Standard Disclaimer: The characters in the Law & Order universe are the property of Dick Wolf and are borrowed below for creative curiosity only.
From time to time his glance makes her shrivel, far behind her careful impassivity. He is wondering how he got stuck with her as a partner, or how she made it into the squad, or what idiocy could have made her ask just that, just then. She has a thousand different suspicions of the mind behind that gaze. A hundred times she's been on the verge of just asking him, and stopped herself for fear he might tell her.
He's a closed window, a shuttered house, a shadow moving behind the curtains that she almost recognizes but can't reach.
"Give it time," Ross tells her. "It's new for him, too."
"He thinks I'm too young."
"You look young. You know it. You've used it. People talk to you because they don't find you threatening."
"Not threatening. Great." She tries to sound wry instead of peevish. It's a very thin line. "Just what every girl cop wants to hear."
Even after months the office is still untethered, still bears the imprint of the last man who owned it. The Captain moves around it with vigor, as though filling it with his personality will somehow overwrite the memory of inheritance. His glance is impatient. "You play the hand you're dealt. Deakins brought him in. Now he's gone. It'll take him a while to warm up to change."
"He thinks the only reason I'm here is because of you," she says. She doesn't ask, Is it?
"You're here because you earned it. So get out there and prove him wrong." He opens the door for her, clear sign that the interview is over. He doesn't say, And prove me right.
Deakins' squad. Deakins' people. She feels their gazes slip off her skin, measuring her against a standard set by a man she has never met. They have been polite in their acceptance of the new kid, but she feels her own inexperience acutely. It is a different world from undercover; they speak a different language, in a cypher she does not have the key to. Ross knows it, like her partner does. They outline strategies and exchange knowledge, measuring each other with a wary respect over common ground while she struggles behind, stumbling to keep up.
The Captain gave her a foot in the door. Everything else is up to her.
She feels like she's in the Red Queen's race, running flat-out just to stand still.
Logan is stretched out at his desk, flipping through the first pages of a book. Before she'd left, it had been on her desk. "You could kill a guy with this stuff," he tells her, not looking up. "If reading it didn't bore him to death, you could drop it on his head to finish the job. You been going through Goren's library?"
"It's mine. One of my neighbors lent it to me. It's interesting."
"You kidding me? The title page alone could put you into a coma."
She is briefly fooled by his raised eyebrows. Unreasonable, to feel defensive about her reading material, and yet. "I've found it--" she begins anyway. "I mean, the author has some groundbreaking ideas about the roots of--"
Logan tosses the book back onto her desk. Its thump cuts her off mid-sentence. "You must be a real barrel of laughs on dates, Wheeler."
The words are right, and his affect is as well, but there's a reserve behind them that lurks just beyond the visible. She settles herself back in her seat and thinks about those hidden places, remembering too late to come up with a reply. The moment is lost; the pause, too long. He looks at her over their desks and mocks her with his silence.
She can't read him.
They are secondaries to Eames's primary for one case, working the minutiae behind who, what, when, where, how and why. Logan takes point on another, the wheels turning invisibly behind that closed and haggard face. She is still too new to be lead on a case. She tags at her partner's heels instead, watching him, studying him, learning the patterns of his speech and the habits of his routine. She learns to recognize the small signs of mounting tension, learns not to provoke him when his temper is high, learns to be the outsider while he connects on some undefinable way with perps and witnesses. The hardened ones, the desperate ones: they recognize something in him and respond to it.
"He's good," Ross says, watching an interview from behind the glass with her.
"Yeah," she says. She does not begrudge the praise. It is the truth. "He is."
He is unlike some of the other detectives in Major Case, whose collars are white and stamped with privilege and education. He is street, and honestly so. His reputation precedes him. She pulls his old case files out of the 27th and reads them, looking for the man behind the dry, meticulous detail of reports. She mentions his name to older cops, friends from a different generation, and listens while they reel through legends and tales of the past. Their stories reduce him to smoke and mirrors, a living man invisible behind a single, iconic act. She tries to lead him into conversation about his past: the cases that he's worked, the people that he's known, his personal life, his family. He will not be led.
She learns, but it's the things she can't grasp that bother her. His look across the interrogation room, sending a silent message that she can't read. The lift of his chin in cues that she misses. The glance that seeks to share a moment of humor that eludes her.
"What was so funny?" she asks him when the door to interrogation closes.
He looks at her oddly. "You didn't notice it?"
"I laughed," Eames says, stepping out of the observation room with her partner.
Goren fumbles the files he is holding and says, "You didn't. Laugh. I didn't hear you."
She amends with a perfectly straight face, "I was laughing on the inside."
"Oh. Well. In-- She was laughing on the inside," Goren tells Logan, and the other three grin and Wheeler is left on the outside again.
She watches him. He is aware, and shows it in the cynical, edged glances that acknowledge her eye. In the lulls, she organizes what she knows as fact against what she believes. A good cop learns to rely on those tiny pushes of instinct, knowing that instinct is simply a word, an explanation for the clues unconsciously gathered, compared against experience, evaluated and analyzed while the conscious mind moves elsewhere.
Two things she knows as fact. Logan is a good cop. She is too.
And he does not trust her.
"He's not a perp, you know."
She starts at the voice at her shoulder and finds Eames there, fishing through the jigsaw puzzle of styrofoam cups by the coffee machine. "Sorry?"
"Your partner." Alex lifts her chin to gesture past her. Goren is saying something to Logan, both safely separated by a pair of desks. Though they are too far away to be overheard, Mike's body language is relaxed, open. Deceptively so; she has learned to pick out the small signs of wariness in the tilt of his body. "He's not a case you have to solve."
"I'm not trying to solve anything," she says. "It's just growing pains."
Eames pours hot water into the cup, a small plastic stirrer bobbing in the spin of a man-made whirlpool. "You're a pusher," she says wisely. "You're like Bobby."
"I'm not." The denial is a little too swift and a little too earnest to be entirely tactful. She flinches under Alex's look. "Am I? I'm sorry. I didn't mean--"
"Forget it." Her dismissal forbids further apologies. Wheeler bites off the explanations crowding her tongue. "I just meant that you like to work things from the inside-out. Sometimes that works."
"It works for Goren," she says diffidently. It is not meant to be flattery.
"He's got a knack for figuring out how people tick."
"So?"
"So, it's not the same as living with them, after. Some guys need their privacy."
"Like Logan?"
"Hey, I'm not meddling," Eames announces with fantastic inconsistency. "He's your partner."
Alex's glance skips back to the two men. Hers follows. Goren's head is tipping, tilting with his upper body as though some hinge has come loose. She does not need to look to know how that distracted, abstracted gaze has abruptly focused, encroaching on privacy with the absoluteness of its attention. Ingenuous. Almost innocent. Logan's pose does not change, but some quality in it shifts. It shouts to her of hackles rising.
Eames does not move to rescue her partner. Wheeler wonders if they see the same things. She can imagine Logan throwing a punch at Goren, if provoked enough.
"What was Barek like?" she asks suddenly.
Alex lifts her eyebrows and returns to her tea. "Smart," she says. "She was inside-out, too."
"And what are you?"
Her smile is a little twisted, a little cynical. It is easy to forget, in the shadow of Goren, how Eames can fill a room with her presence. When she chooses. "You inside-outers need people like us to see the big picture."
"You mean we can't see the forest for the trees."
"I mean sometimes you can't see the bag for the nuts." Eames is acerbic.
She feels her mood lift a little. "Great," she says. "Now I'm a nut collector."
"Don't let it get you down," Alex reassures. "We don't always get to choose our partners."
She could be speaking of any of them. Wheeler smiles anyway. It feels good to do so, in the company of one of her new colleagues. "Logan's not so bad."
"He's a real Prince Charming." Alex is deadpan, with no telltale emphasis to betray what she's thinking. It is hard, sometimes, to tell how much of what she says is serious.
"Prince Charming?" she asks. She can't prevent the note of skepticism.
"Sleeping Beauty," Alex explains kindly. "Or did I mean Frog Prince? I can never keep those stories straight. Guy meets girl, girl meets guy, guy commits a homicide and molests girl, SVU gets called out and arrests everyone--"
"It's a regular New York fairy tale."
Eames blows across her drink. "Now you sound like Logan. Bobby would know. I should buy a book."
"Nobody dies in the Frog Prince--" she begins.
"Wolves," Eames interrupts abruptly. She puts down the tea. "Wolves and sheep. Nothing to do with princes at all."
Wheeler glances out at Logan and Goren. Which is which? "What?"
"Wolves in sheep's clothing." Eames nods towards the other room. "That's what I'm thinking of. They're easy to work with, if you know how."
"How's that?"
"Give them their head, then get the hell out of the way. And hang on for dear life." She glances towards the squad room. "I know," she adds drily, in answer to a question she hasn't even been asked yet. "Coming from me, that's practically a professional opinion."
Wheeler's gaze is drawn by movement. Logan is rising, his shoulders tight with antagonism. Goren tilts even further, as though the weight of his curiosity is too heavy for his body to support. Eames sighs.
"Excuse me," she says. "I need to shear some sheep. Again."
"Um," Wheeler says.
Eames is already heading into the main squad room. "Maybe I'll make you and Bobby some slides," she says over her shoulder. "In case you get confused about which are perps and which are cops."
Wheeler trails at her heels, curiosity spiking her interest as well. Eames is dwarfed by both men, and the alpha male hostility is like cordite in the air. And yet. The older woman is adroit, and practiced; a few words later, Goren is back at his desk, contentedly bending his formidable mind to the puzzle of a case. Logan stands at his own desk, still coiled tight in irritation. Eames has left him to her. Perhaps it's meant as professional courtesy. She imagines if she looks hard enough, she can see sullen sparks of temper burning the floor.
"Everything okay?" she asks.
Logan looks down at her. His eyes are hot for a moment, and then she can't see it anymore, that anger. It does not fade; it is simply gone, as though he has returned it to a box for safekeeping. She is on the outside again, looking in through closed shutters. It doesn't bother her as much as it did.
"Fine," he says. "Everything's just fine."
She glances across the room at Goren, feeling Logan slowly unwind beside her. "He's a interesting guy," she says.
Logan says nothing for a moment. When he answers at last, it is a sardonic little word. "Yeah."
"Eames says I'm like him," Wheeler says.
His glance at her is quizzical. He is thinking, Women, she decides, but all he says is, "If you start turning into a little Goren, I'll have to put you out of my misery."
"Shut up," she says.
"Scary," Logan says.
She glares at him. He looks back, then suddenly, without warning, grins. "What else did Eames say?"
"What'd he do to piss you off?"
"Who says I was pissed off?"
She lifts an eyebrow. Logan makes a noncommittal sound. She is not entirely sure what it means. "C'mon," her partner says, and snags his coat with an arm. He heads towards the door. "Speaking of."
"Where are we going?" she demands. His stride is too long for her, usually. She snatches up her own coat to hasten after, and finds to her surprise that he is waiting for her at the door.
"Disneyland," her partner says. "What do you think?"
She tells him, "She said I don't have to figure you out to work with you." It sounds more accusing than it is.
"What's to figure out?" Logan asks, and glances down at her. He looks honestly surprised.
It throws her. When he moves into the hall, his pace is shorter, slower. She is not expecting it; her own stride has grown longer and faster to keep up with his. She shoots ahead, then has to remember how she used to walk, before Major Case. It takes her half the length of the hallway to find her place at his side.
"Relax, Wheeler," he says. His mouth twists into a crooked smile. "What's the rush?"