…I become what I always hated when I was with you then…"
He was half tempted to shut the music off after hearing that particular lyric, but the fact remained that the apartment was empty and obviously so. It was a group he'd heard of but had never actually heard, and now, more than ever, those words made sense. He had been everything he'd hated, and it was only because he had been with her.
Not like that, though. No…that was one line he was not going to cross, no matter how charming she thought she was, how disarming…There were few who knew what really lay underneath that seemingly calm figure that was Nicole Wallace, but…Suddenly he was glad there was no liquor in the place, because getting drunk certainly wasn't going to help anything.
She'd got him. She'd got him good. He'd admitted as much to his partner, and he hated more than anything to be wrong, but this time…this time, she had been. She had chosen, deliberately, someone that she knew he would hate once he'd heard the stories, and the problem was that he'd long ago managed to teach himself not to judge anyone by their appearance or by the rumors, but there were some things that he could not ignore, and would not ignore. A weakness, of sorts.
Tit for tat, he'd told her. This for that. She knew things about him the same way he knew things about her, darker things from their pasts that no one was supposed to have known about, but then…That, Bobby thought, was what Nicole was about. Finding and exploiting the weaknesses of others, all for her sick purposes, and the truth was that most people fell for her, fell because they couldn't see what she really was, and right then, he'd have given anything in the world for people to see her the same way he did.
As it was, the only one who did was Alex, and that was because she, too, had taken somewhat the same delve into Nicole's mind that he had, because she had been there, with him. The one thing that kept him from going too far, his partner, and the one who quite literally held his life in her hands, because if she wasn't there to have his back, then there was no one. The one who'd backed him the entire time, even when it had been made out to look that he'd caused someone to commit suicide.
But then, that was Nicole, too, and had Nicole written all over it. She wanted to ruin him. He'd figured that out a while ago. She wanted to ruin anyone that was in her way, and there he was, a detective in the NYPD, standing in her way. Naturally, he thought, she would want to take him down. He wondered if it was this that turned him into what he hated most when he was around her. Or, more correctly, when she was around him. She poked at him. Deliberately, too, and he knew it, knew that she wanted to see what sort of rise she could get out of him, and knew that she knew that if she poked hard enough, sooner or later, he was going to snap.
A person of interest. The term sounded ridiculous now, but it was really what Croydon had been, because, technically, he hadn't really done anything wrong, and had been innocent, which was what he had refused to believe, because of this weakness. Once again, Nicole had come out on top, if only marginally. She was under arrest, now and it was about time, too, because it was what she deserved but the problem was that he wasn't sure whether or not she would really get the full punishment for what she had done. He might have known what she really was, but the jury, well…they certainly weren't going to know. No…they would be fooled by her, they would all be fooled by her, because none of them would be able to help it.
The song had started over. Bobby had pressed repeat without realizing it, but didn't feel like changing it. He wondered if Nicole had become what she had always hated when she had been stuck in that interrogation room, in those final moments before he'd finally caught her, caught her well enough to actually count for something. He wondered if she knew that he was thinking about her, not because he wanted to, but because he couldn't help it, either. She seemed to have that same effect on everyone. And as he continued to listen, the same lyric came again.
"…I became what I always hated when I was with you then…"