Will was sitting across from her this time. Her legs were crossed and her body indrawn and tight. She was nervous. Helen Magnus was nervous and scared. She had no idea where this exact conversation was going to take her. "I need you to relax." His voice was soft when he spoke, the psychologist's voice that he had practiced many an hour to perfect taking over.

"I'm not going to relax, Will, it's not something I do." Her tone was short and she knew it, but at that particular moment she didn't care.

"I know, but you have to try or this is not going to be as effective." Magnus closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath slowly and released it reticently and tediously. It was a sign to him that she was ready to begin. "So you were raped."

Magnus' eyelids flew open at his accusation, her blue orbs boring into his. "I was…forced to have sex with him, yes."

He wasn't quite sure what the distinction was, but it was definitely worth tracing her thoughts on the matter. "And what is the difference, if I may ask, between forced sex and rape?"

She looked at her hands then, knowing she had done something wrong, said the wrong words, and implied the wrong answer. That was so unlike her, she was usually always right, except about these matters. She was always wrong about these matters. "It was a different time, Will. There was no such thing as rape." Her voice was defensive, but her movements said resigned.

"You might have been born in a different time, and you might have grown up in one, but you are not of that time now. And let's face it, even back then you weren't of that time, Magnus. So what makes you think that you would still be confined to those rules?"

He did have a valid point. Magnus remained silent: she wanted to let him do the talking for now. She was never very good at this emotional talking. She had decided long ago that it was mostly gibberish and pointless, though it did have some valid points and use during immediate traumas or situations. That had been why she had hired him, not so he could sit there and shrink her. Yet, here she was, sitting in his office on a Tuesday morning after being banned from active duties letting him shrink her.

He interrupted her thoughts with another jarring question, "How many times did he rape you?"

Her eyes slowly moved from the floor where they had somehow locked on a few loose strands of the carpeting, to his shoes, his legs, his chest and then his face. "I—I don't know. Too many times to remember or to count." Her eyes immediately flicked right back to the loose strands of carpeting. The carpeting was safe, it wouldn't ask unnecessary questions.

"Did he rape you with something other than his body?"

She flashed to that moment when she saw the knife, when she knew that's what he was going to do with it. The tears started to streak down her face and her head was shaking back and forth, she was crying out "No! No!" in an instant.

He kneeled down in front of her, grasping her hands to separate them from the death grip they had on each other. He noticed her palms were bleeding from where her nails had been digging into the flesh. "Magnus." She looked up at him, her eyes focusing enough so he knew he held her attention. "Look at me and focus on me." She nodded; her chest was heaving and stopping short with air, while the mucus ran down the back of her throat causing her to gasp sharply so her breathing to become uncontrolled. "Focus on me and only me." She nodded again and her breathing regulated. "Ok, now tell me what you are seeing."

"John."

"And what is he doing?"

She whimpered, "Nothing you want to hear." She stood sharply and stalked to the window, her arms crossed tightly over her chest while she strove to compose herself.

"Magnus," he stood, but he didn't move closer to her, "you don't have to tell me, but I do think it would help."

"You want me to tell you? You want me to tell you how he raped me because I refused to abort Ashley and because I saved the embryo instead?" She was angry now and she turned on him, her body tightly wound, "You want me to tell you how he humiliated me in front of my father's friends, in front my friends and my family because I did something inappropriate? How he would hit and beat me when I would do something he didn't like? How I had to walk on eggshells for weeks at a time when he was in one of his moods and how I had to lay there and pretend I enjoyed it when he would tie me up and press a sharp blade to my skin? How he robbed me not only of Ashley's pregnancy but of two others? I can't have children again, Will, because I stupidly told him I saved the embryo rather than abort it. Do you really want me to continue?"