a/n: just a little doodle I found and polished up.
They went out for their first drink the night that they closed a case that had been plaguing their department for the better part of six months. They had gone undercover as an art dealer and his assistant, and brought down a mob operation that was using a bogus art gallery to launder money. They were in the mood to celebrate, so she said she knew a place, and he countered that he knew a better one. Her curiosity was piqued and so she said he could pick the place, but that she would drive. She found that his instincts were dead on. It was a quiet place, dark and cozy, but busy enough that they could talk without attracting attention to themselves. They had only been partnered together for a few months, so there was some initial awkwardness. Indeed, the bartender thought they were on a first date. They talked about the case. The marveled at how effective their pretense had been. They realized that they both enjoyed the undercover work. By the end of the evening that also found that they enjoyed each others company.
Once the talk about the case had died down she'd asked him about his time in the Army. His service had come up in one of their first cases together, but she had never really had the chance to explore it further with him. He talked about his tour in Germany, about how he had initially ended up an MP mostly because of his size and, he somewhat reluctantly admitted while gazing at the bottom of his beer glass, because of the Army's ability to recognize that his …stubbornness… could be turned into an asset. He shared with her how his training had taken him into the CID and he had begun learning about criminal profiling, discovering along the way that he loved to get inside the mind of a criminal.
He asked her why she decided to become a cop, and she told him about her father and her brothers and how policing was sort of the family business. No one had really expected her to follow in her fathers footsteps. She was petite, but had always been a bit of a rebel, always on the side of the underdog, and never one to back down from a challenge. She found that digging for the truth and calling criminals to account for their crimes was something that she not only did well, but loved. She used the element of surprise to her advantage. People always underestimated her, and that was their fatal mistake. She made him laugh by telling him stories of her days in Vice and how the perps never knew what hit them when they tried to take advantage of what they saw as a tiny, helpless hooker. They quickly learned she was anything but.
There was much that they didn't say that first night over drinks. But by the end of the evening they found themselves invested in their partnership and had begun to see the advantages that working together could bring them. And over the next few years they found great comfort in working as a team. They found that they could both lead and follow equally well, and by turns they played the good cop and the bad cop. They learned to relish their undercover roles, and found that they while they were pretending to flirt or to argue or discuss inane purchases or watch imaginary children play, they could elicit all kinds of information out of people who were concentrating on what the two of them were doing and not paying attention to what they were being asked. And they delighted in the look on people's faces when they pulled their badges out and let on that they weren't quite who they said they were. The element of surprise became their weapon of choice.