Tension Point

Author's Note: Okay, it's not just Heron's internet that's being Axis-Two, Cluster-B, borderline histrionic personality-disordered… Heron's computer has been refusing to save Tension Point's latest chapter, so Heron couldn't even start typing it for a while. AAAARGH! Okay, now that that's all cleared up… Heron loves her reviewers. You've all been so kind, even forgiving Heron her long absence. Thank you so much! Anyway, Heron shall now see if she hasn't lost her edge…on with the insanity!

The stationhouse walls had been taking more beatings than usual from Elliot Stabler. The man kept imagining his own children in the hands of Adam White, the images haunting his dreams and his every waking moment alike without discretion. Olivia tried to help him through it, but she couldn't keep a very objective opinion either. Adam White was a rapist, just like her own father, and she kept envisioning the horror of the future when a child or two found out the hard way that they were never supposed to happen, like she did.

But George Huang was not in the stationhouse with Elliot and Olivia and the other detectives that night. They had seen how tired he looked, how drained, and they had sent him 'home'. Instead, he was at the weary little all-night diner, where the weary waitress took weary orders from weary customers, clicking away on her weary pumps to attain the weary orders from weary cooks. He wasn't at all sure what he himself had ordered, except that the waitress had called it the 'House Special', and that it consisted of lots of cheese, grease, and what was possibly pasta along with several other unidentifiable items.

Even the tables looked weary, tired, and depressed at the outcome of the week. George was so caught up in nothing that he failed to notice the oddly energetic sound of two-inch heels clacking against the tired linoleum floors of the diner.

"You're not going to be any good to anyone if you don't stop beating yourself up long enough to rest, you know," a musical female voice told him, and he startled, having been unaware of his surroundings. Wasn't he supposed to be FBI?

"Hello, Alex," he mumbled, returning to his task of rearranging his food with his fork, but not eating any of it. "Have a seat?"

Alex Cabot took a seat across the table from George, reigning in the urge to kick him in the shins just to get a reaction out of him that wasn't self-deprecating, depressed, or apathetic. Hell, even anger would be a good reaction, because it would be something.

The waitress eyed a new customer, and stopped by to get Alex's order, returning in record time with the watered down coffee that had been the lawyer's request. Alex took a sip of her lukewarm drink after the waitress clicked away, and cringed. At this hour, nowhere had good coffee, but this… If the stuff at the stationhouse was battery acid, this was water with a coffee stain on it.

"Let's go," Alex said finally after she had choked down two mugs of coffee-tinted water in silence. She didn't mind the silence so much. It was an easy silence, a peaceful kind of quiet. George had that effect for her, even when they weren't talking. The world just seemed to disappear when she was around him and all the icky stuff didn't really matter. Usually, but this…this was when he needed the support more than she did. The detectives in Sex Crimes used his mind and his skill shamelessly, and they often took him for granted, but what was worse than that was they forgot that he was, under the FBI shield and all the credentials, still human.

She paid for both her coffees and his uneaten meal, and almost dragged him out of the diner. This was almost like a repeat of their first personal encounter, when he'd bought her a meal at that same said diner, but that time, things had been happy between them. Now, there was a rift of guilt, and shame, and she wanted that to go away. Even if she and George turned out to be nothing more than friends, she wanted them to be friends without regrets coming between them. There was one place she knew of where maybe, just maybe, she could patch the rift before it stopped being a crack and started being a yawning chasm.

Alex ushered George into the passenger seat of her car, and then climbed into the driver's seat, put her key in the ignition, and started the engine. Slowly she pulled out of the parking lot, and she obeyed the speed limit the whole silent way to her destination. Of all the things she'd been called over the years, stupid driver was not one of them.

George was dimly aware of the car slowing to a stop and the shrill screech of squealer tabs that warned that Alex would need new brakes sometime in the near future, but it didn't register to him that he needed to get out of the car until the door he was leaning on suddenly opened and all that kept him from falling out was the seatbelt.

When he finally managed to unbuckle and step out of the car, he noted that Alex had taken them to the park where she'd first taken them after he'd treated her to that greasy meal that hung somewhere in between dinner and breakfast on the timetable. It was the park where all the trouble in the world could be temporarily forgotten, and he could leave the stains on his soul at the door for a while and just exist, like a clean slate. It was their unspoken fantasy world where Adam White didn't exist, and evil didn't exist. Here, in this fantasy, children were not exploited or used for sex, people were not raped, spouses did not beat each other, and every story had a happy ending.

He found himself being led to the very same bench where they had sat together a seeming eternity ago – he'd lost track of time. It was colder now, edging into late October and early November, and George found himself edging slightly closer to Alex for warmth.

"So, feel like talking yet?" Alex queried, slipping an arm around her companion's shoulders. They basically lived together now – her apartment still held too many nightmares – but she felt like she didn't know him anymore.

There is a marked difference between not moving and being still. Before all the bad things with Adam White had gone down, George could be not moving but still be almost vibrating with contained energy. He always had an eager sparkle in his eyes, an air of barely contained excitement, like a dog really, when he was helping the detectives track down yet another scumbag. He could not move and still strain at the leash to get free. Now though, now he was still, all that compressed energy gone from his emotionally tattered form. His motions were flat, dull, and his eyes were emptier than Alex had ever seen them, that sparkle gone, hopefully not for good.

Alex sighed heavily when she received no answer. Looking out at the cityscape that substituted for stars, she pressed on. "I don't blame you. If it's anyone's fault, it's mine. If I had gotten on the phone fast enough or gotten out of my apartment, well, I won't even go there, because that's about as rational as the guilt you're putting yourself through. White decided on expanding his pool of potential victims long before you and I had that chat in the diner about how best to crucify him on the stand."

"But…"

"Don't go there," Alex interrupted. It figured that when she finally got the man to talk, he would try to snatch all the blame back and hoard it for himself. "Let it go, or you'll be even more Adam White's victim than me. Take a deep breath, suck it up, and move on."

George still didn't look convinced that he wasn't the one to blame. Alex dearly didn't want to get angry with him, but he was so stubbornly hanging onto his guilt like a child with a favorite toy, or, back to that canine analogy, like a dog with a bone.

Tears welled up in his eyes. Even grown men needed to cry every now and then, especially when that tension point was pushed as far as this. Alex was amazed that George had held together as long as he did, being pushed from one catastrophe to the next with no outlet, and then discovering her broken body after White had finished with her, and now trying to track down the slippery bastard…

Alex leaned over, kissed him on the cheek, and then just held him for a while. Sometimes, it was actions that mattered, and not words.

Author's Other Note: Again, sorry for the long wait. And the short chapters. And possibly the angst. When Heron started writing this, she planned on light angst, but her reviewers said continue and then the plot bunny took over…

Please tell Heron when you want her to stop, because otherwise this fic could get to be one of those epic ones, and Heron isn't happy with her writing right now. This chapter came out okay, but it doesn't hold a candle to the first chapter, and the others don't even come close to this one.

Heron is updating as fast as she can, given her health and her computer's mental health… Sorry if she's making you wait for too long in between updates.

Once again, this whole story is best read while listening to the Dixie Chicks' 'Easy Silence' on loop track. Heron bought the new CD after she wrote the first chapter, and found that the first chapter was quite elegantly put to music with 'Easy Silence'. Heron doesn't care for the Dixie Chicks' politics, but their music can be pretty damn good.