She was surrounded by a congregation of doctors, nurses, and scrub-clad technicians. They lifted her, still strapped to the backboard, cleanly off the stretcher and onto the bed. She was semi-conscious, and she refused to release his hand during the transfer. He ended up standing by her head, trying to make himself as small as possible as what seemed like dozens of hands attacked her body, cleaning, probing, and evaluating.

The sight of blood had never fazed Goren, but he knew that having to look at her blood leak out of her for much longer would change that. The wound just kept bleeding, no matter how much direct pressure they applied. His hands were dripping with her blood and he felt it burning into his skin as though it were boiling water.

He squeezed her hand, but received no answering squeeze in return.

"She complained of a stabbing pain and trouble breathing?" the doctor asked one of the paramedics. "Punctured lung. Might be the beginning of a hemothorax, too, with all those busted ribs." He turned to a nurse. "How's the head?"

"Clotting, slowly. She'd going to need at least another unit of blood, though. Pressure's still well below 100."

"Make sure you get the bleeding stopped, then let's get CT scans of the head and the chest." He bent down toward Alex's face and smiled. "Detective Eames? How do you feel?"

She held her breath for a second, then let it out with a shudder. "Hurts. Neck."

The doctor looked at Goren with raised eyebrows. No one had mentioned a neck injury to him.

"He tried to . . ." He closed his eyes and swallowed hard. "He tried to strangle her, but it only lasted a few seconds."

The doctor stared at him, his eyes wide. "You allowed someone to get his hands around your partner's neck? You didn't protect her? Were you too worried about saving yourself, Detective, or did you just think she wasn't worth it? After all, she's so small, she can't be much use when it comes to police work."

"No!" he cried, recoiling from the cruel faces that suddenly surrounded him. "I tried to help her!"

The doctor sneered at him. "Well obviously you didn't try hard enough. She's dead, and it's your fault!"

Goren woke up from the nightmare with a hoarse cry at the same point he always did. He hadn't yet been forced to look at her dead body in the dream, and he desperately hoped that he never would. He wasn't sure if he could handle it.

"Bobby!" Deakins said from just behind him. "For the love of god, go home and get some sleep on an actual bed."

He picked his head up off of his arms and looked around, taking in the squad room full of faces watching him. He'd fallen asleep at his desk, for the third time since the attack six days ago, and drifted into the same nightmare he'd been having every time he allowed himself to doze.

"You're not doing you or your partner any good like his, Goren. If you're going to work, you need to sleep, but I still don't understand why won't you just take a few days off and let your arm start to heal."

He shook his head. "No, I can't. I have to . . . there's work to be . . . done and Eames, I don't want her to come back to a backlog of cases . . ."

"Look, you know she isn't going to be back any time soon. They won't even let her out of bed, let alone let her start walking or working. You've got plenty of breathing room when it comes to catching up on work. I'm giving you an order: get out of here. I don't want you back until next week, possibly not even then. And if you won't go home, why don't you go see her? She asks me about you every time I'm in there."

He stared at Deakins, alarmed. "What do you tell her?"

"I've been giving her dumb excuses about you being covered in paperwork and deep in cases, but I can tell she doesn't believe me. It wasn't your fault, Bobby. She doesn't blame you. Just go see her, please. For the sake of all of us who have to work with you, if not her sake."

He just shook his head as he stood to put on his coat. "I can't. Not yet," he said sadly as he walked toward the elevators.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

He followed the stretcher into the ambulance on shaky legs, trying to absorb what had happened in the past few minutes. His partner lay on white linens that were rapidly being turned red by her blood. So much blood; how could such a little body possibly hold that much?

"Move," the male paramedic ordered, pushing him toward the front of the ambulance's box. "We need to work on her."

The paramedics slapped an oxygen mask over her face, obscuring her mouth and nose. One of them put a blood pressure cuff on her arm; it had to be wrapped nearly twice to get it to fit tight enough on her slim arm. The second medic pulled out a device that looked like a large Gameboy, with a wire leading to a clip the man slid onto her finger.

Goren watched in silence as they began to shout out numbers and abbreviations to each other:

"I've got sixty over forty, we need to get more fluid in her!"

"SpO is at ninety-two; turn the oxygen up to fifteen."

"She's got PERL-no-R. Tell them they're going to need a CT."

"Detective Eames? Can you hear me?"

The woman on the stretcher uttered a tiny gasp, sounding as though she couldn't get enough air in to make a proper one.

"Detective, are you having trouble breathing?"

Her eyes widened above the oxygen mask and she seemed to be trying to nod. Surely the mask was too big for her, he thought distractedly; it covered part of her eyes as well as her mouth and nose.

"Buh . . ." she forced out, then struggled to pull in another breath. "Buhb . . ."

The medic looked up at where Goren stood, horrified. "I think she's asking for you, sir. You can hold her hand, but keep your body away from the stretcher." He looked back at his partner. "Do a rapid assessment. They're going to want to know about the head trauma."

"Right." The female put her fingertips against Eames's head and began pressing gently. There was a sudden increase in the flow of blood from her temple. "Shit! Put some whole blood in her, this isn't stopping!"

"Detective Eames, try to stay calm, ok?"

He thought that sounded utterly absurd to say to a woman lying on a stretcher, bleeding her life away and unable to draw in a breath.

"She's really struggling, Brad," the female medic said. "Start bagging her."

The man pulled out a football-shaped apparatus that he attached to the oxygen mask and began squeezing.

Goren recognized that football-thing. It had been part of the CPR class they'd had to take; it was used to force air into a patient's lungs when they couldn't breathe on their own.

She wasn't breathing. He'd killed her.

He shot up in bed, breathing hard. His heart was pounding and he was clammy with sweat. He didn't know how much longer he could go on like this, reliving the terrible details of that day over and over. The nightmares had been coming nearly every night in the two weeks since Alex had been injured. Sometimes they came twice in one night. He didn't think he could deal with them much longer and still remain able to function.

He rubbed at his scratchy eyes and looked at the clock. Seven in the morning, time to get up anyway. Not that he'd be allowed into work; Deakins had issued a direct order a few days ago that Goren was to have the week off no matter what excuses he tried to use. But still, it made him feel slightly more in control to keep getting up at his regular time. It made him feel like maybe one day things would be normal again.

He rolled out of bed and barely managed to land on his feet. His bruises had begun to heal in the weeks since the attack, but he almost wished they'd stayed. Bruises were something real, tangible. Something he could concentrate on. Instead, he was left with just an aching wrist encased in a cast and an excruciating pain in his heart every time he thought of what had almost happened. What he had caused to almost happen.

All his fault. If he hadn't pushed the suspect, he wouldn't have snapped and none of this would ever have happened. If he'd been on his toes, reacted quicker, he could have taken the guy down before he got with ten feet of Eames. But he hadn't been. He'd been slow and heavy-handed, and now they were both paying the price.

She was supposed to be discharged from the hospital today, but he wouldn't be there. He couldn't do it, simply couldn't face her after seeing her accusing face over and over in his dreams. He'd asked Deakins to call him when she was safely settled at home, claiming that his wrist was too painful for him to go to see her, but his unsympathetic boss had snorted into the phone and told him that he had a still-full bottle of pain medication he'd been sent home from the hospital with. "Face it, Goren. You're going to see her today, whether you like it or not. I'm sick of you moping around, when she's the one who got hurt."

As if he needed to be reminded of that.

Alex, hurt.

Alex, dead.

All his fault.