Pairing: John Kennex x Friend!Reader
Summary: After the events of the raid that cost John everything, he and his high school best friend and fellow detective find their old rhythm and continue their reign as the sassiest assholes in the department, now accompanied by Dorian.
Warning: mentions of angst and guilt. Missing limbs also mentioned but not in detail and death.
A/N: I wrote this with a female!reader in mind, but I don’t think I used any gender-specific pronouns.
You had been at the precinct for years, and you had been friends with John Kennex even longer. You had gone to high school together and were particularly inseparable. Having the two of you in the same room was a nightmare for everyone else in the space, mostly because you were both sassy assholes who threw shade at anyone who challenged you.
You had developed your own language early in the friendship, it consisted incoherent sentences that would magically make sense to the other and smartass comments that everyone saw coming, but still never failed to stun. Anyone could be on the receiving and, but most commonly it was Detective Richard Paul who suffered from a particularly obnoxious case of the Napoleon Complex. Neither of you managed to solve a case without smarting off to someone or being in general annoying. Your partner mostly ignored it due solely to the fact that you were extremely good at your job. So was John, and that was the problem. You two knew you were good and you didn’t take peoples shit because of it. You got the job done and that was that.
You, Kennex and Pelham often ended up on cases together, however, when the raid was given the go-ahead, you were ordered by John to stay at the station and coordinate from there. So, you said bye to the two men as they left. It was the last time you saw Pelham and you were told it was probably the last time you would see John. You were given your MX-43 a few months later and all sass stopped, you became a boring cop like everyone else. Working cases. Solving cases. Day in and day out. You didn’t have it in you to continue the game without John, it just wasn’t fun anymore. Paul left you to do you and Even Captain Maldonado was sad that the banter had stopped. It made it very real that they lost so many of their own.
You would visit John and tell him about your day and sometimes bounce cases off him. Even with him in a coma, it felt right to talk with him. It hurt you to visit sometimes. You would think of a wicked zinger that you knew he would appreciate, but he couldn’t respond to it, leaving it completely wasted. You thought about what it would be like for him to wake up, but you doubted that he would return to the force. He had lost his leg, his partner, and his girlfriend. Even if he did wake up and by some miracle come back to the force; it would be John.
When he came back, two years later, he wasn’t the same anymore. He barely acknowledged you for the longest time, that hurt the most out of everything. He pretended you didn’t exist. You thought it was because you reminded him of what he lost; you also thought that he would have looked at the visitor logs from the hospital. He always talked about how no one visited him, but you were there three times a week for seventeen months. It stabbed you each time he said something. Always while you were within earshot. Like he was daring you to start something. You didn’t want to give him the pleasure.
It wasn’t until he found his rhythm with Dorian that things started to become normal again. Detective Paul became an easy target for John, he had hated John for returning to the force, he thought he should have been fired for the raid. After a while, you started in on him too when John wasn’t around to defend himself. It wasn’t because you were friend again. He still hadn’t spoken to you unless it was necessary for the case at hand. When John found out that you had been backing him up, he started saying hello to you in passing. You were one of the few that seemed to still believe in him. You asked Dorian how John was doing. Dorian would tell John that you were worried about him and he began to feel guilty for how he had treated you since his return. You had gone to war for him while he was in the coma. He knew you visited him all the time, but it was still easier to demonize you than admit that he genuinely needed you.
He stopped by your apartment after his shift one day. It was your day off, so you were home catching up on case files and chores. That was the kind of detective you had become. Even on your day off you still were elbows deep in the job. You hadn’t heard the door chime at first. It wasn’t until your dog started barking that you realized that there was someone out there. John had forgotten about Draco. He was a retired drug-sniffing dog that was retired when the started with android officers.
You weren’t expecting company, so you grabbed one of your sidearms from your safe. You walked to the door and checked the security monitor. John knocked again and this time you opened. He saw the gun and dog, who was on high alert as soon as he heard the gun click and stopped dead in his tracks. He waited for you to put the gun down and call Draco off. He knew better than to play games with a K-9 partner.
He didn’t waste time. He immediately jumped into an apology that you had stopped expecting. He hadn’t even given you a chance to ask him what he wanted. By the end of his speech, you were both crying and hugging each other. John wasn’t one to cry and that had made you cry. It was like this was the first time that he had legitimately thought about all that had happened in the last few years. He told you that he knew that you had been there for him and that he was sorry that he had acted like a raging asshole. He also told you that Dorian had told him that despite how he had been acting towards you, that you had still been checking on him. After hours of catching up, you were officially close again.
Your coworkers were horrified to see that the reign of John and (y/n) had returned for part two. The detectives and officers who had arrived after the raid were in for it. Most of all, Detective Richard Paul was going down.
During the power outage, Richard was in charge of the station's energy conservation. It was a dull meeting, to say the least, and the only silver lining was that the Mx-43s were getting charged still. You didn’t fancy going on patrol without a partner. Just when you thought that you would die of boredom, John came to your rescue with sass so perfect you almost died from laughter instead. It was true thou, the donut machine was fully charged and you had taken the last of the chocolate sprinkles the night before.
Amid your laughter, Dorin came in and decked Paul with a beautiful right hook, which stunned you momentarily before sending you into another fit of laughter. After John separated Dorian and Richard, he came over to help you up. You had since ended up almost on the floor and you couldn’t stop laughing long enough to stand up by yourself. You were sleep deprived. You had been at the precinct since the blackouts had started and you were put on patrol the following morning, but now your MXs battery was dead, leaving you to float about the station aimlessly.
John had asked you to go out on patrol with Dorian and himself, mostly because he was sure Det. Paul wanted to kill you for laughing at him during the meeting. You rode quietly in the back seat enjoying the coffee that John had shoved at you while getting you in the car. Dorian and John were bickering about something that you weren’t listening to; that is until Dorian started sassing John. It was gold. You just watched the scene unfold ahead of you, silently wondering if it was like this all the time.
Much to Captain Maldonado’s disappointment, from that day on, there were three sassy officers in the department. It became a game to one-up each other and eventually, it became more fun to watch John and Dorian than try to keep up with them. That’s not to say that you couldn’t keep up, but why would you want to with front row seats to that two-man show.
