Work Text:
Davis is Jack Reese’s partner for a long time. When they were first assigned, she didn’t think it would last. He was too nice, too polite – a gentleman. He didn’t seem to know what to do with a female cop. He was forever bringing her cups of coffee, offering to do more than his share of the paperwork. Once, on a stakeout, he opened the car door for her.
“What,” she huffed. “Aren’t you going to pull out my fucking chair too?”
He blinked at her. “Can’t really,” he said after a beat, scratching the back of his neck. “That car seat is stuck down pretty good.”
It gets better after that. He stops treating her like a woman, starts treating her like a cop. A partner.
They get along well. Not so well that Reese’s pretty wife ever looks twice at Davis, but well enough that it works. And if sometimes, during those early years, Davis wonders if Jack Reese isn’t a little bit dirty – well, she looks the other way.
Eventually she just stops looking.
So they’re partners for a long time.
He learns she likes her coffee once a day, and only ever in the mornings (she is a strong believer in moderation). She learns that he doesn’t talk much, and never about his family. They never once have a heart-to-heart – not on a slow stakeout, or over paperwork in the bullpen, or anywhere – and Davis likes it that way. She doesn’t want to get invested. (Only he saves her life in a firefight once and she is. She is.)
Reese loves metaphor. He always judges their partnership in terms of it. “Hey Davis,” he says at the eleventh-week mark, “we’re a fetus.” After six months: “We’re a baseball season.” After seven years: “We’re that movie – you know, the one with Marilyn Monroe.”
“You thinking of dropping me?” Davis asks, not looking up from her report.
“No,” Reese smiles. “No.”
About a year in, Reese starts bringing her home for dinner. Out to barbeques in his backyard. Reese’s wife stays in the kitchen while Davis sits on the patio and drinks beer with the men. None of them hesitate to swear or burp or talk filthy about women and that is how Davis knows she’s made it. After another year, she joins in.
One of those nights is the night Davis meets Dani Reese.
Davis is sitting back in a lawn chair listening to Hutchinson give Finley shit about being a lightweight when a girl pushes open the screen door with her foot. She has hair to her waist and her mother’s eyes. She is carrying glasses of lemonade and when she sees Davis looking she scowls.
“Dani!” Jack Reese calls, already a little drunk, already listing at the barbeque. Snapping her gaze away from Davis, Dani totters over to him, sagging under the weight of the drinks. Reese downs two glasses in quick succession. Lays a grateful hand on Dani’s shoulder.
“My daughter,” he announces. His hand is large and pale against her collarbone.
Davis thinks she sees the girl sag further. As if under a great weight.
Once, when Davis is picking Reese up after they get an early morning call-in, she catches Dani sneaking home. At first Davis doesn’t understand what she’s seeing. Dani is walking up the driveway, hands shoved in her pockets, almost like she’s just been out to get the mail. She’s wearing jeans and a t-shirt, no makeup, nothing out of the ordinary, except… her hair. Her hair is a mess. And the t-shirt is too big, big like she borrowed it, and-
Dani gives Davis a cool once over. Then she shimmies up the trellace and climbs in her window.
She is fourteen years old.
Davis doesn’t say anything. Not when Reese comes to the door and invites her in for a cup of coffee. Not when she sits at his kitchen table and eats marmalade on toast while his wife cooks bacon and he reads the paper. Not even when Dani comes downstairs, a different t-shirt and the same jeans, her hair pulled back in a braid.
“You’re up early,” Dani’s mother – Nafeesa, Davis remembers – says mildly.
“Sa’at chand ast?” Dani mumbles, rubbing at her eyes. Reese glances sharply at her over his paper. “I mean, what time is it?” Dani says quickly. She drops into a chair and stares fixedly at her cereal.
Davis wonders then, like she never has before, about Jack Reese’s American kitchen in his American house with his all-American breakfast selection and his pretty wife with her long, dark hair and her soft accent at the stove.
“A little after seven,” Davis tells Dani kindly.
Dani looks at Davis then, her face small and sharp with her hair pulled back, her eyes too big and too dark and too old. Not a child’s eyes. Not a child’s face.
Davis looks away first.
Davis assigns Dani to undercover for three reasons:
1) Dani is smart and quick and a good cop. She is by-the-book and Davis thinks (stupid) that that alone (stupid) will be enough to keep her out of trouble. (Idiot.)
2) Dani grows up beautiful, her mother’s eyes and hair to her waist. Too young and too beautiful for the bullpen, Davis thinks. Too headstrong. For reasons she can’t explain or articulate, Davis is worried Dani will get bored. Flit off to another profession. Her eyes are still too old and, sometimes, Davis is a bit afraid of her.
3) When Dani was twelve, she was in her junior high productive of Grease. Jack had invited Davis along to opening night. It was the only time he’d ever really bragged about his kid, wanted to show her off, so Davis had forked over the five dollars and sat obediently in the cheap plastic seats through two acts and an intermission.
Dani was Rizzo, sashaying around the stage with her band of giggly Pink Ladies. She was animated and sarcastic and stole every scene she was in. She sang “There Are Worse Things I Could Do” to a standing ovation and never acknowledged the audience once.
Davis figured if twelve-year-old Dani had that kind of nerve, adult Dani could handle herself just fine.
(What Davis doesn’t know is that Dani was drunk for that performance, and for the matinee the next day, and for every show after that.)
Jack Reese doesn’t say much when he hears where Davis is sending his little girl. They go out for drinks after Dani’s assignment, just like old times, and all he says is “You make sure she behaves herself.” Davis nods and peels the label off her beer and doesn’t say anything.
When they pull Dani out, she’s gone, high as a kite and spitting at the arresting officers. Davis sits with her in the back of the squad car until she quiets. Looks around with glassy, dead eyes that are nothing like her mother’s. Her hair is a mess, and Davis strokes it back from her forehead.
“Shh,” Dani says, and puts an uncoordinated finger to her lips. “Don’t tell.”
Davis has to leave the car to throw up.
Jack – and it’s Jack now, Jack and Karen in their old age and Davis doesn’t like it one bit – says it wasn’t her fault. Says his daughter has always been bad news. Davis doesn’t say “So why did you let me do it?” She nods like she understands and they sit together in the waiting room like they’ve always sat together, in squad cars, on stakeouts: side-by-side and silent.
Dani gets clean. She gets clean and she goes back to work and she gets assigned to Charlie Crews, fresh from jail. It isn’t Davis’s decision. It’s from over her head and someone really wants Jack Reese’s daughter to work with Crews and Davis doesn’t know why. She doesn’t like it. She wonders if Crews isn’t just a little bit dirty.
When she asks, Dani says “He’s a good cop” and “He’s my partner” and Davis wonders if she would have said the same thing about Jack Reese all those years ago. If anyone had bothered to ask.
Davis watches them hard after that. She watches Crews offer Dani a banana and then toast her with his own. She watches Crews construct a paperclip tree and present it to Dani like a medal. She watches Crews talk and talk and talk at Dani until she throws a pen at his head and storms off to the bathroom. When Davis goes in after her, Dani is leaning against the row of sinks, shaking her head and grinning.
Davis thinks that if Charlie Crews ever pulls out Dani’s chair, it won’t be because he doesn’t respect her as a cop.
After it’s all over, Davis goes to visit Jack Reese’s grave. She didn’t go to the funeral. She was afraid to look into Dani’s sharp, drawn face with its too-old eyes and admit that, after everything, she hadn’t known. She hadn’t known because she hadn’t wanted to know. She’d looked the other way for years and stopped looking at all after it got too hard.
Davis runs her hand along the top of Jack’s gravestone. Sits down on the grass beside it.
It has been twenty-one years since the start of their partnership.
“Hey Reese,” she says. “We’re the legal drinking age.”