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All his life, those two words have followed Nick. Pretty Boy. He’s a pretty boy with big eyes, pouty lips, thick eyelashes and sharp cheekbones. Too pretty, too plastic. Because he’s beautiful and his voice sounds like whiskey on the rocks, they take him at face value every single time.Pretty Boy can take a hit. Whether it’s the lick of an Italian leather belt on his scarred back or the crunch of a meaty football player’s fist against his cheek, he takes it like a man. He does not flinch or fight back. There’s a running joke that you could shoot him in the knee, and he’d just stand there and not look at you. He’s above it all. He thinks he’s better than everyone else and that’s why he stands so stone still when blood drips down the crisp angle of his cheek.Pretty Boy does what he’s told. Sit down in your seat, Mr. Amaro, and he drops suddenly with shame and apprehension rolling off of his broad shoulders. He means to impress, to be polite. To chastise him is to look at a little girl and beat a doll from her hands with a rotted stick. Even when it’s not a teacher telling him what to do, he listens with the attention of a soldier. One line from a random classmate and he stumbles over his feet to obey. Cheerleaders laugh and hide from their boyfriends at parties as they tell him to follow them to bedrooms, where he stares at the ceiling while they do what they want to him. Girly laughter fills the room like heavy fog. Beer makes everything fuzzy and disguises any feelings that might come from being used.Pretty Boy is a fragile, breakable thing made of glass and spun sugar. Crystalline tears come from wide doe eyes because he doesn’t understand, can’t understand why they hate him so much. His reflection in the mirror is a fucking betrayal. He punches it into a thousand razor sharp, paper thin shards that he’s half tempted to pick up with bare hands. Each one holds another image of the face that he didn’t choose. He doesn’t want it. This idea that comes with it of airhead little boy who looks great on a shelf but falls apart in practice circulates in his thoughts on repeat. Time and time again until he does something.Four days after his father leaves, Pretty Boy dies and becomes Nick Amaro.Nick Amaro is quick to anger, quicker to instigate. Anyone who dares to come after him soon finds themselves prone on the rough concrete. He promises worse should they ever lay a hand on him again. Suddenly, he becomes a protector who stands between bullies and shy little kids or petite girls who cry when their nails break. To them, he is a noble hero who whisks in just in time to save them every single time.Nick Amaro listens to no one and does what he wants regardless of the consequences. If he feels the rules are unfair, he breaks them. Shatters them. He stands up in class and says no to the teacher. Girls come onto him and he doesn’t lay back and take what he doesn’t want anymore. When he doesn’t want to do something, he doesn’t. And when he does, there’s no shortage of girls in short skirts with too thick eyeliner waiting for him to say their names and pull them close.Nick Amaro is unbreakable. Overnight he becomes the man in the aviators and the dark jackets who sneaks drinks in water bottles during class. He gets angry at small things and blows up quickly, too quickly. His pretty boy face stares back at him when he looks in the fragments of the mirror, but when he looks down, his hands are his father’s hands. Ones that hurt people without thinking and have bruised knuckles. He can escape the mirror, but he can’t escape his own hands and his own thoughts.
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Growing up, Rafael liked things to be black and white. It was just easier that way, to put things in neat little boxes of good and bad, right and wrong. He thought about grey for the first time when he saw a man steal food, only to give it to a starving homeless man. At nine years old, he didn’t know what to think. Stealing is wrong. Helping people is right. How can something be both at the same time? Does that make it neither? Rafael found himself picturing a soft shade of grey. It isn’t right, he supposed, but no one really got hurt, so it’s fine.After that it got easier to see grey, but it was still hard. By the time Rafael becomes the ADA for Manhattan SVU, he’s back to the same black and white guidelines yet again. It doesn’t matter whether the defendant meant it, or why they did it. All that matters is justice served for the victims. That’s easy. A man who rapes several women violently falls strictly in the wrong. No questions asked. But then come the cases that make him think. Mostly they’re vengeance cases, like the woman who mutilated her abuser because he was never punished for his crimes. What she did, her reaction, was wrong. Looking at her motive, however, Rafael can place her in the grey.Things get tricky in the grey. The grey is hard to understand, harder to prosecute with certainty and confidence, and without guilt. Grey lives and breathes in Manhattan SVU with revenge crimes, good intentions, and detectives like Fin and Rollins who sometimes fall outside the lines of the law. Working there makes even the darkest black and the brightest white start to mix. It isn’t fair, it isn’t right, it hurts to stand there and be the one to decide if the grey is dark enough to prosecute. Sometimes he thinks that’s too much power for one man.Too much power, too much grey standing in baby Drew’s ICU room. The switch is right there and the bright, vibrant orange roses look dark, dark grey from where he stands. Everything is that sickening color, but isn’t quite black. It isn’t quite wrong. Rafael stands there for a long time, convincing himself that it isn’t wrong. Dark grey to the slightest off-white. When he turns off the life support, it’s the right thing to do. He doesn’t even realize what he’s done until he wakes up the next morning in pitch black guilt.
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If there is one thing that Sonny can always do, it’s bounce back. His entire life, he’s been trained to do it. When hands on the back of his neck throw him through a glass window that shatters around him, he gets right back up again. Berating, snide comments fly at him every single moment of every day but he takes them in stride. Death is inevitability always so close on his heels, chasing him as he takes shorter and shorter steps forward. Yes, Sonny can bounce back.Lying awake at night, he stares at the ceiling and feels the cold metal on his forehead. It slowly warms up from the heated temperature of his skin as he stares into the face of someone who will be his executioner. The fear of that moment is always present. It never goes away. That anxiety weighs heavily on him but no one notices because Sonny is good at bouncing back.That little girl who Sonny found passed out, curled up in a dryer after being viciously raped sits another thousand pound weight on his shoulders. She was just a kid. Just a kid who will have to live with the trauma of that for the rest of her life when she doesn’t deserve you. They say kids can overcome anything, but it’s not always like that, especially in this line of word. Her cold hands and her limp body as he carried her outside, yelling for a bus come to mind more often than they should. She looked like his sisters when they were younger. She looks like his nieces are becoming. Nausea rolls through him when he remembers that case but no one notices because Sonny is good at bouncing back.A dentist who raped his own niece rots in jail, and Sonny thinks about him quite a lot too. That man took advantage of family, someone he was supposed to protect, not hurt like that. More sickness. More pain. This job is slowly tearing Sonny apart seeing the awful things that people do when they think no one will hold them accountable for it. To think that anyone could look at their own family and hurt them is unthinkable. He imagines a world in which he wasn’t related to his sisters, and someone else took his place and hurt his nieces. He wants to scream but no one notices because Sonny is good at bouncing back.The man he failed to save haunts Sonny every time he shuts his eyes. A life that’s been extinguished is on his conscience. Guilt is a burden that weighs on him most of all. It was bad when they lost the sergeant, but having that perp’s life in his hands and losing it brings a whole new wave of pain. He can’t stop hearing the sound of a body hitting the pavement, feeling the tight grip on his arm before it slips. Someone died and that’s on him. Every time he looks in the mirror, his brain screams that he’s a killer before his reflection blurs through his tears. He can barely stand himself but no one notices because Sonny is good at bouncing back.He smiles and brings cannolis on Wednesdays for the squad. Everything is fine. He’s fine. Days keep passing by, cases come through, some of which hit harder than others, and Sonny keeps breathing, keeps going through the motions. Being a robot is easier than feeling. No one notices, no one cares, because he’s Dominick “Sonny” Carisi and he’s good at bouncing back.
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Blood is something that lingers even long after it drips down the drain. Its smell, so thick and coppery. Metallic. Iron staining noses and hanging on coats even after the stain has been treated. Blood stains are so hard to get out, and even once they’re gone, their ghosts rest in the fabric. The way it coats skin is so disgusting and slippery and it sinks into the fine wrinkles of faces and hands. Once the water runs clear, there’s still more of it.Sonny has scratched his skin raw trying to make it go away. The pink deepens from burning shower water clouding his vision with hazy steam that looks like the smoke from the hood of Jules’ car. Her face paints the inside of his eyelids, shredded by glass from the windshield. She will never look at her daughter again.His knees give out, and next thing Sonny knows he’s folded on his long limbs in the too-small tub, pulling at his hair and shaking with violent sobs. While he waited for the ambulance, he held her body in his hands. Pressed down on the gaping wound in her chest as red-black blood seeped between her fingers. He felt the moment the life drained from her body between one breath and the next.Trembling and crying, he reaches to turn off the shower water and drags himself onto the bath mat. It hurts in his chest. He flings open the toilet bowl and hurls over the rim. Vomit has a distinctive imprint as well, but it doesn’t stick like blood. Over and over. His cheek is flat against the rim, eyes slipping shut and swollen with tears. No shock blanket drapes his shoulders this time. He’s on his own.The next few days he’ll be on his own too. When the paramedics cleared him and withdrew their aid, Olivia ordered him to take time off. She must’ve seen something in his eyes, the same thing that has him too tired to do anything more than flush the toilet and collapse back on his floor. Water cools and he starts shivering from the cold. All he does to help himself is drag down his shoddy towel and drape it like the world’s worst blanket. He can still feel her blood on him. Stinging his nose, staining his clothes, coating his hands. Every little cut and scrape and scratch makes itself felt, but they’re nothing when he can’t get away from Jules’ blood.
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Late nights. It’s always the late nights, the ones where Sonny finds himself wondering home with feet that can barely put themselves one in front of the other. He’s not drunk, can’t do that to himself now that he’s old enough for a hangover. But this is a similar discombobulation. Thoughts string idly by in a language he does not understand, does not care to translate. Pretty things, lights and red bottom shoes and silky siren voices beckon his peripherals but he doesn’t give in.
Failure. Failure. Failure to save to protect to win to breathe to live to think. Lungs that don’t work quite right struggle on air that tastes like rotten apples bitten a day too late during an autumn harvest. For a moment he thinks of days spent picking apples from the trees with family when he was small. A brief memory of happiness and being carefree lasts for a fleeting second before the traffic lights snatch it up smugly and exhale cigar smoke in his face.
He pulls his coat tighter like it can protect him but it can’t. Not from bitter cold and not from fear. Sounds that dance and play jokes on him are always just tricks of the light and ear when he turns around. Alone in the dark and he’s more scared of his shadow than the cruising casing black mustang rolling down the wrong side of the road. Bogeymen mean nothing in comparison to the snarling creatures walked by his desk in low light on busy afternoons.
Easy now, careful, he leans against the wall of a 24 hour bodega, basking in the fluorescent light that casts ghostly shadows down his face. Heavy breathing on his late night stroll through nowhere to just get home. Phantom hands on his neck, phantom guns to his head, phantom screams for help. Too little, too late. Failure. He can’t breathe the icicles of frozen oxygen that seem colder when they hit his mouth. Choking against patchy popcorn plaster to the lullaby of buzzing overheads from inside the bodega. Twenty four hour liquor on bright neon signs before he can finally drag himself back into motion.
Blood spatters splatter his face but when he lifts his hands to his cheeks they’re clean and rough with stubble. It’s been a couple days since he’s been able to look in the mirror and be presentable. Old gel has gone stiff and will have to be scrubbed away with meticulous hands that don’t shake.
Bass thrums in his chest past a night club, rattling his bones much the same way an automatic does when it sews damage in a crowded courtroom as he ducks behind a desk for cover like a coward. Blood on his hands and knees, sticky and warm and fresh and coating his face now too. He runs to get away from the noise, the quiver, the memory.
By the time he gets home, he can’t feel clumsy fingers curled around keys. Jingling locks give way to a safe home that doesn’t feel safe anymore. Everywhere he’s found solstice is now empty and cold like his heart and his skull and the desk with the photographs packed up in evidence boxes to go home to a family that may not even cry.
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“Stay down! Wait for backup! Detective!”Mike’s voice echoes back to him unanswered. She’s gone. Without backup and up against a practiced killer, she might not come back alive, and that’s on his conscience for not being able to stop her. Every passing moment lowers the chance that she makes it out alive. He can’t go after her either, because his legs give out every time he tries to stand up from the pain of the gunshot wound to his shoulder. The blood is warm unlike the rain and air cold enough to numb his lips. He’s alone, and in pain, and drowning in the pitch black dark. He can barely see his own legs. “This is Sergeant Dodds, Detective Lindsay is in rogue pursuit of the suspect,” he adds into the radio. His heart is in his throat waiting for help to arrive. When he was younger, he hated the dark too. Five years old, huddled underneath the covers without a nightlight or cracked door, muffling sobs into his pillowcase. He’s Michael Dodds, for God’s sake, nothing should scare him, least of all something as childish as the absence of light. But sitting here, he can’t help it. He can’t see, can’t move. Weak. Defenseless. A twig snaps and he flinches, biting the inside of his cheek to stay quiet. There’s no signs of life, even as he struggles to stand up and scan the surroundings. Several feet away the young patrol officer lies on the ground in a puddle of his own blood, light reflecting off of it in a gleam that should be pretty but instead makes him sick to his stomach. He looks at anything else for a sign of the perp, but there’s nothing. He’s completely by himself. In the dark. Mike sinks back to the stained asphaltIt feels like hours before he hears the sirens. Party lights cut through the monotony until the beams of the proper headlights cast the carnage in yellow light. Officers spill from the cars, checking the scene and finding him as red seeps between his fingers from the continuous pressure against his wounds. “Sergeant Dodds?” “Detective Lindsay hasn’t come back,” Mike says with less breath behind his voice than he expects. “I don’t know where she is, or the suspect.”“We’re looking for her, don’t worry about it. The paramedics are on their way, Sergeant, just hang on.”He doesn’t like the way they talk to him, as if he’s dying, as if he’s a victim. Someone brings him one of the blankets that squad cars keep in the back for an emergency and drapes it over him. That’s when he realizes how cold he is, unable to to feel his face or hands with. His breath is visible in the freezing air, drifting away. Mike’s eyes fall shut, plunging him back into the dark.