Overnight stays with Hathian PD were like any other Cop motel I'd stayed at over the past few years, the people in it though, they were different. It was my first real run in with the cops, but in so many ways, they were just like their counterparts in the gangs, kids who didn't know any better and were more interested in intimidation through muscle than they were reasoning and breaking. All muscles and sweat, and in this case, they brought a big nasty Nawlins phonebook and beat me till I couldn't see straight.
Thing is though, I'm no stranger to a beating. Matter of fact, those first couple wallops were like smelling salts. They reached down inside me and tried to pull the dormant kid back up onto his feet. You know that kid, the one who locked himself in a trunk, put a big ol' monster at the door and found some bitter bastard of a demon to tell him what to do. Thats really what my mind was, two thugs sitting on a big piece of luggage telling the muffled cries of a child to shut the fuck up and grow up. So while the cops were helping me read the M's section of the business section up close and personal, all it did was stir the kid, and well, that just pisses the other two off pretty good.
A real good cop never hit you. It was a sign of weakness, that they had nothing else but your pain. They wanted to know why the two dead bastards had my information on them. One who'd got hit by a car, the other beaten to death with the leg of a table. I told them I didn't do it. Truth, but they wanted a confession. It wasn't going to happen. Good cop would have sweat me, fucked with me a few solid days, you know, real Columbo shit, these guys...well, I had a lot of envy for a group of testosterone punks who wore their emotions on my face. I couldn't tell you what I felt anymore.

I was hungry though, I could tell you that, and not for anything at the diner.

What I didn't tell you before was the middle, there was a time in my life a few years ago when I thought I could get it together. I spent 3 years and a good solid chunk of the porn cash I'd been depositing and dumped it into some time at a Buddhist Monestary in the Hollywood hills. Lots of the rich, the inherited wealthy....place was full of the fucking assholes. People who didn't know real pain. People who'd never caused real pain. They didn't have the fear in their eyes I did. Not of the world, but of yourself. Three years with Master Renshi and trying to stop the hate, the need, the hunger, the violence. Trying to reconcile the wake of abuse behind me, the hunger to dish out more, to reduce that demon and that monster to something I could work with, and let that kid out to grow up. Hard hard work, but it never went all the way. There was a point that most regular people could pass that I couldn't. I was damned and we all knew it. Whether I was born without some pieces or Mom and Dad ruined them....there was no amount of spiritual healing that would change it. I could stave off the need, but I could never stop the want. Too many people around me were good people who'd done bad things, who'd made mistakes, who had failings.

Not me, I was a bad person, a bad person trying so hard to be good. It was a silent fingertip grip to the side of humanity, each stroke of that phonebook loosened the hold. The days prior, all wearing the railthin hold he had on some sort of morality.

So when feet hit pavement outside the HPD building and I made my way back towards my place, all I wanted was some vengeance. Not against the HPD, not against the two assholes who had been sent to kill me, it was something bigger. Someone was going to fucking pay. Someone was going to feel the pain I felt. Someone was going to get on their fucking knees and serve the way I had been forced to, someone was going to be made hole, someone was going to be ripped apart and look, feel, and be perfect for him. As ugly and broken as I was.

(more later, back to work)