Title: Caution – Dangerous Curves Ahead

Disclaimer: I do not own Chicago PD, Chicago Fire, or any song lyrics/quotes contained within. This fanfiction was written for entertainment purposes only, and as such, I am not making a profit (and have no intentions to go 50 Shades mainstream on you guys)

Summary: Recovering from a nightmarish past is never easy. Will this second chance be Rachel's lucky chance – or will it just be the end of the road?

A/N: This one has been fixed, too. A quick note to clear some things up: Erin and Jay are married – hence the reason I don't mention Erin much in the work scenes. She had to transfer out of intelligence temporarily until they could get the powers that be to approve a husband and wife working together in such a danger prone unit. PS: Yes, I know this is a weird first chapter, just had to get past this to move the story along a bit.

The faint but steady beeping of the heart monitors soothed her as she hovered between consciousness and not so conscious. The nurses moved through the hallways, a certain beauty found in the repetitiveness of their daily routines. Smells of astringent cleaners and sanitizers permeated the already-too-thick hospital air, making her already upset stomach roll in protest. Her body jerked upwards, hands flailing for the bin, not questioning how it ended up in her hands before releasing the contents of her stomach into it. A large hand soothingly rubbed her back, murmuring words of support and reassurance.

"Oh good God, this is awful", she groaned, head falling back against the pillow, eyes remaining shut in an effort to shield herself from the bright florescent lights. Every inch of her body ached, as if she had had the flu for weeks upon weeks.

"Yeah, well, that's what you get when you OD on heroin and they have to pump your stomach.", a voice growled. Rachel wasn't terribly surprised when she turned her head and found a rather pissed off, and somehow exhausted looking Hank Voight sitting in the chair beside her bed. She wanted to say something, anything – to apologize for the state that he had found her in, to apologize for him having to save her yet again.

"Hank,"
"Stop talking."

Placing the cup of coffee he had been toying with on the small table beside the bed, Hank stood up, pacing back and forth as if contemplating his next words.

"When you were 14 years old, so damned dope sick that you couldn't tell which way was up, I sat with you on that bathroom floor and promised that I wasn't going to let anything happen to you – but that I couldn't go through that again, couldn't see you...hear you begging me to kill you, to make it stop.", his words paused, but Rachel remained silent. "I get that you miss Jackson. Losing a kid? That's awful shit. I get it. I get it – because when I got into that apartment and saw you passed out on that sofa, I was pretty sure that I was going to have to watch my daughter die...and I can't do that, Rachel. I won't do that."

The quiver in his normally strong voice had both of them teary eyed, the raw emotion seeping through each of his words.

"I just...I miss him so much, Hank. If I had just been a little bit quicker..."

He had her in a hug before she even knew what was happening.

"This isn't on you, Rachel – do you understand me? This is somebody who was sick in the head long before we ever crossed paths, and nothing any of us could have said or done would have erased that damage, y'know?", he murmured, careful of the IV's and heart monitor leads. She nodded her head, wanting to believe Hank, but noticing that that nagging feeling of guilt still lingered in the pit of her stomach, screaming that she had let her son, her flesh and blood, down in the worst of ways.

With a knock on the door, the pair separated, a slight smile spreading across her face as old friend and coworker, Alvin Olinsky, stuck his head through the opening.

"We up for visitors or should I come back after I score some more H?", he asked, the trademark smirk on his face, not doing such a great job of masking his worry over Rachel's condition. Waving him in, Voight placed on last fatherly kiss to Rachel's forehead before picking up his cup of coffee and tossing his jacket over his arm. "I'm going to go for a walk, give Justin a call and let him know where things are. I'll be back in a bit."

The room was silent for a bit after his departure, neither Rachel nor Alvin knowing how to approach the topic at hand. He had known bits and pieces of what had brought her into Hank's care at fourteen, but beyond the essentials, he knew little else.

"I tried to kill myself once."

'Okay', Rachel thought. 'That's one hell of a way to start a conversation, Al.'

"Had just left Narcotics, Lexi was real small – maybe six months at the oldest, had Meredith on my back about money being so tight. Things felt like they were...like the walls were closing in on me and I just couldn't see a way out. I figured that maybe with my pension, state benefits, it'd be enough for Meredith and Lexi to make a go at having a nice life somewhere outside of Chicago, somewhere safe."

Rachel remained quiet, listening to this stoic person tell a story of what would have had to have been one of the hardest periods in his life, a time that very few people probably knew about, if any.

"I had just come home from a 13-hour shift, was...sitting in my car in the garage, and just couldn't bring myself to go in the house. It was real late, knew that the girls were probably long since asleep, and I just sat there. My service weapon was sitting on the passenger side seat, a .32 that I had got right after I joined the department. Next thing I know, the barrel of that .32 was shoved between my teeth. Christ, I could taste the cleaner I had used it on that morning before leaving the house.", Alvin's voice hitched, lost in the memory from his past and for a minute, Rachel thought it's like he was almost in a PTSD episode, like he was actually back to the night in the garage. But just as quickly as he had slipped into the memory, he snapped himself out of it, brushing it away as thought it were nothing of importance. "Long story short, I realized that things seem godawful in the moment. They seem like you are never going to make it to the other side, but Rachel, I swear to God, you will make it to the other side, and when you do, the problem that seemed impossible to overcome won't seem as awful anymore."

With a slight, uncertain nod of her head, Rachel found herself imaging what had happened if her suicide attempt had been successful - and was horrified at what would become of the people she loved (at least what would happen in her mind). Choosing to follow Alvin's advice, she knew she needed to push through, to push until it felt like she was about to break - and then push even harder. She had to make it worth it, wouldn't - couldnt' - let her son's death be in vain.