Trials and Tribulations - [Bensler EO]

Part Nineteen - Midnight

"Just needed a break, I guess." he responded. She could hear him shrug his shoulders against the sheets, and she could already imagine the blank stare on his face. 

He hated these cases. She knew her partner inside and out, she knew his greatest weaknesses and strengths. She knew just how badly he wanted to scream at the top of his lungs when a case came in involving a child. Even one as cut and dry as this one. 

But even with how much she prided herself in knowing him, she was still oblivious to the fact that sometimes, being around her was his comfort. Not the moment of stepping away and finally taking that first deep breath after drowning. Her atmosphere, her radiance, her environment. 

Just the way she was the calmness inside the eye of the storm. 

Or maybe because she was the storm. 

"Are the parents still here?" she asked. 

He nodded before realizing she couldn't see him in the darkness. "Yup. Can't blame 'em. We've been in this situation a million times but it never gets easier." he rolled back on his side to look at her. "Why is that?"

She could hear the longing in his question, the endless search of why time and experience hadn't numbed the agony. She considered the idea that he only subjected himself to this so it would take away the nightmares. If he exposed himself to it on the logistical side, the savior side, it couldn't hurt him. But he was wrong. They all were. 

"It's always their first time. Not ours. Our jobs require empathy, the only way we can get the job done is to feel it as if it were us." she murmured, barely even listening to the words coming out of her own mouth. It was all on instinct; the answers to the questions that they rarely ever asked. She'd never really pondered, but she still knew the answer as if it were sitting on the surface of her soul.

"I thought..." he trailed off, struggling with his words. "I thought it would get easier. Y'know? That it would become a second nature. Sometimes I think it is. Then I just see the terror on their faces and it's like it's my first case all over again." 

She wanted to listen to the way he spoke. He wasn't a man of many words, certainly not a man of many visible emotions. Hearing him open up was always a welcomed event. She never wanted to be too eager for him to talk, but she always wanted to listen. 

"I get it," she whispered back. How many times had a victim found out they were infected with something from their attacker? How many times did a solved case just lead to further trauma? They saved the day, but they never saved the aftermath. She understood the terror. 

Diego Benitez had cancer. She'd saved him and his mother's lives but she remembered his mother's tearful eyes as the news had sunk in with her that her baby was sick. She always thought she understood the terror that she saw, but until she began to go through it herself, she realized she had barely ever even scratched the surface of understanding. Not until it was her skin, her life, her experience. 

She understood now. Those parents out there, terrified out of their minds as they wait in the bullpen, she understood the pit in their stomachs. She understood the clammy palms and refractory emotions. Their lives were upside down. She hated that she understood. It made her a better cop, but it made the rest of her different.

The situations may not have aligned. They were in two different boats on two different paths and yet, she empathized with them in a way she hadn't even been aware was humanly possible. Terror was terror. 

Silence filled the room again, blanketing itself over them. They both knew where the conversation was heading, but neither of them wanted to step into it. She knew the curiosity burned on the tip of his tongue, waiting for her to give any sort of sign that it was okay to ask.