Reese here. Keep it under a minute, or I'm hanging up.

((Leave any and all RP/fanfic related messages here!))

Song Meme:
1. Put your mp3 player on shuffle and take the first 25 songs it gives you.
2. Link to the lyrics.
3. Let your friends assign you a song and character(s) to write a drabble to.

My list of songs and characters are over here!

Someday, in a place that's sunnier and more tangible than here, there might be an equation in place for when you plus another equals one. This isn't that place. She's too far away to equal half a person, and he's too present.

( Dani's drowning )

Sex me up! // my thread

I haven't written for Dani in ages, but I got a great fic out of this! If you respond, chances are you'll get more of a prompty response than a thread.

Roman said that downtime was the hardest, and he wasn’t wrong. But this isn’t much better, Dani thinks, sitting in a broken plastic chair in the back of a church basement.

She’s not like these people. That’s what she tells herself before, during, and after meetings. It’s not a form of denial—it’s a fact. She doesn’t need to drink to get through the day. That statement alone assumes that she can get through the day, which is a pretty lofty assumption.

She doesn’t drink because her husband’s (doesn’t have one of those, doesn’t want one of those) forgotten an anniversary (same). She doesn’t drink because the babysitter’s called out sick.

A doctor at the clinic once told Dani the odds of carrying a kid to term, after all of the shit she’d done to her body. They weren’t good. Dani’d faked a few tears for the doctor’s benefit. Or hers. She’s never been sure.

She doesn’t drink because of her job, like the woman with the gold earrings standing up at the podium (alter, why not, they’re in a church) now. Work’s what got her clean (clean’s a funny term to use for an addict. When you say it, it’s supposed to mean the stuff is out of your system and always will be, which is inherently a lie.

It’s a word that only addicts use. Part of the vernacular. Saying you’re clean implies that you’ve previously been dirty, and that’s all that people see. The implication).

Even this meeting is required by her employer.

“It wasn’t drinking,” she’d pointed out, while Karen printed out directions to the church.

Karen didn’t look up. Just kept her eyes on the computer screen. “It was a lot of things, Dani.”

It was a lot of things, which makes Dani think she’s not like these people. They seem pathetic to her, in a way that makes her equally pathetic for imagining some kind of junkie hierarchy. Okay, you drink too much. What about coke? What about heroine? What about you don’t know what the hell it is, but he says to trust him, so you do?

So Dani comes to the meetings, hoping no one notices her. Slips out after twenty minutes. And for the first few weeks, it’s worked pretty good. But this week, Dani fucks up. Times things wrong. Gold Earrings has taken her seat, and everyone’s clapping, so Dani stands up to go.

“Dani,” her employer-solicited sponsor says, standing at the snack table. “Good to see you volunteering.”

Shit. Dani looks at the guy, and he already gets that she didn’t want to speak up. She can feel the eyes on the room. Face red, the guy starts to stammer out an apology, draw the attention away from her.

Dani presses the call button on her cell phone, doing the job for him. The phone lights up, and Dani barely glances at it before she’s out the door, mumbling an explanation slash apology. “Work,” she says, walking just a little too quickly out of the basement.

As she leaves the church, she sees her reflection in the building’s simple glass door. It’s walking towards her. The faster Dani moves, the closer it comes.

She puts on her sunglasses. She looks down as she exits the building.

1) The fruit.

Dani, for reasons unlike Charlie's -- or, if she stops to think about the statistics, for reasons entirely too similar to Charlie's -- eats better than most. Fruit and vegetables, to get her vitamins. Dairy. A bit too much dairy, because she was lactose intolerant until her early teens, and still sometimes forgets that she'll be allowed to have milk next week, too. No meat, because the smell of it frying brings her back to Sunday afternoon barbeques at her Father's house. Steaks on the grill, along with corn on the cob and spare ribs, while Dani's mother sat in the kitchen, eating a light salad.

So Dani gets liking fruit. She does. What she does not get is why Crews so often tries to eat it in her car. It's gotten to the point where she has to have it cleaned at least once a week. Once, he brought in a personal watermelon (apparently, they don't just come in pineapples), and Dani made him walk along Sunset until he finished it.

This keeps up, and she's going to start billing him for the carpet cleaning.

2) The Zen

He says he needs something to center himself. Dani admits to not getting that. What she does not admit aloud is the reason why.

Dani doesn’t have enough inside of her to know that need. It’s all been used up.

He says he needs something to center himself, which is fine. But there are days, bad days, when his proverbs fall on tired ears. When he says them in such a way that both partners know it's bullshit.

When he doesn't sound Zen, it's an indicator that the day is really as unsalvageable as Dani thinks. She'd rather not have that indicator. Selfishly, she thinks she might rather have him sound tired all the time. That way she could go back to not knowing the difference between a bad day, and a day she will dream about. The nightmares come easier when the distinctions are made clear.

3) The fact that he finds her attractive.

Dani isn't blind, and neither are the idiots she so often comes across that don't understand what a badge means. The idiots who think they're saying something she's never heard before. Who think they're the first to look past the clothes. Underneath the clothes, in a way that makes her skin crawl. Makes her want to lash out and scratch their skin raw so that they know what it feels like. Whenever those idiots, between meeting her and being arrested, comment on Dani's looks, she sees Crews tilting his head to the side, the way he does on a particularly tough case. That head tilt means he's trying to look at things objectively. Trying to see the minute detail, and the bigger picture.

That head tilt means a great many things. But never does it mean he disagrees.

4) The fact that at some point, they will sleep together.

Still not blind.

Not blind to the fact that there are days, days when he has spoken very little, that she can see herself being attracted to Charlie Crews.

Not blind to the fact that she does see him as a partner, and trusts him implicitly.

Not blind to the fact that many partners have made this mistake before, and will again.

Not blind to the fact that it will be a mistake. It won't destroy them, and it won't end the partnership, but it will be a mistake. One of those things that happen sometimes, likely on a night when Charlie's sounded tired all day. They won't be able to talk about it for years, and even then, it will be in the context of ungenuine laughter, when they're trying to make it sound less serious than it will actually be.

5) His taste in music.

It's twelve years out of date. And while he pretty much has the best excuse on the planet as to why, there's only so many times Hootie and the Blowfish can be reasoned away by prison.

6) His suits.

She can tell he gets them specially made, and so can the rest of the force. It's a sign of his money; it's a sign that he's an outsider. Dani's an outsider too, but at least she doesn't dress the part.

7) That one wrong word, one bad situation, sends him right back into con mentality. He knows she notices. She notices-

8) The way his shoulders hunch up, like he's waiting to attack.

9) The way he looks paranoid, the way she used to look paranoid. He's always so damn ready to go back to prison.

And Dani hates that he has to think like that. She hates that he will never be able to see a world outside the definitions of a barbed wire gate. She hates that he thinks, and will always think, that he is living on borrow time.

But most of all, Dani hates that:

10) He might be right.

Because she knows how it works. If her father is after you...then he doesn't stop. Ever. And it's all she can do to pretend like Charlie pretends. They pretend that things will always be like this. That he will always annoy her, that she will always ask him to be silent, and that somewhere in the bickering they will manage to get their work done.

Things will change. He will become important to her. The day may come when all she wants to do is hear him talk (though even now, this sounds very unlikely). And they may not always work well together. Few people do.

Things change. Things always change. And if pressed to admit it, Dani hates that, too.

The first picture Dani ever sees of Charlie Crews is in black and white. Newsprint, resting on the coffee table. And if she thinks hard enough, didn’t that paper stay on the table a little longer than most? Didn’t her father look it over a few more times than was necessary, before throwing it away?

At the time, Dani doesn’t think much of it. She still tries not to think much of it.

---

The second picture Dani ever sees of Charlie Crews is an image file sent in an email. The subject line is blank, and the message simply reads:

Dani-

Charlie Crews. Your new partner.

It isn’t signed, because she and Karen are still in that strange place where neither of them are sure how to sign their correspondences to each other.

The e-mail might not say much, but the picture more than makes up for it. It’s Crews’ most recent face shot from prison, in full color. There must be hundreds of pictures taken of Crews since his release from prison. Pictures where he’s used that settlement money to get a haircut and a nice suit. Pictures where sunglasses hide a look in his eyes that’s never going to go away.

But this is a mug shot. It’s a picture of a prisoner, with sunken eyes and a state-provided jumpsuit.

Karen sent Dani this picture specifically. Karen wants Dani to remember where Crews has been for the past twelve years. Karen wants Dani to remember what’s in his mind and in his blood. Karen wants Dani to know that no suit, no matter how nice, can take away what’s in someone’s blood.

---

Dani’s own blood is something that has never made the phrase “black and white” logical, in any of its interpretations. There are shades in between, so many shades that people forget. If she were one thing—one color, one culture, one identity—it would all be so much easier. She’d have one thing to hate, one thing to blame.

But that’s not how it works for her. She lives in a spectrum forgotten, grouped in with her father, trying to ignore the sharp ache in her chest when she does nothing to correct the assumption. She can’t correct the assumption. People see things how they want to see things, and Dani would rather be viewed as half of herself than as nothing at all.

---

Ironically, it is because of who her father is that Dani is overlooked when she ought to be stared at. Her face is never on the cover of a newspaper, and Karen has pulled a lot of strings to insure as much.

Though Dani is the partner who’s committed a crime, she remains unpunished. Unseen, the way her mother had to be, the way her father strove to keep his foreign wife and mixed child.

Crews’ face is over examined. Looked at over and over, angle to angle, so that it is no longer a face but a collection of features set to sound reels. Crews isn’t a person anymore, but a story.

He is overexposed, and she under. He’s been beaten into shades of purple and green, while Dani’s skin is untouched, defined only by silence and the sharp prick of needles.

They are, neither of them, comfortable in any sort of spectrum with only two ends.

Charlie professes a Zen outlook. The oneness of all things, the colors of the universe. But in spite of all of those speeches, rants, and tapes, Dani suspects something about Charlie Crews.

Dani suspects that he can no longer see color. That twelve years in the dark have robbed him of that precious, precious sight. As he drives along sunset, peering out from sunglasses that Dani thinks are prescription, he is searching for a focus that he will not ultimately find.

This is why Dani suspects she and Charlie work well as partners, on the days she is willing to admit that they work as partners. Circumstances have conspired so that neither partner can trust the world to exist in anything outside of dull, muted shades of gray.

“I like the red one.”

 

Really, Dani’s only got herself to blame.

 

“The medium sized red one, not the small red one. Although maybe red’s a bad color for me. People might think I bought the couch to match my hair. I don’t want to be the kind of guy that buys a couch to match his hair.”

 

---

 

She can see, clearly now, all the small steps that built towards this moment. This afternoon. Crews’ car is ticketed, impounded, and lost in the shuffle. Dani doesn’t bother to get pissed about too much, but she gets pissed about this. Because he’s a cop. You don’t impound a cop’s car. You don’t lose anyone’s car. You search it, stick it in an evidence locker, and tell them it’s lost.

 

It’s the third time in a week that Crews comes in late, and he looks so damn serene about the whole thing. He sits down across from Dani, smiles, and goes to work on a fruit cup.

 

Dani can’t take it. She reaches across their desks and grabs the cup, leaving Charlie with a grape on a fork.

 

“I could have bought you one,” Charlie says, making figure eights in the air with his lone piece of fruit.

 

“You’re letting them play you,” Dani replies. This isn’t the time or place to have this conversation, but if they don’t have it now, they aren’t having it ever.

 

Charlie shrugs, and his face goes passive in a way that Dani’s never believed in. “They said if it’s not found in six to eight weeks the department will reimburse me.”

 

Six to eight weeks. Long enough for the thing to be stripped and searched and wired. Lips pursed, Dani doesn’t say a word of it out loud but knows he’s listening. When the department does stuff like this, the guy’s always listening.

 

“So get a new car while you wait.”

 

“I like my car.”

 

Dani thinks he meant to sound Zen, but there’s a roughness there that Crews almost looks ashamed of.

 

So Dani offers to cart Charlie around on her way to and from work, even though they both know his neighborhood is forty minutes out of her way.

 

---

 

“Maybe the blue one. The blue one’s bouncy. I like bouncy. At least I think I like bouncy.”

 

---

 

Dani makes him pay for gas so that he knows she’s not doing this as a favor. She’s doing this because the fuckers took Karen away (“Let me tell you how this is going to go.” Dani’s stomach dropped out, and both women knew there was no coming back from this) and the hell if they’re taking Crews, too. He’s annoying and his taste in music is crap, but she’s not about to waste her time breaking in a new partner.

 

---

 

“Dani, what are your thoughts on bouncy?”

 

---

 

Two weeks into chauffer duty, Dani’s car breaks down as she’s dropping Charlie off for the night. Which shouldn’t be a huge deal – all Dani needs is a jump, and she’s got the cables. But the accountant’s the one with a car and he’s out somewhere, probably hiding from coyotes or lost in a solar farm.

 

“He’ll find his way home. I leave food out.” It’s supposed to be a joke, but Charlie’s shoulders are hunched the same way they get when Dani and his old lawyer are in the same room. There’s a tension Charlie’s building up in his head that doesn’t actually exist. And that’s fine for the work day, which is always weird anyway. But right now Dani’s off duty and her ride’s busted, so she shakes her head and gets out of the car, walking towards the house.

 

…which has no furniture. None. But for some reason has a slide projector.

 

Dani turns around, not bothering to hide the fact that she thinks this is strange. Charlie knows damn well that she thinks he’s weird. This is just the latest in a series.

 

“Do you actually live here?”

 

Charlie’s about to answer, when his phone rings. He holds up a finger and answers it. The voice on the other end of the line is loud and nervous, and Dani can make out the phrases “coyotes”, “magpies”, “country music festival”, and “I think I might be a legal Canadian.”

 

Charlie nods along, and when he hangs up he looks just a bit confused.

 

“Is there a Canadian mob? Ted thinks they’re after him.”

 

“Is there a-” Dani cuts herself off. Nope. Not something she wants to get into. “You didn’t answer my question.”

 

She can see Crews hesitating, which is normally not a good thing. He looks down at his phone and then up at Dani.

 

And there’s a smile.

 

“Yeah. I actually live here.”

 

---

 

A couple days later, Charlie asks Dani if she’ll take him to look at furniture. Dani’s just about the worst person to ask. Her apartment came furnished, and she’s never in her life bought anything more substantial than a futon. But if he’s asking her that means the accountant is probably busy, and the idea of Crews living in a giant mansion without furniture is just full on creepy. So furniture shopping they go.

 

And if Dani has to test out one more couch, she’s going to kill someone.

 

“Reese.” Bounce. “Reese.” Bounce. “Reese.” Boun-

 

Dani darts an arm out and clamps it down on Charlie’s shoulder. “You are going to make me carsick. Couch sick. Something.”

 

Charlie nods, and makes a note. On the notebook that Dani has been informed is his official furniture-buying-notebook. “Right. Reese gets couch sick. No bouncy couches.”

 

Dani doesn’t know what to say in regards to the fact that she’s a factor in Charlie’s furniture purchases, so she goes to get a cup of coffee. It’s complimentary, which means it’s lukewarm and in a styrofoam cup. The cup is staticky, and when Dani takes a sip her upper lip gets shocked.

 

This should seem like a big moment. Something they should have a talk about, something that Crews shouldn’t jot down in a notebook without a thought.

 

But it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like any other day. Get up, give her crazy partner a ride, drown in paperwork for twelve hours, and pick up a mansion’s worth of furniture on the way home.

 

His home. Not hers.

 

That thought, that slip-up, should feel like a big deal too. But Dani’s tired and couch sick and isn’t going to waste her time mulling over a pronoun flub.

Tossing the cup in the trash, she goes back to Crews. He’s moved on to ottomans, and apparently that involves arranging the store’s supply in a straight line and walking across them, one by one, with his arms stretched out.

 

Dani means to tell Charlie that he looks ridiculous and is about to break his neck. But two proverbs and a rant about kangaroos later, she’s somehow found herself walking right up there with him.

"Never pray for justice, because you might get some."

-Margaret Atwood.

Justice is a concept that Dani has been nurtured on, so far as Jack Reese is capable of nurture.

For years, her understanding of what comprises justice (J-u-s-t-i-c-e, sound it out, there’s a good girl) is muddled. What she sees and what she is told don’t fit.

When Dani sees men and women with her face, with her mother’s face, arrested en mass by people with her father’s face, her father’s smell, her father’s uniform, she is told this is justice.

When she visits a local prison on "Take Your Daughter to Work Day", and sees men that look like pictures of her grandfather, uncles, and cousins, she is told this is justice.

When she asks why those pictures have all been packed away, she is told nothing, and wonders if it has to do with the cells and the bars and the dead look in the men’s eyes.

She wonders if someday justice will come for her. She wonders what form it will take, whose eyes it will have, and what language it will speak.

When Dani shoots her first suspect, she is told this is justice. She is told that people have been saved, that he had a loaded gun, that he’d done things to that little boy.

She is told that this is justice, and for the first time, she thinks she understands what that word means and feels succinct and focused in her understanding.

When Dani is lying in a room that smells of death, waste, excrement, and dope, that focus is gone, and she does not take the time to wonder on the nature of justice. By her second day in that room, she doesn’t think of anything but the smells and the feelings and God, she’s so sick.

Three days later, after Karen’s pulled her out, when she’s sitting on the edge of a couch and her hair’s wet and her nerves are on fire, Dani wonders if this is when justice comes for her, and she waits for it.

Twenty-one months later, and Dani’s still waiting.

1. Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The book. The movie was horrible. I like a love story that's upfront about what love is.

2. Maria Full of Grace, directed by Joshua Marston. Because I'm not a person to trust with recommendations, and want everyone to see what I see on a weekly basis.

3. The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai. It's well written look at cultures meeting, and at how this country affects people in places no one bothers to think about.

4. See Sally Kick Ass, by Fred Vogt. I'm not usually one for instructional self-defense books. I think every woman should learn basic self-defense, but should be taught in an actual classroom, with a trained instructor. But this is a book I tend to give out when I have to go talk at schools, because it includes advice for girls about all kinds of self-defense, not just the physical stuff.

5. Time Bandits, directed by Terry Gilliam. It's funny?

6. A Fish Called Wanda, directed by John Cleese. Same.

7. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, directed by Mike Nichols. See the answer to item one.

8. Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi

9. Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi

10. Lipstick Jihad, by Azadeh Moaveni

I don't want to get into it. They're all just good books.

1. The day’s first cup of coffee. Objectively, I get that it’s not about the taste. No way is it about the taste. I always overfill my pot, and it winds up coming out bitter and grainy. Cream and sugar are a waste of time, because they never help, so I just suck it up and drink my homemade sludge. But five minutes after I’m done, the caffeine is going through my system, and I feel like I might be able to get through a day of murders and personal pineapples.

2. Those rare moments where Crews is quiet. Not the crazy, frenzied kind of quiet like I.A.D. was moving in on him. That silence was worse than Crews’ longest rants all put together. No, I’m talking about the mornings where Charlie declares that it’s “Contemplation Day”. Contemplation apparently involves silence, sometimes with low-level humming.

I wonder what exactly Crews is contemplating (the wife dead on a staircase, a man in the trunk of his car, dig a hole, fill it up, or maybe just the price of oranges), but it’s probably best for the both of us that I don’t know.

3. I’d say arresting someone guilty, but these days I wonder about that. He makes me wonder about that.

4. Yeah-

All I’ve got is the three.

“Your father loves you.”

Dani is twelve years old the first time she realizes this might be an excuse, and not a truth. She stands in the kitchen with her mother, while that man sits in the dining room, waiting for dessert. There are times she cannot stand to think of Jack Reese as her father. Not because she’s angry (though she is angry), but because the thought of it makes her ill.

“Your father loves you,” her mother repeats, reaching into the freezer and pulling out a carton of Breyer's Neapolitan. “This is why he does those things.”

While her mother scoops the ice cream into hand-painted ceramic bowls, Dani stares at the pan of Ranginak resting on the stovetop. Hot, angry tears are forcing their way through the back of her eyes.

“No use crying,” her mother says, though not unkindly. “He’s right. This neighborhood isn’t safe for ethnic children.”

Her mother doesn’t stumble over the words “ethnic children” like she once did.

Dani says nothing, still staring at the evening’s intended dessert. She and her mother spent all afternoon making them, and the kitchen still smells of dates and cinnamon.

“You know, Dani,” her mother had whispered in Farsi, not four hours ago. “Things like this make me proud.”

She smiled at Dani in a way she rarely got to smile. Her hands were covered in sesame seeds and powdered sugar, and when she reached out to touch Dani’s cheek, the mess got all over her.

Dani hadn’t minded.

Now Dani’s mother stands, unsmiling, spooning factory-made ice cream into a bowl, while that man waits to be served. He’s turned on the television, and Dani can hear a rerun of MASH. The speakers are turned up loud enough that he can hear it from the living room, and Dani finds the sound jarring. She knows her mother does too, but won’t say anything.

“Dani.” Her mother has finished getting the ice cream into bowls, and puts them on a serving tray. “Please bring these into the dining room.”

Trying not to look so angry – for her benefit, not for his – Dani does as she’s asked.
When she leaves the kitchen, she can hear her mother dumping the ranginak into the trashcan, and then rinsing out the dish.

Her father sits at the head of the table, and lights from the television cast shadows across his face.
There are days, growing in number, where Dani hates her father. Today is one of those days.

She suspects that tomorrow will be no different.

So, I'm in this program. I'm in a lot of programs. Programs to help me stay clean, programs where I'm supposed to talk about staying clean, programs where I'm supposed to hang around and hear other people chat about trying to stay clean.

I'm not much of a talker, so I'm not really racking up the participation points. My shrink (department issued) thinks that maybe I should embrace the fact that I'm not a whiny, chatty addict (my words, not hers - I'm an addict, sure, but one who knows when to shut it), and write things down instead.

Without further ado.

Then Things About Dani Reese

1. I hate shopping. I hate malls. I hate shopping in malls. There's noise, kids with sticky hands, and food courts that stink like fried meat. But the alternative is shopping in boutiques, and try that on a cop's budget. So when I shop, I rush in to the back entrance of Sears, or whichever department store is having a sale, grab whatever shirts and pants are in my size and cut high enough that I can wear them to work, and pay without trying them on. The whole thing's over in twenty minutes. It's twenty minutes too long.

2. If I called my father, I could afford to shop in boutiques. But that would involve calling my father. I'll take the kids with the sticky hands and the scratchy cotton/poly blends. Any day.

3. I never dreamed about being married. When I was a kid, and my friends wanted to play-act a wedding, I always volunteered to be the witness. After awhile, I was forbidden from being said witness, because I never held my peace. I would always insist that the groom was either cheating on the bride, or that the bride was an unregistered alien and the marriage was for immigration purposes.

4. I realize now that this was transference (shrink's words). I was always hoping that my father was cheating, so that my mother would leave him. He never was, and she never did. Barring that, I at least hoped it was a marriage of convenience, so that I could understand why my mother would give up everything she ever was for one pathetic, ugly man.

5. When I realized my mother truly loved my father, I had to run to the bathroom, because I got sick.

6. I get sick more than I'd like, but I don't call off of work. Ever.

7. My partner is insane, likely certifiably so.

8. My partner is a better person than I could ever hope to be.

9. I am a recovering alcoholic and cocaine addict. Except there's no real recovering from either of those, so I'm just a junkie who's temporarily got enough sense not to get a hit.

10. I might be a sexoholic too, but I don't want to know what those support groups are like.