May 23, 2013

As Elliot closed the bedroom door softly he took a moment for himself, leaned back against the cool wood of the door and closed his eyes, drew in a few deep, steadying breaths.

One step at a time, that was the advice Captain Cragen had given him. Just take it one step at a time. They'd taught him the same thing in the Corps, taught him to focus on the task in front of him, and not lose himself perseverating over the next and the next and the next. When his destination seemed to far away to reach the only way to keep himself from giving up the fight was to ignore all the distance that separated himself from where he wanted to be, and place all his attention on his immediate goal. That's what he'd been doing, from the moment the call came in that Olivia was safe. First, get to her. Second, tell the boys that their mother was safe. Third, bring her home.

Accomplishing those tasks left him asking what's next; Olivia had answered for him, told him she was tired and the boys needed to rest, said she'd take a shower while he checked on the kids. His heart was screaming at him not to let her out of his sight, still reeling from the last few days without her, still half-expecting some unseen terror to come and take her from him, but he did as she asked, left her alone and stepped out in the hallway, took the chance to breathe before going to check on the boys.

Or that's what he meant to do, anyway, but as he gathered himself there in the hallway he heard the sound of a door opening, and opened his eyes to watch as Sean came walking slowly out of Eli's room.

"Everything all right?" Elliot called to his son hoarsely.

" 's fine," Sean told him, walking towards him slowly. "They didn't want to sleep alone. They're gonna stay in there tonight."

"All three of 'em?" Elliot asked, surprised. There wasn't enough room in Eli's bed for all three of the younger boys; maybe one of them had decided to sleep on the floor, but Elliot didn't like the thought of that too much.

"I'm gonna stay with them," Sean said. "I put my mattress in there while you were…"

While Elliot had been in the bedroom with his wife, carefully helping peel her out of the scrubs the hospital had given her with the least amount of strain on her broken wrist and her bruised ribs, his oldest son had been carrying the mattress from his own bed into Eli's room, so that all the boys might sleep together, comforting one another. Exhausted, and weary, and worried, Elliot's heart broke just a little, in that moment, and he did not try to hide his tears from his son, just reached out and placed his hand on Sean's shoulder and squeezed once, hard.

"Thank you," he said. Sean had always taken the role of big brother seriously, looking out for the younger boys, helping them, defending them, and if he resented at times the burden that fell on him as the eldest that was hardly something Elliot could blame him for, and the boy had just gone above and beyond for his brothers in a way that made Elliot so damn proud, and so damn sad, at the same time.

"She's not gonna be ok, is she," Sean said then, and it didn't come out like a question, came out resigned instead, like now that he'd seen the damage done to his mother he knew there would be no coming back from it. And he hadn't even seen the worst of it, the kaleidoscope of burns and bruises that spiraled across her skin from her shoulders to her thighs. It wasn't like her whole body was covered, the injuries instead scattered and frantic and nonsensical, but they were everywhere, and Elliot had wanted to scream when he saw them, and Olivia had kept her back to him, covered her tits with her hands, refused to meet his gaze like she couldn't stand for him to see. But that was too much, too much for Sean to know, too much horror for him to have in his head.

"She will," Elliot corrected him firmly, his hand still on Sean's shoulder. "It's gonna be a long road, I'm not gonna lie to you about that, but your mom…your mom is a fighter. She's gonna come back from this. It's just gonna take time."

If he repeated those words often enough, maybe he'd start to believe them himself.

"I'm sorry, dad," Sean said then, his voice a little choked, and Elliot wasn't sure what his son was apologizing for but he was sure that he couldn't fucking stand to see his boy in pain, and so he pulled Sean in tight, then, wrapped his arms around his son and held him in a fierce embrace.

"I love you," Elliot told him thickly, earnestly. "And mom loves you. And we are gonna love each other, and we are gonna be ok."

Please, God, let us be ok.

They stood like that for a while, Sean crying quietly and Elliot holding on to him, but as Sean settled they released one another, Elliot taking a moment to look into his son's eyes, searching for some sign of what the boy was thinking, though he found none.

"Come on," he said. "It's late. You should go to bed."

Elliot walked Sean back to Eli's room, went in with him and said good night to each of his sons, watched with a lump in his throat as Sean settled onto the mattress on the floor with Ryan, as Connor and Eli burrowed beneath the covers in the bed together. He told them that he loved them, he promised them that everything was going to be all right, and prayed that he wasn't lying. And then he left them there, went room by room through the house assuring himself that every door and every window was locked. When he was satisfied that his family was safe he returned to his bedroom, and to his wife.

The bathroom door was open just like he'd left it, and he could hear the shower still running, and so he followed the sound of it, stood for a moment in the doorway, looking in dismay at the chaos that waited for him there.

Olivia had cut her hair. Why, he couldn't say, but she'd done it just the same, great hanks of her shiny, beautiful dark hair lying limp and forgotten on the floor in front of the sink, a pair of scissors perched on the counter. There were inches and inches of it; she'd let her hair grow so long, and he'd loved it, loved to run his fingers through it, loved the way it looked, soft and pretty, falling loosely around her face, and now it was dead and gone, discarded like it meant nothing at all. Worse still, he could see her silhouette through the white shower curtain, could see that she was sitting on the floor of the shower beneath the spray. It looked like she'd drawn her knees up to her chest, like she'd bowed her head, like she was hiding, just sitting there, small and lonesome.

He willed his feet to move, skirted the edge of the pile of hair by the sink, felt his stomach twist into knots when he glanced at the toilet and found vomit floating in the bowl. She'd cut her hair, and puked, and now she was just sitting there and he didn't know what the fuck he was supposed to do.

"Olivia," he called her name softly, not wanting to startle her.

In the shower she did not move, did not speak, simply sat, so very still, with her forehead pressed to her knees. There was steam billowing out above the shower curtain, so at least the water was still warm; he hoped it soothed her, somehow.

Some of the guys he'd served with had come home shattered. Elliot hadn't spent much time overseas - mercifully - but he knew men who had. Men who had seen the stuff of nightmares played out in front of them, seen their friends, their brothers-in-arms shot or blown up or worse right in front of them. What little Elliot had experienced of war still haunted him, still made him hear gunshots in the Fourth of July fireworks, sometimes, still came to him in his dreams, angry and bloody and vengeful. Some of the other guys, though, for some of those guys the nightmares never stopped. PTSD was not an alien concept, to Elliot. He'd known guys who had it, had heard stories, remembered the way no one wanted to talk about it until they had no other choice. And the way he saw it, Olivia had fought a war of her own. He knew what terrors haunted his dreams, but he didn't know, yet, what darkness lurked in the recesses of his wife's mind now. He didn't know, yet, what demons he would have to battle to bring her back to him.

But he knew they were there. Like a shadow that wouldn't quite resolve itself into a single shape, growing long and grim, creeping up the walls of their bathroom, darkness was wrapping itself around Olivia, and it would fall to Elliot to bring her back from it.

So he did not leave her, when she refused to acknowledge his presence. Did not run from the evidence of her trauma, the pieces of her grief she'd left scattered around that tiny room, though a part of him wanted to flee, did not want to face it. He was a Marine, the few, the proud, and he would not run from this fight. Instead he went to her, sat himself down on the floor by the edge of the tub, and slowly, very slowly, ran his hand behind the curtain, rested his arm on the edge of the tub and let his hand dangle just inside the steam of the shower, waiting for her.

They had sat together on the floor of a bathroom before. That first time, when Olivia's first pregnancy had ended in tragedy, he had sat on the floor and held her while she wept. There had been other times, times when one or another of them was sick, when one of the boys was sick, when they had sunk to the floor together; he had knelt in front of the toilet and stared up at her in wonder the night she'd told him she was pregnant with Ryan. It was not the first time they'd reached for one another in this place, and it would not be the last.

He waited in silence, breathing slowly, trying to hold himself together. Waited, with his hand extended, to see what his wife might do. To see if she might take his hand, and cling to him, or if she would recoil from him, or ignore him altogether. It seemed to him as if their fate hung in the balance, their future predicated on what choice she made now. If she would not reach for him now, maybe she never would, would only retreat inside herself the way she used to do when times were hard and she was too accustomed to disappointment to trust in him to hold her. If she did not reach for him now maybe they would be broken, forever.

It took so long for her to decide that he very nearly gave up. It wasn't the most comfortable position, sitting with his ass flat on the hard floor and his hand dangling awkwardly in the shower, but as he prevaricated, warred with himself, Olivia came at last to her decision.

It shocked him, the moment her skin touched his. He sucked in a deep breath, but as he felt her fingers lace through his own he let that breath out slowly, relieved. Though she did not speak, though she could not tell him with words what she needed, what she was feeling, she reached for him, just the same. Reached for him, took the hand that he had offered and held on tight, and so he held her back, curled his fingers around hers, their palms flush together, the fierce, almost painful hold of their hands a reminder of all the ties that bound them one to the other, ties no man nor demon could break. Lewis had tried to shatter them, but he had been a fool; the love Elliot felt for his wife, the love she felt for him, endured, still.