She's My Purpose

One of my Rookie Blue fics, written last month. Tweaked a little bit, but didn't change too much.

There wasn't a single day that went by, that Sam didn't think about his big sister. She was - after all - the reason he'd become a cop.

He had struggled with what had happened to her for most of his adult life. He often wondered if there had been something he could have done to stop it from happening. He'd been so young then ... there wasn't really anything he could have done. Maybe if he’d been just a little bit older. He hadn't even really understood what it meant then. To him, it just meant that his sister was sad all the time, and he didn't know how to make it better.

But, he'd figured it out eventually. For the longest time, he'd wanted nothing more than to beat the living hell out of every single one of the guys who'd done such things to her.

After he left the angst and anger of his teenage life behind, he'd been faced with a choice. The only thing he'd ever wanted to do was stop those horrible things from ever happening to his sister, or other girls like her. For the briefest of moments, he'd considered becoming a vigilante, and dealing out his own justice to the vermin that roamed the streets. But, eventually, his sister had changed his mind. She'd made him realize that what he really wanted - the only thing that kept him going - was just to protect her.

So, he became a cop. He became a protector of all the young women on the streets of the dangerous city, pledging to himself that he would do whatever it took to make the world a safer place for them.

He'd often wished that he'd been the older one. He wished that he'd been bigger and stronger, and could have done something to save her that night. He wished that their roles could have been reversed, because if they had, she never would have been walking home alone, and he never would have let those scumbags near her.

Some days were easier than others, some were harder. He smiled when he talked to her on the phone, and she told him something good that she'd done that day. Those days made him happy. But he also cried when he had to hang up the phone, because she was too distraught to talk to her little brother.

She used to be so full of life, she used to be such a happy child. Now, she was barely a shell of the carefree girl he used to know. He wanted her back ... he'd been wanting her back for most of his life.

He knew that he couldn't fix her with a snap of his fingers, he knew that he couldn't take away the scars and pain from that dreadful night so long ago. So, he did the only thing he could do. He put on that badge, he holstered that gun, and he roamed those streets every day, constantly praying that another innocent girl didn't get traumatized on his watch.

He was a cop, through and through. It was his life ... but more than that, it was his mission. His purpose. It was the only thing that he knew made a different in people's lives. It was who he was.