Broken, Flawed & Living (Discontinued)

Chapter Eight

"What the hell happened to you?" I asked. The other few nights I saw him, he had a couple of bruises. Being a cop wasn't like picking cherries in the forest. It aligned more with fighting a bear over the cherries you wanted. So I figured, why ask? Now... I kind of got worried.

"Don't worry about it." His nonchalant actions weren't enough for me. He sat himself on the edge of his bed and brushed tensed fingers through his hair. His groans, his sighs... don't worry about it, yeah, right.

I sat myself upright. "Don't do this. You're the one who-"

"Kingston doesn't play around, alright? He takes a good beating and gives it back." He hunched over and rested his arms on his legs, letting out a quiet breath. True that Officer Kingston looked intimidating, I doubted things were easy and I knew Leone better than that.

Other than the fact he had the gift to change a girl's monthly subscription with Mother Nature into weekly check-ups with a doctor instead in his outfit, why was there a reason to lie? Out of instinct, out of... a desire, to say the least, I got up and went inside the bathroom, grabbing myself the tissue box and wet one. I came back and took a chair from the kitchen placing it in front of him and took a seat. When I laid the box beside him, he brought his head up, curious.

I cupped his chin and dabbed a few swipes under his nostrils and asked, "What really happened?" since my eyes studied him more and found a tear in his shirt on his left shoulder. The faint sight of a bandage asked too many questions.

Another breath left his lips, the warm breeze bristling across my finger and I shivered a bit. Been a while since that happened. "I fucking hate cops."

"But you are on." I threw the damp, blood stained tissue out and drew a dry one, removing the rest of the residue. "Did Kingston-"

"No. I actually like him. He trains me hard but he's a really good guy. It's just the other fucking pigs that don't know how to do their fucking job." He made that face again and this time... I liked it. "They shot an unarmed man five. Fucking. Times. He didn't even fucking do anything! I couldn't jack shit about it." Tori swore up a storm, but he right now swore up a rainforest. His face reddened as much as it could and fumes left a curse under his breath. Multiples actually. "I couldn't do nothing about it, Thomas..."

I lowered my arm as his eyes gazed in mine, his full of a lot of regret and guilt and a sense of helplessness I knew all too well. I threw the dry tissue out and averted my gaze for a while because those eyes... they were the first thing I ever noticed about him back in the day.

"Look where that got me... you can't do jack shit to help your own people without getting beat up. That's fucked up, right?" he asked.

"Was this after Kingston knocked you out?" I stared for an answer, one I knew. So when he looked away quick, licked his lips a certain way, I knew I was right.

"I just wanna do good, Thomas... I want to be better than I used to be. I don't understand why all those pigs think we're to be privileged like that. We go around protecting and serving our people, not picking them off one by one for population control or some shit. Everyone's gonna paint us a bad way and I... don't want to be looked at like I done something bad again..." I knew what he meant, I figured out the double meaning and he was right.

The community would look at him like he did something bad, like he was going to screw up their life and I looked at him like that. Guilt kicked my heart and beat it against my chest when my eyes caught his.

"You are not a bad person... and thinking they have all the power is ridiculous." Ms. Argent said something last week about Power and I paraphrased it for him. "Power is worthless on its own, and it only becomes a force you can't reckon with when it's attached to a certain object or law. And with that object or law instilling fear, a sense of authority, people think they can cast judgement when it best benefits them or even their race, religion or whatever the hell they believe will make the world a better place."