This is another Alpha Station ficlet written as a gift for a friend who has been a supporter of the story for a long time. At their request this scene centers around the Tighs.

It fits into Chapter 33 toward the end before Tawny confronts Laura & Ellen about their physical and mental health and suggests her solution. If you need extra help placing it feel free to PM me. This will only make sense if you have finished the story through Chapter 33.

If you enjoyed this and wouldn't mind additional ficlets or deleted scenes from Alpha Station please let me know in the reviews. I'm hoping 2019 brings a brand new writing project but we will see!

-LLA

WHEN THE BOUGH BREAKS

LOCATION: ALPHA SPACE STATION; approximately 200 miles above the surface of planet Earth

CORRIDOR B

MILITARY QUARTERS

CABIN 119B: ASSIGNMENT; TIGH

YEAR: 2316

"You're putting the cradle in here?"

Saul froze in place for the briefest of moments when he heard Ellen's voice behind him.

Hoping that she hadn't noticed his minor pause he gingerly stood from where he'd been bent over tightening the last knob on the new little crib that had arrived earlier in the afternoon.

It was cramped enough in Katya's old room. With the baby's cradle pushed between the rack and dresser Saul hardly had space to easily turn and face his wife.

"Thought you were sleeping," He greeted her with a forced smile. She looked tired, standing there in a satin robe that hung open to reveal the crumpled nighty she'd gone to bed in a full day before. "Didn't wake you, did I?"

Ellen shook her head looking past him at the little cot, with its perfect bassinet and perfect tiny stars adorning the white resin legs and base.

"They just delivered it," He added, trying to step out of her view within the limited space he had to move.

Ellen stared at the crib with bloodshot eyes. She had been in bed most of the day, unable to get up even for her usual morning visit to the Estuary with Laura. Though both women did their best to go every day there were times when one or both just couldn't make it.

"It's the design you wanted, isn't it?" Saul tested as his attempt at smiling began to waver despite his best effort.

Ellen looked at the little white cradle as if she were staring through it. Truth be told she hardly remembered picking it out.

Saul had brought up the catalogue on the network one night during dinner. She could recall scanning through the options, mostly to appease him. She'd obviously agreed to something, and there it was.

"It's fine," She finally answered, her voice low and slightly hoarse from crying herself to sleep the night before.

It seemed like the only way she could get herself tired enough to sleep at all lately unless she was blind drunk.

"Seems sturdy," He said, turning to give the crib a light shake for effect. "Wasn't that hard to put together either," He added trying to reinforce the lightness of his words. "Not sure what kind Bill and Laura ordered. This was the only delivery so I guess there's isn't ready. It's cute, right?" He asked looking back at her.

Ellen showed no reaction to his words. She continued to glare at the small piece of furniture as if it were some kind of inanimate intruder within their household.

Saul didn't know what to say next. He stood feeling somewhat stuck between the crib and where Ellen blocked the doorway.

"I suppose it's best this way," Ellen finally spoke as she folded her arms over her chest.

"What is?" Saul asked, looking back to the cradle as if he'd missed something.

"That I just move in here once the baby's home," She answered flatly. "That way we won't wake you."

Saul's brows came together in response to her comment but he forced himself to smile yet again.

"Na, it's only in here for the time being," He said with a tentative chuckle, desperately trying to make light of whatever darkness his wife was ushering in. "We have a few months before he's home. This way we aren't tripping over it in the bedroom. Once he's home we'll move it right by our rack within arm's reach."

Though Saul looked right at Ellen she refused to give him her eyes. They stayed set, narrow and red rimmed focused on the cradle.

"It can stay in here," She said with an almost flippant shrug.

Saul swallowed and cracked a knuckle. The tiny relief of tension it offered allowed him to carry on, still unwilling to give into what she was pushing.

"Well, eventually, sure," He nodded, putting his hands in his pockets. "We'll have to make this room his nursery later down the line, but when he's first home and waking up every hour or two for feedings we'll keep him with us. It'll fit fine in the bedroom. I did the measurements before we put the order in."

Saul waited for the expression on Ellen's face to change, hoping that his attempts at dissuasion would work.

"I'll just move in here," She told him, somehow sounding both listless and insistent at the same time.

Saul's jaw tightened and he moved it back and forth trying to keep his teeth from gritting.

The little room was too full. Full of furniture, full of boxes of Alexi's old things, full of memories, full of sadness and tension that just kept on growing. There was no room any longer for Saul's patience to fit among it all.

"What's the point in that?" He asked a bit more sharply.

Ellen finally looked him in the eye.

"So you won't have to be kept up at night."

"Well, I do if you do," He shrugged.

"No," Ellen returned. "You don't."

"Well frak. I want to," Saul challenged. "How bout that? If you and Liam-Daniel are up I will be too."

The tone of his answer was harsher than he'd wanted it to sound, but his stern pledge of assistance was mild compared to what his frustrations were internally urging him to say.

Ellen rolled her eyes a let out caustic snort.

"Since when?" She bit as she leaned against the frame of the doorway.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing, Saul," Ellen said with an exaggerated sigh.

She looked down toward the floor with a bitter smirk.

"No, tell me. C'mon. You seem to have some point you're trying to make. Say it, Elle."

"I'm not trying to make a point of anything, Saul."

The old familiar antagonizing inflection of her voice rang in his ears just the way she'd meant it to, the way she always meant it to when they fought. It worked as well as it ever had.

"The frak you aren't," Saul finally snapped. "Listen, I know you took the heavy end of Kat's nightmares, but don't pretend like I stayed in bed with the covers over my head snoozing while you were holding on to a screaming child all night. I was in here with her almost as much as you were! I stayed up with her when she was sick too, and you know it."

"I'm not talking about that, Saul!" Ellen shouted back, abandoning her indolent posture and leaning further into the room to close off the minimal space between them.

"So what the hell are you getting at? Just say it for frak sake!"

"You seem to sleep peacefully enough these days," She announced with an arched accusatory brow. "Why disturb it? I'm up most nights anyway. Might as well leave them to me."

Saul clenched his fists and puffed some are through his nostrils trying like hell to rein in his temper. In the past he'd never held back his anger when it came to his wife, but now he was afraid to unleash it. She'd always been able to take it. She'd always been able to serve it back to him. Now he considered her far too fragile, far too broken to withstand much of anything, let alone their old ferocious ways of marital dispute.

"Don't, Ellen. Don't do this." He attempted.

"I'm not doing anything."

"Yes you are! Yes you frakkin' are!"

"You don't know what the frak you're even talking about," Ellen sneared.

It wasn't the fire in her eyes that finally pushed Saul to the edge, but the lack of it. Where he had once seen blue flames of fury as they fought he now only saw an angry grey dullness and it infuriated him more than anything that she was shouting at him.

"Ellen...you can't get mad at me because I'm not grieving the same way you are."

Within the split second after he'd said it he thought that he might have seen a spark in her eyes, that his exposure of the raw truth was enough to ignite something within her, but it was gone in a blink.

"Leave me alone, Saul. You sound like an idiot when you say shit like that. I don't need to hear you regurgitating lines from some network self-help article," She mocked in return.

"You can't punish me because I'm not letting this turn me into a basket case! You can't shun me because I'm actually fighting against becoming a hopeless drunk all over again!"

"Oh, frak you!"

Saul had never thought that empty bottles of booze in the bin and sticky unwashed tumblers of liquor left around the cabin would turn his stomach the way they did now. He still drank. It wasn't as if he'd given it up. He just couldn't let it consume him this time. Not with what was coming. He had to be ready. He had to be fit. More than that he wanted to be. Every glass and bottle Ellen emptied told him that she didn't.

"No. Frak yourself, Ellen. I have a job to do. One that's keeping me alive. Forgive me for finding solace in it instead of dreading it!"

"I am not dreading this baby!"

"The hell you aren't!"

"Shut up!"

"I put this crib together today hoping like hell you'd have a positive reaction to it, hoping to gods that you'd smile and think of our son sleeping safe inside it, but no! Just like I should have figured, the sight of it is making you sick! You can't handle it!"

"Shut the frak up!"

"You have to be this boy's mother, Ellen. Kat asked you to! You've got to pull yourself together."

"Don't you dare imply that I won't take care of this baby!" Ellen shrieked with a threatening finger inches from her husband's chest.

"You can't even take care of yourself!" He said shoving himself into her accusatory digit as if he were putting his heart to an enemy's rifle. "You're standing here trying to tell me that you'll take care of him on your own at night as if you're in any shape to take care of him at all!" Saul bellowed back, no longer tempering the volume or ire of his voice. "You resent me for being able to sleep through the damn night without popping a fist full of pills or downing a scotch? Why? Because you really think that I don't hurt inside? Or is it because you know how much I'm hurting and for once I'm able to do what I need to in spite of my pain while you're letting it frakking sink you into a godsdamn black hole!?"

He'd gone from not wanting to yell at her to screaming in her face like an insubordinate boot camp cadet.

She'd always been ready to shout back at him, never willing to give him the last word. Now she stood silently staring at him in disgust.

"Go to hell, Saul," She told him after a long beat.

"This is damn sure the closest I've ever been," He answered.

Ellen swallowed and nodded.

"Enjoy," She said as she tightened her robe and turned to leave.

"Where are you going?" Saul called after her, grabbing on to her elbow and tugging her back.

"Next door," She answered as she attempted to pull away.

"Oh no." He tightened his grip on her arm and pulled her back into the room. "No you're not."

"Let go of me!"

Instead Saul took hold of her other arm and forced her to turn and face him.

"Stop it, Ellen! Leave Laura alone! She's in no better shape than you are!" He accused as he held her in place. "You're too damned frakked up and she's too damned sick and tired to have a handle on any of this!"

Ellen flinched as his thumbs dug into the sensitive skin of the crease of her elbows.

When he realized the force that he was holding her with he loosened his grip.

He felt like a godsdamned bastard treating his grieving wife so harshly. He'd lost control. He hated himself for it, but he hated her more for driving him to it. He needed her. Katya needed her. Their son needed her and she was failing them all. She'd always been the one to come through, the one to stay strong. Irrationally the fact that she couldn't this time made Saul angry at her. She'd abandoned her post. She'd lost herself and worst of all she couldn't even admit it.

Everyone around them saw it happening. Even Tawny was worried. The doctor had privately expressed her concern to Saul several times. She'd gone to Bill as often, worried as much about Laura. Though Tawny was dedicated to fulfilling Katya's wishes she told them that she couldn't in good conscious release the high-needs infants to the primary care of two women who were each in such a declining state of health. Laura and Ellen both visited the twins as often as possible, going through the motions as if they were on some kind of maternal autopilot, but everyone could see that they were each getting worse and worse; physically, mentally and spiritually.

It killed Saul when he and Bill finally had to sit down and begin to discuss hiring a nanny. Neither realistically expected their wives to be well enough to handle the newborns.

Both women had once been forces to be reckoned with.

They'd become mere shells of themselves, and who could blame them? Who could fault them for falling apart after watching their young daughter die?

Saul didn't want to, but he did.

"You're both in the same boat, Elle," He attempted in a lower, tone. "Laura can't help you with this. She can't even help herself."

Ellen's eyes narrowed and her lip curled.

"At least she understands."

Saul's lone eye flared at the accusation. Hurt and rage surged through him and into his arms as he shoved her away causing her back to hit the frame of the doorway.

"Bullshit, Ellen! Bullshit!" He shouted over her as she bent her knees and slid down to the floor. "You keep telling yourself that Laura's the only one who understand what you're going through and maybe on one level that's true, but it's you and me who lost our daughter! We lost the girl we raised and loved together every day for over fifteen years! It's our family that just got torn apart! I'm the one who spent day in and day out with you loving her, loving all four of them and I lost them just the same as you! You go to Laura 'cause she lets you wallow in your misery at her side. You go to her because she makes you feel closer to Kat, but you're forming a damn near obsessive dependance with each other and it's not helping anyone!"

"You don't know what you're talking about!" Ellen shrieked up at him before covering her face with her hands.

Saul looked down at her, knees bent and crying into her palms. He hated what she'd become. He'd never pitied her before. The feeling scared the hell out of him.

"I know that at least twice a week I wind up spending the night on the frakkin' sofa because you have to hold on to her to get some sleep." At first Saul wasn't bothered by Laura spending the night now and then. There were nights he'd even called her to come over himself when Ellen was too upset for him to handle on his own. Once Bill and Laura moved into the cabin beside theirs he'd asked for her help rather often. Maybe he was partly to blame but he never thought that it would become such a habit. He never thought that Laura would become his wife's prefered source of compassion and solace. "That's not right, Ellen. I'm right here. I'm the one you're married to. I can comfort you. She may have been Kat's mother, but Laura didn't live the life we did with her. How could she possibly understand what you lost better than I can?"

Ellen couldn't explain in words just how deeply she and Laura were connected, but she knew damn well why she felt more comfortable with her.

"Because," She said looking up at Saul with angry tears still streaming, "you won't just let me feel the way I need to. You want to make it okay and it's not okay. It never will be! You want me to be okay for this baby and I wish I could make that happen in the blink of an eye, but I can't...I can't," She sobbed. "I still can't even believe it's real."

Saul shook his head. He couldn't watch her hide inside a tunnel of her grief any longer. He was going to lose her there.

"You don't want to be okay for him, Ellen. That's the whole damn problem. I know what this is. I know. This isn't just mourning, it's frakking fear. You're afraid. You're afraid that if you get better you're actually going to start embracing all of this. You're going to have to confront the fact that you're getting what you always wanted," He said as he bent to his knees so he was eye level with her again. "We're about to have a baby, a son of our own and you can't handle it. You're afraid to be happy about it. Of what it means. How's that? Do I understand you well enough!? You think that if you ever admit that you're glad to be that baby's mother it'll mean you're somehow glad that Kat is dead!"

"Frak you! Frak you, Saul! Gods! Godsdamn this…"
Ellen screamed and sobbed folding her arms over her bent knees and hidinging her face within them.

"That's it. Isn't it, Elle?" Saul said leaning closer to her, the accusation and anger fading from his words. He reached out and gently put a hand to her trembling shoulder. "You can say it...You can say it to me."

Ellen shook and wept under his palm.

With her face red and wet she peered up at her husband to find him looking at her with a shared desperation hiding just beyond his composed expression.

"In every lifetime- my whole damn life I wanted this," She cried, forcing the words through her impossibly tightened throat. "So badly...I cried to God, to the gods, to you. I begged the frakking universe for it...I always said I would give anything, do anything, give up anything. Anything at all to experience having a baby of my own with you. Anything. Gods anything...Anything! Anything!? Not this! Not her! Gods why this!? I said anything, but I didn't know! I didn't mean it!"

Saul held onto her, covering her trembling body as if he were trying to shelter her from an unrelenting torrential rain.

"I know, Elle, I know, I'm sorry," He cried with her. "I'm so sorry for all of this. I wish I could take your pain. I'd bear it on top of mine just to spare you from it."

"I see you, Saul." Ellen sniffed. "You're so ready to do this. Ready to be this boy's father and I can't understand how…"

Saul squeezed her shoulders just hoping her shaking would start to subside.

"I have to be," He said close to ear. "He's our reason for being now. He's it. Kat gave him to us. Now we're here for him and for that little girl. And they both deserve to have parents who are glad and grateful to love and care for them. What they don't deserve is to grow up feeling like a couple of burdens the way Kat and Lex did. I'll get up every day and I'll take care of him because Kat asked me to, but I'll love him because I can't help it. Because he's precious and innocent, because he's my child now and he needs me to just like our kit did."

Ellen swallowed and it felt like gulping glass.

"I know you're right, Saul, but I'm in so much agony...Every time I open my eyes it blinds me."

He held her even tighter; his pitiful attempt at comforting her, at attempting to somehow absorb her suffering.

"I know it feels wrong to be happy, Elle. Feels wrong to even be comfortable, to take pleasure in anything at all anymore. I know that even a simple smile can bring on so much damned guilt. We tell ourselves that we don't deserve to enjoy what she's missing, that it's wrong to be happy without her. It's grief and it's a son of a bitch to wade through...But...it's stopping us from doing what she asked...and I can't fail her again. I can't. I won't. Kat wanted loving, caring, stable parents for her kids and I have no other purpose left other than to make sure I do that for her. My job is not to punish myself. It's to build a life and a family that these children deserve because she and Lex cant. Please...please don't hate me for trying, Ellen. Don't hate me for having good days or getting the sleep I need when you can't...I'll deal with you not being able to do this. I'll step up this time. I swear I'll figure it out, but I what I can't deal with is you hating me for it. The hope of those kids is all I have. All the effort and strength that I put into not falling apart is because they exist."

Ellen shakily inhaled.

She leaned up after a moment causing Saul to break his hold on her.

He took her hand as an anchor, not wanting to lose contact altogether.

"Ellen...loving and enjoying our son does not mean that we are glad for how he came to be ours," He told her as he gave her hand a squeeze.

He looked at her; eyes still watering and in so much pain.

"I'm tired, Saul," She told him as she shook her head.

His heart clenched in his chest.

He would do as he'd promised.

He would be the one to step up this time if he had to. He would be the one to make sure that his family survived. He would do everything that he'd seen his wife do for years, to the best of his ability, but he wouldn't stop hoping that one day soon she would be well enough to enjoy the gift they'd been given.

With a long exhale and a grunt he stood and offered her his hands. He pulled her up and helped steady her feet as he hugged her to his chest and kissed her dampened cheek.

"Head back to bed, Elle. I'll bring you a bottle of water and some aspirin."

She nodded quietly and turned to exit the room.

"Want me to call Laura?" He offered after her.

Ellen paused in her steps just as she entered the kitchen.

"No," She answered as she turned to look at him still standing in Katya's room in front of the brand new little cradle. "Not right now, at least," She added.

Saul nodded, accepting that he might very well have to call her over at some point during the night.

"Get some rest, Elle."

She nodded and licked her lips, hesitating to continue.

"Will...you come lay with me? For a few minutes? Just until I fall asleep?"

Saul would never give up. He would never give up because in all of their lives he'd never seen Ellen surrender to a damned thing. He still hadn't. Not yet at least.

"Yeah, Ellen," He promised. "I'll be right in."

Please review or let me know you read.
Thanks for your time!

-lla