Falling

“Will you do it, John?” Lamar asks. “There’s no one else I’d rather have leading this force.”

John sinks lower into the chair and stares at the surprisingly ornate ceiling of Lamar’s office. It’s been a year since Sean’s disappearance, and John knows he’s broken, knows that he needs saving. He and Lara have been putting on the good husband-good wife routine for far too long, and the cracks are beginning to show.

This is a job. A new job. A chance to work with Lamar again. It could work.

Pre-Crime. So he can stop it before it happens to someone else. Before someone else gets a little piece of them torn out of them because they just happened to look away for just one second and someone else took advantage of that. He closes his eyes and rubs his temples, and when he opens them again, he knows exactly what he’s going to say.

“I’ll do it,” John says, and a warm, bright smile spreads across Lamar’s face.

He tells Lara about it that night, and she acts happy and surprised, though the doubt still lingers in her eyes.

“Are you sure you’re ready for this, John?” she asks him, breaking their usual silence during dinner.

John studies his plate as he considers his answer. Chicken, peas, bread, same as they had last night. When he looks up to reply, Lara looks impossibly far away at the other end of the table, impossibly cold in the harsh florescent light, and for some reason that makes him mad.

“It’s been a fucking year,” he snaps. “If I’m not ready now, I’ll never be.”

He pretends not to notice when she gets up and leaves the table immediately afterward, and the Neuroin dose he takes that night keeps him so wired he doesn’t go to bed.

He’d heard Lamar raving about it for years. He’d read the newspaper articles. He’d even imaged what would have happened if it had existed when Sean disappeared.But none of that had truly prepared him for being in Pre-Crime itself.

The temple is eerily beautiful, even though he doesn’t go in to see it up close. The pre-cogs are pale and white, ghost-like, barely human. But they don’t have to be human, in John’s eyes. As long as they help him stop crime, it doesn’t matter.

The video of the crimes are the same way, not crisp and clear, like the indifferent holos captured by cameras, but undeniably human, hazy and emotional and confused, like a memory that doesn’t want to be remembered.

Lamar introduces him to everyone on the first day, the official endorsement of the new chief. They look a little wary, a little hesitant in the shift of power, but that’s good. John can win them over. He’s capable of that.

He eats with the techie, Wally, during lunch, since he seems the least skeptical about John (with maybe the exception of Jad, who knows him from DCPD, but is away on sick leave at the moment), but that’s probably because he doesn’t seem to have any friends on the force.

“So, yeah, we just got these great new screens, with glove control and everything. Should make the whole thing much easier for you guys. Before, they just kept on complaining that it was too hard to go through the video on the smaller screens,” Wally rambles, and John listens, because he doesn’t think many do when Wally talks.

“Things are really beginning to ramp up around here,” Wally says. “And you’re here just in time to see it.”

A red ball is like the Neuroin, a quick jolt of adrenaline that pushes everything else out (like pain and loneliness and sadness), and John is addicted just as quickly and just as easily.

“We got a red ball, Chief,” Jad calls out. “Killer’s James Freddricks. The victim’s one Harriet Jones. Time frame is fifteen minutes, thirty-eight seconds.”

John places the balls next to the video reader and begins sorting through the video feeds pulled from the precogs.

The murder weapon’s a knife, this time, and the precogs get a good look at it. It’s an efficient little thing with nasty, serrated edges. John pulls it out, places it next to the partially hooded face of the killer and the frightened face of the victim.

It’s late, close to eleven, and John knows that Lara might be up waiting for him at their apartment, but this is more important, far more important.

“It’s in the Sprawl. Corner of 10th and 12th,” he announces, after finding a fleeting image of the street sign, and they all spring into action, timers set.

Ten minutes. Plenty of time.

There’s a rush in the challenge, and John embraces it, lets it run over him and through him, as they suit up and lift into the hovercar.

A sandal.

Still neatly wrapped in a plastic bag, labeled in an unfamiliar numbering system in black Sharpie. They took it back, of course, but the image still lingered, so John had to find some way of making it go away.

Sean is running in front of him, laughing and playing. John loves (loved?) him so much. It makes him so happy and so sad.

There’s a gun in his hand, probably the one that Lamar gave him, but its kind of hard to tell, to even care.

He thinks he shot a bullet into the ceiling, though he’s not sure about that either. He might have been aiming for his head. That’s fuzzy, too. Too much, he thinks. Too much, not enough. Of what? Clarity, was it? Full of Clarity.

“John?” a voice asks. Lara, probably.

John ignores her. Watches Sean build a sand castle.

“John, what happened? What are you doing? Why are you holding a gun?” the voice again. Go away, voice. “John, you’re scaring me. Stop.”

“Shhh…” John tells the voice. “Shhh…”

It does goes away after that, and John is happy, because then he can teach Sean about the correct wetness of sand to use for the castle (again) until the red letters come up, but that won’t be for a while, so John doesn’t mind.

Lara doesn’t send the divorce papers until she’s moved out for a month. John was expecting them sooner. It was inevitable, really, and they were just biding their time.

“You sure you’re okay, Chief?” Fletch asks him the day after, during a long break between pre-visions. “If you need to take time off…”

John smiles at him, because they never really know how to respond when you smile. “I’m fine. Really. I’m fine.”

And on some levels, he really is.

Life has almost become easier without her. He spends fourteen hours a day at Pre-Crime, sometimes longer, until someone (usually Jad) makes him go home. It’s always easier at Pre-Crime, because then John is doing something, and he can only think of the future and not the past.

He believes in Pre-Crime in a way that can only be described as bone-deep, and it feels more like home at his desk than in his bed.

“I’ve been keeping in touch with Lara. I hope you don’t mind,” Lamar says, “but she is my friend as well.”

John shrugs. Lara will do what she likes, and while the divorce wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t a petty squabble over property, either. “It doesn’t matter,” he says.

Lamar always has time for him, and John likes that. He likes to talk to Lamar about anything, really, the Mets, the presidential race, whatever, though the conversations tend to veer toward one thing: Pre-Crime.

“We’re building a better future, John. Can you just image it? A world without crime.” Lamar says after breaking the news that the government has upped their funding for Pre-Crime for the next year.

John closes his eyes. He can see it, and a familiar Sean-lump forms in his throat. “Yes,” he says, because all other words seem inadequate. He can’t be saved, he realizes that now. Without Sean, he is broken, damaged without possibility of repair.

But he can save other people. He can create a future where things like Sean don’t happen.

A world without crime. That’s all that matters.

FIN.