Any normal human being, when faced with the level of exhaustions he currently experienced, would simply drop into bed and enjoy countless hours of uninterrupted, peaceful sleep to make up for the lack thereof after days upon days filled with stress and heartache.
But they both weren't normal people and their exhaustion was more than just physical.
As such, sleep had been a welcome stranger he never got to meet on that early morning, and Steve found himself aimlessly rolling back and forth in his bed, trying to get comfortable, hoping to get a few hours of rest as the sun rose and the city once again woke up to another day of business, pleasure and the occasional blood bath.
Even though his eyes were closed, his body warm and comfortably snuggled into the thick sheets, he could feel his heart beating frantically, his traumatized mind putting his body into a state of panic long after the last body had been moved to the morgue and the nightclub sealed for the forensics team to comb through.
He'd tried to slow his breathing, think of every pleasant and comforting thought at his disposal, but in the end, four hours had passed in which he had gotten zero sleep. If anything, it felt as though he'd just gotten done running a marathon.
And it didn't take a genius to figure out that Mike more than likely fared no different.
Late afternoon had been the earliest he wanted him back in the office, if at all today. They were both overdue for a day off, their work schedules keeping them awake twenty-four hours at a time, just to put in another friendly row of sixteen-hour days to fill up the rest of the week.
It had been a grueling month, their case load heavier than usual due to schools being off for a few weeks of fall vacation, causing many of the department's dads to take time off to be with their kids for a precious few days, a request Mike rarely, if ever, denied.
As such, it put the burden on the few souls left to run the show, most of all a certain two San Francisco Homicide detectives whose incredible crime solving rate had turned into both, a blessing and a curse.
Steve didn't begrudge the extra hours too much except for the perplexing increase in homicides over the past few weeks, most of them irregular offshoots from the usual scenes that greeted them.
One was a bizarre murder/suicide, then a hit-and-run, another one an accidental stabbing, a third one a not-so accidental death by vehicle, a bitter soon-to-be ex-wife running over her cheating husband with the families' Buick station wagon some twenty times before the neighbors stopped her.
They'd solved all of them by now, spending time here and there to add witnesses, but overall, things had slowly returned to normal.
Then there was last night, the not so cut-and-dried climax to their recent spike in murderous behavior.
And it was the worst one yet.
Steve tried to reassure his frantic mind once more that they would not be handling the case, that Mike had made it clear early on that the scale exceeded what they were equipped to handle at the moment and that the Feds would be taking over from here.
Part of him felt relief, the other part a strange sense of responsibility to all those lifeless eyes staring back at him, a need to hear their story, and right the wrongs of their untimely death.
It was stupid, he knew that, but one couldn't do this job without caring for other human beings. And that, sometimes, had its drawbacks.
Rolling over, Steve ran the back of his hand across the 2-day beard stubbles on his cheek, stopping briefly to massage the vein on his forehead that felt like it was about to burst under the strain of the migraine spreading in his skull.
Up the road, he could hear a uni putting on his sirens, the waling immediately raising his weary senses into full alert, ripping him out of that partially subdued state of mind he'd found himself in for the past few hours.
Even though it was probably nothing more than a routine traffic stop, the tiny voice in the back of his mind dreaded the idea that it was a call about yet another body that had been found, adding to their two weeks from hell.
Drawing in a resigned breath, Steve reached for the corner of his warm blankets and slowly pulled them aside; crawling out of bed with the grace of a dying swan as he stumbled toward the shower, hoping to start this day on a better note than the last one had ended.