"Another Sunrise"
by Cardinal Robbins
Disclaimer: While John Munch doesn't belong to me, I'd like to rent him.
A challenge response to the word 'sunrise.'
John Munch took the stairs to the roof, where the steady breeze silently ruffled his salt and pepper hair.
He watched the city lights below, as he stood in the crisp dawn air. Red taillights snaked through Manhattan; beneath the indigo giving up its darkness to the sharp slivers of reddish-orange blaze as the sun began to rise. It never ceased to amaze him that, whatever happened on the face of planet Earth, renewal would not be denied. The stars would still retreat, the sun would come across the horizon, and there would always be crime in the city.
John walked over to a bench and sat down, still running on caffeine from the night before. The squad had narrowed down the path of a sexual predator, who had crossed the state line into New York. The perp had screwed up and Cragen's people were there to exploit it, taking him into custody within twenty-four hours. He would be extradited, in due course, but they would sleep with the satisfaction of having taken him off the streets.
As the intense night sky gave up its darkness to fingers of intruding dawn, Munch watched, enraptured at the plethora of colors in the awakening sky. Of all the moments in the day, sunrise was his favorite. He would steal a few minutes to himself, away from the ringing phones and urgent directives, to sit and contemplate the previous day's events. Or, this time, the events of the night.
He thought about Elliot and Olivia, two halves of a cohesive whole, their teamwork not entirely effortless, but somehow seamless in its own right. They finished each other's sentences, knew each other so well, compensated and complemented the other's strengths and weaknesses. He envied them, but knew deep down the blessings of their partnership also held a curse – they could never entirely be together, because of the job.
The Job. John had given his life to it, or at least most of his life thus far. For what? A paltry retirement? The ability to carry a gun and not have to relinquish the sense of power he first discovered as a uniformed officer in Baltimore? No, those weren't the real reasons for his tireless sense of duty. It was the victims. It was The Job. He was a cop, through and through, even when he had tried to retire, made every effort to put law enforcement out of sight and out of mind. It hadn't worked. He had to return to what he knew, to what owned his soul even more than any of his ex-wives and ex-lovers.
It had cost him more than what could be compensated with cold, hard cash or a comfortable retirement account. Eventually, he was forced to admit to himself it was tough being married to a cop. No one understood the raw ambition to solve a case, the hours it would exact from him, the emotional investment he made in The Job. He felt jealousy rise in his throat like bile, as he thought of Elliot and how he always had Olivia. She loved him without conditions or limitations. He longed for that kind of love, but wondered if it would ever be able to find him as he worked at the Sixteenth Precinct.
As John watched Mother Nature's swift, sure hands reaching across the skyline in their multicolored splendor, he had no way of knowing what would happen in just a few short hours.
While he observed the changing cityscape, a woman in the North Tower of the World Trade Center was brewing French Roast for her FBI colleagues, opening a box of Krispy Kremes and waiting for her supervisor to wander in and look for his coffee mug.
Munch was blissfully unaware that he would be called back to the Sixteenth an hour after arriving home, looking in the direction of the WTC to see a plane crash directly into the South Tower, the second of two attacks in a short span of time which would stretch into an eternity.
He could not know, as he sat on the bench on the precinct's roof, the kind of love he longed for would soon be his. He would find her, trapped and bleeding, in the Hell that would be the World Trade Center disaster. John would hear her voice and feel his heart race, a bond growing between them in the precipitous moments before the Towers lurched to ground zero. He would lose her, only to hear Cragen tell him he had found her once more, and he would see her again.
Once more, possibly for the last time, he would reach out with his heart and be rewarded for it. As with Elliot and Olivia, John Munch didn't realize – nor could he – his chance at love had not passed him by.
All he knew at that moment was the joyousness of another sunrise. He looked up and smiled softly, before going back down the stairs to his squad.