Disclaimer: I do not own Law and Order: SVU. It belongs to a genius named Dick Wolf. No profit is being made from this story.

Sorry, not betaread.

Authors note: Since I started working six years ago I have seen many victims of sexual and capital crimes. I have seen every day what kind of pain humans can cause and I still can't accept the brutality. I guess writing fanfics is my way of dealing with the horrors I see everyday.

---- Brutality of humankind ----

Sometimes I wake up drenched in sweat three or four times a night.

Nameless faces are haunting me in my sleep.

I haven't had a good night sleep in days, maybe weeks.

Tonights nightmare had been about a rapist. Someone who had been convicted of raping five women. I can still hear him laughing at me in the courtroom.

He may be staying in prison for a long long time but his victims will suffer for as long as they live.

Not every case gives me nightmares. Sometimes I sleep like a baby while prosecuting the most gruesome cases and sometimes a simple thing has me screaming at night.

Since I started working my life changed.

Even dating isn't easy anymore.

Everytime I met a new guy at a bar or even bump into someone in the local grocerie store I ask myself: Is he a rapist? A murderer? Is he abusing his family? Will he hurt me?

I know that this is not a normal kind of behaviour.

I know that maybe everything would be back to normal once I quit.

Sometimes I can't even stand a human touch. I start to shiver. Imagining what brutality those hands can do. What humans are capable of.

Sometimes I project the horrible things that had happend to the women I see in my line of work into my own life. I look at myself into the mirror and imagine how I would like carved out, beaten nearly to death, my body covered in bruises.

After finishing one case another appears on my desk.

And everything starts anew. It's a neverending cycle.

I could quit.

Maybe I should?

But still someone has to do the job. If not me, then you would fight for the victims?

It has to be me, Casey Novak, Assistant District Attorney Novak.

The End