Title: Boundless Bodies
Author: Battus philenor
Disclaimer: I was hoping with the start of a new season... they're still not mine.
AN: This is a very short and un-betad thing.
Cold static objects on shiny steel vehicles fill the room and spill out into the hallway. They are the dead are on their gurneys, all lined up in perfect little rows, as if in some competition, a race to their final destination. It's the last they'll have to deal with the hurry up and wait game. A rush to bag them and get them to the coroner's office only to be moved into that final line, waiting with their new set of peers to see their cause of death. He wonders if they care; if they hang around longer, waiting to see if the offender gets punished for his deed against them. Do their souls hover about, looking over his shoulder, peering through his spectacles as he showers their bodies for the last time? David wonders a lot of things about the dead that pass before him, the main thing he wonders is do they understand he's helping them?
Perhaps it was growing up a child of the seventies, watching things like the Quincy or perhaps it was the other thing, but David cares to have those who've passed on see that he is a care taker. He respects their bodies, their lives, and those they've left behind, he cares more than anybody knows.
With every corpse shower he gives and with every thermometer he jams into a liver, he remembers her, his Mother, and how he'd seen it all before. A boy of seven should not have to see his Mother's dead body being processed, no matter how gently. And they were gentle with her, it was the single event that prompted his career path and fueled his decision to choose this not so glamorous road. It's the reason he cares so greatly for the bodies before him, for he knows that for every one he sees, there is a family waiting, hoping to see that person who meant so much to them for one more moment, like he did.
And as he looks out over the procession of the dead now, he knows it will never end, but that's okay, it's how he continues to take care of her. He scans and processes now searching for minute clues that they didn't know to look for so many years ago. What then seemed a morbid invasion is now his therapy in dealing with his loss. If anybody asked him, he would say that he was pretty good at his job, but nobody ever asks.
End
Battus philenor