A Law Order: Criminal Intent Fanfiction
Written by Kate "SuperKate" Butler"
I.
The first toy I can consciously remember playing with was a stiff-armed and poorly-articulated Superman action figure my father bought me for my third birthday, arriving in a red-ribboned box after several weeks of my spending time playing with my brother's GI Joes. My mother, later, would blame this very gift for what she considered my more dire personality quirks and personal foibles, announcing loudly at the dinner table that her "little Lexi" would have benefited greatly from dolls and tea sets in the place of action figures and plastic cap guns. After all, in her Irish Catholic universe, I should have been playing Barbies with my little sister; instead, my brother Joey and I pulled off their heads and displayed them proudly around the sandbox, hanging them on stakes made from elm twigs. That's just how our world worked.
I grew up in a little house just on the outskirts of New York City proper, the third child of an Irish-born secretary and a proud police detective. My arrival, or so it was said by some of my looser-lipped relatives at family gatherings, had been a surprise to my parents, considering the fact that my older brother was not yet a year old when I was born. "Real Irish twins," my Dubliner uncle would joke on his few forays over the Atlantic to visit us. "Too bad Lexi wasn't a boy. Then, they'd have real fun."
But, as my astute uncle pointed out, I was a little ruddy-haired girl with plump cheeks and, miraculously, only a modest number of freckles. Because of our miniscule age difference, gender be damned, Joey and I became fast friends, sharing a room and playing together while my oh-so-sophisticated older sister - nearly five years older than myself - flounced about with her crying, diaper-wetting dolls and frilly dress-up clothes. Perhaps growing up with a brother so close in age spoiled my feminine whiles, but I found Ashley's dolls boring and her dress-up clothes silly. The only dress-up I would play was drowning in my father's uniform coat as Joey and I chased one another around the house in a game of "cops and robbers." Most often, I was the cop. Joey was always of the mind that I would make a rotten criminal.
We spent almost all our time together, in those grammar school days, unsupervised and unbothered as our older sister swung her legs, doing homework at the kitchen table, and our younger sister - arrived three years after me - screamed and cried, loud and unruly. Together, we climbed trees and rode our bikes, mine still with training wheels, down to the corner park. We played stickball with the neighborhood boys in the street. My Catholic school uniform skirts forever remained rumpled and grass-stained, damaged from chasing the boys home from school.
Eventually, my mother allowed me a few pairs of slacks to wear out in the yard, and I never again wore a skirt voluntarily after that.
Our games were innocent, fun, and light-hearted, in those moments. Joey loved the superhero cartoons and comics, and we spent a good deal of time make-believe playing Batman, Superman, and Spiderman. I almost always was the hero, with a bath towel cape and a handkerchief mask, the grass cool and wet with dew beneath my bare feet as I chased Joey's Joker, Lex Luthor, or Green Goblin through the well-kept, lush lawns.
One time, after our school day had finished and Joey and I were changing out of our uniforms to go down to the park, Carrie - our strawberry-blonde kindergartener of a younger sister - whined at me from the doorway. "Lexi, let me play!" she pleaded, stomping a stubborn little foot. "I can be the bad guy!"
"We're playing Batman," I informed her coolly. "You can't play Batman."
"I can too!" she protested. "I'll be the bad guy, Joey can be Batman, and you can be Robin."
I stared at her. "I'm Batman. NOT his sidekick."
My mother scolded us for making Carrie cry before we left.
II.
Unfortunately, all good days in the life of an elementary school girl are forced to come to an end.
I was eleven when Joey started at the middle school, a looming, dark brick building separated from the elementary school by a poorly-managed lawn. September that year was cooler than usual, and it found my brother bogged down with homework - a strange, foreign concept - and his new, middle school friends, many of whom hailed from other neighborhoods.
His Irish twin of a sister, however well meant she may have been, was promptly forgotten.
I attempted to accept his apathy with grace and dignity, but reading comic books and playing soccer against the chain link fence in the back yard felt lonely compared to chasing Joey down the sidewalk, laughing and shouting. The neighborhood boys, too, snubbed me, realizing for perhaps the first time that girls were, in fact, different from them. Ashley, now a sixteen-year-old beauty, had begun to attract boyfriends, and spent hours on the phone every night. Our younger sister, a second-grader with a gap-toothed smile, still cuddled her rag dolls and dressed our housecat up in a bonnet and skirt.
I became an island in the midst of the family, too old for dolls, not old enough for the telephone, and not male enough to play football with my one-time friends.
My mother and father spent their nights getting into loud, ugly rows, her brogue mingling with his inner-city accent as I lay awake in bed, Carrie murmuring in her sleep on the bottom bunk. They fought mostly about money and occasionally about us children. He was off in the city for too long of nights; she needed to go back to work as a typist if any of us were expected to attend college. He should attempt a promotion; she should be more understanding of the limbs he climbed out on for the sake of our family. Over and over again, doors slammed, engines revved, my mother sobbed.
But he was always home in time for dinner, and she was always smiling.
I became increasingly independent, teased miserably by the girls at school as I, enraged one winter afternoon at some comment or another from my sisters, sliced off my ruddy pigtails in favor of short-cropped, boyish hair. My friends at the Catholic school giggled over Betty and Veronica comics while I poured over the Green Lantern and Daredevil; they discussed cute boys while I stared out the windows at the looming, dark building across the lawn, wondering what games Joey would play with his friends after school. My teacher sent an endless, steady stream of concerned notes home to the house, all following the same, general theme.
"Lexi spends an enormous amount of time apart from the other children.
"Lexi angrily told one of the other girls that Superman character Lois Lane is a 'bimbo' in class today."
"Lexi refused to change back into her skirt after gym class."
"Lexi informed me today that she would prefer being called Alex."
On the nights those notes came home, my parents fought more loudly and ardently than usual, and those times, it was always about me.
III.
Grammar school segued into middle school and then into high school as,
with my older sister entering college my eighth grade year, we were pulled from Catholic school and deposited roughly into the public school system, where skirts were no longer required and I didn't need to recite a "Hail Mary" when I picked on the other girls my age. I, embarrassed primarily by puberty and secondarily by my awkwardness and inability to make any new friends, wore battered jeans and worn-out sweatshirts to school, moping my way through the system as a number, rather than a name.
If I qualified as becoming increasingly morose, Joey qualified as becoming increasing tumultuous. Every evening at home was a screaming match between himself and my mother, yelling about his friends, his attitude, his grades, his lack of respect. My father worked overtime and my mother was employed nights at the local fire department dispatch station, and often I would rise early in the morning to see Joey just coming home, sneaking in quietly through the back door.
"Hey, 'Lex," he'd smile at me, eyes bloodshot and breath stinking of alcohol. His hands always ran through my hair in a clumsy, drunken noogie. "Don't tell Ma, okay?"
I started making coffee in the mornings for him, and when my mother noticed halfway through my ninth grade year, I claimed I liked it and forced myself to drink the vile, bitter stuff, as well.
A few months into my tenth grade year, two suit-wearing men from the New York City Police Department arrived at my door and, flashing golden badges, demanded to speak to my mother in private. Carrie and I huddled in the kitchen as they discussed the matter in hushed tones, filling the living room with whispers of "embezzlement," "blood money," and "accepting bribes." My mother sobbed as she locked the door behind them, and my little sister peered up at me as I leaned against the doorjamb between the kitchen and living room, watching.
"What's happening, Lexi?" she whispered in the dark that night as doors banged and my father swore and my mother cried. We huddled together on her bottom bunk, balled up in blankets and listening to the spaces between the silence. Her eyes were clenched shut as she clung to my nightshirt, face buried in my chest. "What did Papa do?"
My lips moved, but no sound exited my mouth. There really was no answer.
The divorce papers were served only a few weeks after my father's indictment, and my mother changed her last name back to maiden name, O'Malley. Carrie accepted the change in stride, signing her papers and homework assignments with bubbly letters and changing the apostrophe into a heart. Joey raged against the change and refused to have anything to do with it, cutting up the new ID card the high school sent him when all the paperwork was finalized.
"I'm no fuckin' O'Malley," he grumbled one morning as we sat together in the kitchen, enjoying our coffee in the few moments before Carrie's alarm clock rang. His words slurred slightly together, but they were still his words. "I'm an Eames, 'Lex. We all are."
After that day, I cut up my ID as well, and resumed signing my assignments as Alex Eames.
IV.
The car accident happened almost exactly a year later, at 3 a.m. on a Saturday morning.
Even now, the moments run together, leaving me only to remember the small, insignificant details. The sound of sirens screaming down our street, and Carrie shaking my leg as she attempted to wake me up. My mother screaming at the pair of cops at our door, slamming her fists into their chests, collapsing in their arms. The scent filling the kitchen as I made coffee at six a.m., the same way I always did, even knowing that no one would be there to drink it.
Joey's funeral was on the following Tuesday.
Eameses and O'Malleys mingled together after the service, the former group standing aloof and quiet while the other half the clan, many flying over from Ireland proper, laughed and cursed and gave the required number of hugs, sloppy kisses, and hair-ruffles. My mother remained gracious, smiling warmly thanks to vast amounts of valium. Ashley and her accounting major of a fiancé hovered near the back, shaking hands and accepting introductions, and Carrie stared weakly into space, numb and lonesome.
One distant relative, a cousin from Donegal I'd never before met and would never see again, saddled up to me shortly after the service ended, ruffling my still-short hair. "I'll always remember your Mum's stories about you and Joey when you were a wee lass," he informed me warmly, clapping me around the shoulders. "She said you were Joey's sidekick, a right little gal to her big brother."
I shoved my hands into the pockets of my dress slacks and shook my head. "I wasn't his sidekick," I declared plainly, the cool breeze causing me to shiver. "We were more equals than anything else."
Life continued on despite my brother's unfortunate death, leaving me to get my sister up every morning and feed her a small breakfast of toast and cereal as I sipped my coffee and read through the newspaper. The friend Joey had been riding with when the car spun out of control had been ridiculously drunk and, through some sort of twisted miracle, survived the incident to walk away without a scratch. Short snippets of news on his trial occasionally popped up in the paper, assigned to some obscure inside page that no one ever read.
Except, of course, for me.
It was April when the final news brief ran, boasting the headline, "Drunk driver in O'Malley death acquitted."
"I don't understand it!" I roared to my mother that evening as she dressed for work, powdering her nose in the bathroom mirror. In the next room, Carrie laughed on the phone with one of her friends. "How could he get off? He killed Joey! Ran right into a tree and killed him!"
My mother sighed and shook her head. "Lexi, you just don't understand," she informed me, a gentle hand touching my shoulder. "The police have to work in certain ways. The boy's family hired a very good lawyer, and some of the evidence had to be excluded."
"But he could kill someone else!" I screamed, kicking the wall. Carrie's laughter halted suddenly. "He could do this again! He should be in jail!"
"He should, but the law doesn't always work that way, Lexi."
That was a week before my seventeenth birthday.
On my seventeenth birthday, I decided to become a cop.
V.
My sisters came and visited my inner-city apartment occasionally as my career in law enforcement began, hovering around the tiny studio space and offering to help me by cooking, cleaning, or doing my laundry. My mother, visiting less often, insisted that the local police department in the suburbs would serve me better. She never offered, as my sisters did, to visit my precinct and meet my partner or commanding officer, and I never asked her to visit, either. The silences between us widened as she sat alone in my apartment during my routine patrols, or watched me idly while I filled out paperwork.
Eventually, she decided it would be best to stop visiting. I didn't blame her. Eventually, my sisters, too, decided to spend their lives doing other things, rather than coddling me. I didn't blame them, either.
I made my way through the ranks as most police officers did, eventually landing a position in another precinct as a homicide detective. A handful of older detectives regarded me carefully, whispering comments they didn't think I could hear under their breath, eyes following me as I strode across the squad room. Occasionally, someone would saddle up to me as I bent low over paperwork and ask in a hushed tone, "Say, are you John Eames' daughter?"
Always, I smiled warmly, eyes still focused on my paper. "Never heard of him," I lied.
Blood and guts, however macabre they may have been, became my private Mecca, and I learned to examine victim after victim with a careful eye and artful study. I saw drug lords with gunshot wounds to the eye socket, housewives beaten to death with golf clubs, children shaken by babysitters, and homeless men gnawed upon by stray dogs. The dead spoke to me in ways the living never had, and I slowly realized that crime scenes told more about a person's life than their home or car ever could.
My partner, a blond-haired, blue-eyed Columbia graduate with a chiseled chin and a flashy smile, teased me about my natural interest in criminology over drinks more than once. "Alex," he scolded one night in particular, when I couldn't stop babbling about a recent murder over my beer, "you need to take a break from this. If all you ever worry about is work, you're going to end up leading a fairly sad life."
I rolled my eyes. "Joe," I shot back, waving my long-necked bottle of Miller and mimicking his patronizing tone, "my job is to catch the bad guys of society. If I don't worry about the victims and their murderers, who will?"
"You can't carry the weight of the world on your shoulders," he sighed with a shake of his head. "You can't be the only one to bear this burden. Sympathy and empathy are fine, but if you let this passion take over your life, it'll get you killed."
I attempted, blindly, to take his advice. A few months later, I lay awake in bed, his soft snoring at my side distracting rather than comforting as I studied the map of cracks in the paint on the ceiling. The hum and buzz of the city beneath my window - horns blaring, sirens screaming, shouts echoing in the distance - filled my ears, surrounding me, suffocating me.
New York City may be quieter at night than it is during the daylight hours, but it is never truly dark. Lights blaze from windows and the streetlamps, blotting out the stars. Shadows danced on the street as I watched the city from the fire escape, watching as a lone man stumbled down the sidewalk and listening to two of my neighbors fight across the breezeway.
Three days later, I found an application on my desk for an open position in the Major Case Squad with a post-it note on it. "Fill this out, Alex," the familiar scrawl read.
I glanced at my partner and smiled slightly.
I dumped him the day I got my acceptance letter.
VI.
From the first moment I laid my eyes on him, my major case partner was like nothing I had ever expected.
I sat in my new captain's office my first day on the new job, hands folded in my lap and back straight, watching as my new gray-haired commanding officer tapped a pencil eraser against his desk calendar, waiting impatiently. "He's late," he grumbled after another moment's pause, reaching for his phone. "Still pouring over that case, knowing him. I swear, one of these days, I'll - "
The door burst open as the receiver left its base and a wild-haired, middle-aged man was suddenly before us, holding open a manila folder. He was dressed impeccably in a navy-blue, high-end suit, his tie perfectly matched and aligned with his pale blue dress shirt. He opened his mouth to speak and then hastily closed it again, dark eyes glancing in my direction.
Sighing, the captain rose from his seat and gestured to me. "Detective Robert Goren, I would like you to meet your new partner," he stated. I rose awkwardly, blanching under the staring gaze. When I'd been seated, he appeared as a looming, hulking mountain of a man, but I'd assumed the angle had just been deceiving. Standing before him, my head barely reaching his shoulder even with my three-inch heels, I realized how wrong I'd been.
I swallowed, though, and stuck out my hand, forcing a smile. "Detective Alexandra Eames," I introduced warmly. "I just transferred - "
"From homicide." I blinked, surprised, and Goren's lips curved into a small, amused smile. "You carry yourself too assertively to be from fraud or vice, and most small women tend not to work in narcotics. And you dress in dark colors with warm tones underneath, appropriate for both introducing yourself to grieving family members and interviewing suspects." He accepted my hand and shook it warmly. "And you didn't grow up in the city, either, did you? No accent."
I stared, and Deakins chuckled softly to himself. "Goren is a bit of a wonder around here," he confided as I gaped up at the tall, smiling, staring stranger. "His mind is like a steel trap."
"And sometimes like a sieve," joked my new partner. Then, suddenly, he dropped my hand and turned directly to the captain, as though he'd just remembered the manila folder and the entire reason for bursting into the room in the first place. "I think I know why he killed Stacy Peters," he blurted out, gesturing to the file. "It took a bit of digging, but I found - "
"Why don't you take your partner and show her around?" the captain stressed, accepting the folder and setting it on his desk. "With the suspect in custody, the case can wait. Detective Eames doesn't even know where the bathroom is, yet. You should show her."
I thanked the commander and we exited the office together, my short legs stretching to keep up with Goren's naturally long strides. He pointed out my desk and gun locker, the interrogation and break rooms, the women's restroom (and, for good measure, the men's as well), and introduced me to a spattering of other detectives. We rounded the squad room a second time and stopped at our desks - pushed together so we would face each other when working - and frowned slightly.
"You're John Eames' daughter, aren't you?"
I blanched for a brief moment and then forced a smile, settling onto the edge of my desk. He stared down at me, intent on my face. "People always ask that, but no," I lied for the thousandth time in my career as a police officer, running a hand through my short hair. "I'm just the daughter of an Irish immigrant, and - "
"An Irish immigrant who married a narcotics cop at the one-seven. Their son was killed in a car crash thirteen years ago." He gestured towards my desk, and my heart dropped into my stomach as I realized what he meant for me to look at: a picture of myself, my sisters, and Joey from when I was still in middle school. "I was in college. I remember hearing about the case. Driver got off on a technicality."
I swallowed the lump in my throat and thrust my hands in my pockets. "Something like that," I replied, uncertain of what more to say. His dark eyes watched me as I glanced awkwardly around the squad room, watching the strangers to ensure no one was taking a vested interest in our private tête-à-tête. "How did you notice that?" I asked, dropping my voice cautiously. "Most people, even if they remembered the case, wouldn't put it together like that."
Goren shrugged slightly and rounded to his desk, sinking into his chair. "It's a gift, I guess," he told me with a shrug. "Now, let me show you why Stacy Peter's husband beat her to death. See, I first thought it was the insurance money, but then..."
I listened to him talk, so eloquent and smooth, as I peered over his shoulder, but my mind could not keep focused. My thoughts rambled together, wondering the secrets of this man and his brilliance, and how I - younger, less experienced, versed in "how," "when," and "who" but never "why" - would keep up.
The reason became clear only at a later date:
I had become a sidekick.
VII.
"I've got your back, Bobby."
We stand outside the apartment, pressed to the wall with our guns drawn, our breath crystallizing on the cold winter air. The building had been condemned and abandoned months earlier, leaving it with no heat, water, or electricity. The hallway is silent except for our breathing and the sound of distant sirens - our backup - howling in the distance.
Bobby glances down at me, arching his dark eyebrows slightly, his head cocking inches to one side like a confused puppy. After five and a half years of our partnership - six full years if you counted my months on leave while I acted as a surrogate mother for my sister - I can sometimes confuse him, leave him guessing. Yes, even the great Robert Goren can be thrown off guard, if the correct buttons are pushed. And, if after six years, I didn't know which buttons they are, I would be a pretty lousy partner.
Some evenings, while we're staying late to crack a case that leaves Bobby distracted and disoriented by the work, Deakins will lean over my shoulder and, smirking, say, "He's lucky to have such a good partner."
The rest of the department realizes it too, and we take the jokes in stride. I've been called peanut butter (to his jelly), Lois Lane (to his Clark Kent), Gilligan (to his Skipper), and, most popularly, Doctor Watson to his irrepressible Sherlock Holmes. The first time another detective had dared to call me Watson, I - blessed with the temper of someone who is not only redheaded but short and Irish as well - threatened him with a shaking fist and fiery retort. Now, even the captain will drop that dreaded name into conversation and I'll smile before nodding. Like Watson, I may not be able to keep up with my partner, but I certainly can support him.
Dark eyes blink. "You're covering me?" he asks?
My mother scolds me on the phone sometimes, even now, since my hair is still short, I still hate skirts, and I am still single. My older sister teases me about my dutiful attitude when I bring over toys and games for my nephew, and Carrie and her husband have tried to force Bobby and I together on more than one occasion. My father, out on parole for several years now, stops by the squad room with bagels and doughnuts every once in a great while, and he and Bobby discuss cases over coffee. I bring the coffee, too, buying our favorites every morning on my way to work, and Bobby thanks me for it with a smile when he greets me.
Occasionally, he slips from formality and calls me "Alex" instead of "Eames," an accidental stumbling from his tongue that, like honey, is rich and sweet.
On the mornings following those days, I buy him a venti-sized coffee.
I am a trusty sidekick. The cousins from Donegal who remembered me from my mother's tales as Joey's sidekick would be proud to equate me as Bobby's as well, always at his side and covering his back. I am not afraid to defer to his intelligence, submit to his superior logic, and allow him the chance to shine while I catch a decent tan from the glow.
But, as with any partnership, he is not afraid to defer to me when my expertise is needed. He is not afraid to let me do the talking and sit back, watch, and wonder. He is not afraid to allow me the role of bad cop to his good, Batman to his Robin, Frodo to his Samwise. He depends on me, the same way the Lone Ranger depended on Tonto. We're a dynamic duo, one very few people can wrap their heads around or figure out.
I have come to enjoy the gradual building of our own, private mystery.
Guns drawn, backs against the wall, breath fogging up the air, I smirk up at him. "Of course," I reply with a casual shrug. "I've always got your back, Bobby. I'm your partner, after all."
He grins at me, briefly, and then springs forward to kick open the door.
And I, covering his back while imagining chasing him through our own well-kept, dew-covered lawn, smile.
Fin.
Standard Disclaimer: Law and Order and all related characters belong to NBC and Dick Wolf. I am simply borrowing them with no intent to, you know, make money. Friends, perhaps, but not money.
Author's Notes: Alexandra Eames is interesting to me because she is so willing to back down and let Bobby do the brunt of the talking, work, and case-solving, even though we all know she, herself, is a strong character. I decided to fill in the gaps of her life and create a little tribute to my favorite character on the show, since I feel like she gets the shaft a lot of the time.
Yes, she does date a guy named Joe while her brother is Joey. I did that on purpose. Just, you know, for the record.
February 26, 2005
6:40 p.m.