1. Save

What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.  
-_Antoine De Saint-Exupery_

Leaning on the kitchen surface watching his son play with balloons out of the window, he feels the familiar swell of uneasiness rise within his chest. It is cold outside, Eli and his friends wrapped up against the coming winter, and he can see each breath they take as they run. Fall light spreads across the scene, dancing on the children's skin, and yet he keeps back from the illuminated patch creeping into the kitchen, staying within the shadow the half down blind provides.

All he can think of is the day of his birth, seven years before: the blood staining Olivia's shirt, the cleanliness of Eli as he lay in Kathy's arms. The sound of her heartbeat resounding through her as he held her and thought he would never lose her, that they had come so close it could never now happen. They had cheated fate.

A half drunk beer rests on the side behind him, despite it being only lunchtime on his youngest son's birthday, and he rejoices in the silence of the house while everyone celebrates outside. He can hear their shouts and laughter but he's in his own world, and he's glad. It's been too long since he got to be alone, everyone watches him now, walks on glass and accepts his vicious crap with a patience that infuriates. He wants someone to slap him, to make him see the world. He wants to be called on it. Like she would.

It's only come to the fore again since her kidnapper was caught. It had faded over the years, they had stopped treading gently, but then that day came when he had come so close to the end, to the answers, and now they wait for him to break and shatter in a world without hope.

He's started counting days again. Days since her loss, days counting upwards to a never-ending total. All he really wants to do is count down to a zero, to a specified day. He wouldn't mind if he had to count ten thousand days till then, as long as he knew there was an finish line. But none is offered, and uncertainty is all he can rely on.

Nights are now spent lying in bed with no sleep, thinking of Hartman, their perp, her....her what? Killer? No body. Kidnapper? No person. Rapist? No semen. He knows the man is sat in a cell, locked away as he should be, but not for what he did to her. No justice for Liv. He obsesses over every detail of the man, can recite the facts of his birth and which schools he went to, the story of his life in official documents. He knows his height, his weight, his birthday, better than he knows his wife or children's. He has to know him to defeat him. But what will he win if he does, he wonders.

Picking up the bottle, he downs the half left in one go before moving automatically to the fridge to pull another free, relishing its chill. It's not until he has the cap off and is about to drink that he hears a small cough and a sigh behind him, and looks to see Kathleen standing, watching.

"Time was you'd have heard me thirty seconds ago," she says, no smile on her face. He drinks long and slow before looking at her again.

"Time was you'd have been drinking with me," he counters, a small voice telling him in his head that it is a low blow, that she is his daughter, but he has said it now and it won't be taken back, however much he flushes with sudden regret. She doesn't react though, and that is worse.

"Why don't you go outside and join them? Eli would love to have you play with him." He knows the meaning behind her words. Go be a Dad, the one you're not. Spend time with him instead of wasting away in here, shrivelling to nothing in the dark. She should just say it, they all should, but they fear his implosion. He glances at the window, the bright colours of their coats against stark skies.

"You remember when you first saw him? How tiny and perfect and untouched he was?"

She smiles,

"Yeah. He looked like a doll, except he didn't fit in his skin. And then he cried, and he was suddenly a real person, like it took a cry to make him whole. I never knew that before, that feeling of seeing someone become who they are."

He thinks on her words. On how each of his children had done that, gone from a swollen belly to a person. An unidentified future to a now, of blood and breath and tears. Of the day you stop imagining, and see for the first time.

"She did that. She saved him. She saved your Mom. And no one saved her," he's nearly finished the second of his beers and it tastes as bitter and as sweet as that day, when he was given a son and nearly lost so much, "she was there for him and I wasn't there for her."

It's words he has thought and spoken more times than he can bear, a nightmare lullaby that sends him to sleep in the silent hours of the night when he feels like the only person of the world awake, and not even the wind breaks the silence. "_You weren't there, and you should have been._"

Kathleen is looking at him, he can feel it but he doesn't dare look back. There will be pity in her eyes, perhaps resignation or frustration, perhaps the terrifying moment that all children have when they see their parents as weaker than them. Or at least nothing more than them. She must have that moment so often now.

"You can't save her, Dad. When are you going to realise that?"

He can hear a clock in the background, counting down time. The children will be in soon, for cake and candy, and the house will fill with noise again. But for now the question dulls his senses and all he feels is beer sliding down his throat, the cold of glass beneath his palm, and his sorrow that he has no answer for her.

When the silence becomes too unbearable, she stands with a much repeated sigh and walks from the room without another sound. He reaches for stability, the bottle, but misses, knocking it over so it rolls across the table, spilling beer as it goes. He watches, fascinated, as it flows onto the surface and over the edge, flooding the floor beneath with an expanding puddle. He waits until it stops, just drips sliding off the wood and rippling the beer when they fall, and gives the glass a small push, so it rolls and falls and shatters, just as expected. Cleaning up with no protection, the alcohol stings cuts that are made, and it is a relief.

Once he has done, he doesn't go, despite the pull nagging at him. But there is a calm in the knowledge that he will, soon, and he can stop holding his breath. It's easy now to stand and walk out into the light, to see his own gasps exhale before him, to grab his son and hold him close and do his best pretending.

It is the next day, as the banner and balloons float down from the walls and cake crumbs seem to scatter every place he looks, that he can act. The drive is full of nothing but gentle comfort, a numbness in the setting in motion something he cannot stop. That will not end until all is spilled and something breaks.

The sun has joined him, and he sits outside the gates enjoying its weak attempts at warmth and staring at barbed wire sharp against the sky, waiting heady minutes before moving. He shows his badge to the officer, and says,

"I'm here to see Daniel Hartman."


	2. Lie

He feels strangely comfortable as he walks through the corridors, absorbing the chill coming from bleak walls and sparse areas wrapped in steel. He is even more at ease as he sits in a room and waits for Hartman to arrive, the air dank with the smell of fear and tragedy. There is light but it is weak, sadder even than the waning, listless sun of the winter day outside, and Elliot imagines he can almost taste the sheen of regret coating every surface. He knows what it feels like.

When the tread of feet announces Hartman's arrival, Elliot doesn't react, just listens until he can feel the man's presence behind him, hear his breath. He stays as still as stone, waiting for Hartman to make the first move and finally he does, walking round and sitting in the chair opposite without saying a thing.

He is in the obligatory orange jumpsuit, hands cuffed in front of him, and the colour washes him out so he looks grey and barely human. Even so, Elliot is surprised all over again how normal, how small Hartman is, though he seems to have bulked up in his time there and is sporting a scar on his forehead Elliot doesn't remember from before. And he should know, he has memorised every inch of this man.

They sit and look at each other, a stand-off of sorts, and Elliot is forced to contain the increasing urge to pace, to move, to fidget and scream at the man. It builds within him, making him tense each muscle in order to stay still, and he thinks it will win. But Hartman breaks first, in a languid way as he leans back and stretches his shoulders, arms arching overhead before speaking, and Elliot can release a breath.

"You asked to see me, what can I do for you?" His voice is low and quiet, polite and non-threatening, and Elliot knows that he hasn't got an answer, even as he looks at him. How can he say he needed to make sure the monster he carried with him in his head was still real and not a figment or a ghost. To check that this world is a reality, and not simply a vicious dream.

"Do you remember me?" Elliot sounds curious but in a strangely light-hearted way, with none of the intimidation or underground threat he usually allows to surface when he's confronting a suspect. With the question comes an increase in the feeling that has taken over since the previous day, that this is searingly raw and razor sharp, but also that he is watching from a far away distance as it cuts. It's heady, and dizzying, and wonderfully intoxicating in its power.

"How could I forget?" Hartman looks down at his cuffed hands, picking at the skin by his fingernails and it is a familiar movement from the interrogation that has been replayed over and over again in Elliot's mind. It is another reassurance, that this is still the same man, the one that binds him still to Liv. "Least you don't look like you're about to kill me now."

For a second Elliot wants to tense his muscles and suggest that his observation is wrong, that he will dive across the desk and slam his head back so hard against the wall his brain will smear downwards with him as he falls. But somehow, he doesn't have it in him to engage in the tedious, pointless play. The truth, is he doesn't want to kill the man, not yet, and they both know it.

Still, he cannot resist the habit of years and asks, "Should I want to kill you?". The question, so cop like, tastes artificial in his mouth and he regrets it almost as soon as it leaves him. A game of cat and mouse is pointless when the prey is already caught. Hartman seems to feel it as well, but instead of calling Elliot's bluff he just smiles and shakes his head, giving nothing away.

"How are you?" There is a bizarre note to Elliot's question, the words everyday and polite in such a surreal, damaged place, and Hartman eyes him before answering, searching for an ulterior motive. There isn't one, Elliot feels out of control in his own mind, dictated in this scene by puppet strings with no known master. An unknown force has guided him here and left him to fend for himself, sitting in front of his nemesis and having a chat that wouldn't be out of place at a dinner table, with wives gossiping around them.

"I'm okay. I keep quiet, to myself." Hartman looks subdued and vulnerable as he answers, not a violent rapist at all, and Elliot forces himself to think of the girls broken expressions when they recounted their rapes in order to ground himself in reality. It doesn't seem to work, and edgy compassion is winning the fight despite his head.

"You not getting bothered?"

"I hold my own when I have to." The man is reticent, bewildered, and Elliot can't blame him. He's in a twisting dream and he knows it must be worse for Hartman, who doesn't have confusion and conflict running wild in his mind.

"The guard said I'm the first visitor you've had. Is there anyone I could get in touch with for you?" Thoughts of his loneliness run through his head, how he would feel locked up with no visits, no letters, no contact with an outside world. He imagines it simply as an accentuated feeling of his own existence, walls shielding them both from reality, and even as he does he knows he's spiralling out of his own control.

"I don't really have any family. Just a grandmother. But she won't come." A child-like sadness is evident now.

"Have you asked her?"

"I called her, once. She hung up. I don't blame her," And for the first time he meets Elliot's eye, daring him to argue that a family member should always be loyal, should disregard such events as a conviction for rape. Elliot won't dispute it though, he can see all too easily how a rapist grandson would be hard to stomach.

As a sharp silence reigns he tenses again, to avoid the fidget that would show weakness. He is asking questions that have more to do with concern that with trying to find out Olivia's whereabouts, and he can't bring himself to ask what he wants to know, to shatter the strange illusion they are creating between them. This is between the two men and it is a battle to be fought, with twisted rules of engagement both seem to understand.

"If you need anything, I could help." He doesn't know what he thinks he can do but

it's an offer he realises he means as he says it. However, Hartman has had enough and gives him a scathing look that burns the air of the illusion created.

"What do you want from me?"

"I don't know. I just wanted to see you." Elliot flinches at the admission he makes, at his inability to lie, to bluff, to employ his mask that years of being a detective have created. If it weren't in this context it would sound like someone trying to impress a girl, someone who falls hard but who's feelings aren't reciprocated. Its a strange truth, he has thought more about Hartman over the last months than any lovesick boy could over his first crush, and it grates. He has no script and, while in the back of his mind there is still Olivia and the bitter, aching need for answers, he knows now that he will have to venture further into the unknown wilderness with this man to get them.

Hartman doesn't seem surprised by either Elliot's answer or the silence that falls afterwards, just gestures to the guard and says he's ready to go. As he walks past Elliot with head bowed, he states,

"I'll see you again then," And Elliot knows he will. He won't let go now, however crazy he feels to be sitting having polite conversation with a rapist, the man who stole his partner.

As he leaves the prison and hears the metal resound shut behind him, his chest tightens when he sees the light, the day still existing out there. The walk to his car feels excruciating, his defences flayed open and the weak sunshine scalding like acid.

He sits for a while in the car, not looking at his surroundings but replaying the conversation in his head, matching the answers with the things he knows about the man. Finally he takes his cell phone out and calls Kathy, a strange freedom rushing through him.

"I'm not going to make the parent/teacher thing tonight. The car's broken down, I'm going get it looked at."

It's an easy, simple lie and he neither knows nor cares whether she believes him, though he thinks she will. It's been a long time since he has missed something important or failed his parental duties in such a way, and there was no anger in her voice when he cancelled. Not like so many times in the past. When he hangs up, the drunk feeling is still there, as if he were on a rooftop, ready to jump and believing he will fly.

Instead of heading back to Queens, to where he belongs now, he calls a friend to search an address for him. He could do it himself, he's still a cop of sorts, but it's easier like this; he doesn't want to draw too much attention to himself yet. When he has scrawled the information on a napkin in his car he starts to drive, and there is something soothing to have a purpose in his day, a clear goal that is achievable and gives him purpose.

The house he pulls up at is so unremarkable it could hold a million different lives or secrets, but he is only after one. Even now, before he has stepped over the threshold, he knows she won't know anything, even if he had an idea what he was looking for. All he can think is that he has to get further into this man's life.

The garden is covered with tired, fallen leaves that crackle under his feet as he approaches, and his noise wakes a cat curled asleep on a chair beside the front door. It opens one eye and glares reproachfully at him, but jumps up when he rings the bell and darts inside as soon as the door opens. He hears her before he sees her, greeting the cat with fondness, and then she is there, looking unconcerned at the strange man before her.

"Yes?" She asks, and her voice is surprisingly clear and strong, not a hint of an old lady behind it. If he hadn't been there in person, seen her grey hair and her slightly stooped figure leaning on a walking stick, he wouldn't have been able to place her age.

"Mrs Johnston?" He asks, and she nods. "I'm Elliot Stabler. I'm here about your grandson, Daniel." She runs her eyes down him and then back to meet him, clear and open.

"Are you a policeman?" There is no venom or suspicion as she asks, just a faint trace of familiarity that tells she has been here too many times before, with a cop on her doorstep.

"Yes," he admits, "but that's not why I'm here. I..." he doesn't know what to say to her, at a loss for words yet again, "I visited Daniel today." Something vaguely resembling hope flashes across her face, tinged with sorrow and confusion, but it is gone as quickly as it had been there, replaced with a neat facade.

"You'd better come in. please." And she gestures for him to enter, closing the door against the cold behind him.

There is a quiet warmth to the house, a blanket wrapping itself around him against the stinging cold of the day, and faces smile at him from walls and surfaces. A cup of tea rests on a side table beside what is clearly her chair in the front room, but the cat has stolen the seat. She pushes it to one side as she sits down, which causes it to jump down and supervise Elliot taking a seat across from her, still glaring. He resists the urge to try and out-stare it, the action seeming strangely rude in such a clearly polite house.

"How is my grandson?" The question seems light-hearted as she asks it but he can see the effort such easiness takes, the faint strain to her voice and the tremble of her hand as she takes a sip of the tea.

"He seemed fine. Well." He doesn't know whether that is the truth, how he could possibly tell whether Hartman had been his normal self, but he wants to reassure her.

"Good." She seems at as much of a loss as he feels but goes to stand up, asking "can I get you anything?"

"No, thank you," and with his decline she sinks back down, seeming almost defeated at the lack of task he has left her with. Silence falls again and he feels awkward and out of place as he gazes around the room, taking in no details but clearly sensing her eyes on him, until his unease gets so much that he feels he needs to say something, anything. It's the same as it had been with Hartman, a welling of anxiety, but this time he cannot control it.

"I was hoping you can help me," and as he speaks he automatically leans closer to her, resting his elbows on his legs. She raises her eyebrows slightly, nodding for him to continue, and he takes a breath, preparing to bring Olivia into the conversation, but as he does so he is hit with an image of her, so vivid he has to freeze.

She is sitting in a chair next to him, leaning towards the woman with gentle inquiry and concern, and he rests back, letting her take the lead because she's quieter and more trustworthy as a woman and this is what they do. This is how they get answers. The scene is so strong he wants to flash her a look, a smile, anything, but she isn't looking at him and he cannot get her to meet his eyes, however hard he stares.

By the time he blinks and remembers where he is, she's fading again and he cannot hold her, so he speaks in a rush born of confusion. "Did you know Daniel was linked to another case?"

Mrs Johnston creases her wrinkles as she thinks before nodding slowly, "You mean the missing woman? The cop?" Elliot confirms it, "some other detectives came and asked, when he got caught. I told them I don't know anything."

"I know," and he does, although he hadn't had anything to do with the investigation that kicked into gear after Hartman had been charged. Instead, he had exploited his position as Liv's partner to get hold of everything they dredged up about him, and sat reading it for hours at a time, "but I was just hoping you could tell me a little about Daniel. Anything might be helpful."

She sits back with a sigh and closes her eyes for a moment, absently stroking the cat that has returned to her lap and spread across it in elegant relaxation, so large it makes her look frail. "I don't know what to tell you really. Daniel was always a quiet boy."

"So there were no problems when he was a child?" and what he is really asking for is whether there had been any hint of what was to come, or any weakness or abnormality he can use to burrow his way into the man's mind.

"He wasn't always the most settled of children, but nothing that would explain what he did."

"What do you mean, unsettled?" It's easy to slip into gentle questioning but he also feels uncomfortable, like he's a fake or a fraud in letting the detective within him to come to the fore and take over. This feels too personal, too complicated to detach himself in that way.

"Well, when his parents split up, he stopped speaking at school for a while. And he'd bite his fingernails a lot, right down so they would bleed. But he grew out of it, like all kids do." She shrugs as she finishes.

"How old was he when they split?"

"Nine. He stayed with his father. My daughter left. She was never meant to be a mother." And there is a sigh of sorrow in her voice at that.

"How so?"

"She was always so independent, even as a child. She would never let me or her father do anything for her, it always had to be her doing it, even if it ended in disaster. She would never back down. She used to get up early to dress herself, even when things like buttons were beyond her." Traces of long ago exasperation and frustration come back as she reminisces, but also distinct pride at the strength of her child. "We never thought she'd have a long term boyfriend, much less get married and have a child."

"Did he have much contact with her after she left?" Elliot knows he is going over information he has already read, but that doesn't matter. What does is that he is here, to this woman who is connected to Hartman, and he is feeding off that.

"None of us did. She'd send Christmas cards, a birthday present from whatever part of the world she was in, but nothing more. It didn't come as a surprise when we stopped hearing from her. We were contacted about a year after her last card, saying she had died in India. She was drunk, and high, and went for a swim. Her body was found a couple of days after it happened, but it took them a few months to trace us."

With the telling of tragedy comes no distinct or obvious grief, just a wistful air and a taste of regret that shows Elliot she has come to terms with her daughter's death long ago, perhaps even before it happened.

"What about Daniel's relationship with his father?"

"It was fine. Normal father and son."

Elliot wonders what that means, normal. Whether either Dickie or Eli would describe their relationships with him as such. Both distant in different ways, both boys containing so much of him it scared him more often than he cared to admit. His temper, his introspection, his ability to shut himself down. Eli's tantrums have become notorious, although beginning to lessen as he learns and grows, and he hopes his sons will not have his rage.

"How did he seem when his own marriage broke up?"

"I didn't find out it had for a while after it had happened. He came to see me, said that things hadn't gone his way, that he and his wife had split but that he was okay with it, he was getting things straightened up again." There is complete openness in all the answers she is giving, and he knows from memory that they are the same as she had given before, that there are no slips caused by secrets or lies.

"Did he say why they had split up?" She shakes her head.

"Did you know she had run off with another man?"

"Not till the detectives came asking questions, after he got arrested. That's the first I heard of it. I wasn't surprised he hadn't told me."

Elliot is about to ask about this, her grandson's lack of honesty with her, but startles as the cat jumps off her lap and immediately up onto his, settling immediately with a firmness that indicates who is really in charge, and that little will make it move. He is tense and finds he doesn't know how to react, cats aren't really his thing, but he finally rests one hand on its back and it closes its eyes in approval. When he looks up, Mrs Johnston has a small smile on her face at the behaviour of both him and her pet.

"You haven't got a cat."

"No," and he wants to add that he has never wanted one, that he had never understood their balance of independence and neediness, but now there is a weight settled on him, he finds it strangely calming, to have an animal asleep on him and be unable to move. It's easier, not being in charge, to be pinned in one place. He finds himself relaxing slightly, before continuing.

"What else did he say, when he came to see you?"

She shakes her head minutely as she thinks, "Not much really. Just that he was fine, and getting settled again. He brought me flowers. That was the only odd thing."

"He wouldn't normally do something like that?" He's interested in Hartman's seeming lack of attachment to his grandmother previously, given his lack of a mother figure in so many years of childhood, and he wonders what Huang would say.

"No. He was never a giving child, not the kind that went in for displays of affection. He took after his mother in that way," and another shy smile of memory comes at that.

"Was there anything else odd about that visit?"

"No. Only that he kept looking at everything, walking round and staring at photos, but I just thought it had been so long since he'd come to visit that he was thinking of the past."

Elliot can feel his own experiences nagging at the back of his head, at his own actions in Olivia's apartment, the way he always feels the need to touch and remember, but he cannot let that overtake him now. There will be time for losing himself later.

"But he didn't say anything that hinted to what he'd done?"

"No. I'm sorry." And there seems to be real regret in her words, that she cannot give him whatever he is looking for, or illuminate her grandson for him. An echo of her apology resounds around them and they sit for long moments, during which he finds himself stroking the cat, feeling it begin to vibrate beneath his hand, a purr that increases with each touch and breaks the silence. When he tears his gaze from the nothingness he has been lost in, he finds her also gone from the room, her eyes glazed with the past.

Finally she looks up again and gives a small smile, though he isn't completely sure whether it is intended for him or the cat. As she stands, signalling the end of the conversation and preparing to show him out of the house, he cannot help himself blurting out,

"I was her partner."

She freezes, one hand already reaching for her walking stick, and this time there is nothing but sympathy in her look as she asks,

"The missing woman's?"

"Yes." And it is a comfort to him that she doesn't ask what kind, whether they were a couple or not. It doesn't matter at all, now.

"I'm very sorry for your loss." It's a standard condolence but, as he feels her understanding wash over him, he knows she really means it. That she knows all to well what grief and uncertainty mean within a person, what they do.

"I think Daniel would like to see you."

He's out of control again, and he has no idea why he had said it, only that he knows it to be the truth, and there is something so dignified about the grey-haired woman before him that he wants to see what her reaction will be. That, and the voice whispering to him that if he does this for Hartman, the man will owe him.

"I'm an old woman detective. My life has had enough within it, without needing to see my grandson locked up. I love him, and he knows that. I can do nothing more than that." And when he looks at her, he thinks she must understand some of what he feels, and why he has sought her out. Some of what true sorrow really means, how it aches inside.

And then the cat has jumped down, he's being shown out and when he glances back into the room, the cat is settling in the warm spot he had been sitting. So quick to take advantage. He thinks for a second that it must be cleverer than he is.

When he gets back into the car, he doesn't leave immediately, although it's cold enough to clearly see each breath he releases. Instead he thinks of the old woman, alone and warm within her house, and the leaves fading into nothing on the grass outside, still tinged with a frost in the shadows, where the weak sunlight has not reached. And even as he prepares to drive away, her words keep going through his head. 'Do nothing more. Nothing more. Nothing more.'

He wishes to be able to do nothing more.


	3. Act

There had been no questions when he had got home from his visit, either about the car or what had taken him so long, and for a while it is a gentle relief to slip back into the home life. Leaves finish their fall and scatter the world, Thanksgiving comes and goes and for a while, during the days, he is able to be the person they want. Or he thinks they want. He smiles when he should, listens in the right places, even laughs on occasion.

However, there is still the feeling that the house is holding its breath, waiting for the comedown, and he cannot work out whether it is simply his mind, or whether his family see through his mask and wait for the fallout. He pushes through. Ignores the nagging voice in his head and the ache that seems to increase every day, to press on his chest. The throbbing desire to act. It's back.

Three days before Christmas, it comes to a head, once the lights are done and presents rest with promise under the tree. He has tossed and turned all night, and suddenly he has no control. He simply follows where his body leads, and is up even before Eli, slipping out of bed with long practised ease. The house is a dream-world, the deep sighs of sleep cocooning and containing him. Silencing everything in its warm contentment, full of life. For a brief instant he doesn't want to leave, doesn't want to ever do anything again, just hide within its arms and wile away his days as a sad, lost, hidden man, in the embrace of familiarity. But the nagging voice soon puts paid to that. Still, he watches Dickie for a minute before waking him, relishing the relaxation on his face. He thinks that he never looks so unconcerned.

Dickie is, as ever, difficult to stir, but eventually his eyes drag open and he stares at his father, silhouetted against the faint morning light.

"Dad?" 

"We've got something I need to do. Get dressed, old warm clothes." Elliot says with no further explanation, and Dickie follows, blindly obedient. Such acquiescence is not usual, but neither is Elliot waking him so early on a vacation.

By the time Elliot has made coffee and toast downstairs in the grey, faded morning, Dickie comes downstairs, still without asking what they are doing up at this hour, or where they are going. Despite his ignorance, there is something of a shared secret between them, off on an unknown adventure that excludes the rest of the world, and Dickie grins over breakfast.

Elliot goes to the garage, opening the back of his truck up and putting a few bits and pieces in. Dickie just watches. He hasn't been asked to help with this, and he doesn't know what his father wants. Elliot expects to see confusion on his son's face, but is surprised when there is nothing of the sort. Just expectancy. And trust. He wonders how he deserves it, after all he's failed at. Perhaps his son is a fool. Perhaps he is. He doesn't want to know which.

Once he's done they get in, and drive.

When they pull up in front of her house, there is more light, and it is just as Elliot remembers from weeks before, except the sky is no longer clear, a sharp blue, instead covered with grey, used cotton that has been through too many washes. Dickie heads towards the door but Elliot stops him quietly.

"We're not going in. We're going to clear the yard, tidy up for Christmas." And Dickie doesn't argue, doesn't respond that there is no hint of festivities in this house, no lights blinking. Instead he knuckles down, silently working, and every so often Elliot will find himself watching in awe at his son's stamina and strength, his silent resilience, even his direction of his father to do certain things. He is in control, sure of himself and Elliot envies that more than he would dare, or care, to admit.

At occasional moments he thinks he feels eyes on him, even looks around once, but that time it is just the cat. He gives it a familiar smile as if to an old friend, and loses himself in ten minutes by wondering what a cat thinks of when it sits and stares. Then he wonders what Olivia would think of his mind going off in such a tangent and decides that she would just give him an odd look but say nothing, showing rather than telling him that he is both strange and that she finds him funny. He never said enough to her, never voiced what was going on in his head. If Dickie hadn't been there, he would have told her now but he doesn't. Conversations with the gone aren't for the young and hopeful to hear.

It's almost noon when they break, and both men stand to look at their achievements. There is a tidiness, a stark illusion of care that clearing away the last year's debris brings. Now it looks empty, idling the cold months away, waiting for something more. It isn't pretty, doesn't look nice, but there has been order instilled.

They both move to pick up discarded clothing, jackets shed as the day and their bodies had warmed slightly, and are heading back to the truck when there is the indisputable sound of the door opening behind them.

Mrs. Johnston stands there, bright in an emerald green sweater against the faded day, so washed out and white. She pulls the door open more and gestures gracefully for them to come in, not saying a word. Dickie looks to his father before moving, eye to eye but still a child's uncertainty, looking to the adult for a lead. In this, Elliot can give one for once, and walks towards her.

The house is warmer than outside but teetering uneasily on the uncomfortable, a chill remaining in the air. The floor is hard and biting beneath Elliot's socks once they have slipped their boots off, and when they walk into the same room as Elliot had been in before, there is a wrinkled blanket curled on her seat, looking like a sleeping animal. She's been warding off the cold. It reminds Elliot again of the cat and he searches the room for it, but it is nowhere in sight. I'd like it to be, he thinks, and its a surprise. He remembers that he doesn't like cats.

They are left sitting in silence for a minute as Mrs. Johnston vanishes, the only noise the clinking of china and then she reappears with a tray that doesn't shake in her hands despite her age and caution when walking without a stick. There is a sweet smell as she places it down, and Elliot sees the mugs contain cocoa, warm and soft within, a sprinkling of cinnamon he can taste in the air as he raises it to his mouth, even before he takes a sip. It's a child's treat, festive fare, and it warms him more than a drink is capable of doing.

"Thank you," Dickie speaks first, and Elliot is both pleased at his politeness and amused by the trace of chocolate resting on his upper lip. Sometimes he looks so much the man, and other times he is a small boy again, food and laughter smeared in equal measure across his face. Dickie's simple, obvious pleasure is obvious, and Mrs. Johnston smiles back in the way only grandmothers can, with more creases than would be possible to count.

"You're welcome. It's my pleasure, given all the work you've done." And she glances at Elliot as she says the last, a shadow of query behind the thanks on the surface. When he doesn't respond, feeling as though anything he says will be a lie, she turns back to Dickie. "I suppose you must be too old to look forward to Christmas."

As easy as that, Dickie falls into a conversation with the woman, discussing the merits of a much younger brother and the excitement that can still be gained from Christmas in a child's eyes. Elliot finds himself watching his son through those same eyes for the first time, a view unclouded by knowledge and emotion. It's the stunning, deafening realisation, when a new light is cast across someone and they appear anew, slipping the mask composed of the past, from looking but never seeing. He'd known Dickie was becoming a man, had thought about it, but he'd never recognised the person. He does now, sitting in the house of his worst enemy's grandmother. Such strangeness takes his breath away for a moment, and he wonders where his boy went. How you can lose someone without even realising. He turns back to his drink.

There is still a coating of chocolate at the bottom as he inhales the dregs of comfort, and before he can finish, she's there beside him. Not fully, but he can see her out of the corner of his eye, hands curled round a mug, the slow appreciation of heat, her attention drifting towards nowhere as she sips. She seems comfortable, there is no tension within her hands, and this is a place more for her than for him. She's always been able to fake fitting in, even though she actually does far less than him. People find her easy. Him hard. It's what makes them work. In truth it is the other way around. There is a strength in her that he doesn't have. That only she gives him. Perhaps that's why she's joined him here, so he can make it through. Then he realises his madness, what he is seeing, and the world shatters, as raw every time he loses her.

"We should go," he says, getting bluntly to his feet, and Dickie looks shocked while Mrs. Johnston quickly smooths over his rudeness with the experience of years. What would shock her now, after her life. He needs to get out, to escape, he's caught a glimpse of himself and the picture is bleak. Sitting in a faintly chilly house, trapped in the combined sadness and regret of years, surrounded by pasts, and the shadow of Olivia and Daniel covering them all. He cannot bear it, that his son is sitting in this place with innocence, while he lies in silence and carries such guilt.

As he walks to the door, not looking back when he pulls his boots on, he hears Dickie wish her a Merry Christmas behind him. Without seeing her face, he knows her expression, the smile that doesn't reach inside, the loneliness that stirs inside, hidden by a long built mask which lends no space for complaint. She is resigned, and at times its resignation that is the bitterest pill to swallow at all. The defeat, and the comfort in the lack of fight.

He's tasted that, and being around someone else that Hartman has brought that flavour to is both an understanding and a harsh pain.

When the door shuts behind them and they walk down the path towards the truck, Dickie is silent, looking at the work they have done. It is only as they drive back home, to a house full of life and his children and years of warmth that he dares to speak.

"We should do something for her. Take her a pie or something." And Elliot is surprised at his son. He hasn't asked who she is, hasn't demanded an explanation, and Elliot both wants him too and doesn't. Wants to lift the lie of not saying off his chest, to see the shock in his son's eyes, to be condemned for the strangeness of his behaviour. But it is also easier that he doesn't. He doesn't know why he is acting like this, and perhaps he can keep this pretence up for a while longer. That this is normal behaviour.

Without discussing it, they do not mention where they had gone, only that it was a boy's day out, and Eli's indignation that he didn't go is nothing compared to what would happen if he were to reveal anything. And Dickie still doesn't ask who she is.

All he thinks of over the next few days is them, Daniel and Mrs. Johnston. Both alone in their lives, sitting on Christmas Day with no family around them. As he watches his children, grown and small, throw snowballs in the morning with a turkey filling the house with smells, as there is bright, empty paper spilling across the floor, ripped and colourful in its ruin. As, one by one, they drift to sleep in front of the television and he shakes them awake to stumble to bed with 'Merry Christmas' and kisses whispered on their lips. He thinks of nothing but them.

It is in the dark of night that her whispers come back. Snow has broken over them while the house is comfortably settling down and there is nothing but deep breaths of sleep around him. He watches the faint specks of white, tiny stars falling from an empty sky, and she stands beside him with worry on her face. He's seen it so many times before, the mixture of understanding and fear, the worry at his actions and lack of control. The asking of her eyes without ever saying the words.

"I don't know what I'm doing." He says to the snow, and she gives nothing in reply. She doesn't have the answers either. When he goes to bed, he lies awake and repeats his madness over and over again in his head.

"I talk to my lost partner. I clear the garden of a rapist's grandmother. I visit a rapist and offer help. I don't sleep in the same bed as my wife. I drag my son into my lies."

On his way to visit Hartman, two days after Christmas, as the rest of the family go to ice skate in the city, he leaves a pie on the doorstep of her house, knocking but not waiting for an answer, leaving so fast he is already in the car and pulling away by the time her door opens and he catches just a glimpse of her. He keeps himself busy with the thought of her eating it, and almost turns back to knock again, to receive her thanks. To drop crumbs of pastry to the cat once they have finished. He doesn't.

And then he is at the prison again, and it is so strange that this is where he feels so comfortable. That this is where he is supposed to be. That he can leave behind the impure snow and the faded decorations and retreat to his version of truth. To a place he can act with no second guesses.

This time Hartman comes straight into the cold room, not seeming surprised to see Elliot, and settles down in the chair opposite with an easiness and relaxation Elliot admires and hates in equal measure. Perhaps it's just jealousy that claws at him, his own desperate anxiety and the underlying confusion as to how to get what he wants leaves him tense and out of control. He hates that the man doesn't fear him, doesn't look tormented or grieved over what he has done, but he wishes for that lack of care as well. How blissful it would be to have no regrets.

"Thought you'd be back before this," Daniel says conversationally. Elliot nods and shrugs.

"Christmas, you know?" It seems a stupid comment once he has said it. Christmas within the confines of the prison, with bleak walls and loneliness, families split. However, it then feels strangely real. He knows about broken families, days that are never-ending, the isolation that can only be felt when you're surrounded by people, and it strikes him again that he has more in common with this man than he can bear to accept.

"I visited your grandmother." He had thought maybe it would be better to lead quietly up to the statement, but now he's here he just comes out with it. Its all out of his control again. Daniel looks at him, surprise evident across his face, tinged with something else. Sadness perhaps, regret...hope?

"How is she?" Hartman has the eager expression of a young boy, and this is what Elliot has been wanting. This is the point of it. To strip away the cockiness, the self confidence, to turn him inside out and make him slip up, spill secrets.

"She seemed well."

Daniel nods, waits for more and when it doesn't come, he asks,

"Did she...did she say anything about...me?" And its such a struggle for him, there is such childish fear in his eyes. Elliot nods once, but he doesn't get the reaction he thought. He had expected relief, but instead there is disappointment. "I wish she could forget me."

"You don't forget someone after so little time."

"I thought...it's been nearly six years. I hoped she could put me behind her..." As his wishes drift away in regretful whispers, Elliot isn't surprised to see her. Olivia is in the room again, so lifelike and real, as bright and solid as the last moment he saw her. She stares at him, confirming that such time is nothing at all, that you cannot lose someone as simply as that.

He watches her, standing in the corner, as she then looks at Hartman who seems lost in his own thoughts. He tries to read her, fights the urge to talk to her, to ask her questions. To ask her where she is. What he did to her. He is sure now that she is dead, despite the fleeting hopes he still gets. His brain, his mind, his need to quiz Hartman all confirm it for him. But now she is in front of him, soft sorrow resting on her skin as she looks from one to the other, and he wants to hold her.

It's madness, it's all he can take not to stand and walk towards her, but there is an insane joy at the sight of her. At being in her company, even as logic tells him he's losing his mind. He thinks if this is what it is to be crazy, to be with her, to not have lost her, then he will take it. At that moment, nothing else matters. Not his children he clings onto, his wife who grounds him, the work he still does that he even sometimes cares about. It is just the leaving of the ache inside at her loss.

Then Daniel speaks again, a simple question, and she is gone with no warning. In her leaving, she strips Elliot's control from him and he stares at Daniel with undisguised hatred. In this moment, this second here, he may kill him, and screw finding the truth. The question he has asked rings through Elliot's head as the searing anger rises and he counts down the seconds until he will murder.

"What was she like?"

3...2...1... 


	4. Play

A chair hits the wall opposite him, but does not break. Elliot leans with his hands on the table, fighting the rage. It would be so easy, too easy to snap his neck, but there is still the outside chance she is out there, and he can give away her secrets. Or his.

When he has fetched his chair back from its fallen place, he sets it down quietly before looking at Hartman again. The man is still, contained, but there is a wariness playing in the corners of his eyes that only a cop could see. A cop or a desperate man. Elliot sits.

He thinks of what he's been asked to pay. He knew when he embarked that he would make a deal with the Devil if it meant he got her back. Perhaps even if it meant he could lie her to rest. But this devil? The devil that sits before him, all flesh and blood? He takes a breath, and absorbs the atmosphere: the cold, the fading walls, the emptiness.

A smirk plays across his face. If he could, he'd roll his eyes inwards towards himself. Who was he kidding? Running his palm across the stubble of his face, he leans back and looks at Hartman, and he's back in control. Although that's not truly accurate, because they are both in control. A level playing field. It's an intriguing feeling, to be matched blow for blow. Elliot grins.

"What was your mother like?"

The punch hits, despite Daniel's attempt to hide it. Elliot sees him stiffen, tense his muscles, feel the words bite inwards. But he doesn't drop his gaze, doesn't prevent Elliot from seeing he's scored one, and it makes Elliot tip his head to the side just slightly, intrigued. This man isn't what he first thought.

"You first, and then I'll tell." Daniel nods towards Elliot, and for no logical reason other than he has every reason to lie, and no reasons to reveal the truth, Elliot thinks that truth is just what he's going to get from the man in front, who waits expectantly. The first time he came, he suspected a gentleman's fight, and now it's confirmed. There are rules to this. He just has to work out what the hell they are.

"She's tough. Strong. The strongest woman I've ever met." He's glad Olivia isn't still in the room as he talks of her. He wants to give enough to Daniel, enough that he thinks Elliot is opening up, but not enough that his memory of her is shared, scarred and stained by being in his mind as well. He tries to block out that, of course, she is already there. A scene, or scenes, Elliot has no part of.

Daniel leans back, arms crossed, and for a minute Elliot is struck again by his child like tendencies. He almost expects him to sit on the floor at his feet, waiting for the story. "She can get people to trust her quicker than anyone I know. She's one of the best detectives in the city. She never gives up, like a terrier with a bone."

He's aware he's speaking of her in the present tense, but he won't let Daniel claim her loss, although it flashes through his mind that perhaps he is showing himself as more pitiful rather than less, to talk about her as if she is not gone. He looks at Daniel, who makes a small noise, like confirmation or interest. Elliot stays quiet. That's enough for now.

When Daniel starts to speak, he leans forward and picks the skin around his nails that is thick and red raw from the years he's done it before. It reminds Elliot of Lizzie's nails during her pre-teenage years, bitten down and bleeding. The bottles of foul smelling liquid they had tried to coat them with. The lack of difference it made. He wonders if Daniel too would keep biting, pulling, even through bitter foulness.

"My mom was... like no one else. No one had a mom like her. Everyone envied me. She'd come floating up to soccer matches in long dresses and bare feet. She'd bounce up and down on the sidelines for a couple minutes, and then wander off to sit on swings. She climbed a tree once. I've never been so embarrassed in my life." He flushes at the memory, and his cheeks look like they have been slapped. "My dad said we had to let her be her. That we couldn't ask her to change."

As Daniel murmurs memories to himself, Elliot chokes on his past. It's such an image, a mom like no other. A mom who does her own thing, who embarrasses her children. Who makes them carry shame, and wish they could disown her. Who cannot be the person their children need them to be.

Daniel. Elliot. Olivia. Linked again, trapped in the same web. How differently they all turned out. But all the same, in different places perhaps, but lost nonetheless.

"I'm nothing like you," and it isn't until Hartman looks sharply at Elliot that he realises he has spoken out loud. Now its his turn to cock his head, and for curiosity to flood out.

"I never said you were." Daniel hasn't taken offence, hasn't blustered and angered at the perceived insult, and Elliot cannot get a handle on him. Every time he goes to take a hand hold, grab some clothes or skin or flesh, he's twisted away in the wind. "What do you remember most about..." and even now, Daniel does not dare to say her name.

Flashes of memory overwhelm Elliot's brain for a second, and he wonders if it will short out at the input. Like a computer, black screen taking over and its sigh as it shuts down. Her smile as he meets her, the first day. Her tears. Her laughter. Her taking him down in the gym, and her weight slamming into his. Watching her sprint off, calling shouts of old man back to him.

Then, later...everything else. Coffee and tiredness and her weary smile when she looks up from a file for the millionth time, or answers her phone with the name her mother gave her.

"The sight of her face when I handed her coffee." Its personal but impersonal. He doesn't describe the expression, the when or where or meaning of it all. But he hopes it will be enough, enough to draw Hartman towards him again. Daniel seems satisfied, and speaks before Elliot has a chance to nod towards him for his response.

"Her tucking me into bed." That's all he gives, and instinct tells him to push. He ignores it, and pulls back into silence. This isn't the short game, the twenty-four hours to crack a man and reduce him to nothing. There is more at stake here, so much more, and he has waited years. He can wait longer.

It feels like they've run out of words, the both of them, and after a few more minutes Elliot stands, and before he can help himself, reiterates the offer of the previous visit.

"Do you want anything?" He's expecting, anticipating a no, so it is a surprise when Daniel, looking cautious, says,

"A chess board." It's a strange reply, an odd desire, and Elliot's thoughts must show on his face. "Do you know how to play?" He shakes his head. Chess is something he's never had time for. He knows the game of a cell, the stalking checkmate of an interrogation room, but has no idea of the real thing. "It makes you think. You can lose yourself in it. It would be good, to lose myself sometimes."

Elliot doesn't confirm or deny that he will get him one, just raises his eyebrows slightly and leaves the room.

When he walks through the doors of home, there are the giggles of his children to welcome him, to draw him in. He shuts the door quietly, not wishing to disturb them. To break their happiness. When he glances through, its Eli, a friend of Lizzie's and Lizzie herself, engaged in tickling each other, Lizzie with fluffy reindeer antlers on her head and Eli with a red nose flashing. It's what the remnants of Christmas are, and he catches Kathy's eyes above them, staring at him. She nods for him to come, to join them, but he shakes his head and carries on walking. However, he's not quick enough to avoid the flash of disappointment that streaks across her face. Even now, after so long, she can still be surprised and let down by his actions, and it stings. Slightly.

He hears her footsteps come after him as he retreats, and he stops on the first step of the stairs when she pulls the door quietly behind her, like she is expecting them to share words that will harm the ears of the children.

"Where've you been?" He drops his head, and he knows in doing so he's just revealed guilt, or a lie. He hopes she'll call him on it, demand answers, for a part of him knows he wants to tell. Instead of giving her an answer, he shrugs. She looks at him, reading him.

"Why won't you tell me?" And now there is the note of accusation that there should have been before, even as he left the house hours earlier, to an excitable son and a house still chaotic with the holidays.

"I...I don't know." He feels empty, drained of everything. An image flashes in his head, of a man they found, lying in a dirty puddle at the bottom of a swimming-pool in the middle of winter. He blinks, but the image remains imprinted on his eyes for a second. And then there seems to be nothing further to say, and as he goes to take steps up, to leave her, she puts out her hand and rests it on his arm.

"They won't be here forever." Nodding towards where laughter still glides through the cracks of the door. He listens for a brief moment, too brief, before looking her in the eyes.

"I'll be there. Soon." He goes upstairs, gets changed and slips back down, pausing on the third step to check where she is, to sense her presence before moving forwards again. He doesn't want to confront her. He is a teenager, sneaking to a place he shouldn't be.

The basement is cool, quiet and still, sheltered from the warmth and the light and the life. He knows what he's looking for, but glancing through the remnants of lives lived, he hasn't a clue where it may be. Rolling up the sleeves of his sweater, he starts the search.

There are files full of old paperwork, schoolbooks and report cards, paintings where the paper almost cracks under his touch. Photos forgotten. Tools rusted. Broken things thrown down here because no one could make the decision to get rid of them completely.

Finally, once his hands are dirty and stained and he has sneezed more times than he can count, he lands on what he wants. The chess set is still there, in an old box that is falling apart with age, and he pulls it out, taking each piece out in turn and looking at it. He never really grasped how to play, but his grandfather had. He thinks he must have been better at seven than he would be now.

Placing the box on top of another almost delicately, he sifts through things he has already touched, and comes away with a small pile of leftover sandpaper. The edges will need to come off, before he takes it in. The peaks of the crown and the castle, the ears of the horse. Pawns are fine though. Pawns can't hurt anything...until they are played in the right way.

Perhaps he has more to do with chess than he thinks, so he stops. With such a methodical task, he can turn off his brain and simply work.

He's still busy filing in the darkness when he's vaguely aware of noises outside. They are dulled by the ceiling above but he can make out the front door opening, the murmur of words and the creak of footsteps above him. Then light spills in above him, but he refuses to look up.

Even without doing so, he knows that it is none of his family standing watching him. The figure is different, walking down the steps and coming towards him, and Elliot thinks he knew who it would be, even before he heard the door go, even before he suspected a visitor.

Don sighs as he sits down on a box beside him, and Elliot can feel his eyes on him, watching his actions with the sandpaper, and taking in the figures in front of him, some already sanded, some untouched, the pile of fine dust resting across the surface. After a minute, with no reaction from Elliot, he dares to speak.

"What's going on?"

Elliot shrugs but gives nothing more in the dusty silence. His main actions are obvious, if not understandable, and he can't think about anything else in that moment. "I got a call. I imagine you can guess what it was about." It's still friendly, concerned, but with a hint of their old relationship within it, that makes Elliot stiffen minutely.

However, he still gives no response, just carries on destroying the edges of the pieces, moulding them so they are recognisable but safe. Don sighs again, the sigh he has done before, when Elliot won't speak, won't defend himself, just dwells in his self contempt and misery.

"Seems you've been visiting Hartman. It's raised some eyebrows Elliot. I've been asked to speak to you." And there is a definite Captain's tone to the questioning.

"Not here of your own accord then." There is no malice within the statement. Elliot thinks maybe he doesn't have it in him at that moment, to feel such things as anger at people for interfering. It's enough that he has spoken, without the addition of emotion.

"I would have come. If you'd asked me too." There is an echo in that phrase, not that Don has said it before in this conversation, but from Kathy, before. The people imploring him to let them help. To let them in. That still somehow expected that he would allow himself to rely on anyone else. Dust twists, spins in the faint light, and coats them. "Have you got anything from him?" It's defeat, from Don. The telling-off has failed.

"Not yet." No emotion still. Perhaps later.

"What makes you think you will?"

He works on instinct. Isn't that what a detective is supposed to do? What makes good stand out from mediocre, and the best stand out from good. Instinct, instinct and partnership is what made him and Olivia what they were. The best. Even with his temper, her issues, the whole world thinking they were sleeping together, they were at least considered that.

"I will." He sounds more sure than he feels, and blows unconcernedly at the head of the piece he's just finished.

"Should I be worried about you?" This time Elliot does look at Don, meeting his gaze steadily, and trying not to see the age in his eyes, and the weary skin of his face.

"Haven't you always worried? Every time something went wrong, a problem occurred, one or other of us went off the rails? Even when things were quiet, didn't you glance up and worry through the window about one of us?"

Don nods, and Elliot turns back to the pieces, now almost finished, placing the completed ones in the box and lining the untouched figures up before him, side by side. "Then worry like that. I'm fine. I don't need any extra."

Finally, Don stands and looks down at the discarded lid of the box, the faded colours, the letters that had once been white but would never be again. "You're going to play chess with the man?"

"Maybe I'll get something."

"But what is it you want...?" Don asks, and it's not a question to be answered, but one to be spoken, to hang in the air between them for the length of three long breaths, and many long years as he leaves Elliot to the darkness and his thoughts.

He isn't alone though, as he completes his work. Olivia sits next to him, watching him, and he takes his time. He thinks she'll leave when he finishes. When the world invades the dark space again. He wonders what he should have said to Don. What the man would have said if he had told him he saw her, that she'd join him at unexpected moments.

"Huang would have a field day with me." And she says nothing, just smiles with a smirk and a tiny shake of her head.

It's the next day, past midnight when he has nothing more to do, no more pieces sitting before him, nothing more to say to her that she vanishes. He'd known she would, but still... when he looks and she's not there, it hits him again, a tiny echo of the everyday grief.

He stays up all night thinking of her, even when he leaves the basement and goes back up to the house that has been tucked up to bed, checking his children and watching the sky outside try to snow, pathetic flakes that mean nothing and fade away on impact with the ground.

This time, he only lasts four days of good food and company, of his children wrapping round him like cotton wool, of poker games and laughter. Only four days, and then he's standing in front of the prison again.

"Why did you do it?" The chess board is set out in front of them and they are sitting easily, not looking at each other but concentrated on the board. After a couple of reminders, of hints from Hartman, the distant memories of his grandfather's teaching have come back and easing into the game of logic is like sliding into a hot bath.

"Why does any man do bad things?" Hartman replies, slowly reaching out and touching a piece for a second before taking his hand back off and surveying the game again. Elliot imagines moves in his head, and answers the question internally. He could give any number of replies. Anger. Grief. A switch in their head. Voices. Control. Power. Being backed into a corner. Self defence. Instead, he says nothing, and Hartman makes his move, placing his rook firmly down.

"You want my excuses for what I did to those women? The things the psychiatrist said about me?"

"Sure." Elliot answers with lightness in his tone, like they are discussing baseball stats over a beer in a bar.

"They say it's because I was abandoned by my mother and then my wife. Because I was angry at women, I wanted power over them. I wanted to be the one to hurt them instead of the other way around." There is bitterness now, as one might expect, and Elliot considers his next move.

"Is it true?" A pawn goes forward, into the battle, and it sits vulnerably, as Elliot knew it would. All tactics and sacrifices, playing to win no matter what the cost. Still, when Hartman carelessly knocks it over and it lies on his side of the board, defenceless, it stings.

"Maybe. Does it matter? I did it." There is a sweet finality to the statement, and both men let conversation slide for more minutes, more movements of the pieces in front of them. Elliot has taken two of Hartman's pure white pieces, and the game is in full swing when he speaks again.

"That's not what I meant. I meant why did you kill her. Olivia." Elliot is staring at the board but seeing nothing when Hartman leans backwards at the question and fixes the older man with a stare. It isn't until Elliot looks up at his opponent that he sees it's not threatening, but intrigued, and he smiles inside.

"Do you know what it's like to watch someone die?" Hartman's voice is small in the blankness of the cell, with the uncomfortable cold lingering.

Elliot nods his head. He's seen life leave people. Felt it under his hands. Seen the second that can never be explained, where something akin to the soul leaves, if such a thing exists. He doesn't know any more, whether that is the truth or not.

"Have you?" Hartman moves his piece, a knight, before answering.

"My aunt. My father's sister. She died of cancer. We all sat around because she cried when she was alone, and then she died. I was only little. It was the weirdest thing." He shakes his head, like he's got water in his ears and cannot hear. "That second when they are the person you know, and then they aren't. After they tucked her in, and breathed a sigh of relief that she was gone, and left the room, I waited for hours, looking for it to come back. That something. It never did." Again, there is the child-like tone that Elliot has tasted coming from him before. As if he's lost in a world he has never truly understood.

Elliot thinks of the people he's watched. Victims. Perps. Gitano he felt die behind him. Ryan he saw alive, and then dead. Alex who he thought dead, who then came back to life. The unnamed children stolen by Eugene Hoff. Annika, who bled to death in front of him, after producing life.

The dozens of bodies with the life forced out of them. The hundreds of people that are still walking, but with something irretrievable stolen from them. The living dead.

They're skirting. Dancing around with black and white. And Elliot smiles again as he moves a piece on the board. He's getting closer. 


	5. Hide

February brings with it more snow, that inevitably fades into sodden slush, grey and brown in waves that stain the side walks, stick to the soles of shoes, and gradually creep to numb socks and feet. Night stays late, not leaving until finally forced by the weak light, and returns early to claim back its hours, and it feels that spring will never come.

Elliot sees none of it. To be fair, he is aware of the changing of the months, but only in that a man may be aware when he is walking, but doesn't have to command his muscles to make each movement. It seeps into his skin, scalds his lungs while he sleeps, but doesn't touch him. It doesn't matter how much light the day graces them. It doesn't make a difference when the sun sneaks out for a glimpse at the world. It won't see him.

His domain has become the basement world, his light either the overhead that has no shade and swings slightly when a draft comes from unknown places, or the lamp that sits on his makeshift desk and makes him feel more at home than he often feels in the upstairs of that house.

Before him are scattered files, reports, yearbooks and photos, the recordings of lives. There are two other boxes beside him, and they have been a perfect solace. He has surrounded himself in Olivia, in Hartman, in himself of years ago and forgotten dust that rises from each movement of paper. Her handwriting is scrawled with his, and words form memories in his head as he visits each case they had together, each man and woman and child they saw, each life beginning or ending or simply changing, as stories always will.

It started with going over the files that held none of her writing. The ones that spoke of her instead, retold her disappearance again and again, as if he didn't know it off by heart. But there wasn't enough of her in there, and it gave him nothing, so he went back to their three rape victims. She was there, held within, and he made do for a while, but it wasn't enough.

Then, he'd gone further back, until he'd gathered every case she had ever worked, and fallen into Olivia as a cop. This he has no excuse for. It is self pity at its most exquisite, stunning pure, and it brings her to him, both in his mind and in the basement. Word after word travels by, and he doesn't have the ability to tell when she might show up, it's a constant guessing game, but it's enough that she comes and joins him in her past.

The logical voice in the back of his mind, as he lies and tries to sleep, tells him that there has to be a system as it is his own mind who is forming the hallucinations. There has to be reason she shows when she does, she smiles on occasion, and a tear falls once, twice. That voice doesn't get listened too often though. He isn't ready to hear the truth. It is easier, far easier to accept that it is her visiting from wherever she might be. And perhaps, just perhaps, that is the truth instead. He holds enough ghosts within him, of the living and the dead. Why shouldn't she come as well?

She stays the longest on the two days he reads her mother's report, over and over again. He almost wished she hadn't. The pain she showed, the sorrow within her skin was so excruciating it was a torture, but he kept reading again and again. It was her creation, her life, a part of her as intrinsic as her blood. He cries with her, those days. Tears rest, do not fall, but he knows she will see them. She has to.

There is more. Her smiling from yearbook photos, with always a light detachment to the world, as she holds herself independent already. No one else would see it, but he does. He because he has learned to know her like no one else.

He reads the school reports he has dredged up. Tales of her studiousness and her desire for perfection bring him glimpses of her sitting in a library, avoiding going home. Of studying English, asking her mother for help, and there being moments of happiness across a table while Serena talks and Olivia listens and there is no alcohol on her breath, while she talks of what she knows, and can forget where her daughter comes from for once. These are stories he has not known before, but she tells them now, in her own way.

When he has shielded himself, coated himself in her so much he knows he can never lose her, only then does he thoroughly delve into Hartman. He needs her, to stop himself feeling sorry for the man. To stop himself forgetting what the mission is. To keep him grounded.

There are items that match Olivia's. Photos, yearbooks, school reports. But this time, there are other things. Divorce papers. A copy of a letter explaining the termination of employment. All these are Hartman's life, that he searches for answers, for traps to lay and ways to slip under his skin, and make him speak.

And he loses himself. Loses everything, until he memorises things about Hartman he doesn't know of his own children. He cannot recall the many yearbook pictures for each of his children, but he could sketch every one of Hartman and Olivia's with ease. He knows what their friends have written, what clubs they belonged too, who they were in those years.

When the phone call comes, that tells him he is on mandatory paid sick leave from his part time job at the police academy, he hardly says a word. The conditions for his return are that he sees a psychiatrist. He says nothing to that, just puts the phone down, and tells Kathy quietly, three days later, with no emotion. She doesn't show surprise, just that trace of disappointment that surrounds nearly every interaction with him these days. He doesn't tell her the terms of his return though. There will only be a flash of hope, of promise that he will comply, that it will be the answer. He will not bring her that false hope.

He wonders how he is supposed to talk to someone about the madness that is the only thing keeping him grounded. It makes him smile, both in the dark of night and bright of day, that his insanity should be the thing that stops him spinning off into a world of padded cells, of medication, of supervised visits, but he thinks it is. Olivia's presence keeps him calm, stops him losing control, as she has always done. If she goes, so does he.

He isn't always down there. In the mornings he makes sure he comes down for breakfast, drinks the heavy coffee that has sustained him for years, and eats toast as if it is cardboard. He gives more to his son, checks homework every morning, even takes him to school on occasion.

They sludge through the snow, or sludge, or wet that seems to get into every pore, and weighs down his bones. It does no such thing to Eli who runs into the school yard with no problems, and a fleeting kiss for his father. On good days, he takes in what little sun is sometimes offered, or lets himself get so cold it is a relief to walk into the warmth of home. He makes himself stay outside, watches cracks in side walks to stop himself seeing words in his mind. On a bad day, the thump of his heart is so hard, so desperate to retreat to the basement that he almost runs, crushing the salt beneath his feet. Its a need that dictates his life.

A dim afternoon has taken over the basement, and a paper cut jerks him out of the papers he is reading for the hundredth time. Perhaps more than that. He has turned the page of the divorce papers, charting Hartman's distant behaviour, his tendency for secrets, his clinging jealousy. They're papers he shouldn't have, but he's called in some favours. The desperate ex-cop on the brink of destruction and need burning in his eyes is someone difficult to turn down. It makes people feel more comfortable to help, to reprieve the guilt they feel at the gladness that its not them reduced to this.

The red flares slightly outwards, staining the white, resting on the surface for a moment and then sinking. He swears, and sucks it quietly, but it bubbles again, long enough to not be dissuaded in its need to bleed. He sighs, and stands, aching as joints move. Age has crept up on him, and now, in the cold and the tentative damp of the basement that he spends so much time in, they creak and complain at being in the same shape for so long.

The house is quiet with shallow light as he moves through it, and he's almost to the stairs when he catches a glimpse of sound and colour and movement outside, and can make out Kathy and Eli. The images comes to his brain from afar, and don't resonate for more than a couple of seconds before it flits away again, pushed by the information he is obsessing about today.

He's gone one step away from the top of the stairs when he hears the voices. At first it is a surprise, but then he makes out Dickie, and faintly remembers he had arrived the evening before, late in the evening, seemingly worse for wear, and Elliot hadn't seen him since.

"You're kidding," his son says, with laughter cutting through it.

"No. My old man's gonna go fucking nuts when he finds out." The other person's voice laughs as well, and Elliot tenses as he waits to see what Dickie might say in return, and whether Dickie is involved in whatever has gone on.

"You're telling me. You're dead. I'm glad it's not me." Dickie snorts, and for a second Elliot allows himself to relax. There is no need to worry. It's a mistake, that loss of tension.

"As long as he doesn't turn into an utter psycho like yours," and the unknown speaker's words sear through him, skipping brain and logic and striking straight at his heart as it continues, "he's got to have been fucking that cop that went missing, he's been loopy since then."

Before Elliot knows what has happened, he's in the room with a fistful of the boy's collar in each hand and is shaking him, though he doesn't know whether the movement is the boy trying to get away, or coming all from him. It doesn't matter, nothing matters, only the fury locking his jaw closed and seething round him. His blood drums so hard within, he hears nothing.

The boy's feet don't touch the ground. Elliot feels them stumble as he takes the stairs, and braces his weight to keep them moving but stop them falling. He burns, his muscles with use and everything else with the repetition of the words in his head. He only lets go to open the front door, and then he's thrown the disorganised body down the steps, making him skid in the slush that has been swept off the path to the door, his arms twist as if a broken doll, before he gains his balance. Faintly, behind the sound of pulsing rage, Elliot hears people behind him, the run of footsteps, the slam of doors, the query in voices.

"You never set a fucking foot anywhere near this house again, you hear me?" He growls, and the boy shrugs his clothes back onto his shoulders in a gesture of defiance that fails to work when looking into his eyes, and seeing the fear. Dickie is beside him, a jacket in hand, and Elliot doesn't recognise it and so throws it at the boy. It misses, and curls into a heap beside him.

"No fear, I wouldn't come back if you paid me." The boy tries to sneer and fails as he picks the jacket and turns to Dickie, spitting his words. "First your sister, then your dad, you wanna watch out. You'll be fucking screwed soon enough." And with that he's gone, with a quick walk that turns into a jog and then a run, and Elliot can hear his breath in his ears, surrounding him.

He turns back to the door, and there are people there. Kathy, Dickie. Eli standing at the doorway of the kitchen looking at him, with wide eyes that are the mirror image of Kathy's, also watching him. He slams the door, it shakes in a mimic of his own skin, and he leans back against it in an attempt to compose himself. Still, he is out of his own control, adrenaline dancing, muscles flexing, primeval voices trying to drown him. He remembers how to breath again, just before Dickie shoots him a quiet look and slips quickly to the stairs.

"I'm sorry Dad," he says as he turns, one hand gripping tightly to the bannister, as if fearing a fall, and without waiting for his father to reply, he's gone. Kathy glances towards Eli, who is still watching them, and tugs him out of their son's eye-line, into the front room.

"What the hell was that?" With her hissed questions, his hands regain their position as fists and the thought of the boy's words scream in his mind. Thought begins to make ground on the rage, and he wonders how he is supposed to tell her what was said. Say the words. Put the image of Olivia and him in her mind. He can't bear to think that she would be seen in such a way, that other people could see her as less than she was. That Kathy should have that scene, even for a second.

"I...I don't..." and its when he raises one hand in a need to hit something, that he sees it. Fear flits across her eyes, a butterfly kiss, it makes everything he has left leave, and all that stays is a sickness. She is scared, of him perhaps. He blinks once, and it all comes into focus. This is what he is now. He forces his fist to relax. "It was about Olivia."

Understanding flashes across now, taking over as the strongest emotion in her eyes, but its a resigned understanding. And still, there is something in the background, a wariness of what he is becoming. Or where this path leads.

"I'll never hurt any of you." He has to say it, to try and wipe out what he has seen, and he sinks into an old, soft chair as he does so. There is a second's pause that lasts a year, perhaps a lifetime, before she sits too, and nods.

"I know." The words are nothing more than leaves brushing together as they fall, and she spins the gold on her finger once, only once, before looking at him again. "When is this going to end?" she asks quietly. She's always quiet. Rarely raises her voice. Their arguments have always been tight, ferocious lightening strikes, punches that hit but make no sound. No thunder. He is thunder, but keeps it silent with her. It doesn't seem fair, when she won't hit back.

She knows what is going on by now, that he visits Hartman, that he is working on the case. She had made little comment, like it had come as no surprise. Sometimes she knows him too much. It scares him. Reminds him of how much of his life he has spent with her.

"When I know." He lets himself settle more into the chair. It will be a relief to talk, in stilted sunlight that will soon fade to darkness, in a house he knows every inch of, in a room that has seen everything there is to see of a life.

"I don't..." she sighs, searching the air for something, "why now? You were never this obsessed before. Not since you quit the squad." There is a plea, but he doesn't know what for.

"I didn't have enough before." He's so calm. So still and calm, and it's like sinking into quicksand without a fight. "What could I focus on, when we didn't even have a confirmed perp. But now, he's there. And he knows. And I have to know." His jaw tenses, once, on the end of the sentence.

"What if he never tells?" It's the voice of bedtime stories that comes from her now.

"He will." Elliot insists, and sounds like Eli arguing a fact he isn't sure of. Where he simply repeats his affirmation, because he has nothing more than that to base it on.

"And if he doesn't? Is it always going to be like this?" Her hand lifts, encompasses what their lives have become, captures the endlessness, the teetering on a knife-edge in one, simple gesture. "Because it's going to kill you." 

"Not knowing is killing me." The ache of his heart is building again, that comes when he lets the whole situation, the weight of it all, take over him again. It is easier to be lost in details. "How can I live like that?" It's his plea now. 

"You did before. We were doing okay. It wasn't like this." He can taste the tears in her voice that she swallows, that she absorbs back into her as she tries for a conversation that will make some sense. That will get them somewhere other than here. 

"But he wasn't so close. I can..." How to explain the instinct. He's sighted his prey. The hunt is on. How can he just stop, when it's just a few more strides. A circle here, a lunge there, a fight and a blow and he wins. Or loses. "I can't let him get away with it." 

"He's already locked up." She can't see the difference. Hartman is serving time for the rapes, not for Olivia. Nowhere in this is justice for her. Nowhere is it written that he carries the responsibility. He hasn't answered for her.

"She deserves for people to know what happened to her." And that's not all he is saying. He is saying that he deserves, that Don deserves, that Fin and John and Melinda and Alex and everyone she ever touched deserves to know the end of her story.

Kathy sighs. "Would she ask you to pay this price?" 

Of course she wouldn't. She always sent him home, worked late for him, held the pain of her own life deep so it didn't encompass him as well. Said a million 'fines' to try and preserve him. Lied a million times to save him from the truth, even while they both saw through the empty words. "She isn't here to ask. To have a say, one way or another. That's the point."

"So it doesn't matter that I think it's too much? That I think it might destroy you? That the kids are worried about you?" Kathy's voice rises slightly, with a hint of desperation with it, and her final blow strikes, hits through his defences. Suddenly he sees his children watching him, talking about him, fearing for him as a parent is supposed to of a child, not the other way around. They are not supposed to be there yet, not until he is old and tired and needs someone to remind him to dress and eat and sleep. Bitter irony hits like a slap. Stings, antiseptic on fresh wounds.

"I'll try hard, he says, as if putting more effort in is the answer to it all. He has nothing else. "I'll make sure it's over soon."

Kathy shakes her head slowly, like she hasn't heard him. Or he hasn't heard her. He has. He's heard and he sees what they see, from afar. But it can't change anything. He has to know. It's become as much a part of his life as anything else, as his children, as Kathy, as everything that makes him who he is.

When she has left him, he escapes back. To his sanctuary. To a place he isn't feared. He throbs with cotton against his fingers from the boy's shirt. To the echo of pain against his knuckles, that he would have felt had he given in completely, and let his rage go. It lasts for hours.

She fidgets, that night. She's edgy, at that point of frustrated exhaustion he recognises. He sits, calm, his eyes down but aware of her. The times are few, have always been few, where she has lost more of her control than he has, but it calms him. He cannot be anything else when she lets go. It's their balance. She anchors him when he goes off the rails. He can free-fall, not care, because she'll watch him and stop him. Now he has to do the same. So he works, and he watches.

She seems worried, annoyed, frustrated. He can't quite tell. He doesn't speak to her though. Even on the rare occasion he has slid into that, as if she sits across from him, she hasn't replied, and the silence after his voice will hurt too much tonight.

The small, distant part of his mind that tries to remain in reality wonders what her tension means. Whether it is as it seems, and his subconscious is trying to kick-start him, to make him act. In truth, he has been hiding since Christmas, in the comfort of the in between place. In the place where he can kid himself that he is doing what he says he is, searching for answers, but pulling back at the final hurdle. He has found a quiet shelter in 'research', in 'gaining his trust'. He thinks maybe, still, he's not ready to know. Not for the first time the disparity in all he feels is clear. He wants to know, but doesn't. That's what it comes down to. He can never win, or always lose. Both are true.

Still, he lets another few days slip away, until Fin comes around, and kills it all.

Kathy, Eli and the twins have gone out for dinner, but he's not hungry. That, and being around people is too close to normal in his present state. However, he's not in the basement, but is staring at images on the TV, a Knicks game, beer in one hand and pretending even to himself that he is a family man relishing bachelorhood for the night. It has to be a step forward. It's something.

When the front door goes he considers ignoring it, although the lights betray his presence. But he remembers he's supposed to be normal, and normal people answer the door. They make themselves move and smile and live in the present.

Fin is standing there, beers In one hand, and he waves them slightly as a greeting. Despite the desire to shut the door in his face, Elliot doesn't, instead opening it wider and letting cold air follow him in for a second before shutting it again. Who needs words?

It's only when they're settled back in front of the game, glass to lips and slouched like old furniture in the false warmth of heating turned up, do they speak.

"How's things goings?" Elliot asks, a safe, broad question, his eyes fixed on the moving figures. Fin shrugs, and Elliot feels rather than sees it, so focused he is on being normal, on keeping up the pretence.

"Same old." Rarely now do they talk of the job.

"You spoken to John recently?" Another sip of beer, and he makes himself groan as a shot is missed. It comes half a second too late, as he remembers that's what he is supposed to do, but he hopes Fin won't notice.

"Couple weeks ago. Wouldn't shut up about that kid of his. At least it's better than the conspiracy drivel." They lapse into silence again and Fin offers nothing.

They were never close, before, but the space left after first Olivia, then Munch, meant they had somehow reached for someone familiar, something left from before, and found each other. Slid together, filling the gap and meeting in the middle when there is no one else between them. Finally, Elliot feels a wave of exhaustion wave over him, and the game feels as pointless as it ever has. "Did Kathy call you? Or did she call Don, and he pass it on to you?"

"She called Don," Fin admits after a gap in which he is obviously weighing up the truth against a half hearted lie, and Elliot grunts. "Seems everyone's pretty worried about you."

It irritates him, partly because he's still got the hatred of people interfering in his life, partly because his personal business seems to be spreading, and a small amount because their worry makes him see what he doesn't want to. That this isn't normal. That he's sliding further off the rails. Each drag at their beers before saying something more, and Elliot can't find a response, so waits for Fin.

"Don't see why they bother. Nothings changed. You're just being the same stubborn, selfish son of a bitch you've always been. Except this time with an added dose of self-pity." He says it with a bizarre, floating light-heartedness that means Elliot blinks, and plays the words again in his head to check what he has heard. When he makes out the echo, rage flares again, and his knuckles whiten against the dark glass of the bottle, but he doesn't move. Fin shoots a sideways glance that doesn't connect with Elliot's face and smirks. "Pathetic. Before, you'd have tried to drop me for that."

Elliot fights to keep his voice low and calm, but it is still taut. "You come here for a fight? Or is this just tough love?" Fin snorts, keeping the surreal triviality to the conversation.

"No. I came because you still, against all the odds, have people that care enough to worry. And I needed to see how far up your own ass you've got. And how you're throwing everything you and Olivia worked for away. I couldn't believe you'd be selfish enough to let her down too." At the end, Fin shakes his head once, and it infuriates Elliot. This time, he bites, and now he sees nothing but flashes of moments he has relived for years. The moments he has let her down before, and vowed never to do again.

"What the fuck are you talking about."

"You. You're destroying your reputation and you're dragging her down with you." He takes another drag of his beer, like they are talking about nothing but sports, and Elliot only just suppresses the urge to smash the bottle out of his hand, instead putting his own down on the table with a tense quiver in his hand and stands, turning away from Fin.

"Don't talk about her." His voice is a warning growl that vibrates through the air and grows in the flickering light of just the TV.

"Why not. She's your excuse for everything. But she's not here to fight against what you're doing to her."

"Get to the fucking point." He turns and gives a glare that should wither, but Fin meets it with an unflinching hardness that gives nothing.

"Fine. Despite everything else, the politics, the gossip, your angers issues, you two had one of the best partnerships out there. And it made you good at what we did. You know more that anyone how shitty SVU is. No one in their right mind could want to do it. Or survive it. It has all of the worst parts of everything rolled in, with none of the glamour. Like it or not, you two became pretty fucking well know, not just for the job but for staying sane."

Fin doesn't raise his voice, doesn't stand, but spills the words like water tipping over the edge with a thunder as it hits the ground.

"And then she went missing. And somehow, something good came out of that. We got more money, more resources, because the brass wanted to be seen as responding to a rapist getting one of the people supposed to be catching them. We got a better reputation, not the old crap about us being stained with the same as the perps." Anger skims once across the stillness of his face, then goes.

"And some cops, good cops, actually started seeing our squad as a choice, rather than it being something to be avoided. You and her did that. The fucked up attention did that. The need to watch the car crash of her disappearance. Hell, you even helped afterwards. The work you did for the Academy. The education." He gestures once, trying to force his point home to Elliot, who is standing as still as glacial ice, like he won't move for ten thousand years.

"She'd hate it." Elliot says quietly, trying to break Fin's tirade with a gruff whisper full of contained emotion, but he carries on regardless.

"And now it's all being tarnished. All of it. Your obsession, your decline, you visiting Hartman. The old rumours have surfaced, people questioning your relationship. How close you were. Why you've gone so off the rails. For a few, you're even a joke. A sick caricature of when everything goes wrong." This, finally, brings a rise, and Elliot kicks out at the bottle he had placed on the table. It falls sadly sideways, not breaking, and warm liquid slides out, across the surface and silently onto the floor. It froths as it hits before sinking in.

"I'm just trying to find out what happened. Get answers. Get justice. Isn't that the whole fucking point of this whole thing." He's shaking as the rage slides through, barely contained under his skin. Heat boils his blood, and if he looked down and saw blisters, eruptions bursting across the surface, he wouldn't be surprised. Fin looks on, and breathes evenly, untouched.

"If that's what I thought you were doing, I wouldn't be here. Or I'd be helping. Maybe that's what all this started out as. But now...now I just see someone Olivia would hate. Or pity." With that, he drinks the last of his beer, stands and walks towards the door before turning back as he opens it. Elliot is still as stone, apart from unreleased adrenaline twitching his muscles. "The Elliot I knew would be pretty down on who I see as well."

The door shuts quietly, but it echoes long after Fin has driven away, and Elliot doesn't move. He will shatter if he does, if he lets all those words be truth. If he lets himself feel them. In the end, it doesn't matter, because when she stands in the doorway and looks at him, a tear staining the shadow of her cheek, he breaks anyway.


	6. Learn

Black against white, the constant steps in a game of men. He stops and stares at the silhouette of barb wire catches bright winter light behind it, and frost picks up their points to sparkle like diamonds. There is a plane dark against the sky behind, an impossible escape.

When he sits down this time, he shrugs off his jacket and rolls up his sleeves before Hartman enters the room. The preliminaries are over, he's danced thin ice, and now he will fight or he will fall. He needs the cold, air against skin that makes shivered goosebumps rise. It stops the ease that has grown without his knowledge over the months, the companionship he has felt, and now it alights his rage and his harsh need for blood.

He waits, and he tenses against the familiar comfort of the room. He knows where each crack of plaster leads, and he remembers watching the spider build the web that is now forgotten and forlorn in a high corner of the room, dust-covered in its emptiness. He has spent so long here, and all for nothing.

Hartman comes in with no caution apparent in his stance, his approach, and settles like they are old friends, companions with so much between them words and greetings are not needed. Elliot tries to brace himself against it, to get angry that this...this perp should walk in here with no fear of him, but it's as much of an effort to make his hatred burn as it had been to contain himself in their first meeting. And again, he despises what he has become through these meetings. The easy route he has taken.

Elliot slips a couple of times during the game, releasing a smirk without meaning too, but he knows he has achieved more than he thinks when, at the end, there is query in Hartman's voice as he says "see you soon," so it is more a question than a statement, which he doesn't answer. He has kept up his side, kept a wall in front, and there is anxiety in his eyes when Elliot looks at him briefly.

He sits in the car for a long time, waiting for the feelings to simmer and quiet. As complacence has grown during the visits, so his feelings have sunk, pressed and buried to avoid their full force, but now they're on the rise again. It takes long breaths that settle deep, and the murmur of his own words in his ears twist, so it is her speaking his name that finally means he can finally drive home and appear normal. And every time his feelings flare, he hears her name, and no one can tell.

The next day, he stands outside an apartment building, and looks up at its shut windows. Wind whistles voices down the street, reaching in to his skin and clutching at him. As he considers his next move he feels more like a cop than he has done for a long time, at least out of the safety of his basement where it is easy to pretend. It helped that she joined him on the car ride over, silent still but watching the changes of the world since she actually saw it. Instead of looking himself, he wonders what she sees, the sneaking shifts of people and places that he hasn't even noticed. He stops himself smiling at her, and she never looks his way, but she's gone when he pulls up.

Hartman's ex-wife is not what he expects, being both taller and curvier than he had imagined, and the slim, slight blonde in his head vanishes. "Beth Argent?" he asks, her new married name, and there is suspicion in her face as she confirms. "I wanted to ask about your ex-husband, Daniel. But I appreciate you may not want me too. I'm...I was a detective...about his case."

Elliot waits for a second and sees weariness cross her face with a sigh, the same sigh as he had seen on Hartman's grandmother, the first time. But she nods, opens the door, and tells him to sit while makes herself a coffee as if she is settling in for the long haul. "What can I do for you?"

He wishes it was as easy as him knowing what he is looking for, or to know which questions to ask. Puzzle pieces are spread out in front of him, he stares as hard as he can, but he only has half the picture to work from. He might not even have all the pieces yet. "I needed to ask about Daniel's behaviour. His character, his state of mind. Not just when you broke up, but before that. When you first met."

She thinks, and he drops his eyes, not wanting to watch her as she sorts through her memories. Out of the corner of his vision he takes in his surroundings with mild interest. Her apartment is warm, homely, a mixture of the fashionable and the comfortable, and her new, bright wedding ring catches the light as she takes a sip of coffee.

"He was...he was a challenge at first." She begins to speak, and both hands curl reflexively around the mug for protection. Elliot thinks she will say more, but she doesn't, and he prompts.

"A challenge?" 

"Yeah, he was really shy. Reserved. I guess that's what drew me to him. And he seemed...sweet." A wry smile flashes, and she looks Elliot in the eyes for the first time. In there he sees regret, wisdom, perhaps a hint of something that might still be fondness for the subject. For a second he wonders what she might see in him, but soon blinks it away.

"When did you first meet?"

"Freshman year of college. He was so unlike all the other guys, not loud, not always drunk." Her gaze slips off into empty air and she stays silent for a couple more seconds before standing suddenly, putting down the mug and going to a drawer. When she comes back, she is holding a frame with a photo in, showing her and Daniel. "I kept it. I don't know why."

Elliot takes it, and stares into both their eyes in turn. She is exuberant, laughing, reaching towards the camera. He is quieter, holding back, but his arm is tight round her waist and there is a smile there, with a touch of pride that he has got his girl. Placing it on the table between them, he makes sure it is face down, the smiles unseen "Did he ever talk about his past much?" Beth shakes her head violently, and her hair flicks across her face, making her slide it behind one ear. His heart clenches, just once, and he has to force himself to listen to the words as he stops himself looking for her.

"No. Only that his mom left, and his dad blamed him. I never could get him to talk about it." Sorrow with a hint of bitterness scar the last statement.

"What happened later, after you were married?"

Beth spins her wedding ring subconsciously as she answers. "It was fine at first, but then he wouldn't open up, and it frustrated me. I guess I figured things would be different once we married. But we'd start arguing, and suddenly it wasn't about the little things any more, but about me wanting to leave him, abandon him, and how he wouldn't let me." She looks Elliot straight as she carries on, "I never was going to leave him. I loved..." the sigh comes again, "I love him. But I couldn't bear it any more, the jealousy, the fear of me leaving."

She reaches to the photo, goes to turn it back over and see him but lets her fingers stroke the back instead, and then drops her hand away. In the space that follows he is acutely aware of the sound of her dishwasher, the hum of heating, a faint thrum of music somewhere outside the apartment, and his heartbeat.

"I never thought he'd do what he did though," and she is honest in that statement, he sees no falsity in her eyes, just what might be in the remains of any broken relationship. The shattered mix of grief and anger, bitterness and sorrow at how things go so badly, badly wrong.

"Thank you," he says as he stands to leave, and he hears rather than sees the deep letting go she gives at the end of the discussion.

"I hope I could help with, with whatever you needed." He nods, although he isn't sure, and the door closes behind him before he's even taken a step away, like she fears what might come back in, what he has carried to her door. Or perhaps just what exists in the world, that she now know exists. He doesn't like to admit that she is right to fear, but she is.

That night, he doesn't go to the basement. The picture, of Daniel and Beth so happy and full of laughter keeps haunting him, and he finds himself following Kathy around like a lost dog, needing her companionship. She says nothing about it, as she cooks and he sets the table, as they eat and he does his duty by clearing up afterwards, but when he follows her as she goes to fold laundry, it's too strange, with an undercurrent of despair.

"You okay, El?" She offers him a single glance and then continues with her chores in the quiet hum of the house, and he leans back to watch her, not wanting to hide as he thinks.

"Did marriage change us?" And when she raises her eyebrow in query, he tries to elaborate, "I mean, as people. Did our characters change?"

Kathy looks down, looks away, and smooths her hand across a sweater of Eli's, fingering the worn cuff slightly. "We got a whole lot more responsible," but it's not what he's looking for. He doesn't want answers like 'it made us settle down, it made us poorer, it made us give up some dreams and create others.' He wants more specifics, like it made him angrier, her sadder, something. She can see that she hasn't given him what he wants. "Being a mother changed me more than being married did."

The children flit through his head. The sight of each for the first time, single golden moments wiped clean of fear and tiredness, of trepidation and worry. There is so much he wants to ask, so he wants the answers to. He needs to know if she thinks he is a better man now or when she first laid eyes on him. If fatherhood was his saving, or filled him with rage and bitterness against the world. He aches to know who they would have been, left on their own, without each other tying them together. Who he would have been without Kathy, without the children, without Olivia.

In the comfort of his home, he will not find answers, either in the quiet of his wife or the raw stripping of their lives. Kathy holds no hidden secrets, and he knows what he will see if he asks, the wrinkle of worry gently disguised as she never wants to concern him now. She tries to protect him, as he has done for everyone else all these years.

Before he leaves the room, forcing himself to let go of her, he reaches to the sweater she has folded and placed into the pile on top of a t-shirt of his, and now beneath a top of hers, and his fingers touch the blue of the fabric as delicately as if he might touch a newborn baby. Kathy carries on folding as he leaves, but he can feel her eyes on his back. Wondering.

There is still no hint of life in her yard, and the neighbourhood is quiet as well, like it is sleeping the winter away. So many times in the past he has envied those animals who get to hibernate. To hide from the harsh winds, to lose themselves in warmth and sleep and the passing of time until everything new comes. He pulls his coat tighter to him, and treads the path in a ghostly world, but then the cat shoots round the corner of the porch at the sound of feet, and the spell is broken. He smiles, but it just glares and waits for the door to open once he knocks.

Mrs. Johnston doesn't seem surprised to see him, but welcomes him into the house as if he is a old friend come for a visit, apologising that she has no milk in but he is welcome to black coffee or tea if he would like.

It is still chilly within the walls and he is reluctant to relinquish his coat, but does so in fear of seeming rude. When she has sat opposite and reached for her own tea, he sees a tremble in her hand and realises that now, in the last few months, a frailty has come to cloak her. He remembers it from growing up, suddenly realising that his grandparents weren't just 'getting' old but had now fully arrived there and now there hangs over them a countdown, with no time assured but all hoped for.

"How are you?" she asks politely and they go through the routine, though he thinks she might be lying when she says she is fine. He thinks he might be lying as well. Still, he is impressed when she remembers Dickie's name, asks about his other children, and does all the things well versed and expected in conversation with older people before they run out of words between them and it all drags gently to a halt.

"I've still been visiting Daniel." He regrets it as soon as he says it, when it comes out harsh and loud in the delicate silence of the room. This time, when she hears his name, her defences are not as strong as before, and Elliot can feel her sadness well up between them.

"How is my grandson?" She is quiet, so quiet that he can hardly hear her above the purring of the cat, and now it's not just her hand that has a old tremor, but her voice as well. A shiver runs through him, that has nothing to do with the coldness of the room.

"We've been playing chess." It's an answer without an answer, but it brings a smile to her face, and it makes him glad he has told her.

"I remember him playing chess." For the second time in a few days, he sits across from a woman who eases into memories about Daniel, whose eyes visit places in the past, and he waits for her to make the journey. "My husband taught him. Daniel was such a..., well, he idolised his grandfather." Deja vu is a punch to his gut as she reaches out, picks up a frame and passes it over to him.

Elliot again sees the smile, the eyes looking up from next to an older man with a soft, proud expression, both of them in front of a chess board. It shakes him more than he cares to admit, the sight of Daniel as an innocent child, but he glazes his eyes over and pretends to look for the proper amount of time before handing it back. When she takes it again, he sees there is a thumbprint of his smeared against the glass. She doesn't notice, just looks fondly at it before putting it down.

"When did your husband pass away?" Elliot is unsure why he asks, only that it means something to him, to know how long she has been alone like this, with just memories.

"A year after my daughter left." She looks clearly at him, with not even a hint of tears within her eyes, just the staunch love of people who are truly meant to be together. "He died early, a heart attack, though we thought it was a car accident at first. He was driving to pick up Daniel." She drops now, hiding some of her face. "I'm glad in a way, that he never had to lose a child. Or a grandchild." There is such practicality in her voice, but if there was anything else he doesn't see as he shakes his head slowly. Everything begins to slide into the places made for it, and suddenly the picture is ten different kinds of simple in his mind.

Lost in realisation, his hand scrapes down his face and feels the stubble beneath his palm, but he hasn't noticed himself falling silent, or her quizzical look at him. "What is it?" And now there is a tremor of sadness, grief, fear, age...all in one or none at all, but he cannot register it fully, caught up in a battle of his mind, as instinct battles empathy.

"No wonder he fears it, people leaving. People abandoning him." It's a way in, a weakness, and it sends a surge of energy rippling underneath his skin, the shot of adrenaline they'd get as they stood and looked through glass at a perp, and knew they had the weapons to break them. All that's missing is her eyes matching his, the lack of explanation between them, the understanding as the door opens and they slip into easy sync within those four, harsh walls. He closes his eyes, and pretends for a second, but when he opens them there are two pairs of eyes watching him, and he doesn't know now who is more disconcerting, Mrs Johnston or the cat.

"I'm sorry," he says, though he cannot be sure what he is apologising about, and while he looks at her and waits for a reply, she seems to shut down, to fade and take on the image of someone whose mind is travelling far, far away.

"It's been nice talking with you Mr. Stabler," and her attention is only half on him when she stands, "but I'm rather tired." She won't tell him to leave, she's too polite for that, but her meaning is beyond clear, and he follows her when she walks towards the front door.

Elliot pauses only once, when he steps across the threshold and out into the colder air, but finds himself with nothing to say now. He can't focus fully on what he has done, on why she has reacted so suddenly to talk of her grandson, and in the same way she isn't truly aware of him. Their eyes meet, but then he leaves and the door closes quickly behind him, an echoing sound in the emptiness of the neighbourhood.

The drive home, dinner with just Kathy because Eli is having a sleepover, watching a game that evening, it's all so easy while he's still fuelled by his talks, by the knowledge of how deep Hartman's insecurity goes. The hours he's put in now make sense, become important and not just a sickening, exhausting waste of time, and clarity is bright within him.

For three days Elliot finds some kind of nagging peace while he waits for time to pass, for a new week to start so he can visit again, so he can act instead of simply existing while the world spins around him. Strangely, in those days, being a husband and father comes to the fore again. He does all he should, catching up with his children and his wife, calling Don and Fin and John in an attempt to reassure, to still the growing fear within them all.

By Sunday night he lies down in a heady mix of guilt and relief, happiness and frustration. He has seen Olivia only once, standing on his porch looking out, and the urge had still been there to join her, before Eli's hand came tight in his and dragged him off to games and pictures and all the things boys should do. Now there is the guilt, that he hasn't thought of her enough, that he hasn't used his time to prepare and hone his skills and be with her. It rests heavily, but soothed by the relief that perhaps, just perhaps these days have meant he isn't as far gone from the real world as he feared. Then there is happiness, the simple pleasure of man and family, but the frustration and nagging urge has built and will come to the fore in the morning, when he can play, and maybe win. Still, he cannot allow himself to think of what it means, winning or losing. Of which he wants to do. That night, he dreams of her, and walking away. It's a peaceful night.

Taps and beats fill his morning. He fiddles with his spoon in the bowl of cereal, turning it over and over again in the left over milk. He drums his thumbs against the steering wheel as he drives, and it matches his heartbeat and the clicking as he takes each turn towards his next attempt. His real attempt, now.

Usually he will sit, compose his thoughts for a minute in the car, outside the fences and gates he has known for so many years, but he can't now. There is too much urgency inside, that threatens to spill out, that he can barely contain, and if he was sitting then he would jiggle his legs, jump and twitch, but he restrains himself to just walking quickly towards the entrance.

The officer on duty is one he has come to know, and he shoots a quick smile as he goes to pull his cell phone out of his pocket and hand it over, but the man looks solemn and speaks.

"I'm sorry..."

Elliot's heart stutters, and drops. He's heard those words, said those words, far too many times.


	7. Ask

The guard seems reluctant to speak, but squares his shoulders against Elliot's anger and does.

"He's requested not to receive visitors. I can't let you in to visit." Elliot stares disbelieving at the man in the uniform as the words filter through and finally reach the nerve centre of his brain with a noise that sounds like someone being hit.

"What?" Nothing makes sense, and despite his feet seeming secure against the concrete beneath him it all spins and his stomach drops and churns. He thinks he might puke and searing acid already rises faintly at the back of his throat in dregs, like warm beer spilling out.

"I'm sorry sir." The man repeats, looking edgy.

"You know I'm a cop." In his attempts to fight the nausea his voice comes out gruff and hoarse, and his muscles are tensed both against his somersaulting stomach and the mounting, fierce desire to punch someone, or something.

"Yes sir. But as you're here as a civilian, I can't let you in." Elliot spins away to avoid seeing his apologetic look, catching a glimpse of the outside world and clenching a fist before breathing once and facing him again.

"I was the investigating detective on Hartman's case," he says through gritted teeth, but the guard is already shaking his head with professional sorrow.

"I have my orders sir. And as I understand it, the case was handed over when you..." he clears his throat once before continuing, "when you retired." And in that one sentence, Elliot knows he's out of luck with this man. Not only does he seem to know the whole story, of Elliot's demise and descent, but he is also working for higher orders. His fingernails bite into the palms of his hands so hard blood swells.

He is helpless again.

When he turns and walks away, back to the car, he feels like a drunk man. The world spins, each step is a daring risk into the unknown but he doesn't care. When he reaches it he doesn't get inside but leans against it, and the cold metal and shivering air begin to settle the churning, but not enough. It's never enough. It takes a long time for him to regain control, so long the blood has clotted into dark, thick lines and his fingernails are tinged purple and blue in various shades.

Finally he gets back in but he stares ahead as if he has never learned to drive, and even when he starts, he doesn't turn the heater on. The heat will lull him, soothe him, and it will all become unreal. Or perhaps that's the problem, and if he lets feeling back into his skin, it will become real again.

There is such fury within him it seeps through the cracks that evening, and in the days that follow. His subconscious tries to numb itself and he starts drinking without even realising. Suddenly it's 6pm, or 5pm, or even 4pm, and there are two empty bottles in front of him and a third in his hand. If he sees them, acknowledges the amount, the anger flares and he cannot bear it so mostly he doesn't. Rage spills in other ways. Maureen calls at 10pm, stranded by a friend and needing a ride, but he cannot oblige, cannot drive with so much alcohol diluting his blood. He takes it out on her, snarling that she should be more responsible, and it's Kathy who goes to fetch her while he prowls, hating himself more than anyone else and slamming doors with abandon in the emptiness, with Eli having a sleepover.

He doesn't avoid his father though, and gets snapped at next while shrieking at 8am when he comes home, a noise that feels like it will snap Elliot's brain in half in his hungover state. It's his heart that hurts when tears well in the boy's eyes but he finds himself simply getting angrier, and tells his son to grow up before Kathy shoots him such a vile look he withers beneath it. In the next second he hears Olivia, her voice quiet and still, his responding like he's watching a movie of his life.

"_...at least you know what you're passing on... half my genes are drunk and the other half are violent and cruel."_

"_It's not all about the genes Liv. All you can do is love your kids." _

He swallows at his own words, at her own fear about who she was and what she would pass on, and he feels his own father within him, sees his son's tears sliding down his own face. The hug he holds Eli in is fierce but the smile afterwards is worth it, though it doesn't repair all of the damage and there is a hurt behind them. He is fragile, sharp, lashing out at everyone, and he will not touch another drink. He will not be his father.

Instead he escapes back to the basement, and he's sad that it appears to be a relief to those around him. To keep his mind busy, his body tired, he sorts through box after box of old accumulated junk and is brutal in his disposal of it. Toys, report cards, old games with missing pieces, it all goes, until he is half way through a box and suddenly she is there, and he realises how exhausted he is. It is all he has in him to sink down and let gravity take over, to close his eyes and let himself breathe for the first time. She just watches him, but her presence is enough. Again, she saves him.

He sits so long that he imagines dust floating across and gathering in a thin, shimmering sheen across his skin. He sees spring, summer, autumn form outside while he is trapped in each inhale and exhale. Kathy, his children, they all grow old and he doesn't move, but when he is calm and numb he ventures upstairs and it's only been hours. Just hours, nothing else.

Again he goes back to the prison, again he is refused, and for a third and a fourth time. He doesn't understand, he feels as lost as he ever has, and it's this that means he can't face going home one day after sitting in the car for half an hour, trying to work out how these things came to pass.

He drives into the city, and there is a flush of traffic as he slides in and out of lanes, his cell to one ear. It's an easy, five minute conversation, and the time between the snap of his phone closing and pulling quietly, slowly up to his destination means that the higher functions of his brain have begun to take over. He is even aware of parking, not just working on instinct and subconsciousness.

The bar is familiar, from long ago. He hasn't been in in...forever, a lifetime, though it will only be years. The beermats are different, the face behind the bar has changed to another nondescript man with a five-day beard, and the people sitting in the air that is just slightly too dark for the time of day seem the same old people. Hell, they might actually BE the same people that were here last time. He slides into a booth and as he waits, he remembers.

_She's halfway through her second beer and neither are thinking of going home, although that is a lie. He is thinking of it, dreading it in an gentle way that doesn't particularly take much thought or energy, just a nagging in the back of his mind that only creeps in when he stops thinking of everything else. He's almost finished his second, further on than her, and they have lapsed into silence, listening to the sounds of others escaping their lives. It's an easy soundtrack, voices they cannot distinguish, glass filling with drink, the occasional laugh devoid of meaning. _

_The bottle top he is playing with catches on a piece of rough skin of his fingertips, a slight halt in him turning it over and over and over again, and he flicks it across the stained, half varnished table that is flaking off if you get a thumbnail underneath the right part. It can keep him occupied for longer than he would care to admit, peeling back to raw wood._

_It rattles once as it spins and then her hand comes down, halting its progress. The top is sharp edge up, she has her palm flattened across it, and he knows it must be biting into her. She hasn't just rested her hand down, it is a deliberate stop of its motion, and they both look at it for a second. Then she flips it, just once, and again as an afterthought so it slides easily back across to him on its smooth side._

_And so it starts. He can't count how many times it goes across that table. Fast, slow, direct, out wide: it doesn't matter. Sometimes they put so little energy in it barely makes halfway and needs an extra touch to travel the distance. Sometimes it is so fast it requires sudden, awake actions to stop it falling off the edge of the table._

_Rules become clear, though neither speak. There is a limit to the angle of attack; a bonus if it strikes the now replenished bottles. Nearly falling off will elicit a groan, a laugh, a foreign twinkle in both their eyes and they lose all sense of time or place. They know if it disappears for good, even just once, it will mean the end of it all. _

This is what he remembers, as he waits.

Finally she joins him and gestures for the barman to bring her one of her father's beers. He has allowed himself this one, knowing he has to drive home, and he tilts it towards her. The bottle is barely touched and she takes a pull before handing it back, just as her own appears in front of her with a smile from the barman that she returns, before looking at him.

"I could have been in class, you know," Kathleen chastises as she assesses his mood, a half smile at the end of the sentence. It reads, I love you Dad. I'm glad we're here. But I don't know what's going on.

"You weren't," he replies, and she shakes her head and drinks.

"You're right. I wasn't. But I could have been." There is still a hint of doubt in her tone.

"I pay your tuition, you can skip if I say so."

"Only if you say so?" She tips her head to one side, and gives him a grin that is no longer cautious, tentative, but instead so full-blown he cannot help smiling in return. It is a genuine one, and when he raises one eyebrow in reply, she lets loose a small giggle, like the letting go of a held breath. "What's up then, Dad?"

He finds himself spinning the bottle top again, makes himself stop with a clear, simple movement that contains so much thought it hurts. He tries to speak, once, then again, each time starting before finding he doesn't know truly how to explain what he needs to know.

"Why..." he stutters, and then asks again, "why would someone not want someone to see them, if that is the only person they had left in the world." He waits a second, and then looks at her. She's spinning her bottle top in the same way as he does and it fills him with sorrow. From him, to Olivia, and back to him. And now to his daughter who is so clearly thinking, both about his question and why he is asking.

"Is there love between the people?" she asks, and he decides that now he's not asking about him and Hartman, but about Hartman and his grandmother. Because that's easier, that makes sense, that fits into it all so much better than he and Hartman do.

"I think so. Yes. They don't hate each other. But maybe I don't know the whole story."

"I guess then, if it's not that they hate each other then it's probably shame, perhaps? Or regret? Fear" She shrugs, still a hint of confusion in her eyes.

"Yeah, that's what I thought but... it seems so intense. If it is shame, it's pretty extreme."

"Then he hates himself. He cannot bear what he is, what he has done, and if he lets anyone else see then it becomes true. It's a weird mix of punishment and self-pity, of fear and guilt. Of shutting out reality."

Elliot wants to look away from the truth in his daughter's eyes but he can't. He's captivated, drawn in by her honesty, by the opening of her heart to him after everything that has gone before. But after seconds that might be their entire lives, he takes a drag of beer and breaks the contact, looking round the bar. Out of the corner of his eye he can see Kathleen smile, a small movement inwards, like she's acknowledging how far they have come.

As he lets things settle in his brain, warming beer sliding into him, her words become stark. How many people try to hide from their reality. How her words, her explanation could be talking of her, of him, of Hartman, of a hundred different people they know.

"Would you have talked to us? Your Mom or me? If things hadn't gone the way they did?" Elliot isn't sure why he wants to know because if there is one thing he is sure of, it's that it doesn't matter what has gone before. You cannot change the past, or ask questions like 'if' or 'why. There is no point. It hasn't stopped him asking though.

She shrugs with a quick movement, like she knows the pointlessness of the question as well. "I guess. That, or things would have gotten so I couldn't hide it any more. Depends which would have come first." In the breath she takes, the blink of her eyes, he sees her laid out before him, her lack of response to his hand hitting her, the tube going down her throat. He sees her cold and blue on a slab, with a sheet being pulled over her face.

"Are you happy?" And he doesn't look at her when he asks, doesn't want to see sorrow in her face if she says no, and while he waits for an answer he thinks of all the reasons she might not be.

"What is happiness?" She replies with a snort, and it's so Kathleen it makes him smile even as he fears her coping mechanism, that she will laugh off the question because she doesn't want to give him an honest answer. But then he feels, rather than sees, her grow serious again and risks a glance. "Yeah Dad. I'm pretty happy." It lights a tiny spark he didn't know he could feel any more, and reminds him how much he loves his children. Reminds him so much that a lump in his throat grows, and threatens to suffocate him. He swallows but it doesn't ease away, and Kathleen makes it worse by reaching a hand towards his and taking it.

"I wish... I wish..." She is unable to spit the words out but he moves his hand once, a gesture for her to continue, and she seems embarrassed as she says, "I wish you could be happy too." And, as a whispered afterthought, "I miss her too."

Now he truly cannot look at her, because he dare not let her see him cry. He dare not fall apart this much in front of her. He dare not start because perhaps he will never stop. He just squeezes her hand, and they sit like that for a long time, until he finds stability and thinks he can speak without a crack in his voice. The rest of their brief conversation is made of laughs and teasing.

When they stand to leave, he hugs her, kisses her on the forehead, whispers "thanks sweetie," to her, and there is light laughter disguising the serious point when she replies,

"Any time Dad, as long as you're buying."

By the time he makes it to the sixth attempted visit it is the beginning of March, slush is everywhere and he has got nowhere. He has done nothing further, has nowhere left to turn, and he promises himself as he drives that this will be the last attempt. Of course, he'd promised himself that on the previous two occasions as well, but this is different. This time he really means it.

In such a short time he has learnt to brace himself against the refusal, the shake of the head, and he has almost turned to walk away before the guard speaks. "You've been granted permission to visit," and the words are as dream-like to him as the refusal had been the first time. He must stare in confusion, or in blankness, because the man pushes the visitor sign-in and a pen towards him and says his name before he can respond. His signature is nothing like it should be but it doesn't matter.

All that matters is that he's now sitting, waiting, and wondering what the hell has changed. What switched the first time for Hartman, the man who appealed with his eyes for Elliot to come back, to refuse him and now for him to be allowed again. Nothing makes any sense, but he gives a wry smirk inwards at that thought. Nothing has made sense for a long, long time now.

Even with his experience of perps, of criminals, of people locked up and others going through hell, he is shocked by the change in Hartman when he walks into the room. Gone is the quiet, self contained man of before and in his place is someone with every muscle tense, and fire in his eyes. It is matched with calculating, chilling glare that Elliot can't admit is scary, but sends a shiver up his spine nonetheless. This is a different man.

They sit across each other in silence like so many times before, but this silence has an edge. It's like being cut shaving, a vicious sting. It's what Elliot imagines a razor-blade drawn slowly across skin would feel like, without the relief once it's over. When someone breaks, he's surprised to find it is him.

"What's been going on?" Of course, as ever, it isn't what he wants to ask, but it gets a reaction. He's too slow to counter against it, his sharp instincts have been blunted by the last six years and Hartman has him pinned against the wall of the room quicker than he would think possible.

"How dare you. How fucking dare you," Hartman has time to spit at Elliot before the guards are in the room, pulling him away, and Elliot draws a hand across his throat to soothe the skin that had been pressed. It hurts to swallow, once, and then it fades. He gestures for Hartman to be let go and the guards look apprehensive but do what he has asked, but Hartman doesn't seem to notice them releasing him. They square off again, standing this time, on other sides of the room.

"Well? What have I done?" It is meant to come out calm, like a proper question, not meaning to provoke too hard, but instead it sounds like a taunt to his own ears and he knows Hartman has taken it that way when his eyes narrow.

"My grandmother." The whisper of words howls through the room, Arctic winds with ice, and Elliot feels the blast but doesn't show it.

"What about her?"

"I told you, I wanted her to forget me. I told you that. But no, you leave us alone. You had to go and fuck it all up, you had to go and torment her, hurt her, make her feel for me. You did this..." and he pulls a folded, well handled piece of paper from the pocket of his jumpsuit and throws it to Elliot with disdain, or disgust. Both men look down at it for a second, white and insignificant against the empty floor, but finally Elliot bends to pick it up, keeping half an eye on Hartman as he unfolds it. When he doesn't look further at the page immediately, Hartman growls at him. "Read it."

The handwriting is neat, but slips on occasion, and his heart sinks with realisation. He reads with it beating, almost hurting in his throat.

_Dear Daniel, _

_This is a letter I never anticipated writing, but I have learned that the most important things in life, the moments in time that matter, are ones that we are never able to anticipate. It was such meeting your grandfather, becoming a mother and especially in becoming a grandmother. I remember when your mother first told me...but perhaps that is for a different time. _

_I wish you to know that you have always been an immense source of pride to me, from your first steps to your first report card. I was once told that you can never experience true happiness until you become a grandmother, and it was to be true. You have been nothing but joy in my life._

_It saddens me greatly to know that you have held yourself to blame for all these years, for your mother's behaviour and for your grandfather's death. I cannot imagine the pain you have gone through, and I only wish I could have done more to prevent your troubles. However, I am unable to minimise the grief and suffering you have caused to others, including myself, and I regret that it should have come to such a situation. In my head I hope that those you have hurt are able to find solace in your punishment, but in my heart I am truly sad that you find yourself where you are._

_I feel I must have done something to fail you, to let you down, but we cannot relive our lives, or change what has happened. All we are able to do is move on, and try to right our wrongs. I hope you are able to do this, and if I can be of assistance then I hope you will let me know. _

_You are the only grandson I will ever have, and I wish to let you know simply this. I love you, and I always will. _

_Mary _

Elliot can see it as clearly as if he had been there with her, sitting at her antique desk with a quiver to her hand and something more than tears released from her. He doesn't think she will have cried, not then, but perhaps late at night in her empty bed with no one there to bear witness. The date is the day he went to see her for the last time.

When he has read it through a second time he composes himself, taking a breath before daring to look at Hartman again. The man is still, worryingly still, and Elliot thinks he knows what he must seem like now, in the midst of such fury that it cannot be released in one go. He finds himself unsure how to react, on this other side, but calmly hands the letter back, proud that it doesn't shake when he does. Hartman grabs it off him, and gestures violently.

"This is all your fucking fault. I told you, I told you I wanted her to forget me. I just want to be forgotten. I told you..." and there is not only rage but a bite of tears in his voice, a self-pity that burns into Elliot, that ignites the kind of cold, white fury he does best, with no thought for himself or anyone else. He stands, and Hartman must see something in his eyes, because he takes a step back.

Elliot feels his muscles tense and hairs on the back of him neck up, in an ancient instinct, stemming from the need to look bigger, tougher, stronger than the opponent. He holds on, waits for it to build, waits for the air to crackle, and for weakness to show in Hartman's eyes again. He blinks, and Elliot strikes.


	8. Lose

"You want people to forget you?" Elliot's voice is low as it vibrates through the air, each word perfectly enunciated and terrifyingly calm. Hartman nods slowly, a man trapped in a spell with no control, no way to deny what he feels. Elliot continues, "You really think that's possible? That you can hide in here and people will forget? That if you don't exist in peoples minds, your acts won't either? None of what you did will be real, or matter?"

He takes a step forward and Hartman backs up in return, staring like an animal in the headlights but with still a hint, an attempt at bravado in his eyes. It acts as fuel, Elliot blinks once and he's watching from above, a hunter sighting prey with nowhere to run in the vicious glare of the artificial light. At the edges of the dream he hears a quiet voice, telling him that this will achieve nothing, this will ruin it all, but it only lasts a moment and then fades. Predatory instinct floods him, and it is sheer relief not to think, but just to act. Rage, disgust, fury at the whole world bubbles, and he will take it out on this man.

"You know how many people will never forget you? How many peoples lives you have infected and tainted?" Another step forward, closing the distance. "You think those three girls will ever forget your face? You think you don't haunt them every night, as they try to sleep?" Each sentence is full of a scalding bitterness, and Hartman keeps retreating until his back is against the wall. Elliot doesn't care. Each muscle is finely, exquisitely tensed and to sink into violence would be so easy. Too easy. He knows it would bring him no relief, create too little pain, and so he carries on with words.

"Their families will never forget you either, as they watch their daughters, their sisters, their granddaughters crumble and fall apart, bit by bit. As they witness their pain and are helpless against it." Now would be the prime time to throw a punch, if he was going to, but he takes another step into Hartman's space and doesn't stop for a moment. "You think their partners, their lovers will be able to stop seeing your face, as they try to repair the hurt? As they carry your guilt, for being men, for not being there, for not being able to fix it all. You think you won't be there while those girls cry in their arms, or tremor in fear?"

Hartman's tremble vibrates the thick, dense air between them and he looks like a small boy cowering in front of him, but Elliot will not let himself feel sorry. Not now. "Anyone who had anything to do with Olivia will always remember your name." And now this, this is what he really wants to say, to throw in this man's face, and he hopes it feels like acid as it hits him. "You think her colleagues, her friends, will ever forget having to search for her because of you? Forty thousand cops will forget that you are the one who stole one of them?"

He leans in, so one hand rests against the cold wall and traps Hartman. When he breathes in, he can smell the fear emanating from every inch of his skin and it sears the air with heat, despite the chill of the room. "The victims she helped will always remember that you stole the person who stood up for them. The hundreds of people she made a difference to think of you with pure disgust." Droplets of spit hit Hartman's face as each word spills out, and he is forced to listen. The other hand comes up, cages him, and there is no going back now. Elliot couldn't stop, even if he tried with all his strength, and it comes out in a growling whisper that could shatter mountains with its force.

"You think my family will ever forget you? You think my wife, my children can ever wipe your name from their minds? You think I will ever forget you?" And with the breaths that come after this are rolling thunder, churning in their force until he has no more air. He takes a step back like he is finished, and it seems as if Hartman's knees might give out. At Elliot's movement he closes his eyes, but Elliot's not done yet.

The sound of splintering wood makes him jump in fear, his eyes widen so the whites are clear and he shrinks back against the wall as Elliot destroys the table that has sat as a boundary between them for so long, smashing it against the concrete. Pieces fly, skid across the floor, and a guard steps into the room, but Elliot holds a restraining hard backwards without even looking, and the man stops moving. All are frozen in their places as words slice through them all.

"You think your grandmother will ever forget her only grandchild? The grandchild she loved, grow into you? The grandchild with rapist always next to his name. With murderer next to his name. That carries her blood running through his veins? You really, honestly thing she will forget you?" At the chilling, almost comical rise to his voice at the end; at the sardonic, broken laugh that threatens to fall, Hartman sinks to the ground.

"I'm sorry," and it's a whimper that causes a surge of disgust to rise through Elliot. Disgust, and a sickening knowledge that he has just lost the game despite the tears that are falling from Hartman's face. He is broken, defeated, and the tears turn into sobs that shake his body and leave him empty on the ground. Elliot cannot watch any more, and turns away. There is no pride in rejoicing over a weaker opponent, and now he's in sight of the end, the rage dissipates, leaving just dread that drags him down.

When he reaches the door, turns to look back one last time, he knows he has lost. Hartman will never forgive him for this, will never tell him what he did, and it's all over. The hours, the days, the weeks of trying are gone, the time and energy all for nothing. It's over.

Elliot has stared at the bottle for so long he thinks it might be simply a mirage, bathed in the stream of sallow light coming in through her kitchen window. It's taunting, tempting, and each minute is another moment he has made it through without losing his mind. The wall behind his back is cold, numbing his skin, in the empty apartment where dust covers everything and has settled into every pore of his body. Hours ago, the specks had danced in the beam of light breaking the shadows but now, everything is still.

The glass of the bottle is clear though, he had wiped it gently when he took it from the cupboard, and he can easily see through the pure, brilliant liquid inside, that offers such relief. At times, he has stared so hard he expected it to shatter, explode, just with the force of his pain, but it hasn't.

For the hundredth, perhaps the thousandth time, he calls her land-line and closes his eyes to the familiar sound surrounding him. It is all the same, as if years haven't passed: the noise it makes as it echoes around the lonely walls, her voice kicking in, none of it has changed and he wonders what has. He thought he had, that the time had made a difference to him but it hasn't at all. He remains trapped in his anger, in his ability to well and truly fuck things up and destroy everything he has strived for. His children, his wife, everyone around his have survived despite him, not because of it. And this time, this time he came so close, but still he failed.

He will never know.

The ache is so intense he wonders how he can even draw a breath, how he hasn't passed out from the pain. It's huge, all encompassing, and its wiped out everything else from his body and his mind. He's sitting in an apartment that doesn't smell of her any more, that holds nothing of her here, and this is what unbearable really is.

And she hasn't come. He keeps waiting for her to appear, to walk through the door or stand in front of him and offer solace, but she has forsaken him. He has lost her.

Finally he stands, and opens the bottle of vodka. Her untouched bottle of vodka. And drinks.

There is a different kind of pain when daylight hits his eyes the next morning, and he groans as he struggles through the haze, even though his eyelids are still closed. For one brief, blissful second he is still disorientated, unable to understand why it is so hard beneath him, why his head throbs and why nothing makes sense. But when it hits him he has to move fast, stumbling to the sink and vomiting again and again and again, vicious bile with harsh vodka burning until he has nothing left, and still his stomach turns. He pants each breath, cold sweat beads across his face, and shivers churn through him. It takes a long, long time but eventually there is neither no more liquid, nor energy, and it's over.

Splashing cold water helps to clear the fog but not much, and things only begin to make sense when he turns and sees glass scattered in splintered pieces across the floor, sharp in the morning light. His cell lies on its side next to the wall near the place he had lain, and after a while he manages to reach done and pick it up. There is no sense of responsibility or reason for his actions, only that this is what people do. They have their cells, and they check them when they wake.

There are eleven missed calls from home, staggered until the last one at 3.47am, and he's confused as to why Kathy would be calling until he remembers she doesn't know what he has done, having come straight to this refuge without admitting anything to anyone. His actions are what she would expect, if she knew, but she doesn't, and acid threatens to rise again at the thought of telling her. When he imagines her face, the sadness in her eyes, other people flash across his view. Don, Fin, John, they all glare accusingly but then she's here, and she doesn't.

She's on the other side of the kitchen from him, standing where she should be, in her apartment, but she looks entirely foreign. He finds nothing of blame or anger in her look though, and perhaps its that that breaks him all over again. No accusations, not fury at how he has let her down, most of all. Instead there is just an all-encompassing sorrow that feels like a fatal wound in his chest. Almost, almost he reaches out to touch to, to reach out to her for comfort and remind him in quiet, calm words who he is, but instead he runs. He cannot face her pity. He cannot face her not being real.

Nothing goes through his head as he drives. Absolutely nothing. No recrimnations, playing what has happened over and over again, no trepidation about what will come now. Even no sense of how bad he feels and the way his hands shake like an old man when he doesn't grip the wheel so tightly it hurts. There is none of this in him.

He is a shadow walking into the house, a ghost making no noise, and perhaps he's not real and this is all a dream. But, just as his hand touches the cold metal of the door handle to the basement, she comes into view and stricken anxiety is clear upon her face. When she immediately grows paler, reaches out an arm to him and says his name in disbelief under his breath, he knows how bad he must look. But he has nothing to say.

The moment his feet hit the solid flood of the basement, something changes. A switch flicks, he walks through a shimmering wall of protection and everything tumbles from him. It is a heady, primeval, adrenaline filled rush of anger welling from deep inside and it spills in violent waves as the dam is broken. Rage roars.

Everything in his path is destroyed. He pulls shelves down, box upon box of objects he hadn't gotten around to sorting that hit the walls opposite and old children's clothes shred beneath his hands. The sounds are so loud there is no way to pick out the raining glass from his gasping breaths or snapping wood from the drumming of his heart. He could go on forever like this, destroying it all, except...

Except he hears his name. It comes just one, in the quietest of tones, small enough to pierce the cloud swirling around him, and it stops him in his tracks. The fog clears. When he looks down there is blood coating his hands from the fingertips down, the nails ripped from their beds, and they shake like leaves on the edge of falling. And it's Kathy who has said his name, who is standing on the stairs full of grief and fear.

She reaches him just in time, as his legs give way. His knees hit the floor hard but she is there to catch his body, and he curls across her lap like a child, face down and stricken with sobs that howl and echo through the basement, sliding up the stairs and out into the world.

It all tumbles in waves, every ounce of grief he has ever held tight within him and pressed down into the dark, never to see the light of day. Victims with broken lives, parents with empty bedrooms, people they could never even put a name to, they all pore from him. His mother, who tried so hard but still became lost, who he has never forgiven for not being enough. His father, who he has never forgiven for not being perfect.

It's for his children, and the moments he will never see or get back. For the times he wasn't there and they needed him. For Kathy, who deserved so much better and ended up with only him. For himself. And for Olivia...Olivia who he has failed, who was his best friend and his partner and his strength. Who life never, ever treated fairly.

It's a moaning, choking drowning that sucks him under. His lungs burn, his eyes sting and the muscles of his chest and back and stomach scream with tension when he gulps down air. He is blind, and there is a sound like dying around him, wet gasps that rattle so violently that each may be the last he takes. But they don't stop. That would be too kind.

Slowly, like drips falling from a glacier, the sobs ease to become simply crying, trails of tears picking out their descent, and he becomes aware of his surroundings. It's the second time in twelve hours he has been lost, once in forgetting and numbing, now in remembering and feeling. Kathy still holds him, rocking backwards and forwards, and he feels like a child. He cannot pick out her murmurs through his exhausted mind but she kisses the back of his head, rubs up and down his spine, and doesn't let go.

When it's finally over and he has nothing left, the world slows down and stills. He is wrapped in thick, dense insulation and all that remains inside is Kathy, and him. Her heartbeat surrounds him, her breathing softens through him and her touch calms him until he matches her in rhythm. And that's all there is. He is numb now.

He can't remember walking up stairs or through the house, he just follows Kathy, and she slides him into bed like she has done so many times before with their children, taking off his shoes and easing the covers over him. He doesn't move, doesn't react, and she sits in the curve of his body as he lies on his side, stroking slowly. A grey, heavy cloud covers him, and he sinks into the darkness.

Day after day drift past. He sleeps, a lot, but even when he's not lost in unconsciousness his brain remains shut down. The only awareness he has is that of the most basic instincts, of food and drink and a nagging urge to pee occasionally. Cold creeps up on him but doesn't notice, and it's Kathy who smooths covers back over him. Sweat soaks through t-shirts when he has tossed and turned for hours, but he does nothing until Kathy makes him sit up, and strips them off him. He can lie still forever, paralysed, with emptiness all around.

For brief moments something more filters into him, and then he hates himself. He hates the self-pity he is indulging in, the trauma he is putting those he loves through. He hates his weakness, and how pathetic he has become. And once those thoughts have found a hold, he begins to wonder how long it will be until there is a psychiatrist sitting where Kathy usually does, telling him he needs help and he has no choice. It's both terrifying and welcoming, the idea of falling into a padded cell and forgetting everything. It's only then that he begins to think of what he wants to forget, and that is too hard to face. So, he doesn't.

Somewhere, far aware, words are being spoken. The noise nags in the corners of his mind, drags him out of the blissful darkness of sleep but he cannot decipher them. All he can sense is that they seem to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, it must be night because Kathy's been lying next to him, and he's irritated by the interruption. So irritated that he makes the effort and struggles through the haze to try and hear more.

Eventually he can work out that the sound is Kathy talking in a hushed tone, and she must be on the phone because no voice comes in response. His brain slowly kicks into action, and plucks words from the swirling mess to give to him.

"...not able to talk...how important...wait until morning..."

There is more but he cannot figure it out, and he begins to give up and sink back into the unknown when the bed sinks beside him and Kathy has a hand on his shoulder, rocking urgently. His eyes feel stuck together as he tries to force them open, it's as hard as climbing a mountain, but finally he can see her leaning over him. She is holding the phone in one hand.

"El...it's for you. They say it's important, but will only talk to you. They won't say who they are." There is apology in her voice, and he sighs.

Sitting up is like being in the midst of the flu, everything aches, but he takes the phone from her and grunts something resembling hello, not even alert enough to speculate who might be disturbing him in the middle of the night. Everyone must know he is lost by now, that there is nothing left.

He confirms his identity, rubbing sleep out of his eyes, and as the person on the other end speaks an electric current runs through him, from his toes upwards, until he is almost painfully alert. Everything becomes alarmingly clear, the state of his clothes and his body, the stiffness of inactivity, the nagging hunger and thirst. But it's not only that, the voice at the other end is ice water being thrown at him, is being slapped a thousand times at once, and when he hangs up there is no question of him simply sinking back into numbness. He has to act, and so he will.

In brief moments he explains to Kathy, who watches in silence as he steps into a cold shower, as he shaves and dresses and becomes human again. When he is done, ready to go, she grips him in such a tight hold he feels her heartbeat, and he sinks into her neck for a moment. Then, he lets go, and walks out of the door.


	9. Win

The lights are on as he pulls smoothly up outside the house, the only ones on the street, and they cast a shallow glow across the front yard, shaking the darkness. It's the dead hour, creeping slowly towards a grey dawn but deep within the night still. Damp hangs in the air when he gets out and he shivers as he walks up the path. It might be years since he's been truly warm.

The door opens before he can lift a hand, and the cat scuttles sharply through the gap, stopping in alarm at the sight of him and blinking its bright yellow eyes once before vanishing into the gloom without a sound. When he looks back at the door, Mrs Johnston is pulling it closed behind her, well wrapped up against the wet air but still looking frail to him as he holds out his arm. When she takes it, her hand faint against him, he sees the fabric fraying on her sleeves, the worn material, and it clings to his heart.

No words are shared, no greetings breaking the night and their movements feel muffled as he helps her to the car and shuts the door gently behind her. Getting in and starting it up, he risks just one glance over before he pulls away but she doesn't look back, seemingly captivated by her empty house. He wonders what she sees, now.

It's a quick, easy drive, sliding through silent streets only broken occasionally by a person, or another vehicle. Signs of life grow as they get closer and in the shadows movements shift, a group of people huddled together, the pinpoint flare of cigarettes showing, and for a minute other drives grab him, to places he doesn't want to go, with her beside him. Gliding and untouched in the dark, safe in the confines of the car and lost in their own minds. When he looks at her again, staring straight ahead, he almost feels the urge to speak, but it dissipates quickly. He has nothing to say.

The lights are glaringly bright as they drive towards them, homing in like moths to the flame, and it fits perfectly. He will feel pain, but he can't stop, drawn by something uncontrollable and with her by his side. Now he can see her clearly when he looks, and the blue of the light makes her skin look grey and dead next to him, sending shivers up his spine. He's never been one for premonitions, but goosebumps flood his skin. He parks, cuts the engine, but neither move to escape. They can both stay safe in here, a bubble against the world. If she gives him one look, one single sign telling him to leave then he will drive away and hide from it all, but she won't. She is braver that he.

He watches her hand as she finally reaches for the door, and it captivates him. There is no tremor, no weakness shown despite the paper-thin skin that every vein shows through. He's amazed at her strength, and when he goes round to help her back out of the car, he is struck by the truth. It is always women who keep him whole, who hold him together.

This time, he doesn't offer an arm as they walk forward, and she doesn't ask for one, doesn't appear to need one. In fact, as they near the light that is brighter than daylight, she stretches taller with confidence, and falters only once as they walk in and that smell hits them both. Elliot holds out a hand in response, not touching but hovering next to her elbow, but she still doesn't need him.

Approaching the desk, she is firm in her questioning and he stands back and to one side, away from the conversation occurring. This is not his place, he has no role here, and if someone asked him about his presence he would have no answers. The fact is, he is here, and that is all.

In the elevator an exhausted student doctor joins them, bringing with her the scent of antiseptic and that faint, almost sweet touch of illness that seems to lurk despite all attempts to destroy it. Her eyes close as she leans against the side and Elliot feels the echo of her tiredness. He knows exactly what it is to have no end in sight, to keep moving despite all the needs of your body, and the way your eyelids slide down at any given moment.

She jerks awake when the elevator stops, it's their floor, and she gets out with them. walking off as though her legs are made of lead. Even Mrs Johnston has more energy, more lift to her step, as she walks towards a man at the desk without a single hesitation. When she gives her name, and Daniel's, explaining that she was called, the man flicks a look at Elliot curiously but asks nothing. Elliot gives nothing back. "I'll get a doctor to come and speak with you first," he says in monotone, and gestures to some chairs that they sit in, ready to wait.

Elliot lets his mind go blank as he sits, tracing patterns across the floor in swirling shapes that make no sense, sometimes reminding himself to breathe. The noises around him are too familiar and yet not familiar enough, he hasn't heard them for so long and so they immediately draw memories he doesn't want from deep within. Fighting them, he only succeeds in lessening the impact, so she is a see-through ghost walking towards him with a coffee as they wait, a distant presence next to him rather than fully formed. She is real, beautiful, nagging at his emotions and drawing desperation from him. Bidding her goodbye is a relief as a doctor's voice breaks through, and he looks up.

The doctor, a young man that seems not old enough for this, is standing in front of Mrs Johnston, introducing himself before sitting down in the chair next to her, and immediately Elliot's heart skips a random beat. He recognises the pose the man takes, and once the initial flash has gone, a calm foreknowledge takes over. There is something in his body, in the way his voice washes quiet and firm across them, and it's exactly the way bad news comes. That careful balance of compassion and professionalism, that once learnt is never forgotten, that he and Olivia could do in their sleep but never get used to. It is hard to make himself listen to the words, but he makes the effort.

"Mr Hartman was admitted yesterday afternoon, presenting with severe vomiting and abdominal pains. He was also confused and agitated. Following tests, we were able to diagnose him with acetaminophen poisoning, following an overdose." The doctor stops, waiting for a reaction, but Mrs Johnston is still except for a slight nod to her head. Elliot wonders if it is sinking in yet, but the doctor continues. "Unfortunately, the length of time before treatment has meant that your grandson has suffered significant damage to his liver, and is now in acute liver failure."

"Length of time?" Elliot asks, and the doctor seems relieved that one of them is reacting, that they are not able to simply absorb the information he is giving.

"Yes, of three or four days we believe. The tylenol seems to have been taken as long ago as that, but Mr Hartman won't tell us when, or how many he took." He turns back to Mrs Johnston, who remains silent and still as they speak around her. "We called you because, despite starting treatment, Mr Hartman's condition has deteriorated. His periods of lucidity are lessening, and the damage caused to his liver is putting a strain on his body and causing other organs to fail. His kidneys are giving out, his heart is weakening, and there are neurological indications of hepatic encephalopathy, which is swelling of the brain."

Elliot's head spins with the words, trying to decipher his way through the maze of medical information. He can't imagine what she is feeling, what her lack of reaction means, but after a minute her voice breaks through the cloud that has settled around them. "He tried to kill himself?" And the question is drenched in sorrow, no hysterical pain but a drowning wave of defeat.

The doctor doesn't answer immediately, but leans further forward and more towards her, as if closing the small distance will make her understand. "The prognosis is not good at all, I'm afraid," but if he expects some outpouring of grief, he is left wanting. He seems to size her up before continuing, "he's also been resisting treatment, and has been violent and increasing agitated. He's had to be restrained."

She nods at his words, hardly reacting either to the bad news, or to the fact her grandson is tied to a bed, and as she looks the doctor in the face for the first time, Elliot sees her back straighten and the back of her neck rise and stiffen in preparation for what will come next.

"I understand." As clear as a bell, a chime across a winter sky, she answers. Elliot spins, churning against the unfolding events, but has enough coherent thought remaining to marvel at the resolve that comes across her, at the transformation happening. She is an old lady no longer, all frailty gone for the minute. In her place is a woman with the strength of the world, with a heart that beats and feels despite the pain, who has said goodbye to those she loves and knows the end to this story. The doctor stands.

"He's been asking for you. And for Mr Stabler," he adds, glancing Elliot's way for the first time, "but he may not be coherent for long, or very often." Elliot thinks he may not be coherent either, that the words don't make sense, because he cannot be hearing the doctor right. Hartman cannot have asked for him.

"I understand Doctor. Thank you." She says, the man stands and walks away after telling them he will fetch a nurse, and Elliot sits with shock draining through him still. He has come because she called, because she asked for his help, not because Hartman asked. The possibility hadn't even crossed his mind that his presence was wanted by that man, that he might be here for him and not her. He tightens with anger, almost stands and walks away, out of the hospital and out of this fucking mess forever, but then he looks at her sitting proud and silent, and he cannot leave her to do this on her own, despite her lie to him. He just can't.

She says nothing about getting him here under false pretences, and they wait in the humming quiet, as a clock nearby ticks away time of a life. Both lose themselves in thoughts, and an ache of guilt begins to weigh on Elliot's chest as his words replay in his head. The things he had spat at Hartman, the venom in each statement. He had known his actions would destroy the chance for answers even as he had done it, but he hadn't expected the end to come like this. For hope to truly die.

When the nurse strides towards them, slowing as she approaches and finally stops to say she will take one of them to him, Elliot expects Mrs Johnston to stand, but she doesn't. Instead, she looks at him, acknowledging his presence for the first time. "Perhaps you should go first," she says slowly. "I could use a little more time."

His body reacts before his mind does, taking over automatically to follow the woman in scrubs, and his thoughts can't catch up to the idea that he should be ready for this, that he is going to confront him again, but before anything can settle and fix in his head, there is a door being held open for him and he nods without thinking to the cop that is standing just inside, who then steps out, leaving them alone. In the brief second as the door brushes closed, he would give anything to be able to walk away and not look back, but he can't now.

The room is faded, colours lost in the lack of light, and there is a halo around Hartman who is propped up in bed, tubes leading to his arms that are covered in scrapes and scratches and dressings covering some areas. There is dark, dried blood still beneath his fingers, and red-raw sores on his wrists. Bathed as such, he doesn't look angelic, innocent in the circle, but instead it brings out the shadows of his face, the new creases of skin, the pain and resignation and defeat. Dying does nothing for him, Elliot thinks, but can't speak.

"It's you," Hartman says, a trace of wonder threaded in his voice, and Elliot is tempted to bite harshly back, but doesn't. He cannot bring himself to goad a dying man, but he can't figure out what he is supposed to do instead, in this strange scene that could never be scripted, never believed in any story told. "Is she here?" Hartman continues, and Elliot finds himself drawn forward a couple of paces before nodding.

"Yes, she came."

He leans back against white pillows, closing his eyes, and a cacophony of emotions quickly flit across the man's face before he opens them. Some Elliot recognises, and some he doesn't, and he has plenty of time to work them out as Hartman's eyes open but drift away into blankness. Elliot shuffles his feet, uncomfortable in the emptiness, but he soon returns to the room with a blink, his eyes settling on him again.

They stare at each other now, accompanied by the steady beat of a heart, and in that look there is a hunt for something, anything, in each other's eyes. Each want something from the other, and neither will get it.

"You think I'm a coward," Hartman finally says, and Elliot pauses at the words, wondering if that is truly what he feels. Is he supposed to argue, or simply agree? To indulge the man or fighting him, but no illumination comes.

"I think you're weak. And that the world will be a better place without you," and it's a truth that leaves no bitterness against his tongue, spoken as a simple fact that isn't met with either pain or anger from Hartman, who simply nods.

"I agree." His simple acceptance, his feeble agreement is almost enough, and if Elliot was to get angry, now would be the time. For some reason, the feebleness of the man infuriates him, his eager approach to death playing against those people he has seen, who have fought so hard to the end. But something in him tells him it will be a waste of time, a waste of emotion, and he has no stomach for touching death-bed scenes with this man. Hartman grants him a reprieve and drifts off, mumbling words and thrashing his head in agitation, fighting harsh against his restraints. "Make it stop...just make it end...please make it over..." Elliot hears, but any semblance of words vanish soon, lost in the ramblings of a failing mind. Finally, after endless minutes, he turns to go, but as he reaches the door he is stopped in his tracks.

"It... it may not matter any more..." Hartman says quietly, and Elliot stays still, waiting without turning around and letting the voice collide with his back and wash over him. "It was true though. I never meant to hurt anyone. Please...it's true." His words are slurred, sounding drunk and sleepy, and it's the same as Elliot has heard so many times before, remorse with no meaning to it. A faint urge to put his hand through the wall comes, at the pointlessness of it all, but he has no energy for it now. Hartman hasn't given him what he wants, what he is after, and he knew he wouldn't. He hadn't even bothered to ask. A whisper follows him, "I'm sorry," it might be, but he closes the door behind him, cutting the tail from the breeze of the words. Hartman has won, and defeat stings, creeping through the numbness.

His feet sound loud as he walks back to the chairs, and he feels like he's walking to his execution. She raises her head at his approach, and stands just as he goes to slump in the chair next to her. He realises, as she looks down at him, that she barely has to lower her gaze to reach his eyes, so different are their heights. Still, he feels weak next to her, her relentless strength, the compassion that she offers him in a simple look. He should be offering her the support, she who is about to lose her only relative, but he has nothing, and she must see it as she turns away.

Once she has gone, he can't settle to anything, any thought that comes his way. He wants to pace the sparkling corridors, dispel the nervous energy that has gathered within him, but it doesn't seem right to be so impatient for an end. Pacing is too reminiscent of men in old movies, frantically waiting while their wives give birth, associated with life and not death. With birth, there will only be a finite amount of time, hours or maybe a day, but dying offers no such timeline. Days, weeks, a whole lifetime will pass, though he doesn't think it will take so long with Hartman. He wants to die.

Trying to flick through magazines is pointless, his eyes settle on words but he might as well have never learnt to read, unintelligible, foreign symbols blurring across the pages. He drinks one cup of weak, lifeless coffee but it's not the liquid that makes him fidget. He was never any good at waiting. If he tries to close his eyes the memories swamp him, and he drowns, until he can breathe no longer and digs his nails into his skin to find some sense of stability in the churning day. In the end, he lists under his breath every regulation and law he knows, every statistic that has ever touched his brain. It is enough, but only barely, and he doesn't have the energy to care about the looks he gets as he speaks under his breath.

Running footsteps jerk him from the spell he has woven around himself, and adrenaline begins to rush, though he is impotent in this place and time. Doors slam, break the tenuous silence as nurses and a couple of doctors dash past him and into the room down the hall, where Hartman and his grandmother have seen hours together. It is a long, long time before there is any further movement, but the door opens slowly now, filtering out medical staff who strip gloves from their hands and don't look back as they leave.

Finally, with excruciating steps, Mrs Johnston comes out, leaning against the door-frame with a shaking hand before taking a deep breath and straightening as she sees him, sitting and waiting. Each footstep is firm, tortuous in its deliberate placement, but when she gets close enough she stops, and says "It's over," like she's charting the simple end to a movie, a book, instead of a life. He looks into her eyes, into a face that carries lines of a million days and there is a tired sorrow within, but no tears, though there might be the hint of them beginning to form.

"I'm sorry," he says, and she shakes her head.

"I'm not." He doesn't know whether to believe her, to trust in the steely, cold resolve that she tries so hard to keep, but he keeps her pretence for them both and won't dispute it. He nods, like he understands, and she holds a hand out to him.

"That you for all your help, Detective Stabler." Her voice is formal, and it strikes him that this is a goodbye he doesn't want to have now, though he will be given no reason to visit her again, or continue to drag her into her past and sorrow. He stands, takes her hand, and shakes the grip that is still firm beneath his palm. He doesn't know what else to say, how to express everything that swirls within him at the loss of Hartman, the loss of truth. The loss of everything.

"I'm sorry," he repeats, but she lets go and walks away without another word.

His knees give out from under him now and he falls heavily back into the chair as he wonders what he is supposed to do now. Holding his head in his hands, there feels too much inside it, and it is exhausting. Home calls, resounds in echoes through him, calling of a life that needs to start again but he doesn't know how to walk towards it. Instead, he watches her, as she takes her steps onwards.

She reaches the doors at the end of the corridor and pushes one open, and he waits for it to brush closed behind him, but she has paused, and her head drops towards the ground. A nurse walks through the doors towards him, then another, then three more people who look at her with faint curiosity and concern that doesn't spread towards enquiring about her. Slowly, she turns, controlled by a force beyond her, and there is hesitancy to her steps for the first time he has seen.

When their eyes connect, he stands and begins to walk towards her, without knowing how or why. His strides are long, and he meets her quickly and stands, trying to read her. Only now does he see a trace of tears hovering delicately on her eyelashes, but they aren't enough to fall, and disappear when she blinks, and shakes her head. Once, twice, three times she goes to walk away again but comes back to him, and now there is something different in her eyes, pain and tears no longer. Resignation, perhaps, the knowing of how things have to be.

She takes a crumpled, open envelope from the depths of her coat and both look down at the handwriting scrawled across it, and who it is addressed to. "Gran," it reads, the spidery writing reminding him of her veins, patterned beneath her skin.

"I thought...maybe it would be better...or...but I can't...," she is unsure for the first time, her hand shaking, and for a brief moment he thinks she might collapse. Certainly she seems to make no sense, but then she pushes the envelope towards him, "...but better for who?" He can't decipher her meaning, but as she lets go of the paper and he grips automatically, she repeats his own words back to him and turns away for good. "I'm sorry." 

He waits until the doors have whispered closed behind him, and goes back to his seat, easing the paper from the envelope slowly. There are two sheets, covered in scrawls that require more concentration than he thinks he has, but he forces his eyes to focus with all he has left. As he sits reading, the hospital, the smells and the sounds, all vanish from around him and sickness grows until it overwhelms him and he has to sink forward to avoid vomiting across the perfect, stainless floor, his head in his hands.

Choices, time-lines, lives flash through his head, never ending in their fury. One minute he wants to smash all the glass around him, watch as his hands break through and come out covered in blood. He wants to find Hartman's body, to annihilate it, to see it burn in flames of rage. He wants to tear the paper into a million pieces, to forget it all and go home to his family. Live his life. He wants, briefly, to kill the old woman for giving him this, and then he wants to kill her for nearly not doing so.

He can't tell how many hours pass before a decision forms, and he can trust his legs and his voice to do as they must. Numbness follows him to the elevator, and when he enters there is an elderly couple there, smiles bright and fresh across their faces, as if they have been granted something special here today. They look at him, smiles open and ready to share joy, but there must be something of his pain across his face that makes them drop their gazes in helplessness at the pain and grief staining him.

When he steps outside, there is the dim light of late afternoon, and he cannot comprehend that a day has passed already, that this day is nearly over. The sky is clear, a faint blue hinted at, and it twists above him as he stares. Taking his cell phone out, he dials.


	10. Mercy

There is blue sky, the bright yellow of crime tape that flickers in the breeze, and birds sing.

He thinks, if he closes his eyes he would be able to hear just them, the call of birds awakening, but he can't do such a thing. He will be haunted, will see her in a million different lights, and so he doesn't.

The trees around are silhouetted tall against the sky, long branches bare and almost empty from the winter, with a green brush across them that is merely a hint, a promise of things to come. Of a purpose, somewhere.

No snow stains the ground beneath his feet - as he stares down and tries to fight the murmurs of sound drifting down the hill, carried on a wind that is cold no longer but straight from the south, and almost sings in its delight. To him, it would once have smelt of laughter. Laughter, and days that might one day be full of innocence again, but now there is nothing but broken earth, and memories.

There is coffee too, on the ground by his feet, left cold and dark by the waves of nausea flushing through him, that match the waves inside his head. The tossing of thoughts, of dreams, of clouds that should not be like this. Not here and now.

Storms should come, batter across them with hurricane force, and rip the world apart. Roots thrash in plummeting rain that stings as it beats against his skin, and the crack of thunder than can be nothing compared to the beating of his heart. That is what there should be.

Instead, there are dancing wisps that float and streak nonsense patterns across the sky. That offer nothing he wants. His fists clench, furious against the day. It should not be like this. It is all he can allow himself to feel, for now.

Don leans against the open door, a dark NYPD jacket slung across his shoulders, and Elliot can only focus on the colour of his blue jeans. How they are worn, fading at the knees, and near to ripping. One day, when least expected, they will tear. He can never get used to him like this. A man, not a boss. It's another thing wrong.

Elliot is wearing a jacket as well, and when he had slipped it on he had closed his eyes at how uncomfortably familiar it was again. An old skin - that doesn't quite fit any more- but that aches with past smells, and peoples lives. When he dares to look up at Don, clean and clear in morning light, he is struck by the age within his skin. He wonders what she'd say – now – walking down the hill with a small, faint smile and sliding her hair behind her ear before she meets his eyes.

He swallows. Too much, too soon. Too late to think of her, while people dig at the tree-line, and the tape keeps them away, by choice and not force. Closing his eyes, he hears the birds again, and wonders who else does. How far they carry on the wind. Whether they will reach to her.

There is a trickle already, a thaw not just of the fresh air but that is dripping from his heart. He is warming, dying, in equal measure. Never dead till warm, the old declaration of hypothermia. Of people pulled frozen from water. Perhaps this is what dying is, as feelings and blood flood back through him.

Time is indeterminate, here on the hill, and no one speaks to him. Not Don, who stands guard next to him. Not Fin, whose partner waits up on the hill, and watches all. Not Munch, who has run out of jokes, now when maybe they need them most, though he thinks he might kill him if he tries. There is only impossible sounds of life, of people's voices and whispering trees that hold secrets he can only guess at.

He looks up now, feeling rather than seeing anything, and through the glass of the door she is there. There, with hair escaping sideways in the breeze, and a stride to her step, and for the briefest of moments he allows it to be her. Allows himself to kid himself, just once more. One more time, as the end of hope walks towards them, and he thinks his heart may be breaking even before he knows.

_Run. Run and never look back. Run and never know. Leave this all behind, and follow the winds. _

It's too late. And suddenly, she is in front of them and he thinks, this can't be it. There has to be something more. There has to be lightening and fanfares and earthquakes that shatter them all. Lava and ash and molten death to destroy. This can't be it, with quiet grace and a woman they have known for so long, who grants them a look of reprieve as they gather around her, and then speaks.

"I'll have to confirm with dental records, back in the city, but..." and it's to Elliot that she holds out a hand and offers a clear, plastic evidence bag that he has held so many times before.

_It won't be real. Don't see it and it won't be real._

He takes it, automatically, and he knows what he will see before he can focus. There, curled within so it rests gently in his palm, he sees the twisting chains of gold still stained with dirt, the pendants pressed together. His thumb moves them, shifts them until the letters speak to him, and it's her voice he hears, though perhaps she has never said it in words. Only in actions, next to him. Ready to save him. Always there.

_Fearlessness_

For a moment – as time leaves on a brush of air – it's unreal, but then there is the sound of John, of a pain that moans out without thinking, and the earth spins. He closes his eyes, and it's not his life that flashes before his eyes, but theirs, and he doesn't feel the moment his knees hit the ground.

_You're just gonna sit here all night until I do aren't you, you stubborn son-of-a-bitch...You kill yourself to make something happen. Or you do nothing, and, it doesn't matter...I don't need you to take care of me...Screw you... You're the longest relationship I've ever had with a man. Who else would put up with me?...What about me?...How 'bout that. Me too...You're a classy guy, you know that?...Just what the world needs. Another Elliot Stabler.…...I work here...I'm sorry. I'm sorry._

Someone, somewhere, is shaking him, and when he blinks and pants, and the world begins to right itself, he hears Melinda nearby, and it's her hand on his shoulder. He looks up, blankly, seeing nothing, and it takes him a while to decipher her words again. There is a buzzing, a blurred noise shooting through him, and he almost doesn't want to hear, but now she shakes him harder and looks him in the eyes and he has to.

"Elliot!" He tries to nod, his head heavy, and blinks before focusing on her eyes, and when she sees him, her voice softens. "Elliot, it's exactly as he said. I'll have to do a proper, full report, but I see no reason to doubt him." Thoughts are beginning to form inside him again, though in pieces, jagged edges biting against him.

"So he wasn't... he didn't... she didn't..." he's not sure what he is trying to ask, but Melinda knows anyway.

"She's unlikely to have felt a thing. The damage on... on the body matches his description. I'll have to investigate, to check it wasn't in transit, or in the ground but the bone fragmentation..."

As Melinda accidentally eases into the slightest details, acid floods into his mouth and chokes him, and he coughs, kneeling and spitting into the dirt, with her hand resting on his back. Dirt that has held her, deep within. The information sinks in. He goes to sit up, and catches a glimpse of the people still working, of the job he has seen done so many times, and the tidal wave of grief hits fully.

Squeezing his eyes shut, tears burn and push their way out, and he thinks his skin might split, raw and gashed with the force of the pain. He can't possibly hold this all within, this roaring agony that makes every cell in his body scream and tense, and there is a low moan from somewhere, but it can't be him. It can't be. Such a sound, small and lost in the flood is nothing compared to what he feels, and how is his chest big enough? How are his bones not cracking, shattering? There has to be something, something that gives and lets this pressure escape into the world. He cannot, will never be able to bear this for another second, and yet it goes on and on with no end in sight. This is what eternity is. Infinity. This pain.

Finally, there is a different noise that makes it through the pounding despair, and he opens burning eyes to see Fin and Munch restraining Don, who fights them both with a vicious fury Elliot can understand as if it was racing through his own body.

"I need to see her," he shouts, and now there are black silhouettes of birds scattering into the sky, harsh against the blue, and people have frozen above, looking down on their grief from afar. A figure detaches, running down the hill, and this time he won't allow himself to twist the woman into someone she's not.

It's Fin's Captain, the woman who took over after Don, and she reaches him just as Fin and Munch can hold him back no longer. She is slim, the same height as him, and for a moment Elliot watches, stunned, as it looks as if he will go straight through her. But then her hands are on his shoulders and he stops at her command.

"Stop it Don! Stop it." Her voice is loud, clear, but it reaches Elliot from miles away. She shakes him, like Melinda had done him. "Don't do this to yourself. Don't remember her like that. Let us do our jobs."

Don leans on her now, his head forward on her shoulder, and she wraps her arms around him like she's comforting a child, and there is a keening sound growing through the air, and Elliot can't tell if it comes from him, or Don, or all of them or none of them, only that is the sound of losing. The sound of the end of the world, with Olivia's name woven so deep it will never be free.

_Olivia_

There is blue sky, the bright yellow of crime tape that flickers in the breeze, and the birds still sing.

It might be hours, or days later, and he's sitting in the back of a car, being driven along a road he doesn't know, to a place that has changed forever. He's out of tears, out of pain, and when he looks down, he's surprised to find the bag with her necklace still crumpled in his fist. Her name is almost on his tongue again, he almost swells into the agony, but stops himself.

How can her life be only this? End, in such accidental quietness. In a flourish of violence that is only a whimper in the night. That has no meaning.

When he closes his eyes, this time, it is the letter and not her life that is burnt there.

_Gran,_

_I'm so sorry. Please forgive me. I can't make things right any more. But I never meant to hurt anyone, truly. Especially not you._

_The pain is too much. Every time I close my eyes I see her. We fought, and I was so mad, and it happened without me meaning it to. If only the chair hadn't been there. I never meant to hurt her. But she fell over it, and her head hit the corner of the counter and it made this sound. I hear that sound every second now. I can't make it stop._

_Her eyes were open and she wasn't breathing. I held her for so long but she didn't breathe again. Then I saw the badge, and the gun, and I got so scared Gran, really scared, like when Dad would yell. I knew everyone would hate me, for killing her._

_I waited until it got quiet, and then I carried her away. No one saw me, so I guess I got lucky. I drove her to Uncle Henry's, you remember? The cabin? We used to play there, and be so happy. _

_I was real careful with her Gran. I promise. I did it proper, the best I could. I never wanted to hurt anyone. And now the pain and the thoughts and seeing her again and again just won't stop and they have to. I can't live like this._

_I love you. I'm so sorry. I love you. _

Elliot sees it happen. Again and again until he thinks there can be no more acid left to sear through him. No more left to watch her fall. In the mists of the day, Melinda's voice drifts again, in ways she thought might help. That he had buried her, east to west. That he had shown respect. A cross, made of stone.

Still he sees her fall.

* * *

Spring is fierce as it banishes winter, and the day is warm enough for him to leave his coat in his car as he walks. There is life, everywhere, trying to soak into his skin like sunlight, weak and tentative in its beginnings.

He is adapting to the ache, slowly. Heavy, solid, it rests across his chest at every moment but it doesn't flare or overwhelm so much now, even in short weeks. It is just there, and some deeper wisdom, some ancient instinct tells him that this is always as it will be. He remembers someone - in a distant past that might not even be his life - telling him that grief and loss never get easy. Never let up. They simply change, and you learn their taste and their weight and familiarity sees each day through.

He feels reassured, knowing that this pain will never cease. Perhaps he could not bear it if he did, if he thought that one day he would wake and be light and free of her. It wouldn't be right, somehow.

Outside the precinct, flowers scatter the side-walk. Different every day, but all for her. He pauses, breathes them in, and the air keeps a hint of them within it. He has no rage against this, though none lie there from him. She didn't die here, but she is remembered.

Ghosts slide across his skin as he walks into the building, along with smiles he knows so well. People are sad, yes, but relief is palpable. They can move on. He can't, of course, but that should matter to no one but him. He revels in the sight of her at every turn and step. Laughter trickles through him. Hers.

He is the last into the office. They have papers to sign, a formality. The closing of her case by all detectives involved, and so all four of them stand before the Captain's desk and scrawl their names beneath hers. Don. Fin. Munch. And him. She has gone, quietly into the ground near her mother, and already he knows he will never see her there, though others will. They will do their duty, with love.

Now they are left alone as the air dims around them. A bottle, four glasses, another clear with water that she would want. Don't fail, just for me, and Don holds onto it easily, fingers loose and knuckles hardly white. Elliot swirls the liquid in the glass, and Don speaks, as their glasses touch hers and the sound rings clear as snow falling. They toast.

To the best of the best.

When he walks out, he says goodbye. He will never return.

The walk back to the car is full of peace, of dusk sinking around him in layers. And he gets in, and she is there, of course.

"_I knew you'd be here," _and she smiles, and listens, eyes dark next to him. As always.

"_You'd tell me I'm crazy, I guess. You'd worry, and nag until I saw a shrink. Or maybe, maybe you wouldn't. You'd understand._

_You do understand, or you wouldn't be here._

_I can't do this without you. You have to be here, to keep me together. If I don't have you, I will fall, and I can't do that to them. Neither can you, you never could. You always tried so hard to keep us whole. All of us. And you will. I can't do this without you, but I can with you. I promise. _

_Thank you, for being here. _

_Let's go home."_

He talks, all the way, though she is gone as he cuts the engine out and sees his house with lights burning bright against the night. He knows she'll be back. He can be a better father, be a husband, be a man still, but only if she holds him tight. If she saves him, again.

_I'll see you soon,_ he whispers, and he knows he will. She will never leave him now, and perhaps there is, in this strange way, some mercy to be found in life after all.

"_Goodnight."_


End file.
