A/N: I haven't seen To the Bone yet. I'm going to see it because NBC's reairing it tonight, but I've heard so much about it, that I figured I might as well take a shot at something of a post-ep for it. Hopefully, it works. If it doesn't, well...anyways. CI's not mine, and there you have it.
It had become my sanctuary over the years….a quiet place where I could go to escape the pressures of the world around me. Or rather, to escape my mother. She had never known about this place, which I had always found myself grateful for. Everywhere else I had ever gone, she'd known where to find me. But when I came here…it'd take her hours on end of searching before she realized she wasn't going to find me. Drunk as she normally was by the time I got home, I always knew I was in for it when I walked through the front door, but I didn't care. The time alone was always worth it.
It was to this place I found myself running, years after I thought I'd relieved myself of the habit. I was surprised to find that it still existed. New York City had changed considerably since I was a child; I'd have expected that this small wooded area would be developed, but it hadn't been. Night had fallen, but I could see the streetlights from the main part of the park. They lit the path I took, the one that led me further into the heart of the woods. The farther I went, the more the sounds of the city faded away.
I'd talked to Elizabeth Olivet, for once on my own. My entire career as a cop, I'd never had to shoot anyone. The one time I do, and it's an undercover cop. I wondered what the odds were. Slim to none, I reckoned, and felt even more guilty for it. I had only wanted to close a case. No one else was supposed to have gotten hurt. Apparently, though, not everything turned out the way people wanted it to.
I fell to my knees when I finally reached my destination, feeling like a child again, and wishing that I didn't. There was a bench nearby, but I didn't want to sit. Somehow it felt as if my thoughts would be clearer in this position. And they were. I thought of my mother, how things had been before the abuse. How I had hidden the signs, afraid of the repercussions, afraid of being blamed, like it was somehow my fault that my mother was an alcoholic that had no problem beating me. I thought of how she herself hid what was really going on, behind her smiles, and everything else. I thought of how the mother in this case had turned children entrusted to her into the men they had become…murderers, some, and all of them dependent on her so completely that they'd do anything for her approval.
Chesley Watkins. Damn that name. I felt myself shaking as I remained there, on my knees, trying to make it all go away, but I knew it would linger. Cases like this one always did. Even now, I could see myself standing there in shock after Carolyn told me that I'd shot an undercover. I could see myself sitting across from Chesley in the interrogation room, inwardly struggling to hold my own, and hoping that there were no outward signs of the one thing that had always been my weakness. One could hide anything behind a mother's warm demeanor, and I wondered if things might've been different if that wasn't so.
It probably would've been, I mused as I knelt there, unwilling to move, despite the wind that made it seem colder than it already was. At least then there might've come a time for a second chance. A time for those who had done wrong to redeem themselves, the way I had done. Then again, I hadn't murdered that city councilman; I'd just decked him, because that damned fool had deserved it. Ten years on Staten Island had been worth it. I wished more than anything that things could have been different, but I knew there was no going back in time. I could not change what had happened, I could not change what they had done, nor what I had done, and that was the problem. I felt guilty, as if I myself were to blame for what had happened, and though I knew it was ridiculous, I couldn't help it.
It really was like I was a kid again, I thought disgustedly. Always feeling guilty for something I hadn't even done. Didn't help that more often than not, I'd been the one blamed for most of everything that went wrong. I'd wondered more often than not if things could've been different if I'd been a better child. When I grew older, I figured out that nothing I could say or do was ever going to make my mother happy, other than my running down to that damned liquor store a few blocks down from our home, for whatever the hell she wanted that day. She hadn't even bothered showing up when I'd graduated from the academy, not that I really gave a damn. She wasn't the one I'd wanted there.
And I didn't want to think about her now, either, now that all of this was over, and I could finally at least try to go sleep, though I knew I would never be able to. This case was one of those that would linger, the same way the case behind Max Greevey's death did, or every child case I'd ever come across in my career. Or even the first case I'd worked with Barek, when she'd used my so-called shadowed past as leverage against as suspect, to get him to talk. But the thoughts of my "beloved" mother lingered, and I knew they wouldn't go away. At least, not for a while. Chesley had made sure of that.
It bothered the hell out of me. Here I was, forty-odd years old, and I still couldn't forget about any of what had happened to me. Not even here, where I had always come to escape before, this place, where I knew no one could find me and hurt me. As a child, it had once been a comfort. As an adult, it was anything but. The shadows I saw formed the figures of my past, and before I knew it, before I even realized it, there were tears streaming down my face.
This place had been my sanctuary, all those years ago, the one place where I knew I could find a temporary escape from the world, but now…now it was anything but.