Monsters

Daughter

"Whoopsie-daisy!"

A four year old toddler laughed as her father tossed her in to the air. They've been doing this for the past ten minutes. Every time he tried to put her down she reached her arms out to him and begged in her adorably childish voice: "More! More!" How could any father possibly refuse that?

"Just one more time okay?" he said, as he revved up for another launch.

To the man, his daughter was the miracle that brought him back to life. Before her birth, he had completely lost his way. Back then he had only a couple months out in the field to show, yet he was already so completely desensitized to the horrors around him. His work demanded him to spend hours a day staring at dead bodies and bloody crime scenes, and interrogate the most despicable people he had every faced. He spent almost every day watching good people either get horribly betrayed or turn horrible themselves. For a while, he could feel his humanity drain from him as he lost faith in the people around him and became madly distrustful of the people he used to love.

Yet, with every case he took, he began to enjoy it. Even worse, he began to crave it. The inhuman actions these disgusting monsters took gave him something to do, something to break him out of this own growing paranoid mind and get him excited about life once more. Without a case to work on, he could feel his senses dull with the distance he put between himself and everybody else. Without his job, he would be returning to a bland, colorless life in isolation. The cases he took were like his drug; he needed the crime, action, and violence to stir up his emotions once more. The more he stared into the darkest depths of society, the more he felt it take over him. It as all he could look forward to in his life, with no one else beside him.

He spent his life being stuck to the office waiting for another's tragedy to bring excitement back to his life again and even in the rare occasion he did go back home, he was constantly fighting with his pregnant wife. She pleaded for him to stay home, to talk to her, to leave his job for at least one day so that they could be a family again, but she just couldn't understand that he was nothing without his work. He was scared of her. His work had taught him that the close he got to someone, the more likely they could hurt him. She just couldn't understand, it wasn't his own will that he kept her at a distance: it was experience. Every time he told her this, tears welled up in her eyes and she shook her head.

"You've changed," she would whisper, staring straight into his tired, blank eyes, "Your work has killed you."

He gave her the same response each time: he'd spend a moment peering at her growing stomach, shrug his coat back on, and leave the house, hunting for more crime. What he never stopped to see was her stretching out one hand towards his retreating back and placing the other on her belly, trying unavailingly to keep her corroding family together.

Even his co-workers couldn't understand his devotion.

"What kind of sicko would take pleasure in receiving news of others' disasters?"

Whispers swirled around him, but he couldn't care less. He carried shadows under his eyes like a tattoo as insomnia wrecked his nights while he spent the hours flicking through each case in his head. Scars on his body grew day by day as he involved himself in more and more dangerous jobs. Both his mental and physical strain was pulling him close to a breaking point. Just as he was at the brink of losing it completely two events pulled him back together.

******

When the call came into the office, he was obviously the first one to eagerly take the job. No one else showed the slightest interest in looking into this particular case. As he drove to the crime scene he could feel his heart thump wildly in his chest; if everyone else avoided it to terribly, there must be something particularly horrifying about these cases. Maybe this was a case that would be able to stir his interest for much longer than any of the other. He didn't know what he should have expected. This was the first child abuse case he had ever taken but he couldn't imagine for it to be any more disgusting than the murder cases he had done. However, when he arrived at the scene, this heart stopped. At the scene of the crime there were no clues, no excitement, and no need for a chase. Every horrifying detailed was splayed right in front of him on a young girl's body. She was huddled on the floor next to the door and when he approached her she scream like a terrified wild animal and bore a bloody pocket knife as her fangs. He stared at her, dumbfounded. Such a tiny girl, beaten and bloody. He could have never been so wrong. How could he derive any sort of joy from the cries of small, sickly child? This gave him no excitement, no "chase", nothing to stir anything but lifeless despair in his heart. He felt sick of himself.

When they blocked off the crime scene and carted a body out, the girl burst into tears. They had to bring in a woman from paramedics to calm her down and take her away. As he watched her leave, he received a call that his wife was in labor.Ten excruciating hours later, he was gazing at a helpless little creature breathe peacefully, completely ignorant of the world around her. Her tiny figure overlapped the face of the trembling young girl he felt a surge of emotions rush to the surface and tears dropped onto the tiny girl's face. The warm from his daughter's body cradled his cold hands and brought the color back into his days.

Back in the present, he caught his daughter in his arms and squeezed her affectionately. A shrill ring from his cellphone cut through her giggles. He quickly put his daughter down and picked up the phone.

"Hello?" he answered, slightly annoyed that his rare quality time with his daughter had been interrupted.

"We've got a new link in the Wolverine case," his partner's excited voice rang through to his ears.

"What?" exclaimed the detective, suddenly giving his full attention. His daughter's disappointed cries faded into the background.

"You heard me, get your ass in here!"

The detective hung up the phone and quickly grabbed a coat from his room and strode towards the door. His daughter followed him around, desperately trying to get his attention. When he reached the door he heard a crash and a wail rouse the house. His wife quickly ran out of the kitchen and pulled the child into her chest, muffling the noise.

"Where are you going?" she asked, "Dinner's almost ready."

"I have to get into the office, we just had out first breakthrough in weeks!" his wife caught a sharp twinkle in his eyes as he reached for the handle, "Don't wait up."

"Daddy!" the girl shouted, struggling out of her mother's grip and toddling towards her father's direction.

The detective heard nothing as he slammed the door behind him. He could feel a familiar pounding of his heart: one he couldn't exactly place in his memory but nevertheless drove in back to the promise he had made 4 years ago with a young girl.

*****

"Oh shit," the girl repeated over and over again in her head, her hands shaking violently as she watched the news, "oh shit, oh shit!"

This was bad. Really bad. She fucked up. Her first mistake. She was too impatient, too confident.

In front of her, a bright flashing message was plastered over her TV screen.

"Murder weapon found"