Kelly didn't know how long he'd been asleep, when he opened his eyes all he noticed was that Casey was still asleep beside him, though he'd rolled over and away from Severide at some point. Kelly got up from the bed and stretched, and parked himself in the chair by the bed again. Casey slept for a while longer, than out of nowhere he shot up in bed screaming.
"What is it, Matt?" Kelly wanted to know.
Casey huffed and panted as he tried to calm down, and all he said was, "I'm soaked...I need a shower."
Kelly hadn't seen it as it happened but now he could plainly see the sweat clinging to Casey's face and forehead in beads and all his hair had turned a shade darker from it.
"Did you have another nightmare?"
"I don't know," Casey braced his hands to push himself up from the bed, "But I need a shower."
Kelly wanted to help but felt completely clueless about what to do. "Do...you need me to help you?"
"No," Casey got to his feet, headed for the bathroom, then turned on his heel and said, "Well...I'm going to need a change of clothes."
Kelly nodded, "I'll see what I can do."
He found Maggie passing by in the hall and explained the situation to her, she brought a couple spare gowns for Matt, and Kelly found himself with a new conundrum since he'd have to take one into the bathroom for Casey to change into. He went over to the door and heard the water running, then heard it shut off. He knocked carefully, "Matt? Can I come in?"
Casey didn't answer right away, but a few seconds later he called out, "Yeah, go ahead."
Kelly opened the door and saw Casey had just stepped out of the shower and was wrapped in a towel.
"How're you doing, buddy?" he asked.
Casey sighed and answered, "Okay...I think..."
"Was it another nightmare?" Kelly asked.
"I..." Casey shook his head, "I don't really remember..."
Kelly felt awkward being there. He laid the gown over the sink and said, "Well I...I'll be out here if you need anything."
Casey nodded, "Thank you."
Casey exited the bathroom a couple minutes later dried off and dressed in a new hospital gown, an orderly had come and put a new set of sheets on the bed while he was in the shower. Whatever adrenaline had jolted him out of the bed earlier was clearly gone now and he looked ready to fall over. With hardly a word to Kelly, the blonde man crawled back into the hospital bed, pulled the sheet up and in a few minutes he was asleep again. Kelly stood over him and watched him for a few minutes, and silently prayed that Casey would just sleep right through this time and not wake up screaming again. He knew he was taking a massive risk but he leaned over and lightly kissed the side of Matt's head, hoping his best friend knew he wasn't alone. As Kelly straightened his back again, he heard a faint tapping sound, and looked, and saw Voight and Dr. Charles standing outside the room gesturing to him. Kelly quietly left the room and pulled the door shut behind him to find out what it was.
"What's going on?" he asked.
Dr. Charles had a grim expression on his face as he answered, "Bad news, Kelly, the exam showed tissue scarring consistent with anal trauma."
Kelly knew this had been a possibility, but actually having it confirmed made him feel sick. "Matt was raped?"
Daniel nodded ominously.
The world as Kelly Severide knew it ceased to exist, ceased to make sense. He spun on one heel and looked at the walls in the corridor and tried to make some sense of this. He turned back to the two men and asked, "What does this mean, he was raped when he was a kid?"
Daniel shook his head, "No, the scarring is too new for that, it's only recently healed."
Kelly blinked, "What?"
"There's no way to put an exact timeline on it, but the nurse's guess was they're about a month old," Dr. Charles said.
Kelly looked from Dr. Charles to Voight and back to the psychiatrist again, hoping one of them could fill in the blanks, but it was obvious they couldn't.
"I don't understand any of this," he said helplessly, "Only a month ago? Matt would remember that...why...why didn't he tell anybody?"
"To figure that out we have to try and narrow down when it happened to try and figure out who did it," Dr. Charles said, "Is there any way this could've happened at the firehouse when you were on shift?"
Kelly felt his eyes strain as they widened to their limit and he was immediately screaming at the doctor, "Hell no! Nobody at 51 would-"
Voight stepped in and broke up Kelly's train of thought by interjecting, "51 has an open door policy, is there any chance somebody slipped in when you weren't looking?"
Kelly thought about it briefly, and shook his head, "No way, there are always people coming in and out, somebody would've seen something."
"Were there any shifts at that time," Dr. Charles asked, "where nobody went out all night?"
Kelly shook his head again, "Sometimes we'd be gone all night, sometimes the bells only went off a couple times, but nobody could've come into 51 and attacked Casey while we slept, it's too unpredictable, nobody could plan that."
"Okay, so if it wasn't on shift, that narrows it down," Dr. Charles said. "There's the next question...the fact remains that Matt was injured during this ordeal, he would've come away from it with obvious physical discomfort, so what could possibly have been going on that he wouldn't have noticed this, or might've attributed it to some other cause?"
"I don't know, I don't-" Kelly stopped before he finished that thought, he had a blank look on his face, then his eyes doubled in size in a look of horror, "Oh my God."
"What is it?" Voight asked.
"A month ago...we were on a call and a gas line exploded...half of us were kept overnight in Med, Casey was with us, we were all put in different rooms...he...he was covered in bruises from it for weeks, he got knocked down in the blast, he said every inch of his body was killing him...that...oh my God," Kelly was reeling now and looked like he was about to collapse, "That must've been when it happened. Oh my God, you're telling me somebody came into his hospital room in the middle of the night and raped Matt?"
"What?"
The voice drew all three men's attention and they turned and saw Crockett Marcel standing behind them. The doctor had just come from the ED to see how Matt was doing, and now the doctor from Louisiana looked like he was going to murder someone.
The three men looked at one another, none of them knowing when Dr. Marcel came into the conversation. One by one it dawned on them that he hadn't known they suspected Casey had been the victim of a rape, when Voight brought him in he was merely hysterical with no apparent cause, later found to be exhausted almost to the point of a total breakdown, which was what he'd kept monitoring Casey for. This revelation blew up in his face like a bombshell.
"Crockett," Dr. Charles started to say.
There was a determined, murderous gleam in Marcel's eyes as he told the three of them, "Don't-move," and with that he spun on his heel and took off down the corridor. The cop, the psychiatrist and the firefighter all looked at each other for a minute before their senses kicked in and they followed after the doctor, who had almost disappeared from their sight altogether. He ducked around a corner, and before they could catch up with him they heard the sound of a struggle and two people shouting, and when they turned the corner they saw Crockett beating the hell out of an orderly and seemed intent on knocking him through the wall instead of merely into it.
Voight and Severide intercepted the fight and tried to pull the two men apart, Marcel was screaming at the 40-something 6'0 tall heavyset orderly with a buzzed haircut and trimmed facial hair who looked like he might've been a prison inmate not too long ago, and who by now was a nice shade of black and blue and blood from the pounding he'd received from Crockett.
"So that's what you were doing that night I caught you hovering outside Casey's room, you made sure nobody was coming and you went in and raped him!"
"I did not!" the orderly replied, "I was just standing guard!"
The commotion died down and everybody could've heard a pin drop after that.
"Standing guard for what?" Voight demanded to know.
"Somebody, start explaining, now," Sharon Goodwin said as she addressed the four men gathered in her office. "And make it good. I want to know why our new ED surgeon took it upon himself to start a cage death match in the hallway with one of our orderlies."
"Miss Goodwin," Crockett started to say, but was abruptly cut off.
"This better be damn good, Crockett, because I won't think twice about firing your ass," she warned him.
Dr. Charles cleared his throat and stepped forward, "Sharon, there's a logical explanation for what happened, but it's not easy to explain."
"Well get started, Daniel, because my patience has frayed down to the last straw," Sharon told him.
"Okay," Daniel inhaled and answered, "Last night Matt Casey was admitted for what appeared to be a case of shock, it was in fact a severe case of exhaustion, which bordered on a nervous breakdown. During my evaluation, he told me about a series of nightmares he'd been having in which he was violently and brutally sexually assaulted...and his description led me to believe it was in fact not just a nightmare, but in fact a repressed memory from an actual incident. He agreed to a rape kit exam, which unfortunately confirmed my suspicions."
Sharon blinked a couple times and her mouth slowly fell open at this explanation.
"The nurse estimated his attack would've been around the same time he was kept here overnight following that gas explosion" Daniel added, "That's where Dr. Marcel came into the conversation."
Crockett took it from there, "When I heard that, I remembered the night the firemen were brought in...I got tied up in surgery so I didn't get out of here until well after midnight, and when I was getting ready to leave, I noticed that orderly, Thompson, hanging around outside Casey's room acting kind of shifty. So I...confronted him about it. And when I did, he confessed that he was standing watch for someone else who did go into Casey's hospital room and stayed there for over half an hour."
"Who?" Sharon asked.
"A friend of his. A paramedic named David Swango. Thompson figured Swango was having a thing with one of the night nurses in the spare bed in Casey's room and thought that's why he was standing watch incase anybody came by."
Kelly turned his head and stared at Dr. Marcel for a minute, then gasped, "Oh my God."
That got the attention of the other people in the room.
"You know him?" Sharon asked.
"We've met a few times on the job. We had to call Ambos in from other houses when the explosion happened," Kelly recalled, "Swango works at Firehouse 33, he..." the color went out of Kelly's face as he remembered, "He was the one that rode with Casey to the hospital..."
"You're sure?" Voight asked.
Kelly nodded, "I remember, he...he's PIC so he rode in the back monitoring Casey."
There was a haunting silence in the room as Voight and Daniel exchanged a look.
"Oh my God," Sharon finally said as the weight of this revelation dropped on her at full force. "Where...where is David Swango now?"
"We're not on shift until tomorrow," Kelly said, "so he should be off today...unless he had to fill in for someone else."
"Either way, should be easy enough to find out," Voight said. "What's this guy look like?"
Kelly blinked slowly and looked over to Voight, "You can't miss him." He turned the other way and said more to himself than the others, "Now it all makes sense."
David Swango, it was discovered when the members of Intelligence rolled up to Firehouse 33, and found he actually was on shift that day, and was in fact on the apparatus floor with everybody else, bore a very striking resemblance to Kelly Severide. There were obvious differences, he was a larger build than Kelly, his hair was darker, but the resemblance was uncanny, right down to the gap in his front teeth. Voight and his men arrested Swango in front of the men and women he worked with at 33, loaded him into the back of Voight's SUV, and he was taken to the 21st District and promptly placed in the box, where Voight did what he did best, to find out exactly what they were dealing with.
9 hours later, Voight was back at Med sitting in the waiting room with Severide as he explained the situation as he best understood it.
"Swango tried joining the fire academy, but the people in charge decided he wasn't cut out for a firefighter, so he settled for becoming a paramedic. And as a paramedic, he'd size up several patients they transported to the hospital, he'd come back and find out the status on them, find out who was alone for the night, who'd make a perfect victim...and it just so happened that most of them were other first responders, cops and firemen."
"Oh God," Kelly felt his leg shaking and couldn't get it to stop as he tried to take this in. "So...all the things Casey thought I said to him in the dream..."
"Swango probably said them to Casey while he attacked him, thought he should've wound up in Casey's spot as lieutenant and resented he could only make it as far as Ambo," Voight said, "The self loathing of this guy is thick enough you can cut through it with a power saw."
Kelly leaned back in his chair and looked like he had a migraine about to split his skull open.
"He stole drugs out of the Ambo and injected them all so they couldn't move, they couldn't fight, they couldn't scream for help...sometimes he knocked them out, other times they stayed conscious, they knew what happened to them but there wasn't anybody they could tell who'd believe them."
"And Matt?" Kelly dreaded asking, but he knew he wouldn't have any peace of mind until he knew.
"He climbed on top of Casey and pinned him down until the drugs did their job and he couldn't move...he asphyxiated Casey until he was about passed out, the bruises from being knocked around in the explosion covered any that he sustained during the rape."
Kelly buried his face in his hands and slumped over crying as the details became more and more unraveled. After a moment he dropped his hands to his sides, and looked at the cop.
"The morning after the explosion...he thought he had the flu, when he woke up he was covered in sweat, he'd thrown up, he felt sick, that's how he put it...he was raped, and he felt sick. I looked at those bruises every day for weeks and I just thought it was from the explosion. God, if somebody had been paying attention..."
"This isn't on you, Kelly," Hank told him.
"I was three rooms away from him, how did I not know?" Kelly asked.
"Nobody did," Voight pointed out, "This isn't the first time Swango's done this...but it's definitely his last."
"He's going to jail?" It almost seemed too much to hope for.
"The better part of the last nine hours was spent with him writing out a full confession to all the people he raped," Hank told the fireman. "Casey's was included, but it will not be part of his allocution."
Kelly looked at him confused and asked the cop, "How'd you get him to do that?"
"I have my ways," was all Voight offered.
There was a pause, before Kelly asked, equally confused, "Why? Doesn't it all have to be on the record?"
"Do you think Matt wants it on the record?" Hank asked.
"What about the others?" Kelly asked.
"He has to confess to something that warrants putting him away for the rest of his life, just for today I'm putting Casey above all the others."
"I don't know what to say," Kelly admitted. Only after the fact did he think to add, "Thanks."
"So how's Matt doing?"
"He's been asleep most of the day," Kelly said with a sigh, "Now I'm worried what's going to happen when he wakes up." Another thought dawned on him, "We're supposed to be on shift tomorrow, how am I going to explain this to Boden?"
"You're not," Hank answered.
"What?"
"This isn't your call to make, Matt has to make it, and if he doesn't want your chief to know, then he won't know."
"He's going to want to know why Casey isn't there."
"Didn't he send Casey home for being exhausted?" Voight asked.
"Yeah?" Kelly shrugged.
"So just tell him he's not fully recovered yet, that's all Wallace has to know."
"But what happens to Casey now?"