Chapter Text
How It Started
by Joanne Soper-Cook
He doesn't remember how it started, not really. It's almost a reflex with him nowadays: when he's hurting, he goes out of his way to help someone else, even if it kills him. A part of him hopes it will, someday.
He sucks at dealing with people; he knows this as a truth, accepts it as an article of faith. He pretends to be Mr. Good Cop, Kindly Daddy, big brother to the world but there are some days - like today - when he really doesn't give a rat's ass, when he wants the world to crap all over itself and die, die, die.
He sits in dark places and gets drunk. He watches women fling themselves lethargically around sweat-shiny poles, their gazes fixed on the middle distance, never on him. He drinks until he can't feel his face anymore, and then he stumbles out and calls a cab. He wonders if he'd ever drive like this If he thought he'd get away with it - it he thought nobody else would be hurt by it - yeah, he would.
And it's not even that nobody seems to care, because he doesn't expect them to, not anymore. For exactly half his life he's been a cop, the one who watches in the darkness, the one who sits in silence with a weapon by his side and protects the sleeping city. He doesn't want to be thanked for it. What he really wants is to be left alone, so he can tend to the suppurating sore inside of him. He thinks it might be where his heart was, once - but time and circumstance and one too many bad relationships have burned it out of him. He fully expects he'll die in the line of duty. If he still believed in God he'd pray for it, but he doesn't, and he won't.
He will never, ever ask for help. He will never say, "Hey, you know what? I don't feel so good. You got a minute?" Because everybody talks to him. Everybody talks to good old Jim, patient Jim, Jim who's always got time, and if he doesn't, he'll get back to you. Yeah, that Jim.
When it gets real bad, he takes his weapon out and looks at it, polishes the butt on the corner of the bedspread. He tries it in his mouth - he's never going to do it - because he likes the taste of greasy metal. It's comforting, like sucking on a favourite spoon after all the ice cream's gone. //No one// - he tells himself this regularly - //no one will ever love you, ever again.//
So he's lying on the bed staring at the ceiling and wishing he still smoked so he could have a cigarette and pretend to be a character from some bad noir film. He's lying on the bed with his gun in his hand and the phone rings. How cinematic it is, how Humphrey Bogart. "Brass."
"Jim?" Grissom's voice is trembling, unnatural.
"Gil." He snaps his mask in place: good old Jim. "What can I do for you?" //Sack up, man. People need you. Time to do your good deed for the day.//
//You owe the world so many. Are you keeping track? Somebody is. And they don't like you very much.//
"I'm outside in the driveway."
"Locked yourself out? Geez, Gil." He forces himself to chuckle. It's expected.
"Outside in your driveway. Can I come in?"
He has no idea what to say.
End Part 1