Title: Invisible Man
By: angstytimelord
Pairing: Michael Cutter/Ryan O'Halloran
Fandom: Law & Order
Rating: PG-13
Table: 1drabble
Prompt: 28, Notebook
Warning: Mentions of rape, previous non-con
Disclaimer: This is entirely a product of my own imagination, and I make no profit from it. I do not own the lovely Michael Cutter or Ryan O'Halloran, unfortunately, just borrowing them for a while. Please do not sue.
***
Ryan scowled as he walked out of the lawyer's office, feeling thoroughly annoyed.He felt nonexistent, passed over, as though he was an invisible man.
That lawyer didn't seem to want his opinion on anything; nothing was wanted but cold hard facts. It didn't matter how he felt, or even what had been done to him.
No, all that seemed to matter were the facts of the case. Nothing mattered other than proving Stuckey had raped him. That was all, that was the only thing he could focus on. He couldn't offer anything about his sleepless nights, his feelings of worthlessness, his paranoia. Nothing.
All of those cold hard facts were written down in a notebook, but anything else he said was tossed aside, as though his feelings, his pain and suffering, didn't matter.
Mike wouldn't have been like this, he told himself. Mike would </i>care</i>.
Of course he would care, Ryan thought with a sigh. Mike was his boyfriend; he had too much of a personal stake in this. He wanted to see Stuckey behind bars as badly as Ryan did. Michael couldn't be his lawyer on the case because of his personal involvement, his bias.
But Ryan wanted him there. He wanted Mike to be the one who was up there prosecuting Stuckey, the one who would be asking him those questions in front of a courtroom full of people.
He didn't want the cold, impersonal lawyer he had, who seemed to think that this was nothing more than a litany of facts that had no basis in human emotions.
The entire time that he'd been sitting there in the office talking to that lawyer about the upcoming trial, going over what he was supposed to do, what the lawyer would question him about, he'd wanted to grab that stupid notebook that the bozo constantly wrote in and toss it out of the window.
The man paid more attention to that notebook than he did to Ryan.
Ryan felt that he wasn't present, that it didn't make any difference what he said. This lawyer would concentrate on those cold hard facts, and ignore him as a person.
He felt less than human, as though he had been reduced to nothing more than one more fact to be written down in that notebook in stark black and white. He wasn't shades of grey; he didn't have any substance, other than as someone to spout out words that, in the end, might not make a difference.
He glanced down the hallway, knowing that Michael's office was near. All he had to do to see his boyfriend and talk about this was to take a slight detour, and skip lunch.
His feet led him down that hallway of their own volition.
Hell, maybe Mike would take him out to lunch. At the moment, he needed it.
***