A/N: Written for a prompt on Tumblr; feel free to leave your own prompts there or in the comments here if you wish. I hope you enjoy this despite my evilness. Finally, the title means "I trust you" in Spanish.
"You're the only one I trust to do this."
It's dark in Olivia's office, and Olivia is thankful for it. She blinks back tears as those broken, whispered words escape Rafael. She look at Rafael, who is by far the worse off of the two, and swallows hard. Words fail her for the first few tries. What can she say? She feels impotent. So many times she's done this, and she'd always thought herself rather good at her job. Until now.
Rafael had stood there faithfully through Olivia's trauma, through Amanda's, even through Nick's. And now… she is hardly doing the same for him. She's failing every which way.
"I-" She waves her arms around. Finally she decides to let it drop. Let it fall onto the surface and then sink to the deepest trench. "Come on. We need to get you to the hospital."
"No." Rafael's voice is brittle, with a sharp edge, like cracked glass.
"Barba."
"Benson."
"Barba."
"Benson."
"God damn it, Barba-" Olivia seethes, rubbing her forehead, and then begins to berate herself. He may be her coworker and on-the-sly boyfriend, but in this moment, he's a victim.
"Liv," Rafael interrupts, looking up at her. He's seated, while she's standing. The power dynamic is obvious to both of them. She's in charge, as always. "I trust you enough to disclose. I trust you enough to give you my statement. I do not trust any hospital worker to…" And he pales, actually pales. "To swab my genitalia, while not judging me as I tell my story of being raped by a woman. A woman who is also a lawyer in the Sex Crimes Bureau. No one in or even out of their right mind will believe me. Besides you." Breathing heavy and fast, he says, "Because I trust you, I'll tell you. I'll give you a name. No more than that."
"And what, exactly, am I supposed to do with this name?" Olivia asks, working hard to keep her voice calm and rational. "What evidence am I going to give whoever charges your case?"
Rafael stands, legs trembling- and Christ seeing him so afraid sends daggers into her heart- and leans heavily against a wall, covering his face. He breathes deliberately, gradually slowing his breaths.
"Then I'll get it done as a John Doe," he says finally, looking in the exact opposite direction of her. "It stays anonymous. You ask an ADA from Queens or somewhere- they won't have any of my colleagues charge, it's too close to home, too open to accusations of workplace harassment- how they'd proceed if I came forward. If they'd proceed."
For a moment, Olivia remembers Dana Lewis, showing up at her apartment and drinking as she handed over her own rape kit. She steps closer to Rafael, moving in front of him first. "When you disclose, it can feel-"
"Empowering, yes. I know. That's why I'll do it to you. But there's a lot at stake here…" He swallows. "If I were assigned a case like this, I don't think I'd be able to take it to trial. So I need… I need to see how far they'd go first. Before I open myself up. Me oyes?"
"Te comprendo," Olivia says, reaching out to set a hand on his shoulder. "Let's get you to the hospital."
Rafael swallows, looking at her, facial expression clearly saying he'd rather walk on a bed of nails than do this. But he does. Maybe more for her than himself, which bothers her, but she can't address it. Not now.
The drive is full of silence, thick and oppressive like muggy summer air. It's full of unspoken pain. Rafael zones out, then comes to himself in cycles that last ten minutes or so. He starts trembling the closer they get to the hospital, breathing harder, digging his nails in to his forearms. He moves himself as close to the door as possible.
"I've got a John Doe here who needs a rape kit," she says as they enter the hospital, Rafael stumbling just a little. He's out of it again, in shock.
Olivia asks Rafael to fill out the forms as best he can, realizing that she can't do it for him without betraying his identity. Rafael can barely focus and ends up skipping half the questions, but it's enough for now. She grabs his arm gently to bring him back to the room the nurses lead them to.
"What I'm going to do," the nurse, Abbie, says, "is a rape kit. I'm sure Sergeant Benson explained it to you, but in case you have questions I can answer them."
He shakes his head and stays silent. He gets changed into a hospital gown, giving his suit as evidence- hell, he thinks, like that won't give him away? He's never seen an attorney in the city with a tie like that. It used to be his favorite, too, what a shame.
"Whenever you're ready, I'd like to hear your statement," Olivia prompts.
He gazes at the ceiling, counting the tiles, and then the little dots in the tiles. Abbie and Olivia begin scraping under his fingernails as he opens his mouth. Then he pauses. How can he give a statement with no specifics, without it biting him in the ass later?
He closes his eyes. They reach his left middle finger as the first words leave his mouth. "I was at work. I'm a lawyer. A coworker, Mariah, she asked me for a drink after work. And I said no. She said, 'oh, come on, it's my birthday' and I… I said no again." He takes in a breath and opens his eyes again. He has one black eye which makes it rather painful. He looks at a strange brown stain in the corner tile and he can't for the life of him figure out what it is or where it could have come from. "She said I must be a fag not to like her, and I got mad, really mad, so I said, 'I'm not gay, just half. This is because I have standards.' And she, she pushed me. She said, 'what standards?' and started rubbing my… my penis."
He feels something flicker and fade away inside him, taking his ability to feel with it, taking the emotion out of his voice. The memory becomes a strange mixture of blurred and painfully clear; parts of it seem sharp, yet it all seems so jumbled together too.
"She touched my penis." They finish with his fingers and take pictures of his black eye and the bruises on his wrists. Then they turn him to his side to do the same for the scratch marks on his back. "It got hard. I told her, 'we both know that doesn't mean anything, I don't-'" He pauses as Olivia takes in a sharp breath. "'Don't want it. And she said it didn't matter, it was her birthday and she wanted me to pay her attention for once. So she pushed me again. And I fell. She pinned my wrists, took one hand off, grabbed her belt, and put it on my neck. I-I don't like belts…"
Olivia makes a sound, like she wants more than anything to tell him something. He knows she's thinking of what he told her about his childhood, how his father used to hit him with them. It's part of why he wears suspenders instead- along with the fashion aspect- and part of why it had been so hard for him to do what he'd done during Jocelyn Paley's case.
"So I… I don't know. I didn't freeze. I just stopped fighting, I thought she was going to choke me or take it off and hit me with it. I asked her to stop a few times and she slapped me, said to stop whining. So I did. I cursed her out, said she was despicable, asked how she could look any of our coworkers in the eye. And she said she bet all of them were thinking the same thing, she was just the first to act on it." He looks at Abbie. "My eye is tingling."
Abbie swallows. "I'll tell the doctor when we're done. Continue please."
He does. "So she took my pants off. She kept holding the belt, I guess she could tell I was afraid of it. She crawled on top of me, put me- my penis- inside of her and started… sex. She was rough. It hurt. She kept saying, how big and sexy I was, how much of a shame it was that she hadn't done this before. She- she climaxed, and I didn't, I could barely stay hard. She said I should look into Viagra." He bites his lip.
Olivia says nothing. He can tell she wants to, but there are also tears in her eyes. He wonders if Abbie will ask anything, what explanation Olivia will give.
Abbie, meanwhile, tells him, "I know this is bad timing, so I'll give you a minute to get yourself together. But I need to take some swabs of your genital area."
"No," Rafael says and returns his gaze to the ceiling. "Just get it over with, yeah?"Then I can go home and see how much scotch I can drink without dying.
"Okay," she says quietly, "but if you need to stop, you tell me. We don't want you distressed."
"Mm-hmm," he says. 31, 32, 33… what the hell is that stain? Did someone throw their coffee cup at the ceiling?
The next thing he's aware of, he's lying in bed, Abbie is gone, and Olivia is packing his clothes into a brown bag. He has no idea how long he's been zoned out.
"I'll bring these to the station, and then get you home," she says softly.
"Kay," he says, still feeling detached.
Olivia sets a hand on his forehead. He closes his eyes, sore and drained.
"You… you can work through this. I, I have numbers."
"No…" he sighs. "I'll find my own way."
"You always do."
"Not true," he objects.
Olivia lets out a sound of irritation. "For god's sake, Rafael, just let me help you for once. Like you did for me. Please."
"Lewis? That was doing my job," he argues. "Which involved something good for you, but…"
"And this is my job. Looking out for survivors."
He closes his eyes again. Raises a hand to his black eye. It doesn't hurt any less than before.
"Okay."
"Okay? Just like that?"
He nods. "I don't have much fight in me at the moment." He opens his eyes just in time to see Olivia wince.
"Ba- Rafael." She reaches out to pat his hand, but he moves and she ends up on his wrist instead, and it's his turn to wince.
"Don't, Liv." He heaves a sigh. "We'll work through this. I think."
"I'm here for you, every step of the way."
"I know." He looks down and flexes his fingers. He thinks a minute. "I trust you, still…"
"But not the same way," Olivia argues.
"Maybe. Maybe not. I don't know. It's… raw."
"Yeah." Olivia looks down as he looks up. It seems fitting, somehow, in ways Rafael can't put into words.
"I meant it," he says suddenly. "What I said earlier."
"Which is?"
"That… that you're the only one I'd trust. To do this. And you're the only one I trust now, to… to know what happened."
For the first time, Rafael sees what one gets when they combine touched and heartbroken on a human face.