InsaneJournal

[QM] 78: The African Queen
It was a sadly familiar routine. Athena hadn't shown up for work; without saying a word, David had left the precinct to find her. On the way over he had called her phone, getting voicemail the first two times and a groggy, "David, go back to the precinct," the last time. But he'd continued on, pulling up in front of her building and greeting the doorman with a wave as he walked in. A few moments later, he was knocking on her door, softly demanding to be let in. When she opened the door for him the first time around, it caught him off guard.

"You, uh ... you didn't come in today," he said, looking around. She had gone back to the couch where she was nursing her 10 AM whiskey, but she didn't look like he was expecting her to. No red eyes from crying all night, no trashed apartment from an alcohol fueled rage. "Are you ..."

"Okay?" she scoffed. "David, I'm fine. I quit."

"Oh, you - what?"

She smiled a little and got up to pour him a drink, knowing he was going to need it.

"I quit," she repeated. "Yesterday. Gave the Chief the finger and everything."

David sank to the couch, stunned. "But the job was your life."

"Yeah, well," she shrugged. "I didn't want that life anymore."

"I don't believe it," he said, twirling the tumbler between his palms. "You always talked about how much you loved solving the cases, working out the puzzles, putting all the evidence together, bringing closure to the families ..."

"... watching them fall apart in trials because no amount of justice can bring back what they lost?" Athena added coldly. "Watching kids shrug off gunning down other kids in the street? Or women punished because they took action against the men who swore to love and protect them, but instead raped and beat them?"

"No one ever said human nature was glamorous," David murmured, sipping at his drink. "Our job is to be better than that, to set an example."

"Right, because drinking away the nightmares is such a great example," she grumbled. "I can't be better, David. I'm not better. Do you even know how much I've wanted to beat the life out of some of the scum we've brought in? So badly I've dreamt about it; I've woken up and been able to smell the blood. I've wanted to kill so many of them ..."

"But you didn't," he said. "That makes you better, stronger than they are."

"But I might," she answers softly. "And that's why I quit. I can't stay around ... that. It's like a virus that gets under your skin and into your blood and makes you crazy. And I know we're supposed to be immune, but I'm not."

"You could be," he told her, brushing his hand against her cheek. Her eyes closed as she fought the urge to tell him how she could never be, to tell him the truth that was hidden from her own mind. Instead she sighed and let her lips fall gently against his.

"You are," she whispered. "And that's all that really matters."

"[Human] Nature... is what we are put in this world to rise above."
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