Story Nugget

Story idea brewing in my head, need to write it down... feel free to skip this.

Present-day rural America, it's the story of a rookie police officer (State Trooper, probably? Deputy, more likely) who becomes borderline-creepy obsessed with the 12-year-old daughter of a local pair of Meth dealers.

The story will have undertones focusing on the inner turmoil felt by the Deputy as he struggles to figure out if his feelings towards this girl are Paternal/protective in nature, or deviant "Lolita" sexual thoughts. Lots of uncomfortable descriptive passages about how he's seen this girl blossoming in to a beautiful young woman, how she's so sweet and pure... lots of "Creepy Uncle" wording.

The hook of the story is when the Deputy protectively kills the parents of the girl and then realizes that the murders can easily be traced back to him. He feels justified in he murders and has no problem with spending the rest of his life in prison or even the death penalty, but he worries that the girl will just be shipped off to other relatives who are just as scum-baggish as her parents had been.

This starts a cross-country road trip where the Deputy is trying to find a way to make sure that the girl has a chance at a good life - trying to obtain a new identity, trying to find a nice family that will unofficially adopt her, SOMETHING that would allow him to leave her safe. Once she is safe, the plan is for the Deputy to turn himself in and claim that he killed the girl (refusing to reveal where he burried the body).

Unfortunately, each "Safe Place" he finds for her makes the Deputy paranoid and suspicious - Buying a new identity from a criminal is too risky, letting some strangers adopt her would be handing her over to people who for some reason can't adopt regularly, leaving her with family would make her to easy to find... he doesn't want her getting stuck in the Foster Care system, he's seen too many kids get shafted that way.

It ends bad. The Law catches up with them, there's a shoot-out, last thing the Deputy sees as he lay bleeding on the ground is the girl, being taken in to custody.

Epilogue: Deputy is dead (died in the shoot out), girl runs away from the foster home they put her in and is now an underage prostitute.

About that Story Nugget

So yeah... see, about that Story Nugget I posted earlier...

...I want it *GONE*.

It started out s a weird third-person nightmare I was having, just a quick snippet of the story that my awake-brain extrapolated on and built in to a full story, and now my brain won't leave it alone and my brain keeps going SUPER DARK with it.

My brain is going to places that scare me - A LOT. Places that... like, if it were a TV show, I'd turn off the TV. Only this is MY BRAIN and I *can't* turn it off! It's ALWAYS ON!

I try to distract myself away from it with mind-numbing stuff; do the dishes, listen to the radio, watch TV. Doesn't matter, my brain goes back to "I want this Deputy to make a journey from law-abiding good guy to wretched despot. I want the reader to be sad, relieved and glad when he dies at the end. It needs to be not just the end of HIS story, but the end of a MONSTER story. How do I make him a monster, but a pitiable monster. How do I rationalize the horrors that he does?"

And then I rationalize his actions, in my head. And I come up with even MORE terrible things. It's... it's a whirlpool of justification that I don't agree with and I don't like and I don't want it in my head, I don't want my brain to make those leaps. I don't want to think of the kind of mindset that can make rape in to a noble action, or make murder in to a reasonable alternative.

I need to get this out of my head :(