Hi everyone! Thank you for your wonderful support and review. It took me a long time to manage to write this one - Mojo was being lazy, but now he seems to be on fire so hopefully I'll be back with more soon.

Enjoy,

So ;)

ps: scuby thanks for fighting with me you're the best :)

Max, thank you for your insight, it helps a lot ;)

Freddie, thank you for giving me tips and your opinion. :)

Chapter 11

"Welcome ladies, how are we today?" I ask once Catherine and Sara are settled on the couch.

"Tired," Catherine shrugs. I look at Sara who just shrugs as well.

"So…do you have the feeling to have found closure…about the Holly Gribbs issue?"

Catherine looks at Sara who doesn't stop watching ahead of her.

"Yes we resolved the Holly issue," Catherine answers not convinced and start to tap on the arm of the couch.

Something's different. I don't know what but something changed. They've always been tensed around each other, even during 'quiet' sessions. Sara seems relaxed somewhat, I know it might not last, but something has definitely changed. I don't know what happened after our last session, but whatever it was changed everything. Catherine on the other hand is nervous or at least in a hurry for this session to be over with.

"Catherine?" I call.

She looks up. "Yes?"

"Is there anything you want to share?"

"What?" she looks at Sara quickly and then back at me. Something definitely happened between the two of them, I don't know if Catherine's afraid Sara will tell something or if she did something she's afraid of Sara's reaction, in any way something's going on. "No…nothing," she answers quickly.

I look at Sara who's just as calm and detached as usual sighs "We found closure, we talked it through," she shrugs.

"Yes…" she clears her throat. "We…talked…it through," Catherine adds, and blushing a bit if I'm not mistaking.

"How do you feel about it?"

"Feel about it?" Catherine chews her bottom lip. She looks at her watch again for the tenth time since she got here.

"Yes."

"I'm glad we…worked it out."

"Is there something wrong?"

"Something wrong? No…what makes you think something is wrong?" she turns to Sara. "Nothing's wrong," she says firmly.

"Your nervousness, your avoidance…" I can feel her ready to protest so I correct myself. "The vagueness in your answers, make me think that something is indeed wrong."

"I just told you, nothing's wrong."

"He's right actually," Sara finally points out. Catherine's head snaps in Sara's direction, she obviously feels like Sara ganged up with me. "You do seem nervous about something. Is something bothering you?" Sara asks looking at Catherine with genuine concern.

"No, should there be?"

"I don't know Cath, you're the nervous one here," Sara's used of Catherine's short name and for Catherine not to tensed at it is a confirmation that something changed between them, something positive. "Something's bothering you at work?"

Catherine leans forward with her elbows on her knees and puts her face in her hands. She laughs sarcastically. "Do you know what today is?"

"Today is…Tuesday," Sara ventures.

"Yes it is…it's also one of the rare days that I allow Lindsey to play hooky from school, we go out for pancakes…then we go to the florist….and then to the cemetery."

Sara tenses up a bit when she's making some connection. "Eddie's death anniversary is…" she lifts her eyes to the ceiling. "Three months and five days from now," she frowns.

"Yes…but today is…well would have been…"

"His birthday…" Sara finishes. Catherine looks at her puzzled but Sara goes on without paying attention to it. "You celebrate his birthday…don't you feel it weird?"

"Well, I don't expect you to know anything about losing a love one, let alone understand it."

Sara just nods silently and purses her lip to prevent herself from responding to the barb.

"How do you feel Catherine," I ask.

"I'm fine," she sends me a fake smile.

"Catherine, how do you feel?"

She lets out an exasperated "I feel…tired," she starts. "I'm tired of not knowing who…or why…tired of not being able to give my little girl answers…tired of pretending I'm okay with it."

I can literally Sara's walls standing up, she trying really hard to contain her anger under a mask of impassivity.

"If I had worked that case, if I had conducted the interviews, processed the evidence…I'd have found what I needed to make a case but… no, I wasn't allowed to."

Sara snorts and with an angry smirk and shakes her head lightly before going back to her contemplation of the wall.

"If you had worked the case it'd have been dismissed in court because of conflict of interest," I point out.

"Like it ever stopped her," Sara mutters, Catherine is so caught up in her own anger that she doesn't catch it. I decide to let that comment slide, not willing to give an exit to Sara.

"So you're considering Sara's work on this particular case wasn't enough."

"Did she find what happen? No. Did she catch the responsible person? No," she says angrily. "She did a goddamned lousy job!!" she explodes.

Sara laughs hollowly and shakes her head, a reaction which naturally makes Catherine's anger rise up a notch.

"Do you have something to say?" Catherine snaps.

"No…I did a lousy job," Sara's voice is full of sarcasm and resentment.

"Yes, you did," Catherine accuses her.

"No I didn't, no I didn't," Sara states with a controlled voice yet her anger is underlying. "I did a perfect job, I worked my ass off, more than ever to build a case from scratch."

"You did a lousy job! Cause no one is paying for taking Lindsey's father away. No one!" she chuckles bitterly. "I wonder how you managed to pass your competency test each year when you couldn't make a case with all the evidences you had on this case!"

"My job was perfect, you want to know the 'lousy' part or it? You really want to know?"

"Yes, enlighten me!"

"It was you, Catherine. The only thing lousy was you."

"Do you always blame the victims Sara or are you making an exception for me?" Catherine snaps.

"This is useless," Sara states calmly, looking at me.

"Answer me! Do you always blame the victims when you screw up?" Catherine stands up, having trouble to control her anger she starts to pace while Sara contains her emotions – as usual – and just stays sit and waits patiently for what she knows is to come. Catherine laughs in a humourless way. "Now, it's my fault if you didn't work properly, it's my fault if you didn't know how to do your job…next time we don't find a murderer we'll blame the victim for looking for troubles, why don't we!"

Catherine's clenching and unclenching her fists. "You know, I wouldn't expect you to know what it's like to be a victim and need closure…what it's like to have your father snatched away right before your very eyes, but we're supposed to be empathetic…you're supposed to be empathetic…you knew Lindsey…you knew me…that was supposed to make you work harder to solve it!"

"Right, I didn't do of half of anything," as usual Sara caves in to fuel Catherine's anger only to better put her down in a few moments.

"Finally you admit it!" and as usual Catherine doesn't see the freight train coming at full speed in her direction, by the time she'll realise what's coming her way she won't be able to avoid the collision.

It's something I've learned watching them. Catherine has no grasp whatsoever on her emotions and her only defence mechanisms are anger and confrontation. Sara on the other hand is much more in control of her feelings, she hides them, and has a sense of self control which means that the only time you take the upper hand with her is because she lets you do so.

Someone said that no one could make you feel inferior without your consent. And Sara is just like that, she'll only let you take the upper hand when she feels that the juice isn't worth the squeeze. She allows you to 'stomp' over her, she allows you to 'take her down', but reality is that she never loses the control.

In a relationship between two persons when there is no equality or complementarities, there is a relationship of domination. There's the dominant and the submissive, the dominant has the illusion of power while the real power belong to the submissive. I think that it's what people don't really get, but Sara definitely knows it, and this knowledge makes her even more powerful.

"I worked my ass off on this case, more than ever," Sara states calmly.

"Really? I've seen you do more with less evidence. Was that because I was involved? That's it isn't it? Was it payback? Because I wasn't nice to you?" Catherine is getting more and more agitated which contrasts with Sara's calm. "So answer me, do you always blame the victim or is it just me?"

Sara's jaw is clenched and in about a minute she's about to take control and put Catherine down.

"How dare you blame me for your lousy job?" Catherine asks rhetorically "I'm the one who had to pull my daughter out of a sinking car, if I had been one minute later she'd have been dead too. Would that have helped your case? Think you could have found who was responsible then, uh? Is it the drive you needed to do a proper job? Maybe she should have died, yeah, maybe then you'd have tried harder. Is that it? Is it?!"

Sara stands up and faces Catherine. Impact in four, three, two, one…

"Let's have a look, play by play on that case. The car was sinking, so water washed off pretty much everything, you were 100 per cent involved with the victims, your ex-husband and your daughter, so you knew that you couldn't work the case, yet what is the first thing you did? You handled the evidence, that was strike one. And it's one good thing I didn't mention your slip on the report because that would have reduce my already short list of evidence."

"I…"

"Shut up," Sara cuts Catherine sharply. "You want answers, I'm giving them to you. We had only one witness who happened to be Lindsey and what did you do? You pressured her so much, she would rather clam up than telling a thing about her father not wanting to make him look bad. That was strike two."

"I had little to nothing as far as the evidence went, I search for the gun for days and didn't put my hands on it, I did everything possible and more and the only chance left was to have a confession from that egotistical, delusional, stupid, wannabe singer. I had her on the spot, she was about to confess and what did you do? You burst into the interview room to threaten her life. What was her next move? She got a lawyer and guess what he told her? They don't have anything against you, so don't say a word. Strike three, congratulation Catherine because your little desire for vendetta threw away every chance you had to find justice."

"Bullshit, maybe if you understood what it's like to be a parent…" Catherine starts but Sara just keeps on.

"Interrogation 101, you never ever, under any circumstance interrupt an interview with a suspect…"

"Your mother would have done exactly the same thing if it was you she had pulled out of a sinking car…"

"I did my job perfectly, pushed myself on this case like my own life depended on it while you put all your energy into trying your best to mess with my job because you decided from the very start that I wasn't good enough. Well you should be happy because you sure did your best."

Catherine's jaw is tightly screwed, her breathing is shallow and heavy. She looks like she had just received several deep blows in her stomach.

"You want someone to blame? Look into a mirror."

"Fuck you Sara"

"You already did!" by the look on Catherine's face tells me that this wasn't just a witty come back from Sara. Now I know why I felt that things were so different at the beginning of the session, that explains a lot.

"Shut up!"

"You went into a revengeful power trip just not to admit that you were weak, that you were vulnerable, that you were suffering, that you were scared, you acted strong and self righteous not to even remotely deal with your own pain that you actually created your own prejudice."

"Go to hell," Catherine spits between her teeth.

They stare intently at one another, daring the other to make a move. The tension is palpable, Catherine's emotions are threatening to spill at any moment. I'm ready to jump in at any second if I feel any inappropriate physical contact coming.

Sara's expression relaxes from anger to smugness, she won this battle and is clearly proud of it. She shakes her head lightly with a cold smirk. "With pleasure," and with that she grabs her belongings and leaves my office. "I'm done, Doc," she eventually throws over her shoulder. For a split second the idea of putting bolts on the door crosses my mind, as they seem to make a habit of leaving in the middle of a session, but I shake it out just as quickly and focus on Catherine once again.

She is standing still, shaking with tension, disoriented from Sara's words. Suddenly she takes the vase standing on the coffee table and throws it violently against the wall, it shatters in pieces, and water splashes everywhere. Catherine heaves with her fists balled tightly, unexpectedly she lets out a cry of frustration and anger.

"Does it feel better?" I ask after a long silence.

"Oh yeah watch me I'm fucking relieved!" she groans.

She starts to pace with energy on a really short distance. "Who the hell does she think she is? How dare she…" she mutters to herself. I can see a door closing, and before she has a chance to lock herself in her on mind I step in.

"How do you feel?" I decide to give her what she needs. She needs to work her anger out, to do so she needs something or someone to channel that anger on.

"Seriously? You have to ask how I feel right now?" she almost shouts. "What kind of question is that? 'How do you feel', did you buy your degree on the internet or something? I'll tell you how I feel. I feel like everyday for the last few years someone has rubbed my skin with sandpaper, and each time it scabs over, they come back and rub it again. And then, the real kicker, you'll like this since you obviously get off on other people's pain…after they're scrubbed my skin every day, they drop me in a vat of alcohol. Does that sound pleasant to you?" she's speaking at the top of her lung with vehemence.

"You're angry," I state.

She stops immediately and looks at me like I was intellectually challenged. She tilts her head. "I'm angry? How absolutely intuitive," she fakes awe. "What clued you in that I'm angry? The pacing? The shouting? The fists clenched at my side? The vase I threw against the wall? The vein that's probably prominent on my forehead right now? What was it?"

"I take that as a yes," I give her the last push she needs to reach her breaking point.

"Yes of course I'm fucking angry!" she shouts even louder as if to blow my head off with her words. "Yes, I'm fucking angry because she blames me! I'm fucking angry because you…you just sit there and let that happen! I'm fucking angry because that bastard, that pathetic excuse of a man nearly killed our daughter! I'm fucking angry because he's not there anymore, now instead of almost no father Lindsey doesn't have a father at all! I'm fucking angry because it hurts! I'm angry because Sara…because…because…" she struggles and gets frustrated.

She looks at the coffee table, the mugs she and Sara used to have a coffee at the beginning of the session. She grabs one of them and makes it take the same path the vase did only a few minutes ago. The impact doesn't seem nearly enough so she takes the mug Sara left behind and sends it crashing against the wall as well. Broken pieces fly down to the temporary cemetery of glass. She balls her fists tightly to the point her jointure turns white, she screams and pants, like she was suffocating.

"…she's right…" she whispers with difficulty. "I'm angry at myself…because she's right…" she repeats. There is no doubt that this is the first time she made this statement out loud, add to that the fact that she's utterly vulnerable now that all her emotions have been let out, I know that those words have had a nuclear impact.

She sobs but fights her tears, she covers her mouth with her hand and paces quickly. Her legs seem to give up on her, she falls more than she sits down on the couch. She tries to breathe but it's like there was no oxygen in the room, and starts to hyperventilate heavily. She buries her face in her hands to try to calm herself. Even from my sit I can see her shaking, she gasps loudly, greedily sucking air in. it's only a minute before her little moan of distress turn into violent sobs.

I stand up silently and go to the kitchen side. I come back three minutes later and wordlessly, I put a new mug full of hot tea on the coffee table next to the tissue box. Then I sit down on my chair again and take a sip out of my glass of cold milk, letting her compose herself in her own time.

She's shaking quickly her legs up and down in a nervous way; her breathing, though irregular is calmer than a few minutes. She pushing she ball of her palms against her eyes, probably berating herself for crying.

"Fuck", she mutters. She takes big cleansing breaths and finally lifts her head up only to look straight at the ceiling. She's heaving, here breathing slowly takes a regular pace, but she can't help little hiccups. Her face is a bit red from her outburst, she's staring at the window, mimicking Sara unknowingly. She looks exhausted and fragile, like a precious object that can chatter at any moment.

She finally sees the steaming mug, she looks at me briefly but doesn't maintain de contact, I just wait patiently for her to be ready again. She takes the mug and cradles it in her hands. Her eyes are glue to the liquid as if it was holding the great secret of life.

"Empty…" she suddenly says. Finally she meets my gaze, I look back but don't say anything. "Something tells me you're going to ask me 'how I feel', I thought I'd spare you the ridicule," I smile subtly at her comment, she recovered her wit. "I feel empty…raw…hurt...so much that I can feel it on a physical level…" she sniffs "I'm so…angry…I feel so much…anger that I'm…numb…"

She loses herself in thoughts and I let her. "I could tell you what happened that day…then you'd tell me that it's not my fault…but it is my fault…but I needed to show that I was the good parent, just because I couldn't bite my tongue…after all his choices of that day weren't any different from any others…but I had to be petty…"

"Do you have a child?" she asks.

"I have children, yes."

"I had to watch my daughter fearing for her life…I had to watch her almost dying before my eyes…in my dreams…" she shakes her head. "In my nightmare…I'm too late," she poses and breathes deep to hold back her tears. "You want to know what the worse part is?" she says purely rhetorically. "I put her in that car…my attitude put her in that car…at least when I blame the world then I don't have to face that fact…I don't have to look at myself in the mirror and face that fact that I almost killed my baby girl…" she looks away quickly, and in spite of all her effort she can't keep silent tears from falling.

"It's not your fault Catherine."

She chuckles bitterly. "Wasn't it you who asked me to act like an adult?" she looks at me intently. "Well, adults take responsibilities for their action and that's exactly what I'm doing, so you see…it is my fault"

"As children we control the elements, the time, the rotation of earth, the position of the sun and its ecliptic, even the drift of the continents…" she's frowning and is about to cut me off but I just raise a finger so she lets me finish. "We think that when we grew up, those powers would grow with us, but instead something else happened. We start to get acquainted with the reality and stopped living in our fantasy world. And in reality, there are not so many things we can control. You see, taking responsibility for your actions is one step but the hardest part is to acknowledge your own limits."

She stares at me silently, letting my words sink.

"You can spend your lifetime blaming yourself. Or as you said you can take your responsibilities, but in order to do that you need to define them, and to define them you need to acknowledge the extent of your control. You cannot take responsibilities for other people's action."

She nods slowly and finishes her tea. "And this should make me feel better?"

"No, probably not, but taking your responsibilities, the real ones, will help you to let go and move on, and that's what growing is all about."

She puts her mug on the table and leans back again. She sighs heavily and passes her hand on her face in a tired way. "I should go, my daughter is waiting for me."

I just nod and stand, I go to the wall, which still wears the imprint of her breakdown, and start picking up pieces of glass.

"I'm sorry about…"

"Don't worry about it," I answer honestly.

"Was it…the vase was it…sentimental?"

"It belonged to my late wife."

"Gee…I'm…"

"Don't…it's nothing glue can't fix," I reply, she's about to apologize again but I cut her. "Honestly, don't worry."

"Alright."

She stands and goes to the sink to drop her mug, then she gathers her belongings and goes to the door.

"I'll see you next session," I say.

"Yeah."

She opens the door and steps outside, she starts closing the door but instead steps back in.

"Doc?"

"Yes."

"I hate you," she says calmly.

I chuckle a little. "It's good thing I'm not here to be loved then."

She snorts and smiles a bit and with that she's gone.

There you go, I know a lot of you asked for Sara's past to pop up and it will trust me. I'm a girl with a plan so just bear with me , and have faith in me ;)

Thank you for reading