Author: Minervacat
Fandom: Homicide: Life On The Street
Pairing: Kay Howard gen, implied Howard/Munch
Rating: R
Spoilers: Through Homicide: the Movie
Summary: five dollars says that your heart goes with it 1100 words.

She left Homicide for Vice on the rotating schedule that disrupted no department the way it disrupted Homicide. People came to Homicide because they wanted to, and people left because they had to. Because it got to be too much -- because they got caught in the middle of something that they'd underestimated.

More often than not, they left broken, or in pine boxes.

Homicide was eternity; Homicide was eternal.

She'd thought of Beau as being in Homicide even after he wasn't. He'd disappeared, slid out of the department and into another life. Kay had thought they were friends. She'd thought they'd been more than partners, but when Gee had partnered them up her first day in the Homicide squad room, Kay had wished -- a stupid little girl wish -- that Gee hadn't done that.

She'd thought she could have loved Beau Felton, and she did, in her own way. Her heart tore and her stomach turned over when they found him, alone in that rundown place, and she thought that this one, this body, this name on the board -- this one would be the one that'd kill her.

It didn't. She loved Beau the best way she'd known how, and it hadn't been enough to save him, or her. There wasn't anything that saved you from Homicide. Kay had given up on love after that.

She bought a house in Canton before there was cachet to buying a house in Canton. The first year, her neighbors were two couples who'd lived in Canton for fifty years; the second year, her neighbors were seven assorted graduate students at Hopkins, renting from the property companies who'd bought the houses and turned the place into a mecca for the young, the hip, the sad.

Kay thought that she only fit the last category.

Sad, because you can only see so much death laid out before you like a banquet of worms before it starts to hurt. Before it starts to eat you up from the inside, and either you force it down (and get eaten up anyway, despite your best efforts) or you run (and Kay doesn't think that anyone who worked in Homicide can ever run fast enough, but Munch was trying).

You get out while you can.

She took the transfer to Vice because she had to -- because she wasn't offered a choice -- and it wasn't like Munch, who went to New York just because he could. Everyone who she thinks of as Homicide are scattered to the four corners of the country; some crazy, some sane, and some -- too many of them -- dead, names that she wrote in red, and then black, on the board in the squad room.

Munchkin went to New York because it's a city of strangers. He called her, his first day at SVU, and she sat at her desk in Vice with the phone pressed to her ear and listened to the clatter, the chatter, of the New York squad room. She listened to the noise behind his voice and thought it sounded more like Homicide than the squad room in Vice ever had.

"Did you swap one evil for another?" she asked him, aiming for teasing and falling flat.

His voice was low, and Kay thought that he sounded sad, instead of cynical, but maybe she was just projecting. "It's different here," he said.

"Different how?"

"It's not home," he said. "It's somebody else's home. They're all nice people here, good detectives, dedicated to their work. But they're family to each other."

He didn't say, but they're not family to me, because he didn't have to. Kay knew: Homicide was family to them, and always would be.

The family you choose -- the family you're burdened with, tied together with grief and fear.

Munch didn't call again, after his first phone call, and Kay worried -- she'd always worried about them, all of them, everyone who passed through that squad room at any point in time; because no one had worried about themselves. She'd been at Vice almost four years and she'd spent almost eight in Homicide; it took her all of three minutes to find the phone number.

Just because she was quiet, Munch had once said, didn't mean that Kay was stupid.

The first time he'd said it, Meldrick had made an awful joke -- and funny, that Kay remembered what Munch said and not what Meldrick had responded -- and Munch had been up and out of his chair so fast Kay had hardly seen him move, finger prodding Meldrick in the chest, demanding an apology on Kay's behalf.

Kay hadn't been offended, but she'd never been able to tell Munchkin anything. "Sorry, Kay," Meldrick had said.

She'd shrugged and gone back to her paperwork. She hadn't looked up, but she'd felt Munch's eyes on the back of her neck.

Kay had never understood why Munch had cared so much, but she'd cared, too, in the same inexplicable way, and that was why she called New York, the first time, a slow Monday morning when the phones in Vice weren't ringing. She cared about Munch -- it had just taken longer. Years.

And Munch was never one to talk about his feelings, which was okay -- Kay wasn't, either.

She called the first Monday of the month because it was the only way she knew to keep Munch from drowning in his own cynicism; the only way she knew to keep herself from freezing up completely.

Vice was a different kind of work from Homicide. She never ends up caring about the people she encounters -- there's no story behind the crimes, just clinical motive and factual resolution. It's a different kind of horror, one that never twisted her heart around and left her gasping at her desk, in an alley, on the floor of the women's bathroom.

It was the kind of horror that she leaves in the office. After Homicide, Kay didn't think that anyone ever left their horror, their pain, their grief, in the office -- she went to Vice and was surprised that no one else took that home with them.

She calls Munch on Mondays at the beginning of the month because the number one has always felt like a clean slate. It's always felt like the board in the squad room at the stroke of midnight exactly on New Year's Eve. They always stood in the squad room at the end of the year, no parties, no dates, no family, because the board was blank then, if only for a moment, and at 12:01 the phone would ring.

At 12:01 on January 1st, there was always a new name on the board.

Sometimes he isn't in the squad room when she calls. She gets to know the voices, the names, of the people on the other end of the phone -- Benson, Stabler, later Munch's partner Finn Tutuola -- and thinks about Munch turning these people into family, like they had in Homicide. She thinks she'd like Finn Tutuola, funny and dry and kind on the other end of the phone.

She thinks about visiting Munch, sometimes.

She never does. She looks at the paperwork on her desk -- none of it meaningful, all of it needing to be finished -- and instead she just picks up the phone.

Homicide has always done better with the phone. The other end of the phone, that's something she's conditioned to understand -- phone rings, someone's dead. Black and white, night and day, right and wrong.

Life and death.

"Hey, Munchkin," she says. "How's the weather?"

Grief, pain, the fear that she's going to leave the Baltimore Police Department in a box -- and it's raining outside, and on the other end of her phone, it's raining in New York.

author's notes: this is for rocket, who wanted to know what kay was doing during the difference between murder and homicide. ash did beta duty. title and summary from the mountain goats, "going to maryland".