He's decided he's going in.
She's been gone from the camera for three full days and the Feds still can't devise a plan. The issue, as he sees it, is that their attention is focused on the bigger picture, on catching the so-called big fish. They won't share their strategy, of course; they're too damned territorial and don't give a shit that his partner of a dozen years is a hostage. Worse, he's gotten the distinct sense they're starting to make contingency plans. As in, what happens if they can't get everyone out alive? Damage control. It's a bad sign.
So fuck it. Fuck the Feds. He can't let her keep going through the God-knows-what he's sure is being done to her. He'll accept the consequences. Even if the whole damn building explodes, at least it'll end her suffering.
He spends the entire afternoon plotting his plan, puzzling over how to get past their blockade undetected. He has to do it all himself; his ex-colleagues are of course just as anxious to get Olivia out, but not at the expense of their careers. Or maybe they haven't pictured, as he has, just what might be happening to her in there. Maybe they're in denial. Maybe they're blocking it out. A convenient way to justify their impotence. While she suffers.
Or maybe they don't want to risk the lives of all those little children.
God dammit, he thinks, as the visual of twenty-five miniature faces comes to view again. It's all well and good to distance himself, desensitize himself from the risk he's decided to take, to turn his mind off to the reality of what it means to jeopardize the lives of twenty-five children. To pretend the risk is so miniscule, so ill-defined, the consequences simply hadn't entered his calculus. To pretend he isn't thinking straight, because he's blinded by love.
He is in love.
But he's not blinded. They're children.
At the hands of men who might not hesitate to blow them to bits if provoked.
He can't be responsible for the death of another child.
His shoulders slump as he gazes up, helplessly at the building.
He can't go in.
Not even for her.
x-x-x-x-x-x-
She's been an atheist her whole life, but in the past few hours one thought has gripped her mind and she hasn't been able to let it go: what if she's wrong? So much of the world, after all, is so convinced of God's existence. So many of those people are well educated, more so than she.
What if she's in the wrong? What if what she's going through now is just the beginning of her punishment, of what she's set to endure for all of eternity? What if none of this has anything to do with her mother, her father, but rather with the choices she's made?
What if Elliot's been right all along? His religion has been around for over two thousand years; who the hell is she to decide such a venerable, resilient faith is a sham? And if that faith really has pegged God correctly, then so many of her choices have been against God's will. She, a mere human being, a mortal, has had the arrogance, the audacity, to challenge the almighty. How dare she? What if God's got a running log of her various transgressions over the years? Like the scores of one-night stands because she was feeling sorry for herself? Or all the ardent pontification to vulnerable others about the importance of artificially suppressing the creation of children? Who knows how many children are not in the world today because of her?
So if there is a God, she can't possibly be in his good graces.
No wonder God sent Gunther to punish her.
This is the least she deserves.
x-x-x-x-x-x-
He thinks he might have lost his faith in God.
In all those years of witnessing what terrible things one human being can do to another, he always saw it through the framework of his faith.
And then out of nowhere last night, the idea gripped him, and he can't let it go: how is it possible so many human beings are so convinced of so many different versions of God? Convinced. A hundred percent sure. And yet they can't all be right. Which must mean there are an awful lot of very smart people in the world who are dead-wrong about God. So who's to say he's got God pegged? Worse, what if nobody's right?
Which brought him to the logical, frightening conclusion:
What if prayer is futile? What if there is no higher plan, no grand goal for goodness to prevail?
What if he's really the only one out there to protect her?
x-x-x-x-x-x-
She's become frightened of the sound of her own voice. It used to be a normal, average, feminine voice, she believes, but somehow in the abyss of silence to which she's been subjected, she's convinced her voice has become distorted, shrill. Menacing. She doesn't like it. So she's been trying to shush it. Which has presented a new confusion: she could have sworn she hadn't been speaking aloud in the first place.
Then there have been the visions. She's adamant they're not hallucinations, that they're real events, playing out in front of her. It makes perfect sense; in the radio silence and pitch-darkness, certain memories are bound to come alive. And sometimes, she reasons, it is possible for those things to be real.
Somewhere in the back of her head she senses her logic is flawed, but she's too starved to question it.
She has no concept of time. Of how slowly or quickly it passes, or of whether it passes at all.
She thinks there's a chance she's already dead.
Because she's been hearing her mother's voice, and her mother, she knows, is dead.
Her mother's been telling her things about who she is. About why she is.
Sometimes I think about how my life would've been if I hadn't had you.
Her mother had a beguilingly feminine-sounding voice, Olivia recalls. Even when her words were biting. It was one of those off-putting, incongruous things about her mother Olivia took for granted. For years, she secretly wondered if she, too, frightened children when she spoke to them.
Do you ever think about that, Olivia? What it would be like to not exist?
When they come to punish her, it's not Gunther or Dwight, but rather her mother, who beats her. And when she thanks Gunther for teaching her an important lesson, she believes he really is Serena simply masquerading as another, helping her to understand her lot. It's reasonable, after all, that she be made to earn her worthiness. That's what everyone's been trying to teach her all her life.
There are tiny snippets of time when she's able to recognize she's descending into madness. When she's able to give herself a pep talk about keeping her wits about her, about having faith that this is not how it's supposed to be. Such speeches are then followed by the attempt to recall all the people her squad has rescued over the years who were also imperfect, flawed. Sinful. Sometimes she's able to concentrate on the train of thought long enough to reason that if her squad tried to help those people, then there's a good chance they also want to help her.
But as her brain struggles to pass hour after hour, she just looks forward to those rare moments when Gunther opens the door, breaks the silence.
Pays attention to her.
x-x-x-x-x-x-
He thinks he's slept about ten hours in five days. He didn't know such a thing was humanly possible.
Lying on the makeshift cot inside the trailer, where he's been ordered to go under the threat of handcuffs, his eyes shut automatically. As he drifts off against his will, he tries to channel her. Tries to enter her mind, give her comfort. He's well aware he's never believed in this sort of thing before and that it's awfully convenient for him to suddenly change his tune, but he's desperate for something to cling to, some way of processing what hell she must be going through, and to take some of the burden off her shoulders.
But when he tries to summon an image of her against the backdrop of his mind, all he sees is nothingness.
