A/N: I haven't written in years. This is an idea that's been swirling in my head since the CM news. This chapter is short, but I just wanted to see if it was worth continuing or not.

Part 1: Captain

She had heard the rumors.

Of course she had. It was an unspoken bond in their world, an unspoken tie amongst captains. She had smoothly woven herself into that circle. Don had made that part easy for her. The boys club of former detectives on the cusp of retirement was exactly the sort of club she didn't want to be part of, but for her it was more than that. She had the opportunity to fly through the ranks and she took it. Not because the thought of control was alluring, but New York needed people to investigate sex crimes, and she realized it was her time to pass the torch just enough to alleviate some of the middle of the night calls. She was tired. But she wasn't finished.

Neither was he.

She had heard the rumors. Organized Crime was just far enough away from her purview that she had never had a reason to look. He hadn't either. But the distance between the focuses of their respective departments was just an excuse. She knew that.

The words that were left unsaid that danced so delicately through the New York air were just thick enough to keep them apart. She had every reason and no reason at all to cross the threshold into the building at One Police Plaza that held the suite where his office was, and she subconsciously decided she would prefer to stick with the latter.

He had seen her.

She was certain of it. She could sense his proximity to her. She was flooded with the urge to turn around, to meet his gaze for only a second, but she hadn't. She knew why. So much had changed in the years since the shooting, but it was the thing that hadn't changed that kept her looking forward.

Whether he came to Tucker's funeral out of respect for the man or duty of the job, it didn't matter. She couldn't afford to mourn both losses.

Later she had wondered if he saw her. Of course he did. She was in the front, just beside his family. But it was wondering what he saw that kept her up that night. It's possible that he saw who she was ten years ago. It's more likely that he saw everything she's become since then. Did he notice the parts of her that were splintered into a thousand pieces with every voicemail she left? Did he see the bruises, long healed, that she could still feel burning beneath her skin from William Lewis? Did he see the pain she felt when she realized just how many pieces of her were being buried right in front of her?

That's the part she agonized the most over that night as she lay awake after too much wine. She had let her guard down. So much of her wanted him to know that she was fine without him. But so much of that was a lie. She didn't want him to know that she had loved anyone other than him, because without that holding them together, what other reason would he have to seek her out after all of these years.

The call came late.

She envied him, she thought as she put the shoes on that she had taken off only three hours earlier. It must be nice to work a soft 9am to 5pm, in an executive suite, investigating government officials for pushing money around. She envied his world. No late night calls, no dead bodies, no gruesome hospital visits. She was tired.

It was her turn to be on-call, something she hadn't given up with her new title. For as much as she was ready to walk away from the front line, she couldn't.

"What've we got?"

Photographs, evidence, witness statements, rain. She could do without the rain. But it was the sound of the rain that quieted the blood pounding in her ears when she squinted just enough to see the blur of "NYPD Organized Crime Unit" on the back of a squad car nearly a block to her left. To her right a kid in a beat uniform is walking to her.

"Captain Benson?"

The fucking rain won't stop. It's blurring her vision. It soaks her just enough to make her shiver. But it's not the rain that sends the stinging sensation down her spine.

In this exact moment she wishes she would have called someone else to come do this. She wasn't ready. She wasn't sure if she ever would be. What was she going to say? Would they say anything, or would they dance around her heartache and his subsequent guilt? It's unlikely that the car has anything to do with the crime scene she's about to walk into, but if by some money-laundering-scheme-gone-wrong chance that the OCU would be lead on this case, there's no way he'd come out on his own in the middle of the night with rain pissing out of the sky. He was too old for that in the same way that she was. But here she was, and there was that squad car with vinyl lettering spelling out everything but his name right there in front of her. A few beats passed before she remembered why she was there.

"Captain, CSU is looking for you."

She glances one more time at the car before she turns and walks up the six steps into the brownstone. She can't breathe.