Author's note; this is for and was inspired by Christina, the best friend in the entire universe. She came up with a crazy case and I filled in the Olivia and Elliot. Basically, plotlines came from her; I just put them into the story. I switched things up a bit in the narration, so, hopefully it works out to everyone's liking :) . Enjoy. –breigh.
Abandonment.
They find your best friend since you were 14 murdered on the subway. Your name is in her date book as the person she's supposed to be meeting. Your cell phone number is the last one dialed on her phone. Her voicemail is filled with messages from you; secrets that you never thought analysts in a lab would be listening to.
I've seen enough of those cop shows, the dramas where someone's crying and screaming because the best thing in their life has been taken from them by someone who could never understand, to know that I'm a suspect.
I feel like maybe I should send the people who write those shows a letter that says when you get a call that you're best friend, the one you were waiting to meet and who is an hour late and who never called, when instead you get a call that she's been found murdered, I should write them to let them know that you don't cry.
You don't scream. You don't see every memory that you had with them paraded across your memory like a silent film.
You lose your senses. You can't feel. You can't smell. You can't see. You can't hear. People are talking but it doesn't matter because sound is the interlude to silence and at the moment that you find out that the one person who had you in the whole entire world is dead, the interlude stops and all there is is silence.
You asked the man with the blue eyes and the neck too big for his shirt to button properly for a diet coke because it is comfort. Familiar. He doesn't look forgiving and he doesn't look like he's about to comfort you for the loss of your best friend. Your sister. Your other half.
There is a window on the far wall and I can't look out it because I know that the sun is shining even though it shouldn't be. I think the universe should have stopped moving. The planets should have stopped revolving around the sun. The stars should have fallen from the sky.
But the detective doesn't seem to care about how I feel and what I think should happen. He needs a suspect and I understand that because I watched all those stupid TV shows were they're out for blood, regardless of that that has already been spilled.
It's never enough.
The door opens and I don't look over to see his partner entering. Her eyes are brown and more forgiving than his, she seems to be telling me something in their silence, but I've lost my senses and any message that she is trying to convey.
If I wasn't so displaced from my center because of this I would have noted that they moved together like gears, clicking in and sliding out perfectly, like they were reading each others mind and riding on each others words and I would have been in awe of them if they were not out for my blood.
"Callie." The woman sits next to me. She introduced herself earlier, but I don't remember her name because it wasn't important.
Nothing was important.
The man is standing now and I know he's going to make me give him answers I don't have and I look him over, wondering if he's going to be able to find the person who made me a victim and her a victim. I wonder if he's going to be able to find the person who woke up this morning a mere human and will go to sleep tonight God. The person who decided when another life should end.
"I didn't do it." I say the words quickly and I am almost embarrassed because they are not eloquent and they are not looped with feeling and double entendres and hidden meanings. This is not how I talk, but today, in this instant, this simplicity is all I know. I fear that everything else I know was based in something that no longer exists.
This god has killed it.
"You're the last person she talked to when she was alive. You're the name in her date book –"
"So that doesn't mean I killed her! I've talked to her every day for 8 years! I've had my name scribbled in her planner for what can be summed up as months out of the years, and I've never done anything to her!" I'm screaming now and I can hear the words abandon me like she did. Like they made her.
I don't believe in God anymore.
I can feel the weight of the cross around my neck and I reach up and wrap my fingers around the silver chain and with a quick tug I break it, remove it from my neck and hand it to the woman next to me.
I need to go to confession. I need to talk to God, but I will never again pray.
"I know that you were best friends," she is trying to be the good cop and I would like to think that I don't have time for this, but I know now that I have an infinite amount of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years.
This will be who I am tomorrow and in the next second and in the next year.
I wish I knew how to pray.
My fingers are playing with the diet coke can, and my stomach begins to catch up with the reality of this when I realize that outside of this room people are going through her things, looking in her diary and at her computer and going through her phone and contacts and they are learning things in this second that it took me years to learn.
I feel like I'm going to throw up, and the woman places a hand on my back. It is warm and for a minute I want to believe that she understands because I need to.
I need this just like he needs me to confess to something so that he can go home to his couch and beer and football game and her life and loss of such can just be another thing he had to deal with.
I do not like the detective with the blue eyes, and by the look in them I know my feelings for him are mirrored by his contempt for me.
It's never enough.
"Look, we can make this easy, or we can make this hard,"
"Make this hard!" My hands slam the table, but I do not feel the pain shoot through them and up my arms because my heart is falling away from me and that overtakes it all. "Thank you for being so nice, detective."
I want to be strong. I am strong.
I am also a liar and at this second I break and my emotion comes from my eyes.
"Elliot," The woman next to me, she stands up and walks over to her partner. She grabs his arm and the instant he touches her I swear I could have seen his eyes lighten. "We need to talk." She drags him out and he doesn't look at me and I don't look at him because all that's left here are pieces.
&&&&&
"Elliot, I don't think she did it." Olivia is standing next to him, Elliot turned away from the mirror with his fingers pinching the bridge of his nose.
"She was the last person to talk to her alive." His voice is strong and contradicting to his fallen state, his back is curled and his eyes are closed and Olivia turns back to look into the room. She wants to tell him her secrets, but she fears that he wouldn't understand them now, now that everything in his life is different and changed and he forgot how to trust.
Compassion. That's what the thing that he lost is called. Before he would have died for her, now she feels as if he would die for himself and his sins and no one else because Elliot Stabler, once invincible, was now only out for blood. Blood to replace that which he had lost.
"Not if she didn't do it. By Anna's accounts, yes, Callie was the last person to see her, but you heard Callie, Anna never showed up." Sometimes this job felt like it were puppets playing out Olivia's life before her on stage, and sometimes she had to close her eyes and count to ten and hope like hell the world would disappear when she opened her eyes again.
She never had luck. Her prayers seemed to always fall on deaf ears, no matter how loudly they were shouted.
"You want to believe a murderer?" Elliot sneered, and Olivia walked up to him and put her hands on his shoulders, pushing him upright so that his eyes could no longer hide from her.
For an instant she saw the stars fall from his universe before having to look away.
"I want you to believe her best friend." Olivia's words were hard and rough and forced and Elliot did not want to believe that they were personal and he did not want to believe that they were intended for him.
&&&&
They brought in her pink date book and they put in on the table in front of me and I don't know how to react to this because this is not her life anymore. This is a history of what was her life, this is her story painted now for the NYPD to read.
I realize, in this instant, when I see her handwriting and her scribbles and her papers and receipts, I realize in that second that I am no better than anyone else.
I want blood.
"Who is this, Callie?" The woman, I remember now her name being Olivia, she points to a blocked out hour early today with the name Cain scribbled in bubble letters.
"Cain." I try not to let any more emotion than is necessary taint his name. "They were dating." I decide that if anyone is going to hear about Anna I want it to be from me. "They went out a few times, just started seeing each other a few months ago. We all used to be friends, then we lost touch with him, and he just shows up one day while we were getting coffee."
"Just showed up?" The blue eyed detective spins around quickly, and I realize I've just named Cain as a suspect.
"Yeah. He's like that, I guess. Just appears and disappears. You think you'd be annoyed with someone like that, but I think it makes you love him more." I shrugged, and the man sits down across from me.
"You love him?" I don't like what he's trying to do. I don't like that he's suspicious of everyone and everything and I wonder if that bothers him.
"As a friend. He's done a lot for me. We dated years back, I was 18. It was 4 years ago. It didn't last, I went off to college and…we went our separate ways."
"Must be pretty upsetting when your best friend shows up one day dating your boyfriend."
"He wasn't my boyfriend anymore. And it's not how you think. We both liked him. We both wanted to be with him. I had my turn, she has hers. We're not like that." I know he thinks I'm crazy and sometimes when I describe it out loud I think I am too and so for this I do not blame him.
"That's an interesting theory." He raises a single eyebrow, and I turn to Olivia. She is watching him. She is studying him like he is some case or some book, his words long and intricate as they tell his story across his face in a language that she can't understand.
She wants to be closer to him. I can feel that I am between them, and yet, they want me there. I am safe, even though he thinks I am dangerous.
She wants to believe me.
"I want her to be happy. She's happy when she's with him." I don't let myself think about how it should be past tense now and I feel for the woman, her muscles tighten, her hand going to my back. I studied the brain and I studied behavior and I studied psychology and philosophy and I've been in love and I've been loved and I've had someone so close to me that they can finish my sentences and so I know that when she swallows hard it is because she is uncomfortable because she feels like that about someone. And I know that she is trying not to make it visible to the man across from us, so I know that it's him.
You do not need to be an academic to know what love looks like. What friendship looks like. What broken friendship looks like.
I'm out for blood.
I wonder if the man with the blue eyes notices because he doesn't notice Olivia.
&&&&&
She would prefer small talk.
The air between them is silent. The windows are rolled up. The radio is turned all the way down.
The air conditioner is humming and she wants to think that small talk would be better than this, but she knows that that is a lie because there are more important things to talk about. Things that Elliot will not bring up. Words that Elliot refuses to form.
"So you think this guy could have done it?" Elliot didn't listen to her about Callie, but Olivia forced him out of the station in search of this Cain person because she knew that Callie didn't do it and he had to get Elliot off of her case for an hour or two to let her mourn.
Olivia knew what she had lost. Death is not always constituted by a lack of pulse and brain waves and breathing. It is far more intricate than that.
This, she looked to Elliot quickly, is far more complicated than that.
"Maybe." Olivia's voice was small as Elliot pulled up in front of the hospital, parked the car, and got out quickly.
Olivia knew he was running from her.
"Young doctor kills his girlfriend. That's no good." Elliot shook his head, and Olivia let out a sigh.
"But, 23 year old med student kills her best friend, and that is? What is it with you, Stabler? Think about this." Olivia walked quickly into the hospital, asked information for Dr. Andrews, and then followed the winding hall to the pediatrics wing.
Another nurse, small with red hair, sat behind an information desk in the department, and Olivia asked for the doctor again and then stepped back by Elliot while the woman went to find him.
"Working in a hospital, a children's ER, at the time of death sounds like a pretty good alibi to me, detective," he clenched his jaw, and his words fell hard like stone upon Olivia and she looked to him with broken eyes because she knew that he didn't trust her.
"Except he started at 2." Olivia pointed to the board with the doctors' names written in one column and when their shift started in another. "We found Anna at 1. Seems like the good doctor would have had plenty of time."
The man who approached them, in blue scrubs and a white lab coat, was not what they were expecting. His face was deceiving, young with dark freckles that lay in contrast against his fair skin. His hair was not blonde, but not brown, but not in the middle. It was a color all it's own, light but dark, short and wavy atop his head. His eyes were blue and questioning and Olivia wanted to tell him that he would never find the answers, no matter how many lives he saved.
The lines of his face gave away his age, though, straight and deep, juxtaposed against his soft skin and round freckles. They proved that he was older, that he had lived and loved and lost and had never found the answers.
"Can I help you?" His voice shook as Olivia and Elliot went through the routine of showing him their badges, telling him someone he loved was killed, and then telling him he had to be taken in for questioning.
It was routine, this process, and it was automatic, and Elliot didn't look at Olivia when they did it anymore and he didn't want to think that she felt it to, that she felt like they were just going through the motions.
He had lost his empathy and everything that went with that, Olivia included.
&&&&&
Olivia was always intrigued by how people handled guilt, by how it was as unique to each person as their fingerprint. No two people felt loss the same way, and she didn't look at Elliot when she thought about this.
33-year-old Cain Andrews was crying and he had asked about Callie and he did not look them over and he did not try to guess their motives because he couldn't. For the first time in his life he could not think.
"So you've known Anna a long time?" Elliot began the questioning, and Olivia stood by the far wall, watching him work. She needed a second to breath.
"About 5 years." He wiped at his eyes, and Olivia could see his appeal. Smart, good looking, easy going. His eyes were blue like the ocean, his playground, and his personality was soft while being intense.
"And before her, you were involved with Callie, is that right?" Elliot did not like him.
Cain's head dropped and he focused on his hands, pushed together, fingers locked.
"It's complicated, me and Callie. And Anna, too. But…"
"But you dated Callie when you were her teacher, right? That makes any situation a little more complicated, Cain." Olivia joined in now because this was one detail she was going to make him elaborate on. A 28-year-old teacher and his 18-year-old student.
"It wasn't like that, I swear." He shook his head and looked back and forth at both of them for an out, but neither was about to give him one. "She was going through some rough stuff-"
"And you saw that as the perfect in, right? Play off of that. You're a smart guy. Undergraduate degree in mathematics from Princeton. Medical school at the University of Pennsylvania. That's not joking around." Elliot smirked, and Cain closed the curtain over his blue eyes.
"Callie and Anna, they had friends who were – they were – they had," he stumbled over his words and Elliot took this to mean that he was nervous. "They were crazy." Cain decided against eloquence. "Callie's best friend, one of them, she was manic depressive. She kind of, I guess it was like stalking her, she was obsessive and she was depressed and she was taking Callie out with her. Her and Anna started talking to me about it one day. I had a friend who was the same. Callie and me, we were the same. You talk about those things with someone and you connect. And it may have been wrong, but she was graduating and I was going to medical school and it just seemed like it was supposed to be."
Olivia wanted to tell Cain that the fate card would not work with Elliot, because he did not believe in it.
"It didn't last long, but I don't regret it, and I did nothing wrong. She was 18. We saved each other. Depression is dark and it's deep and you need someone to help you," he explained, and Elliot nodded.
"Okay, so then why don't you just stick with her? Why mess with her and then move onto Anna a few years later? You trying to get Callie back? Anna get in the way? You have to take care of her? You lore her in and you give her a few good nights, a couple of nice dinners, a movie, and then you take her out. Callie falls into your arms. Genius." Elliot explained the scenario to him and Cain wanted to scream. This man was not god. This man did not control him; he would not let him tell him how he lived his life.
"Kind of ironic that you were named after the original murderer." Olivia smiled to him, and he pounded the table.
"Whoa, whoa, someone has a temper." Elliot got up and walked over to him, he knelt in front of him and their eyes met, testing each other to see who would break.
"I loved her." He clenched his jaw. "I don't need you to tell me whether or not it was right or okay because I loved her. Sometimes you don't see what's in front of you, sometimes you miss it and you have to go back. That's what happened with Anna. I loved her." He looked back and forth between the two detectives, hoping that either of them would understand love, and he knew, as the woman cowarded away, that she did. "You don't kill someone if you love them, detective. You don't have that ability."
Olivia wanted to tell Cain that he was wrong and Elliot was her evidence. Elliot was her exception. The room felt too small for her to remain and she turned quickly to leave before breaking down in front of their suspect.
Elliot rose slowly, licked his lips, and gave Cain a nod before leaving the room.
"What the hell was that, Olivia? We had him emotional, he could have confessed!" Elliot threw his hands up and Olivia couldn't breath because she knew that he didn't understand.
She didn't want to give him the dignity of deserving an explanation, so she nodded once and then went back into the interrogation room.
"These friends," Elliot heard Olivia's words as he walked back into the room after her. "You said they were crazy?"
"I don't like using that word. Medical school, you meet people and you can't label and –"
"I don't need a detailed account of your ethics, doctor." Olivia was harsh.
"They had problems, yes. Callie and Anna, they were friends with two other girls, all pretty close, and the other two just…they weren't stable, I guess."
"They still talk to them?" Olivia pressed him, and he shook his head.
"Not sure. Callie might know."
Elliot was already out the door, and Cain jumped up and went after him.
"Wait, is she here? She's here?" Cain asked in a panic, and Elliot turned to him quickly.
"You got a problem with that? You want to change your story now? Think she's gonna rat you out? You still love her?" His questions were rapid fire, and Cain felt like he'd been shot with them.
"Can I talk to her? Can I see her?" Olivia's eyes widened.
"So you can collaborate your story? Refine it a little? So what, Cain, you had Callie organize this little lunch date with Anna so that you could intervene and kill her?" Elliot spoke for her, and Olivia felt ashamed that she had let whatever she had lost with Elliot interfere on how she was solving this case. She didn't believe the blue-eyed doctor anymore.
"I didn't kill her!" He yelled, running his hands through a hair in a panic. "Callie – she's like my sister."
"You'd date your sister?" Olivia chimed in.
"No! NO! God, just…NO! You people, you don't understand that every case isn't the same. Everything doesn't follow a pattern. Chaos. It's all fucking chaos and you're not going to accuse me of this because it fits what you think it should! Callie – they were inseparable, Callie and Anna, and Callie helped me, I helped Callie, and I just want to see if she's okay. I care about her. I want –"
"To protect her." Elliot finished for him, and Olivia didn't want to believe that she felt his eyes on her.
&&&&&
"So we talked to Cain. He seems pretty upset about this whole thing. Wants to see you." That's what she said when she walked in, alone, and I know that she is trying to break me because she believes that I trust her.
I don't react to Cain's name because that's what she wants. She wants confirmation of her suspicions. The lines on her face, the circles under her eyes, they tell me that being this suspicious of everything and everyone all the time is tiring.
The door opens and Detective Stabler, the blue-eyed detective, walks back in and sits down across from me. I don't like that he acts like he knows me because I know he doesn't. He doesn't know anyone, and I don't need to look at the detective next to me to know that she feels this too.
"Callie, we talked to Cain. He said he loves you still." He's trying to get something out of me. He's playing him against me and I want to tell him that all I want to do is go home, back to my memories with pictures and sounds and things that were my life a few hours ago.
I make a mental note to move, because I can't stay in my apartment anymore, filled with memories of the life I had before I lost Anna.
No, before someone took Anna from me.
I think about Cain as the detective rambles on about how he loves me and how he was using Anna to get to me and I know that he knows that I am in shock and I am malleable and he could form me into what he wants to get me to say what he wants because I am suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome and he doesn't give a fuck. He doesn't care that my world is shattered, and there is something in his eyes that tells me Welcome, as if he's already at where I'm just entering.
I don't want his fucking greeting. With a degree in psychology and philosophy I know that she loves him because of how she's sitting, how she's watching him when she thinks he's not watching.
I've lost my entire life and from her I do not feel empathy, I feel her tattered regret of knowing from experience.
I can't hold my head up any longer and I don't have the energy to respond to his lies, my caffeine fix fading from the diet coke, and my head falls to the table because I cannot live through this in a two by two box with two people who think they know my best friend, but don't even know themselves.
I cannot listen to their assumptions.
"Callie," they reach for my diet coke can that is on the far end of the table. I'm not looking at them, but I know that they took it because they're talking about how they have DNA from the murder scene and they can take what I left on the can and compare it.
I want to offer them another one of the many pieces that are broken from me, but I resist.
"I have nothing to hide." They inform me that the lab says that she was raped with a wooden object and I can feel the bile in my mouth, and as I look to the woman next to me, now standing, her eyes are sorry.
"Tell us what you know." She is looking at me pleading, and I shake my head.
"I know nothing." My words are honest and I can tell that she is resisting the urge to say "me too" as she follows the man out of the room.
&&&&&
"It's not Callie." Olivia places the papers on Elliot's desk, and he leans back in his chair, running his hands in circles over his temples. "Her prints don't match anything," Olivia further explained.
"But the prints then, whose are they? They said the DNA was from a woman." Elliot didn't want to do this anymore, and he didn't even know what he was referencing with that thought. "Where are you going?" He called to Olivia as she walked towards the interrogation room where Callie Harper was waiting. "You said it wasn't her!"
"She needs to tell me more about the friends Cain was talking about She needs to figure this out for Anna. We can't." Olivia conceded because she knew that when you lose your best friend, the world cannot bring them back to you, you have to do it for yourself.
&&&&&
They brought me into her interrogation room and I stood against the door, his hands holding me up now like a father and not the bad cop he had to play. I leaned against him because I needed the support when I saw her face, exactly how I remembered it, from years ago. You don't forget the person who robbed you of your adolescence with her problems and her near death experiences and slow suicide.
Only she survived. And Anna didn't.
In a moment I knew that I wanted blood and that I wanted revenge and that if his hands were not holding me I would have done it. I looked quickly to Olivia and I knew now why she looked so sad.
His hands were on me, keeping me standing, and I knew that these hands had once held her.
"You." I couldn't feel the tears as they fell from my eyes, and I felt like I was running at her, screaming something that even I couldn't understand, and in the next moment the woman was in front of me, her eyes telling and she spoke with them. "She saved your life." I tried to be calm, but I knew that if he let go I wouldn't be able to stand.
"She ruined it." Abby Daniels, high school friend with a litany of problems smiled when she said it.
"She's a fucking nut!" I screamed, and he pulled me back, out of the room, leaning me against the wall and then she came to stand next to him, to look at me.
"I know this is hard." He seemed to be cracking; his blue eyes seemed softer, closer to the color of Cain's. "But we need you to get a confession out of her, if you can. She isn't talking, we need her to say she did it, we need her to admit it."
Olivia watched him softly, like she could feel the empathy as it fell back into him, and I could feel it as he was soft and nodded at me slowly. She placed her hand on his back, and this time I got a head on view of the change in his eyes.
I wanted blood.
&&&&&
"Elliot," Olivia's voice shook when she saw him upon opening the door to her apartment.
"She lost her best friend. That girl lost her best friend because she tried to help someone. She was killed because she tried to help." She didn't want to smile because he was coming back to her, because he was bothered and he felt this.
Fireflies danced in her eyes and the universe was realigning itself in his.
The girl had confessed. Abby admitted that she did it. That she was abandoned by Anna after she had her committed for an eating disorder that nearly killed her and she had to do it – she had to get back at her.
She wanted blood.
"I know how she feels." Olivia said it quietly as she turned around, and in the next instant she felt Elliot's hands on her. His fingers dug into her arms and he turned her around to face him, he searched for face, trying to figure out if this resurrection was worth the pain it would cause him, and he found his answer in Olivia's tears, tracing trails down her cheeks.
She cried fear.
"You know, I would have died for you." Elliot looked her over when he talked, and Olivia moved out of his hands.
"Would have? Elliot, what the hell happened to us? Death – it comes in more than one sense. Your best friend can die in more than just the literal way, what that girl went through today – I –"
"Don't say it," Elliot moved to her and in his eyes he apologized for not being there and not being able to talk to her and be with her and love her like she wanted. Like she needed. Like he needed. "I would have died for you. You sign up for this job and you have to know that you are going to walk in and meet someone that you have to be willing to die for. You never know if it's worth it. If it's ever worth it."
"I miss you, El." She could feel him coming back to her and he leaned down and pressed his forehead to hers.
"I never knew that dying for you would be easier than living for you, Olivia, that is…" He trailed off, and Olivia let out a strangled sob.
In their silence he brought her closer to him.
He went to say something, but he had no words, and Olivia knew that this is how silence should feel, strong and protective.
Elliot had come home.
&&&&&
finished.