Chapter Text
“Don’t, please.”
Chloe knew the signs, of course she did, she was a cop after all. You couldn’t be a mandatory reporter if you didn’t know the signs to report.
She just never expected to see them in him. Her wisecracking, sexually inappropriate partner wasn’t...couldn’t have been, but the evidence was all there.
The first time she’d seen them she’d been a beat cop, fresh from the academy. She’d been on two dates with Dan and the idea of settling down and kids were far enough away that children kind of freaked her out a bit, but when the call came in about a kid who had been admitted to a hospital near her who was refusing to give his name, she radiod dispatch and took the call.
He was barely a teenager, 14 or maybe 15 at most and destined to be absurdly tall going by how he was still growing into his gangly, long limbs.
(Years later she would remember this boy and think how much Lucifer might have looked like him as a teenager, all clumsy gangly limbs and dead eyes just hoping against hope for a bit of affection that he knew he was never going to get, but just kept trying for, and she would curl up in her bed and cry the same way she had when she went home from that hospital.)
His black hair was limp and hung over his forehead, but did nothing to hide the intensely black eye he was sporting or the other bruises on his arms, more hidden under the sling that was stabilizing his formerly dislocated shoulder. The nurse had given her a rundown of his injuries on the way there, until Chloe had felt nauseous.
“Hi there, I’m Officer Decker...but you can call me Chloe if you want. What’s your name?” He’d glared at her distrustfully and she kept her distance.
“It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me. It looks like you got banged up pretty good, can you tell what happened?”
“Why bother” he spat. “You won’t believe me anyway.”
“Yes, I will.” Chloe tried to make her voice as trustworthy as possible. “I trust you, whatever you say happened, happened, okay?”
There was a brief flicker of something like hope in the boys eyes and he took a deep breath, his uninjured hand tapping restlessly against his leg.
“I...I can’t go back there” he finally said, almost a whisper.
“Okay.”
“I CAN’T!” He suddenly screamed, jumping off the bed and rushing at Chloe, who stood between him and the door, shoving her into the wall. She almost reached out to stop him, but he flinched away from her touch.
“Don’t touch me!”
Chloe backed off and gave him space.
“You aren’t going anywhere you don’t want to go, I promise” she said and his hand paused on the door handle.
“You...you can’t promise that.”
“Well” she admitted. “Maybe not, but I can promise that wherever it is that you are so afraid to go, you definitely aren’t going back there.”
He turned to look at her and she was sure that tiny speck of hope was growing brighter.
“I...almost believe you.” He stepped away from the door and walked back to the bed. “You...you can sit down if you want.” He said. She stepped forward and moved to stand between the chair and the bed.
“Here, or here?” She indicated the two seating options and he shrugged. She moved toward the chair and his shoulders slumped. “Chairs in hospitals are pretty uncomfortable actually, you’d think they didn’t want people having visitors” she said, non-chalantly before stepping back toward the bed and setting on the other end from him.
“My names John, but...I hate it. Everyone calls me Jay.”
“Okay, Jay. Do you wanna tell me what happened?”
There was a moment of complete silence and then a sniffle. She saw Jay wipe his nose out of the corner of her eye and waited.
“He hates me. He...he says everything is my fault, that I ruined everything and that if he had to have a son at the very least he should have gotten one that’s not an...an evil, worthless...” his voice trailed off and Chloe had to lean in to hear him when he finally whispered the final word “queer.” She felt her fists clench and desperately wanted to smash in the face of this boy’s father, punish him the way he punished his son, but she knew that wasn’t her job right now.
“What about your mom?”
“She...she doesn’t care. I mean, sometimes, she’ll say something if he...if he goes too far, but...” If this wasn’t what ‘too far’ looked like, Chloe thought, she didn’t want to know what it did look like. She looked at Jay and he looked defeated. “I didn’t mean to be this way, I don’t want...I just want him to love me.” He said, voice breaking. “Why doesn’t he...”
“Oh, sweetheart, that’s not...you didn’t do anything wrong.” Jay looked up at her, eyes filled with tears and scrambled toward her. Chloe opened her arms and wrapped them around him in a loose embrace that he could easily break. “You aren’t ever going back there, Jay. I’m going to make sure. Okay?” Jay nodded against her shoulder, tears wetting the fabric of her uniform.
Jay was the first, but certainly not the last abused child to cross her path. The impact of those cases were always the worst for her, somehow more gruesome than all the homicides that came across her desk as a detective. Murder was grotesque, true, but the motives usually made a certain awful sense. A logic that a detective could follow to the source, not the indiscriminate angry mess of child abuse.
It had been years since Jay had almost literally fallen into her lap and now here she was facing those same skittish behaviors, that same heartbreaking “don’t, please” when she reached out her hand to touch his scars and it broke her heart. He was as childish, narcissistic ass that wanted in her pants, sure, but that was all surface...underneath she couldn’t help but see him in Jay’s place. Defiantly putting on a brave face, while hoping someone would finally help him.
And god help anyone who tried to stop her from doing it.