I am an at-first-sight kind of person.
When I was six, I walked into my first grade class and spotted a girl angrily struggling to take her blonde hair out of its pigtails, and I knew we'd be best friends.
When I was thirteen, my parents took me to an animal shelter. I scanned the cages and stopped when my eyes met those of a tiny puppy, a mutt of uncertain origins, who I knew would be the perfect pet.
When I was fifteen, I saw another girl, this one eating granola on a bench outside the cafeteria. I asked her on a date immediately. It would be a year of being friends before she said yes. It would only be another month after that before we said the word love, and meant it.
But the defining characteristics of my life aren't Laurie, Buddy, or Christine. They're all important, they're all from first sight, and to me that means forever. But if they went away, two other first sights would still rule my life.
The one, my career. When I was ten, I walked past a crime scene, a store front closed off by police tape warning the rubberneckers not to stop for a closer look. I was one who would have liked to, but my mother held fast to my hand and hurried along the sidewalk. Still I saw a woman step out of a car, a notebook in her hand, a confidence in her step as she approached the officer in charge and started asking questions. That was my first sight of a real detective, and the first time I had a good answer to the immortal question, 'What do you want to be when you grow up?'
That answer would never change.
The other first sight that defines me, that rules my life, is both a blessing and a curse. I'd like to be free of her. I want her behind bars, for the safety of society. But I don't know who I'd be without her. Half the smaller cases I have, I pick up while on her trail. I bag the little guy and sometimes some medium-sized players, but she's the puppet master and I'm hardly close to touching her.
She does fear me, I know that, or she wouldn't go to the lengths she does to act nonchalant. Meanwhile, she has twenty different escape routes everywhere I look, and the frenzy of preparation grows every time I find one out.
I first saw her when I was thirteen, and it was an indescribable moment. Like when I was ten, my life suddenly had a meaning, a purpose, a goal. This one was more specific, more centralized. Every fiber of my being lit up in her presence to scream, 'It's her, it's her fault! Whatever's happening, whatever's wrong with this picture, it's all down to her!" I memorized the pale brown eyes and straight nose, the slightly crooked front teeth and the hair, dyed and artificially straightened, falling across her face. I asked her name, straining not to reach out and grab her, wrestle her to the ground and from there to the nearest prison, for what crime, I didn't know. She quirked an eyebrow at me and said nothing, turning up the music on her device and crossing the street to get away from me. There was no crosswalk. Jaywalking's not much of a crime, until it's your arch-nemesis committing it.
She wouldn't show up in my life again for another five years. In that time I earned a little bit of a reputation as the one-look-wunderkind. Textbook sentences that would be on the test, clues at a crime scene, where my mom had set her glasses down, all glaringly obvious before my eyes like someone had gone over the world with a highlighter. My memory was as good, or as bad, as an ordinary person's, so I learned to take notes when I could and memorization techniques for when I couldn't. And I started to use them. Making friends with the police detectives enough that they would let me give them my own insight on a crime scene wasn't easy, but perseverance can take you anywhere.
Having the information doesn't always make everything easy: Laurie hit me with her lunchbox when I tried to declare our forever friendship the first time; evidence I know is important is dismissed for being too vague or circumstantial; and knowing the most important things at one look doesn't help me figure out the smaller details in my life - I knew I wanted to be a detective when I was ten, but I never had some moment of realization that said I was meant to collect baseball cards. I have quite the collection anyway.
So in any case, we were talking about my arch-nemesis, right? So while I was surviving high school, dating Christine, learning the art of detecting, and starting that great baseball card collection, she was getting into the underworld, making connections and building a reputation. As I understand it, it was slow going for the both of us. I finally saw her picture my senior year, when a conversation with Detective Roth about my future derailed into a rant about the trouble some teenagers were causing in this community, and she pulled up the files to prove it.
And there she was, my arch nemesis. A new hair color and cut, but it still fell into her face, across pale brown eyes and a straight nose above crooked front teeth. Below the image, her name: Emma Schroeder, new leader of an area street gang.
My pulse thrummed as I scanned her file. Words like 'abusive home' and 'absent mother' gave way to words like 'violent temper', 'drugs trafficking,' and 'wanted on multiple charges.' I felt sorry for her. I felt angry at her. But mostly what I felt was responsible. There was no reason, it just was. She was my responsibility, and I had to stop her. I'd known it at first sight.
I'm not the only one who knows it anymore. Christine knows it. She understand why I'm home late some nights - too late, too many nights.
Laurie knows it, and she squeezes my hand and advises I take a break from thinking and shoot darts with her.
Even Buddy, getting so old he rarely even barks, seems to know when he wags his tail and whines encouragingly at me.
The media knows it. Detective Bamboozled Again, a headline reads. Emma Shroeder Robs Bank. Emma Schroeder Kidnaps Child. Emma Shroeder Responsible for Counterfeit Cash. Local Criminal and Detective Arch-Nemeses Miss Each Other by Inches. And all their other reaching propaganda. I can't admit I take the relationship personally, that it's more than professional pride driving me onward, but they suspect, they sensationalize it within an inch of its life and thrust their ideas into the public view. Seeing headlines like those never fail to nettle me.
Emma and I, we have an understanding. I don't think I'll ever bring her in. I'll just keep curtailing the damage she can do and catching her associates. And as much as she may try, I don't think she'll ever escape me for good. She knows it. She's stopped trying. We've begun a slow spiral down, dancing closer together, with just enough resistance to keep ourselves from touching.
One of us will kill the other one day. I don't know which. And the killer will probably die in the process, if not from the immediate circumstances then from the pointlessness of a life with no pursuit, no chase, no mind games, no unfriendly face to smirk and raise the bar a little higher. I'm not looking forward to dying. I'm not looking forward to killing. But I look forward to ending the game that is our lives. It will happen, I can say that with certainty. I knew it at first sight.
A/N - I feel like I could've stuck closer to the prompt, but this is where the dice rolled, and I wanted it to be a little more realistic than "superhero" style, "the fate of the world depends on us" arch nemesis.
