A/N: Consider this a rather long interlude between the previous chapter and a pivotal point.
The door opened in front of Alex as if Dr. George Huang knew she was coming…
…and he did. Her footsteps were clearly audible: soft, gentle, like the quiet padding of woman's boots down a carpeted hallway. Right before she stepped up to the door, her feet hesitated; there was no second-guessing for Huang.
Then again, as a profiler there weren't many chances to.
"Hello, you must be Alex Eames," he said to the perplexed woman standing in front of him.
"Yes, I, um…I left a message?"
"I know, come on in." He stepped aside from the doorway and with a slight shift of his hand he gestured for Alex to step inside as well.
As she crossed the carpeted entryway, she couldn't help but wonder at the man before her. His kind gestures and studious demeanor reminded her of only one other person, and despite the numerous differences she could find in Bobby's appearance, awkwardness, and history, Huang's obvious attention to detail and downright genlemanliness made her understand why Bobby liked to come here.
She sat down plush chair perpendicular to the couch, which placed her right in front of Huang's gaze.
This is what you wanted: honest talk, everything out in the open.
Only seconds later did she realize she would want to divert her own…
"So, this is about Bobby? And your sex life?"
Maybe not that honest.
She froze automatically upon the word sex, the one secret she had been hiding from the world, the one that came directly after the word Bobby, the saying that had become automatic don't ask, don't tell.
"I realize this is a bit unorthodox, but in order to get an better understanding of your relationship with Bobby, I need to hear about both of your experiences."
"Um…" Just talk, Alex…breathing would be good too. "Yeah…it is…" She let out a small laugh. "Wow…it's just, I never-"
"You never thought of using that term?"
"Yeah."
"Why?"
"Well, I guess…I don't know."
"Yes you do." The doctor took out a pen from his desk drawer and set it above the notepad in his lap. "Alex, at this point, with this investigation, all that the truth can do now is help. Don't be nervous."
Don't be nervous. You're just about to put my sex life in transcript for the Chief of D's to dissect. No biggie.
"You're right. What I was trying to say is….I never just saw it as…sex." There, I said it, sex. SEX. SEX WITH BOBBY. "It was always something more…"
"Permanent?"
"Yeah…what we have is so…layered, I guess. I mean the sex was…amazing…but there was this greater level of us there that made it more than that."
"So the way the relationship started contributed to the level of intimacy?"
"In so many ways." Alex sighed as she swept her bangs from her face. "I know that once the world gets a hold of this story they're going to try to twist it into two horny cops who blew off their job during a midlife crisis, but if they even knew…"
"The last few years have been…rough?"
"To say the least. I've gone through hell, and at every step he's always been there for me, and he's been through so much…sometimes when I think about what he's had to deal with throughout his life, I wish I could give up so many good memories from my life just to give him some closure. I guess, at that point, the relationship had been put through so much and it just kept on staying there…nothing could break it, you know?"
"Does it bother you that people might confuse your intimacy with curiosity?"
Alex let out a faint laugh. "Only every spare second. That's really my biggest fear, that people will take this and think that we would abandon our work over something like that. For years, for both of us, the work was like our second family. It requires so much time and commitment…there's this level of self that you give to the job that you never get back. It's like a relationship…there's an investment that you put into it, and whether it works or it fails, you never get back to that original level.
"I understand what partners are supposed to feel for each other. I've had other partners before…God knows Bobby has had twice as many as I have…you'd give your life for them. There's a level of trust that is so different from any other kind of interaction, because it's not a question, it's a necessity…
"…but what Bobby and I were at the beginning is not what we became. We turned into, in our own way, with what we would allow, each other's security. Yes, I told him things I've never told anyone else, but despite the job, it was more than blind trust. He gave me hope, encouragement…he was my support whenever I needed it…and when he needed me, I didn't feel obligated…I wanted him to need me as much as he did. We were dependent on each other by choice, not by force."
"So your relationship was based on something more?"
"Exactly. By the time we got to that level, I didn't even realize it. I don't think he did either…I mean, there's attraction, but…I think what hit both of us first was magnetism. I could stare at him for hours and not understand why, or how six months apart could make me want so much more of him…but I did. And after a while I could tell he did too.
"When it finally hit me that I…" she paused. "I'm sorry, it's kind of hard knowing that the brass is going to read this..."
"It's okay, Alex."
"I know." She took a deep breath and began again. "When it finally hit me, it wasn't a giant shock. It just seemed like these feelings finally had an explanation, the dependency, the wanting…there was a cause and those were effects…gradually came up and bit me, I guess…
"I love him." She smiled as the words fell through her lips without hesitancy. "I'm not just acting out of attraction or lust, I'm not just curious. I want him because at this point I can't imagine not being with him. It's just the way it is."
"And Bobby?"
"He's exactly the same…it's indescribable, how much I care."
"So do you see this going somewhere?"
"It is somewhere. After all of the things we've been through, it's a definite milestone."
"But what do you see happening if or when Bobby gets back on his feet?"
She ran her hands through her hair again. "That's why I'm here."
...
"I said no."
Alex sat at her desk buried under witness statements and testimonies, but even heavier was the burden of carrying her partner's words. The weight and meaning of them made her dizzy: even if that woman never physically raped him, she violently molested his body to the point of pain; she had known that had to leave scars mentally, but as he actually said the words, she knew he had been raped in all totality emotionally.
"For hours, she'd watch me."
In the days following, Bobby opened up in bits and pieces. He dropped lines between dinner and desert and before entering the shower in the morning, while they were watching television after her work or in the car on his way to an appointment. There was never any conversation, just little parts of the entire story…
…but as he said them they all started to add up.
"She'd dig her nails into my dick if I made her mad."
The cruelty with which his molester had treated him was unyielding and astounding, but as far as Alex was concerned, Nicole never had any reason to her madness. That she would sit and stare at Bobby, naked and vulnerable, unnerved her. It was something that Alex reserved solely for herself, a right and a claim to Bobby in a way Nicole could never understand; after all, Nicole had only wanted to torture him. All she wanted was to protect him, to see him at his most desperate times and to lead him out of his self imposed punishment…
…Nicole would rather he rot in the caverns of his mind.
"She left scratches…sometimes I wonder if they're still there."
When he said that phrase, she was in the kitchen eating a Yoplait peach yogurt as he was washing dishes. While enjoying the rich taste, she hadn't noticed the gentle hum of running water stop or stopped to analyze the way Bobby's arms tensed above the countertop as his knuckles turned white from grasping the kitchen sink. As she dug around the peach chunks, he let out a strangled sigh before voicing the incident that paralyzed him with shame.
Afterwords, he picked up another dish and started scrubbing even more meticulously than before. Even in shock, Alex wondered if it felt as if the words stuck to him as much as the situation, if cleaning every dish as well as he could would make the action fall from his memory. Either way, the yogurt was never finished.
It affected her wherever she went; there was just no escaping the horrors in Bobby's mind as they transposed onto her own. At first she had thought that she could handle it, that perspective would give her insight on how to save him from his demons, but now…
…now she wasn't sure if she could save herself.
Then there was the time when they sat on the couch staring at a movie on TMC, black and white images of two lovers making there way through the streets of Kobe, Japan. While the lovers enjoyed close proximity, Bobby and Alex mirrored them in perhaps the most intimate relaxed positions they had been party to since the kidnapping. With Bobby's arm wrapped around her shoulders, Alex had her feet tucked under her and her forehead pressed the headrest, eyes closed, taking in the words of Marlon Brando to his love Hana-ogi. She felt his voice resonate in her head, his will to keep their relationship alive though the world would want them separated.
In response, the Asian beauty could reply only with how she felt.
"I'm so frightened and confused," she said through the screen. "I cannot think. I cannot even understand your thinking."
"She'd laugh when I'd come."
He said it as if it fell from his lips like lead, making the air around them toxic. Alex inadvertently shivered in Bobby's arms as an even heavier meaning attached itself to her memory. Her thoughts drifted between the movie and their lives, weaving together similarities until they created a bridge between the synapses in her mind and the energy pouring through the screen's pixels.
She wanted to say something, to scream, to yell, to tell the images in her head to disappear, but all she could focus on was the eerily quiet breathing of her man and the reluctance of her Japanese counterpart to take a leap of faith.
She was beginning to feel the same.
As she told herself to let it go, mental pictures forced to disappear into the dark recesses of her mind, the deep timber of her current Brando spoke up voicing emotions so repressed and mangled that his words came out in a tangled whisper.
"She'd laugh when I'd cry."
And the worst part was she couldn't make a move, couldn't breathe, because she was sure at that point her hurt and anger at Nicole, at a world that pained and destroyed lives, could nearly eclipse Bobby's. As the lovers were forced to say sayonara, she could almost feel the tears her leading man had cried.
She was rocked out of her musings as droplets hit the sensitive nerves of her wrist. Looking down at the paper on her desk, she saw a sprinkling of water stains marring the ink. She quickly tried to wipe away the stray streaks on her face, only to feel them replaced with more thick tears.
She knew this was it: this was when the series of rips his story had created in her façade would finally combine to tear her to pieces.
Rising from her seat as quickly and silently as possible, she pushed herself away from the desk; holding back sobs strangling to break free, she charted a path to the closest restroom and walked with speed she never knew she possessed as far as she could from prying eyes.
The door swung open and shut with one firm shove; as soon as it closed, her restraint crumbled. The scream her throat had been clinging to roared to life as she fell to the ground, pounding on the tile with cries that shook her frame.
"Fuck you, Nicole! You evil fucking cunt! I hate you! I…HATE…YOU!"
She wished her fists could make the linoleum squares brake and batter instead of echoing her voice throughout the room. She needed them to at least chip, for the anger and frustration to leave a mark, a dent, anything to prove she was there…to prove she had strength…
…to make Nicole feel one millionth of the pain she was feeling, the pain she wished she could inflict.
Wailing on the floor with all the strength she had left, her fists made one final pound before flattening and spreading against the coolness of the ground. She stretched against the bathroom's tile and cried, uninhibited. Her tears were relentless as they flowed out of her eyes like a flood, down her cheeks and onto the floor where they made small pools.
She wanted her dead. It was the only thing she could think of to repay her cruelty: pure absence of the life she had been given and abused so unabashedly. She may have been abused as a child, she may have been unloved, but Alex was sure she had never had a heart. Ever.
Through her sobs, she never heard the door slowly creak open and closed, or the soft sound of shoes making their way across the sorely underused women's restroom, or the bending of knees…
…all that she felt were soft arms wrapping themselves around her as they pulled her face away from the ground into another woman's embrace.
"Alex," Megan said as the broken woman before her sobbed into her shoulder, "it's okay."
"No," she sobbed, "it won't ever be okay…what she did will never be okay…"
"I know, Alex, I know." Wheeler held onto her as dry sobs shook through her body. "But you've got to calm down, okay?"
The woman she held in her arms slowly began to still, but as she turned her face up to look at Megan it was covered in a sickly pale yellow tinge.
"I think I'm going to-"
"Here." Megan pulled her up and into the handicapped stall as Alex fell in front of the toilet and heaved. The breakfast of coffee and more espresso fell bit by bit into the basin, and while Megan held back her hair, Alex's body reached its limit.
As soon as the last heave had purged her stomach of its contents, she fell against the edge of the stall, too exhausted to support her own weight as she slid down the wall. Megan caught her just before her head hit the ground before propping her up in a corner and heading for the sink. She came back into the stall with a wet folded towel and two Advil.
"Were…" Alex said hoarsely before coughing and speaking again. "Were those with you the whole time?"
"Yeah," Megan admitted as she laid the towel over her forehead. "After a few weeks of this job I learned to keep some in my desk. When I saw you get up and leave I could tell you would probably need your space, but after thirty minutes…"
"Thirty?" Alex turned her head against the cool metal divide and sighed. "Did anyone else-"
"No, but you've been acting kind of strange the past two days so I was looking out for it." The woman who had appointed herself as caretaker held out the gel capsules. "Your head is going to hurt like hell in a few minutes so I would take these…can you swallow them dry?"
"Yeah, um…one second." Alex put her hands against the floor and pushed with the strength she was slowly starting to regain. She shakily got on her feet, refusing the hand Megan offered, and slowly walked over to the sink. Pulling the towel off, she splashed some cold water on her face and wiped the excess off. She turned back around, confident that she now only looked partially broken, and took the pills from Megan to swallow them in one try.
"Thanks," said Alex, leaning against the sink feeling partially exposed. She folded her arms on her stomach as if to slightly cover herself and her emotions, but if the puffy feeling in her eyes was any indicator, she was doing a shoddy job.
"It really is going to be okay, you know."
Alex let a grim laugh go. "Yeah, right."
"But…I think you should talk to someone about it."
She dropped her head to stare at the unaffected floor. "It won't change anything."
"No, you're right," Megan said, moving to lean against the sink next to her. "It's not going to change what happened…but it could make you feel better."
"With what he's gone through-"
"I'm not saying you should break his confidence. I'm just saying you can't keep this all inside of you…it'll tear you apart."
Alex sighed as she raised her hand, brushing her bangs to the side. "I know…I know." She looked back towards the door and gave a small, hopeful smile. "Think Ross'll let me go early?"
Megan's face brightened with her compliance. "With how puffy your eyes look now, I think he'll try to save the rest of us from pink eye."
…
Anne Eames, who was blessed with a large and boisterous family, realized that her children were all grown up. That was the way it was supposed to be: they reached the proper age and left the nest; sure they would come back on holidays and planned dinners, but they had their own lives now.
That didn't stop her from worrying about them, though. Having all but two of her children in the force didn't stop her from checking up on them regularly, or eagerly inviting her grandchildren over when both parents were forced to work; after all, this family needed a matriarch, and stroke or no stroke, her memory was still good enough to know how much she cared for each and every one of it's members.
So when she opened the front door and saw her daughter, who had been distant as of late, nothing could stop her from taking her child in a firm hug.
"I saw the headline in the paper," she whispered in her daughter's ear, and Anne knew she understood.
…
Sitting in the living room of her parents' home, Alex felt a bit out of place. The walls were still a pale yellow, and the family photos still lined the end of the room as they lead up the stairs. Since leaving her home for college, the house hadn't aged a day, while she had years to attest to the fact that she was no longer young.
But I guess some things never change, because after everything, this is the one place I always end up coming back to.
Her mom came through the archway with two steaming mugs of hot chocolate, placing them on the coffee table before sitting next to Alex and handing her a cup.
"I know you like it with the small marshmallows," she said, and Alex smiled. After all this time, her mom still knew how to comfort her. She took a few sips of her mug as her mom rubbed her thumb along the handle of her own mug and said, "So are you going to tell me more about why you're here?"
Alex put cup aside. "Yeah, Mom…I am…"
"This is about your partner, isn't it?"
"Yeah," said Alex, taking as long a sip of her hot chocolate as possible to stall for time. "How did you know?"
"Mother's intuition," the older woman said with a wink that made the corner of her eye wrinkle. "But really, like I said, he was in the paper, and…well, you didn't come home for a while."
Alex tried to put aside the guilt for a few minutes to remain focused on why she came. "I'm sorry Mom, but he needed help, and…I guess I needed some space."
The slight shift in Alex's gaze was all the proof her mother needed. "Honey, what is going on between you two?"
"Um…"
"Alexandra," Anne said, knowing that the four syllable word from her mother would snap her daughter to attention, "what is going on between you and your partner?"
Alex may have been confused and exhausted, but stupid she was not; when her mother used her full name, she meant business. Slowly, slightly painfully, she began to tell their story, and though she carefully omitted the things that weren't for a mother's ears, Alex knew her mom was getting the most complete version of the story that she had ever told.
"And your captain let you leave early?" Anne said as she ended, hours later, with each of them facing the other curled up on the couch.
"Yeah," she said with a small smile. "Megan was right. Ross was a bit worried because of the amount of work required for finishing up the case I'm working…not to mention he's starting to get questions about the Garner case from the brass because it's still with SVU…but I really looked like hell. He probably thought it was best that I leave before I give anyone else what I must have."
"That's really nice of him." The cup having been long empty, her mom still stroked the handle of the mug as she had at 2 o' clock that day. "So, you and your partner…Bobby…you're in a relationship?"
"Yes." Here it comes, Alex thought. The moment where she says something that'll give me guilt until I decompose. So why didn't you-
"So why didn't you bring him over for dinner?"
What? Alex couldn't believe it. She just told her mother that she was basically under investigation, her partner was essentially raped, and she had chosen that particular time to fall head over heals with him and might possibly have been negligent in her job…and Mom wanted to know why they hadn't shown up for dinner?
"Mom?"
"He's your boyfriend, right? So why didn't you bring him over for dinner?"
This was to good to be true. It had to be a faulty neuron. Surely, her dad would think it was a mistake. Her mom had to know by know that for all intensive purposes, most sane people would think this was a mistake. Her mom, wife of a cop, mother of five children, three of which ended up in the force, couldn't possibly be offering her…support…
"Um, Mom, I don't think Dad would have approved…or Sam…or Eddie...heck, even Elise and Bill would probably think-"
"Honey, you've changed."
Those three words were all it took to stop Alex mid-tangent. "What do you mean?"
"Don't think we haven't noticed. Over the past few years, this job with Major Case…you've had a hell of a time, been through kidnapping and what happened to Joe all over again…I know you're going to hate me for this, but I almost asked your father to speak to Captain Ross, put you on less high profile cases…"
Wow. "I could never hate you Mom…a bit shocking, yes, but still, I understand-"
"-No, Alex, you don't." When her daughter's gaze turned quizzical, Anne kept on. "You had a bigger share of bad moments than any of your brothers, but you were growing more…contented. For some reason, you seemed calmer and more…okay…than you had in years. Something about you made it seem like you accepted that your life wasn't perfect, but something was keeping you going…making it decent.
"And then you're partner 'went on vacation', which I think you should know by know we all knew wasn't true, and you changed again. You were reserved, less open, and you didn't smile anymore…that something inside of you turned off and we all saw it.
"But then he came back, and when you brought him to Nathan's party we literally saw you come back to life again. Seriously, honey, you were glowing! For the first time in a long time, you didn't seem like you were just hanging on…you were happy…and for the first time in a long time, we could see why."
Alex looked down, a small smile creeping on to her face. "And by we you mean-"
"Yep, all of us. Ben tried to start a betting pool with Sam and Eddie that night, but Elise found out and told your father, and he said very frankly 'If you try to make money off your sister's happiness I will give you boys the beating of your life'. Ben decided he wanted to be around to see Nathan graduate from kindergarten, so they called it of…officially anyway."
I should've known, she thought as the smile eclipsed her eyes.
"You're in the clear honey, so bring him by sometime, okay?"
"Sure Mom, I'll do that."
Anne put down her mug to wrap her arms around her daughter before Alex stood up. "I should be getting home."
"You mean Bobby's, don't you?"
Alex stopped for a second, taking in the meaning of her words. "Yeah," she nodded as she grabbed her purse, "I guess I do."
"Wow," said Anne, moving to sit with her knees tucked under her in classic Eames style. "Even with everything that's going on between you two? It's odd, you two are so committed…"
"Mom-"
"-But for you two, I guess it works." She picked up the Santa mug to thumb the cool surface once again. "Come by again soon, Alex."
"I will, Mom. I love you."
"I love you too…Alex?"
Her daughter turned around at the door.
"Tell me when it gets serious?"
...
"So that's what she said?" Huang asked.
"Yeah," said Alex, toying with the sleeve of her sweater. Tell me when it gets serious? "All I could say in the doorway was that it already is."
"I think you know what she meant, Alex."
And he was right, because she did.
"You still haven't answered the question." Huang watched as she looked up, her eyes locked on his.
"What question?" she asked, even though she knew.
"What do you see happening between you two after all of this ends?"
A/N: Want to see what happens? R&R, please. (This chapter is almost half as long as the entire story, but it's good, yes?)