Chapter Text
~Two Weeks Later~
Doug laid silently on his couch, arms wrapped around his chest, his attention locked fully on an episode of The Rifleman.
Empty and new soda cans covered the floor of his apartment and coffee table, as well as empty and half full boxes of pizza, burger wrappers, bags of chips and cans of ravioli.
He hasn't heard from his teammates or captain since his ordeal as he refused to answer any of their calls, respond to any of their messages and eventually unplugged the phone and answering machine. When he was in the hospital he refused to see any of them.
Doug looked slightly different as he had grown out a beard and mustache and his hair was longer.
He still had bruises covering his body. Two black eyes, and a busted lip and nose.
He was dead to the world and wanted to continue his sentence of purgatory in peace.
His left middle finger accidentally brushes up against his shirt, or what was left of it. It couldn't be reattached. The cut had been too jagged, too much of a hack job, it had been unattached for too long and the jar that animal had dropped his finger into had too much bacteria, chemicals and dirt.
When he first found out his finger had been partially cut off, his reaction could be akin to that or a victim in a Friday the 13th movie running into Jason and realizing they were about to be added to his body count.
Doug didn't want to go back to work. He’d never hear the end of it. He could hear them all now, chastising him over his stupidity. Even Tom.
Harry, Dennis and Judy were right, he wasn't fit to be a cop. Too young, dumb and immature. And that was how he fell into his current ordeal.
He just had to prove himself that Saturday night, prove to all of his fellow officers that he wasn't a little boy, he was a grown man, he wasn't a liability and that he didn't need them, they needed him.
And in his attempt to prove them wrong he proved them completely right, he got into the car of a prime suspect of serial slayings without calling for backup and he turned his back on the damn suspect.
He didn't deserve to be a cop, all of his doubters had been right.
Doug never thought he’d be a victim of rape, with his build he arrogantly and foolishly assumed no rapist would try anything with him and if they did they wouldn’t get too far.
Moreover he had never believed it possible for a grown man to be raped until two years prior when he saw a film on tv called "The Rape Of Richard Beck". A movie about a middle aged male cop who gets raped. That movie changed his entire outlook and perspective on the subject.
So he wasn't as dumbfounded over teen boys being raped as most of his other teammates seemed to have been when they were first handed the case of the Savage Of Metropolis. The team was originally only told that the case was a serial rape case. A rape case where the victims were all boys. Judy seemed flabbergasted and borderline offended in the beginning. In her words they shouldn't have been treating an issue that only women were the victims of and men were the perpetrators of as something that could affect men and that them doing so turned a real issue into a bad joke.
Dennis automatically cracked jokes, before he heard the age of the victims and how they were brutally murdered which made him stop and feel very guilty.
Tom was puzzled and just downright confused when Fuller said the word "rape". The boy had just been so damn sheltered, and conservative minded before he had become a cop, there were so many things he wasn't privy to. He had never even heard of Jimi Hendrix before he joined the squad and Jenko introduced the legendary guitarist to him.
Doug was a mixture of surprised and intrigued.
Harry seemed to be the one who took it the most serious from the get go and never doubted the idea of men being victims.
As the black and white picture of Lucas McCain being tied up to wagon wheels by the vengeful father of a man he helped capture flash in front of him, Doug's mind wanders to a comment he made when the team was first handed the case. A comment he deeply regrets now.
"Just send me in there cap'in, That sonofabitch won't know what hit em once I'm through with him." His comment actually managed to get a laugh out of everyone as they all surprisingly believed him.
''One could hope Douglas." Fuller replied.
That was the first and currently only time that they had been handed a case like this where the victim was male. And despite how graphic the slayings were and that Metropolis had a serial killer murdering teenagers on the loose the case was very odd in that it wasn't being reported on by the vast majority of the media. The only publications that would touch the case were the smaller more indie publications. That was the one thing that puzzled Doug about this whole case. The thing that truly made this case feel so eerie. It made the victims feel like lost boys who had never been here in the first place and would never be again.
However during the six months Doug has spent at Jumpstreet he has learned how shamefully the media worked. It was the sensational cases that got all media coverage, if an agenda could be pushed that is.
Case in point their bust on P.S. 113 an inner city, racially diverse highschool that was predominantly Black and Hispanic. The school had a real bad violence problem. Students and teachers regularly carried guns and knifes to school. There was a metal detector at every entrance. A breaking point had been reached when a student stabbed another for laughing at her. The school had a terrible grade point average, a slightly higher than average teen parent rate, wide spread issues of drug dealing, but interestingly enough most of the buyers went to other, more prestigious schools.
After Jumpstreet went undercover and did their thing the story was all over the news and made national headlines. Leading to so many widespread debates about fixing the so-called widespread problems that supposedly mainly plagued inner-city schools where students of color dominated the student body. Apparently a made for TV movie produced by major Hollywood studio Fox was in the works.
However when they the busted the 95 percent white elite private school Marimount, for honestly far worse, seven reported rapes and sexual assaults, 30 complaints of sexual harassment. A widespread number of students dealing and using all sorts of drugs including heroin, cocaine, weed, oxy, crystal meth, etc. Students having sex with teachers in order to change their grades. Teachers getting gangs of students to hurt students that they did not like with the goal of ousting them from school, the media did everything in its power to bury it.
It was a shock to young Doug, he would never forget Judy solemnly telling him that that was just how things were. Biases regarding race and class among many other things had and would always determine what cases the media would and wouldn't report on and how they would report on them. Because to Doug the kids of Marimount were lost causes compared to those of P.S. 113.
Getting back to the Savage Of Metropolis, when the team saw the photos of those boys it humbled them all quick. You couldn't fake what they saw in those photos, or consent to what they had been subjected to.
Doug might have been young but he was still a grown man at Nineteen, rather large and most importantly, a cop. It was always Judy that the team looked out for when it came to potentially lecherous creeps on cases or any case involving, rape, sexual assault or sexual harassment. But it made sense as the victims in all of those cases had been women. Nevertheless those same precautions weren't had when Doug, Harry and Dennis posed as teenaged prostitutes, they all assumed the threesome wouldn't have anything to worry about. Not counting on Doug's horrific lack of judgement.
Doug had been far too cocky, too ignorant, as when he got sent on the streets to pose as a streetwalker he honestly snorted and thought he was far more fitted for Tom's role because why would a man be attracted to him of all be people? What was so cute about him, a lot of women didn't even find him cute. Boy was he wrong.
He really didn't know anything, anything at all. He never should have become a cop.
He had that badge stashed deep within a drawer of junk, Doug hadn't been able to look at it since he woke up in the hospital one day to discover it on his bedside table.
That badge. That badge that didn't help him when he needed it to the most.
He was being kept in the dark about the case and the suspect. He had heard his name- Jonathan Stryker but that was all he knew.
Everyone that he had asked refused to tell him about the fate of Aaron Conniff. And that scared Doug.
The one thing Doug found himself wishing for throughout this whole ordeal was that his parents were still alive.
Doug's mother killed herself when he was six, as the result of a suicide by overdose. Apparently she dealt with mental health issues all throughout her life. All of these issues she supposedly had, he never noticed and looking back on her behavior as an adult, he still didn't see anything wrong with it.
Sure she was eccentric, but being eccentric didn't inherently make someone mentally ill or prove that they had something wrong with them. And even if she was mentally ill, she had been a great mother.
He was initially shielded from her death, told that she died abruptly of a heart attack...at the age of 26. It wasn't until he was a teenager that he was deemed mature enough to handle the truth.
His father turned to alcohol in his grief and eventually turned slightly abusive as he put his hands on Doug twice and not too long after that he killed himself when the boy was eight.
It wasn't until he was eighteen that Doug's grandparents finally allowed him to read this father's suicide note. One of the biggest catalysts for his father deciding to take his own life was him putting his hands on Doug. That was the final straw in his eyes, the point of no return. An unforgivable offense.
Doug cried like a baby when he read the note. He would have forgiven his father, he had long since forgiven him. As he got older the incidents got rather vague and fuzzy in his mind. It had never been something he harped on.
Everyone was different, just because some would never forgive an offense like that, doesn't mean everyone felt the same. An unforgivable offense in someone else's eyes wasn't the same in another person's eyes.
Doug was under the strong belief his father could have gotten him some help from somewhere and changed for the better but in his father's mind the only help he deserved was his only good belt wrapped tightly around his neck.
His grandparents practically became his parents and unfortunately they died due to old age days apart not too long after he joined the academy.
He has no siblings. No cousins, aunts or uncles that he knew of. All he had was himself and now his best friend.
Speaking of his best friend, a thought constantly crossed his mind during these past two weeks: What would Tom think of him now?
Doug's attention lands back on the episode of The Rifleman playing and now Lucas was nearly killing the man with his bare hands over the belief that he killed his son Mark, only to find that his son was perfectly fine.
The image of the embrace of a father and son, reunited after unforseen terror, brought on unusual feelings for Doug.
Doug couldn't help but think that Mark McCain was lucky, truly lucky. But The Rifleman was an old ass black and white western, this was the real world and the real world fucking sucked.
As the episode ends and the credits start to roll, Doug finally lets his eyes glance around the apartment, viewing the total chaos of his usually semi clean place.
His apartment looked as though a group of teenagers threw a wild party in the place and never bothered to clean up.
Doug nearly snorts at the irony, he was a teenager....and a defender of law and order. Maybe Jude was right, the minimum age you could become a cop in Evergreen should be raised, to keep morons like him out.
He was starting to run out of basic necessities including food, water, soap and toilet paper. Which meant that Doug would have to leave his house soon...go out into the real world for the first time since he left the hospital.
Anxiety built in his gut at the thought.
He continues to sit in his spot, waiting for the commercial to finish and the next episode to begin when he hears a knock on the door, loud, urgent.
A feeling of dread and anxiety grew in the pit of his stomach.
The face of the animal who violated him flashes in his mind and he stops dead in his tracks: Jonathan Stryker.
He slowly sits up, automatically feeling pain coursing through his sore body.
For a brief second he thinks about going for his gun, only to remember that it had never been returned to him and that as far as he that bastard was getting out of jail anytime soon.
The knocking not only continues but picks up in urgency.
Doug begrudgingly trudges to the door, dread and anxiety building with every step.
He reaches the door and looks through the peep hole and audibly blows out a breath when he spots a very familiar middle aged black man standing in front of the door.
Doug opens the door with hesitation. He had been avoiding his coworkers and captain for weeks now and he was completely unprepared to have this house visit.
"Fuller?” He asks, wondering what his captain was doing at his apartment door, but he had a feeling he knew the answer.
Shock was plastered on the older man's face. Doug looked so unkempt to say the least. His hair was longer and wild, he had facial hair and was still in pajamas despite it being 12:30 pm.
“Penhall." He states, almost everything he planned on saying to the young man, dying on his tongue as he got a good look at him.
"May I come in son?"