Author: Minervacat
Fandom: Homicide: Life on the Street/Law & Order: SVU
Pairing: John Munch gen.
Rating: R
Spoilers: Through Homicide: the Movie; none for SVU.
Summary: mur·der n. 1. The unlawful killing of one human by another, especially with premeditated malice. -- hom·i·cide n. 1. The killing of one person by another. 1000 words.

He's conditioned, after all these years, to hear murder and homicide and assume that they mean the same thing. Somebody's dead; somebody else killed them; therefore it goes to Homicide, and it's a murder. Every murder is homicide -- but not every homicide is, in the end, murder. Some days, John forgets that, even though Danvers always wanted to remind them. Danvers is out of sight, and so out of mind, and the differences are, too, most of the time.

They're always at the back of his mind, though, more so now, in New York, than they ever were when he was in Baltimore.

In Baltimore, homicides and murders both landed on his desk -- or on Kay's desk, or Bayliss's desk, or Pembleton's desk, or Meldrick's desk. Down in Fells Point, homicide and murder were always the same thing; dead is dead is dead in Baltimore. Dead as Bob Irsay's reputation in the city, still, after all these years. How you got dead was only important to whichever of them had picked up the phone.

John doesn't know how many bodies he looked at while he was in Baltimore. Hundreds, maybe thousands, and Kay teased him that he'd been sarcastic and cynical from the very first one.

"Everyone else sees a body and pukes," she says on the phone. She's the only one he still talks to. Her accent is familiar as the smell of the squad room (the same in New York as it always was in Baltimore, gun oil and stale cigarette smoke even though nobody smokes anymore, fast food grease and sweat and fear), and surrounded by New Yorkers, he leans into the phone like he could fall into the familiar cadence of the Eastern Shore. "You looked at the bodies and laughed."

"Aw, Kay," he says, and she laughs at him. "Hey," he says, "do you know the different between murder and homicide?"

"Trick question, Munchkin?"

"No," he says. "But you ever wonder why nobody in Baltimore mentioned it more often?"

Kay laughs again, and says, "Plenty of things nobody ever mentioned in Baltimore."

"You ever wonder about that?"

"Don't think so hard," Kay tells him. "After Homicide, everything else should be a piece of cake."

John thinks, but what if it isn't?

He isn't sure if there was ever even a dictionary in the squad room in Baltimore -- who needed a dictionary when you had Frank Pembleton, Crosetti said once. Bayliss found a HELLO MY NAME IS sticker in the bottom of a drawer no one had probably opened for ten years and scrawled The Oxford English Dictionary (Unabridged) and slapped it onto Pembleton's chest. Everything started falling to pieces in Homicide after that, and about the way it was the only time he saw Tim Bayliss unwind enough to make a joke Bayliss's whole first year in the department.

Pembleton wore the sticker on his coat all day, cheerfully, and if John had known that Adena Watson would be the beginning of a seven-year-long end back then, he'd have ... gone out and bought a dictionary, or something.

He doesn't really know.

SVU has a dictionary -- four of them, in fact, even if Finn is using the paperback Webster's to keep the drawer on his desk propped open because it sticks if he shuts it all the way.

Benson was the one who looked up the definitions of murder and homicide. "I'm settling a bet with Eliot," she said, and perched on the corner of Finn's desk.

"What do you get if you win?" Finn said.

"A sense of moral superiority," John muttered, and Benson glared at him.

Finn said, "Hey, she already got one of those, and so does Stabler, this ain't no kind of bet." Benson hefted the dictionary like she was going to throw it at Finn, but instead she braced it against her thighs and read them the definitions.

It didn't settle the bet -- she and Stabler were still arguing semantics when John's phone rang, Kay on the other end, because it was the first Monday of the month and that was when Kay called.

When he transferred to New York, they offered him Homicide, anywhere in the city he wanted it. When he turned that down, they offered him any nice, safe desk job that he could imagine. John turned that down, too, and they stuck him in SVU. He never minded; he was doing penance in New York, the way that Kay was doing penance in Arson (which she hated) and the way that Bayliss was doing penance somewhere no one could find him.

John Munch always survived. Crosetti and Felton didn't survive, and Kellerman almost didn't. Gee didn't. The rest of them who escaped from Homicide are marking time, saying prayers or cursing God, and waiting for signs from above that everything they'd done in Baltimore was being counted.

Homicide: we work for God.

No one ever said anything about murder, but John listened to Benson read the definitions and thought that they should have.

He likes New York because he doesn't know anyone. He never looks down at a victim and sees a childhood friend. He could make a list, if he were that sort of man, of the ways that SVU is harder, more terrible, than Homicide ever was, and he could make one of the ways that Baltimore was crueler and more vicious than anything they face in New York.

John can't compare the two -- he can't compare the two any better than Stabler and Benson can compare murder and homicide, and they'll all die trying if they keep it up.

He doesn't know why he's still trying. He wonders why sometimes why he still tries, except that it's part of his penance, for crimes unnamed and unknown. For things he didn't do and should have as well as the things he did and shouldn't have. He's spent more of his life looking at gruesome, horrifying situations than he hasn't. Kay calls, and after all these years, she still laughs, or at least she's learning to laugh again. John thinks he's forgotten how; when he hears himself bark out a response to Finn's jokes -- if you can't laugh, you gotta cry -- the noise sounds like something that's more like a sob than a laugh.

Every murder is homicide, but not every homicide is murder.

In the end, it's all in God's court, and the best John can do is remember that.

author's notes: this may well have been the oldest story in my "in progress" folder that i finished for this project -- the file creation date was "april 18, 2006". the title comes from an example that my advanced cataloging professor used frequently in class last spring; the idea to attach it to munch came from the fact that i didn't pay a lot of attention in that class. rocket did beta duty, because all the homicide fic i write, i write for him.