Disclaimer: Don't own them.
A/N: Vartann deals with his pending divorce and having to be in an apartment with Sofia on stakeout. No romance.
Sofia wanted him to go to bed, he could tell. It was rubbing him the wrong way, this undeserved disdain. He had made a comment that had probably been in bad taste. OK, so it had been in bad taste, but what gave Greg Sanders the right to go spreading around the lab that he didn't like women with any weight on them? Greg was following Sara around like a puppy, and it wasn't like she was packing any extra on her frame. And what gave Sofia Curtis the right to judge him at all? She didn't know him, other than to have worked with him a little. He was beginning to feel like he had nothing to lose anymore – no wife, no house, and no real friends.
"You know, you can't be mad at me about something I might have said, that was most definitely misconstrued. You can't judge me before you even know me, and now we're sitting in this little fucking apartment walking on eggshells with one another. It's not right. We're partners, at least on this case. Partners talk," Vartann said, with little introduction.
Sofia just looked at him. Her face was blank. Then she frowned at him.
"So talk," she said, unfazed by his outburst. She was infuriating. "Explain, or don't. Talk about the case. I don't care. You're the one sulking."
"I'm not sulking," he protested, though he had to admit, it did feel a bit like he was sulking.
"Your choice," she said mildly.
Their chat was interrupted by a phone call to Norman Gimble, the suspect next door. They listened carefully as Norman, and someone named Donnie, made an arrangement for Donnie to come to the Norman apartment for a "special treat" as Norman called it.
"This is it," said Sofia. Vartann was already on the phone to the narcs in the vans below.
Donnie, who appeared to be a business man in his mid-thirties, arrived at the pre-arranged time. Both Sofia and Vartann, who had gotten at least a couple hours sleep, were watching in the apartment. The plan was to watch and let Donnie leave the building afterwards. Then he would be pulled over by a black and white and searched. Once the drugs were found on him or his car, he would be booked, and maybe used as a wire tap. Donnie and Norman shook hands and made a little small talk. Donnie looked nervous, or maybe excited, to Vartann's eye. To Sofia and Alex's disappointment, the men walked to the back of the apartment where there was no surveillance. The judge had only given permission for the main living area of the man's apartment. To their surprise, Norman walked back out and toward the kitchen area.
"What the hell is he doing?" Sofia asked. "Is he using the drugs back there? I thought this guy was a dealer in large volume."
"He is. Mid-level. He shouldn't be dealing with individual buyers, and I can't imagine him letting them use in his apartment. This is strange," Vartann agreed. Within thirty minutes, Donnie had come back into the living room. To Alex's eye, he looked lightly disheveled and almost high. The two men seemed to be negotiating a price.
"A nice piece," said Donnie. "How many other buyers?"
"Two at least. I have thought of keeping it for myself," Norman had answered.
Sofia and Vartann looked at each other, confused.
"Are they talking art now? Or furniture?" Sofia asked.
"Maybe it's code," Vartann replied, though his brain was percolating behind his bright eyes. The two men shook hands again. Donnie had said that he had an older piece that Norman might want to trade. They agreed that Norman would come look at it tomorrow.
Sofia was talking with the narcs. They would follow Norman tomorrow. Vartann would stay at the apartment and Sofia would go with the set of detectives following him.
"I'm sorry," Vartann said, after things had gone back to mind-numbingly normal in the apartment next door. "It's rough being on a stakeout," he said, as an excuse.
"Don't be sorry," Sofia said, surprising him. "Maybe we shouldn't have all taken Greg's report to heart. It sounded very callous, though," she offered. Vartann felt a little better.
"It was callous, and unthinking," Vartann admitted. "But I was pretty … bitter at that time. I had just found out that she was cheating on me."
"What does that have to do with overweight women?" Sofia asked.
"Nothing. But when you've been stepped on like that, you feel like lashing out at anyone. And I did," he said, his tone apologetic. "It's strange, but I kept going through denial. I remember, not long after that, Ecklie and I were interviewing this older woman. You were out of town, but you might have heard about it - the case where the body went missing – and the older women going on and on about her husband, and she asked Ecklie if he was married. And then she asked me, and I really didn't have an answer. So I just side stepped it," Vartann said. He hadn't thought about it before, but now he was looking back on the last few months with more clarity. Maybe his comment on the case wasn't the only reason the ladies of the lab had been chilly to him. Everyone had been chilly to him, except Sam Vega. And Sam was just too nice to turn his back on a guy in that predicament. If he admitted it, he was still in denial, because almost no one knew that he was in the middle of a divorce. Had he been this way with Mona? She always told him that he never let his guard down enough with her, that he always pulled away. "Maybe I'm to blame for being alone," he said. He murmured it to himself, but Sofia caught it.
"It's hard being a cop's wife, or boyfriend for that matter," she offered. "It's hard to be a cop's family in general."
"Yeah. Well, I thought I understood that. I thought I was doing right by her," he said. It was strange to be talking about this, finally. It was stranger to be talking about it to Sofia Curtis.
"Everything happens for a reason," she said. He cut his eyes at her.
"Really? You believe that?" he said, his voice heavy with sarcasm.
"No. But I try." She squirmed a little. "I really thought that I was the one who shot the uniform," she said abruptly. Alex raised his eyebrows. He had never heard Sofia talk about the friendly fire incident that had happened months before. "At first, I knew that I hadn't, but I kept playing it over and over in my head until I convinced myself that it was me. I would be driven off the force and there was no way I could hold my head up in Vegas."
"But it was Jim," Alex said softly. Sofia's eyes looked suspiciously watery.
"Yeah, and watching him handle that has been the biggest lesson of my career." She shook her head and looked back at Vartann. "So, yeah, I try to believe that everything happens for a reason. Because in a deserving world, it wouldn't have been Jim Brass' cross to bear."
They ate Chinese delivery that night. The tension that had been between them for the last few days had subsided, and they had even found themselves telling war stories about their careers. Unguarded, Sofia could be surprisingly funny, and had a prankster side he wouldn't have guessed.
"So, you're the one who kept hiding Ecklie's name plate," Vartann was saying.
"He never suspected me, his right hand, the quality control officer," Sofia said, laughing. She was remembering the look on Conrad's face when he had seen his name plate on the utility closet. She groaned as she got up from the couch to take her paper plate to the trashcan. "I've eaten more actual meals in the last three days than I have in the last three weeks, I think. I never sit down and eat anymore."
"I know what you mean. Without Mona around, I don't think to cook. I just eat whatever's handy, or out. Last week, I actually made a meal out of a couple of pieces of deli meat, a piece of cheddar and half a jar of pickles. No bread."
"Sounds like a crappy supper," Sofia said.
"Yeah, and a worse breakfast," Alex responded. Sofia wrinkled her nose and made a noise of disgust.
"I'm going to run on the treadmill and hit the hay," she said. Alex nodded his head as she turned towards the bedroom.
"Sofia," he said, and she turned back towards him, face expectant. "Thanks. For listening," he said softly. She gave him a shy, full smile that he hadn't seen on her before.
"That's what partners do, right?"
A/N: And one more chapter to come. Please review!