I'm warning you now- this isn't a masterpiece. I've just had the general idea of this floating around in my head for some time, and after doing some ranting this morning, and reading much discussion on twitter about this week's episode, I decided to write it into a fic. This is in no way related to Bridging the Gaps (which, I promise, I'm working on updating. Don't look at me). This is a stand alone monologue that is based on some thoughts I, and others, had about the episode and how the case might stir up some things for Olivia. Note: the lines in italic/bold font are direct quotes from Decaying Morality.
Hope you enjoy! Feedback is always welcomed.
"Her memory came back in pieces. She didn't want to remember it."
She hadn't lied to them. Not really. Not when weeks had passed by of telling herself it was nothing. Countless, weary weeks of writing off the memory of his hand shoving into her pants, the soiled fabric sliding down her legs, as nothing more than a drug induced hallucination of what she feared most. It couldn't have been. Denial was a mighty force, designed by the human psyche to conceal and obliterate those certain things in our heads that just might drive us insane if we let them. For a good while, denial had been her closest friend in the aftermath of her assault. It did its job, working simultaneously with her as she fought to get through each day, keeping the worst of the details pushed to the invisible back burner. Conventional or not, healthy or not, denial worked for her... Until it didn't.
And then it was as if she would be thrown into that place again-her back pressed against the cold leather, wrists grinding within sharp metal bracelets as his weight added an unbearable burden. It was only quick snapshots like this that she could recall most often, fleeting moments that were more like physical sensations than whole memories themselves. They came at the least convenient times, if there was such a thing for a scenario like that, and they were always unexpected. The smallest hair triggers would bring them back to her, the slightest provocations sending her spiraling out into to unknown.
"The therapist said the trauma and drugs and alcohol can really mess with short term memory."
She had once made an offhand remark to Elliot after Sealview about not knowing which was worse: the inability to remember your attack, or the inability to forget it. Two assaults later, she still couldn't say with any amount of certainty that she knew the answer to that dilemma. Everything she had been lucid for with Lewis was bad enough. The white hot pain of glowing embers approaching her, sinking into her skin as she tore her wrists apart trying to escape the binds, never quite left her nightmares. Neither did the sound of her own screams, the cool of the blade that traced her chest, or the feel of his not-so-subtle touches to her most intimate areas. But it was those marginal blackout moments, those brief threads of darkness that weakly strung together all the bits and pieces, that haunted her most.
"Something this traumatic takes time to process. Bits and pieces come back slowly."
Helpless. It seemed to be the only description that came to mind as she took inventory of all the collected snapshots she had acquired in a year and a half, but the word didn't even begin to cover it. Helpless was being handcuffed so tightly she couldn't move without summoning a rip of pain through her body. Helpless was being forced to ingest an inhumane dose of drugs and alcohol, never knowing if this would be the time it killed her. Helpless was being effortlessly held down with one strong hand while the other felt its way down her body, yanking at her belt buckle, then his. It was the inability to breathe with his body crushing her lungs and the duct tape sealing off her best chance at oxygen. It was his hand on her face as she tried to turn her away, gently wiping at tears she hadn't meant to release, and the sound of strangled pleas for mercy that came out as nothing more than hollow whimpers. Shhh, shhh. Don't cry, Sweetheart. You're going to love this.
Helpless was being raped.
"Any sounds? Smells?" "Music...maybe. His belt buckle clinked, over and over."
She had cried. She remembered that part because the soft, wet tears trailing down her cheeks had served as somewhat of a focal point for her, both to separate her from reality and shackle her to it. Her brain had been like a weak signal for a radio station, cutting in and out of the moment, covering what she could decipher with a thick layer of scratchy white noise. Even still, there were a few constants that pulled her back when she closed her eyes. Clink, clink, clink, clink. The light clinking of metal against metal started in time with his movements. Despite the nausea it provoked in her stomach even in the moment, she focused on the rhythmic sound as an alternative to the pain as her wrists rolled beneath them with each jolting thrust. At one point, the most distant, subconscious part of her noted with irony that the clinking had synced up with the beat of the song in the distance. Every morning, every evening, ain't we got fun…
"She was so out of it, she couldn't even process that she had been raped. But she was in pain afterwards."
The next time she had woken up with Lewis, it was upon the break of daylight. She remembered that much more clearly. She supposed the denial started there, on the back seat floor with which she had become so well acquainted, as he hummed that same awful tune and she squeezed her thighs together, ignoring the swell of soreness that threatened to taunt her. She closed her eyes.
That was helpless.
But how did that compare to being robbed of the very memory that validated her assault? How could one simple word summarize how it felt to be a victim to her own mind? To be stripped of her ability to process the worst thing that had ever happened to her? Sure, here and now, almost a year and a half later, the snapshots had built themselves up into some semblance of a memory. But before, in all the weeks and months of aftermath? The fervent denial and the temporary lack of solidified recollection had been more of a hindrance to her recovery than she liked to admit. When she turned over the past year in her head, the proof was right in front of her. Undeniable, ironically. Aside from the obvious damage of having to endure unsolicited flashbacks to a time of which she was previously unaware, her repression had created the largest wedge between her and the ones she loved. She had seen the looks on their faces when she told them she had been spared that burden. At the time, she had convinced herself of that "truth" as much as them.
But as days trickled together and old wounds began to settle and heal, the truth began to rise up in her like a flame that burned at her insides. The truth came for her in nightmares, in flashbacks, in tiny moments that left her breathless, unrelenting in its mission to claw its way to the surface. But how could she? After everything-after watching their relief at her false confession-how could she tell them this new and horrible revelation, especially when it still wasn't solid within her own mind? The secrecy became a poison that ate away at her. Or rather, the threat of the secrecy being relinquished.
It was the same reason she denied William Lewis his allocution at the trial, unwilling to allow his voice to be the one that painted the full picture for her, bridging the gaps between all the jagged little pieces she carried with her every day. She knew what he had planned. Their dirty little secret-it danced behind his eyes as he greeted her in the courtroom, a silent communication that seemed to release an invisible gush of bottled emotion into the air between them. And there it was, no more denying. Up until that moment, she wondered if Lewis simply assumed she had been too out of it to remember what happened. For a while, that assumption might have been true-that she was too consumed by the lethal mix of alcohol, drugs, and paralyzing fear to remember their escapades from an abandoned backlot in the middle of the night. Perhaps he had assumed-with a little disappointment, she was sure-that her forgetfulness was the reason behind leaving that particular accusation off the books. But natural predator as he was, one fleeting moment of fiery eye contact was all it took to extract the truth; the truth he had every intention of expelling. And she couldn't have allowed that.
Lewis was dead now. It was something she had to remind herself every day. Lewis was dead, and their secret died with him if she chose to keep it that way. She suspected she would. After all, the people in her life found enough reasons to throw it in her face without her adding fuel to the fire. At any rate, it shouldn't matter, right? Almost a year and a half of therapy and break ups and promotions and healing had past, and she had to admit the progress was significant. She had survived, she had grown, and she had moved on. But every once in a while, even as she sat in her new apartment, rocking her beautiful son to sleep in her arms, a tremor of chills would snake down her spine as she recalled the evil voice of William Lewis. "He probably sits there with you, tells you you're working through it. 'You can be whole again, Olivia.' Well, he's lying. What I do...nobody ever recovers from."
"Tell me how either one of them starts over."