It was what any one of us called routine. Together, the four of us had more than beat the usual two-year average run that most spent in the unit. We thought we had seen it all, and yet, we knew, somewhere deep inside ourselves, that we hadn't. It was part of what drove us. Part of what made us want to stay. That, and the fact that we'd all had our separate, personal reasons for coming into the Special Victims Unit in the first place.
Mine was because I had wanted a change. A different life, I suppose you could say. One that wasn't spent looking at dead bodies day in and day out. I'd thought that moving away from all that would help, but…Some things just aren't meant to be. I figured out pretty quickly that it was the living victims that affected me the most. That it was the living victims that affected all of us the most.
Especially when it happened to be a child. I found myself standing in a mostly abandoned house, feeling frozen, yet somehow able to move. I heard my partner's voice shouting "Clear!" and responded with the same. I heard other voices, too, but none of them seemed to register. Once we were all satisfied that at least the bottom level of the house was empty, we split up.
I heard something as I wandered up the stairs. We had a warrant to search the place, but from the looks of the downstairs, it didn't look like we were going to find anything. Hopefully, we would, and we'd also be able to find the people we were looking for. Otherwise…I didn't want to think about it. All the doors were open up there except for one; the daylight from outside streaming in through the windows. It was ironic, I thought, that it could be so light inside this place, when we all had the suspicion that dark things had been happening here.
It was the door at the end of the hall that caught my attention; it was the only one that was closed. I'd kept my gun out in case, but had the feeling that I wouldn't need it. Even so, it remained in my hands; a precaution, if you would. The door was unlocked, which I found myself surprised by. The way things had been going with the case lately…Well, to put it shortly, it was another one of those things that I didn't want to think about.
Nor did I want to think about what I would find inside. But I turned the doorknob anyway, and looked in. After that…nothing. It was like it all went blank. I remembered later on that night walking downstairs, carrying a frightened little girl in my arms. I remembered her simple request when she'd seen me, an almost desperate plea for me not to hurt her, as if I were another of the people that had come along in her young life to torment her. Later on, I remembered the sight of her sitting there on the bed, a terrified expression on her face as she remained in the position she'd obviously been left in, holding onto a well-worn doll.
It haunted me that night. I and the others had seen many things, things we cared not to remember, things we remembered because they would not go away, things we'd never thought we would see. But the sight of that little girl, and her doll, the one companion she had in an otherwise lonely world…it got to me.
And it got to me because I knew somehow that in her eyes, the doll was a symbol of happier times…the one thing she had left of her innocence.
