Disclaimer: I don't own The Killing. Sarah and Stephen deserve and have much better than I.

Please read, enjoy and (hopefully) review! :) Thank you so much.

North Star

He can't meet her gaze when she enters the room. But Sarah can see that his eyes are hollow, lacking their joking luster. Beer cans litter the floor and too many cigarettes fill the ashtray - this is the taste of despair, lingering and mixing with the smoke. He finally looks at her when she is sitting on the couch, buoyed by his counterweight.

They both light up, the only heat in the room burns at the end of their cigarettes.

"It's not your fault." Those words sound so empty, even to her ears. He tries to refocus the conversation- away from what was really bothering him, deflecting deftly. At first she thinks, she's taught him too well. That he's turning into her, a vacant space on the sofa. And she won't have that- because he's fucking Stephen Holder - her anchor, her strength. He beat the meth, fought her when he knew she was wrong, and held her when she cried.

Yet, she looks again and can see that he actually wants to know. He's still trying to care for her through all of this and it should be the other way around. It's her turn, her time. Seward-case related talk could wait, at least for now. So she lets the conversation drop. His breathing is heavy and shaking, full of blame and preparing to speak.

"I should've picked up." In the gray light, his brow is dark, Linden can't see his eyes. He's folding in on himself, packing the feelings into boxes made of self-hatred.

Her voice comes out softer than she's ever let it be around him. The reassurance draws his attention. And suddenly he's staring at her. So close.

She stops him from kissing her. She leans just far enough forward that their mouths can't connect. His lips brushing her forehead for the barest of seconds before he jerks away at the rejection. It stings him, she can tell. Body heat and silent exchanges of air build on the moving planes of his tattooed skin- a second, two seconds - and he pulls away first.

She couldn't let him kiss her. Couldn't.

He needed comfort, not a thing that couldn't be named right now. Not a complex built-up shitstorm of sexual tension. She cares for him too much to give him that instead of what he needed, which was assurance that things would be okay. And if they weren't she sure as hell would make them okay for him, somehow. Somehow.

So, for now, she would pull away. Knowing he would take it in stride even in his vulnerable state, just like he does with everything about their partnership. It wasn't a 'no' and it wasn't a 'yes'. He knows that if she really didn't care or was repulsed by him she would have run by now.

All her impulses are screaming at her to just run – like she has for so long. Yet, she can't. He's pulled her in, like he always does. He's one of the reasons she could never leave. Holder has a magnetic quality that leaves her vulnerable, a raw metal being tugged in against his current.

He was wrong before, about her having nothing in Seattle. She does have something here, and right now that something is going numb beside her, bombarding himself with every legal form of escape he can afford on a detective's salary.

She can't leave this broken man. Not alone in the fading light where the darkness could find him. Linden has seen monsters. The ones that come dressed in human skin were hardly the worst. It was the ones that lurked when you were alone, in unanswered phone calls, in regret, in Bullet's necklace - those were the ones that could kill you slowly.

She goes to place a hand on his shoulder, thumb running along the ink she finds there and she immediately removes it – too much skin on hers - choosing to pat his knee instead, at least his jeans posed a reasonable barrier.

He's apologizing, with his eyes, with his body. Tilting forward into the regret as if he was resisting the wind, that's when the tears come. He's letting it wash over him, over her.

She pulls back but doesn't leave. Her right leg is still pressed up against him, her presence still felt in the gray cast of the room, through the shadows of the couch.

"Everyone wants to see in black and white. But me? I see the grays."

Right now he needs more than gray though. He needs light, something more than where they are at this moment - a dirty room, a rain-drenched city, with shattered hopes collecting in their pockets.

Linden takes a drag on her cigarette; her fingers trace his shoulder blades before dropping her hand to her own leg. "Do you remember when we were with Bullet in the car?"

"Sarah, I can't..." He sounds desperate, fists clenching, knuckles bleaching white. "Please don't."

"No, you need to hear this." Suddenly, he's sitting back; forehead drawn together, making wrinkles appear in harsh lines, and graveyard eyes peering deeply into her. She looks away for a moment, his gaze too intense.

"Look at me." It was more of a command than a request. "Look at me, Sarah, I need to see your eyes. They're the windows of the soul you know – I need a little of your soul right now. I don't have much left of mine."

She complies, drawing her eyes up his face, memorizing this moment. "Sharing is caring, ya hear?" His gaze is softening, wet, and his mouth twitches around the shrinking smoke. She starts again.

"It was when Bullet took us to that underpass, after you got out of the car to talk to those kids." She moistens her shaking lips, a breath, a beat of time hangs between this and her next statement.

"She said you grew on her, even though you were lame. Looked like a stretched out white rabbit."

He snorts halfheartedly, but holds her gaze, "She…Bullet," a quivering inhale, "kept calling me Bugs. Like Bugs Bunny."

Linden chuckles softly. Contorting her face into her famous lopsided smile as she takes another pull from her present addiction- its glow burning bright for a millisecond, "She believed that no one had faith in her but herself. She was strong, Holder, so strong."

This time she feathers a hand on his arm. She feels the muscle grooves beneath the skin tightening, and he slides from her grip like moving water. He hisses, as though he was burned- by her words, her touch, "Not strong enough. Not against that sick bastard." Kicking his leg out, he hits the table hard; hard enough that it scoots out a good five inches into the center of the drab room leaving scars on the floor.

"Stephen." She is quiet again, laying her words carefully, like bricks. With her next few, she wanted to build something for him to stand on, against the waves of sorrow, something that wouldn't wash away in this god-forsaken rain.

"She said I was like the North Star." He snaps his head to look at her, as she douses the cigarette in the ashtray on the table. Linden turns her body in his direction, knocking knees with him as she does. "You gonna help me find my way home, Linden?"

She takes his face in her hands, pressing her forehead to his again, with closed eyes. He doesn't move an inch, ridged like stone between her palms.

Behind her eyes she sees gray, so much gray, with the cloud-blocked light filtering in to coat them both in a warmth-absent glow. "Yes."

He pulls her close, lengthy arms encircling her waist and pressing her into his body like he is trying to absorb her. He buries his face in the crook of her neck; tears soaking through her sweater. Holder leans back on the couch, the furniture creaking with the change in weight – he drags her with him. Her fingers find his hair and begin to comb comforting lines through it.

"I believe you."

Longing nestles into Linden's heart as she looks at him. She knew that he would understand later everything this moment meant, and she would tell him when she was ready about all the things that were burning in her chest. But right now was not the time. Now was a time of comfort, of direction, of light and she would do her best not to blur the lines of their precious friendship, for now. He would be the darkness to her light, black to her white.

She would be the North Star, untouchable and luminescent in the night. But stars eventually fall, fade, and turn to gray ash. Stars need someone to catch them.

And she could only hope like hell that he would be able to see the grays when the time came, because gray is where dark and light collide.