Spoilers: very mild through to episode 5.
Summary: He'd gotten out of prison. Some days it was hard to remember that.
Notes: I'm not entirely happy with this, but oh well. Let me know what you think.
Gilded Cage
Some days he woke up sweating, and thought he was back in prison. It was only when his heart slowed and his breathing evened out and he saw the sun (the light rays on his face made him want to laugh and cry and scream because there'd been a time when he thought he'd never feel them again) that he remembered: he was free.
Well, as free as anyone ever was (and aren't we all prisoners inside our skin, our shell, our humanity, anyway?)
On days like that, when he found it hard to shake the shadows of prison from his skin, he reveled in the simple joys: orange juice in the kitchen with Ted; the feeling of the steering wheel, warmed by the sun, under his hands; the look on Reese's face when he walked through the door at work(torn between reluctant pleasure and aggravation at his presence and he wondered why she thought she had to choose between the two).
There was even joy in crime solving, he found. Not in the crime itself, of course (only on bad days did he worry that prison had taken even that humanity from him) but in the satisfaction of thought, of rational consideration. Particularly when the case could finally be confidently closed, with the total belief that they'd found the perpetrator and that justice would now be served (he'd never be able to close a case without that confidence. Never.)
He told himself, most days, that it was only justice (vengeance) he sought. Not so much for himself (and he glossed over the thought of a wall full of photos and arrows and notations) but for the others; the children and the Easleys and the fallen angels of the world. They deserved it as much as anyone, he felt. Bad people should go to prison, and good people should have justice; wasn't that Zen?(And maybe he was only Zen-ish because he was a good person that went to prison. And that wasn't right).
On those bad days, sometimes that thought (it wasn't right, it wasn't right) drove him to anger he didn't want to feel. He'd had enough of anger in prison, in those walls stained by the despair of humanity and things much nastier and more visceral. Prison was an institution with enough rage (hard to say who felt it more, the prisoners or the guards but it didn't really matter; it was just as ugly either way) for a lifetime. And he was free now. Free of those trappings. Free of the bars and the beatings and the thought, every day, (I'm going to die).
He just wished, on those days, when he woke up sweating and shaking and his mind was back in the cage he'd spent twelve years in that he could be free of himself. But there are some prisons that no man can escape.
