A/N - I love you guys for your kind words in the reviews you left for the last chapter. Hope you enjoy this one. x


A Fairytale By Another Name

She looks like shit and she knows it. The bathroom mirror all but shouts out those words too: a not-so-gentle reflection of the horrible person she is staring back at her with red-rimmed eyes and cold, grey skin. She looks old, she thinks. Old for twenty-three at least, with a messy ponytail and chewed nails and a constant expression of resignation, like she signed up for this and had known all along it would end badly. The only time that expression of hers lightens, she knows, is when she sees Jack. She reserves the last remnants of energy she has solely for him.

Charlie decides on a plan of action while she's settling Jack to sleep. He tells her he'll drive back to the apartment belonging to Jay's brother and watch for him; figure out his route so he can catch him off guard without any witnesses; alert him to his brother's fate if he doesn't pay what he owes - plus the interest.

"Interest?" Erin asks dumbly, stroking Jack's hair away from his face. She wishes she could sleep as peacefully as he does - always untroubled and soothed simply by the palm of her hand.

"Cop's gotta be worth more than a couple hundred," Charlie answers from the doorway. "And it's his brother down there."

"How much?" she asks, knowing the answer is going to be high. Too high.

"Five."

"Hundred?"

"Grand."

"Five thousand dollars?" she asks in something close to disbelief, except it's a whispered shriek because she can't have Jay hear Jack cry. Can't have him know there's a child in all of this somewhere if he hasn't figured that out yet.

"Car heater's broke. You wanna keep this place warm all day. He needs diapers and formula and crap," Charlie replies, nodding his head towards their sleeping child. "And we can't have word getting around that customers aren't paying."

And there it is: the real reason for all of this, she supposes. And yet, Erin knows he's right in maintaining his stance on being paid: dealing is a chain and as soon as one of the links breaks, it works its way to the top. The last thing they need is someone beating down their door - or worse - so they can get paid too.

He makes to leave after Erin closes the door behind her, gun already back in hand despite the new lock on the basement door, and tells her he'll be back in an hour or two.

"Just watching, right?" she checks, watching his eyes to see if the resulting "right," is a lie or not.

"Promise?"

"Promise."

His kiss makes her feel uneasy, yet Erin offers her lips again anyway. He tastes like whiskey and cigarettes. He tastes like him.

"Be careful Charlie," she says. He doesn't give a reply; just simply heads out of the door to his car.

She busies herself with tidying; washing up the few plates and mugs from earlier; straightening the few photographs above the fireplace until she's almost certain that the last of her energy has been consumed. She sinks onto the couch, closes her eyes and sucks in a breath she's not entirely sure she wants to let back out again, but of course, she does. For Jack. Only for that little boy upstairs with Charlie's dark hair and Charlie's dark eyes and Charlie's everything. His personality though, Erin hopes, will be the one thing he gets from her.

She's picturing their son's future as a doctor or maybe a lawyer or teacher or something else good, something so much better than the culmination of his parents, and that's when she hears it: a clanging accompanied with a shout. Her stomach lurches, heart sinking so far so fast that she nearly hurls all over the livingroom floor. Maybe, she figures, it's a one-off. A test of their word that if he made a noise, they'd shoot.

But it comes again, louder this time and so she grabs her gun, resting by her side as it always is now. She won't have him wake Jack and risk his cries, so she rises with tired, aching limbs that are screaming for any kind of respite she can grant them.

The key for the lock on the basement door lives in the kitchen drawer where her gun always used to be. Erin takes it in her shaking left hand, willing her fingers to still so as not to give anything away. The light performs its usual on-off flickering until it finally stays on to light the room below the house.

Her descent of the stairs is like something from a movie, she concludes, as she finally reaches the bottom and takes in Jay's hunched body. She's not sure how he's managed to get himself into that position what with the rope binding his hands and feet, but he has and now it's up to her to do something about this noise.

"Hey, Halstead," she hisses, keeping her distance as she aims her gun at his face. "Quit with the noise."

Jay turns to her then, his face screwed and eyes so, so red that he looks something like the protagonist in a horror film. The words he speaks though are so much softer than the noise he's been making that Erin wonders how on earth they could come from the same person.

"I need the bathroom."

Well shit, she hadn't thought of this.

She shrugs, unsure of what else to do. There's no toilet down here and she's not about to untie him so he can use the upstairs bathroom.

"There's a bucket over there," he continues, indicating the far side of the room with his head. "I can use that if you bring it over."

She looks at him then, narrowing her eyes because why on earth is this guy speaking to her like she's anything more than a monster? He stares right back, his face marred with bruises and so she looks away; can't bring herself to look any longer at what Charlie's done. What they've both done, she supposes.

She doesn't recall the moment she decides to get the bucket. It's not a conscious decision evidently, and she only realises she's made it when she's setting down the black tub Charlie uses to wash the car in the summer beside Jay.

"You're going to have to untie my hands."

Erin scoffs. "You really think I'm gonna do that?"

"I'll miss."

"Chance I'll take," she replies, not even sure why she's engaging in this conversation.

"You can keep the gun pointed at me," he says, "Keep my feet tied. But I need my hands free. Can't undo my zipper without them."

She considers his words for a moment, conjures up the scenarios in her head: her unzipping his jeans; him peeing all over the floor and himself.

"He's upstairs," she lies. "Try and escape and he'll kill you and your brother."

He stares at her then: really stares like he's taking in every last detail of her face. She can't bare it - the intensity of his gaze - and so she moves the gun, points it at his chest and then back up to the space between his eyes in order to shift his focus. He seems to realise her decision though, and turns his wrist slightly so they're pointing up. Erin wonders if whether the cable ties might be too loose if he can do this, and so she vows to make the next set tighter.

The knot Charlie's tied in the rope is haphazard - no real finesse to the way he's looped the ends and so it proves easier to loosen than Erin might have suspected. Her gun is by her feet, far enough away that Jay can't reach it, with the barrel pointed at him.

"Okay," she says, picking it up again before undoing the knot fully. "You've got a minute."

"What about the cable tie?"

"You'll manage," she replies flatly.

Jay makes to turn and her heart rating ramps up another fifty paces a minute it seems.

"Hey!" Her voice is teetering on the edge of panicked and she silently curses herself for betraying her exterior. "Face me."

"You can't even give me this last shred of dignity?" he asks, the emotion in his eyes halfway between anger and desperation. For some reason, she thinks of Jack. Thinks, God-forbid, what if it were him in someone's basement, tied to a radiator in the freezing cold and being made to pee in a bucket?

Something inside of her chest tugs. She simultaneously knows and doesn't want to acknowledge what it is. It was never there before she became a mother, but Jack's made her softer in these past few months than she's ever been before. She knows it's a weakness in this situation; knows too, that it'll get her into trouble.

But Jay's not Jack and she shakes her head. "Forty seconds."

He complies and Erin holds in the sigh of relief threatening to tumble out of her mouth as he loosens his jeans, letting them tumble down to his ankles in surrender to this showcase of the loss of dignity she's subjecting him to.

She shivers as she's watching, her flesh goosebumping under her sweater, but she still stands straight, aiming the gun at the man in front of her. It occurs to her that Jay must be absolutely freezing down here. The radiator he's tied to hasn't worked for as long as she can remember, and the heat from the house won't do any good when hot air only rises.

He finishes and she moves forward, indicating his previous sitting place with the glock. He complies without question and once he's settled back down beside the radiator, Erin sets the gun on the concrete - barrel always pointing towards him - and takes the rope in her hands.

She knows he's watching her face the entire time; knows even without looking that his eyes are reading her and so she does her very best to remain impassive, like binding someone twice her size to a radiator is something she does routinely. Once she slips the rope over his wrists however, taking care to note exactly how much room the cable tie allocates between them, she hears Jay suck in a breath; senses his focus is no longer on her, but on something else. She continues to twist the rope around into the figure of nine knot she learned how to do at school once when some cub scout leader came in to recruit more kids under the guise of teaching her fifth grade class 'survival skills'. The only real survival skills she's learned came as a result of Bunny being her mother and the South Side of Chicago being her home for the last twenty-three years. Funny enough, skimming bark off branches so she can toast marshmallows around a fire hasn't ever been a situation she's encountered in daily life.

When she tugs on the rope to ensure its stability, Jay lets out a noise - not so much a grunt or a wince, but some similar hybrid that makes Erin appraise him. His eyes are closed now, head turned away from her and that's when she sees the sweat beading on his forehead.

It must be close to freezing down here - no more than forty degrees she suspects - and so whatever he's feeling as a result of the rope must be pretty horrific, Erin figures. Thing is, it's not like she can ask him if he's okay: the answer to that is always going to be something stronger than 'no' and so she opts for something else, figuring it'll shift his attention.

"You hungry?"

She doesn't know why she asks; what good she's going to gain from his answer, and yet he does turn his head at her words; opens an eye, then the other; checks (she surmises) that he's still here in this God-awful basement.

"No."

And yet he hasn't eaten for over two days and hasn't drunk either - as far as she knows.

"A drink then?"

"So you can watch me piss into a bucket again?" he asks, words clipped and cutting, and yet Erin knows she has no right to feel any sort of sting. She's the one keeping him down here right now after all.

"On average, humans can only last three days without water."

Already, something's telling her that Jay Halstead isn't average.

"What's it matter if he's going to kill me anyway?"

"He just wants to get paid," she tells him. Lies to him. "It's not about killing you."

Jay scoffs and she wonders where he's drawing this strength from when he's been beaten and bound and kept down here; made to pee in front of her; had a gun pointed at him whilst doing it. "How much?"

"Five grand."

This time, he lets out something of a laugh: a crisp, staccato burst of air that's barely even tinged with humour, but Erin supposes that's what it's meant to represent. "You might as well tell your boyfriend to kill me now."

It'd be easier, she thinks. Easier if Charlie killed him now before this runs on any longer than it already has, but she knows he won't. Knows he'll wait at least until he's been paid - whatever capacity that might come in - and so she settles on the words "He'll get paid."

Jay says nothing more and so she heads up the stairs silently too, shuts and locks the basement door even though she'll have to reopen it in a few minutes anyway. She checks Jack first to make sure he's stayed ignorant to all of this; kisses his head and strokes her fingers over his tiny upturned palm, smiling as it twitches, before heading back to the kitchen.

There aren't any bottles of water in the refrigerator, nor cans of soda, but she spies a juice box on the top shelf next to the eggs and figures it'll do. Gun back in her right hand, she heads back down to Jay, stopping in front of him with the realisation she's going to have to hold the juice box for him.

"Here," she says gruffly. "There's no water so this'll have to do."

She pierces the hole with the straw and puts it to his lips, but Jay doesn't open them. If anything, he purses them closed tighter.

"I haven't got all day here Halstead."

That's when Erin spots the goosebumps covering his red flesh. She realises then, that this pursed stance he's in is because he's conserving his energy; trying to stop himself from losing anymore bodyheat. And so, making her next mistake in all of this, she bends so she can catch his gaze; gets him to look at her all without saying any words. When his lips part slightly, she forces the straw in as gently as she can. It takes a few seconds, but finally she sees the purple liquid begin to move up the straw as he sucks. He stares at her the entire time, and as uncomfortable as it is, Erin remains there, crouched in front of him as he consumes what's in the box.

She rises once he's done, feeling that inevitable burn in her thighs and the slight pull of the scar on her lower abdomen but does her best to ignore both.

"I'll uh, bring you a sweater," she tells him. "'S cold down here."

Jay doesn't reply as she backs away, gun pointed towards him at all times, even when she's heading back up the stairs.

She's only just locked the basement door and begun to make her way to the kitchen when she hears a key in the lock, manages somehow to turn and aim the gun, only to see Charlie entering the house with a hand up.

"Woah! Jeez Erin."

Her heart's hammering in her ears and she can hear nothing but that and a high-pitched continuous noise - something like ringing. Charlie's talking to her she knows, because she can see his lips moving, but no words are reaching her brain. He's coming towards her slowly, hand reaching out until it makes contact with her wrist, and only then do her senses return fully in a rush of noise.

"Calm the fuck down," Charlie's telling her. "You want a drink?"

She's nodding and all of a sudden desperate for that burning sensation that comes with gulping too much whiskey at once. The sweater she was about to head upstairs for is all but forgotten, and she wonders - as she brings the glass Charlie gives her to her lips with a shaking hand - how the hell she's going to keep going.