A/N: I tried to fight it, I really did! I told myself everyone and their brother would be doing post-eps, and I already have three stories going, and it would be too much . . . but the evil already-provided-plot bunny of doom bit me anyway!
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Alex sits quietly on a hard wooden bench in a hallway just off the main lobby of the courthouse. The slats that make up the seat have begun to dig in to her legs, and she knows that when she stands up her thighs will bear a perfect indented replica of them. For the moment, though, she couldn't care less about her uncomfortable seat or her bruised legs; right now her mind is focused on a very different uncomfortable seat, one she occupied not too long ago, and the only bruising she cares about is that done to her partner's heart and her own.
Question his mental stability . . . an acquired taste . . . I want to explain . . .
Words and phrases from those hellish minutes refuse to be pushed out of her head. She's been trying for as long as she's been sitting here - she estimates that it's been about half an hour since she found this deserted hallway and slumped down onto the bench - but every time she manages to banish one memory, two more appear, dancing through her mind, mocking her with the careless words she wrote down years ago and then foolishly assumed were gone forever.
Bobby got trampled in this case. She's aware that even before she took the stand, he was reeling from the fact that someone could be cruel enough to torment his mother to get to him, and today, while he still hadn't found his balance, they'd used her, his partner, against him. She could have handled the dirty tactics if the defense attorney had been attacking her; she would have taken the blows, explained herself, and known that she wasn't what they were saying she was. But she has been used as a weapon against Bobby, and she is afraid that the impact has broken not only her, but him as well.
Afraid. A short word that couldn't possibly explain what she is bracing herself against. Horror, terror, anxiety, trepidation . . . she might consider asking to borrow Bobby's thesaurus - or his brain - to find more synonyms when they return to work, but she doubts that she'd find a word that covered it. Fear, mixed with guilt, mixed with resentment, mixed with pity, mixed with pain, mixed with love, mixed with betrayal. All of those.
He blew her off outside the courtroom. Oh, it wasn't an obvious blow-off - to most people it probably looked like he was actually exculpating her - but it was a blow-off all the same. The same type she'd seen him give to nosy co-workers, reporters, and probably girlfriends (although she hadn't been privy to those happenings): he approaches as if he's just going to brush past you and you, concerned that he might be angry, stop him to apologize. He glances at you, his face either completely blank or schooled into a mask of polite friendliness, then looks away and tells you that it's fine, he understands. And then he's done with you and he's gone.
He'd never blown her off before this afternoon, ever. Even when she brought up something he desperately didn't want to discuss, the harshest he had been toward her was a snappish, "I don't want to talk about it, ok?"
But he'd done it today. I am an acquired taste. I'm lucky you withdrew the letter. All said in a flat voice, of course, and then that was it as far as he was concerned. He'd maintained a polite facade, even when they re-joined their group outside the courthouse, but she had no trouble identifying it as a false front that he put up to close himself off from her.
The anger hidden in his response began to eat at her then, and it only got worse as time went on. Once Bobby talked the judge's wife into confessing, she'd been out of the room as fast as it was possible to go without looking like she was fleeing. A vague muttered conversation with Deakins about how she was still shaken from the events of the day, and she was gone from the squad room, followed by his shouted admonition to keep her pager turned on.
Then she returned here, to the scene of her crime, to sit on this penitent's bench and try to think.
It's not working. She's not sure why she thought it would. She's also not sure what she's going to do now.
A body sits down next to her. Without looking, she knows it's not Goren; this body is much smaller than his. She really doesn't want to talk to anyone else, and she listlessly turns her head and opens her mouth to tell this interloper so. Her mouth closes again when the realizes that she's looking at Ron Carver, who led her to the slaughter but also tried to rescue her from it.
"Detective," he says in his low, mellifluous voice that usually makes her think of James Earl Jones. Today, it reminds her of being on the stand and she tenses involuntarily. "I'm very sorry for what happened in there," he continues, nodding toward the closed doors of the courtroom they occupied earlier. "If I had known they had that letter . . ." he trails off, leaving her wondering if he's putting the blame on the defense, for not sharing it, or on her, for not telling him about it before it became an issue.
"Yeah, well, they did." With that, she gives him a shrug and returns her eyes to the floor, where they were before he sat down.
"Detective Eames," he tries again. "You did well up there. They shook you, but you kept it together and we were able to rebut their argument." He says this in a semi-excited voice, as if he thinks congratulating her for not crying on the stand will make things all better.
"Fat lot of good it did us," she mutters, feeling sick at the irony he has reminded her of: that she, Bobby, and their partnership were completely torn apart during her few minutes on the stand, and in the end, the murder charge was dropped and her testimony turned out to be near-useless.
She can hear him breathing next to her, but he doesn't speak for another few minutes. Finally, he sighs and says, "I was just passing by and thought I'd tell you that. I'll leave you to your thoughts now. Goodnight, Detective."
Then he's gone and Alex rests her elbows on her knees and drops her head into her hands and fights the tears that she's been battling all day and losing. And here, alone in a dark hallway, she finally allows herself to cry.
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Bobby leans against the wall, tips his head back, and tries to stop the tremors running through him. He's been here for an hour, camped out outside her apartment door. It's a last resort; she hasn't been answering her cell phone at all, and Deakins told him she said she would only respond to pages from Deakins himself.
So he's sitting here alone with his thoughts, playing and re-playing the events of the day in his head. He can't forget the look on her face when the defense attorney asked her to read the letter: horrified pain. She hadn't looked directly at him in those next few seconds, but he could feel her mind squirreling around for a way to spare him. There had been silence, loud and harsh, then she had finally taken a shaky breath and read the paragraph as requested.
And he felt like someone punched him in the gut, but forced himself to keep his face and posture neutral, partly out of pride and partly out of a reluctance to let her see how hurt he was. It was obvious, at least to him, that reading the words out loud was costing her dearly. Whatever she had thought back then, she was pained at the idea of hurting him now.
She'd tried to talk to him outside the courtroom as he leaned against the wall trying to quiet his thoughts, but he had been far too shaken by the combination of both his mother and Eames being hurt to get into a conversation with her. He'd given her a distillation of his thoughts, in two short sentences, and then walked back to the knot of people standing in the center of the lobby and tried to forget today was any different from any other court day.
It had worked for a grand total of thirteen seconds, but even when the events came crashing down on him, he forced himself to hold it together. The case had to be closed now, today, before anyone else could be hurt. Before she could be hurt again, and she would be. They had inured her today only incidentally, to get to him; he feared that tomorrow would bring a direct attack on Eames herself.
And so he had devoted his attention to eliciting a confession, and he had succeeded. And then he had gone looking for his partner to apologize to her and receive in return the apology he was sure she felt she needed to make . . . and she had been gone. He'd had to go to his captain to find out what had happened to her.
She's just really shaken, Bobby, Deakins had said placatingly. You know she's been upset since we left the courthouse, and when she asked if she could take off a little early, I told her to go ahead.
Deakins hadn't known where she had gone, though. He could only say that he assumed she'd gone home and that he doubted she'd be answering her phone.
Bobby had tried anyway and been dumped directly to her voicemail. He'd continued to hit redial again and again as he walked to the subway, then again when he emerged back onto the street. When she still hadn't picked up after something like twenty tries, he had cut back to calling every ten minutes - for all the good it did him, since she still wouldn't answer. So he'd changed clothes and then headed for her building, thinking that he might be able to talk his way into her apartment.
Her doorman knows him and allowed him into the lobby, but informed him that Detective Eames had come and gone. She'd been wearing casual clothes when she left; the man thought it was jeans and a pullover but he hadn't paid much attention. Bobby had thought about it for a few seconds and realized that, although he didn't have a good idea where she might have fled to, she had to come home eventually. And so, with the blessing of her concerned doorman, he found himself pacing the hallway in front of her apartment.
It's nine o'clock at night and he's beginning to truly worry that she may not come back, or may not be able to come back. As safe as the City has become in the last decade or so, a distracted, upset woman is still not a good thing to be while on the street at night. He tries her phone again and nearly burst a blood vessel when it actually begins to ring, but after four rings he receives the familiar voicemail greeting and hangs up.
This means that she has at least turned her phone back on. He decides to consider that a good sign. He also decides that maybe if he makes her phone keep ringing long enough, she'll answer just to shut the thing up.
On re-dial number eleven, he hears the faint sound of her ring coming from the stairwell. She's come back, he realizes with a wash of relief. But will she allow him to stay?
His concern over how she might react to him is forgotten before she's even completely through the stairwell door. She's moving stiffly, as if she's injured or one of her legs has fallen asleep. He desperately hopes it's the latter. Her face gives him no reassurance as it becomes visible a second later. It's red and puffy and she's obviously been crying, long and hard. He closes his eyes and wishes he could turn back time and talk to her there at the courthouse, but time stubbornly continues to run in only one direction.
She stops short when she looks up from pulling her keys out of her purse and catches sight of him. A guilty swipe at her eyes confirms his fear that she's been crying. "You couldn't tell I didn't want to talk from the forty times I didn't answer your call?" she says hoarsely.
"I have . . ." He stops, clears his throat, looks at the floor. "We need to talk, Eames."
She shakes her head as she unlocks her door. "I can't, Bobby. Not now, not tonight."
He ignores that and follows her inside, closing and locking the door behind him. "Eam- Alex, I'm not angry. I don't know if that's what you think, but . . . I'm not."
She takes off her sweater and hangs it up with her back to him. He recognizes the shirt she's wearing under it; it's many sizes too large for her, probably belonged to either her dad or her husband, and she only wears it when she feels like crap and needs something to cuddle into. She doesn't turn to face him as she says, "I don't want to talk about this."
Her voice sounds harsh and he almost believes that she's angry until he sees one arm go up to wipe her eyes. He takes a step closer to her and lays a hand on her shoulder. He doesn't exert much pressure, just enough to let her know that he's here and he's comforting and he cares. "Do you believe me when I say I'm not angry?"
She sniffles and pulls away from his hand, walking into the kitchen with him close behind her. "Can we please just not lie to each other?"
He leans a hip against the counter, crosses his arms, and finally gets to look her in the eye. "I don't know about you, but I'm not lying. Alex, you didn't see your face when he asked you to read that letter," he adds with conviction. "You were -"
"Don't," she says, turning away from him again. "I know what I looked like. I looked like a traitor, and as much as I hate it, you're totally justified in being angry at me."
"You didn't look like a traitor. You want to know what you looked like?"
"Not really." She pulls a box of crackers out of a cabinet and opens it, looks down at it, and re-closes it without eating any.
He pretends not to hear that and goes on, "You looked like you were trying to decide whether going into contempt would do me any good."
She freezes with the box in her hand, halfway up to the cabinet. There is silence for what seems like forever before she slowly slips the box back into the cabinet, plants her hands, palms down, on the counter, and lets her head fall forward between them.
He watches and waits, saying nothing.
She turns to face him, slowly. Her hair is still covering most of her face, but he considers it an improvement from seeing only the back of her neck. "You have no idea how much I wanted to do it," she says with quiet intensity. "I wanted to throw it back in his face and tell him to go find mud that's at least true, if he has to fling mud."
He takes a step toward her and reaches out, pushing her hair behind her ears so he can see her eyes. His hands come to rest on her shoulders as he says, "It would have been useless; the letter was already entered into evidence. You did what you had to do."
"If that's what you think, then how come . . . in the hallway . . ." She breaks off, shaking her head. "Never mind."
"It was true," he says, knowing what she wants to ask. "I am an acquired taste, and I am lucky you dropped the request. I just . . . didn't know if I could get out any more words than that, so I kept it short."
"You blew me off, Bobby," she replies, a flash of her usual spirit replacing the dullness in her eyes for a moment.
"I didn't mean to. You . . ." He sighs and leans against the counter next to her. "All I could think about was that the only two people in my life I really care about were targeted because of their association with me. And you were going to need me to talk you through this, and I couldn't do it. Not then."
Without warning, she wraps her arms loosely around his waist and leans her head against his arm. "I'm so sorry about your mother."
He inhales sharply and uses his free hand to touch her hair. "She'll be ok. It . . . this has happened before and we've always been able to get her back." He feels wetness against his skin and looks down to see tears running down her face.
She gives him a weak smile as an attempt at reassurance. "I just . . . It hurt me to know that they went after her, I can't even begin to imagine what you felt like."
"What I feel about my mother is . . . I could be wrong about this, but it seems like how I feel about my mother being sucked into this is pretty similar to how you felt when you had to read that letter."
"Homicidal?"
He smiles. "Homicidal, and guilty, and feeling like I need to prove that I want to help her, not make her life more difficult than it already is."
Alex nods against his arm. "That's pretty close. Are you sure you're . . .?"
He moves to stand in front of her and takes her face in his hands. Leaning down until his nose almost touches hers, he says, slowly and distinctly, "I am not angry with you. I don't blame you. I'm . . . touched that you wanted to protect me so badly that you considered doing something that would have harmed you. I'd kill you if you ever actually did it," he adds warningly, "but I'm still touched by the thought."
She responds by putting her arms back around his waist, leaning her had against his chest this time and listening to his heartbeat under her ear. It sounds fast, and she tilts her head up and says, "Something's wrong."
He closes his arms around her. "Wrong? With what?"
"Your heart's racing," she replies, raising one of her hands to feel the pulse in his neck.
"It's been . . . a stressful day. I think it's going to be a good week before I get my blood pressure back down to normal." He reaches up and pulls her hand away from his neck, replacing it at his waist. "I'm fine. If I checked your pulse, it would probably be fast too."
She considers that. "You're right, it probably is. Bobby?"
"Hmm?" he says, looking down at her upturned face.
"Did you have . . . plans for tonight?"
He cocks his head to the side curiously. "No, why?"
"You want to stay here for a while? Watch TV or whatever?"
"I'll stay here all night if you want me to," he assures her, dropping a kiss on the top of her head. "Do you want dinner?"
Her eyes widen at the mention of food. "Pizza? I can't remember if I even had any lunch."
"Neither can I - for you or me. Pizza's good. Go get comfortable on the couch while I order it."
"Ok." She keeps her arms around him long enough to give him a hard squeeze, then smiles. "First one on the couch gets to hog most of it."
"Second one on the couch will just have to sit on the first one."
She sticks her tongue out at him before turning and heading for her living room.
He lets out a deep breath he didn't know he'd been holding and just smiles for a moment before reaching for the phone.