Rating: high T
(disturbing imagery and subject matter)
Disclaimer: Own
nothing other than the storyline.
Spoilers: Twilight (only
just)
A/N: Written for "First" challenge on ncisflashfic
I was told when I joined the police force that the first was always the worst. Nothing will ever come close.
My first was a call to an apartment block in a middle class area. It had been called in as a body on the street, we didn't know what we would find until we were standing there looking at it.
Or rather, her. Four years old, blonde hair in tiny pig-tails, a purple dinosaur top with matching purple pants, socks on otherwise bare feet, brains splattered on the pavement.
She'd fallen three floors. Her sister was babysitting her, and had left the window open.
It was a tragedy, a child accidentally falling; a child dead. But the worst thing was that she wasn't dead. The entirety of who she was lay spread around her, but her heart still beat and her chest went up and down with every wheezing breath she took.
My partner sat with her, stroking her hair until the awful noise stopped, until the parody of life was ended. I didn't understand how he could do that; he had a kid her age. How could he do that knowing that it could be his daughter, how much he would be grieving and heart broken by the sight before him? I didn't know how he could see past the horror and the wrongness of it to the fact that it was a child that deserved to be comforted as she died. I didn't understand how he could let himself see her as a child.
I went home that night and cried. I promised myself that I would transfer to Homicide as soon as I could, because at least then they were already dead. I wouldn't be forced to see them as being living beings, to grieve.
And they were right. With everything I've seen since then, nothing has been worse.
Not even today.
Dedicated to a child who I will never know more about than the fact that they died in such a horrible way.