All he can recall is how the room felt like a vacuum, how all the air had left the house, the city, the state. He doesn't remember the part where he grabbed one of the chairs by the counter and almost knocked it over, he doesn't remember the way Eli kept asking him questions—"Dad? Dad, what's going on? Are you ok?"—he doesn't remember the sound. His sound. The one where his whole throat had ripped open, the one that'd been a scream. He doesn't remember. It's blank.
He doesn't know in the same way she didn't know.
She didn't know.
That's what haunts him as he stands under the shower head, right hand pressed against the white tile like the wall can hold him upright. He's still. For the first time in hours or days, his chest isn't heaving. He is purged and broken. The water scalds his skin but he doesn't care, not when she's in the ground. Not when her body is down there and his is up here but equally empty. He thinks the funny thing about people is that they're all the same, just bones and flesh and blood knocking together until something happens and the knocking stops.
She didn't know.
When the bullet tore through her scull—because that's what it did, if he's thinking logically, it got her skull and her brain and everything that mattered—she didn't know. She'd known everything about their history but was missing the most vital part, and he won't flatter himself to think that she'd wanted him in those last moments, but if she had he can't figure out what she could have been thinking if she didn't know. If she really did have no idea. He has his fears about it. Realistic ones. Gruesome ones, bloody ones, worse than her death in actuality. When he thinks about her finger pulling the trigger, he wonders if it's him that made her give up. He wonders if it was his leaving that had ever resigned her to take her own life. To cause her death.
Did you really expect me to?
Her voice jars him. Pitches his body forward. She wouldn't have caused his death, she wouldn't have, she wouldn't have.
Otherwise... we can't be partners.
And they hadn't been partners after that. Not really. Not for a long time. In a warehouse they had looked at each other and realized that nothing else could ever really exist for them again. Nothing that wasn't the other, locked intricately and safely away. Nothing that wasn't mutual protection, mutual something. Nothing that wasn't giving up everything for the person across the room, on the other end of the gun.
But in a warehouse eight days ago she had looked at William Lewis and realized that nobody was fighting for her anymore. In a warehouse eight days ago, she'd shot herself in the temple.
He didn't know what she was thinking then, in the moment she did it. But with a little girl lost and a monster staring into her eyes, it might have been him.
It's alright.
He wanted her to have heard him yelling instead. Yelling for her and against her, yelling with her, yelling at Lewis for getting her again and taking her away. The for-better-or-worse. The you're-the-longest-relationship-I've-ever-had-with-a-man. The unspoken. Yelling that she's strong, that she was gonna get out of there. That he was coming soon. Yelling. He doesn't want her to have heard his soothing voice, his whisper to pull the trigger. He would have wanted to sweep her from the quiet, to scream, to make her listen. She would have.
If you yell loud enough and long enough and strong enough they always listen and that's not something he had known before.
He would have yelled that he loved her. He would have made her know. If he could change one thing it's that in the second before her body hit the ground, the second before the blood got all over the concrete, her hair, her sweater, that she would have known how much he'd loved her. Loves her. Still will, every goddamned day.
Before the funeral they fixed the bullet hole and parted her hair so no one observing the body could see it. He thinks about her body on Melinda's table and then her body at the funeral home, and he thinks about how nobody who'd fixed her head after she died knew that what really needed fixing had been broken for years. How nobody knew that she only cut her hair when she was nervous. How nobody knew how special and beautiful and perfect Olivia Benson was—not even him, he never did get to know that—just like she died and didn't get know that he loved her.
She didn't know.
She had killed herself not knowing.
The fault is his.
The fist that's holding him up against the tile collides violently with the shower wall. He hears a crack and thinks about the sound of shots firing in an empty room, thinks about how Lewis had shot himself immediately afterward, about how he'd only escaped prison in the first place to make sure she died at her own hands in the minutes before he'd offed himself. He keeps punching. The noise is muffled against the water, against the squeal of a basement pipe he never fixed.
He thinks about how it wasn't enough for William Lewis to kill her. It wasn't enough to kidnap her, to assault her, to undermine her and take away her dignity. It wasn't enough to have her as his submissive, as his pawn for the torture. It wasn't enough to tell her that she was undeserving of life, that she was filth, that she was nothing; he'd made her do it to herself. He'd made her believe it. He'd made her act upon it.
When he thinks about how worthless you'd have to feel to raise a gun to your head and pull the trigger, he feels the skin on his knuckles tear.
He cries out. He thinks about her standing there, shaking. Closing her eyes. Remembering the leaving, remembering Brian, Serena, Don, Munch. Jeffries. Calvin, Gladys's daughter. Maria Recinos. Vivian. Marta Stevens. Valerie Sennet. Ryan and Rebecca Clifford. A baby without name that Fin had said they'd found on a case a few months ago. All of the others, the hundreds and hundreds of others.
He thinks about her exhale.
He's sobbing.
He thinks about her gone. Cold. And there's blood dripping off his hands.
It trails into the drain like wine.