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Dani knows there’s no backup plan the moment Crews looks at her as he leans on the car while he’s patted down by Roman’s goons. She asks Bodner out loud all the same as the cars leave, hoping it’s one of those times she’s getting it completely wrong. She isn’t, and as Roman’s cars disappear in a cloud of dust, Dani remembers their first case with the dog and the dead kid and Crews asking her if anyone had ever loved her that much, and a ball of dread settles in her stomach.
She stands still next to Bodner, neither of them knowing exactly what to do next. She moves first, walks purposely towards where Crews’ things were carelessly thrown to the ground and picks them up. When she goes back to the car, Bodner is already waiting in the driver’s seat, hands on the wheel, and a hard look on his face.
They follow from a distance the column of dust Roman’s cars leave, knowing it won’t do them any good the moment they get to the main road. Dani clutches Crews’ badge in her hands, wipes away the dirt, and tries not to think of the brush of their hands as he traded places with her.
Suddenly, the dust changes directions. Bodner stops the car and they wait warily, not knowing exactly what to expect. After a couple of minutes, they see in the distance one of the cars comes back in their direction and then stops again. A familiar, lone figure gets off the car before it drives away again, and just like that, Crews is simply there, standing in the middle of the road, alive and apparently unscathed.
Bodner starts the car again, and the ball of dread in Dani’s stomach loosens, becomes smaller and smaller the closer they get to Crews, until it transforms into something else, moves upwards and makes itself comfortable right under her chest, and she finds herself unable to tear her eyes from him.
He’s just standing there, his face calm, looking first straight at her and then soaking up the sun as if he wasn’t as good as dead ten minutes ago. Dani doesn’t know what to do with the relief that floods her. Relief and something that feels a lot like awe, at him and at the fact that he’s standing there, alive.
Crews doesn’t open his eyes immediately when the car stops next to him and she gets out of it. For a second it feels almost normal, just her partner waiting for her at a crime scene, but then her hand clenches around the badge, remembers the barely-there brush of their fingers and reality crashes in. “Crews?”
He opens his eyes and looks at her in lieu of answering, smiling peacefully and she finds herself breathing a little bit easier. “Roman?”
“Dead,” he replies matter-of-factly, looking meaningfully at Bodner, who closes his eyes and nods, looking absurdly relieved.
“Good,” she says. One less bastard to worry about.
Crews looks back at her, and there’s something different in his gaze, a new intensity under the ever-present layer of calmness that wasn’t there before, and she fights the urge to reach out to him. They stay still like that, staring at each other silently until Bodner clears his throat and mentions the many agencies currently searching for them and the need to get their story straight.
She stops Crews as he’s moving towards the back seat and waits until Bodner is inside the car and mostly out of earshot. “You don’t get to do that,” she tells him pressing his badge against his chest a bit harder than necessary and thinking of the knot in her stomach when she realized there was no plan. “No more ‘me for her’ bullshit.”
Crews takes the badge, and rests his hand on hers gently, keeping it against his chest, right above where his heart is and smiles softly, nodding. When he doesn’t let go, she raises an eyebrow in question. “One plus one equals one, Reese,” he says with a shrug and looks at her like he knows something she doesn’t.
———
The week that follows is one interminable meeting after another, questionings and depositions with way more people and agencies than Dani cares for.
She almost doesn’t see Crews during that time. After the whole “driving your car into an FBI agent’s garage where the body of another presumed-dirty FBI agent was found” thing, he’s lucky he’s just suspended pending investigation. And so, she mostly sees him across the bullpen or when they pass each other by in corridors as they both come and go from one meeting to the next. It seems to her that lately all they do is see each other across a distance.
On one occasion, they meet outside the shrink’s office. As he comes out he tells her the shrink is not very zen with a resigned half smile, and it takes her all of two minutes to realize who she has to thank for the shrink’s obvious short temper.
On the days they don’t see each other, she always finds before she leaves the office a different piece of fruit on her desk. It always comes with a post-it next to it with the fruit’s name and a smiley face, and the sheer ridiculousness of it makes her smile despite herself more often than not. She catches Kevin looking at her from his office with a mournful look on his face as she inspects amused the chirimoya resting in front of her keyboard and something like guilt settles unexpectedly in her stomach.
It’s not that she has anything to feel guilty about exactly, but since she got back she hasn’t exactly been at her most communicative — which is saying something — and avoiding him will only work for so long.
And it’s not just about Crews and Roman. The weeks she spent away with the FBI have added a strain to the relationship that wasn’t there when they saw each other every day. She doesn’t know what to do with it, and the longer it goes on, the harder it seems to even attempt to put things back together the way they were.
She sees Kevin on the phone through the window in his office as he rubs his eyes tiredly in the way he does when he’s running on too much coffee and little sleep, and suddenly she misses him — misses them — and the way that going home with someone that understood was enough. She holds that thought as she puts the chirimoya in a drawer, turns off her computer and makes her way to his office. She takes a deep breath and knocks on the frame of the door softly just as he hangs up the phone. “Hey, you ready to go home?”
He smiles in response, wide and hopeful, and Dani has to swallow down the pang of guilt it brings.
———
Halfway through the second week after Roman, with Crews still suspended and Dani on desk duty, the results of Roman’s autopsy appear magically on her desk after her lunch break.
She knows they probably come from Tidwell, who is still trying to help despite the shitstorm he’s in for helping Crews and ignoring the SWAT team leader while searching for her. She makes a mental note to thank him later.
She opens the file and starts reading, and holds her breath the whole time it takes her to find the cause of death in the report. Asfixia provoked by blunt force trauma to the trachea. She scans the rest of the report for traces of DNA, for anything that points to Crews or to what really happened, and when she doesn’t find it, she sighs relieved beyond measure and oddly grateful for whatever Roman’s men did.
Dani knows this doesn’t mean that Crews will be back with her — back to active duty — any time soon, but it feels like another bullet dodged in the mess that has been the last few months, one step closer to things going back to normal.
And she really wants them to go back to normal.
It took her less than a week with the FBI to realize that she actually missed him. She knew going in that she was going to miss him on the job, the way they go over the details of a case, asking question after question until they find the missing piece, until they find the right question. She knew she wouldn’t have that in the FBI — not right away at least — and still during those first few days, its absence hit her at the weirdest moments. She’d find herself with an observation at the tip of her tongue, lower the file she was reading to share it with Crews, only to find no desk across from hers, just one of Agent Ray’s agents looking at her from several feet away, with an inquisitive look on his face that did little to make Dani want to share.
On those days, they ended up talking on the phone more often than not, but it still wasn’t the same. Then things at the FBI changed, they started having less to do with the job and more with everything else and worrying and wondering about him became as easy as breathing. It all makes her miss the good old days, the ones with open and shut cases where their biggest worry was beat cops looking at Crews funny.
And so the days go by.
She deals with ridiculous amounts of paperwork and with the rat squad’s desperate attempts at getting her to give them something they can pin on Crews. She works the program with minimum amounts of prompting and keeps her head down, and amid all, Dani counts the days until she can go back to the field with her partner.
———
On Crews’ first day back, Dani comes into the bullpen to find another unusual looking fruit on her desk, this time without explanatory post-it. Crews is nowhere to be seen, and so she spends a good part of the next half an hour sipping her coffee and browsing through pages of Google’s image results for “weird fruits”.
She finally sees him as he steps out of one of the meeting rooms on the far end of the bullpen, followed by a worrying mix of lawyers and higher-ups that never bring good news whenever they show up together.
“A Saturn peach?” she says in lieu of greeting when Crews reaches his desk.
“They are also called Donut peaches,” he replies without missing a beat. “I thought it was fitting. First day back as partners.” He smiles and adds, “You know, because of donuts and cops.”
Dani rolls her eyes, hardly surprised he had that tidbit ready, but still amused. “Well, partner, I’ve left on your desk your share of paperwork.”
“Material things mean nothing,” he says solemnly, taking a breath and looking at the pile of papers on his desk.
“Tell that to Tidwell,” she replies, not bothering to hide her smile this time.
They fall into a comfortable silence, and she finds herself looking away from the report she’s writing to look at him, small fleeting glances that serve to reassure her more than anything else, and she’s hit again by how much she’s actually missed this. Not that she’ll ever tell him.
She notices him watching on and off the bunch of lawyers that are now crowding Tidwell’s office. “Everything alright?” she asks him, worried for a second that maybe they’re not out of the woods yet.
“Yeah. Just… bureaucracy,” he says with a grimace, still looking at them as he leans back on his chair and bounces its back a bit, testing it. When he looks back at her, he seems calmer, more like himself. “Have you tried the peach? They are really good.”
“Maybe for lunch,” she says, surprising herself. Crews grins, clearly pleased, and in that moment, Tidwell opens the door of his office and yells, “We just got two warm bodies downtown. Reese, Crews, you’re up!”
They both stand up immediately, eager to get back in the field and out of the office in a way she would mock under any other circumstances. On the way out, Crews fishes without prompting the car keys from his pocket and gives them to her. When their hands touch, it feels like in the orange grove all over again, and Dani finds herself fighting the urge to hold onto him and not let go.
It’s not the last time it happens.
When they reach the crime scene, they fall into their old rhythm almost immediately, and after months of weirdness, this more than anything is what makes Dani feel like things are back on track.
They work the case as usual, finding the complementary angles in a way that feels almost like muscle memory. But then there are moments when Dani remembers Roman’s grasp on her arm, and Crews’ words as they passed each other by on that dusty path, and so when Crews stands a little closer than strictly necessary, she doesn’t move away. And maybe, just maybe, instead of calling Crews’ name, she starts calling his attention by touching his arm lightly and doesn’t even think to complain when he starts doing the same.
They don’t mention it, but every once in a while she’ll catch a glint of something in Crew’s eyes as he leans closer, a searching look she doesn’t know what to make of, a different sort of smile as he guides her through a door with a hand on the small of her back. They are small gestures, tiny details that most people would make without thinking twice about it. It doesn’t change how they work together, or keep Crews from being his annoying self and speaking in riddles more often than not, but there’s something reassuring about it, and so it stays and in the meantime, Dani tries very hard not to think about what it means.
She doesn’t realize anyone else has noticed until she catches Tidwell looking at her with a resigned look in his eyes, right after Crews leaves the meeting room where they are discussing the case to answer a call and he squeezes gently her arm on his way out.
She waits for him to say something, ask about it, but he never does, and part of her is relieved, not sure she’d even know what to answer.
———
Inevitably, things with Kevin fizz out.
Dani knows it was a long time coming, and that it has more to do with her than with him; she also knows she probably could salvage it if she tried harder, which only serves to make her feel worse about the fact that she really doesn’t want to try at all.
They are in the kitchen, the argument she had been expecting since Roman going full swing for the last twenty minutes and she can see the moment Kevin just gives up, frustration clear as day on his face. “Dani, do you even want to be here anymore?”
And ain’t that the crux of the matter.
“I — I don’t know,” she says, after a beat too long. “Not enough,” she adds and she thinks fleetingly how that’s probably the most honest thing she’s said to him in a while.
“Then you probably shouldn’t,” he says, deflating. He rubs his eyes, disappointment shows in every line of his body and there’s a resigned smile on his face. “Shit.”
“Yeah.”
He helps her pack some of her things, more disappointed than angry, and tells her she can get the rest whenever she wants. He’s as nice as anyone can be under the circumstances despite the fact that she can see he’s torn about it. It makes her feel worse about the whole thing, and for a second she hesitates. Kevin is a good man, and there’s something very comfortable about being with someone that understands the job, that understands where she comes from. But comfortable is very unfair to him and not good enough for her, even if this is by far the healthiest relationship she’s ever been in.
Its ending feels like a brand new kind of failure and it sits low and heavy under her chest.
In the end, they say goodbye with an awkward hug, and a less than subtle, “Take care of yourself, okay?” from Kevin that leaves no room for misinterpretation.
But no matter how unsubtle Kevin’s parting comment is, on her way home she notices every single liquor store open. On the fifth one she gives in, does a very illegal U-turn, and gets a bottle of vodka from a kid that can’t be a day over sixteen.
Dani gets back in the car with the bottle unopened, throwing it to the copilot seat among empty coffee cups and rests of what’s probably way too much junk food. She decides a DUI is not worth it and starts the car without a destination in mind. She avoids her old hunting grounds and tries to think of something other than the bottle sitting next to her and the many ways in which it would help her forget for a little while and then her mind drifts to their current case, and before she knows it, she’s pulling up on Crew’s house.
When she turns off the engine, she doesn’t immediately get out of the car, suddenly unsure of how much of a good idea it is to turn up unannounced and more than a little ashamed by the bottle of vodka next to her. She stays inside the car, debating whether to call him or not, when suddenly Crews appears next to her window startling her, looking at her with a smile.
“Hi!”
She does a double take when she sees that he’s carrying a pair of gardening shears as long as his arm and wearing a straw hat that makes him look more than a little ridiculous. “What—”
“I was pruning,” he says before she’s had the chance to finish the question, opening and closing the shears in quick succession to demonstrate. “And I burn easily,” he adds, tipping his hat.
She doesn’t say anything for a moment, not knowing what to do with that information and still embarrassed to have been caught unaware. Something imperceptible changes in his face and Dani belatedly remembers the bottle of vodka on the other seat.
“Reese?” She can hear the worry in his voice, and so with a shake of her head, she finally remembers why she drove here in the first place.
“We know it wasn’t planned,” she starts as she gets out of the car. “And we know that most of what the killer used to decorate the body was not in that warehouse in the first place and they are not the kind of things you usually carry around with you...”
“So, where did he get them,” he says, playing along.
“There are only so many places open on a Sunday at the time of the murder,” she continues, “and luckily for us, they are usually the kind of places with cameras.”
“Or with talkative cashiers for the right price.” He’s smiling wider now and she can’t help but smile back.
“We can show around his picture tomorrow.”
They stay in silence for a few seconds before out of nowhere he blurts, “I’ve got pizza. It arrived just before you got here.”
“Pizza?”
“Ted is in Spain,” he adds as if it explained anything. “He’s usually the one that takes care of the groceries,” he continues with a rueful smile. “I ordered the Hawaiian one, thought. It has pineapple.”
Dani considers it for a moment, knowing what will happen if she gets back into the car with that bottle. “Okay,” she says, and she thinks she sees something like relief in his eyes.
Crews pulls out a pizza from the oven and they sit to eat on the kitchen island as they keep talking about the case, pulling up maps of the zone and planning where to go first. It gives her a much-needed distraction, helps her take the edge off a bit. He doesn’t ask why she had a bottle of vodka with her or why she didn’t wait until tomorrow to tell him about the lead, and she’s as thankful about it as she’s ever been about anything.
After a while, the conversation inevitably falls into a lull.
“Do you want to watch a movie?”
Her eyebrows rise in surprise. “You have a TV? What happened to the uncluttered life?”
“Rachel and Ted outvoted me,” Crews says shrugging, not seeming bothered by it. “They got some DVDs, too.” He seems almost excited by the prospect of watching a movie and before she knows it she’s following him as he leads her to one of the many rooms on the ground floor, babbling about what constituted movie night in jail.
The room is empty except for a TV bigger than her bed, a sofa — also bigger than her bed — and a cabinet full of DVDs. Dani goes straight to the cabinet to choose the movie. As much as she trusts Crews, his taste in music and movies is still up for debate. She ends up picking what seems to be a ‘Die Hard’ wannabe that promises mindless action and a plot they won’t have to follow too closely, and so without much fanfare, they settle on the sofa and start the movie.
It lives up to its promise.
The plot of the movie stops making sense after the 10-minute mark, and as it goes on, it just becomes more and more ludicrous, from made-up police protocols and impossible jurisdictions to fight moves that would most definitely not work and in some cases, end up in injury.
Dani scoffs and harrumphs, and after the main character straight up defies the laws of physics she starts to comment on it out loud much to Crews’ amusement. Crews gets into it and starts playing Devil’s advocate, thinking up plausible scenarios and premises where it could actually work. It makes the movie a 100% more entertaining, and halfway through it, she’s looking forward more to the running commentary than to anything remotely related to the plot.
Two thirds into the movie, Dani can feel her eyelids starting to drop, the day catching up with her. She’s lying down on the sofa, her shoes discarded a dozen explosions ago and her feet nested under a cushion next to Crews’s thigh, searching for warmth.
“Tidwell and I broke up,” she blurts, needing to explain before falling asleep. She thinks of Tidwell’s disappointed face and of the bottle of vodka in the car, and hopes Crews understands without having to elaborate any further. He doesn’t say anything. A beat goes by and the feeling of failure comes back with a vengeance. “It’s what I do, Crews, I screw up and I drink. Not always in that order.”
He looks at her then with eyes kinder than she expects and something else she doesn’t have a name for. “But you didn’t drink, Dani,” he says and moves his hand over the cushion and squeezes her foot gently.
“I guess I didn’t.”
She falls asleep with his hand still resting on her ankle.
When she wakes up it’s barely morning. She’s still lying across the sofa, the cushion kicked to the floor and her feet almost touching Crews, who seems to have fallen asleep right where he was sitting.
She stays still for a few minutes, her mind fuzzy with sleep. She watches Crews, almost unnaturally still in his sleep except for the rise and fall of his chest with every breath. She notices the hand that rests mere inches from her foot, and for a moment she’s terribly disappointed that he is no longer touching her. The thought comes unbidden, and the unexpectedness of it wakes her up more than soft light coming through the windows.
After that, it’s not long before she gets up from the sofa, waking Crews up the moment she moves.
He makes her coffee — and an orange juice glass — and walks her to her car. It feels oddly date-like and she’s surprised by the flutter of something that the idea brings to her chest. When they reach the car, she grimaces at the bottle of vodka still waiting on the seat. She hands it to Crews without comment, and somehow it’s easier than she thought it would be. They make plans to follow up on the case lead after she goes home to change and then to a meeting.
Crews waves as she pulls away in her car, a soft smile on his face, and despite everything, she feels lighter than she has in days.
———
After the impromptu sleepover — Crew’s words, not hers — dinner and a movie become kind of a thing.
Most of the time it’s just dinner, and more often than not, it’s grabbing something to eat while they keep working. It’s not that different from having lunch at the station. Still, some days they’ll close the file folders when the take out arrives, hide the crime scene photos before they dive into whatever it is they’ve ordered and take a brief respite where they’ll talk about anything but work. Sometimes Ted or Rachel are there, and instead of take-out, they are just called to dinner when it’s ready. It’s oddly domestic in a way that makes Dani less uncomfortable than she would have anticipated.
Movie nights are rarer. It’s always just Crews and her, the same sofa where she fell asleep that first time, and a silly movie as a healthy-ish way of letting go of whatever new brand of human fuckedupness they've gotten to witness that week.
They’ve just closed their latest case and called it a day earlier than either of them are used to.
She’s standing outside his front door, her hands full of Chinese take-out, trying to ring the doorbell with her elbow when he opens the door before she has a chance to do so.
“Hey,”
“Hey,” he says letting her in with a small smile as he takes one of the bags from her hands and carries it to the kitchen. There’s a nervous look about him, something subtle that she doesn’t think many people would pick on. “Crews?”
He pauses for a second, taps a finger on the kitchen counter, and after taking a breath, he says, “I need to show you something.”
She follows him upstairs, slightly wary, to the first floor and to the left, towards where she knows his bedroom is. He opens the door to the left, of what turns out to be a walk-in closet. She follows him out of habit and is about to ask him what the hell he wants to show her in a closet when she sees the wall.
Her gaze flits between the pictures and the placeholders in between and even though she’s not truly surprised, her stomach sinks when she sees a picture of her father up there.
“You said he wasn’t involved in setting you up,” she says, walking closer and touching softly the picture, and for a moment she’s pissed that he would lie to her about the only thing she asked him about the whole mess she sometimes could feel brewing under the surface.
“He wasn’t,” he replies. “At least not in that.”
Crews tells her about the bank robbery and the money, and the pattern of anonymous donations Ted traced to the charity. He tells her about Hollis and about Rachel, and how Jack Reese was the only one that could get Rachel to talk again. He tells her the facts, what he knows about Raymond and Roman, and then he tells her what he thinks happened in the in-betweens, and she stays silent the whole time, taking it all in.
Dani’s not surprised that her father was dirty, in a pretty fucked-up way, she feels vindicated by the fact that he wasn’t as perfect as he liked people to believe. But there’s also how he tried to make up for it and the fact that at the end of the day, no matter how bad their relationship was, he is her father. Or was.
“Roman told me he is dead,” she says out loud. “While he had me in that basement after he made that tape. He said my father had cried when he killed him.”
A hard look comes over Crews’ face, and Dani can suddenly see every single day he spent in jail reflected there, the same way the rings of a tree tell its age. It makes him look dangerous in a way Dani has only seen a handful of times, the kind of dangerous she would definitely have gone for a lifetime ago.
“Do you believe him?”
Dani takes her time answering, she has tried to avoid thinking about it.
Despite everything, she knows her father — knows that no matter how bad things got he wouldn’t leave just like that, not without saying something, not for so long. “Yes,” she says. “As much as you can without a body,” she adds with a small shrug.
Saying it out loud makes it more real somehow, and all of a sudden she thinks of her mom, how she will have to explain it to her, and all of the sadness she hasn’t felt since Roman told her hits her in a rush. She feels herself start to tear up. She looks down, trying to avoid Crews inquisitive gaze, blinks repeatedly and breathes deeply, trying to get a hold of herself.
“Hey,” Crews says touching her chin lightly to get her to look at him again. “I’m sorry, Dani.”
“I didn’t even like him that much,” she says, wiping away an errant tear angrily.
“It doesn’t matter. He was your father.” And then he seems to make a decision, and very seriously, with a bit of trepidation he says, “I’m going to hug you now.” Before she has time to react, he’s taking a step forward and engulfing her in a hug.
Dani tenses at first, already uncomfortable enough with crying in front of him, but Crews doesn’t let go, and after a couple of seconds she brings her hands around his waist and just relaxes into it — into him — solid and warm and safe. He’s a surprisingly good hugger.
“You can only lose what you cling to,” he says after a minute, effectively ruining the moment.
“You had to speak,” she says with a sigh and an exasperated smile on her face as she leans back to look at him without letting go.
“Part of my charm?”
“Part of your something alright.”
Crews smiles with his whole face, something warm and familiar that Dani cannot quite place in his eyes, and not for the first time, Dani feels like he knows something she doesn’t. She takes a deep breath and a step back, squeezing his arm lightly in silent thanks and tries not to think of how easy it seems to touch him like this. “So, tell me everything that’s not on the wall.”
He starts walking her through the timeline. She drills him about every detail, where the info comes from, where he has searched and where he hasn’t, and he answers each one of them no differently than if it were any other case.
She can feel the thrill of the chase the more she learns about it all, the need to pull on the thread and see where it leads them; she sees it in Crews’ eyes too as she asks him question after question, and this, this they are good at.
They end up bringing the take out up to the closet.
———
“I have something for you,” she says as soon as Crews opens the door.
“Is it mango fro-yo from the place near your apartment?” he asks before she’s even stepped in and then proceeds to look disappointed when he doesn’t see anything in her hands that looks even remotely close to frozen yogurt. “I’ve been feeling like mango fro-yo all day, but not the one they sell in little boxes, the homemade one with pistachio crumbles on top,” he adds in explanation, his face wistful.
“It’s not frozen yogurt,” Dani says, and not being able to help herself she adds, “and fro-yo is a stupid word.”
He babbles on about frozen yogurt and fruits as he follows her upstairs and towards his room. When they reach his closet, Charlie falls silent, watching her intently as she takes the manila envelope in her hands and gives it to him.
Two photographs slide out of it when he opens it, headshots of two men in police uniform of just the right size to fit in the fourth and fifth placeholders on the wall. His breath catches and he goes unnaturally still as he stares at them silently. After a couple of seconds, Dani takes the pictures from his hands and tacks each one of them in the empty squares.
“Meet James R. Goldberg and Charles Bruckner,” she says out loud as she starts writing their names underneath the pictures. When she turns around, he’s not looking at the wall but straight at her with something that looks a lot like wonder in his face. “How did you—”
“It’s about time something good came from being Jack Reese’s daughter, isn’t it?” she replies, shrugging slightly.
The look of wonder doesn’t go away, but he gives her half a smile and Dani takes it as a sign to keep talking.
She tells him how she scourged both her father’s office and the way-too-many boxes he had kept in her mom’s attic, searching for any photograph or reference to officers his father had crossed paths with during his career. She tells him how she got a list long enough to wallpaper her whole apartment, and how she started cross-referencing them with the guys from the funeral picture. She tells him with a teasing tone how it was tedious enough to make her miss good old regular paperwork, until she ended up with a much more manageable list after she charmed a wonderful piece of software out of one of the technicians in the office after she overheard him talk about it in the elevator.
Crews doesn’t miss a single word she says, looking at her intently all throughout the tale, and she can see the barrel of questions already brewing inside.
Dani doesn’t tell him about how her mother asked her one day as she puttered around in the attic if she was sure of what she was doing, apprehension clear as day on her face. She is still not sure if it had to do with the — still officially unconfirmed — news of her father’s death or a lifetime of sharing a house with him and all his secrets. “He’s my partner,” she had replied, and something in that must have given her mother enough of an answer because the next thing she said was, “You’ll have to bring him for dinner someday. I want to meet this partner of yours, azizam.” Dani rolled her eyes good-naturedly and said, “Sure, Mama. He’ll love that.”
When she’s done, Crews stays silent, looking at her in a way she’s not sure she knows how to deal with. It’s a new thing, being aware of the possibilities, of the underlying current of something that comes up every once in a while, ever since Roman.
“Crews—” she starts, unsure of what she wants to say.
“You are—,” he says at the same time, and stops halfway. He takes a step closer to her, and for a second Dani thinks that this is it, this is how things change, but then he stops, takes a deep breath and turns to look at the wall again.
He starts asking questions then, about the information and the new men in the wall, and at some point, they go down to her car to pick up all the information she had cobbled together. They go over everything together, over every link she’s found no matter how weak. They move pictures around and redraw arrows as they need to, and by the time they are done, the wall looks like something else altogether, the new timeline making more and more sense.
“Thank you,” Crews says, well into the night, when they’ve run out of facts and questions and lines to add to the wall, both of them sitting on the floor with their backs against the wall.
When Dani looks at him, he is staring straight at her again instead of at the wall, and something in his expression makes her think of Roman, and the orange orchard and wanting to reach for Crews more than she’s ever wanted anything in her life. It leaves her breathless all over again and she answers a beat too late, distracted. “Yeah.”
Crews doesn’t say anything, just looks at her curiously with a contented smile, and Dani feels something pull in her chest, expanding undeterred and filling her up. Before she knows it, she has grabbed Crews’ hand lying right next to hers. Crews smiles widely in response and for the first time since she was fifteen, Dani Reese blushes.
———
They plan.
They go slowly, take every step carefully, tiptoeing around anything that may make too much noise.
On the good days, she feels like they are spiders spinning a web, little by little, thread by thread in the hope that at some point they will be able to notice the smallest vibrations on it. An informant told to keep his eye out. A conversation in a police picnic with a retired cop that seemed clean-cut but that always seemed to flit around those who weren’t. Database queries related to their cases but wide enough to get them the information they need without calling any unwanted attention.
It’s slow-going and frustrating more often than not — and Charlie definitely deals with the slow pace much better than she does — but it gives them bits and pieces, new threads to pull, hints of where they can push next.
There are bad days too, days when leads don’t pan out and doors are closed in their faces and the work of months seems to hang from a precarious single thread.
It’s one of those days when they run into JR Goldberg, aka picture #4, in a public act with a bunch of low level politicians. It’s completely accidental and actually related to their current official investigation, but he sees them asking questions and recognizes Charlie.
It’s enough.
He appears dead in his garage the next day, a gardening hose connected from the exhaust pipe to the window and a bunch of papers burnt nearby, and then everything is riding on catching picture #5, Charles Bruckner — a police officer turned construction entrepreneur, turned politician, turned entrepreneur again, with a much higher level of success than his first time around.
They pull every favor they are owed and then some more. By a strike of luck or some divine intervention, they find hard-proof evidence in the form of papers left to rot in a box somebody should not have brought home with them when they were fired.
They brief Tidwell. He chews their asses for a good fifteen minutes and uses many words that start with an i to describe them and their investigation — irresponsible, illegal and idiotic, among them — but after he has gotten it out of his system, he asks all the right questions, and Dani feels a pang of something akin to nostalgia. He really is one of the good ones.
After he’s huffed and puffed some more, Tidwell suggests going to one of the newest DAs, a woman he knows back from NY that’s moved relatively recently and that’s less likely to have any ties here.
Just as they are leaving, Crews receives a message from the guy they got to keep tabs on Bruckner: he’s on the move.
“I’ll go with Dani to the DA’s office,” Tidwell says. Crews looks at her, looking for confirmation, and she appreciates the gesture more than she can say.
“We’ll be right behind you,” she says, and then she adds, as sternly as she can, “Don’t get killed.”
Crews smiles widely. “Yes, ma’am.” He squeezes briefly her arm as he leaves the room and Dani tries to tamp down the ball of worry that seems to take residence in her stomach.
When they meet DA Torres, Dani is extremely glad Tidwell has gone with her. Between the anxiety of knowing that this is their only chance, that Charlie is out there without backup, and her usual lack of patience for bureaucracy, she doesn’t think Torres would have kept listening to her after the first ten minutes.
But Tidwell knows how to play the game and has been doing this for long enough to know how to sell it. And he was right to suggest DA Torres, anyone with more ties and less to gain would not touch this case with a ten-foot pole. They have buckets of circumstantial evidence — some of them related to not unimportant people in the city — but they have been meticulously careful with getting all the details right, and the documents they found give the whole case enough credibility to get Torres on board.
Dani keeps checking her phone through the meeting, hoping for more information from Charlie than the construction site he’s followed Bruckner to. When she looks up again, there’s a paper in front of her, a search warrant for the construction site as well as Bruckner’s home and office.
“Go,” says Tidwell. “DA Torres and I can clear up what’s left. Find Crews. I don’t trust him this long by himself,” he adds with a smile, trying to lighten the mood, ease her worry. She sees DA Torres looking at her with kindness, and Dani wonders how worried she must actually look.
“Will do, Sir.”
When she reaches the construction site, she sees Crews’ car and the kind of black sedan that only makes her worry increase. She starts walking up to the building — the concrete skeleton of one— when she sees him, high above in the last floor, hands in a conciliatory gesture and way closer to the edge than anyone would be comfortable with. The ball of anxiety in her stomach comes back with a vengeance.
She starts running.
When she’s up to the third floor, a little more than halfway up, two shots echo followed by a body falling outside the building. Her heart catches in her throat, and for a handful of seconds she’s torn between wanting to check on the body or keep moving up. Voices from above break her out of it, and she starts running up again, taking the stairs two by two, thighs burning with the effort, trying to recall if the body she glimpsed falling wore the same kind of white shirt Crews had on that day.
As she reaches the last flight of stairs, she hears in the distance the sirens of the backup team she called right after Tidwell confirmed they had an arrest warrant for Bruckner. She takes one second to breathe, as much as her lungs will let her, and then steps outside the door and into the sun, gun at the ready.
The first thing she sees is a body down in the ground with a gun close to his hand, groaning softly but not moving. She rushes to kick it outside his reach, and keeps scanning the area until she finds Crews sitting against one of the columns closest to the edge.
There’s some blood on his shirt, and his gun is still in his hand, but he looks straight at her as soon as there’s a line of sight between them, and that more than anything puts her a little bit at ease. Next to him is Bruckner, visibly hurt but breathing, and by the looks of it, not feeling any longer like putting up much of a fight.
She proceeds to handcuff Bruckner, reads him his Miranda rights between huffs and puffs, still trying to catch her breath, and goes to check on the other man on the ground until some of the paramedics and uniforms find them.
Charlie doesn’t take his eyes from her all the while, and for the first time in a while, Dani doesn’t need any explanations of what it means.
She’s barely had the time to catalog the new set of scratches and bruises on his arms and face when Tidwell appears through the door and ushers them to the precinct between congratulations to give DA Torres every piece of information her people are going to need.
She leaves Charlie with the paramedics as she starts briefing Tidwell and resigns herself to a long afternoon of bureaucracy.
They go back to his home as soon as Tidwell lets them, tired after what feels like a never-ending day but with a nonchalance that seems out of place after something so big. Charlie goes straight to the kitchen, humming softly under his breath and grabs an orange and starts eating it. Just like that.
She leans against the doorframe and stares at him, the day catching up with her. She is still a little bit baffled at what they’ve done — at the fact that they are both still here with no more than a few bruises, with Bruckner alive and in jail after testifying and giving the DA, Internal Affairs and the FBI a list of names longer than her arm.
They did it.
Charlie spins on the stool until he’s facing her, seemingly not unnerved by her staring. “Do you want some?” He has an orange slice in his hand and a contented smile on his face. The last rays of sun of the day fill the kitchen giving it a dream-like quality, and she’s filled with something huge and unnameable in her chest, an overwhelming need to reach out to him. She does not fight it.
She moves towards him slowly, takes the orange slice and puts it on the counter. She takes his hand in hers, links their fingers together and thinks of the orchard, of reaching out and missing and the improbability of second chances.
Dani reaches for his tie and pulls him down softly, kisses him deeply, calm in the knowledge that they have time. He tastes like oranges.