a kid's involvement has touched off her maternal-warrior instincts. Not when yet another suspect has come onto her and she reacts with her stone face. And not when he tells her his mother wants to meet her, and she furrows her brow and with her lips makes a very strange, half-smiling half-pursed motion.
He watches, he listens, and he commits to memory. He asks her questions. But he never questions her.
They don't touch, not with intent. Not when she's in a hospital bed and he's sitting at her side, just hours after she's been tortured and he's slammed his mentor into a wall out of fear that he's lost her. Not when they're standing alone in the bullpen and he's watching her ache from the newly-opened wounds that her husband's death cut into her. Not when they're searching through the woods on Thanksgiving Day, and she sees his face as his mother's call shreds another of the unraveling threads of his heart.
When they're sitting side-by-side at a bar, he never reaches out and covers her hand with his. When they're walking next to each other, she never lifts her fingers to curl them around the muscle of his forearm. His knuckles don't know the silk of her cheek. Her shoulders have never felt the warm weight of his arm.
They look, when there's soft humor or resigned cynicism to share. They avoid looking, when the emotions are too much for sharing. They speak. They breathe. And they know.
But they don't touch.