another victim of ordinary fame

another victim of ordinary fame;
Luke Cameron is supposed to meet Janet Ford at ten o'clock. Instead he meets her at nine-thirty when he hits a fleeing defendant with his car.

They're both in the parking garage when the five-time robbery suspect comes running by them having escaped his latest arraignment. Janet and her partner Michael Davis are just stepping out of their car when he passes by. But just as she's turning to pursue, Luke is arriving in his Mercedes C-Class looking for a parking space. He knows a runner when he sees one and purposefully slams on his brakes so Joseph Brooks ends up colliding with his hood. Janet holds him in place until the bailiffs catch up moments later and take Brooks into custody, leaving the Assistant U.S. Attorney looking at the FBI agent and trying not to laugh.

"That's not how I was supposed to start my work day," Luke deadpans because there is nothing that could come out of his mouth to make this make any sense. "Are you all right?"

"Yeah, I'm fine." Janet shakes her head and then politely offers him a hand. "Janet Ford, FBI. This is my partner, Michael Davis."

"Agent Ford? You're my ten o'clock." He chuckles as he shakes her hand before remembering his car is still stopped in the middle of the aisle. "Let me park and then I'll walk you up."

The meeting is nothing important—the first pre-trial conference in their young careers. Michael and Janet have been on the job for a month and Luke is just about as green as that. The three of them go through the motions efficiently and square everything away for a case that won't even make it to trial when Luke negotiates a plea deal a week later. The whole threat of going to trial is actually a bluff but Janet won't know that until two weeks afterward when she calls to ask why he hasn't called her. That's when she realizes Luke is a crafty son of a bitch. But the conversation in his office is what clues them both in to the fact they're going to be stuck with each other for a while, and not just because he's one of the U.S. Attorneys assigned to their section.

"How long have you been on the job?" she asks.

"Six months."

"And you're driving a Mercedes and wearing Armani."

That makes him laugh. "It's a C-Class," he says like that makes his choice of luxury car palatable. "And I saved up for the suit. What about you?"

"One month and three days."

"Not like you're counting." A small smile. "You're good at what you do. I've never seen paperwork prepared as well as this."

"In six months?"

"You'd be surprised how hard it is to do paperwork." Luke stacks it all on his desk and puts it back into the appropriate folder. "A lot of officers are so focused on catching the bad guy that they're not as sharp about the procedural specifics."

"I wouldn't see why." Janet shrugs. "It's part of the job."

She walks out after that to catch up with her partner while he nods to himself. Janet's exactly right and Luke appreciates that someone shares his ability to see the full picture of the judicial process. In six months he's already been around long enough to know some people only consider the part that gets them a win. And for years later, after they've proven themselves to each other and become friends, they'll laugh about the fact that a relationship so intense started over something so mundane. A conversation like that now would seem almost out of character.

"Can you believe we bonded over paperwork?" he says one night over a beer in his apartment, and Janet laughs. "What I wouldn't give for paperwork to be our biggest problem now."

"I dunno. I think we were always headed here." Luke catches himself shrugging this time. "We've both decided that we're going to take on the world. We decided that since we were teenagers. It's no wonder we got stuck with each other."

"We do have a lot in common." Janet gives him a gentle look and he can't stop himself from taking his free arm and wrapping it around her shoulders. Years from now they'll have less in common as trauma changes the way they look at the world. She'll want less of this life and the same trauma will make him want more. But they'll always have that first day to look back on and realize that it wasn't about the strange way in which they met, but that they were both so committed to the right thing that they did it in even the most absurd circumstance.