Jason helps Elizabeth through one of the most difficult times in her life. This began as a one shot. I intend to extend it eventually.
Elizabeth stared blankly up into the sky. Rocks bit unforgivingly at her back, her red dress–smeared with wet dirt-was hiked above her waist. One high heel still on her foot, the other lost in the struggle. She would never think about the shoe again. The police would never tell her that they found it ten feet away from where she was attacked and were keeping it as evidence and she wouldn’t wonder and she wouldn’t ask.
She would question other events of the night though and she would come to question every move she made in the coming year. But lying on her back under the dark and hauntingly beautiful starry night she didn’t know that yet.
She wasn’t sure how long she stayed in that position, hidden in a thick brush. She didn’t count minutes or seconds after her assailant rolled off of her breathing hard, smiling triumphantly as though he had won a gold medal in a triathlon.
He waited till his breathing evened out then pulled his pants up. “Don’t tell anyone about this.” He warned.
Elizabeth shook her head, letting him know she wouldn’t. He didn’t say any more words to her. Only looked at her with a sort of pity in his eyes. Like it was a shame that she had been raped and like he wasn’t the one who’d done it. The look made her sick and she turned her head away from him and purged as he slipped out quietly from behind the bushes.
She would never remember what prompted her to move away from the spot where she lay with the cold ground numbing her back the moist grass seeping through the thin material of her dress chilling her to the bone. But somehow she found herself crawling from the bushes and vines of the earth.
She would remember Lucky Spencer and how he looked at her in shock. He seemed as though he was trying to digest the scene in front of him.
Elizabeth Imogene Webber: Dress ripped, skin sodden with dirt, makeup smeared, missing a shoe, scared, emotionless, hurt.
It took the eighteen year old boy only seconds to digest the sight then he sprang into action. He touched her arms, trying to pull her up to him but she hissed at him not to. “Don’t touch me,” she said.
He yanked his hands away from her. He didn’t want to scare her more than she already was. “Elizabeth I’m going to call for help.”
Elizabeth had recoiled into sitting position. Her knees were bent as close to her chest as they could get. Her arms were wrapped tightly around her knees. She rocked slightly back and forth back and forth and stared at nothing and everything. She didn’t hear Lucky call out for help and she didn’t notice when a young couple arrived, hurriedly, at his side. She didn’t recall how he explained what he had walked upon to the couple. She just didn’t.
She felt a new set of hands on her, the third pair of the night. But she didn’t flinch under this person’s touch. The hands were delicate and touched her arms gently. The hands coaxed her away from the spot she sat in. The hands smoothed her torn dress below her bare bottom and the hands held her in the back of the police car on their way to the hospital.
Elizabeth wouldn’t know until later that the hands belonged to Robin Scorpio. She and her boyfriend, Jason Morgan, were the couple that came when Lucky Spencer called.
Jason Morgan paced the hospital corridor. Couldn’t help it, he just did. The girl’s face flashed repeatedly through his head.
He was the first to hear Lucky Spencer calling for help. Robin heard him next and they raced across the midnight damp grass to see what they could do. He didn’t know what he expected to find but he didn’t expect to find a girl of only seventeen years crouched indecently on the ground, her lower half fully exposed, dried rust-colored blood stained on her pale thigh. At one time the blood had been bright red, he knew that much. Fresh blood was vibrant, dry blood was rust.
He had seen a lot of bad things and done a lot of bad things but he had never seen the complete helplessness he saw in the eyes of the girl. Her eyes haunted him. They were big and cornflower blue and wild and empty.
He decided, in that moment, that he would find the man responsible and he would make him pay.
“Jason, you can go home. I’ll stay.” That was his girlfriend, Robin Scorpio. She was sitting just feet away from where he was pacing.
He stopped. “I think I should stay,” he told her. They fell into silent agreement and he paced again.
Nurse Bobbie Spencer rounded the corner walking tiredly in their direction. Jason stopped wearing the hospital linoleum thin and drew his attention to her. Robin did the same.
“How is she?” He asked. Then snapped his mouth closed, shocked that he’d been the first to speak.
Bobby sighed. “She’s sleeping now. The doctor gave her a sedative that should keep her sleep through the night.”
“Physically?” Robin asked.
“She will recover fine physically...”
The drop off in the nurse’s words enveloped them all and they knew that she would not recover fine emotionally.
“Her grandmother is with her now so you two can go home...get some rest.” Bobbie left.
Robin and Jason followed, both reluctantly.
That night while Robin slept restfully in Jason’s arms, Jason thought. He thought about the many ways he could kill the man who had forever scarred the girl in the park.
Elizabeth’s lids fluttered up heavily and then dropped back down like sand bags were tied to her lashes. In the brief moment they were open she saw a man sitting in a chair beside her bed.
He saw her open her eyes, she knew this much because she stared into his steel blue eyes. It made her feel as though she was staring down the barrel of a gun. If it had not been for the sedatives she would have screamed but the drugs were too powerful and the thought to scream was unable to cross her mind. She didn’t know that then and she never would. She fell asleep.
The next time her eyes opened she saw her Grams.
Audrey fussed over her, arranging the stiff hospital sheets around Elizabeth’s legs, she then propped a pillow behind Elizabeth’s head and brushed her granddaughter’s dark curly hair for a few minutes.
“You have such beautiful unruly hair Elizabeth,” she said.
Elizabeth fell asleep once more.
She awoke again but this time she didn’t open her eyes. She played possum, listening to the two nurses in her room speaking to each other in hushed tones. “Poor girl,” they said. “What a tragedy,” they whispered. When they left, she cried.
Days later she left the hospital. The scrapes on her back had scabbed then pealed revealing a fresh layer of pale skin. The ache between her legs was long gone and the delicate flesh there healed. There was no outward sign that she had been assaulted that night in the park. She should be happy for that at least. Partly she was and partly she wasn’t.
As she walked out of the hospital into the coolness of the early morning air and drizzle of light rain, Elizabeth thought. It was a trivial thought, she told herself, but a thought none the less.
She would never be able to save herself for marriage like her friend Emily was. Elizabeth never had intentions of doing that but if one day she had; those plans had been crushed.
She would never be able to share “her first time” story with anyone. For her first time had not been in the backseat of a car with her secret crush after a night of partying. It hadn’t been after prom in a rented hotel room with her high school sweetheart. It wasn’t special or a mistake it wasn’t even mutual.
On a gray sky, rainy morning he watched her leave the hospital with her grandmother. To the outside world she was just an ordinary teenage girl walking her grandmother out of the hospital.
To Jason Morgan she was a broken girl being escorted back into the harsh reality of the world.
Innocence lost.
***
The thick soles of his motorcycle boots thumped off the elevator. He barley acknowledged his guard and friend as he walked by him and into his penthouse. He closed the door with a loud thud and shrugged out of his leather coat.
They had no leads. That’s what his inside man had told him. “The police have no leads.”
“But they have his name, his height, his picture, the whole town knows who he is,” Jason said.
“The police have no leads,” the informant repeated quietly.
Jason felt a sense of hopelessness in hearing that the police were no further along in finding the girls rapist than he was. With the help of his boss, Sonny Corinthos, he had come across a couple of good leads but all of them turned into dead ends and now, a full month after the assault, the trail on Tom Baker had turned cold.
***
Robin heard Jason come home. She waited a few minutes after he arrived to go downstairs. He had been so distant lately. She knew all the reasons why but never brought them up to him. He was worried about Elizabeth Webber, the girl from the park. He worked on finding Tom Baker day in and day out. Robin knew that if Jason ever found the man who had raped Elizabeth in the park no legal justice would be served, only vigilante.
“Any new leads?” Robin asked when she reached the last step before the landing.
“No.”
“Do you want to go for a ride?”
“Not right now.”
“Jason...”
“She’s an outcast.”
“Elizabeth?” Robin asked, though she knew the answer. Elizabeth was the only person Jason ever thought about lately.
He didn’t answer.
Robin had seen Elizabeth around before the rape. The little brunette had spunk. Always smiling, and talking, just being a teen. She had only seen her twice since the night in the park. Once at her grandmother’s house. She stopped by to check on Elizabeth about a week after shed been released from the hospital.
“Elizabeth is in her room,” Audrey told her. “How can I ever repay you for what you did that night?” Audrey asked her.
“No need,” Robin said.
They sipped on hot tea and talked about mundane things like the weather then Robin left. After she got in her car she looked up at the Hardy house and saw Elizabeth in a small window looking down at her. Her skin was paler than usual and her once shiny, curly locks seemed dull and mousy behind the glass. They stared at each other, Robin from her car and Elizabeth from a second floor window, for what seemed like minutes when in reality was only seconds. Then the connection broke and Elizabeth was gone.
The second time Robin saw her Elizabeth was at Kelly’s; it was only a week ago. She was sitting with her sister, Sarah Webber. Sarah was eating cheese fries and Elizabeth was drinking what looked like hot chocolate but could have been coffee.
Elizabeth was dressed uncharacteristically in baggy jeans and a large coat zipped all the way up. It was obvious to Robin that she was hiding behind the layers. Without them she probably felt exposed.
“Hello Elizabeth,” she said, stopping at their table on her way to the counter.
“Hi,” Elizabeth quietly returned.
Robin ordered her food to go and was stepping out of the door when she felt a cold hand graze hers. She turned and faced Elizabeth.
“Thank you.” Elizabeth said.
Robin nodded her head knowingly. “You’re welcome.”
****
Elizabeth looked at the clock above her English teacher’s desk, one minute until the final bell for the school day. It couldn’t come fast enough.
In the weeks after her rape Elizabeth had become accustomed to the stares and whispers and they no longer had the same effect they had when she overheard the nurses in the hospital. The monotone words did not faze her. She heard them but she didn’t, she saw them stare but she didn’t. She had become detached. Her therapist said that she was turning away from the world and into herself.
The therapist said, “Shutting out the outside world isn’t a good thing”.
Elizabeth said “Fuck you,” under her breath, of course.
The bell rang and her classmates rushed out of the room. She lagged behind hoping to miss Lucky Spencer. It was nice of him to walk her home everyday after school but today she wanted to be alone.
The halls were empty before Elizabeth made her way out into them. She slowly packed her book bag with the books that she needed for homework and slammed her locker shut.
Once outside she finally felt like she could breathe. The winter air felt good against her skin, almost cleansing. Her steps were fast and deliberate. She purposely took a wrong turn down an empty alley, slipped behind a large trash bin and waited. It only took a few seconds but she heard his boots crush against the brown slushy snow and the gravel in the alley.
Elizabeth stepped out from behind the green trash bin.
“You’re following me.”
He spun around and faced her. “You shouldn’t be alone in an alley,” he said.
He sounded concerned but she couldn’t be sure. She pushed her hand into the pocket of her oversized coat. Her fingers met the metal of her switchblade, she’d stole it from a tackle and bait shop a week ago and now carried it everywhere.
She was with Lucky at the time of the theft. She didn’t want him to know that she wanted a knife so when he wasn’t looking she slipped it off of a shelf and into her pocket.
Elizabeth pulled the small knife out and flipped the blade up. “Who are you?”
“I’m Jason. Robin’s boyfriend...your friend Emily's brother.” He stayed where he stood but he slowly raised his hands up.
“Why are you following me? Does Robin have you...”
“No. Robin doesn’t know. I’m not going to hurt you Elizabeth.”
“Lizzie. Everyone calls me Lizzie.” She was still holding the blade just not as pointedly as a few moments before. Something in his eyes made her let her guard down a little.
“I’d like to call you Elizabeth...if that’s okay.”
That night Jason lay awake in his bed, Robin curled closely into his side. He thought about the conversation he had with Elizabeth in the alley. She asked him a lot of questions about himself. He answered each one truthfully. Then she asked him if he had been in her hospital room. Something about his eyes... he seemed familiar to her.
“Yes. I was there.”
“Why?” She asked, finally putting the blade, that would have been no match for him had he wanted to hurt her, back into her pocket.
“I don’t know.” He answered honestly.
She pulled her bottom lip into her mouth between her teeth and eyed him curiously. He was sure she was wondering what type of creep he must be, following around a rape victim.
He thought for a moment that she might be embarrassed that he had seen her that night.
What he didn’t know is that Elizabeth had blacked out that night, the only thing she remembered about it was Robin's hands.
He waited for her next question and was mildly taken aback when it came.
“Do you know how it feels to wake up and realize that you are not the person you were before you went to sleep?”
“Yes,” he answered. He did.