Note from Author: This will be my first multi-chapter fic. Criticism would be greatly appreciated. I have encountered some technical difficulties here, so please bear with the reversed chapters until I can fix them.
Disclaimer: If I said I owned them, would you believe me?
I. The Sound of Silence
Grabbing her gun hastily from her holster, Olivia Benson experiences the closest thing she's ever known to transcendence. She no longer feels like herself; she is merely a timed weapon, a trained robot; taught to seek after her target mercilessly.
She's aware of him reaching for the gun, but unlike the clichés, it doesn't seem rash and unexpected. It seems quite the contrary, in fact; his hands wrapping around the cool, black metal, each finger intertwining with the next, and she's not sure where the human begins and automatic weapon ends.
So she shoots him.
It's when he hits the ground, when a heavy, dull thud reverberates around the concrete where she stands, that she fully grasps the transposable consequences of her actions. For once, she is responsible for another; another living, breathing, feeling, human being besides herself; and a profound amount of newfound responsibility courses through her veins. Guilt, she supposes.
Her partner glances over momentarily, understanding and concern etched into his gentle features.
It makes her sick, this look; because she knows that he's not concerned about the victim; the living, breathing, feeling human being that she just brutally, thoughtlessly murdered in cold blood; but her. Somehow she is the victim, and somewhere in the midst of this silent reverie, her implacable guilt becomes unadulterated anger.
"You okay, Liv?" he asks, the doubt clouding his eyes already prophesizing her answer.
I am, but he's not.
"Sure," she offers, and even she knows the words ring hollow and vacant. He comes over slowly, as if approaching one of their rape victims at the scene of the crime, unsure of what kind of psychotic meltdown sudden movements would cause.
He drapes a threadbare wool blanket over her shoulders; a symbolic representation of comfort in their terms; but she arches inward at the contact and remains motionless, her eyes transfixed by the void of nothingness that lays a few feet in front of her.
It's not even cold, Elliot.
"Thank you," she whispers inaudibly, and even he knows that she doesn't mean it. She resents his conciliatory gestures of comfort and protection, and on any other day she would quip that he was some sort of a token alpha-male, but today isn't one of those days. All that she'll remember from this day is the sound of that bullet; her actions, her responsibility, her guilt; shattering the bones in the brain of someone she hardly even knew, but someone who she would be inextricably linked to for the rest of her existence.
Maybe this is how my mother felt about her rapist and me.
Except this time, she realized, which side was she on?