Author: Dichotomy
E-mail: dichotomy@ dichotomy.slashcity.net
Title: Mark
Rating: Hard PG-13
Disclaimer: NBC and their cohorts own them, if I owned them, they would be a whole hell of a lot happier.
Summary: Tim changes over time.
Another dead body. It's even worse if it is a child that is the body. He has seen so many of them in his time as a police officer. Each one left a mark on his soul, each one he didn't solve left a special kind of mark. The kind of mark that burns you so deeply and ridicules you so greatly that you stay up late and try to drink the mark away. But it never leaves. Just stays there, festering like a wound that has healed over on top but is still unhealed underneath.
Like an ulcer on a diabetic's foot. Always there, never healing. Only this kind of mark doesn't show on the outside, only on the inside. You don't tell anyone about it; you just pretend that you are fine, that you feel nothing for the victim in front of you. When that is nothing but a lie.
You see the victim in front of you. Maybe this child was shot in the head, tearing a hole through where the eye should be, or where the jaw should be. Leaving a mockery of a human face behind, distorted and uneven. Strangulation leaves their eyes buggy and distended from the body, the hand prints of the killer or the imprint of the weapon the killer used are usually visible on the victim's neck. Deep purply blue surrounded by pale, pale skin. Stabbings are usually messy, blood spurting from the wound makes the hilt of a knife or other sharp (and not so sharp sometimes) implement slippery. The splattered blood making an odd sort of artwork on the surroundings. Almost beautiful in a macabre way.
Their eyes shine glossy and dead back up at you if their eyes are open. It has been said that the eyes are a window to the soul, this may be true for the living, but it is a lie for the dead. There is no soul left, just an empty carcass devoid of any real being waiting for someone to stick it in a casket and stuff it underground. Underground where the living are safe from having to deal with such trivialities as death.
You used to care about every body that came your way, deserving or not of your care. You especially cared if they were children. Those ones always hurt the most. Now you don't care so much. You see the body lying there, and it is no longer a body, just a carcass that used to be alive. You take the pertinent notes, round up a few witnesses and hope that the case goes down. These murders don't mark your soul as much as the murders you handled when you were a rookie to the Homicide unit. They are just part of the job now, care has nothing to do with it.
Sleep comes easily now. So much easier to not care about dead people. You strip down, tumble onto clean, cool sheets and fall fast, fast asleep. Mornings are easy now, you wake up in the morning ready to see another carcass in the street, ready to turn a little bit more of yourself off. And you're fine with that, it makes everything easier. The blood, the crying relatives of the victim, the pain of a killer going free, is so much easier when you don't care.
It is no longer a lie; you are fine after not putting down a child murder. You just don't care.
~~finis~~