Disclaimer: -Almost forgot, although how could I forget I don't own them :-( -I don't own NCIS: New Orleans or its characters...
Author's Note: Basically, Marjorie K. Place was right… How could I resist writing a tag to 1x16 My Brother's Keeper? (Also, forgot The Abyss is one of the episode titles, but this only indirectly relates to the content of that one.)
SPOILERS: 1x14, 1x16 (and other episodes with character back story).
It had to be on her desk. Yes. She'd certainly left it on her desk. Had taken it out of her pocket but neglected to slip it into its customary pocket in her bag when she packed up for the day. She would just run in real quick, snatch it and get out, hopefully without causing any noise and waking Pride who was still living at the NCIS office.
Because once she realized it was gone, there was no way she could not go and fetch it. So she dragged her butt out of bed (not that she had been sleeping much anyway) put on some clothes and drove back to work at 3am. For her stupid phone.
Any other time, it wouldn't have mattered. But this week, as the awful anniversary approached, her mother was liable to call her, regardless of the hour. And that would be a phone call Meredith Brody could not miss. This was the time of year her father would become especially distant, spending all hours at his office on campus, sleeping on that worn leather sofa Merri and her sister had spent many afternoon naps upon as small children as he graded papers. Her mother, left to her own devices, abandoned by her introspective husband, would be turning to the liquor cabinet around this time, fall into that abyss Merri herself knew well but desperately tried to avoid. For the daughter, the descent was not one aided by alcohol but solely driven by guilt. Survivor's guilt.
It was a painful experience listening to her mother's sobbing, mostly incoherent, sometimes violently angry and abusive rants in the wee hours of the morning. Perhaps, Merri did it because she felt it a punishment she deserved, simply for being alive when Emily was not. Perhaps, she did it because she could not bear to lose another family member, and there was no telling what the woman would do without an outlet for her pain.
No. Merri needed her phone.
It was on her desk, right where she thought she left it, and she sighed in relief after hastily scooping it up and scrambling to find that there were no missed calls. And then she realized that some of the lights were still on in the building, and not the ones usually left on for overnight illumination. Was Pride still up? If he was, something was wrong.
She definitely had the feeling that something was awry as she walked into the kitchen and found it fully lit but empty, before she glanced out into the courtyard, saw a figure sitting on one of the metal patio chairs, in the dark... and the feeling worsened. Slowly she approached the person who sat still as the grave with his back to her, recognizing almost immediately that it wasn't a stranger, and it wasn't Dwayne Pride.
Still. He was so still. She knew it was ridiculous, but the anxiety welled up fast in her chest. Dead. What if he was dead? What if he'd been killed, along with Pride and everyone else in the building (although there should've only been the older agent there, really). Merri couldn't take any more loss. Especially not now. Not ever again. Not without it shutting her down completely, until she wound up sitting in a facility, just as still as the man who she hesitantly walked up beside, staring vacantly at the walls for the rest of her life.
She swallowed down the ridiculous knot of fear.
"LaSalle?" she asked, her voice, although barely above a whisper, cutting sharply through the still night air.
He turned his head, slowly and looked up at her, blinking lethargically, as if he were emerging from heavy anesthesia. He looked so utterly despondent, that she skipped the formality of 'what are you doing here?'
"What's wrong?" she asked, grabbing a nearby chair and pulling up to sit knee to knee with him, straining her eyes as they adjusted to the wan light, trying to read his face, interrogator mode kicking in automatically. She tried to shut it off, to think 'caring friend' not 'interrogator', but sometimes they were the same thing. Sometimes listening and prodding was the duty of both. Besides, it was so ingrained within her instincts, that she often wondered if it was genetic predisposition as much as being raised by natural interrogators and then subsequently trained as one.
The expression on her fellow agent's ever-alert face was unsettlingly catatonic. Vacant and unanimated. He had retreated into himself. Deep. But everything she knew about the man… he would do better talking it out. Maybe he'd come here to talk to Pride, who as far she could tell, was the younger agent's closest confidant. But once here, he hadn't been able to bring himself to wake the older man. Or to talk about it. She knew what it felt like to have things you rather keep buried dredged painfully to the surface.
Nevertheless...
She placed a hand on his forearm that was lying slackly in his lap. The contact seemed to do the trick, drawing his attention to her presence. His dark eyes focused on her face.
"Cade's slipped agin," he said, flatly. Obviously, he'd detached himself from his feelings on the subject. "Savannah helped me get 'im into a clinic for a 48 hour hold. I jus' couldn' go back ta my place."
Savannah? Merri hadn't heard the name before. Maybe he'd been emailing a girl when she'd caught him all embarrassed earlier... But that wasn't important now. Unless maybe he could talk to her about the issues with his brother. It was 3am, however, and Merri was there now.
And she knew what sort of pain a sibling's suffering could cause, feeling helpless to do anything for them. How well she knew...
"That's good," Merri said, squeezing his arm. "You got him the help he needed, Chris."
He nodded, and suddenly his face, previously devoid of emotion was instantly flooded with it. His pain was so acute and apparent that it stabbed Merri in the gut. She swallowed down a sympathetic knot of agony in her throat.
"I'm losin' him agin," he said, his voice a strangled sob. This time, she could only nod, as she fought the tears in her eyes. As an interrogator, as someone who worked investigations of violent crimes, she witnessed people angry, upset, grieving, all of the time. But it was somehow different to see the agony on a friend's face, especially a pain she knew all too well herself. God, it hurt.
"But you haven't lost him." Her fingers were digging into his forearm now and she didn't even realize she might be bruising his skin there, so desperate she was to make him see that he had a chance, that there was hope for him. "Cade's still here. And you're fighting for him."
His eyes grew wide, as if just realizing something that mortified him.
"Jeez, Merri," he said. "I'm sorry. I didn't even think... Here I am goin' on 'bout havin' to deal with my brother's issues and ya..."
"Lost her forever," she finished his thought quietly when he seemed unwilling to do so. It was a heartache that would never quite heal. She knew she would've been just as helpless had she been still living nearby when the accident happened, but she'd been thousands of miles away when Emily had been lost to them. The pain of the loss of a sibling was like having a part of one's flesh torn away, worse, like part of a vital organ, leaving you incomplete and incapable of living a whole, normal life.
And she saw that loss in Chris LaSalle's eyes. Is this what he went through every time? Merri suffered her wound being reopened several times a year, sometimes it seemed daily... God she'd just had it excruciatingly debrided as she recounted and relived in vivid detail the events of the Moultrie, perhaps allowing it to heal more properly now. But Chris must suffer a fresh, unique injury every time he recovered his brother only to lose him again. How many pieces of his heart and soul had been rent from him?
Leaning forward, she grabbed his shoulders and pulled him into a hug he could not resist had he wanted to, wrapping her arms about him and holding him so tight to her, that when he leaned into the embrace, circling his own arms around her, and pressing his face into her shoulder, they slowly fell out of the flimsy patio chairs until they were kneeling on the cool stone pavement. She clung to him in an uncharacteristically hard and emotional manner, and she didn't care.
Preserving her cool countenance, her barriers, her detachment and her professionalism didn't matter an ounce in comparison with the need to comfort her friend, to anchor him against the pull of the abyss she knew all too well. She would not let him get dragged down into that dark place, of loss and loneliness, and guilt so profound it choked, cut off one's air, suffocated and smothered, destroyed one's soul.
No. These people -this man- had become her friends. They had taken her in, somewhat against her will, had helped her heal in ways she never thought possible. She would not abandon a single one of them to a misery she was intimately familiar with, that she could help them fight.
"You're not alone, Chris," she whispered into her partner's ear as he sobbed quietly into her neck, holding her so tight she could barely breathe. "You're not alone."
A/N: I feel like LaSalle and Brody are eminently qualified to commiserate and comfort one another when it comes to sibling-centered heartache.
A/N 2: I'm sure they gave us a date for the Moultrie whatnot, but I didn't check/fudged it to meet my needs here.