Work Text:
What is love?
Amongst billions of other things, it was what Morgan Gillory thought about. A lot.
In concept, she understood it. It was hard not to — love was something that came so naturally from her, even if it rarely made its way back. That, coupled with the relentless intricacies of her mind, made her something of an amateur expert on the definition of love. She had read it in every form: the ancient Greeks and their seven distinctions, the neurochemical cascade of dopamine and oxytocin, the poetry she devoured as a teenager not because she felt it but because she wanted to.
The active process of it, though — that was something far more foreign.
It was no secret that her childhood was filled with nothing but neglect. Love was an unfamiliar feeling, sandwiched between an estranged mother who didn't care for her relentless tangents and a father who was too fixated on them. Her whole childhood felt like she was simultaneously hated and valued for her intellect, and somewhere along the line she herself became a vessel for it. Not Morgan, or even just as a person, but a brain with legs and a loud mouth.
It was no surprise her first eighteen years were spent feeling pain, anger, frustration, sadness — certainly no love.
Maybe she should cut her family some slack, she thought sometimes. It was because of them she learnt what not to do when she had made a family of her own, after all. Ava, Elliot, Chloe — hers, undeniably, irreversibly. And in their own ways, Ludo and Henry too. through them, she had learned something true and warm and real. She experienced love.
But despite this, love remained confusing. Her concept of family had been built on polar opposite foundations — one of cold absence and one of fierce, loud presence. She had to define it herself. It looked nothing like what she had read about, and everything like what she actually lived.
But somewhere along the way she defaced a crime board. She almost got arrested. She met Selena Soto, Daphne Forrester and Lev Ozdil. She helped solve a murder. She joined the LAPD as a consultant and kept solving cases after cases. There were trials and tribulations every step of the way — but unlike family, these people chose her. They were strangers at the beginning who ended up caring for her more than blood relatives ever had.
However, she knew that what she had with Soto, with Daphne, with Oz, was platonic. Deeply, beautifully platonic — they said I love you in different ways and she was not ungrateful for any of it. It was one of the best things she'd ever felt. The kind of love she'd been owed for a long time.
It was just that — the notion of romantic love was still the most confusing thing she had ever encountered. She'd known since childhood that it existed. She'd watched it fail spectacularly in her own home. Her friends were always trying to set her up with a certain someone, nudging and teasing and raising their eyebrows, and she always deflected because — because what, exactly? Because she didn't understand it (or him) well enough yet.
It started small, as most life-altering realizations do.
The first thing she noticed was that he listened differently than other people. When she would inevitably go off on a tangent about eyewitness unreliability or the etymology of a victim's last name, his eyes didn't glaze over. He'd catch the thread she buried in the middle of a ramble and pull it out ten minutes later like the thing you said earlier about the victim's wife — and she'd stop and blink and think: you were actually paying attention.
The second thing she noticed was that he was unfair about coffee. He'd set a cup on her desk without saying anything and walk away without a word. Her eyes immediately scanned the printed sticker on the side of the cup reading "iced latte, oatmilk, two packets of stevia", exactly how she took it.
"Karadec, did you memorize my coffee order?" she asked him once, suspicious.
He looked at her like this was an absurd question. "You ordered it in front of me four times."
"Most people don't pay attention to things like that."
"Most people aren't solving homicides with you," he said, and went back to his paperwork.
She stared at the coffee for a long time after that.
The third thing — and this was the one that started to rearrange something in her chest — was how he handled her being too much.
Because she was too much. She knew this. She had always known this. She was loud and fast and her brain made leaps that left other people standing at the starting line wondering what happened. She once talked for eleven consecutive minutes about underwater decomposition rates while a suspect was being processed in the next room and didn't realize until Soto touched her arm.
Karadec never once made her feel like a problem to be managed.
When she went too fast, he didn't tell her to slow down. He just asked the one question that made her backtrack naturally, and she'd land where he needed her to be. When she said something that landed wrong in a room full of people, he'd step in with a redirect so smooth it looked accidental. He wasn't cleaning up after her. He was — she struggled to find the right word for it — compensating. She found it irritating at first, as if she needed to be transcribed to be truly understood. Then she found it interesting, the way that he was able to make sense of her. In the end, she found herself watching for it, seeing if he could really keep up with her.
There was a case in November. A sixteen-year-old girl, runaway, found in a parking structure downtown. The details were bad — the kind that made the other detectives go quiet and professional in a way that meant don't feel this right now, feel it later.
Morgan felt it immediately and all at once, because as she was often told, she was not a detective, and she hadn't signed up for this. As fervently as she tried to argue otherwise, she knew this case was taking a toll on her.
She'd stepped out to the hallway and was standing very still with her back against the wall and her arms folded when Karadec found her. He didn't ask if she was okay. He stood next to her, keeping her company, and said nothing for almost two minutes.
"She reminded you of someone," he said eventually, not a question but a knowing statement. Morgan chose not to dwell on how well Karadec knew her for him to be able to deduce that so quickly.
Instead, she exhaled slowly. "Myself, a little. The part of me that could have… yeah."
He nodded. He didn't push or offer a platitude or a redirect or "this is the job, Gillory." He simply stayed there until she pushed off the wall, gave her an "okay, let's go," and followed her back in.
She thought about that in the car on the way home. The staying and the saying nothing and the way he seemed to understand that some things didn't need to be solved, only sat with until it was better.
She thought: I don't have a word for what that was.
And to her, someone who was supposed to know all, was terrifying.
She started cataloguing it without meaning to, the way she catalogued everything. Involuntary data collection, she dubbed it once, her mind building a file she hadn't asked it to build.
The way he always angled himself slightly between her and an agitated suspect, subtle enough that she could pretend she hadn't noticed. The way he called her name in a voice that somehow managed to mean twelve different things depending on the day — exasperation, amusement, warning, something softer that she hadn't named yet. The way when she solved something, he didn't look surprised. He looked satisfied, like he'd expected nothing less, like her being extraordinary was a baseline he'd already accounted for.
It was Ava, actually, who said it out loud first. Because of course it was Ava.
"You talk about him a lot," Ava said one evening, doing homework at the kitchen table while Morgan debriefed her day to no one in particular.
"I talk about the case a lot. Karadec is part of the case."
"You do this thing with your voice."
"What thing?"
"That thing. The thing you're doing right now." Ava looked up, annoyingly perceptive, a trait that despite her insistence that she hadn't gotten any of Morgan's, well, Morganess, she possessed in tenfold. "It's the same thing you do when you're about to figure something out."
"I'm not figuring anything out."
"Sure, Mom," said Ava, and went back to her homework.
Morgan stood in the kitchen for a long time after that, even after Ava had left for her room, the day's events forgone for dissecting whatever that conversation was.
It came to a point where there was no denying that she was certainly feeling something about Karadec. It was different than to how she felt about any of her other colleagues, but also different to how she felt about her family.
But what kind of good consultant would she be if she just accepted it at that? So, she did what she knew best and pondered.
She turned it over the way she turned everything over — analytically, from multiple angles, looking for the logical flaw. She made a list in her head of all the reasons it didn't make sense. They worked together. He was structured and she was chaos. She didn't have a good track record with the feeling part of love, only the giving part.
But then invasively, she would recall the times she'd catch the upturn of his lips at something she said — small and almost unnoticeable except for the few fortunate enough to be privy to the softness of Adam Karadec — and that list went very quiet.
Morgan stopped, and for the first time in a long time, thought slowly and carefully about all the things she had read about love. She thought about how none of it, not a single framework or formula or verse, had prepared her for this. The accumulation of small things. The coffee and the listening and the staying. The steady presence of someone who never once asked her to be less than she was.
She thought: Oh.
She thought: So this is what it does. It builds.
Morgan Gillory, who understood everything before she felt it, who read love in seven languages before she recognized it in one face — stood in her kitchen at ten forty-three on an unsuspecting Tuesday night, and felt, for the first time in her life, like it all finally made sense.
She still didn't have a word for it.
She thought maybe she didn't need one. Maybe some things weren't meant to be defined. Maybe some things were just meant to be known.
And at last, she knew.