Your Honor Im Cruel - Tumblr Posts

There was blood on the hero’s hands. The hero had felt blood before, on themself, on their knuckles, on their clothes. This time it hurt. It was cold, and it cracked every time the hero moved their fingers, and yet they couldn’t look away.

If they looked away they would have to look at—they couldn’t look.

The hero stared at their hands. They were cold, too.

Footsteps, the hush of clothing.

“Hey, hey, hey,” hands skated along the Hero’s chin, tilting it up. “Hey, can you look at me, please?”

They blinked.

“There you are,” the villain murmured, hands gentle as they smoothed the hero’s jaw. “Love, can you—“

“I need to buy eggs.” The hero’s lips were numb.

The villain paused. “Eggs?”

“I’m out,” they stared at the villains face. It was safe, and it was familiar, and they were staring back at them with worry. “They’re my roommate’s favorite.”

The villain knelt, then, eyes briefly dropping to the hero’s hands before training back on their face.

“You’re in shock.”

“My mailman keeps putting my mail in my neighbors’ mailbox. It’s never the same neighbor either, so I think it’s on purpose—“

The villain looked pained. “It wasn’t your fault.”

The hero had words, and then they didn’t. It was their fault, wasn’t it? They hadn’t—their mind slipped off it like water, and their chest eased.

“I failed my geometry test,” they whispered, and their tongue hurt.

The villains hands shifted to the hero’s forearms. Gentle, so gentle. Like the hero would break if they weren’t.

“Can you stand up for me, please?”

“It’s cold.”

The villains face rippled.

“The city is in the middle of a heatwave,” they said softly.

The hero drifted, and found the sun. It looked warm. So warm.

“I’m cold.”

“I know, love.”

They drifted back. It felt like sinking.

“They’re cold, too.”

The villain tensed. They looked over. The hero didn’t.

“It wasn’t your fault,” the villain repeated.

“They stopped breathing,” the hero whispered, and the words cut their lungs on the way out, shredding their tongue.

The villain’s face dropped.

“Let me help you,” the begged. “Please.”

“I tried so hard,” the hero’s voice broke. “And I did compressions and their ribs broke but they—“ their voice left, their mind slid.

The villain’s hands gripped their face, guiding it to look at them.

“You did everything you could.”

Their voice was firm.

There was no room for argument.

“They didn’t deserve to die,” the hero sobbed, broken wretched sobs that ached on the way out.

“Love,” the villain breathed, and then they were sobbing into the villain’s chest like a child. Their hand rubbed soothing circles on the hero’s back. “I know. I know.”

“They were just a kid—“

“I know,” the villain said softly.

The hero shattered, and they looked, and it hurt and it hurt and it—their mind slipped.

They blinked, and the villain was wrapping a blanket around them on a too soft couch.

“Where?”

The villain’s head snapped up, and the tension bled from their face.

“You passed out.”

“Oh.”

The memories came like sludge. They stung.

“It hurts,” they breathed.

“It’s okay, love. It’s okay.” The hero took the mug of tea they were handed. “Breathe.”

The hero did.

They watched the villain. There was a plant in the corner of the apartment. It made the hero smile. So mundane, so soft. So gentle, their villain.

“It wasn’t your fault.”

And this time, the hero almost believed them.

Later, when the tea was cold and they had pressed themselves against the villain’s side, the villain kissed the top of their head and murmured “Stay.”

Bundled in blankets and the villain’s arms, the hero did.

A sapphic detective who gets too close to the truth of a case and gets confronted by her girlfriend for being too obsessed?

“You need to stop.”

The detective didn’t jerk up at the sound of her voice—just quietly stirred, rustling papers as she shifted upright to meet her eyes.

“I didn’t hear you come in,” the detective said slowly, eyes scanning over her. She watched her gaze catch on the water dripping from the ends of her hair, the mascara smudging itself down her cheeks.

“It’s date night,” she said, and even to her own ears her voice sounded tired. Dead. Rotting roses and dirty dishes in the sink.

The detective blinked once, then shifted through her papers until she found a scribbled in calendar. It was stuck on the wrong month.

“I forgot,” the detective murmured. It wasn’t an apology, and neither of them were pretending that it was. She could tell, even now, with her girlfriend pathetic and dripping water onto the hardwood floor in front of her, that the detective wanted nothing more than to go back to her evidence.

“Yeah,” she croaked. “Funny how it’s never the case you forget.”

The detective jerked, slightly, like she hadn’t expected the barbs in her girlfriend’s voice.

In the hallway, there was a drooping bouquet of flowers she hadn’t been able to bear bringing into the apartment.

“You know how important this is,” the detective implored, and it made her want to break things. Burn the papers, shatter the fancy glasses in the cabinet, spill wine across the carpets.

What about me, she wanted to scream. Am I not important to you anymore?

Instead, she said again, “You need to stop.”

“Stop?”

“The case. You need to stop.”

“I can’t just stop,” the detective laughed slightly, as if she thought it would convey how inconceivable the idea of stopping was.

“Yes, you can. Give it to someone else. There’s a whole precinct just waiting for you to put this file into their hands.”

At the thought of it, the thought of giving up this case, the hunt, the chase, pain flashed across the detective’s face.

“You don’t understand.”

“I do,” she replied. She had to shift her gaze to the dead plant on the corner of her partner’s desk, dirt dry and leaves brittle. “How could I not?”

“So then how could you ask me to do that? To give it all up? Why now?”

She had so many answers to that. So many moments that cut into her hands like a mosaic of memories. The bed empty beside her through the entire night. Cancelled reservations, one seat alone at the dinner table, laughs that died in her ribs. Friends, well meaning, who asked where the detective was, and the painful smiles she forced through the explanations. Work, and work, and work. Crime scene photos on the coffee table. The loneliness that seemed to care about her more than her girlfriend did.

There were so many times when she almost said something. Almost said enough. But she hadn’t, and now they were here, as she dripped a puddle onto the floor, and the detective looked at her like she had never seen her before.

When she tried to say that, any of that, it caught in her throat.

The detective took her silence for an inability to answer. A lack of evidence. Like she was throwing this tantrum for no reason, a little kid in the toy aisle of the store.

The detective sighed, rubbing a hand over her forehead. The other was already fanning through the papers once more. Her voice turned into something that begged to be understood.

“I’m so close—“

“To losing me.” She swallowed, painfully. “You’re losing me.”

“That’s not fair.”

“This isn’t fair,” her voice broke as she gestured between the two of them. “What you’re doing to me isn’t fair.”

“I’m not doing anything—“

“Exactly.” It was louder than she meant it to be. They both flinched.

“I’ll have it solved in a week, I promise.” She wasn’t sure who the detective was promising to.

“No.”

The detective blinked.

“No?”

“You heard me the first time.”

“I heard you, but I’m not sure what you’re saying ‘no’ to.”

If she had the energy to be slightly meaner, she would have told her to figure it out. Told her that she was a detective, this should be easy for her.

“I’m not giving you a week.” She took a deep breath. “And you’re not going to solve it.”

The detective’s looked at her like she didn’t recognize the person on the other side of the desk.

Finally, she understood what it felt like to face her girlfriend from the other side of an interrogation table.

Her girlfriend’s face was cold, and closed off. Her jaw was grinding into itself. She was staring at her like she couldn’t decide whether or not to consider her a suspect. As if the only reason she could fathom her girlfriend saying something like that was if she was actively sabotaging her.

She was cold, and her coat was wet, and this place no longer felt like home.

“You won’t solve this case.”

She was pretty sure there wasn’t anything crueler she could have said.

“You don’t know anything.” It was dripping with venom, and fear, and frustration. The fear the detective really wouldn’t solve it. The frustration that it still wasn’t solved.

“Do you really think you’re that special?” By now, it was too far gone for her to stop. There was no pretty way out of this. “You aren’t. This isn’t a TV show. You aren’t the main character who swoops in where no one else has before. It’s been decades of the same bullshit—taunting and evidence trails, and nobody has solved it. Don’t you think if it was solvable, it would have been by now?”

“There’s new evidence, and I’m not them—“

“What part of ‘you aren’t special’ don’t you understand,” she hissed, and the detective shifted away from her. “You aren’t the miracle detective who solves this. They’re going to keep on killing, and driving the people who try and find them crazy, and you’re letting them do it to you.”

“I’m not letting them do anything.”

“But you are,” she countered. “You have been for months. They’re messing with you. They’re everything to you, and you’re a game to them, and I’m nothing on the sidelines.”

“Babe, that’s not true,” The detective tried, voice softening. As if she had just realized something between them was wrong. That her girlfriend was hurting—had been, for a while.

She swallowed the tears rising in her throat.

“Do I need to become a crime scene for you to finally care about me again?” She slammed her hand down on the papers. Pretended the wince on the detectives face was concern for her, and not the papers she crumpled. “Will you look at me, love me again, if I’m a bloody photograph in this folder?”

“I do love you.”

“When someone loves someone else, they don’t leave them alone in the rain, waiting to be picked up. They don’t cancel to go dig through old archives on their loved one’s birthday. They don’t leave them in the middle of the night and let the blankets beside them get cold. People who love someone don’t live their life without a concern for the person they’re putting below everything else.”

“You’re making this really hard.”

“Good,” she snapped. “Because you’ve been making it hard to love you for months, and I’m glad you finally know how it feels.”

The detective paused, at that. Swallowed, eyes flitting around the room as if she would find the perfect thing to say in the remnants of the life they had built together.

“I love you,” The detective managed. Somehow, it was the worst thing she could have said.

“Good. Prove it.” She thought maybe dying would have hurt less than this.

“Prove it?”

“Prove it. Me, or the case.”

The detective froze.

“You don’t mean that,” she said, and it sounded like a plea. Don’t make me choose.

“Look at me and try and tell me I’m joking.” When the detective said nothing, she pushed further. “Go on. Do it. Choose.”

“I can’t do that—“ the detective choked. “This isn’t fair, you know that. I’m so close.”

Somehow, she had expected it to hurt less.

“Don’t make me choose,” the detective, her girlfriend, the love of her life finally said, voice breaking.

She had thought it would feel like dying.

It felt like nothing.

“You just did,” she said. The tears refused to be held, this time. The pain ran rampant through every word.

She knew her girlfriend could hear it.

“I love you,” the detective whispered. A final, desperate prayer for her to stay. But she was no god, and her girlfriend was no believer. And it would never be enough.

She let the door slam on the way out.

The detective never did solve that case.