**I lied, this is the longest one.**

Pathologists are the people who do autopsies in hospitals. They also do tests and make sure labs are well regulated and that the tests run in those labs are accurate. Al was a pathologist.

Pathologists check biopsies and blood, cerebrospinal fluids and pleural fluid. They make sure all those pesky numbers are correct and that the results are within reason. They triple check the unusual numbers before sending out results so they know they are accurate and not the product of a broken machine.

But the thing that they are most known for was autopsies. Al, who was a pathologist, was really good at them, which sounds ridiculous because how can someone be good at running tests on dead bodies?

It was true, though. Al was really good at autopsies and he never missed anything. He had, for a time, worked as a pathologist for a police department because of how good he was. It was Al's attention to detail.

There was a case a few years back, it had been a tough one to break. There had been a man murdered and the crime scene had been bleached clean. There wasn't a single fingerprint, not from the victim or the man who had killed him. Nothing on the body, no skin under the victims nails, nothing at all. It was Al who found the clue who cracked the case. An eyelash, fallen into the victim's mouth. It was remarkable he found it, though he swore he had a "hint". He had been checking the mouth for any signs of a struggle. Al checked for any chipped teeth or lacerations on the tongue when he found the lash stuck behind his bottom teeth.

Al had been the best of the best for a few years before he ended up going to the hospital. He was a little tired of all the death he saw on a daily basis. A little tired of the constant darkness. A little tired of all the murder victims and abused children and drug overdoses.

He wanted something more mundane. If you has asked Al three years ago what he thought of running lab tests and checking the pH strips to make sure they are right, he would have laughed in your face and told you it would never happen. And there was the testing of urine or spinal fluids or blood or masses cut off of organs. It was work that made Al sick, body fluids made him sick. Hell, he couldn't wipe up his puppy's accidents without feeling like hurling.

But after a few years at the Police Department, Al was bored and sick of the world's evilness. He was sick of washing the blood off his hands and thinking of all the ways that blood could be his children's' or his wife's or his.

So he moved to the hospital and started working on the mundane. A few weeks of being even more bored, something he didn't even think was possible, he started to like it more. He didn't see patients as much as other doctors did, in fact, he never saw them at all. But he had the lab to himself most of the time and got to put on music.

It wasn't unlike his job at the department, really. He put on his playlist, put some blood samples in a centrifuge, sent a resident to do some tests on a biopsy, and then tapped his foot to Bon Jovi and Carly Rae Jepsen while looking through reports. Every day he set aside his last two hours at the hospitals to do autopsies.

When there weren't any autopsies to be done, Al tidied up the lab and ran tests on the machinery.

But most nights, there were autopsies. They were a routine procedure at the hospital, they only ever didn't do them when the family of a patient specifically asked them not to. They weren't so "who dun it" as much as they were "what was in them?"

At the police station, Al combed through bodies for a scrap of DNA. A hint as to how much was too much in an overdose. He figured out the difference between cat scratches and signs of a struggle. He did tests on the dirt under nails and moss in hair and dandruff on coat collars.

At the hospital, Al combed through bodies for information on how effective experimental treatments were. How far diseases had spread. The damaged organs and how bad they were after accidents or anything else. Yes, sometimes he saw suicides come through the ER and ended up working on them. Yes, sometimes he saw some uglier cases, but for the most part, they were more clean and safe and way less emotionally draining.

It was about 2 years into that job when he realized that he had been blind to a whole different kind of awful in the hospital. He didn't look too much into the patients home lives. He tried to avoid the crying families and the parents who lost kids or kids who lost parents.

It sounded rough, yeah. Sounded like he didn't have feelings at all. But Al did have feelings and he wanted to protect himself now. He wanted to sleep at night.

One of the habits Al had picked up since his work with the police was double checking the locks on his front door. He thought it was kind of funny, honestly. It seemed like everyone in his family had picked up some habit somewhere that came out when they were worried.

His son had started watching a show called Supernatural and once his daughter had joined in, the two of them started salting doors when Al and his wife left for more than a couple hours.

His wife hated silence ever since she watched a documentary on the ghostly properties of spirit boxes and radio static. Now, when she was home alone, she had an old 80's movie running or music on. Loud.

But Al wasn't afraid of the ghosts or ghouls his family was afraid of. He was afraid of the killer they were still looking for and the people who so easily tortured others. He was afraid of his work.

At the hospital, that changed. He wasn't reminded so constantly about the evils of the world, so he wasn't so afraid of them.

It was about 2 years into that job when he realized that he had been blind to a whole different kind of awful in the hospital.

He was doing an autopsy on a young girl. She was healthy enough, naturally, but she had died in a car accident. It wasn't a bad accident, she wasn't crushed or ripped apart. She'd had internal bleeding that was missed at first, leading to her death. To be fair to the doctors in the ER, she had good vitals when she came in, and the other 12 people involved did not. She was not a priority.

The driver who crashed into the young girl's car had been the victim of a stroke. Not their fault.

That day he learned about the horrors of tragedy with no end. No closure. No bad guy to catch. 

He saw it come up a few times in the next few weeks. An attempted suicide victim came in with a drug overdose. A young boy suffering from bulimia and anxiety who died of a ruptured esophagus. A few more people who died of accidents or complications. People who had scars up and down their arms.

Al had a case of a young girl, barely 4. Killed in a domestic dispute. It wasn't abuse, it was her mother's ex boyfriend. He'd come around to pick up the child for the weekend, as per the custody agreement. He and the child's mother had gotten into a fight. The little girl got scared. She tried to run down the stairs. She fell and broke her neck.

The two parents were distraught. The father, Al later learned, shot himself. The mother would have her own autopsy done by Al within the next 9 months. Overdose of Heroin.

Al learned a lot in his time at the hospital, and after about 3 years there, he decided to leave the practice all together.

There was something sacred about medicine. Something about having the chance to save someone. For Al, pathology wasn't medicine. There wasn't a hope to save anyone. Not a chance to make things right. He couldn't even promise the victims' families closure, because there was no one to blame. Just freak accidents and broken bodies.

So Al left.

For once, Al was happy and unworried about the world he walked in. No worry about murderers or MRSA or cars moving too fast.

Al's new habits became things like making bread on Sundays and bringing his wife and kids pancakes in bed on Fridays.

There were Friday night dinners with his daughter when they talked about boys and social media and how she was doing. There were Saturday runs with his son when he learned that he only started running to impress the girl down the street and to talk about the science fair.

He always double checked the door, though. That habit never left him because he could never forget what he had seen all those years ago, and even though he knew he couldn't escape the pains of every day life, he felt safer with the door locked. Like it could keep out the disease and accidents and pain.