Chapter Text
“Yo, is it bring-your-kid-to-work day or somethin’?”
Linden glances up from the pages and pages of phone records stacked on her desk to see Holder peering out the vertical blinds of their office window with an expression on his face she’s come to recognize as boredom with a hankering to disturb some shit.
She rolls her chair sideways a little and leans over to see what he’s looking at. Out in the hall, Carlson and Chief Hanson are standing with a tight cluster of high school-aged kids. The chief is talking and gesticulating, Carlson has a twitchy look on his face like he’s dying to get a word in edgewise, and the kids seem to be mostly bored.
“Career day,” she tells Holder, rolling her chair back to her desk. “They bring in some high school kids, tour them around. Come on, would you take some of these?”
She waves a stack of phone records at him because they have six months’ worth to go through and, so far, he’s been less than helpful. He spares her a quick glance over his shoulder.
“Nah, you seem like you got it. Don’t wanna mess up your flow or nothin’.”
“Holder,” she says flatly.
“Linden,” he mimics, quirking a smile at her. “Hey, I brought you coffee this morning. Don’t that buy me a stay?”
She drops the stack onto his desk. He goes back to staring out the window and mutters something she can’t quite make out. She knows he hates this kind of thing, trying to match dates and times with suspect travel patterns. It’s a seemingly endless and often fruitless game of connect-the-dots, and anything they find has a decent chance of getting thrown out in court anyway because cell tower data is notoriously iffy. He’d rather spend his time throwing his weight around in the interrogation room, but cases aren’t always won that way. She thinks about the kids out in the hall, how they probably showed up at the precinct that morning expecting to be dazzled. They always do, just like they always leave a little deflated at the end of the day, because the truth is that real police work is pretty mundane.
“Imma bring some of them pipsqueaks up in here,” Holder announces. “Drop some sweet knowledge on ’em. You wanna tag team?”
Linden’s irritation ratchets up another notch. “No,” she says firmly. “Would you just —”
“They look bored as fuck,” he interrupts. “It’s a public service. BRB, partner.”
“Holder,” she hisses as he opens the door, but he disappears into the hall without another word.
She watches him sidle up to the chief, all swagger and confidence despite the fact he’s dressed like a bum in front of his boss and his boss’s boss’s boss. She stops watching when he tries to lead the chief through some kind of convoluted handshake and positions her chair so no one in the hall can see her. She’s always hated career day. If she doesn’t lay low, she invariably ends up getting strong-armed into the Q&A session, because she’s “a senior officer with great experience to share,” which really just means she checks the diversity box and the chief trusts her not to say anything stupid. But small talk is painful for her in the best of times, nevermind when they have an active case and she has a million better things she could be doing. The kids always ask the same questions anyway.
Have you shot your gun? Can I hold your gun? Have you killed anyone? What’s the craziest case you’ve ever investigated? What’s the grossest thing you’ve ever seen? Could I be arrested for blah blah blah? Asking for a friend.
She tries to injure Holder with her eyes as he re-enters their office with a giant grin on his face and four kids in tow, but her laser beams go right over his head. Or he chooses to ignore them.
So she smiles tightly and nods a hello only because he introduces her (“Detective Sarah Linden, crime fighter extraordinaire and general badass”) and then goes back to the phone records and tries to ignore the little show he puts on.
But it’s impossible, and not only because their office is way too small to comfortably contain six people. Holder’s loud. He demands attention. He charms them with his usual inappropriate commentary. He shows them crime scene photos they have no business seeing. He goes on and on about what it’s like to be a detective.
“See, me, I went right into undercover,” he’s saying, half-sitting on the filing cabinet. “Did my time with Seattle’s finest tweakers and skeezers and shit rats before I got my gold shield. But Linden here, she did the whole patrol thing for, what, five years? And now she’s the best detective we got.”
Kiss ass, she thinks to herself, but she casts him a smile anyway.
“You best keep your noses clean,” Holder continues, going all stern-dad on them. “You guys ever find yourselves stuck in one of those little interrogation rooms with me and her, it ain’t gonna be good.”
They laugh nervously, and he moves on to a whole rant about chain of custody, so she starts to tune him out again until one of the kids, a fidgety girl standing at the back of the group, interrupts him to ask a question.
“Are you guys allowed to date?”
Linden’s ears prick, and her head snaps up. Holder getting hit on by a hormonal teenager is too good to miss.
But she realizes quickly that’s not what’s happening. The girl has the blissfully ignorant expression of someone without an ounce of self-awareness, the slightly off-kilter look of a perpetual misfit. She looks like someone who constantly says the wrong thing at the wrong time and doesn’t know she’s doing it.
Holder looks thrown off. His leg is starting to jitter slightly. Annoyed or nervous.
“What, like, civilians?” he asks. “Well ... yeah. I mean we don’t have a ton of free time, but —”
“No,” the girl corrects. She blinks rapidly, looking from Holder to Linden. “I meant each other. Like, could you two date?”
The other kids exchange unsubtle, long-suffering glances with one another, confirming Linden’s read on the girl as the weirdo who can’t keep her mouth shut. Linden would definitely like to shut it for her, especially when every pair of eyes in the room turns to her.
And then, to her total horror, she feels a blush warming her cheeks. Four curious kids, five if you count Holder, wait to see what she’ll say, and she doesn’t miss Holder’s double-take when he notices the flush in her face.
The silence stretches out to the point that it feels wrong and strange, and she realizes it’s because Holder would normally have saved her by now, filling the void with his ramblings. But there’s nothing from him. No jokes. No smartass remarks at her expense. No macho posturing.
So she levels a stare at the girl and snaps, “No. Against the rules.”
The girl blinks and looks back towards Holder, and Linden stares down at the phone records again. She can see Holder in her peripheral vision, watching her. She feels physically tense. Her heart is starting to pump quicker. Her skin feels hot. She’s having a flight response. And that is fucking ridiculous.
Holder’s voice jerks her back into the moment. It sounds unnaturally loud.
“Uh, actually,” he says, “it ain’t strictly against the rules. More like ... frowned upon.”
Now she looks at him, and his face is completely unreadable. He’s not wrong - she knows the rule book well enough to know where the grey areas are. Section 5.130, Employee Relationships. Tried and tested, by her. So she thinks for a second that he must be referring to that, that someone told him about her and Skinner, and for some reason he’s just chosen this moment to let her know he knows.
But his leg is still jittering, and he’s staring at her from across the room — and it makes her wonder. She knows she should leave it alone, file it away, just like she does every time there’s a casual touch that lingers too long, a glance that has extra layers to it, the occasional joke that doesn’t land because there’s too much truth in it.
Her innate curiosity gets the better of her, and she can't resist asking him, “What, did you look it up?”
The muscles in his jaw clench briefly, and he crosses his arms, shrugging. “Maybe. It’s good to know, alright?”
Now he’s the one avoiding her eyes. He’s clearing his throat and starting up his speech on evidence control again, and she’s thinking — what the hell just happened? What kind of bizarre breadcrumb trail led us to this point?
The sight of the chief darkening their doorway isn’t something she’s usually happy about, but at the moment, she’s pretty fucking relieved to see him poking his head in.
“Corrupting young minds, Detective Holder?” he asks gruffly, smiling.
“Never, sir,” Holder replies, smiling back. It’s such an odd, lukewarm response, especially by Holder’s standards, that she knows for sure he’s rattled.
The kids follow the chief out, leaving behind a quiet that’s so heavy and palpable she feels like it’s sitting on her shoulders, compressing her spine. She can hear everything with extra clarity — snippets of conversation from the hall, a gust of wind blowing rain against the window, the squeak of the kids’ tennis shoes against the cheap linoleum.
She watches Holder fold his long frame into his desk chair, grabbing the stack of phone records she’d left on his desk and reclining as far as the chair will let him, swivelling it so she’s not directly in his line of sight.
“Yo,” he says casually, flipping a few pages. “You gave me April. You do February and March already?”
She almost takes the out he’s giving her. She wants to. She should. But instead, she hears herself say, “Frowned upon, huh? Is that what it actually says?”
He looks over at her, not bothering to mask the surprise on his face that she isn’t just pretending the last few minutes didn’t happen.
“Who the fuck knows?” he drawls. “I haven’t read that shit.”
She nods, eyes back on her phone records, letting him have his lie. She feels like she screwed something up, somehow. Missed something, made a mess of something without even knowing she was doing it. She isn’t wired for this, she doesn’t know how to navigate when things get emotionally thorny. She always zigs when she should be zagging.
“I mean, you should probably check,” Holder continues. “There are some fine new recruits comin’ in. Right in your preferred age bracket, too.”
She huffs a laugh at that. “That was one time,” she mutters. She will forever regret telling him about the time she had a fling with a rookie patrol officer like, four years ago. She never would have mentioned it in the first place, except the they ran into the guy one day and it took Holder all of two seconds to figure it out.
“Whatever, Linden,” he says. “You let me know what you learn, once you read up on the do’s and don’ts.”
Her gaze flickers back up to his, and something in the way he’s looking at her makes her both exceptionally wary and impossibly intrigued at the same time.
“Will do,” she replies, going for casual. She misses by a long shot.