Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters except for Darren and Hanna.
Chapter 4
She was soaked in sweat. Adrenaline kept her moving, and she kept running. He was after her. She felt his hands touching her naked body. "Stop! Stop!" She was kicking her legs. Screaming. Watching her blood soak the gravel on the road. She was surprised she wasn't dead. "Don't kill me…!"
Olivia woke up from her nightmare. This was the second nightmare she had since her attack, and she hoped that they would stop soon. But she didn't need to let them get to her, just like she didn't need to let Darren Richards get to her. That would be just like letting him win. And there was no way in hell that she was going to let him win.
Olivia sat up in bed, realizing that it was 3:00 a.m. in the morning when she leaned over to look at her alarm clock. The case about the woman who was bludgeoned to death, now identified to be Stacy McDaniel, was bothering her. She realized that she could have been killed. 'No, I wouldn't have let it get that far. I'm trained in self-defense,' Olivia reminded herself.
She was awake now, though, and she didn't think that she would be able to fall back asleep. She stood up and stretched her arms, walking over to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of lemonade. Standing at her counter and staring out her window into the deep, dark abyss, Olivia wondered why things happened the way they did and wondered if some things happen for a reason. Sometimes, there was more to a case than could be easily seen on the surface. There were some emotions that Olivia was feeling that she couldn't even admit that she was feeling, but they were there, lingering underneath her shell, just waiting for the right moment to stick their little heads above the surface and finally be able to breathe the free air.
She knew what she had to do to get Darren out of her head. She needed to know why he raped her. So she went to her room and brought her laptop out to her kitchen table. She wasn't going to stalk him exactly; she was an officer of the law and she knew better. All she was going to do was look him up online and try to find out why he did what he did. In most cases, arresting the perp was enough. But this wasn't most cases, this was her case. And more than anything else, if she ever wanted any sort of closure at all, Olivia needed to know why.
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Darren's POV
He stood in the darkness of his apartment, thinking back to a time before his mother had shot his father and then offed herself with the last bullet. He had been only fifteen then, and his sister, Hanna, had only been five. She was so young, so innocent. She deserved to have a mother and a father. Darren had tried to take care of Hanna the best he could, but he had only been a teenager. He quit school and got a job at a coffee shop to work full-time to provide for his sister. He fell in love with poetry, and for a while everything was alright. The rejection letters hadn't bothered him, because soon enough Darren improved his writing and acceptance letters started coming. Eventually, Darren had earned enough
money to rent an apartment so Hanna didn't have to live the terrible life of a homeless runaway. He made sure she went to elementary school – he went with her in a cab to make sure she was alright.
But then a tragedy stroke when Hanna was only ten. The cab crashed, and although Darren survived without much more than a broken leg and a concussion, Hanna didn't survive. Darren was devastated. He had no reason to live anymore. He was weak. He was incapable of anything. The worst thing was, his mother's suicide had scarred him so deeply that he couldn't even think of killing himself. So he sold his apartment and became a rogue, wandering from town to town and sleeping behind dumpsters. He still wrote poetry, so he had money, but he couldn't bear the thought of living in an apartment or any comfortable house when Hanna was dead. He would do anything to bring her back, even sacrifice his own life.
As the years went by, slowly Darren's outer shell hardened and he built up walls to protect him from the cruelness of reality. He buried his emotions, and eventually he forgot that they were even there. He forgot how to feel, and he forgot how to think about others. His depression worsened and he turned to alcohol and prostitutes. But poetry was still the only thing that really sustained him. Poetry was to Darren like blood was to vampires.
He was drunk that night. He could say that he was out of control and that he didn't know what he was doing, but then he would be lying. He didn't want to think that he had become his father, the gruff man who had abused his mother for years before his mother killed his father and herself. It scared him that he was becoming his father. If he couldn't kill himself when his sister died, he sure as hell wanted to now. He couldn't take it that he had hurt someone, taken something from someone that he knew he could never give back. He wanted to kill himself. He wanted to turn back time. He even considered turning himself in.
He couldn't stop thinking about how beautiful she was. He couldn't get the image of her wide, shocked brown eyes out of his head. Something had fallen out of her pocket the night he attacked her. It was a receipt or something that said her name: Olivia Benson.
He had an apartment now. By age thirty he had given up living on the streets. He couldn't take it anymore, not that he cared. He lived in a small one-floor apartment, but he still slept in the streets sometimes. His eyes were the alert eyes of a vigilante when he wasn't drunk. Whenever he saw a little girl pass by, scared and alone, he thought of little Hanna and wanted to protect her from all of the heartless bastards that were out there.
But now he had become one of them. 'What have I done?' he thought, not bothering to wipe the tears that rolled down his cheek. His emotions were resurfacing and he wanted to protest but it felt like a volcano was exploded, and once the lava started its vicious path of destruction the only thing you could do was watch with wide, fearful eyes. 'What have I become?' He reached for a banana peel lying on the ground and threw it into the dumpster and thought about killing himself again.
Or he could just stop drinking. He didn't want to be a monster. He didn't want to hurt anyone again. But he didn't know if he could stop drinking. Darren didn't know if he was strong enough. He didn't know if there were enough pieces left of the man he was before his precious sister died.
It started raining, the whole thing: thunder, lightning, cruel raindrops. Darren listened to the thunder echoing the lightning and sat down by the dumpster and listened to the sound of the rain's pointless catch and release. He stood up and stared at the moon for what seemed like hours. The moon was so small that it seemed like it was invisible – a ghost of reality, a sliver of humanity that was struggling to resurface despite the grim darkness overcoming Darren's body and spreading through his veins like a disease. Then he went home and turned on his laptop and wrote poetry.
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Olivia's POV; at the precinct the next day
Olivia was groggy, having been up since 3 a.m. She sat at her desk working on the last of the paperwork for the Stacy McDaniel case, which had been pretty much straightforward and easy to solve.
"You look horrible," Elliot said, reminding Olivia of what Legolas had said to Aragorn after Aragorn narrowly escaped death. Lord of the Rings was Olivia's favorite novel. She thought of her favorite quote:
Aragorn: "You have some skill with a blade."
Eowyn: "The women of this land learned long ago, that those without swords can still die upon them. I fear neither death nor pain."
Aragorn: "What do you fear, my Lady?"
Eowyn: "A cage. To be kept behind bars until use and old age accept them, and all chance of valor has gone beyond recall or desire."
Aragorn: "You are a daughter of Kings, a shieldmaiden of Rohan, I do not think that will be your fate."
"I couldn't sleep," Olivia said. "But I'm fine." She hadn't found out that much out about Darren Richards, except that fifteen or so years ago a Hanna Richards died in a car accident.
Olivia thought about why she did what she did. Words of encouragement Sam had given to Frodo near the end of his journey perfectly described the reason Olivia worked days and night to get evil murderers and rapists off the street.
Frodo: "I can't do this, Sam."
Sam: "I know. It's all wrong. By rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo, the ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. 'Cause sometimes you didn't want to know the end because how could the end be happy? How can the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end it's only a passing thing. A shadow even
darkness must pass. A new day will come and when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you, that meant something even if you were to small to understand why. But I think Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folks in those stories had lots of chances in turning back only they didn't. They kept going because they were holding onto to something."
Frodo: "What are we holding onto, Sam?"
Sam: "That there's some good left in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it's worth fighting for."
What was Olivia fighting for? Peace, justice, an end to crime? Would it ever really come to that? If only it really could be that simple, that all of the evil in the world could be held in one small golden ring, and the only thing that needed to be done to destroy evil forever, banishing it from the face of the universe, was to destroy it by casting it into hellish flames. If only.
No, the real world was more complicated. But just like Frodo had been, Olivia was willing to sacrifice herself for humanity if it ever came to that.
