InsaneJournal

WHO: Karrin Murphy and OPEN
WHAT: Exploring
WHERE: The Library
WHEN: Thursday morning
WARNINGS: Spoilers to Cold Days, TBD
STATUS: Open/Ongoing


Karrin woke up early, having found it very difficult the last few days to get any sleep at all. She spent most of her time tossing and turning, playing through different scenarios in her mind, thinking about what had happened on Demonreach, and not the least what she'd done to Molly. What she'd done to Molly. She didn't for a second regret killing Maeve. That bitch was bad news, and had hurt plenty enough people. She'd killed Lily right there in front of them. But she hadn't thought - it had never crossed her mind - that the mantle would leave Maeve and go right into Molly, condemning her to the same life...Maeve had had? She didn't understand that exactly, how the mantle worked. She should talk to Harry about it - she would - but the idea of it scared her more than a little. More than she would ever be willing to admit.

Molly was acting...not like the Molly she remembered, although she couldn't say that she was too surprised. She'd known for a long time that Marry had her scary side. Ever since the Ragged Lady, she'd known that.

And Karrin herself was feeling...lost. She'd felt at least a little lost since she'd lost her job on the force, forced into early retirement because she cared too much about her job. That was how she thought about it, anyway. She'd lost her job because she wanted to do it right, and not just half-ass it and sweep everything under the carpet. Because she wanted the truth. Because she wanted justice. And because she'd come to understand, working with Harry Dresden, that maybe the law of the United States and the State of Illinois wasn't flexible enough to account for all...sorts of crimes. Her sense of justice hadn't changed one bit - or her sense of righteousness. She realized, in a way, that she was as devout a believer in the rule of law as Michael Carpenter was a believer in the almighty. It was an article of faith to her, something she followed with every ounce of her being. The world was divided into right and wrong, and she was an agent for the right. Or, the White as that Cuthbert kid would put it.

But the right path, in the last few years, hadn't always been so clear. She didn't really believe in shades of grey - she thought of it more as a path of justice that started wiggling, and made it harder to find. And maybe the law didn't understand all the things out there. In fact, she was pretty sure that it didn't.

She'd participated in vigilante action against Black Court vampires. And people had been killed and destroyed - not by them, but shooting the Renfields would always weigh heavy on her. She'd also helped Harry to destroy an entire race of vampires...not that she regretted it, but the law would likely censure her actions out of misunderstanding. In short, she'd done things in the last few years that were so far outside of the rule of law that the only path she'd had to follow was the guide in her heart. And she trusted it completely. She had a good moral compass. She knew she did.

But following it instead of the letter of the law had ended in her losing the job she'd fought tooth and nail for her entire life. The job that had defined who she was so long that she'd had a crisis of identity after losing it. She'd been Karrin Murphy, CPD or Karrin Murphy, SI for so long that losing that had been devastating.

But while she missed her job, she didn't regret what she'd done. And she didn't regret what she was doing, back home. Maybe she didn't have even the tiniest bit of magical ability, but she'd seen a lot. And she knew a lot. And she'd do her best to help people, to find justice and a higher law than the police had ever sought.

But here...things were different. She felt out of place. She'd gotten off on the wrong foot with most of the people here, and the supes were convinced that she hated them. Which she didn't. Hell, she'd spent months (years? she couldn't remember how long it had been) in a sexual relationship with Kincaid, who wasn't human at all. And her feelings for Harry Dresden...well, that was complicated. The point was, she didn't hate supes at all. She addressed them because it was what she was trained to do - the cop in her still considered them her jurisdiction. Leave the normal people to the other cops.

Karrin had gone to the shooting range after waking, glad to find that the interdimensional hop hadn't destroyed her aim. Then she'd gone to Walmart, eyes peeled, as they always were now, for vicious faerie plant-monsters, and picked up some more ammo, some orange juice, and several cases of Coke. She'd taken it on herself to pick up a few whenever she was at the store, to make herself a third player in the struggle for Coca-Cola between Harry and Georgia Mason.

After taking her things back to her apartment, she made her way to the library, to catch up on the news, and to find what she could about the creatures and supes here. She wasn't a fool, and she'd also taken Georgia's advice about reading the network to find out what had been going on before she'd gotten here. And she had quickly discovered that it wasn't good. She'd doggedly avoided looking up her own books - she'd heard that apparently this dimension had a fiction series about them - but she really didn't want to know.

She was deep in the stacks searching for a book on vampires when she heard footsteps behind her, and her senses went on edge. She didn't think she was in danger, but it was sometimes hard to tell, and she'd been through enough weird shit that she didn't just ignore her gut.

"Hey," she said, trying to keep her voice calm. "I'll be right out of your way."