A/N: Once again, thanks for the reviews. I'm really enjoying this story so far. If you guys like it, please let me know. Oh, and for those who were wondering, the title will be explained in the next few chapters.



Faith Yokas stared hard into the locker room mirror, reaching up with her right hand and tugging gently on the collar of her uniform to straighten it. She glanced up at the clock hanging on the wall above her, and frowned just noticeably. Bosco was late. It was definitely not uncommon; hell, it was practically the story of his life. But Faith couldn't help but worry, nonetheless. It was what she did, who she was, as a mother. Even with those she cared about right in front of her face, part of her still worried for their safety.

"So he's late again, huh?"

Faith looked up as John Sullivan and Ty Davis Jr, two fellow officers already dressed and ready for duty, entered the locker room. Davis, showing a moment of remarkable perception for a man, noticed the worry lines around her eyes. "Hey, I'm sure he's fine. Probably just had a date last night, or something. I bet he's waking up to some girl right about now."

Faith shook her head in denial. "No, if he would've told me about that yesterday." She slumped down on the bench to tighten her shoes. From the other side of the room, where he stood slipping slowly at a mug of coffee, Sully laughed.

"You mean, he would've bragged about it. I agree with Davis. The kid's got a messed up sense of priorities."

At that very moment, the door to the locker room swung open angrily. The man in question stood motionless in the doorway for a long few seconds, studying those already there with narrowed eyes. With a keen eye of observation only a mother possessed, Faith immediately noticed his appearance. His clothes were wrinkle and spot free and his hair had been styled in the loosest sense of the word. Bosco rolled his eyes in a classic 'what-the-hell-are-you-looking-at Boscorelli expression, and brushed past her on his way to his locker. As he slid past her, the faint hand shaped red mark on his left cheek became visible.

"What the hell happened to your face?"Faith cried, much to Bosco's discouragement. Her shout attracted the attention of the other two officers, who sauntered over and observed their co-worker as he kicked off his sneakers. When he wasn't forthcoming with a reply, Sully decided to come up with his own explanation.

"What, you call a girl by the wrong name again?"

Having forgotten her earlier worry, Faith smiled. Sully and Bosco had a relationship that was complex had best. Although each had marginal amounts of respect for the other, they were always trying to outdo one another. Bosco would make a snide remark about Sully's weight, or choice in dinner meals, with Sully coming back with a retort about Bosco's height, or choice in women. To the casual observer, it was hurtful and insulting. To one who knew them as well as Faith did, it was quite entertaining.

Today, however, it seemed as though Bosco didn't want to play. One shoe on, the other sitting on the bench, and his pants on but not buckled, he crossed the space between him and Sully in two giant steps. Before Sully, or anyone one else for that matter, could do anything to stop him, he had grabbed the older and larger man by the collar, and slammed him against the bank of lockers with a tinny thud.

"Shut the fuck up, Sullivan!"he shouted, pushing him again for emphasis. "You don't know what the hell you're talking about!"

"Get the hell off me!"Sully yelled, having recovered from his initial surprise. Bosco released his grip and backed off, the fight obviously gone from his blue eyes. He resumed changing, buckling his pants and pulling his sweater off over his head. Faith and Davis exchanged glances; the confrontation had gone down too quickly for either of them to have prevented it. She noticed Sully eyeing her partner angrily, and motioned to Davis to get him the heck out of there. Davis complied, steering the older man out of the locker room and down the hall to roll call.

Silence descended on the room like a plague, the only sound was the occasional rustling of Bosco's clothes as he dressed hurriedly.

"What the hell was that about?"Faith asked finally. When Bosco didn't reply, she stepped over the wooden bench to stand directly in front of him. Reaching out, she stilled his hands as they frantically buttoned up his shirt. "Who hit you?"she asked softly.

A pained expression crossed his face, but it only lasted a second. "It's nothing, Faith. Really. Just said the wrong thing to a pretty lady." Bosco tried to ignore her eyes on his face as he finished preparing for their shift. He didn't want to talk about it. He didn't want to think about it. In fact, if given the chance, he would've traveled back in time and stopped himself from saying those things. He shook his head slowly to himself. Who was he kidding? He couldn't have stopped himself from doing that anymore than he could stop an airplane with his pinky finger. Having finished getting ready, he looked to Faith. She was standing just inside the locker room door, studying him with a look he recognized well. He saw it every time he was in the same place at the same time as Faith and either of her two kids. She was mothering him, just with her eyes. He scowled, and walked towards her.

"We'd better hurry. Don't want to be late."

'Since when?'Faith thought to herself as she followed her partner down the hall to roll call. She would get it out of him eventually, she knew. She always did.

A little over a half an hour later, Maurice Boscorelli turned the ignition of 55-David, glancing at his partner just as the engine turned over. This had to be some kind of a record for Faith. She had managed to sit through roll call, keep quiet while Sergeant Christopher interrogated him about his face; had even walked out of the station and over to their cruiser without bringing it up. He was impressed.

"So, are you gonna tell me, or what?"

He froze instantly, hand hovering above the gear shift. 'Here it comes.' He resumed the motion, and threw the car into reverse, backing out of the spot with tires squealing. "There's nothing to tell, Yokas."

Faith rolled her eyes. He thought she didn't know him. After eight years of being partners, he thought she couldn't recognize his little tricks and quirks. He always called her by her last name whenever she got too close to something personal. Maybe it was a defense mechanism, a way of trying to convince himself that they were just business partners, and nothing more. What he didn't know was that it had not effect on Faith.

"Look, Bosco, you wouldn't have thrown Sully up against the lockers if there was nothing to tell. You don't have to tell me, but you should know that I'd be a pretty shitty cop if I couldn't figure it out on my own."

Fortunately for Bosco, the dispatcher's voice came crackling over their shoulder radios. "55-David, reports of a possible 10-54 in alley behind 34th and Elm."

Faith responded promptly as Bosco swung the cruiser into a highly illegal u-turn. "Great way to start a shift,"she muttered to herself, as she reached out and flicked on the flashing lights.

Despite the pleasant sounding street name, Elm was a hive of drug activity. While it wasn't routine, it certainly wasn't unheard of for a dead body to show up in the area. Drug overdose, fight among junkies, even a simple heart attack. It seemed to Bosco as if they had been called to the area at least a dozen times for every cause of death there was. Even so, as he pulled the RMP into a parking spot across the street, he touched his gun with his right hand, reassured by the cool metal his fingers encountered. In an area like this, dead bodies were checked over and picked clean for anything of value. It was highly likely they would find some poor idiot high on something, willing to risk his life for another hit. Neither officer wanted to take a chance.

They approached the alley behind the old and crumbling buildings by way of a narrow opening between an abandoned bowling alley, and a variety store. "So, what do you think?"he asked, as they stepped out into the garbage strewn alley. "Hit, or overdose?"

Faith frowned in concentration as she looked around. "My gut tells me something else, this time."

A ten foot high chain link fence stretched up before them, lined at the base with overflowing garbage dumpsters, and little villages of cardboard boxes that ran along the fence as far as Bosco could see. He wrinkled his nose in distaste. Although a part of his mind felt for the people trapped in this cycle of drugs and living off the street, another part of him hated them for making his job that much harder. He glanced over at Faith, picking through piles of garbage bags with her foot, and decided to do the same.

"Dispatch didn't have anything else to say, did they?"he called over as he pulled himself up onto the edge of a dumpster. He pulled his nightstick out of his gunbelt, and used it to rifle through the items in various stages of decay.

"You heard about as much as I did, Bos,"she replied, a heavy clattering of a metal garbage can following her words. Bosco jumped down from the dumpster, and moved onto the next. "I swear to whatever powers that be, if this is a prank, heads are gonna roll. We're police officers. Not garbage men."

He lifted a black garbage bag nearly bursting with filth, and tossed it over his shoulder.

"They prefer to be called waste management, Bos. Try and be a little politically correct."

Rolling his eyes, Bosco grabbed the mouth piece of his shoulder radio. "Central, this is 55-David at 34th and Elm. Got anything else on that 10-54?"

A short burst of static followed his words, then the dispatchers voice came through the speaker. "Nothing. Anonymous tip. Sorry, guys."

"Come on, Bos!"Faith shouted from where she crouched peering into an overturned can. "The sooner we check the area, the sooner we can get the hell out of here."

Bosco nodded more to himself, than anything else, and continued moving further from Faith in his search. There was nothing he hated more than dead body calls. For a man of action, it was intensely frustrating to come across someone that he couldn't do anything for. But after all this time working in New York City, he understood. He approached an old, Oscar the Grouch style garbage can, wondering how a body could've ended up in there, but pulling the lid off anyway. A strangled gasp suddenly escaped his lips, and he flew back instinctively. 'Oh, jeez, please don't tell me...' He bent forward at the waist, hands resting on his knees, trying to resist the bile bubbling up in the back of his throat. 'You're a police officer,'he told himself forcibly. 'Just do your damn job.' After a short minute, he straightened, and neared the can slowly. Swallowing hard, Maurice Boscorelli peered into the can. A tiny baby, probably no more than a few months old, was nestled on top of a garbage bag near the top of the can. She was wearing only a diaper; actually, a t-shirt fashioned into a diaper. The tips of her nose, and fingertips were slightly blue with frostbite. Bosco bit back the swell of anger. How someone could do this to a child so young and defenseless, he would never know. He looked over to Faith, who was using her flashlight to search a partially filled dumpster. He opened his mouth to call out to her, but a sudden movement caught his eyes. He looked down at the baby, and was startled to see a pair of brilliantly blue eyes staring back at him. She began to shiver, so aggressively that the garbage can she was in vibrated slowly. Without a second thought, Bosco ripped off his jacket and picked the girl up, wrapping her tightly.

"Faith!"he yelled, hurrying back to the alley opening. "Start the car! I got a little girl!"

His partner looked up, her face momentarily written with confusion. But a partner's connection once again proved to be stronger than words, and she understood. She sprinted ahead of Bosco, who was running as fast as he could without jostling the tiny life in his arms. She opened his door, then swung around the other side and climbed in, starting the car and peeling away from the curb as Bosco shut his door. "Is she alright?"

Bosco shook his head helplessly. "I don't know. She looks nearly frozen. I thought she was dead."

Faith grabbed the CB radio off the dashboard. "This is 55-David, advise Mercy we're on route with a baby, possible frostbite and hypothermia."

"Shouldn't she be crying?"Bosco asked, frowning in concern as he looked down into the bundle that lay nearly motionless in his arms. "I thought that's what babies do."

Faith didn't answer. She chewed her lip nervously as she threw the RMP into a tight right hand turn. This was hardly what she had been expecting when told there was a dead body waiting for them. Her first assumption was that the baby had been abandoned by her junkie mother who left in search of another hit. But in the city she lived and worked, it could be any of a number of things. As a mother of two, her heart always went out to children caught up in the situations of their parents. And that seemed to be the case this time as well.

Thankfully they arrived at Mercy, pulling up in the Emergency Vehicles Lane. Bosco was swarmed as soon as he set foot out of the car. A nurse took the baby from him, securing her on a gurney with Bosco's jacket still wrapped around her. Then the team rushed her inside, leaving the two police officers standing still in the parking lot.

"Well, it's out of our hands now, Bos,"Faith said, slapping her hand on his shoulder. "Let's get out of here."

But Bosco wasn't listening. He was motionless, with his arms hanging loosely at his sides, staring at the closed emergency room doors. His face was blank of emotion, although Faith could see the storm of feelings behind his indigo eyes. "My jacket,"he said softly, reaching up and rubbing his hand over the top of his head. "She still had my jacket on."

Faith nodded to herself as she followed him into the hospital, but paused mid-stride when something occurred to her. "Bosco!" She jogged a few steps to catch up with him, reaching out to touch his bare arm. "How did you know the baby was a girl?"

He responded with a small smile, and a slight shrug. "I'm not sure. I just did. Lucky guess."

He favoured Faith with a knowing glance, then continued on to the nurses station.