#rowrogue

     Friday nights became some of the hardest nights of the week for Debra Morgan nearly six years ago. It was almost six years ago that she had been working massive overtime within vice, trying and repeatedly failing to secure sufficient evidence to convict several key players of the Stilwater Saints to life in prison, and found herself in over her head. Six years since a massive explosion at a local marina had shaken half the coastline of Florida state, late one Friday night. After that, Deb’s entire operation had been suspended indefinitely, and a handful of months later, she had learned to her surprise -- and horror -- that she was pregnant, and already a week into her second trimester.

     Since then, Deb has more or less had to re-invent herself. Having never seen herself as a mother, and certainly not a single mother at that, she had some tough choices to make. She had to step away from her career, briefly, but more than she’d ever wanted to. It was only with the close personal support of brother, and professional support from current head of the police department Captain Matthews, that she’d eventually realized she would keep her kid. Adoption was simply out of the question, and abortion seemed... unthinkable, given the circumstances.

     Elijah Kent Morgan was later born at 3:13 in the morning on a Friday in June. It was true, she had fallen in love with him harder and faster than she’d ever loved anyone, including his father. But every single morning that she woke up to his crying, and every night that she came home from work to see him just a little bit bigger, she would never admit it, but part of her resented what her life had become because of him. Jumping at the smallest bump in the night. Double and triple checking the locks on her doors. Watching the news nearly every night, while wringing her hands and wondering just when and how they had let this city get so fucked up? 

     Her now 5-year-old son is asleep this Friday, only recently having been tucked into bed, whilst Deb sits out in the living room with the TV’s volume on low, watching some mind-numbing reality show and trying to forget about the craziness that has consumed her the last few weeks. All over town, crime sprees seem to have quadrupled, and like most other nights, Debra will need half a bottle of wine and some stupid, horrible show to help lull her to sleep. 

     Suddenly though, a firm and somehow familiar knock at her door sends a chill down her spine, and she is suddenly wide awake again. It’s late, she’s not expecting anyone, and half of the criminal scum in the city must know her as Detective Debra Morgan, the bitch-cop who had put their friends and family away. Debra rises from her couch, and instinctively grabs her fully loaded, police issued handgun from the coffee table in front of her. She crosses the floor of her apartment tentatively, unlocks the bolt and chain keeping it shut, and puts her finger lightly against the trigger hidden behind her thigh as she pulls open the door. Once she does, and her eyes fall onto the man just outside, her mouth falls open and she almost lets her weapon clatter to the ground. The blood in her veins runs cold, and she’s certain she must be seeing a ghost. Shakily, the only words she can manage are,

so i’ve been thinking about doing this for a while and i’m just gonna say fuck it:

if anyone is in contact with/knows what happened to sunny (vallaslined, amprettee, rowrogue, puckiish, a few deactivated others) a really beautiful british girl with a talent for prose, please tell her to message me. we abruptly lost contact over a year and a half ago and i miss her. i’ve thought about her really often. if she’s still on this hellsite writing, i just want to talk and write with her one more time. if she’s not, i really just hope she’s doing well in life. 

i know that this is dumb and desperate and all y’all reading this are probably like ??? yeah ok lol but... she’s one of the people on this website i really felt i connected with, and it was just bad life timing that we never actually got to do more.

     Vice. It’s not one of the most well known, widely popularized police task forces out there for no reason. Vice work is dangerous, usually heavily involved work that not all officers are cut out for. Narcotics, gambling, prostitution -- all things that many view as victimless crimes, if they consider them crimes at all -- run rampant throughout the biggest cities in the world, and it’s girls like Deb who see much of it firsthand.

   Or rather, girls like Mandy see it. Tonight, ‘Mandy’ stands, mostly alone, on a street corner, leant against the light pole. It’s shortly before midnight on a quiet Thursday night, and believe it or not, she has already made 2 easy arrests. You’d be hard pressed to guess that this tall, skinny, curly-haired and skimpily-dressed woman is actually a born and bred police officer. She holds a hard to place power about her that other prostitutes don’t have... but in a way, that helps her more than it hurts. Most men seem to like a little bit of a challenge, and she is more than happy to oblige. 

     Scrolling lazily through her smart phone, Deb feels safe knowing that only a few, discrete blocks away reside two equally young male officers in a squad car, waiting for back her up. Despite every moment of her facade being ‘work,’ she feels mind-numbingly bored, and thinks about how this waiting around part is rarely what gets put on TV. When a black Cadillac, or Lincoln, or some other luxury car rolls quietly up towards the curb, Mandy doesn’t acknowledge it until it doesn’t move for several seconds. Her brown eyes then slip upwards, and she smiles.

     Anyone who was anyone in the great, sunshine state of Florida had been to a hurricane party. Harry Morgan had, long before his death some five years ago, thrown a few of them at his family home in the cul-de-sac when Debra was rather young. She remembers very little of them. She and Dexter usually had their own quiet space, in the basement, where they drank hot cider and listened to the wind and rain pounding the outside of their home, away from the party of law enforcement. Her pseudo-brother usually ignored her, reading a book or getting ahead on his homework for most of the night and only sometimes assuring her that the house was ‘very structurally sound’. She usually ‘ignored’ him too, headphones in but with nothing playing. She would usually wait for him to look at her, notice her. Something. 

     Some things never change though, and Dexter never really paid her any attention. Neither did Harry, or his pals at the precinct. When her father died of cancer, and her brother went off to his prestigious, full-ride scholarship college, Debra was left with a newly sold childhood home, four suitcases full of a lifetime of items, and a boyfriend who took a lot more than he could give. Fast forward to now, she’s in her mid-twenties, has done what she’s had to to survive, and finds herself here, where the ongoing hurricane party is unlike one she’d ever been to. The space is huge, the music louder than the storm outside, and more drugs and alcohol being shared than frozen foods and water bottles. She has been invited as a ‘guest’, but she knows this is another kind of working. Sourcing for clientele and broadening her experience, so to speak. 

     ...Okay, so, safe to say that that doing this may have just been one of the absolute worst ideas she has ever had, ever.

     She’d been in a lot of fights, ever since her mom had died, her adopted brother had been hauled off to juvie, and her father had killed himself, but not one of them had been quite like this one. Ten others, nearly all of them male and bigger than she was, had taken their turns to beat on her (though it was much less like ‘turns,’ and more like an ambush). She hadn’t taken a moment of it lying down, of course (Deb could take a hit almost as good as she could give one); and fortunately, a lifetime of rage and resentment, on top of the eight weeks of intensive police training she’d endured before eventually dropping out had given her a few skills that the Saints didn’t have. Nonetheless, when all is said and done, Debra has hauled herself to her feet for the third and final time, and is one of only four who remains... well, conscious. Not a bad ratio.

     Her heart beats at what feels like a thousand miles an hour, and she has to wipe her own blood from her upper lip every several seconds to keep it from pouring down her chest. She’s certain that she will be black and blue from nearly head to toe, but she feels very much alive, enthralled by the adrenaline that forced her to fight back until there was no one left to fight. It may not be the perfect score they’re looking for, but she doesn’t care. Everything hurts, and yet, she feels fucking great. They can tell her to get lost, for all she cares. Nothing lost, nothing gained. 

     “...”