Awakenings

A/N: Basically, if you hated the season 5 finale "Homecoming", you might like this story. Hope you enjoy, please read and review!

"Sorry, Al."

Hank Voight looked at the picture of his partner and best friend, Alvin Olinsky. Everything he'd kept pent up since that doctor came out of the OR and announced that Al hadn't made it, just came crashing down on him. No longer could he maintain the brick wall exterior he'd personified after all his years on the job. He took another drink, then stepped over to the edge of the roof, looked down, finally, throwing the bottle, watching it fall, hearing it shatter on the empty parking space below. He walked back, and punched the door of the roof access with his fists. They were bruised and bleeding long before he acknowledged any pain. When he finally did, he turned and slid down with his back against the door. He sat on the roof and drew his knees up, half curled in a ball. The events of the last few days kept flashing through his mind, everything that had gone wrong, everything that should never have been allowed to happen. It wasn't supposed to be like this, Al wasn't supposed to go out like this. Voight felt his face scrunch up as his eyes burned harder than his throat had from the liquor, now the tears started to come, now it was actually real. Voight pressed his back against the door, pressed his hands against the sides of his head, and screamed with raw abandon.

Voight continued screaming as somewhere in the recesses of his mind, he became aware of a faint, familiar sound. He couldn't place it, but it kept buzzing, and seemed to be getting louder, louder, louder... Then suddenly, Hank felt the floor beneath his feet give way, and he was falling.

Voight screamed as he felt something hit his back and his eyes shot open. It took a minute for him to remember where he was but it slowly dawned on him that he was in his bedroom. The noise that he'd been hearing in his dream, that was still continuing now, was his cell phone buzzing on the night stand next to him.

"Oh man," Hank murmured to himself as he rubbed his eyes, then reached over for his phone and answered. "Yeah?"

His mind was foggy, still piecing together where reality started and his dream had ended. It was all so real...was any of it real? What time was it? Hell for that matter what day was it? All of the thoughts racing through Voight's mind crashed to a halt when he heard what the person on the other end had to say. Then he was wide awake.

"When?" Voight asked as he looked at the clock. "Where?" He threw back the covers. "I'll be right down."

"You look like hell," Olinsky said as Voight came up to him.

"Been a rough night," Hank answered as they walked onto the crime scene and noticed one body in the street that the paramedics were in no hurry to load up. "Anybody see anything?"

"No eyewitnesses, somebody heard the shots and called 911," Al explained. "Possibly a gang related drive-by. Apartment complex over there took most of the hits, some of the families were hit while they slept, minor injuries, family of five was taken to the hospital, two teen boys shot dead on the sidewalk...the one in the street is the reason we got called in on this."

One of these things was not like the other. The two fatalities on the sidewalk were a couple of high school boys, this one was a grown man in his 50s who was dressed too professionally to come from this neighborhood, save for the blood stained shirt he wore which showed that all the damage from the shooting had been in the chest and upper torso. Had he been here to meet someone who actually lived on the block? And if so, for what reason?

"He say anything when first responders arrived?" Voight asked.

"DOA," his friend answered.

"Too bad, he might've been able to tell us who killed him," Hank replied as he looked at the bloody, bullet riddled body almost pityingly.

"That would just be too easy," Al replied. "Intelligence wasn't made for easy cases."

Olinsky looked at his friend and saw that Voight wasn't looking well, even by his standards. It was 30-some years too late for Hank to be sickened by the senseless gore of a drive-by shooting, but right now the sergeant looked like he was about to collapse and/or puke.

Al reached over and placed a hand on Voight's shoulder, "You okay, man?"

Voight stepped away and said only, "Gimme a minute."

Olinsky conceded to that, Voight could take a minute, but Olinsky was going with him. He followed Voight over to a dumpster at the corner, Hank forced the lid up and proceeded to lean over and vomit, something Olinsky had never seen him do on the job. After a night of too many drinks, yeah, back in their earlier days before they both learned some self control. But never a crime scene. Especially one that wasn't any bloodier than any of the other random acts of violence which plagued their fine city of Chicago by the hundreds every year. In their line of work, they'd dealt with bodies charred beyond recognition, bodies partially dissolved in acid, people cut open and all their insides strewn out all over the crime scene. None of that had the power to make Voight so much as flinch.

Al stood back and waited until Voight's body had emptied itself of anything it had in it, and switched over to a series of dry heaves, before asking him, "You never get sick, what's the matter, you get food poisoning or something?"

Voight took a Kleenex out of his jacket pocket and wiped out his mouth and tossed it in the dumpster, and still felt a need to wipe his mouth on his sleeve. "Oh man, Al, you wouldn't believe the dream I had earlier."

"I didn't think you ever dreamt," Al replied.

"Well I sure did tonight," Voight told him.

"Past finally catching up to you?" Olinsky asked.

"That wouldn't bother me," Voight said.

"What then?"

Voight turned to his friend and asked, "You got a minute?"

Olinsky gestured back to the corpse in the street. "He's not going anywhere."

"Woods, huh?" Al asked after Voight finished recapping his nightmare. "Well, hard to put anything past him, as we well know."

Voight shook his head in a stupor, "That was a real nightmare, everything went wrong, stuff I would never let happen."

"It was just a dream, it's over," Al tried to assure his visibly shaken friend. It bothered him to watch Hank get his nerves so frazzled by a dream. He was the one who no matter what he'd done or what happened, always boasted he slept like a baby every night. Al told him, "I'm here, I'm still in one piece. I don't have any plans of going to prison anytime soon."

"Let's get done here," Hank said. "When everybody goes home, there's something I need to tell you."

"You got it," Al remarked.

They went back to the crime scene, stepping around the yellow tape.

"Canvas turn up anything?" Voight asked the uniforms and his crew from Intelligence.

"Just the typical," Antonio said, "nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything, nobody knows nothing, nobody even speaks English, and when I called them on it they didn't speak Spanish either."

"Sergeant, are you alright?" Burgess asked, noticing that something about Voight's appearance seemed off, but not able to put her finger on it.

"Fine," Voight answered.

"We get this is a personal case for you," Ruzek said.

"It's not personal, it's just our business," Voight replied. "And we will treat this just like any other case, understood?"

Nobody was dumb enough to argue with that, whether they actually believed it or not.

"Can they get him out of here now?" Atwater asked, gesturing to the body in the street.

"Yeah," Voight answered.

"Cool," Kevin went to inform the paramedics.

"Anybody notify his daughter yet?" Voight asked.

"We tried, nobody answered," one of the uniforms answered.

"Okay, we'll go do it ourselves," he replied.

Voight took one last look at the bloody body of Denny Woods laying in the middle of the street, an estimated five bullets in his chest, but they'd have to wait for an autopsy to get the official report. Death, or maybe just the sheer fact that somebody would actually gun him down, had wiped that arrogant smug smirk off of his face that he had worn so well over the years. Of course, everybody knew that there was no way this was premeditated on anybody's part, just a simple matter wrong place wrong time drive-by and Woods, for whatever reason he'd been out here this late in the night, had simply gotten caught in the crossfire. Behind him, the apartment complex had been peppered with bullets, half the windows shot out, a family of five on the second floor all injured while they slept, two teen boys dead in the yard, possible gang affiliations would have to be checked out. And Denny lay in front of all this, five feet from his car, which had also received damage from the spray of ammo as the shooters had driven by. What had he been doing out here? Did it even matter? Technicalities for a by-the-book report, it would matter there, but in the grand scheme of things, it was irrelevant.

"Goodbye, Denny," Hank said. Somber though his simple statement was, he'd be damned if he didn't feel the inside of one cheek tightening as the beginning of a smile. It didn't last long though, because now he had to go find Brianna and break the news to her. And he would do it with just as much professional courtesy as any other death he'd had to inform next of kin on.

"Poor kid," Voight said as he and Al left the Woods' home. They'd arrived an hour ago to tell Brianna about her father, and it hadn't been pretty when she found out. Voight wasn't sure about leaving her alone, so he'd called one of the patrolmen to park their squad car outside her house and inform him if she left.

"Only thing worse than losing a child is losing a parent," Al said as he followed his partner out to the car.

Both cops turned when they saw someone walking down the street towards them. The illumination from the street lamp revealed it was Ruzek.

"How'd it go?" he asked.

"Girl just lost her father, how do you think?" Olinsky asked.

"Find anything?" Voight asked him.

"Gang unit's being territorial, they won't talk to us," Adam answered.

"It'll keep until morning," Voight said, "let's call it a night. Oh, Ruzek."

Adam turned on his heel. "Yeah, Sarge?"

"How's your sister doing these days?" Hank asked.

The look on Adam's face said he was just as confused as Al was.

"Uh, fine, I think, I haven't talked to her in a while," he answered.

"Make sure you do," Voight told him. "Don't let too much time pass, we know plenty well from our line of work that the future isn't guaranteed."

Ruzek stood there for a minute with a dumbstruck look on his face before finally responding, "Right...okay...well, 'night."

Al waved in response. Once Ruzek turned the corner and was out of earshot, he turned to Hank and asked, "His sister? You're not starting to get paranoid on me, are you?"

"I just want to make sure," Voight responded.

"Don't start losing it now, friend," Al told him.

"I think I've already lost it," Hank said.

Al turned to get in the car, behind him he heard Voight call to him, "Al."

"Huh?" he turned back to face his partner.

The next thing Olinsky was aware of was the air being squeezed out of him as Voight gripped him in a crushing bear hug. The first couple seconds Olinsky was so stunned he wasn't sure what was happening, then slowly his mind took it all in.

"Hey, hey," he tried to think of something to say, but came up empty. He managed to wriggle one hand out of Voight's death grip and put it on his friend's shoulder and told him, "It's alright, Hank."

They stood like that for several seconds, Al inhaled but still felt like the air wasn't actually getting in. His ribs and half of the stuff in his back were starting to hurt.

"Hank," he rasped, "Hank, this is starting to get awkward. People are going to talk."

As if a cue, Voight saw the squad car pulling up to stake out Woods' house, and he finally let go of his friend.

Al sucked in a large breath and said sheepishly, "After that, I feel like I should buy dinner." On a slightly more serious note he added, "I'd invite you back to my place but a garage isn't too homey."

"You're coming home with me," Voight told him. "Something I want to show you."

Voight closed his safe and moved the shelf back in front of it. He turned to Al and held up several stacks of bills with bands wrapped around them.

"What's that?" Olinsky asked.

"100 thou, you keep this, if anything ever happens, or looks like it will, you get the best lawyer in the city on retainer," Voight told him as he all but stuffed the money in Al's coat pocket.

"Come on, Hank," Al said.

"I'm serious."

"What could possibly happen?" Al asked.

"The lives we lead, you show a stunning lack of imagination," Voight told him.

"Yeah, but as much stuff as we've pulled over the years, nothing's happened," Al said.

"And I'm for keeping it that way," Voight replied as they headed up the stairs, "but where people go wrong is when they think nothing can happen."

"So what about you?" Al asked.

"I've got my own ass covered, it's you I want to be sure about," he answered.

"Hank, you know that what you dreamed about could never happen."

"I know," Hank said as they returned to the kitchen. "But I don't feel like taking any chances."

Al looked at his friend and said simply, "I don't get it."

Voight turned to face him, and explained, "First I lost Camille, then I lost Justin, then I lost my grandson, then I lost Erin." Now the picture was starting to get clearer to Olinsky, who just stood there and said nothing. Voight paced around the room, looking like he couldn't go through with what he was about to say, but somehow he managed, though Al could hear his voice starting to break. "My whole family, everyone I ever cared about, they're all gone...I can't let anything happen to you too, you're all I've got now."

"Hank." Now it was Olinsky grabbing Voight and pulling him close as he heard the sobs emerging from his friend's throat, then felt the tremors wracking through his body. It had been many years since he had ever seen Hank like this, many years and many personal tragedies ago, back when Camille died. That had been a lifetime ago, and at the time it was the worst thing that they'd lived through, neither of them at the time could possibly envision all the deaths they'd had to live with since.

"It's alright, Hank," Al tried to reassure his friend as he kept a tight hold on him. "It's alright."

Voight could hardly hear him. He was lost in the memories of the dream. Alvin arrested, locked up, denied bail, stabbed, all the blood, waiting by the OR doors, waiting...waiting...waiting...then the doctor coming out.

Hank struggled in Olinsky's embrace as he brought his hands up to his head and screamed, just as he had on the rooftop in the dream.