Title: Green Park Benches
Author: Mucada
Rating: PG-13 for language
Disclaimer: They are Dick Wolf's.
Summary: Central Park benches and concrete stubble.
Author's note: This is inspired from a conglomeration of scenes from different eps, mainly when Elliot and Olivia interact and there is more to see under the surface. It's short, but I hope it says something.
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He always feels like they have little depth. Misconceptions, which aren't real, just used to cover up their inability to agree to connect. Not connect; agree to connect. Stubborn. Not deep, not profound; they are pointless and one in a million. Another pair, another team of detectives on the road to becoming seasoned. Another team that is on the road of decline.
Green Park Benches.
Detective one and detective two. Anonymous. Both wearing old hardened looks too outdated for their still young faces. They sit on a Central Park green park bench, and he thinks of their resent case involving a…who the fuck cares? Does he even want to care anymore? They all fall together, who was he kidding. He doesn't want to care, and he can't anymore.
Misconceptions: does she think of it as they sat. He watches her finger her newly cut hair with an air of false indifference.
--
Green Park Benches.
It is the decline of autumn, with leaves still lingering on the ground; yet, it is still warm for the early November, and she doesn't feel the cold of winter coming. The weather is so odd this year in New York. Colds aren't as cold as they should. It gives her headaches after work. During work. All the time.
He fingers his outdated wedding band with indifference. He had barely mentioned it; only a passing statement that he had tossed out to see how the sounded fluttering in the stale air of the squadroom. She didn't mention it again. She let it go; pretended it mattered little in the whole makeup of their relationship.
She questions the latest case, but she soon finds herself losing interest, which makes her feel guilt. Guilt for indifference, or is that just another misconception, like their battered and bruised souls?
He had locked her in an interrogation room and beat the shit out of her soul, and she took it like a pushover. That's how she feels about their falling out.
She had snapped at him, for being on the rebound.
Their inability to want to connect and their inability to find solid ground as they tailspinned. It all amounts to chipped green park benches on a nondescript path in the Park. She sometimes hates this town; she sometimes hates him; more so she hates what she thinks she has become.
An extension of their squad and an extension of the intertwined lives in New York.
An extension of him.
She tells herself that he doesn't even think of that.
--
Concrete Stubble.
When they walk along the path, he watches their feet hit the black asphalt; he thinks of the pavement, the rough surface not able to take the salt of the winter and the feeling of falling to his knees on it.
He watches her legs as they walk, feet hitting in unison with his, like they are part of his own frame.
His heart surges once, like a test; like a whisper. She is that extension, and he had mutilated that extension; he had felt her get cut off, like a car accident from hell.
Will he learn to live handicapped, or will he beg the surgeons to try their best?
He needs that will to go on; he needs the strength endure the long road to recovery.
He needs her to tell him he will survive the long winter in New York. He wants her to make him naïve to the scumbags and the fuckers with bad ideas; he wants her to point out the slush puddles outside the precinct, so not to slip.
So not to tailspin with his body being ripped in half.
He will have to beg the surgeons to try their hardest; his life really does depend on it; his life depends on his better half.
He misses her when she's gone.
--
Concrete Stubble.
She misses him when he's gone. She wonders if he could come home from his driving out of control. He races towards the end of nothing.
She doesn't want their walk to end; the day gives her a headache, but she wants to spend the last hours of the sun with him, even though they accomplish no forging connection.
They can't replace their first years together, when they had fit together just right and didn't think of the job just yet. She hadn't yet let it get to her. She wants that naivety again, when she didn't let it all move her to the breaking point.
That point of the wreckage is now, their long week of whatever the fuck they were trying to solve and their inability to verbally communicate themselves to each other.
The motherfucker is on the rebound; she had to say it.
But she doesn't have to think that his rebound could perhaps hit her.
The concrete looks like stubble; like the morning after. She imagines it raw with the burn of the winter salt. They will waste time repaving it too late in a few years, and cracks will form on the surface before that. She will busy herself mentally by avoiding those cracks when she walks, to pass the silence in her mind with some stimulation.
And, she will probably be walking with him in the silence of the sunset; the silence of a million souls surrounding them in New York. They found silence in themselves.
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