She remembers it in colours that bleed and run together, so it isn't the clearest picture. The details are hazy, but the biggest shapes are in shades of red and blue. She remembers the red most; the burning and the bleeding, the pain and fear that threatened to suffocate her as his hands squeezed hard and deadly around her mother's throat. She remembered the sound of her mother coughing, choking on her sorrows as she told her everything would be okay. She always said that and Gillian could always hear how uncertain her words seemed to be.
The house was always rank with the smell of fear and alcohol and it never, ever felt like home. Love seemed only to linger in the in betweens. She felt it between drunken stupors and whiskeyed promises when her mother laxened and she let herself think that it wouldn't happen again.
They were scared to leave. He would hurt them if they tried, he would find them and he would destroy them. Gillian knew that for certain because when she was twelve years old and overflowing with courage, she packed up for her and her mother. He came home hours early from work and saw the bags. Gillian had never seen more red (or felt more blue) in her life.
She hated, absolutely detested the power intimidation and violence could have if used the right (very, very wrong) way. She hated that it made her mother stay, too afraid to stand up, too afraid to say she's had enough. And she never left. She waited and ached and ailed until he sobered himself up and decided to make things right. He never could with Gill.
She hated him. With every fibre of her being, she hated him. Not only her father, but any and every person who used fear in that way, used fear to make their own life just so while ruining so many others.
She swore she had felt her blood boil as that cultist Cowley had insinuated that her infertility was spiritual as if she hadn't prayed to gods she didn't even believe in, but tried so damn hard to out of sheer and dire desperation to hold and nurture a child within her aching womb. He had just found her weakest point, her fraying thread and he tried to pull her apart. He was just like her father. He made her feel nothing but small and meaningless and angry beyond measure. He made her feel less.
But she was more. She was more human than he could ever be because she was full of kindness and compassion and virtue, sprouting like flowers while all he did was cause decay, make people fall to pieces only to devour the dead masses like saprobric fungi. She was better, she was. She saved a woman he would've destroyed, even if it meant compromising the IRS case and her own credibility in the process. She did what was right. Or at least, what she had believed to be right. Loker didn't think so, but Loker seemed to love going against her. Time after time, he had seen that they didn't share the same convinctions and even though hers were valid too, he decided to follow his own, even when it stung like a betrayal. But what man hadn't betrayed her? Her father surely had, Alec too. And Eli, he took every opportunity. Even Cal had betrayed her in the past, burning her with lies and excuses.
But Cal was different. He may have hurt her, but he was also the salve that healed her wounds, even those that he didn't inflict. He was both the poison and the anecdote. She needed him.
She went to Cal after the whole thing, knowing he would support her and maybe even Loker who had finally learnt his lesson. The last time Loker had an opposing view, he had disobeyed her by revealing a ponzi scheme and forfeiting the money of innocents. Cal had him demoted to a position as an unpaid intern. This time, he lied to support her.
He smiles widely as she tells him what she's done.
"I'll take care of it, Gill. You did the right thing," he said, pulling her in for a hug.
"I know," she says, voice muffled by his shoulder.
He pulls away to look at her, seemingly just realising who Cowley had reminded Gill of.
"Do you want to talk about it?" He asks.
She shakes her head. She doesn't want to remember the red and the blue; the burning and the bleeding, the sadness and the shame, the crippling fear. She doesn't want to remember the smell of his beer and the sound of his fist hitting flesh (never, ever hers). She doesn't want to think of her mother who still stays with him, hoping his sobriety sticks.
She just wants to find her home in Cal's arms, where she finally feels love not only in between, but all over and she knows there may be hurt, but never bruising or bleeding, never too much red or blue.
They aren't ready to say what they feel, not yet. But, they both know it's there. So, she reaches for him, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. And like always, he holds her close.