Recovery

Home again. Kelly Severide looked around Casey's apartment and noticed how different it was, not just because Gabby was no longer there, but neither was any of her stuff, or the furniture that she'd bought for the place. And the furniture that remained, was no longer in the same place it was before Casey was taken to the hospital when Gabby tried to kill him. During Casey's stay at Lakeshore, the guys from 51 had come over to the apartment, tossed half the furniture and picked up the rest and moved it around the rooms. The couch that had been in the middle of the room was now over against the opposite side wall, the entertainment center with the TV that had been there was now on the other side of the apartment. The lamp that had stood beside the couch now stood in a corner. Chairs, an inn table, they'd also been shuffled around to new positions, nothing was in the same place it had been a week before. It had been a cockeyed idea, but they'd all agreed that Casey might adapt back to his life at home, if everything wasn't as familiar as it had been when he was rushed out in an ambulance.

Matt had been so glad to be home and out of the hospital. He'd promptly fallen asleep on the couch clutching his bag, minutes after they'd come in the door. Kelly hadn't really been sure how Casey would adjust to being home again, but the day had gone well, he didn't seem to dwell on what wasn't there anymore, there hadn't been any long gazes in the closet where Gabby's clothes had been or glancing around the room in awe of how much emptier it was now without all the touches Gabby had given the apartment. They didn't talk about Gabby. They didn't talk a whole lot, but some, just small talk, how things were going at 51, how anxious Casey was to get back to work.

That however, was still a ways off. Now that Boden and everyone else at 51 knew that among all the other things Casey had suffered during Gabby's abusive reign of terror, was a sleep debt so severe the doctor initially said he should've already died from it. Casey had recuperated enough in the hospital that the doctor sent him home, but it was still the doctor's orders that if Casey was going to recover, he had to tack an extra hour of sleep onto what he was regularly getting anyway, every night, for the next few weeks. And Boden wouldn't let back on Truck until he knew Casey wasn't a risk on the job due to his exhaustion, he'd already 'suggested' Casey take the next couple weeks' worth of shifts off and rest.

And here they were. Dinner had been over a couple hours ago, the sun was starting to set and from the windows there was a pinkish gold tint on everything because of it. Kelly stuck his head in Casey's bedroom and saw, to his surprise, that Matt was already changed into a light gray T-shirt and plaid pajama pants as he stood by the window near the bed and just gazed out at the scenery.

"Casey," he knocked on the door frame to announce his presence, "Everything okay?"

Casey adjusted the weight on his foot and slightly turned to his side and Kelly was slightly more concerned as he saw Casey clutching the teddy bear that Dr. Charles had given him back in the hospital. At the time the psychiatrist had suggested Casey try it for an alternative sleep aid, and stupid as the idea sounded, he had to admit that it did seem to have some kind of effect on Matt. He knew Casey had brought it home, it had been in his bag he fell asleep clutching. But still, there was just something about the scene that caught him by surprise.

"Yeah," Casey answered simply, "everything's fine."

Kelly stepped into the room, feeling that there was something he was missing. "You sure?"

Casey looked back out the window at the tinted sunlight highlighting the rooftops across the way, and the tops of the trees, "Yeah."

Kelly walked over towards the window and looked out, and tried to see what it was Casey was seeing. Out there was the usual evening hustle and bustle of people coming home, kids playing outside, people walking their dogs. But Severide had a feeling Casey was looking far past all of that, and looking towards something else, trying to see something else.

And it finally hit him.

"She's not out there, Matt," Kelly told him. "Gabby's not coming back."

"I know," Casey nodded, sounding like he couldn't care less.

Kelly stayed on the subject and added, "She would never show her face around this city again."

"I know," Casey nodded again, though Kelly noticed he slightly tightened his grip on the teddy bear.

Kelly wanted to ask Casey what was the matter, what was going through his mind, but he knew he couldn't. He just stood alongside his friend and looked out as the sky gradually changed colors and everything slowly got a little darker.

Finally Casey turned away from the window and told Kelly, "I'm tired...I think I'm just going to go ahead and call it a night. Do you care?"

The question surprised Kelly but he was quick to shake his head, "No, that's fine, what the doctor said you needed to do...I'll...I'll be in the living room if you need anything, just yell."

A small smile formed on Matt's face as he nodded once, "Thanks, but, I'm fine."

Kelly was sprawled over the couch cushions watching TV, his head resting on the arm of the couch and his eyes were starting to get heavy, every so often when he blinked his eyes stayed closed for a few seconds, then he opened them again, then they stayed closed again, he was just about to fall asleep entirely when he heard a distant voice calling, "Kelly?"

He opened his eyes again and sat up on the couch and looked around, and realized it was Casey. He hopped up from the couch and went into the bedroom. With the light from the living room shining in the doorway he could see Casey sitting up in bed against the headboard, still clutching the teddy bear in one arm.

"You okay, Casey?" he asked.

"Yeah...can you come here?"

"Sure," Kelly headed over to the bed and stood beside it, watching him. "What's up?"

"Can you sit down?"

"Uh, yeah," Kelly seated himself on the edge of the bed, "What's on your mind?"

"Well..." Casey looked at him, "I'm sorry that I never told you about what was going on with Gabby...I'm sorry that you had to get involved."

"That's not a problem, Matt," Kelly assured him, "I'm just sorry that you had to go through it, and you didn't think you could tell anyone. I'm sorry I didn't get you out of here before she tried to kill you."

"That wasn't your fault," Casey said, "That was my own problem, I should've left...I should've left when it first happened, I should've...I should've stopped excusing what she did, and I should've realized she wasn't going to change."

"She had us all fooled, Matt," Kelly told him, "I can understand why you didn't try to leave, it was the ultimate rock and a hard place."

Casey suddenly got very quiet and looked towards the wall.

"What is it?" Kelly carefully probed.

Matt looked at him again, nervously licked his lips and answered, "The thing is...I did leave...I tried to once anyway."

Kelly squinted one eye curiously, "What do you mean?"

"One time...a couple months before she tried to kill me...I just couldn't take it anymore, and I decided the only thing I could do was leave. Gabby was working late at Molly's that night, so I packed all my stuff, put my bags in my truck and left."

Kelly's eyes were wide. "I never knew about that."

"I never told anybody," Casey said. "I still couldn't bring myself to actually admit she was abusing me, but I was just so sick and tired of everything that was going on, of never being able to do anything right, her always screaming and yelling and hitting me, and just taking it. I hit her back one time, you know that."

Kelly nodded.

"I couldn't do that again, but I had to do something, and I decided the only thing I could do was to get out of there. I drove off, and I didn't have any idea where I was going, there was nobody I could go to because I couldn't tell anybody what was going on, so I got a hotel room for the night and decided I'd get some sleep and figure it out in the morning. I wasn't going to do that anymore, I wasn't going to put up with it anymore," Casey admitted.

Kelly said nothing and just waited patiently as Matt told the whole story.

"It was so nice there...it wasn't fancy or anything, but it was quiet...I mean you could hear people passing in the halls, stuff like that, but there wasn't anybody screaming, there wasn't anybody fighting, nothing was my fault, it was like heaven. All I wanted to do was crawl under the covers and sleep until the next day...I already wasn't sleeping very well with what was going on, at the time I didn't think anything of it, I just thought I could rest now, and things would get better."

"So what happened?" Kelly asked.

Casey was quiet for a moment, then explained, "All of a sudden, everything just hit me like a ton of bricks. I couldn't breathe, I felt pins and needles stabbing my entire body, I was freaking out. I was so scared of what was going to happen when Gabby came home and found out I was gone, all my stuff was gone...and what if somebody saw me at the hotel? What if they called her and told her where I was? She could find me, she could actually track me down, and she would be so angry that I tried to leave, that she'd probably hit me even worse than she had before. I had to get out of there. I left the hotel less than an hour after I checked in. I raced back to the apartment, scared to death the entire time that she would be there waiting for me when I finally got back and what she would do to me if she was."

Kelly felt like his stomach was up in his throat as he asked, "And what happened?"

Matt didn't say anything at first, and until he did the air was thick with tension.

Finally he answered, "I got back home...Gabby still wasn't there, I was so relieved. I unpacked everything, and sat up waiting for her. I couldn't catch my breath for two hours...I could hear my heart pounding in my ears for about three hours. She got home around 2:30, business had been good, so she was happy...as far as I could tell, she didn't know anything. I sat around panicking for five hours waiting for her to come home. And even then, I didn't sleep that night because I was worried she actually knew what I'd done and just wasn't letting on...I didn't sleep for two days." He paused, and sighed, "I got out, I'd left, I was free, but I just couldn't stay gone...because I was so worried what Gabby would do when she found out I'd left her...I couldn't even imagine how angry she'd be, so I went right back because I was afraid of what would happen, what might happen. And I stayed...and you know the rest."

Kelly did, all too well he knew. So much from the last week came flooding back to him.

"It's about Matt Casey."

"What about Matt Casey?" Voight asked, not sure where this was going.

Severide paused as he took in a breath. Then he jumped in. "Gabby Dawson is beating the crap out of him."

"What?" Voight asked.

"She's..." he squeezed his eyes shut for a second, the actual words just seemed too weird even though he knew it was the truth. "She's abusing him."

Finally Hank replied with, "He told you?"

Kelly shook his head. "He would never admit to something like that."

"You saw it then?"

"No...but I know she is."

"Kelly...we got him...EMS is taking him to Lakeshore...his condition?"

Kelly's voice was choked with tears that tightened his throat, "Oh my God, Casey."

Casey was bawling as soon as he opened his mouth, it was impossible for him to talk. Severide squeezed his arms around Casey's back and almost deliriously kissed Matt on his cheek, then his forehead, then he raised one hand to cup the back of Casey's head and felt as well as heard Casey gasp against him, then he felt somebody grabbing him and opened his eyes and saw Voight peeling his fingers back until he no longer had a grip on Casey.

Voight simply said, in a notably softer voice than usual, "Don't, don't touch his head, they're going to check him for a concussion."

Casey closed his eyes and lowered his head. "I didn't want anyone to know."

"I understand that, buddy, but you still should've told me, I would've believed you."

"The first time she hit me," Casey's eyes spoke volumes how painful an experience it had been for him. "It was so sudden, it just came out of nowhere...I was stunned...I told myself it was a freak one time thing...I told myself it wouldn't happen again, she wouldn't do it again...but it did, and she did."

"She hit me again some time later, and I said again, it won't happen again, it won't...it doesn't mean anything, she loves me, she would never intentionally...hurt me."

Kelly just sat by the bed and watched as Casey admitted to everything he'd been hiding from everyone for the past few months.

"She kept hitting me...and it started to take a lot less to set her off, and I just kept telling myself 'this isn't abuse, this isn't abuse'...I know abuse, I saw it every day growing up, I saw my dad abuse my mom, I knew what it looked like...and I always swore I'd never be like him, I would never do that to a woman..." Casey sighed and shook his head, his voice thick with tears again, "instead I grew up to be my mom."

"I told myself it wasn't worth starting any trouble, it wasn't worth walking away and ending our marriage over, it wasn't worth...telling anyone, and having them say I was making too much out of it or that I was being...emotional," Casey's voice continued to break by degrees as he pressed on to explain. "I kept thinking 'I can deal with this, we'll get past this', a few times, God help me I got so mad at her, I slapped her back just wanting it all to stop, instead she hit me harder."

"Then one time...she hit me in the head..." Casey raised his hand and traced it over the same spot where his skull had been fractured, and the tears started again as he recalled, "I got scared."

Kelly tightened his embrace on Casey, wanting his best friend to know he wasn't alone, he was safe now, it would be alright.

"I just kept thinking 'She knows, God, she knows it can kill me...why is she doing it? Why would she do that?'"

"I'm so sorry, Casey," Severide said in a low whisper.

Casey was openly sobbing again as he struggled to tell Kelly, "I still love her...but how could she do that to me?"

Kelly shook his head, "I don't know, buddy, I don't know."

"I still couldn't leave her...I still couldn't tell anyone, even when I knew...sooner or later she would kill me...last night...was it last night? I finally decided I was going to leave her...she kept hitting my head and she wouldn't stop...if Voight and the others hadn't come in..."

"What happened?" Voight asked, feeling a knot forming in his stomach.

Kelly didn't even look at him, his eyes were distant like he was miles away, and he said absently, "Casey started throwing up again...they rushed him out of here."

"The concussion?"

"I don't know," Severide shrugged his shoulders cluelessly, "they said they were going to do some tests and find out what's going on."

"If Casey dies because I didn't help him sooner..."

"Whatever's going on, the mask is coming off, everybody's starting to see Gabby for what she really is," Voight told him, and gestured to Matt, "What'd the doc say?"

"Well he went on for a while about everybody's got a different internal clock that they all need so many hours of sleep a night to actually function right, talking about when you come up short on hours it has to be put back somewhere..." the mood changed before Severide said the next thing he did, "and he said Casey's been running on empty for so long he should already be dead."

"What?"

"They found out what was going on, the doc says Casey probably went into survival mode every night to make sure Gabby didn't kill him in his sleep...that he might've slept but it didn't do any good because he couldn't rest, so his clock couldn't reset itself, something along those lines. They said...his blood pressure's out of whack, his blood sugar, hormone levels, said we can expect a lot of mood swings until he's better...started talking about microsleep, saying as little as Casey's been running on, that there should've been a lot of instances where his body fell asleep for anywhere between a second and a few minutes...apparently people who do don't know that they do it and it just leaves them more confused than before. Like, they close their eyes and bam, five minutes have gone by and they didn't know it. The doctor said if this happened, Casey would just appear to blank out..."

"And has he?" Voight asked, suspecting where this was going.

Kelly reluctantly nodded, "I just thought it was because of what was going on and he was trying to hide it from all of us...there were a lot of times on shift the last couple months he just seemed to be staring off into space for a couple minutes...if I'd known what it meant, I would've done something quicker."

"Well...apparently the amount of sleep he's gotten since that night hasn't been enough, his body's still running on empty, and the doctor said if this becomes a long term thing it's going to give him heart disease, he could have a heart attack..."

"I know," Kelly said softly as he reached over and hugged Casey, "I know you still love her, Casey, she is not worth it."

"She's my wife."

"Who tried to kill you. Casey, you cannot stay with someone like that, and you know it."

Dr. Charles took in a breath and explained, "Intermittent explosive disorder means that Gabby suffers repeated episodes of sudden aggression which includes physically and verbally violent outbursts that are not justified or even proportionate to whatever it is that sets her off."

"Sounds like we have a winner," Kelly dryly commented.

"Dr. Charles, do any of these conditions impair her ability to restrain herself?" Voight asked.

"Patients with IED do have a notably harder time controlling their actions than other people, but if you're asking is Gabby legally competent? Yes, she knows what she's doing is wrong, but that's not enough to stop her...remorse following outbursts is not uncommon for patients with this disorder...but as soon as something sets them off again, nothing changes. Episodes of violence aren't generally regular, there can be periods of days, weeks, months in between them...but duing the in between periods, the patient is still easily aggravated and are very likely to verbally abuse people, they scream, they shout, they have tantrums, they make threats, arguments are easily heated...and judging by the looks on your faces, I'm guessing this isn't news to you."

"That would explain a lot," Kelly answered. "Everything always has to be Gabby's way, or else."

"But what about Casey?"

"All you have to do is look at his track record and you'll get that answer," Dr. Charles told him. "Abusive spouses know what they're doing, they dominate, they control, they isolate, physically, mentally, emotionally...gradually they chip away at everything their victims ever knew, so the only normal they know from there on out, is the abuse. They are so terrified to leave because by that time, their batterers actually have them convinced that they will never find anybody who treats them any better than they do. Understandably, Casey was already so starved for any affection, when faced with this threat, he chose to stay with what he at least knew and could anticipate would happen, than risk winding up alone again."

"Wait..." something occurred to Kelly, "all the times he kept asking where she was...you mean..."

"Might not be that different from an addict trying to get a fix, he knows it'll kill him but he needs it anyway, she made sure that was all he knew for years," Dr. Charles said.

"My God," Kelly barely choked out.

"I'd heard what happened when they took him a couple days ago," Dr. Charles told Severide. "Matt Casey isn't just starved for sleep, he's starved for basic human contact, any non-threatening physical touch, he needs as much of it right now as he can get from anybody he trusts enough to give it."

"He needs to know he's not alone, physically or emotionally," Dr. Charles said. "He needs to see that Gabby was wrong, intellectually he knows that but he needs reassurance, he's in a very vulnerable place right now and needs to know that he can survive without her, because he still has people around him who love and support him. He needs as much close contact as he can get right now, adapt back to being around people who aren't trying to hurt him."

"So," Casey's voice drew Kelly out of his thoughts, the memories, and back to the present. He looked at his best friend as Casey told him, "I know Gabby's not coming back...but," he nodded towards the window, "I still think about it."

Kelly guessed he shouldn't be surprised. She really had Matt under her control, domination, manipulation, she had him trained, conditioned, to accept her abuse as 'normal', so much so that he'd actually reached a point he couldn't stand the thought of facing life without it, because instead his mind had translated a life without the abuse as a life of worse abuse than he had gotten used to. Thinking about it was still very overwhelming for Severide, he could only imagine what Casey was going through.

"Kelly."

Severide blinked and looked at Matt, drawn back to the here and now again.

Casey opened and shut his mouth a couple times before he finally got out, "Can...would you stay in here tonight?"

Kelly nodded, "Sure, I can do that."

A very small smile appeared on Matt's face, "Thanks."

Kelly reached over, pulled the covers up over Casey and tucked him in, then slipped under the other side of the blankets.

He didn't know how much time had passed, but after a while he could hear Casey's steady breathing and knew the blonde man was asleep, he was thankful for that and hoped Matt stayed that way until morning.

Casey made a small grunting sound and rolled over onto Kelly, he was caught off guard by this and wriggled under Casey before he stopped, not wanting to wake him up. He could feel the fur of the teddy bear pressed against his armpit and he tried not to laugh. It moved, as Casey rolled further over till his whole body was on top of Kelly's and he pressed his face into the crook of Kelly's neck. It took a few seconds for Severide to adjust to it, but somewhere in his head he heard Dr. Charles' voice from that night in the hospital.

"Matt Casey isn't just starved for sleep, he's starved for basic human contact, any non-threatening physical touch, he needs as much of it right now as he can get from anybody he trusts enough to give it. He needs as much close contact as he can get right now, adapt back to being around people who aren't trying to hurt him."

Kelly brought one arm up and draped it over Casey's back and held his friend close while he slept.

Casey woke up in the middle of the bed tangled in a mess of crumpled sheets, and the sun was very bright coming in the window.

"Kelly?" he called out, feeling very confused.

He heard footsteps bounding through the apartment and heard Kelly stick his head in the door, "Hey, you up?"

"What time is it?" Casey grumbled as he rubbed his eyes.

"10 o' clock."

"What?" Casey sat up and looked at the clock. "Why didn't you wake me up?"

"Come on, Casey, you're still recovering, the doctor said you have to get more sleep than usual, a couple more hours in the morning isn't going to hurt you."

Casey grumbled again and decided, "I guess not." Slowly he untangled himself from the sheets and got up.

"You sleep okay?" Kelly asked him.

Casey looked at him like he actually had to think about it, then he nodded, "Yeah...thanks for staying with me."

Kelly smiled and replied, "That's what I'm here for."