Fic Title: "Snake Eyes"

Author: Melody Clark

E-mail: melodyclark@fanfictiononthenet.com

Fandom: SVU

Category: slash and het

Pairing: Fin/Munch and Olivia/Elliot

Date: 15 November 2003

Archive: yes, just let me know where.

Rating: PG to R

Disclaimer: I am not Dick Wolf. I only play with the virtual life-size robo action figures in my stories.

Summary: It was all routine, except that it is never routine.

Warnings: Very little to offend anyone open to slash and het in the same story…no sex even...in this one...heh heh...

Snake Eyes
by Melody Clark

There's no easy way to handle it when the call comes in. It was Tutuola and I finishing paperwork and yakking back and forth: bits about investigations, questions about the day. Our respective partners had driven across town for clean up detail on cases our two teams had covered. It was all routine, except that it is never routine. And then the call comes in, and there is never an easy way.

Two NYPD detectives involved in a convenience store hold-up they'd walked in on. (I remembered sharply asking Elliot for Ibuprofen – they were on their way to midtown: the call that came in tagged the store as in midtown). Units were dispatched, shots had been fired, an officer was down (they didn't say "detective", I told myself)… finally, "officer declared DOA".

I was sure my heart stopped. I wondered faintly when the world would end. I felt myself being pushed toward a door to somewhere, maybe an abyss.

"Liv!" snapped a voice beside me, from a good man as terrified as I. I realized he was pulling me out the door. Suddenly, we were both running outside, blindly hurtling toward a waiting car. I climbed in the first open door, and Fin crawled behind the wheel.

I pounded on the radio (radio silence…scanner at large). Fin was punching up numbers on his phone.

"…name of the deceased…" Fin was yelling into the phone. There were tears spilling down his face, but none tightening his voice. He was on NYPD automatic. I knew it well. I was working on involuntary impulse myself.

"Hospital's got punk phone operators," Fin yelled, slamming the phone against the dash. "It's not their partner."

"It's not ours either," I snapped.

"Six responding," Fin coughed out, stating the relative chances we already knew. "One down. We got two in there. I don't like those odds. This is one bad crapshoot."

"It's…not…them," I said as clearly and firmly as I could, as if this might reach into the fabric of the night and make it all right.

Fin nodded, trying to believe it, but starting to lose it again at the edges. He shook his head at himself, thumb whisking away tears from his face. "Called him a bastard today."

"You call him a bastard every day," I said gently.

"Not like that. Okay, just like that, but those other times…they weren't today…"

"I know," I whispered to him. I rubbed his arm with understanding, while I worked over my own inner rosary of regrets. "John knows," I promised him, trusting that Elliot did, too.

Partners know each other intimately: it is a marriage, recited the guidebook. It will become the equal, on every level of your life, to any other marriage. Partnership intimacy is the primary cause of divorce among…

She tried not to think of the rest of it. Elliot strained at the tether as often as she: enraged her, angered her, yet created a unit despite both of them. She realized, at some point, the relationship would combust or evolve, as it had evolved for Fin and John, to something more visceral than partnership and more intense than even love.

And now she wondered if Fin had suffered the ultimate loss, or if she and Elliot would never have the chance to grow together, as their squad partners had done.

Fin drove slow enough to keep the car on the road, but only just. He suddenly reached for the phone, plucking madly for the number. He braced the phone beneath his chin, while he fought for something in his pocket. He then yanked the phone away and threw it to the floor.

"I'll make their damn circuits busy," he said, gripping in his other hand what I knew was one of their dice.

He and Munch had one set of loaded dice between them: John held one and Fin kept the other. It was their symbol, their unspoken bond. He gripped it tightly in his fist, as if praying to the gods of odds that the House would, just this once, be in our favor.

And we both knew that if it wasn't us, somebody else was going to have their heart ripped in half. If not us, then somebody.

And I knew we were both thinking, silently and to ourselves, so long as it's somebody else…

He peeled around an impossible corner, then another harder left into the carpark. We parked it somewhere, in some place open. Don't know where.

It was a race up the walk and around installed trees and bushes, to the first signs of police presence, the first waiting clusters of uniforms, of OIS IA officials, the NYPD chaplain…

Then there was Sandor McGusky from the 2-2, with his head bowed to his knees and his arms wrapped around them, convulsed into a full-body fist. He was howling horror and rage and tears. Naked, raw grief, ripped out of the soul, from the center of the self. He had people around him, surrounding him, unable to reach through the debris field of killer grief that engulfed him. Still, he was with friends. He wasn't alone. We could continue our own quest.

I felt so terrible for him…I felt the empathy of one who knew the depth of the wound he had just suffered. As terrible my empathy, I also felt blood returning to my legs as I saw him. And I heard Fin exhale, whispering a tearful volley of gratitude to an unseen presence. He had looked into a room and seen something…the someone I now heard.

"Face it, Elliot, the International Bankers have it all planned out," a beautifully annoying voice rolled out of the other waiting room.

I thought Fin Tutuola was going to scream something loud and long and triumphant, but instead he pushed silently through swinging doors and climbed Mount Munchkin, standing tall, dark, adorable and very much alive.

I only saw this afterward, however, because I was grabbing for the pale, weary face of a tall man who had worked three hours past his shift. He was carrying a box of Ibuprofen. He tried to hand it to me, but I framed his face in my hands and loved every inch of it, bit by bit. His honesty, his honor, his decency. I would have kissed him that moment, but I knew that was for another time.

"I got your pills," he said, showing the container in his palm.

"You got my pills. You got a donor heart for the one I damn near lost?"

Elliot grinned beyond the ability to mean it. It had been a gesture for me.

I kissed both sides of his face, and rubbed away the tears I'd just smeared there. Then I leaned across and grabbed John Munch's head, dragging it over for an errant lip smack on the brow, Fin Tutuola still firmly attached to Mount Munchkin.

John Munch was blushing, darker than I'd ever before seen a human being blush, but it was good for him, I concluded. He needed some public discomfiture. It was tonic for the soul. But I knew it hadn't been my head smooch that had gotten him started. I realized he was a trifle unsettled by the black man who was wrapped around him like a guidepost from which Fin Tutuola would never let go. Fin only released one hand to give Elliot a high five, but then reclaimed his embrace of Munch.

"Fin, I can't breathe," Munch coughed out. "Ease up."

"No," he mumbled, face still hidden in John's shoulder.

"People are staring – "

"Deal with it," he said, his mouth still full of Munchjacket. "I thought you might be dead."

After a second of deliberation, John surrendered, his long arms surrounding his partner equally, drawing him closer than before. John leaned gratefully into his embrace, rubbing solace into the other man's back.

I leaned against Elliot, my ear against the warm measure of his beating heart. It was the prettiest sound alive.

We watched our squad partners cling desperately to each other, not even Munch caring any longer who was seeing them this way. He had just reached into his overcoat pocket to pull an object free from inside. Munch reached for one of Fin's hands, drew it around. He plunked his own object into Fin's open palm. It had been Fin's hand holding one of the dice: the two dice were now together.

This world, this city, this life was a crapshoot: I knew that was half of what the dice embodied. And that each of us rolled our lot alone in life, except for one other. And no matter what the shoot
was, it didn't matter which way it rolled, so long as it came up snake eyes.

"I thought we we're going to need the Jaws of Life to pry them apart," Elliot whispered.

I laughed, nodding. I patted his arm. "Maybe we should take your car and get you home."

Elliot gathered me against him, his lips warm against my face that felt cold from the now-dried tears.

"I'm home, Liv," he whispered. "I'm home."

[END]