Chapter Five: Inextricably Linked

Title: Oblivion

Rating: M

Category: AU/Thriller/Angst/Hurt & Comfort/UST/RST/Pre and Post "Infiltrated"

Summary: All of the pieces except the ones that mattered, were beginning to spin into their empty places as names began to usher forth and the old, smallest details rushed to the forefront once more. Olivia wanted to know everything but fate was giving her a whole lot of nothing to the ticking of a metronome.

"Right now I'm having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before." – Steven Wright

Note: I did a fair amount of research on the way that memories can return after a head injury; memory recovery isn't exact. It doesn't have the freedom to pick or choose the perfect time to return. It's messy and flows more like a river with ample bends and rocks in its way. Some things might be quick while others are not. For this fic, bear with the uniqueness of Olivia's personality. The majority of her personality is stuck in her early 20s (just before joining the police force).

Warning: Regression hypnosis is dangerous and can lead to a severe spike in blood pressure, anxiety, and other panic-related conditions (such as confusion or disorientation). Please don't attempt to recreate the steps within the text. They have been whittled down for the sake of the fic and are not as intense as an actual regression session would be. However, the after-effects, are fairly accurate. Approach cautiously. Also, this isn't where I originally intended on going so I hope it translates well.

You feel that bitter taste on your tongue

Swallow your every wrong

Let your sins fill your lungs

Ending all worries now for you

-Jonna Emily Lee & Claes Erick Marten Bjorklund

10:30 AM

Olivia was zoning out while Cragen had the Sheriff on speaker. She had stopped listening as the sting of recollection met growing aches along her ribs as each breath became labored against them. The words weren't making sense and no matter how hard she pushed, the only mechanism that clicked was the pain. The dull, throbbing sensation started at the top of her head and worked its way down. Little by little, nerve by nerve, twisting at the failing façade that no longer held any weight. The painkiller Olivia had sworn off was looking more attractive by the moment as another shooting pain shifted, stabbing at her ribs, her shoulder, her road rash down her arm.

The only thing Olivia was more aware of was the ticking of the clock.

It made it that much more difficult to keep from going glassy-eyed as she shifted once more, straightened her spine, and forced a nod to comply. Anything to keep from getting asked if she was okay. To avoid another inquiry about her mental state or physical well-being. She wasn't that fragile. She'd been offered a chair twice but found the smooth, cool edge of an adjacent cabinet sufficient to lean against. Amid her agony, she was painfully aware of Elliot's attention on her from across the room. He hadn't stopped stealing glances at her since that door had shut. She couldn't tell, though, if it was out of concern or something deeper as he awkwardly shifted his hips and hid his mouth behind his knuckles. The maneuver, though, wasn't enough to assist in the endeavor of going unnoticed.

You're not fooling anyone, Elliot Stabler.

"I know that an open investigation really shouldn't be shared with the victim in the room but asking about the progress of what you've found so far would really help us out to go along with these photographs," Cragen lifted his chin and glanced at Elliot before continuing to download what was waiting in his inbox.

"I don't think I have to tell you twice that the FBI has been a little uncooperative at the scene," Sherriff Bartley's voice was muddled by the distinctive crack of thunder and repetitive tinkering of rain that brought Olivia's attention back to the fold. "However, with that said, there was at least time to ascertain that Miss Benson fell from the cement edge of the walkway leading into the apartment complex, specifically toward the stairwell. She was lucky that she fell the way she did."

"Lucky?" Cragen was expertly fishing. "Care to elaborate?"

"There are cement barriers that she tumbled over, roughly knee-high," Bartley paused as static crept in with the jostling of his mouthpiece against his cheek. "…if she had fallen straight back, her head would have hit it. Lights out."

Olivia closed her eyes and felt the air rushing past her skin, along with the brutal twisting of her memory's conscious effort to evoke another flash. Fire and ice colliding. Another nightmare that she couldn't avoid buried beneath a darkness that had coiled desperately around her neck, slowly tightening. Her knuckles went white across the finish and her heart thumped against the sling as the cold chill etched over every inch of her, biting at her skin in refrain. The unseemly ghost of rain. The revenant that hadn't been able to tighten its grip on her long enough to suck the last of her oxygen from her aching lungs and leave her to rot like it had that night.

That specter still didn't have a face but the smell of alcohol was prevalent above the saturation of mud, shrubbery, wet cement, and grass that tore her skin to shreds on the way down.

Vile. Putrid. Contaminated.

"Liv? Hey, hey come back to us. You've got that far away look again," Elliot's voice nearly made the room spin as she blinked and swallowed hard while her stomach settled back into its spot with a featherlight touch of his digits against her shoulder. "Did you have another flashback?"

"Yeah, no—I don't know," Olivia's jaw trembled as her eyes searched the features of his face, settling on the intensity of his eyes as he steadied his palms on either side of her hips after she knocked over one of the many tchotchkes that Cragen had collected over the years. "How long have I been sitting here? How long have I been off in thought like that?"

"We need to get you to a hospital, Liv," Cragen's growing disquiet was rivaling Elliot's as he instinctively closed the blinds and allowed her to fall apart with the audience of her choice as she slid backward, knocking a photograph over. "Even if it's just to discover that this is all normal and you're just experiencing typical side effects of the amnesia. I wouldn't forgive myself if you were making yourself worse by staying here."

"No, no more doctors," Olivia was adamant as the agitation grew and the areas around the black and blue had become crimson from the loss of reason. "I can't have another doctor tell me I'm fine when I'm a fucking mess."

"You're not a mess. God, Olivia, I know you just had a flashback over hearing the grisly details of your accident. Your mind is putting the pieces together and we knew it would be overwhelming," Elliot slowly backed away and watched her as she studied his hands while they skidded across the lacquer finish before he straightened his spine. "If you won't go to the hospital, will you talk to Huang?"

The name settled into the recesses of blank spaces and bounced against the processes to understand. Faces no longer had names and names floated into oblivion; forgotten, eclipsed by darkness until rescued by light. Olivia knew, though, that the name Huang meant something profound but didn't understand exactly how far it reached as she narrowed her eyes to recall. It wasn't unlike the kind associated with Elliot despite the marked appearance of pieces that her soul could never forget. It was as if Olivia had held onto pieces of Elliot's memory and refused to let go even though they had been torn asunder, then scattered to the winds. Bit by bit, notch by notch; another key began to turn. Another lock that much closer to being undone and set free.

The way it should have always been.

Olivia nodded and scooted off of the edge of the cabinet, scrutinizing Elliot's elated sigh and softened posture as Cragen sank into his chair. "If you think it'll help…Elliot?"

Elliot felt the responsibility and the weight of her eyes on him as he contemplated the words, choosing to react with his heart and mind in tandem, nodding carefully. "It couldn't hurt and he will be honest without judgment, guaranteed."

"I'm putting a lot of faith in you," Olivia didn't mean for the comment to come out sarcastic but it did as Elliot paused, drawing him completely off-kilter. "I don't handle disappointment very well but you probably already knew that."

"Uh-huh," Elliot swallowed hard and nodded as the redness crept up his neck and bit his earlobes, lighting his cheeks on fire. "I haven't steered you wrong yet."

Somehow, Olivia couldn't help but doubt the validity of that statement even if she had decided to indulge the gesture. Satisfaction of pushing Elliot Stabler's buttons had taken the place of her trepidation and smothered the pain, even it was temporary. The answers hadn't appeared nor had every memory been restored but, for the time being, solace and comfort resided in the color of blush. It was disarming and slipped into the reaches of an addled mind that needed to feel something other than hurt, fear, and a loss of faith. Olivia knew that Elliot wasn't going to be the secret to solving her problems overnight or healing all of her open wounds.

He was certainly the start of remembering more of her past despite how content with being forgotten all of it had become.

Some days

The memories

Still knock the wind

Out of me…

-Unknown

11:15 AM

"How's the head?" George Huang was already on Olivia's last nerve with that question. "Are you refusing the pain medication?"

Olivia wrinkled her nose and evaded the bitter, white beam of light as George Huang flashed his penlight into her field of vision for the third time. Gaining her trust was no easy feat but Huang relied on Elliot to keep her from running out of the room at the first mention of reading her vitals. She was sick of being prodded but no one of it was going to involve a needle. This time. It echoed in her consciousness and even though she'd begun to sweat, the aggression was already teeming. Olivia secretly wanted to swat at him.

"Do you always ask a series of redundant questions that you already know the answer to or is this exclusive to headcases like me?" Olivia jerked her head back and earned the chuckle from Elliot as she caught the end of the penlight with the tips of her fingers, knocking it from Huang's grasp. "Stop it with the light, already."

"You're not a headcase, Olivia," Huang had a crooked smile and gentle confidence as he took great care in checking bandages, bruising, and the jagged mark along her hairline, assessing the modest amount of healing she'd already done. "I cannot make a one hundred percent assumption on the extent of the injuries to your brain without a CT scan but if I had to wager a guess, you hit your cranium in multiple places. Tends to knock everything around."

"So that's what that unbearable ache creeping through my skull is," Olivia snapped again, this time flashing her pearly whites as she leaned back, letting her spine sink against the cushions. "It doesn't tell me why my memory has gone the way of the dodo or how long I can expect to not recall more than a flicker at a time."

"At least your sense of humor hasn't suffered any of the effects of your injuries," Huang exchanged glances with Elliot before resuming scrutiny of Olivia's body language, gauging the ticking timebomb that sat before him. "You didn't sleep last night. Tell me about what caused that."

Olivia's eyes bulged, her posture shifted, and she cleared her throat as the tension began to rise. Crossing that bridge, while an imminent beast she had prepared for, was something she had hoped to avoid for a little longer. She didn't want to talk about the nightmare. She didn't want to relive the sensory overload or watch Elliot's face contort with the details. Neither of them could handle the implications of what resided below the surface and none of it made enough sense to utter. Huang, though, wasn't backing down and Olivia could tell, by his unmoved position, that he wasn't going to easily accept another punchy comment as gospel.

The sarcasm was only going to take Olivia just far enough and not a step further.

"Wouldn't you say that the current state of my life is enough of a mess without introducing the details of late night terrors or do you specialize in making sense of the things that make a person want to climb the walls?" Olivia was second-guessing the decision to keep Elliot in the room but he was, on the other side of that coin, the only reason she was still standing. "I don't think I'm ready to talk about it."

"Olivia, if you don't elucidate some details, it will stay bottled up and do more harm than it will good," Huang was more eloquent than Olivia had fully anticipated and it was making her twitch as she bit down on her bottom lip and narrowed her eyes while he continued. "You're angry and that's a completely rational emotion to have right now, but you need to talk about it."

Olivia jerked her chin to one side, making eye contact with Elliot, who had been stoic and quiet since they had closed the doors, letting Huang take the lead, a notion that had her blood pressure steadily climbing. "Are you just going to sit there observing me? Taking it all in? Realizing you made an enormous mistake by helping me or are you getting a real kick out of watching me fail?"

"You're not failing," Elliot knew it was misdirected but this was reflective of Olivia when cornered as he sank into the chair next to her, his eyes on those big, mahogany wonders that were glaring a hole through him. "I would let you punch me square in the jaw if I knew it would do any good and that is how much I want to see you get through this. I don't want to push but I agree with Huang—you said something to me last night that I can't get out of my brain."

Olivia stayed locked in his gaze as the crosshairs of fear and anger zeroed in on him and wheedled another involuntary spasm through her ocular nerve. "Elliot—"

"Liv, you were certain that someone other than me was in the room and they were hurting you," Elliot blurted it, cutting her off before she could make another excuse and putting her on blast in front of Huang as they were in their own fucked up version of couple's therapy. "You insisted and nearly yanked the curtains clean off the rod over that feeling. I know you and I can't remember the last time you panicked like that."

Olivia wanted to be tough; it was ingrained in her nature with compulsivity and she had no one to thank but herself. Well, no one but herself and genetics, of course. Olivia's natural urge was to run but it was the easy way out. She knew it was once the only way out but doubted it was the way she did things since walking into Elliot's life. Something screamed into her consciousness that confrontation, puffing up like an equally impressive peacock, and refusing to back down had become the means for maintaining the same fire that burned behind the eyes of Elliot Stabler. He certainly had managed to keep her from losing what remained of her patience.

Olivia kept her spine rigid but she wanted to slide into obscurity as the white flag began to angle up, preparing to wave. "Saying it out loud means that I have to confront the element in all of this that I still don't know what he looks like or exactly what he did to me. I'm afraid. No, I'm terrified."

"Fear is in a similar category to anger in that we sometimes have to confront the irrationality to discover the rationality behind it," Huang was painfully aware of the buttons he was pushing as Olivia's mouth contorted and her nose wrinkled as she buried the outburst, forcing more of her pain higher as she held her arms against her ribs. "Let me help."

"You can't help," Olivia's indignance masked the trauma, but it was only temporary as a stray tear streaked down her cheek. "I've never been the kind of girl that anyone wanted to help unless it was right off the ledge or into their good graces for just long enough to take everything I held dear."

The comment ached in Elliot's chest and throbbed as the woman that he knew seemed content with letting go. Giving up. Letting the past win. That wasn't the Olivia that that could browbeat a suspect into professing their sins nor was she the woman that he was ready to run into the shadows to hold. To save. To come clean. To love. The ghost that sat in her place was the one that still had Serena's death grip around every piece of her soul, squeezing the life right out of it. The very same one that had spent so long building the understanding that blood was never thicker than water.

Olivia had regressed even further; into the cocoon of the college student that reached for any method of forgetting her trauma except for the one that might actually help her heal.

The one right in front of her.

"You are not the woman that you think you are," Huang suspected the readied breakdown as Elliot sniffed the air and held a palm to his mouth, utilizing any method to soothe as his voice remained steady. "Losing time did not mean you lost years. Your memory is not gone; it is locked within your subconsciousness and has no way of connecting back to the front of your conscious thought."

"I think I know where this is going and I don't think I like it," Olivia wiped another tear and watched Elliot's shadow move across the floor as he fidgeted against the back of another chair.

"I'd like to try regression hypnosis with you to alleviate some of the mental stress you are currently experiencing," Huang tapped a pen against a notepad while consternation bloomed on Olivia's visage with the mere idea. "I won't try to reach into the memories that are associated with the accident unless you are ready."

"I don't know if it's going to help since it seems like you'd need an inch of receptivity for that to work but I'll give it a shot," Olivia was already suffering from the duality as her instincts told her to leap while lingering experience whispered in opposition as her eyes traveled toward Elliot. "I don't want to do this alone."

"I'm not going anywhere," Elliot didn't know how else to reassure her as his backside found the chair beside her and shifted it into her orbit, within reach. "I'll stay as long as you want me to stay."

"Okay," Olivia's features softened as she stayed in his gaze while Huang set a metronome on the desk and let it begin to tick. "Really?"

Huang chuckled before gently sighing while folding his hands in his lap, gesturing toward the metronome with his chin. "You'd be surprised at how invaluable focusing on a rhythmic tap becomes for someone attempting to regress. Just trust me."

The immediate urge was to get up and walk out but Olivia thought against it as she wetted her lips and let the tick, tick, tick begin to settle in her ears. Her pulse was already slowing within the beats as her breathing patterns began to adjust to the sound. Olivia barely had to focus on it to feel the desired effect as a breath pushed from her lips in a slow, muted hiss with the roll of her eyes. She wanted to resist but the sensation working through her limbs countered with every thought to move, pushing her further into the chair.

Keeping her in place as though weighed down.

"Olivia, I need you to close your eyes and let your spine relax," Huang steadied his posture as he scooted to the edge of his chair and set his notepad off to one side, the tenor in his voice level and comforting. "Concentrate on your breaths, in through the nose, out through your mouth. Every inhale will bring you closer to two doors and every exhale will help you to see the letters on them. One will say safety while the other will say memories. At any time that this becomes overwhelming, you're going to open the door for safety. Do you understand?"

"Yes," Olivia's head was already beginning to tilt back while her free hand groped at the armrest until her fingertips began to skid across the finish. "I, I can't…There's so much fog."

"Take another deep breath and exhale that fog away from your path," Huang rested his elbow against his knee and stroked his chin as Olivia's struggle translated to the furrowing of her brows and a grimace. "Is the door open?"

"Um, yes," Olivia's rapid eye movement mimicked the kind you'd see during a nightmare as her mouth went agape and the breaths began to stagger despite every effort to control them. "4015. 4015. It's…it's…my badge number. I haven't stopped staring at it. Detective Benson. Blood, sweat, and tears. She didn't think I could do it and, she didn't want me to."

Olivia's spine stiffened at the thought of her mother and nausea surged as the colors undulated in an endless spiral. The numbers vibrated as her thumb moved across the nickel, feeling each curve and groove, while the clang of glass echoed. Celebratory glass of champagne or a beer, perhaps, but Olivia was too deep in taking it all in to notice. Too proud to care about the strong jaw framed by a crooked smile leering at her from across the room looking to take her home. Remembering that night came, equally, with a price, though as an exhale ushered the look of disappointment in staggered flashes of red from Serena Benson as she sat at the table hugging another glass of vodka.

It must've been a bad night.

"Olivia, what do you see?" Huang didn't like the way she was breathing and the silence was deafening aside from short, labored grunts as her muscles responded to stimuli. "Take a deep breath. Slowly."

"I don't think I should say," Olivia was fidgeting like one of Elliot's kids during a scolding, complete with the stray tears that etched a path down her cheeks. "I don't—I can't."

Olivia was hovering, between reality and a sequence of events that had already happened, tilting her world a little further from grasp. She was no longer confused but, instead, could no decipher the intoxicating, continuous reverberations of a life forgotten crawling home from the tangible seat beneath her. It was even more isolating than the twisting nightmare full of holes and deep, dark alleys where monsters could hide. Fear didn't go far enough. Olivia could still smell the liquor, hear the sound of glass breaking, and witnessed the anger-fueled stupor that her mother had become.

"Remember, you're safe and you need to breathe," Huang's voice cut through the vertigo and snuffed out the suffocating visuals with the snap of his fingers just inches from her head. "That evocation will stay but it isn't going to harm you. You're going to move to another place, another time, and put another piece back into place—if you're still feeling up to it."

"Come on, Huang, don't push," Elliot kept his voice low but insistent, as the sweat was collecting on her hairline, and her distress only increased. "She's been through enough."

"I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm—wait, shit, fuck. Oh, God," Olivia stretched her fingers as a wave of heat traveled from the top of her head to the tips of her toes while her face contorted with the first of the more vivid flashes from her subconscious. "Oh, my God. Elliot, I should've…I should've blinked my lights."

Olivia shook her head, evading the calculated stare of Richard White as he stood still while the room began to tear itself in two. The darkness wrapped itself around the light and strobed again while she slipped a little further, descending into that hell she had put herself through even as she could hear Elliot's voice repeating into the abyss. Calling her name louder each time until it blended into a loud utterance and left her in silence. Alone again; to listen to the sound of her heart beating. To be reminded of what melancholy was.

God damn him.

"I can't do this," Olivia sucked her bottom lip into her mouth and exhaled so much more than stress as the pain shook her bones while her voice began to crack. "I wanted to be tough. I had to be. I didn't think. I didn't want you to feel like you had to save me."

Oh, Liv, no.

Elliot wanted nothing more for Olivia than for her to remember but the trauma was weaved through the strength, some of which he'd inflicted. She'd gone back to the Richard White case in no more than a few breaths. He was already regretting the decision to recommend Huang's help as the thought crossed his mind over the depths of what might come bubbling to the surface. Elliot couldn't say, with certainty, that Olivia could handle reliving it. She was already so battered and bruised; it didn't seem fair to make her go through it from the beginning. Olivia was in enough pain.

"Take another deep breath and concentrate on what you're seeing like it is nothing more than a video playing on a television. It is barely loud enough to hear," Huang recentered her with his voice and took note of Elliot's discomfort as Olivia let her chin drop back once more. "Who is Elliot to you as this plays out, Olivia? Is he upsetting you?"

"Far from it. He's my partner," Olivia said so nonchalantly that it had Elliot rocking against the seat in disbelief while she sighed and sank a little further in the chair, allowing her shoulders to press into the cushion. "My best friend…for better or worse. The only one that puts up with me."

"I know you want to hold onto that memory but I want you to let it rejoin your consciousness so you can visit the next tape, okay?" Huang held a breath and kept his attention on Olivia despite the emotional affectation from Elliot as he did his best to hide an errant tear. "Deep breath in…and out…slowly, hold for a count, and press play."

"Some of it is jumbled," Olivia cringed, leaned onto her right shoulder, and cast her digits toward Elliot, desperately reaching for his arm until she grasped onto his jacket. "I can hear them better than I can see them."

Elliot glanced at Olivia's hand, at the delicate bend of her fingers in the twist of fabric. No leap of faith or testament of conviction would have been enough to put the worry to rest over the war that was raging within his partner's mind. Olivia was fighting it but she wasn't alone. Huang might've had the tools and the training to lead her down that path but Elliot couldn't help but wonder if his presence was enough to keep her from giving up. She'd barely tapped the surface and was already losing her ability to concentrate.

"That's okay," Huang reassured her with a smile she couldn't even see. "What do you hear? Is it anything specific?"

"Political discussion. An argument about paranoid ideology and government interference," Olivia squinted as a wisp of a smirk crawled across her lips, while the soft light flooded and the fog began to rise. "Munch and Fin…Cragen just threatened to send them both to the crib to think about the tone of their voice. We're all in the squad room. Cabot is there."

"Are the faces starting to stand out above their voices?" Huang glanced at Elliot with a soft nod, after taking note of the time. "You're doing really well. You can stop at any time by going through that other door, remember?"

"I remember," Olivia's voice was far away but not quite as distant as the last moment in time that felt real enough to hold while the reel began to turn again. "It's going too fast. I can't see—the details. Wait, I need it to slow down. It won't let me look!"

Olivia yanked Elliot's sleeve once more and willed him closer to soften the blow of unbearable baggage unloading before their very eyes. The metronome was moving at the same rate of speed but Olivia had become lost in the slanting of time, of her recollections as they floated by like birds in flight. Starlings in deep dive. Huang already knew she'd been under too long and had plummeted too quickly. The fall was unprotected and the foundation hadn't been touched. Olivia hadn't touched the farthest point; she was spiraling without a safety net.

"You are the only one that can get it to function at your pace," Huang's concern was growing as the color slowly faded from Olivia's face only to be replaced by a dull shade of green and eggshell. "I need you to go through the door we talked about before with the word safety on it. We're going to come back to this at a different time, Olivia."

"I want to see," Olivia was on the brink of tears as she pushed herself once more and felt the lacerated mangling along scar tissue, mutilating her all over again. "Jesus!"

Olivia's hand pressed against the spot, against the pooling of blood, against her pulse. A string plucked and the note it played soured in her ears as she feverishly fumbled at the second door. Olivia glanced back at the prone silhouette of her body on the floor and at the chaos that had come to a head with the flick of a blade. Olivia's hand was around the brass as Elliot's face came into view and every hair stood on end as his tunnel vision was centered on his bloodied partner on the floor.

This was the commemoration that had changed fate; this was the domino that set everything else into motion.

"Olivia, open your eyes," Huang nearly had her leaping from her skin with a touch to the top of her hand to force her out of the panic. "You're safe. Just take a deep breath."

"No, I, uh, I…" Olivia barely looked at either one of them as she staggered to her feet and nearly took out the wastebasket with her shin in the process. "I…need to vomit."

"Liv, wait," Elliot couldn't get up fast enough to catch her before the door banged against the wall, the anxiety visible on her face as she was into the hallway in mere seconds. "She's gonna wind up hurting herself out there, Huang. It went too far."

"What part has you more concerned, Elliot," Huang captured the tip of the metronome, returning the room to a modicum of silence aside from their voices and shot him a sideways stare. "That she'll remember why she left or that she'll blame you this time?"

"I don't know," Elliot balanced his spine against the jamb, reticent to move but aching to go after her as his eyes found the floor. "Olivia doesn't need to add to the mountain in front of her. You saw what her mind wants to cling to and it's all of the hardest parts of her life. It's going to make it worse."

"Elliot, you can't keep shielding her from the truth," Huang lowered his voice and placed the metronome back into its case, gently tucking it away while his back was to Elliot. "You once told me that you wished you didn't care so much and that Olivia didn't need you that day but it's clear you needed her."

"Psychoanalyzing me after you traumatized my partner, that's rich," Elliot scoffed, his anger colliding with the bitterness of being called out again without hesitation. "You think you know the truth, Huang? Enlighten me. Tell me."

"Yeah, you know it's written all over your face. The hypersensitivity, protecting her from everything, showing so much concern over the potential for her falling apart in front of anyone but you," Huang read him the riot act but kept his voice as even as the intimation would allow, knowing he was twisting the blade a little deeper with every word. "You're in love with Olivia and the longer you hide it from her, the more you complicate what little amount of recovery she's made."

Elliot didn't want to hear it from Huang. He barely wanted to hear it from himself. It felt foreign and dirty next to the profoundness of Olivia's condition. He owed it to her not to lay it on thick and it was so much more than personal because of the deeply rooted feelings that had dug their way out of a grave. Olivia had barely begun to realize the reaches of time; adding his ego to the equation was more of the same nonsense.

It was hollow.

Borderline pathetic.

Unnecessary.

"You are not my priest. I don't owe you a confession," Elliot snapped, burning a hole through him with an impressively hot glare. "Not when Olivia is wandering around a building she doesn't remember worth a damn."

Huang's shoulders dropped as he surrendered the fight while Elliot's neck turned a deep shade of crimson, joining the popped vein on the center of his forehead. "You're not going to be able to avoid it forever. She's got a stubborn streak nearly as formidable as yours."

Elliot sighed and rubbed his eyes as his cranium throbbed while taking the first step into the open space. "I don't want to be the reason things get worse for her—or the reason she gives up."

"Then, don't," Huang made it sound so simple as his head cocked to the side, stopping Elliot in his tracks with another phrase. "You heard what she said about her past…give her a reason to fight. A reason to keep pushing forward."

Elliot didn't need to reply or refute the advice. Huang already knew exactly where Elliot's head was and what made his heart beat a little faster. The solution would never be easy but the choice was already made. Perhaps, it had always been made but it was just unspoken. Something neither of them had dared to speak or let it be truly willed into fruition. Elliot tapped his fingers along the jamb, slowly nodded, and made a final sprint toward the exit. Toward the woman that flayed open too many of her wounds and some of his.

Elliot was so focused on finding her that he hadn't taken notice of Dani's intense, spiteful stare from behind the blue glow of a computer screen.

Quotes by:

Steven Wright

Jonna Emily Lee & Claes Erick Marten Bjorklund

Unknown

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