Part 1
Things have been tense between them all week.
Not normal tense, like, I can't believe you didn't tell me about your boyfriend and oh by the way Kathy's pregnant tense.
Not, I can't believe you didn't tell me you were back with Kathy and oh by the way months ago I tried to adopt a child tense.
No, this tension runs far deeper. There's a new undercurrent present that neither of them recognize or understand.
Because for the first time in a while, in years, perhaps, they're angry at each other. Not pissed, not irritated, not jealous, but angry.
And neither thinks the other has any right to be.
x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-
In Olivia's opinion, her partner was out of his mind to do the three-day stint in jail, on purpose, when there was no one to save, no loftier cause. He just did it to see what it was like.
And she can't help but think that on some unconscious level he also did it to show her how easy it was. That it was no big deal.
He didn't even tell her he was going.
And then he came back, acting all traumatized, like he really suffered so terribly. Three days alone. He had to have a few conversations with himself. He nearly died of boredom counting tiles on the floor. Boo hoo.
She had spent a week at Sealview. A whole fucking week. Without a moment to herself. She'd peed in front of other people, had been groped and harassed and humiliated and physically assaulted. And all that didn't even count what had happened at the end, with Harris.
She shudders for a second, remembering it, and then she's indignant all over again, as she thinks about Elliot's measly three days, during which the worst that happened to him was boredom. At least he got to retain his identity. She'd had to do all of it pretending to be someone else, keeping up a charade.
It is true that she volunteered to do it; nobody forced her. But she didn't do it for kicks, for Christsakes. She did it to catch a rapist. A dangerous, ruthless predator. There had been a higher purpose at play.
He did it out of curiosity about the validity of a defense attorney's argument.
The way he's been going on and on about the experience, like she has no clue what it feels like to be dehumanized, it's like a slap in the face.
When she thinks back to it nowadays, she realizes she didn't prepare herself properly for prison. She thought that because creepy men leered at her and made obnoxious remarks to her every day on the job, that enduring such treatment in prison would be a piece of cake. But it wasn't. Well before the final, devastating experience, the indignities she suffered earlier in the week began to get to her. Showering, using the toilet and even being ordered around in front of others upset her more than she would have expected them to. It was like being reminded that nothing she had accomplished in her life entitled her to even the lowest of human dignities. Matthew Parker put his hands all over her, and she was powerless to stop him. He humiliated her again and again, mostly only verbally, but each incident took a little piece out of her. That horrible orange jumpsuit turned her into someone else; someone without an identity, someone who existed to take orders from people like Parker and to like it. As a prisoner, her sole purpose was to be degraded by them. To be reminded over and over again that she was worse than nobody; she was somebody who had done something to deserve the deliberate and systematic stripping away of her dignity. And even though she was only pretending, pretending to be someone who had done something terrible enough to merit the state's use of tax payers' money to place her in an institution specifically designed to degrade and dehumanize, by the end, she started to believe it. That was the worst part of it all. She let Harris take her to that basement against her better judgment, because in those crucial moments when he took her away, she believed she was Kat, she believed she deserved to be punished for starting a riot, and so there was no "better judgment" to call upon in the first place. Olivia, in those moments, did not exist. Only Kat did. And Kat was used to not being loved, to having men abuse her, to taking the fall for them.
Sometimes Olivia thinks that perhaps she and Kat aren't so different after all. Perhaps that's why Olivia so easily became Kat. Deep down, she believes she doesn't deserve the space she takes up, because no one has ever told her otherwise. Deep down, she believes she needs to be punished. Those are the hardest nights for Olivia to bear, when the underlying truth behind her subconscious behavior that day hits her over the head, when she realizes she could have prevented all of it. If only she'd been someone other than Kat. If only Kat had been someone other than Olivia.
And then there are other nights when she manages to forgive herself, when the pain isn't as bad and she can sleep without dreaming of being pushed up against a cold wall with her hands shackled behind her back. When the salve that is the passage of time does its wonders, and she can focus on other things, the good things, like the fact that she still has her partner and that things between them have been pretty good lately. That they faced near-death yet again last spring and survived. She and Elliot have grown closer since the day she rescued him from Stuckey.
And then he went ahead and disappeared for three days and came back a so-called changed man.
If only Harris had actually taken her to the hole. She would have given anything to spend a few hours – hell, a few days – in solitary confinement.
x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-
In Elliot's opinion, his partner is being pretty damn insensitive, considering she doesn't know what the hell she's talking about.
Solitary confinement is like torture. Hell, it is torture. After three days he's prepared to defend Donovan in court himself.
The three days were the worst of his life, worse than getting thrown off a rooftop, or shot, or stabbed by a crazy CSU tech, or nearly blinded. But he's glad he has done them, because though he almost lost his mind, he also learned something valuable. He learned that sometimes defense attorneys are right. It isn't something he would go out of his way to admit out loud, but in the privacy of his own head, he is proud of himself, for having grown a little, become a little more enlightened, as a cop, as a human being.
Olivia just doesn't understand.
Solitary confinement isn't anything like regular prison. He knows for certain that Olivia made friends with some of the other women there. Granted, they weren't women she'd normally hang out with, but at least she had other human beings to talk to, to commiserate with, to shoot the breeze with. And yes, to his knowledge, she endured some pretty nasty treatment. But she's tough as nails, his partner; she thrives on challenging situations. It was unpleasant, possibly humiliating, possibly even violent – he's not blind, he saw the bruise across her cheek – but it still didn't qualify as torture.
Apparently in his own country, a supposed beacon of enlightenment, prisoners are tortured every single day for years at a time, and it is all perfectly legal.
No wonder Donovan threw him off a rooftop. It turns out there really is such a thing as not being in one's right mind. Elliot appreciates this now. He understands the need for affirmative defenses, even if most of the time they're bogus. Some of the time, some of the time, they are legitimate and crucial. He could have worked twenty more years in law enforcement and never known what this was like.
After only three days he thought he was going to lose his mind. Olivia keeps alluding that she thinks the experience is akin to nothing more than being incredibly bored, which sounds utterly unpleasant, she admits, but certainly doesn't justify throwing a cop off a rooftop.
But it went beyond boredom to complete sensory deprivation. There were moments when every fiber of his being demanded to be let out, every muscle of his body was primed and flexed and bursting with adrenaline-fueled energy, aching to break free of his cage, of his solitude, and he was powerless to make it happen. He screamed and screamed for attention, but nobody came. And then when his mind began to realize there was no way out, that's when the true torture began. For it was the awareness that such nothingness would continue, that there was absolutely no possible way to divert his focus to anything but the fact that there was nothing upon which to focus, that the onset of the insanity truly took form. It had never before occurred to him that the inability to communicate one's suffering to another person represented suffering in and of itself. The compounding effect was tremendous. He would have done anything to interact with another person; hell, even endured actual torture if it meant communication with his torturer.
He reached his nadir on what he thinks must have been the third day. That was when he expended his last bit of sanity on the realization that he had started to lose sight of who he was, of who, fundamentally, he was, when the sound of his own name stopped making sense to him.
And so he forced himself to say his name out loud, like it was a form of exercise, like an amnesiac memorizing the name of someone he's supposed to know. He tried out different emphases, different inflections.
I'm Elliot Stabler.
I AM Elliot Stabler.
*I* am ELLIOT. STABLER!
But then he was presented with a quandary: With nobody to hear but his own faulty brain, he wasn't sure it counted.
And so after many hours of such uncertainty, he finally found somebody to tell.
And so he said his name aloud once again.
To a cockroach.
He introduced himself to a fucking cockroach.
He can't imagine being remotely functional after twenty years of this.
So how come Olivia doesn't see this? He's known her for over a decade. She is one of the most intelligent, sensitive and empathetic people he knows. So how come she's acting like what he did, what he endured, the insight he gained, isn't important?
