"You know, just because you never saw me smoking crack doesn't mean I wasn't."
He says this meaning it to be a smart-ass remark, because he knows that Fin will not take him seriously. And he knows that Fin is the one who has come up after him. It is mid-afternoon and the two of them have only just returned to the precinct from where they were, and now, he is staring out at nothing, because he can, thinking about the two lives that he and Fin have helped to keep from going to ruins.
Detective Lake has given way to Chester, yet again, and he thinks that he might just be a little lost on this one.
"Were you?" Fin's voice breaks into his thoughts, and he turns and shakes his head.
"You think I'm gonna admit that to a Narcotics cop?" he asks. Fin looks at him with raised eyebrows. He laughs. "Don't worry, I wasn't."
There is silence for a moment, and then Fin speaks again.
"You all right?" he asks.
Chester snorts. "Yeah, right," he says, and then, "I'm not sure. I just…have a lot on my mind."
Fin doesn't answer. He is well aware of the fact that some cases come a little close to home and hit a little bit harder than others, and is also aware of the fact that this might very well be his new partner's first time seeing it. Never mind the time spent in Brooklyn's SVU. It doesn't mean anything anymore. This is Manhattan, now and things are different.
"You know, those boys would've been stuck if it weren't for you," he says finally, but Chester shrugs, turning back to the nothingness.
"They shouldn't have been stuck in the first place," he says.
"Not even you can save everyone," Fin starts, but Chester cuts him off.
"Never said I wanted to. But what kind of cops would that have made us if we'd just let it slide?"
Fin ignores the implication that he hears in his new partner's remark. "Heard you were going over that video with Elliot."
"Does it matter? Case is closed, end of story, answer the phone and pick up a new one, move on."
Chester has the feeling that if he turns around at this point, he will not like what happens. And so he remains as he is, waiting for Detective Lake to come back, but he doubts it will happen.
"If you could wish for one thing in the world, what would it be?" he asks, and can just tell that Fin is giving him one of those looks behind his back, but he doesn't care. After a moment, Fin answers.
"Right now?" he says, and then, "Right now, I'd wish that their mother hadn't managed to OD and that she'd stayed clean, and that drugs didn't exist in the first place."
Silence. Chester is half tempted to tell him that this is typical of a Narcotics cop, but he doesn't know much about Narcotics cops other than Fin, and so he says nothing and after a moment, he, too, voices his thoughts on this question.
"I'd wish for the system to actually work," he says, and does his best to ignore the questioning look that he sees on Fin's face in the corner of his eye. "You know, so there wasn't anyone who fell through the cracks and so there wasn't anyone who people forgot about…that sort of thing."
It's spoken in such an off-handed, flippant way that for a moment, he almost believes Detective Lake has taken over again, but he knows better than that.
"Something got to you," says Fin, more of a question than a statement. "You ain't thinking about jumping, are you?"
Chester laughs, and for once, the sound almost scares him. "Nah," he says, shaking his head. "I'm not gonna jump. A few years ago, maybe, but not now."
Fin wonders what this means, but doesn't want to ask and as it turns out, he doesn't have to.
"You probably want to know why," says Chester, and continues before Fin can reply to this. "It wasn't a few years ago as in literally a few years ago…more like a decade or so."
A decade or so, he had been twenty, and he had taken the police exam and was waiting to go into the academy at twenty-one. It had been one of those moments where he knew what he wanted, and yet he didn't. One of those moments in time where he was caught between himself and the person he wanted to be, with no way out. He had stood on an apartment rooftop then and stared down and scared the hell out of himself.
"You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to," says Fin, because he knows all too well what it's like to be poked into talking about something that you'd rather forget.
"Might help," says Chester, shaking his head. "You know, I used to think that the system was all there was. That you went in and you came out, and you went back and there was nothing you could do about it."
"Sometimes it is that way," says Fin.
"Until you turn eighteen, and then they shove you out on your own, without telling you where to go, what to do, without giving you any sort of advice. And then they expect you to live your life the way everyone else does, but it doesn't always work that way."
There is bitterness, and there is anger, and there is something else that Chester cannot place and he doesn't think he wants to.
"What they want," he says, "Is to think that they're helping out, and you know what? Sometimes they are. And sometimes you turn out the way everyone thinks you're supposed to and other times, you just…fall, and there's nothing you can do about it, because you've been bouncing around for so damn long that you have nothing and no one to lean on."
Something in this rant tells Fin that his partner might know a little bit more about the system than he's letting on, but something else tells him that now's not the time to push the issue.
"I never paid attention to why I was always getting taken," Chester says, after a while. "I just knew that it was happening. And then I look at those two kids, and I just…they know. They paid attention when they were taken, and they could see exactly what the problem was, and they still thought they could fix it somehow."
He is not the only one who's hurt by this. Fin spent too much time in Narcotics not to know the effect that drugs can have on a family, and he has seen too many of them fall apart because of the system, because of the drugs, and because of the unwillingness to truly let go of it all, despite the promises.
"System doesn't fail everyone," he says finally. "I mean, come on, Lake, not everyone's going to end up in this kind of situation."
"Doesn't change the fact that some people do."
"Yeah, well, you weren't one of them. So what does that tell you?"
"That I was lucky."
And he was, too, and he knows it. He is lucky that he did not lose himself somewhere else along the line, and lucky that he is here, in this unit, where he finally has people who will pull him back before he goes too far, and a partner who knows exactly what he's talking about, even if he can't make himself directly say the words.
"You know what's stupid about it?" he asks, and Fin moves so that he's leaning back against the railing, staring in the opposite direction.
"What?" he asks.
"I feel like I still let 'em down."
There is no need for him to elaborate, because Fin already knows what he means. The two of them sat in that restaurant with those two boys, and neither of them were exactly sure how they were going to inform them that their mother had died. It is something that they have grown used to having to do at the beginning of cases, when they get a name. But not at the end, where it's supposed to be all over and done with.
One solitary raindrop falls, suddenly, and that is all it takes for the rest of them to come pouring down in a torrent that obscures one from the other's view, but they both remain where they are.
"You know, there's more than one definition for the word 'foster'," says Chester, as he and Fin finally give up and head towards the door and the long descent down the stairs back to the squad room. Fin looks at him.
"So, what's the first one that comes to mind?" he asks, and walks inside. Chester follows and lets the door swing closed behind him.
"To care for or cherish," he says. "And it wouldn't be funny if that was actually what went on when no one's looking."
He says nothing else after this, and they make their way back to the squad room in silence. Fin goes in, but Chester does not.
Instead he wanders outside and heads down the sidewalk, thinking about this last remark, and the case, and his own past and everything that he thinks just might be coming sooner than he thinks.
The definition sticks.
But the problem with this is that being 'fostered' doesn't always make it all better.