Title: Eye, Eye, Partner

Author: badly-knitted

Characters: Ryo, Dee

Rating: G

Setting: After Vol. 7.

Summary: Catching the bad guys can be more difficult, not to mention more hazardous, than it sounds.

Word Count: 816

Written For: My own prompt 'FAKE, Dee/Ryo, Eye trouble,' at fic_promptly.

Disclaimer: I don't own FAKE, or the characters. They belong to the wonderful Sanami Matoh.

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Catching the bad guys was what the job was all about; it was the reason Dee had wanted to be a cop in the first place, to get the scum off the streets so that regular people could sleep at night. Trouble was, generally speaking, the bad guys didn't much like being caught and tended to fight back, using anything that came to hand. Besides having suspects take a swing at them, all cops had to contend with being shot at, threatened with knives, and having heavy objects thrown at them. They were just the everyday hazards of the job. No one had ever said being a cop was easy

It was just their bad luck that this time the perp they were chasing was a little more innovative than usual. Ryo had managed to bring the guy down single-handedly after Dee was put out of action, despite taking an elbow to the eye, but then a couple of uniformed officers had to take over with the arrest while the two detectives got to take a trip to the ER.

They'd chased their quarry onto a construction site, splitting up to corner him, but Vinny the Weasel, as he colourfully named himself, had no intention of giving up easily. Dee had his gun trained on the skinny guy as Ryo approached from behind to cuff him, and that was when Vinny had grabbed a handful of grit from the bin beside him and thrown it in Dee's face. If he'd been wearing sunglasses like Ryo, Dee would've been alright, but he'd left his in the car. Isn't hindsight wonderful? In a way, Dee was lucky, the grit only went in one eye, but it was enough to effectively blind him and he went down hard, scrabbling at his face, trying to clear his vision. Just getting an eyelash in your eye hurt badly enough, the sharp grit felt a thousand times worse.

Not done with causing mayhem, Vinny twisted half out of Ryo's grasp, elbowing him in the eye in the process. As luck would have it, Ryo was wearing sunglasses, and unsurprisingly, the lens popped out, cutting him just under his eyebrow, the blood from the wound running straight into his eye and blurring his vision. He had a good grip on Vinny's other arm though, and with a twist, a jerk, and a well-placed foot to the back of the man's knee, Ryo managed to get him face down on the ground. Before Vinny knew what was happening, he was cuffed, and Ryo sat on him to keep him from trying to make another break for it, before digging out his radio and calling for assistance.

As there was no way either of them could drive, they had the dubious pleasure of travelling to hospital by ambulance, the paramedics doing their best to flush the grit from Dee's eye while Ryo sat across from him, holding a pressure dressing against his own eye, trying to stop the bleeding. All in all, it wasn't their finest hour.

At the ER, they were rushed straight into a treatment room so that the damage to Dee's eye could be assessed. Eye numbed with local anaesthetic, and the last fragments of grit removed, the doctor informed them that the grit had scratched Dee's cornea and the eye would need to be kept covered while it healed. To Dee's mind, that was just one more indignity for him to suffer.

"You look like a pirate!" Ryo chuckled, looking at the stylish eye-patch Dee was sporting over his right eye.

"You can talk!" Dee took in Ryo's appearance; the cut under his eyebrow had been stitched, but his left eye was almost swollen shut and the bruising extended across the bridge of his nose, which also looked a bit swollen. "Black eye and stitches, Bikky's gonna freak when he sees you!"

"Could've been worse, at least we still have one good eye each."

"How you can be so cheerful is beyond me," Dee grumbled. Then something horrible occurred to him and he groaned. "Oh man, you know what this means, don't ya? No way the Chief's gonna let us out on the street like this, we're gonna be stuck on desk duty until we can see where we're goin'!"

"Probably," Ryo agreed with a wry smile. "I wouldn't really want to try driving at the moment anyway. C'mon, we'd better get a taxi back to the precinct and face the music."

"I suppose. So help me though, if JJ starts fussing over me, I'll kill him."

"Maybe the Chief will let us take off early because of our injuries."

Dee brightened. "Yeah! Then we could pick up some comfort food, go back to your place and take care of each other!"

"Sounds like a plan."

All they had to do now was convince Chief Smith. How hard could that be?

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The End