It bothered me sometimes that when I was randomly asked by a child I came across what my favorite color was, I said red. Typical answer, really. Most of the time it was blue, but sometimes…sometimes, if I felt like a change, it was red, and I had no idea why.
It bothered me because red was the color of many things, and it was the color of one thing that half the time, I preferred to forget. Every time I answered, I found myself looking back at any number of crime scenes, and I saw the color there, vivid in the back of my memories, but it was there, and I knew exactly what it was. Blood.
It amazed me sometimes that the color could signify life and passion, and at the same time signal an injury or death. Definitions that were at one end of the scale and the other. I didn't know why I was thinking about it now, but I was, and for some reason, my mind didn't want to turn off, so I let it go, knowing that sooner or later, it would. It always did.
This time, I thought of it because of Alexandra Cabot. It was the strangest thing in the world, because she was the last person on earth I'd have ever thought to associate with that color and blood at the same time, but now…I'd left her behind in that hotel room with Olivia because somehow, she'd decided it would be a good idea to come back from wherever the hell she had been, to testify in this case and put away this guy who'd killed four other people and left an eight-year-old child for dead.
I could've sworn Casey was going to kill Olivia and me, both, when she found out that Alex was really alive. We hadn't had a choice but to arrest Liam Connors, though, because outing Alex's real status in open court wasn't a move that we wanted to make. It turned out all right, though. Neither Olivia and I were charged with anything, the trial went through, Connors got sent to prison. And the next thing we knew, we were in Casey's office, waiting for her, for Alex.
But she had disappeared again. And I looked at Olivia and knew that for a brief moment, she was flashing back on what I was. A night, a year ago, when we'd been walking out of wherever it was that we had been. A night where we'd watched a DEA agent blown up by the cartel because they were so damn determined to stop whoever it was that was coming after them. The cuts on Alex's face as she sat in an ambulance, resigned to knowing that someone was after her, the same way we were.
A night, a year ago, when we'd walked out of another place, with any number of cars driving around, as usual, and then the sound of gunshots, and then I was running, and there was blood on the ground, Alex's blood, and Olivia was there with her, trying to reassure her that everything would be fine. The blood was everywhere, dark red and staining the concrete beneath her body and beneath my feet, and Olivia's knees, and I was staring, oddly fascinated, but I didn't know why.
It was strange, because in any other circumstances, I might've been disgusted, but the three of us were in shock, and then the ambulance was there, and Alex was gone, and Olivia and I were sitting in the squad room with a newspaper on my desk declaring that she was dead. And then the phone call had come.
Her arm was in a sling and her hair was pulled back and she looked like normal, except for the fact that she looked more tired than usual, and she told us that she was leaving, and we were relieved that she was alive, upset that she was going away, but at the same time we both knew that it was the only way for her to stay alive. And so she'd gone, and we'd gone back to the squad room, where we knew without really knowing that we'd been charged with keeping her secret.
And now it was happening all over again, but everyone knew she was alive this time, but no one knew where she was. And I looked at Olivia again as we stood there in Casey's office, in shock again because once more, the DEA had whisked her away, along with our eight-year-old child witness, but it was still the only way to keep them alive, and so once more, we'd had to let them go. And it made perfect sense.
Later that night, before I went home, I went to the site where we'd been when Alex had first been shot, and I stared at the concrete. The red was gone. There was no blood there, only grey. But there had been blood there, once, and I knew it. And it was ironic because Alex had told me once that red was her favorite color, too, and it suited her perfectly, because that was just her, life and a passion about her job, the same way the rest of us had. The irony came because red, for her, had met a different meaning than the one it was supposed to have.
And now she was gone again, and for some reason, all I could remember about it was the color of red…the color of blood…the color of the one thing that all of us paid with, in one way or another.