Anew

There’s something about this woman— girl, really— in front of him that makes Gabriel wonder if they take applications from high schoolers now.

“I’m not working with her,” are the first words out of his mouth, and yeah, sure, that was probably rude, but he thinks he has a right to be a little bitter that they’re throwing this kid into a war she shouldn’t have to worry about. 

“You saw the file, Gabe,” Krasminski says, nodding towards the folder in his hand. He’d been given it last week, among others, and after sifting through some of the recruits he’d picked who he thought was the most qualified, but Cameron Allen was supposed to be an agent with three years of field experience, exceptional scores in all her combat classes at the FBI Academy, and recommendations from two of Gabriel’s old coworkers. 

“I know what I saw.” He turns and heads back towards the recruitment offices. “I’m not working with a kid.”

Her frown and the curves of her face just scream I-have-dimples. Young. Too young. Her dark hair is pulled back in a tight braid on the back of her head, and he can’t actually tell if that’s makeup on her face or if her skin is just that clear. She huffs in a way that only cements her immaturity. “All due respect, sir, this kid is twenty three and perfectly capable.”

“I don’t doubt your capabilities.” I doubt my ability to keep you alive, runs through his head. “I work dangerous operations. I’m not going to be the reason someone has to call your mother with the news.”

Something in her gaze shifts, a look in her eyes that fades as quickly as it comes. “You won’t be. I swear, Agent Kendrick. We want the same thing: we both need a partner. You said so yourself, my work is impressive. You have no valid reason to refuse me.”

Gabe tries to make himself deny her. Really, he does. He tries to look at that woman far too young to be on the frontlines, who should be in college not the FBI, but can’t look past the obviously trained muscles and the stern confidence held in her straight back and relaxed shoulders. He sees a capable woman no matter how long he tries to convince himself that twenty three is too young.

“You’re staying in the car for the first month,” he says instead of agreeing fully.

Cameron smiles, and oh no she has dimples, replying, “You can try.”

He doesn’t know if he sighs just in his head, or if the disgruntled look on her face is from a sigh he doesn’t manage to contain.

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True to his word, Gabe tries to keep her in the car for this bust, but despite all odds (and the child lock that he can't make work on the front passenger door) Cameron comes trotting up beside him less than ten seconds after he tells her to stay put.

“I’m not doing this because I’m childish,” she tries to tell him. “I’m doing this because I’m capable and you just can’t see that yet.”

“Doing what? Getting under my skin?”

She sticks out her tongue at him in the same breath as she spots the guy they were supposed to be after running off, suggesting what sounds like just about the perfect plan of execution.

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She’s bubbly. Cameron keeps him on his toes, at the ready with a one-liner no matter the situation. When he tells her to go into Dunkin’s to get them food, she asks what he wants and he replies “Anything,” which was a terrible decision when she comes back with a cup of water. She smirks while he scowls, and after ten seconds of tense silence she hands him the bag with a muffin and sets down the second coffee, the way he likes it. He’s not sure how she remembers, but it’s those little things which she catches. Not the important ones, sometimes, but certainly the mundane ones.

“You don’t remember where you parked,” he says, “But you remember every episode of Psych?”

Cameron scoffs. “Duh,” she tells him, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, while still frantically searching for her car as she repeatedly presses the unlock button. After a minute Gabe just grabs the keys, sighing and pressing the panic button to locate the sad screaming of her 2008 Subaru that’s on its last leg.

She whoops, pumping her fist in the air and chasing after the vehicle like it’s going to go somewhere, but Gabe only chuckles to himself and throws her the keys when she can’t get it unlocked.

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Sometimes Gabe feels like the woman at his side who yells “Horse!” everytime they pass one is as innocent as she seems. But he knows, logically, that three years of field work doesn’t come unburdened; he just doesn’t see it right away. She’s professional when she needs to be, on cases and in briefings, she’s an adult in every way that matters and a child in every other one.

The first hint at the pain Cameron’s really seen is when they’re at a crime scene, late at night, the surroundings illuminated by only the blaring lights on an ambulance. She’s hovering over the victim, voice calm and steady in a way that suggests she knows exactly what she’s doing. The woman, arm bandaged, has her head in her hands, shaking like a leaf, letting Cameron keep one steady hand on her shoulder as she speaks.

The next morning, when they’re running on five hours of sleep, Cameron takes an extra half hour before work to visit the woman at the hospital, and Gabe thinks he’s gotten a good partner.

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Gabe remembers his childhood in memories of his younger siblings: chasing his sister Lily around the backyard in a game of tag that he’d always let her win, showing his brother Kaden how to change a tire when they’re stuck on the side of the road; the youngest, Grace, on his hip, Lily rolling a car across the kitchen floor and Kaden asking him questions about his history homework while onions simmer on the stove in front of him. He’s built to protect, to nurture, to care for.

This, he tells himself, is why when Cameron calls out of work with a lilt to her voice that speaks volumes, he ducks out of the office an hour early to drop by her apartment. He knows where it is only from records he was handed some three months ago when they became partners.

“I brought bread,” he says in lieu of a greeting when she answers the door. “My wife makes it like we’re going to have a blizzard or something, and I figured you might like some.”

Cameron stands in her doorway, a weariness in how she leans against the doorframe evident. Her arms wrap around her hoodie-covered midriff, and if Gabe were to look closely he thinks he could call it a way of comforting herself, keeping her stuck to the floor and not floating off into the nothingness of her thoughts. Her fingers dig into the skin underneath her sweatshirt. The first thing he does upon getting inside is take her hands in his.

He rubs her knuckles gently. “You’re gonna hurt yourself.”

She mumbles something like won’t be the first time, that Gabe does his best to ignore. “Thanks for the bread,” she replies, freeing her hands to take it from him and setting it on the counter, opening a drawer with the other hand.

“Hold up, you have a bread knife? You live in a studio, you don’t even have a bedroom.”

“My dad’s a chef,” she says with a smile that feels too small, but real, and he’ll take that. “You couldn’t live without a bread knife in my house.”

He recalls a memory of her telling him all about how she would play in his workshop as a child, her own hammer hanging on the wall ready for her to pound stray nails into two-by-fours. “I thought your dad’s a carpenter?”

Her smile comes back. “Wait until I tell you about how he worked at Apple.”

“I wonder where you got your ‘jack of all trades’ gene,” he says with his eyes rolling, sitting down on one of two bar stools. “So. You okay?” he finally asks.

Cameron shrugs. “I just woke up with a case of ‘can’t do paperwork’ and decided to risk faking being sick.”

He doesn’t smile at the joke, and he sort of wishes he could, because her face falls as soon as his eyes meet hers. “What’s really going on, Cam?” The nickname slips out instinctually; he’s used to calling his sister all manners of nicknames, his brother hating them but never stopping him from calling him Kade or Kase or KK, ruffling his hair and throwing an arm around his shoulder.

Cameron doesn’t really react right away. But when she sits beside him, she pointedly doesn’t make eye contact, a piece of now-buttered bread hanging loosely in her hand. “It was just a bad night.”

He nods along, saying nothing as she takes a bite of her bread, choosing instead to talk about Krasminski’s water cooler excursion that day, but if she falls asleep on his shoulder an hour later as they watch Dog Cops on her tiny television, no one has to know but them.

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Gabe gives her a paperback copy (“Because paperback is clearly better than hardcover,” she tells him during a stakeout) of a book she mentioned wanting, for her birthday that year. Two months later he unwraps a new bottle of the cologne he’s used since he was a rookie some ten years ago, the bottle in his desk suspiciously running low about the time his birthday comes around. They don’t really talk about either, but smiles are shared, and it seems to work.

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He and his wife move into an apartment closer to the FBI headquarters. Cameron picks him up for work in her still dilapidated Subaru now, sometimes bringing coffee, always the correct order, and refuses to be paid even though she’s living off a GL-10 salary in New York City, which he fights to change even though he knows she probably won’t get a raise until she’s in her fifth year in the field. Her taste in music is almost exactly the same as his wife’s: cheesy pop, contemporary rock, and three specific Queen songs. He doesn’t so much like it as he’s so used to it it doesn’t bother him anymore. But after week two of listening to her music, she hands him the aux and he plugs in his phone, scrolling through the best of his music (which isn’t much, to be fair), submitting to playing We Are The Champions because he will admit that it’s pretty good.

He starts the day laughing, and ends it with Cameron’s blood on his hands.

Cameron starts with the blood on her hands from forcing it inside herself as long as possible, the white-hot pain of a gunshot wound keeping her conscious long enough to make it into the ambulance.

“My dad died when I was twelve,” she tells him, her bloodied hand falling by her side as the doors to the ambulance shut. Her face pales and he knows she wants to sleep, wants to give up. “Every time I get you coffee it’s decaf, ‘cause I know you drink too much. I went to— to boarding school when I was twelve and got expelled for—” she grunts in pain as the EMT presses down too hard on her wound. A sob tears its way through her chest and Gabe tries to stay quiet, he does; but there’s something so disgusting and terrifying about seeing her like this that makes him wince and grab ahold of her hand. His own becomes slick and red. “—for staying out too late so many times.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Gabe asks quietly, knowing exactly what she’s going to say but asking anyway, praying it’ll be different. 

Her voice is quiet, and her eyes are shutting against the pain. “I don’t want to die.”

“You’re not going to,” he replies, repeating, “You’ll be fine, Cam. You’ll be fine,” like it’ll save her.

She doesn’t get to hear him. An EMT yells something he doesn’t hear as his head hits the wall, a sob falling from his lips. Her bloodied hand is still clasped in his.

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Cameron’s not yet out of surgery when Ella, his wife, gets to the hospital at seven that night. She brings with her takeout by the Chinese place next to her workplace, her latest book under one arm. She’s three chapters in when she sits beside him, leaning into his side, and sixteen in when a doctor comes to fetch them.

“Family of Cameron Allen?”

Gabe nods. He tries to think of when she might have told him of any living family, but after the admittance of her dead father and the common knowledge that her mother had never been around, he doesn’t have anyone to call but his boss to let him know what’s happening. It only hurts long enough for the doctor to continue speaking. “Miss Allen’s out of surgery, and you can see her. The bullet didn’t hit anything unrepairable, and we were able to stabilize her. With sufficient rest she’ll be back to work in a few months.”

Gabe stops listening as soon as he says the room number, Ella following behind him and thanking the doctor as they walk off.

Cameron’s pale, and looks tiny under that blanket, but her chest rises and falls, and that’s enough.

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The first words Cameron says after waking are in jest, telling him “you look like you got run over by a donkey.”

“Why a donkey?” he asks, instead of yelling at her or crying in relief or holding her tight and never letting go. He lets her tease him like it’s normal.

She yawns. “Because donkeys are cuter than horses,” she says like it makes perfect sense.

Ella makes him leave for an hour a few days later while they give her a proper shower, telling him to go retrieve clothes from her apartment. She won’t be discharged for another two days but it’s clearly important to her to feel at least mildly presentable.

They spend their one year anniversary of being partners in the hospital, crappy coffee clutched in Gabe’s hand (caffeinated, thank you very much) and tea in Cameron’s.

A year after Krazminski hands him that file, Cameron’s just as bubbly, makes as many jokes, and is ready with as many one-liners as she was when they started out. Gabe still grumbles about her taste in music, and has to drag her back on topic once in a while. But there’s a depth and severity to their partnership that makes him think, maybe, if he can drop some of his gruff older-brother mindset, and she could sober up for briefings a little more often, they might make it in the long run.

He finds, unlike so many partners he’s had in the past, he wants them to make it.