Stay

Chapter 33

A/N: Thank you so much for your comments and follows! I really appreciate all of you! Please feel free to drop a comment and let me know what you like about this story or any other thoughts you may have. If you would like to connect via social media, my Instagram/twitter is faceinbud.

Here is Chapter 33, the beginning of the trial. Trigger warning for case details, Alex's struggle to get through testimony, as well as a scene addressing discomfort around penetration.

I need to add both a disclaimer that I do not own SVU or its characters and a trigger warning for SVU-related topics. I will try to be more specific when necessary.

"This is Tommy Jiang, Dominic Pizzolo, and Bryson Mills." The prosecutor inhaled deeply, gesturing to school portraits of each child, all taken just before Tommy was attacked. The boys were smiling, and they seemed at ease in the photos, a stark contrast to what the prosecutor had been witness to during the course of the past several months. "Before September of last year, Tommy enjoyed writing and drawing, Dominic liked to play baseball with his father, and Bryson could have spent hours talking about a book he was reading. After September 18th, September 25th, and October 2nd, respectively, something changed. Tommy started ripping up and throwing away his drawings. Dominic, who could often be found playing ball with his friends as soon as the sun rose, began staying in bed all day. And Bryson hasn't picked up a book since. So, what happened? The defendant, Father Roberto D'Agostino happened. On three consecutive Wednesday nights, Father D'Agostino met each of these three twelve-year-old boys at their church for confession. But these were not ordinary confessions. Over the next few days, you will hear each child describe the nightmare that unfolded when their priest sexually assaulted them in the confession booth. You will hear about their fear, their confusion, and their shame as everything they thought they knew was shattered to pieces. You will hear expert testimony from a forensic psychologist, and he will explain to you why these boys will never be the same. And then, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you will be charged with ensuring that justice is done for these children." Alex pointed again to the white board adorning pictures of each boy. "This was Tommy, Dominic, and Bryson before their priest attacked them. Remember these faces when you see them now."

Kressler traded places with Alex, walking slowly towards the jury box. "Ms. Cabot knows how to bring the pathos, but it remains to be seen whether she can bring the necessary evidence for a conviction." Olivia scoffed from the gallery, wishing she could stand up and simply push the self-important man down. "And what she has and will continue to fail to mention is that these boys had motive to seek revenge on Father D'Agostino after they were forced to clean up the vandalism they themselves inflicted on the church's chapel. As ADA Cabot said, Tommy, Bryson, and Dominic are twelve-years-old, so they are unaware of the damage a false accusation can cause. Remember, ladies and gentlemen, as you listen to courtroom testimony, for you to find the defendant guilty, the people have to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that my client committed sexual abuse in the first degree. All I have to prove for you to find him not guilty is that Ms. Cabot has not done that."

Alex called Tommy to the stand first.

After being sworn in, Tommy, led by the attorney, set up the circumstances around the people's first piece of evidence.

"People's exhibit one." Alex pressed play on the security video, dated September 18th, and the entire courtroom watched Tommy enter the church and sit down in the confession booth. "Tommy, what happened on the evening of September 18th, 2002, after this video ended?"

"I, um." The young boy inhaled shakily, and the woman smiled at him sadly, empathy coursing through her body like burning hot magma.

"I told him what my friends and I did."

Alex had confessed to Pastor Paul that she'd slept in Cassie's bed. That it made me her feel warm and safe.

"He said he knew how I'd pay my penance."

Pastor Paul had—in a creepily soothing tone—assured the eleven-year-old girl that he knew how to "make her better."

"He told me to pull down my underwear."

He'd told her to pull down her underwear.

"He made me stand up."

He'd forced her to lie down.

"When he touched me, I was confused."

She'd been so confused.

The boy finished recounting the details of the attack, and Alex guided him expertly through his testimony. Next, she wanted to begin establishing the pattern of what D'Agostino had said to each of the children after they'd been victim to their own bodies' reaction. "Tommy, did Father D'Agostino say anything to you, during or after the assault?"

He nodded, blushing furiously. "He said that…what came out…he said it was like baptism or rebirth."

Cabot walked back to the prosecution desk, retrieving a piece of college-ruled notebook paper, which had been ripped from its source. "People's two, your honor." She held up the document. "May I approach the witness?" Judge Bradley nodded, and Alex thanked him before turning to Tommy, placing the tattered and written all over piece of writing in front of him on the stand. "Tommy, do you recognize this?"

"It's one of my journal entries." The boy began to bounce his leg up and down anxiously.

"Taken from a journal you've been keeping for over a year, yes?"

"Yes."

"And Tommy," she continued, "what is the date on this particular entry?"

"September 18th."

"Please read us the entry, Tommy," Alex softly directed him, and the child cleared his throat, leaning into the microphone.

The prosecutor had told him that it was especially important the jury heard what he'd written that night after getting home. "Something bad happened today," he read breathlessly into the microphone. "It happened at confession. I guess I did something bad, but I think Father did something worse. He used to say that only my wife should touch me like that. What changed? It felt weird, and I wanted him to stop." Tommy teared up at the memory, and he felt his heart begin to accelerate. Alex gently nodded for him to continue. She had told him many times that he could do this. He could get through it. "I don't think anyone would believe me if I told them. And if they did, Father could get in trouble. I guess I deserved it."

Olivia studied the younger woman as she watched the boy speak to her, and the brunette's heart broke at the struggle she could see in the corner of her eye. It wasn't very noticeable, but for Benson, who had the absolute honor of spending hours each day staring into those crystal blues, conflict was evident in her orbs. Emotion. Unacknowledged pain. Alex still wasn't great at finding the balance between her two warring modes.

Kressler announced he had no questions for Tommy, so Dominic's testimony was next. "People's three," Alex declared, playing the video of her current fact witness entering the church.

"Did he say anything to you?" the blonde asked him after he'd described the assault.

The boy looked down at his hands, which were shaking subtly. Alex could see it, but she hoped the jury couldn't, mostly because she feared they would think he was nervous due to lying on the stand, which the attorney knew he certainly wasn't doing. "He told me that when I, when I, um, you know, like when you wake up in the morning and the sheets are sticky, he said that that meant a second baptism."

They broke for lunch, Alex quickly reaching to squeeze her partner's hand as she exited the courtroom. She didn't have the time or the strength to give in to human Alex at the moment, so she offered the woman she loved a quick gesture of mutual comfort, and then she sat alone in her office, putting the finishing touches on her questions for Bryson, unable to stomach lunch. The boy knew what to expect, so she didn't plan to change much, but since Kressler had opted not to cross examine either Tommy or Dominic, she predicted that the defense attorney planned to give the youngest of the three boys an incredibly hard time. It wasn't a secret that he had always been most nervous to talk about what had happened. Tommy was the most scared, period, but Cabot suspected that since he was the first boy to be assaulted, his shock had added to the chronic anxiety with which he was contending. And Dominic had been impossibly brave, channeling his trauma into doing something productive. Bryson, however, who Alex learned had been the mastermind behind the vandalism of the chapel, didn't have great people skills before his assault—beyond discussing the things he liked to read and the adventures he went on with his friends—and now he just crumbled under any amount of pressure.

Kressler was a smart man, and Alex didn't know how to prepare the vulnerable child for this.

Moving on to the last of her complaining witnesses, the lawyer showed the jury Bryson's security tape, the people's exhibit four.

"Bryson, in the weeks between Tommy's confession and yours, did he or Dominic say anything out of character to you?" she asked, pacing the courtroom and tapping her pen against her hand.

"Uh, yeah, they both did."

Alex nodded at his response. "What did Dominic and Tommy tell you?"

"Objection!" Kressler rose from his seat. "Hearsay."

Alex paused her walking, and addressed the judge. "I am not attempting to prove the matter at hand by asking Bryson to share information he learned through hearsay, your honor. This question goes to the witness's state of mind."

Bradley shook his head, and the prosecuting attorney was not surprised. "Objection is sustained, Ms. Cabot. Ask another question, counselor."

Now, Alex was frazzled. What was Bradley doing, sustaining even the least valid of Kressler's objections? "Because of what your friends told you, you were afraid you'd be assaulted?"

"Objection—leading."

The ADA grit her teeth. She had indeed asked a leading question on direct, which she was usually skilled at avoiding, but she hated it when it felt like a judge was purposefully ruling against her. Or was Alex's technique really that shoddy at the moment? "I'll rephrase that. How did you feel going into confession?"

"Scared."

"Why?"

It was a roundabout way of getting Bryson to share what his friends had said, but it got the job done, and Kressler seemed satisfied with the pivot. "Because Tommy and Dominic told me that Father touched them…on their private parts. I didn't want him to do that to me."

"And did he? Touch you?"

"Yes."

Alex was almost done with her questions, and she just had to pray that he could handle what Kressler had planned. "Did he say anything during the assault?"

"At the end, afterwards. He said that I had been reborn."

"Thank you, Bryson. I have nothing further for this witness."

Kressler had refrained from crossing the other two boys in favor of saving his questions for Bryson, whose testimony was admittedly the shakiest. He'd been the first of the children to accuse Father D'Agostino, and he seemed the most nervous on the stand. The lawyer considered him to be a perfectly impeachable witness.

"Do you know of anyone else your age that often goes to confession?"

"My friend Dion does. But he wasn't with us when we—" He cut himself off. He'd prepped with Alex for hours, and she asked him to not mention the graffiti unless it was brought up, not that she thought it wouldn't be brought up. Still, answering a "yes" or "no" question in favor of the defense wasn't as harmful to the people's case as the statement Bryson was about to make. At least he stopped in time, right? He glanced at the ADA, who feigned not being dismayed and gave the boy an encouraging nod to say it was okay.

"Please continue, Bryson," Kressler coaxed. "He wasn't with you when you and Tommy and Dominic were caught graffitiing the chapel, is that correct?"

Alex took her oath to speak for the victims very seriously, and Kressler was on a slippery slope. "Objection—relevance."

"I'm getting there, your honor."

Bradley bobbed his head up and down in the defense attorney's direction. "I'll allow you some latitude, counselor. Get there fast."

Alex wondered if the judge would have granted latitude to a fucking snail.

"Father D'Agostino forced you, Dominic, and Tommy to clean up the chapel, correct?"

"Uh huh," he replied nervously. Ms. Cabot hadn't told him how to answer these questions. Just tell the truth, he reminded himself, his fingernails digging into his dress pants.

"And that night, October 2nd, was the night of your confession?"

"Uh huh."

"Is it a coincidence that you came forward the next morning?"

Bryson didn't understand what was happening. He hated being made to feel stupid. "What?"

"Is it a coincidence Dion didn't accuse Father D'Agostino of assault? Or did he simply not need revenge against a priest that hadn't just forced him to spend a Wednesday evening scrubbing pews?"

His answer was lost in Alex's memory of scrubbing her own pew. But she hadn't been washing off spray paint.

"And isn't it convenient, Bryson, that you and your friends accused Father D'Agostino with the kind of assault that can't be proven with a medical exam?"

Cabot jumped from her seat, forcing herself to shake off the distressing image of young Alexandra—scared, in pain, and alone. If she had just told Cassie that they shouldn't be sleeping in the same bed…."Objection, your honor. He's badgering the witness."

"Sustained," Judge Bradley drawled begrudgingly. "Mr. Kressler, tread lightly please." The judge seemed almost disappointed to have to agree with the prosecutor, but he at least needed to keep up appearances. Apparently, the man was friends with Petrovsky.

"Judge Bradley has it out for me," Alex said to Olivia once they'd arrived home, in separate vehicles so as not to draw attention to the fact that they were living together. Word got around the courthouse quickly, and some judges were prejudiced against her as soon as they saw her name. Alex wondered if her indiscretions regarding Linda Cavanaugh would follow her forever, yet another ghost of the past.

"It sure seems like it," Benson conceded, pulling her partner in for a hug. "Is there anything you can do?"

"No, I mean, an argument can be made for sustaining Kressler's objections and overruling mine. Unfortunately, that's one of the things that can happen when the law is open to interpretation, and I can't very well be a hypocrite and suddenly not support that." She sighed, burying her face in Olivia's neck, grateful to be home, so she could throw her attorney hat angrily across the room, succumbing to her human needs. "But," she concluded, "judges hold grudges."

Soon, it was time for the blonde to call Huang to testify to the victims' state of mind as an expert witness. Alex asked the doctor a series of questions in order to establish his expertise, and Kressler didn't object. She breathed easily. Things were goings well so far. Adult witnesses didn't pull as much emotion from jurors as children naturally did, but they were more able to keep their eyes on the prize, as it were. It was easier to keep them on track, and they held themselves together more often during cross.

"People's two again, your honor." She handed George Tommy's journal entry. "Dr. Huang, have you seen this piece of writing before?"

"Yes, I have."

Alex was grateful to not put the three kids through any more questioning, as well as to have a confident witness, who she wasn't traumatizing during this trial. There was always guilt there with complaining witnesses, especially young ones. "Where have you seen it before?"

"This is Tommy Jiang's journal entry from September 18th. He showed it to me during our interview."

"People's exhibit five." Alex searched through her evidence quickly, producing a nearly identical sheet of notebook paper and getting Bradley's permission to hand it to him. "Do you recognize this, Doctor?"

"Yes, it's another one of Tommy Jiang's journal entries, dated September 21st. He showed this one to me as well."

"Please read the highlighted portion, Dr. Huang."

"Tommy writes, 'Today was like yesterday and the day before. I haven't really slept since it happened. I tried to do my math homework, but I can't think about anything but what happened. So instead, I took a shower. I think I'm at four for today. My mom asked me why I wasn't eating my dinner, and I started to cry for no reason. She doesn't know that eating makes me throw up now. Maybe tomorrow I'll only take three showers.'"

"And what conclusions can you draw from these writings and your conversation with Tommy?" Alex half expected Kressler to object on the grounds of speculation, even though Huang was an expert, and she wouldn't have been surprised if Bradley sustained the objection just because he could.

Fortunately, Huang was the only one to speak. "Tommy was experiencing insomnia, diminished alertness, inability to concentrate, an obsession with washing himself, and anxiety induced vomiting. He was confused, crying at the drop of a hat."

"In the world of psychiatry, what do you call this collection of symptoms?"

"Rape Trauma Syndrome."

Alex decided to take the initiative and beat Kressler to the punch, knowing he would cross George on the "rape" part of Rape Trauma Syndrome. "But the boys weren't raped."

The doctor appreciated the opportunity to answer this question on Alex's turf. The attorney always thought out the case she was arguing, and that included anticipating the defense's moves. "The severity of the assault is actually least relevant in these cases. What we tend to look for is the psychological factors. Dominic and Bryson spoke of similar struggles in our interviews as well."

"So, in your expert opinion, can you say confidently that what these boys are experiencing now is the result of a violent traumatic event?"

"Absolutely."

The past few days had been a disaster. It was almost time to rest her case, and if she were on that jury….She shook her head at herself. Burden of proof was a pain in the ass sometimes. Alex figured if anything had saved her case, it was Huang's testimony, which Kressler didn't dig into as deeply as she'd expected.

Thank God for small mercies.

Still, Huang had proved that the boys had been assaulted, not that D'Agostino had assaulted them, and if Alex knew that, Kressler definitely did.

Olivia was slightly concerned when she convinced Alex without much effort to agree to burgers and fries for dinner, and though she was still worried after they ate, she was less confused. Cabot wanted to go to bed as quickly as possible after they arrived home, so she had decided not to waste time arguing with Liv over something that didn't really matter, and she took a liberal estimate of four bites of her food before excusing herself to the bathroom.

"Hey, so, since we're not reconvening until tomorrow afternoon," she announced to her girlfriend, "I called Dr. Whitley's office to see if I could get in with her earlier, especially since I think this trial is going to take some time. Apparently, she had one open morning appointment, so I'm going at nine."

Alex had just wanted some control.

Olivia mulled over the idea, remembering the conflict with a gasp. "Oh, shit, baby, I can't come with you. I'm supposed to be working the Rogers case with Elliot in the morning. Maybe I can get Fin or Munch to cover me."

The attorney approached the brunette, sitting in the chair next to her and clapping her hand over her thigh. "Hey, sweetie, it's fine. I'll be okay by myself."

She was clearly determined to go to this appointment. "Are you sure?"

"Yeah. I'll call you after." If she'd survived looking at Bryson's face as Kressler manipulated him and forced him to help his case, she'd survive one more visit to the gynecologist by herself. "I'm going to take a shower."

The scorching stream coming from the shower head soothed her aching muscles as she scrubbed her body for an extended period of time. Rape Trauma Syndrome, with symptoms akin to PTSD (just more specific) was something she hadn't spent much time thinking about, and though the boys were currently in the acute stage, she knew better than most people that the obsessive need to be clean didn't go away.

It was a way to take control over a powerless situation.

Another way was to consciously do the work, to see healing as a crusade she fought for every day of her life.

As casually as possible, Alex let her hand descend her body, stopping it at the apex of her thighs. This time, she intentionally bypassed her clit, which swelled in anticipation, and nestled her pinky finger against her opening, pushing in just slightly before feeling the quintessential burn she'd become used to.

What would Olivia say?

She let her hand rest over her heart, almost in comfort. "It's okay. This isn't your fault. Just breathe. This clearly isn't a good day to try this. There will be better days."

At least she'd have more evidence to bring to Dr. Whitley.

After her shower, the blonde threw herself onto the bed, burying her face in her pillow. Olivia crawled onto the comforter behind her, placing her hand on her back and rubbing long, steadying lines. "Hey. What are you thinking?"

She turned just slightly in order to make eye contact, granting herself levity with a small smirk at the thought that entered her mind. "I'm thinking that my only hope is Kressler tripping on his holier-than-thou shoes and busting his head open on the railing while he's on his way to kiss Bradley's ass."

A/N: Thank you for reading! Would love to know your questions/thoughts/predictions!