A/N: Yet another random thing that I have no idea where it came from. And SVU is not mine.
They called us a unit. Or rather, most people did. Others called us a ragtag band of misfits, and thought we wouldn't hear. But we did. We just didn't care. We'd beaten the odds, every one of us; the average two-year run in Special Victims was no longer existent when it came to us. The department knew it. And so did we.
I was what one might have called the so-called seasoned, seen-it-all veteran. Fourteen years, and I'd thought I had seen it all, but I hadn't. New cases disgusted me; seeing the dark side of people made me sick, but I'd never been one to show weakness. So I held it all in. And it had gotten me nowhere. I had a family, yes, people to love, and people who loved me in return, but along the way, they'd tired of it all. They'd walked away. At present, my life was falling apart, and it was all I could do to hold it together. So I stayed where I was.
There was Olivia, the only woman currently in the unit, my partner, and the one I always leaned on. I'd watched her change over the years, from the inexperienced rookie to the same sort of veteran I was. Her patience never failed to amaze me; I often wondered how she put up with me, but until she left, I never knew how far she was willing to let it go. But SVU was in her blood, or so she said, so she'd come back. She always had been the dependable one.
There was Munch, come up to the lot of us from the streets of Baltimore, Maryland, a former homicide detective looking for a change. Four times divorced, and not afraid to talk about it, the rest of us looked up to him, sometimes as a mentor, sometimes as a friend…sometimes as a pain in the ass. But he was still there, and one of us…the one whose sense of humor kept faint smiles on our faces and our guns where they belonged.
There was Fin, the so-called rough and tumble Northside Manhattan cop, come in from the Narcotics squad. There was more to him than any of us knew; sometimes things that seemed completely out of character came out but it was like that with all of us. So we understood. He was like me the way Munch was like Olivia; we were the so-called 'fire' to their 'ice'.
There was Casey, the prosecutor, the one who put away the ones we nailed. She'd been the new kid on the block for a year, until we got used to her .But she, too, had found her niche, and was like the rest of us. Focused, determined, and dedicated to getting the job done. She was the one who came with search warrants, court orders, the one who gave us convictions, or acquittals. But she was still one of us.
And then there was Captain Cragen, the one who saw us through everything and pushed us to our limits, knowing that if he kept it up, some of the best work we'd ever done would result. We hated more than anything to disappoint him; more often than not ,the lot of us looked to him as a father figure, which was yet another reason why we were so close .One of the reasons why all of us remained. He was the one that we knew we could go to for anything; another person we could lean on.
We were a unit, plain and simple, every one of us…and a family, at that. None of what anyone else had to say really mattered. We had each other, we had our precinct, we had our beat, we had ourselves.
That was all we ever really cared about.
