"Okay, if you can check on her every fifteen minutes. Call me when she wakes up?" Amber asked, looking up from the patient chart she'd been filling in on the iPad.
"Yes, Doctor." The nurse nodded. "You have a visitor, by the way, he's waiting in your office."
"Thanks." Amber yawned, knowing without having to ask it was going to be Kelly. She'd been meaning to call him back when she'd ended up rushing into a surgery. That was over eight hours ago and he was probably worried. She wondered for a moment if she had time to go and grab a coffee first, but he'd probably been waiting a while already.
"Hey." She greeted him as she walked into her office, stripping out of her lab coat and sitting herself down on the sofa beside him. He was still in his turnout gear, soot covering his face and an unreadable expression. "Everything okay?"She asked warily, although she knew the answer was going to be no.
He nodded, but as he did so his eyes filled with tears. He grabbed her and pulled her into a hug, burying his face in her shoulder. She could feel his breathing turn ragged and he sobbed silently into her shoulder.
"Kelly, what's wrong?" She asked gently, her hands rubbing soothing circles across his back. "Hey, talk to me." She prompted when he didn't say anything.
She pulled back a fraction, using a finger under his chin to tilt his head up so she could look at him. "I'm sorry." He mumbled, wiping roughly at his eyes. The tears had left streaks in the soot that covered his face. "I shouldn't have come here."
"Don't be stupid." She dismissed him quickly. "Tell me what happened."
"I um.. there was... there was a building fire, and this kid." His voice cracked. "I was right there Amber, right there in the room with him and I missed him. He died because of me."
She pulled him tight against her, rubbing his back gently as he cried on her shoulder. "I know it hurts now, but you're going to look back on this at some point and realise there was nothing you could've done differently." She realised her words were going to offer very little comfort to him at this point, she'd been in his position enough times to know that, but it was all she really had to offer him at this point.
"I should've checked under the bed." He mumbled. "I thought I did..."
"You did everything you could, Kelly." She soothed. "I know that, and you do too. Sometimes things don't go our way."
He looked up at her for a moment, eyes filled with tears, as though he was going to say something. The shrill beeping of her pager cut through the silence in the office before she could speak. "Sorry." She mumbled, rummaging in her pocket to see who it was. "Shit... I've got to go. Can you wait here?" She asked, seeing it was a 9-1-1 page about the patient she'd just been in surgery with. She jumped to her feet and ran for the door.
****
He was gone when she got back to her office an hour later, and she wasn't surprised. She'd learned by now that if there was one thing Kelly Severide didn't do well, it was talking about his feelings. She'd tried calling him a couple of times but of course hadn't got any kind of response for him. That was how she'd found herself hammering on the door of his apartment at 2 am.
"Amber?" A very confused and half asleep looking Shay opened the door. "Is everything okay?"
"Is Kelly here?" She asked. "Sorry, I didn't realise how late it was. I was just on my way home from work."
"It's fine." Shay waved a hand dismissively. "I thought he was with you?"
"He turned up in my office this afternoon and he was really upset. My patient crashed and I told him to wait for me and then when I got back he was gone. I've been trying to call him for ages but he won't answer." Amber explained.
"He never came home after our shift. Said he was staying at your place tonight." Shay explained, waving her inside and closing the door. She grabbed her phone off the counter and tried calling him again. "Straight to voicemail."
"He seemed pretty upset earlier." Amber frowned. "Do you know where he might go? I haven't been home yet so I can check my place, but what if he's not there?"
Shay was quiet for a moment. "Go home and check he's not there. If he's not I'll call Casey and find out if he knows where he is. He um... he doesn't deal with stuff like this very well. His face when they found the kid..."
She squeezed Shay's arm gently. "I'll go home and check now. I'll call you as soon as I get there." Amber suggested, heading straight for the door.
She breathed a sigh of relief when she reached her building and spotted his car out front. She headed in and was relieved to see him asleep on her couch. 'He's here. I'll call you in the morning.' She quickly fired off a text to Shay.
"Kelly." She knelt down beside him and shook him awake. "Kelly, wake up."
He sat up abruptly, looking at her in confusion. "What?"
"What are you doing here Kelly?" The stench of alcohol hit her as she got closer to him. Then she spotted all the empty beer bottles on the coffee table. "You didn't wait for me."
"It's fine, I'm fine." He mumbled. "Just didn't want to go home to Shay."
"You can keep saying you're fine all you want Kelly, you're really not fine." She sighed, sitting down on the sofa next to him. "Drinking yourself unconscious really isn't the way to deal with something."
"Made me feel better for a bit though." He shrugged, leaning back against the sofa again and staring at the ceiling. He might've been drunk, but he wasn't drunk enough to miss the disappointment in her eyes as she looked at him and he didn't want to see it. "I might as well just stay here and get drunk anyway. I'm no good to anyone, no good at my job. That kid died because of me. So why not? Not like anyone's going to miss me is it."
"Don't." She snapped. He sat up and looked at her again, surprised by her change of tone. "You know full well what I mean Kelly. After everything I told you, yeah fine you might be doing it with beer instead of prescription drugs, but I'm telling you now having spent years trying to get my life back on track that burying whatever you're feeling in alcohol isn't the way to do it."
He snorted indignantly. "I'm nothing like you. I'll have a drink to forget about it if I want to. I've got the willpower to stop any time, unlike some people."
She stared at him for a moment, trying to remind herself that he was drunk and upset and he didn't mean it. It wasn't enough to stop his words from stinging though and her eyes began to fill with tears. "Get out." She snapped.
He looked at her blankly. "I said get out!" She shouted, loud enough this time that she'd probably woken her neighbours. "Get out of my apartment Kelly!"
He scrambled to his feet still looking confused, his drunk brain struggling to put together what he'd said with her sudden change of mood.
"Get out!" She yelled again when he still hadn't left. This time he did, the door slamming behind him with enough force to shake the pictures hanging on the wall. She got up and locked the door behind him to make sure he didn't come back, then collapsed into bed and sobbed into her pillow until she fell asleep.
****
When she woke the next morning it was light, the sunlight was streaming in through the window in her bedroom as she hadn't shut the curtains the night before. Her head was pounding and she still felt exhausted. She laid there for a moment, then the memories of the argument with Kelly came flooding back. She grabbed her phone off the bedside table but he hadn't tried to call or text her. She had one message from Shay asking if everything was okay as Kelly had turned up at home again. She stared at it for a minute before deciding to ignore it. She didn't want to talk to anyone, at least not yet.
She knew he was drunk and hurting, that he probably hadn't meant what he had said... and that was if he could even remember having said it in the first place. She'd been in his position and she could understand the hurt that came along with losing someone you felt you should have been able to save. But if this was going to be his reaction every time something went wrong or her lost someone... could she really put herself through that all over again?
Last night, he'd reminded her of Jack in the aftermath of the school shooting. It was an unsettling realisation which sent a rush of nausea straight to her stomach. She lurched out of bed and onto the cool tiles of the bathroom floor just in time to empty the contents of her stomach into the toilet.
As unsettling as it was, it was true. In those early days after the school shooting, Jack had taken up residence on their sofa and drunk himself stupid on a daily basis claiming it was easier than thinking about it. She hadn't known what to do at the time, had figured it was just his way of dealing with things and that after a week or so had passed he'd pull himself out of it and go back to work, that sooner or later he was going to have to accept that there was nothing he could have done and start to move on with his life. She'd been wrong though, three weeks later he was still there surrounded by beer bottles and mumbling about what he could've done differently.
She'd put her foot down in the end, or at least tried to, and stopped buying the alcohol for him and told him he needed to pull himself together. That was the first time he'd hit her that night, and she could still feel the sting of his palm as it had connected with her cheek and taste the alcohol on his breath as he'd stood over her laughing at how pathetic she was.
She sat on the bathroom floor for a little while until she was relatively sure she wasn't going to be sick again, then got up and brushed her teeth before flopping back down on the bed. She grabbed her phone and quickly called the hospital to tell them she was sick and wouldn't be in today. She laid on the bed and closed her eyes, trying to ignore the churning feeling in her stomach. The images of Jack just wouldn't go away though. She could see him standing over her, laughing at what he'd done to her. All the names he'd ever called her, the ways he'd threatened to kill her, all the reasons he'd given why she was worthless and pathetic were just playing in her head on a loop over and over.
She got up and started pacing around the apartment, the wooden floorboards creaking under her feet as she went. As she paced past the kitchen her eyes came to rest on the bottle of red wine beside the cooker. One of the neighbours had brought it over the day she moved in. She'd meant to give it to Shay or Kelly because while she did drink occasionally she didn't allow herself to drink at home. Her therapist back home had pointed out on more than one occasion that although it might be in liquid form, alcohol was still a drug and she was still an addict.
She looked at the bottle again for a moment. One glass wouldn't do any harm though... It might be enough to take the edge off the crippling anxiety she could feel building and allow her to get some rest. Despite what Kelly had said, she had the willpower to just have one glass. She knew she did.
****
"Wake up!"
Kelly groaned, shielding his eyes from the bright sunlight. He blinked as his eyes adjusted enough to realise the reason it was suddenly so bright was that Shay had opened the curtains. She flopped down on the bed beside him, jolting the bed enough that for a moment he thought he might throw up.
"Shay, don't." He warned, throwing his arm over his eyes as his head began to throb. How much had he drunk last night? How had he ended up at home?
"Shut up Kelly." Shay snapped. "Tell me what happened?"
He tentatively raised his arm away from his eyes enough to look at her. "What do you mean what happened?"
"Well, Amber turned up here in the middle of the night looking for you, then texted me to say you'd turned up at her place and then you came crashing back in here so drunk you could barely stand and swearing about her at half-past five this morning..." Shay explained. "So again, what the hell happened Kelly?"
He stared at her, his brow furrowed as he tried to remember what had happened. He'd gone to the hospital, sat and waited for her for a while and then when he realised she was going to be a while he'd gone to the store to grab some beer and waited for her on her couch. He couldn't even remember her coming home?
"I don't know." He mumbled. He reached out for his phone.
"I already tried calling her," Shay explained. "She's not answering my calls or my messages. Something tells me she's even less likely to want to speak to you."
He dropped his phone back on the bedside table. "I just wanted it to stop." He mumbled. "I just didn't want to keep seeing his face."
Shay squeezed his arm. "I know, but like everyone keeps telling you it wasn't your fault Kelly. No one else would've done anything any different. You can't punish yourself forever. Maybe just give Amber some space for a bit? Whatever you did, I'm sure she knows you were upset and you didn't mean it."
Kelly nodded reluctantly. Maybe Shay was right, she usually was in situations like this.
"You'd better get up and shower, shift starts in two hours." She announced, getting back up off the bed.
"Two hours?" Kelly looked at her blankly. "How long have I been asleep?"