Scraps (SVU flavored)
Ignorance is (Bliss)
Cold nights make her think about the stream of people that pass her car. She wonders how many of them see the world as she does, in shades of gray. She's curious about their lives: where do they eat, who do they love, what do they know? Her and her colleagues seem to have the distinguished honor of swimming in the filth of humanity-or at least the filth of the City (though it's likely an accurate representation). After all, is New York City not the melting pot the rest of the country aspires to become?
Groups of private school teens; families of two, four and six; corporate suits; and tourists alike...from her seat within her car, they all seem to walk without weight, without worry, in the ignorant kind of fog that metropolises tend to encourage. It's the masses, moving so fast they can ignore the shadows, the pleas, the disturbances that molest the City. Do they see the bruises? Do they smell the decay? Can they feel the absolute ruin as a living victim can?
She does. She doesn't have a choice; it's been her life since she was born. Since before, in fact. She just hopes she can continue to turn all that evil energy from which she was created into something for the innocent to wield. Nurture, she prays, not nature, will dictate her meaning.
Olivia chases too much of the ugly to walk as lightly as these bodies do. Sometimes the ugly catches her and then it stays around a little longer than it should. It's probably the hardest part of the job, because when the hideous takes hold-when it pulls her below the surface-she is lost. She thinks that's what her partner might be for. Sometimes she wonders what would happen if they both succumb at the same time. Who would save her then?
Who would save him?
And the public...do they wake up in the morning; echoes of screaming children, mothers lost in the chaos of grief hang in their periphery? Do shadows from the alleys darken their sight? Does the stench of rotting flesh blanket their appetites? All of these, and the stills of defiled bodies are hard to stomach, but she remembers how much harder it pulls at the guts when no one claims the dead. It's almost unbearable for her to think about the children…the ones that have no one to call them by name. No one to say, "This child was a part of me and I am proof he existed." How could anyone let that go?
Incidentally, she's afraid that with every case that crosses her desk, a part of her gets stuffed in the folders between crime scene photos and faulty eyewitness reports. Then she worries she can't possibly call herself whole again, not with so many pieces scattered amongst the carnage. Not that she ever started from solid or whole.
**
Something Like the Truth
Because the truth is, she sees the perversion before she sees the innocence and she knows beyond doubt that every last one of us can be violent; it’s all a matter of provocation. What she doesn't know--what she can't pin down--is when that changed.
How long has she been wandering this city with one eye on a perp, the other on a vic? Why can't a woman simply be a woman in love? Why can't a child be a child with wonder curling his hair? Now all she sees are the men with furrowed brows, their jaws clenched so very tightly, and imagines them snatching prey right out from under her.
All she has is a badge and a gun, and sometimes, if it's a good month, she has a partner she can trust. Every other time, she's just another Jane roving the streets of a cold-hearted bitch of a town, New York fucking City, looking for anything to make her quiet inside.
She calls this place home. She calls this job her life.
And there's not much more than that.
**