a/n: just polishing up an old drabble about the nature of Goren and Eames' partnership, gently embroidered. They fascinate me as they are so firmly bonded, but there's still a fragility to that bond. It ended up taking a turn at the end which I didn't see coming, but which I couldn't deny once I had written it down.
Lines in the Sand
After five years together on the job, there are some places that they have come to think of as "theirs." There's a spot in front of 1PP where they can take a break and talk, where he can smoke if he feels like it, and she can keep an eye on the time with the help of the courthouse clock across the street. They have a special coffee shop around the corner, where they often escape for life giving caffeinated substances on a busy morning full of paperwork, or to grab a couple sandwiches to get them through an afternoon full of interviews. They have a favorite Chinese place for late nights with unsolved cases, and a little Italian restaurant in his neighborhood where they sometimes go for dinner when they finally close those cases. And when the chips are down, or they have an especially rough day, there is a little bar in her neighborhood, where he can sip smoky scotch and she can indulge in her weakness for Margaritas. She has a fondness for drinks which are tart and strong, the irony of which he loves, just as she loves that he tends to favor drinks that are complex and full of hidden mysteries.
Their lives are rather like the conjoined desks where they spend so much of their time sharing their thoughts and the myriad of paperwork that piles up while they are out gathering more information to generate even more paperwork. They stand together yet separate, joined but still discreet, although after so many years as partners, things tend to flow across their desks – sometimes on his, sometimes on hers – but each knows where the boundaries lie. His books are his. Her pictures are hers. The Santa mug was hers too, but much coveted by him, and so they fought over it amicably, the way married couples might fight over the remote control. Some days she let him keep it, other days he acceded to her sovereign right of ownership. During a rough patch in their partnership he accidentally knocked it off the desk and shattered it, and its absence left an empty hole on their desks much like the empty spot in their relationship caused by a certain amount of personal unease with each other, the product of several very bad cases in a row, and some looming personal problems on both their parts. For a while some thought that their partnership might have been shattered just like the mug. But she and he both knew that even if they had their differences and were apart for a while, eventually they would find their way back to that common middle ground where they work so well together.
It is like that in their lives. Things flow across between them, private jokes, shared experiences, common enemies. But when the time comes to stop working for the day, they each have their own lives and their own places, and they both somehow know that in order for them to function as a team they have to respect each others boundaries. To the outside world they seem joined. They seem the same and in many ways they are. It's part of what makes them great partners. But their real strength comes from their differences. Yin and yang, two halves of a whole, completely in sync and yet they are two very different people with very different outlooks and opinions.
They need their time apart, just as they need their time together. So while they have places they share, they also have places that they never go to together -- his mother's bedside and her husband's grave site among them. She spends her holidays surrounded by a large, loud, loving family. His holidays are spent alone, the consequence of a scattered, battered family. As families go, they couldn't be more different. Hers is intact and relatively stable (as stable as they get nowadays). His is broken and unsound of both mind and body. She has family reunions. He has none. She once had a husband. Whether he ever had a lasting relationship is buried somewhere in his past, mysterious and unspoken. Her only child belonged to her sister, her pregnancy, not really her own. He is great with kids, but with his past, he does not see fatherhood in his future. But whatever their beginnings, they ended up at an intersection, and after a few early detours, both turned the right way.
Their partnership was not of their creation, but was of their making. They found their right of way. They discovered that together they are more than the sum of their parts, for better or for worse. But now they tenderly and tentatively wait for the day that their private lives will have to crush up against each other, when she must stand beside him, stand for him, stand in for his family. On that day when he exchanges bedside for graveside, and they both have gravestones to visit …