NEUR0vanity

Title: The Haves and the Have-Nots
Fandom: Numb3rs
Characters: Billy Cooper
Rating: G
Word Count: 300
Challenge: #168 New York for Numb3rs100

Snow gathers on the hotel window sill. New York City is a gray blanket with specks of white, and those little flakes look like they could be furry and soft, like the skies above fields of dandelions after you’d blown the seeds up into the blue when you were a kid. To go from a memory of such bright and vivid color – blues and greens and yellow – to a monochromatic present is a jolt. You spend so much time when you’re young fantasizing about the future, and next thing you know, the future is now, and it’s not so great. You thought you’d be filled with some amazing sense of goodwill and virtue – saving mankind – and you find yourself feeling drained, empty, lifeless. It’s another day and another criminal to catch. At one point, you’d felt that what you were doing was good – keeping the streets safe. Now you feel like you’re the clean-up crew, like your job is to deny freedom. It makes no difference that the freedom isn’t deserved; all you can see is that you’re putting someone back into prison. And, yeah, you’re saving lives in doing so, but that thought just doesn’t seem to want to factor into your assessment of the situation. You move from city to city to capture criminals and close the door on the little things – seeing their friends, catching a matinee, going down to the gas station to buy a pack of smokes. All you can see is that you’re depriving someone of the things you take for granted, the small things that build up to mean so much to someone who doesn’t have them.

New York City looks like crap, but to someone who’s seen only a prison block for the last five years, it is a vision of beauty.

end.

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