Archive of Our Own ^beta

Dani watches him, sometimes. All long limbs and red hair and annoyance wrapped in a well-cut suit.

She wonders if he really thinks he's fooling anyone. If he's so stupid as to not see how plainly he wears his pain and anger.

It takes her a while to figure out that no one sees him as clearly as she does.

---

Something breaks in his head when he takes Amanda Puryer's call that Dani has been abducted.

There's a tingling sensation behind his left ear that spreads up the back of his neck into his brain stem. The edges of his vision go slightly red and it takes everything in him not to crush the phone in his hand to dust.

Before prison, he'd never been a possessive man. He'd never needed to be. People and objects were what they were. Prison though. The smallest of objects or moments that were his were important in a way they could never be outside.

He'd tried to leave that behind when he got out. Through zen and acknowledgement and conscious thought. He'd been fairly successful as well.

But Dani? Dani is his in a way that has little to do with romance or dominance or anything other than she is his partner. His.

So he takes a moment. Beats the terror and the rage back into the little box he'd created in his mind. When he opens his eyes again, there's nothing but the goal.

The inmates of Pelican Bay knew not to touch anything that belonged to Charlie Crews. Roman Nevikov may have been born in prison, but Crews was forged there.

---

The first time Crews touches her, Dani's covered in smack and not much else. And if that isn't a bullshit summary of her life, she doesn't know what is.

She pulls away; of course she pulls away. It's the only thing she knows how to do. She doesn't know him, has only met him a few days before, and goddammit he is a hammer to her life that she does not need.

Two years later, she touches him for the first time. A brush of a finger against the back of his hand before he pulls away. Has to pull away. But in that moment before, he smiles at her, lit from the inside.

"Just breathe," he whispers, brushing past her.

She does.

---

Charlie does not know who his partner will be. He knows her name; Lt. Davis was direct and informative during the phone interview, asking up front whether he had a problem working for a woman.

He'd smiled and said he didn't have any problem like that because women and men drew the same breath and grew under the same sun, and how could anyone have a problem with someone who shared so much and so intimately?

Davis had smirked and told him that he and his new partner would get along fine.