Oh my. So here's the deal...this whole thing was originally meant to be a one-shot. Then I decided to take it through to the end of the time gap in Surrender Benson. This part was supposed to accomplish that, but it was getting out of hand, so there will be another short one or two scene part to wrap that up. After that, I'll likely skip ahead to some point later in the season.

As always, I'm so thankful to all the lovely people who take the time to comment. I've been in fic 'retirement' for almost five years, so this is a wonderful welcome back.

Same warnings in place as always. Title and quotes from Pompeii by Bastille.

{if you close your eyes

does it almost feel like you've been here before?}

July is familiar.

Too familiar, to be exact. Seven weeks was all it took before you were back in the ER, reuniting with your old buddies and thanking all the deities out there that compared to your last visit, you were doing pretty goddamn well- not like that was saying much.

This time you had been lying listlessly on the couch, clutching a fleece blanket that covered you all the way up to your chin. It may have been July, and the air conditioner in the apartment was pathetic on its best days, but you were shivering nonetheless. The night before you had kept getting up to add layers of clothing until you had so much on that you felt like a penguin, waddling more than you were walking.

And yet when Brian came home, you refused to entertain his suggestion that you were sick (still sick, or sick again? You had so many things going on that it was hard to tell if you ever actually recovered from any of them). You were fine, you said with a dismissive shake of your head. All you really wanted was to sleep now that he was finally home. Of course, in what was probably his passive aggressive revenge for your obvious dishonesty, he decided to put off going to bed and sat down with a horrid smelling sandwich to watch The View. Having developed a fascination with daytime tv after working nights for so long, he would laugh and shake his head and agree or disagree with the ladies out loud as if they were his lifelong friends.

To you personally, it reminded you of everything you had always hated about groups of women, everyone talking over one another in higher and higher pitched voices until someone finally wore the rest of the group down with their shrill buzzing. You were feeling nauseous again, and the TV wasn't helping. You moved to get up off of the couch and, in one oddly fluid motion, fell flat on your ass. "Shit."

He stopped mid-laugh and rushed over to you as you flailed around in an unsuccessful attempt to get to your feet. "'m okay, gimme a second. Just a little dizzy."

Long story short, he didn't believe you, especially not when he felt your forehead and said you were so warm that you might have been radiating heat waves. He was exaggerating, really, but you were in the ER waiting room before you knew it. (Literally, before you knew it. You were getting a little loopy and wouldn't remember how you got from the floor to the hospital).

The woman sitting across from you had a tattoo of a pot leaf covering one entire side of her neck. She was turned around, yelling to anyone who would listen that she didn't have time for this, okay, she had a husband at home and DOGS got treated better than this. You liked her. It was nice to feel like you weren't the most out of control person in the room for once.

You didn't know the nurse who finally called your name, and while that had its advantages, you almost would've preferred listening to another uncomfortable 'I'm so sorry' from an acquaintance who would never look at you the same way again. It's not like they were going to see or hear anything they didn't already know, and it would have saved you from trying to explain the whole story once more while your heart thumped erratically and your lungs couldn't seem to get enough oxygen in them. The poster on the wall in front of you looked harmless enough, a cartoon monster of some sort reminding you to get a flu shot, but it was that same poster that had stared you in the face for hours the last time you were here. You had forced yourself to focus on the little creature's beady purple eyes, shutting out the pain and fear and the pitying looks from the doctors and nurses as they catalogued your injuries. Every question received a monotone answer, as matter of fact as if you were reading excerpts from the phone book. You never once said his name and it took a conscious effort not to refer to yourself in the third person.

Now here you were once again, and the nurse was gaping at you like she wasn't even sure where the hell to start. You wanted to tell her to take it easy because the best was yet to come.

"I'm only doing this once," you said with a firm shake of your head, refusing to give her the whole magical mystery tour of your injuries until the doctor arrived. She gave you a look that said you wouldn't be receiving any patient of the year awards from her and asked if you wanted the guy you were with to come back while you were waiting. That earned another sharp no from you and her disapproving frown deepened, undoubtedly wondering how much of a bitch you must be to live with. More than you can imagine, lady.

The magazine on the table next to you had a cover story about a still-living Princess Diana going on an exotic vacation with a new love, but you picked it up anyway just to have something to focus on other than flu monsters and the way your stomach plunged every time your heart skipped a beat. According to your recent ECG, everything was physically fine ("if you were having a heart attack, you would be dead already," the receptionist had assured you). The PA who had done the test had clapped you on the shoulder- you had shuddered, he didn't notice- when he told you that you should relax and try to avoid becoming overly anxious. He wrote you a prescription for Xanax and sent you out with a warning not to drive after taking it.

As relieved as you were to know that you weren't on the verge of a massive coronary, you still weren't sure how exactly you were supposed to relax when every skipped beat seemed to leave your head that much lighter. You counted them as you laid awake at night, wondering which might be the lucky number that could cause you to black out altogether from lack of oxygen. In other words, it was not terribly conducive to avoiding anxiety.

Nor was having to show off all your scars to yet another pair of strangers. Trying to avoid looking at them as much as possible, you pointed each one out like a tour guide in some grotesque museum of human cruelty. Your memories of the 'incident' were starting to change. Some details were becoming fuzzy, and you were starting to doubt some of your other recollections, which you had been assured were normal reactions to traumatic events. Unfortunately, your injuries served as ugly mementos of the stories behind each of them- a cigarette burn, a cut from a kitchen knife, a bite mark. You remembered every one much too clearly.

When you had finished, the nurse pointed to the thin white line across your throat. "Oh, that's years old," you said with all the emotion of someone describing what they had for breakfast. Only in your life, you thought wryly, was a near-stabbing a relatively minor event. Civilians had no idea what they were missing out on.

After all the fun and games had ended, the official diagnosis was that you were a human train wreck (and yes, you were sure that was the proper scientific term for it). One of your wounds had gotten infected- naturally, the one that was already the worst in terms of the sheer fucking horrific way you had been gifted with it. "I'm no plastic surgeon, man oh man, but that shouldn't be healing like that," the doctor had announced, clearly pleased with the chance to put that med school dermatology rotation to good use. Not content to stay in one place, the infection had somehow teleported to your kidneys, which you never noticed because you were too busy being 'considerably' dehydrated. When the doctor asked you when you had last eaten and you said you couldn't remember, he didn't look especially surprised.

They gave you a stack of papers to sign that you didn't bother to read. You were probably consenting to a lobotomy, but you would have been fine with that if it could save you from having a conversation about how "it's okay to have trouble coping with these kinds of things"- because Dr. Whoever was speaking from experience, no doubt. And here you were thinking you were coping relatively well because you hadn't considered eating your gun yet. You resisted the urge to thank him for giving you permission to feel and assured him that you were already going to counseling, now if you would please just tell me what I have to do to get out of here.

Next they hooked you up to an IV so they could pump God only knows how many substances into your bloodstream. You suspected one of them was a sedative, but they tried to convince you that drowsiness was just a side effect of some anti-nausea drug and thrust a cup into your hand. The liquid in it tasted like tears that had fallen onto your bottom lip and slid into your mouth, a taste you were well acquainted with, but there was no emotion behind it this time and somehow it made you feel as empty as that little paper cup. You were promised some Gatorade if you could keep that down- now there's a reason to stay alive if you ever heard one- and Brian came back to see you with Us Weekly in hand because he knew mindless celebrity gossip was your secret guilty pleasure.

"So I'm a mess," you said softly when he sat down next to you, beating him to his usual job of stating the obvious. He reacted in surprise to you saying something other than how fine you were, blinking hard before he gave his head a half-shake and pressed his lips to your temple, whispering that you're the strongest fucking person he knows. And the only one who makes yellow fluorescent lighting look sexy, he added. Normally you would have rolled your eyes and told him to stop being ridiculous, but the drug cocktail in your veins was making everything softer around the edges, you included. You turned toward where his palm was cupping your cheek, kissing the spot where hand meets wrist.

"Stay." Your voice was a soft drawl, slow and heavy as you moved to let him sit down on the edge of the bed. The back of your head was resting on his shoulder and his arm was around your waist and that's how it always seemed to be with you and him, the bad and the good and no way to disentangle the two.

{and the walls kept tumbling down in the city that we loved}

You tried to open your eyes, then to lift your head up, but failed at both. "How drunk did you let me get?" you complained.

An unfamiliar voice snickered, and you heard Brian saying "Hey. Buddy," in a warning tone before his voice softened. "Still not drunk, babe. Hospital. Remember?"

"Ohhh. Yeah." You had a brief flash of memory, of lying there hooked up to an IV while the guy in the bed next to you pushed the call button over and over. Ding. Ding. Ding. "I'm tired."

"You're supposed to be. That's why they gave you the good stuff. You'll sleep it off and be a new person," he said, and your brain slowly chewed over his words, unable to decide what he meant by that or if that was something he really wanted.

You felt the cab come to a stop at the curb. The brakes squeaked, and something exploded in your memory. Everything was tinted red, like a movie with discolored film, but it wasn't a movie. It was you and you were her and bad things were going to happen. "Hey. Hey. I wanna tell you something."

Brian ignored how you were tugging on his sleeve and kept trying to pull you out of the cab. "Yeah, hold that thought until we get inside."

"Now," you insisted, shaking your head, because you didn't like the way this movie was making your stomach churn and this seemed like the only way to purge it from your mind. Movie-you was screaming so loud, too loud, need to make her stop. "I killed him. He was already down but I killed him anyway."

You didn't have to open your eyes to know that you now had two people watching you in confusion. "No, Liv. You didn't kill anyone. I promise. C'mon, you can't stay here all night."

Frustrated that he didn't believe you, you turned toward the driver. "I cracked his skull. On purpose. I killed him because Elliot wasn't there to do it."

You felt yourself being all but lifted up and out onto the sidewalk and ushered inside as quickly as he could urge you along. He kept promising you that you were wrong, that you were confused because nobody was dead, but you knew you were right. It was all red and the scene was swimming before you and yet there was no mistaking what you were seeing.

Now you were back in the apartment, and he was steering you toward the bedroom. You need to sleep, he said. We don't need to talk about this, he said. You're only imagining things, he said. The frustration made your chest tighten with every word he spoke. Maybe if he would just listen, the missing piece would slot itself into place, because it didn't make sense. You killed him for the hell of it, and yet there was no guilt- just the satisfaction from doing what had to be done. He couldn't hurt you, but that wasn't enough. He had to die because a part of you had to die. If he was gone, everything you had done and seen and said for the last four days disappeared with him, buried inside you and never to emerge. Stories only kept their power for as long as they continued to be told.

You tried to protest, but nothing came out. Your eyes closed again and you gave in to sleep.

When morning came, all you would remember was red.

{I was left to my own devices

many days fell away with nothing to show}

July is restless.

Against your doctor's best advice- med school, always making people think they know everything- you start running again. Not in the metaphorical sense, although you do plenty of that too. Some may even call it a specialty of yours. No, you reached for your perfectly broken in tennis shoes, the ones that had been sitting at the bottom of a suitcase ever since you came home from the hospital. You laced them up with the care worthy of this momentous reunion and when they finally connected with the pavement after such a prolonged absence, you ran.

At first it was freeing, just like it was when you were ten years old and it was the closest you could come to flying, shedding the invisible weights buried in your heart. You felt the burning of muscles stirring to life after weeks of lying dormant and the ache propelled you forward until the noise in that goddamn head of yours couldn't be heard over the rhythmic thud of your heart beating in time with your musical flavor of the moment blasting in your iPod.

If only it lasted. You scan every face as you pass by, hyper-aware of each one that looks back as if they were scorching you with their eyes. I can always smell a victim. You wonder what your tell is, what it is that sets you apart and how many of these strangers can recognize it with a cursory glance. How you managed to hide it before- if you ever really did. You itch to have your gun and badge back in hand, transforming you into the fearless detective and distracting attention from the person (and the fears) lying underneath. It was a disguise that had served you well. You realize that this is the longest period of time in almost two decades that you've had to go back to playing Olivia, and you think that maybe you've gotten too good at your former role, that Olivia just doesn't fit you anymore and that's why you feel like a snake struggling out of a skin that grew too tight.

You decide to forgo running for the time being and take up kickboxing as a way to channel the rage that has taken up permanent residence in every cell of your body like a fast moving cancer. There are fewer people to have to scrutinize here, and they all seem too preoccupied with their own issues to notice the brunette with the fading pink burn marks dotting her upper arms. You will unfortunately not be the first- and certainly not the last- woman to step through these doors looking a bit battered.

There's no denying that you get winded much quicker than you once did. It's temporary, you know, but that doesn't keep you from pushing yourself past the point where a more reasonable person would stop. You shake and throw up and curse your throbbing limbs and then you go right back and do it all over again because you just can't quit. You don't deserve to quit.

Brian's only response when he hears about your latest hobby is some sort of noncommittal hum, but later on he turns to you in the middle of some mindless sitcom, very carefully telling you that there was nothing you could have done differently to prevent what had happened. You close your eyes and sigh, asking if you can please not talk about this right now.

"But when?" you hear him ask behind you, the biting tone of his voice making you scowl to yourself as you go into the kitchen and mentally debate the merits of wine versus painkillers. Once you've decided, you grab a glass and the bottle and head down the hall to the bedroom to spend some quality time alone with tonight's chosen vice. Your arms are heavy, unable to stay steady as you attempt to pour, so you give up and decide to drink straight from the bottle. Might as well make it easy on yourself- the gym opens back up in ten hours, after all.

{But if you close your eyes

does it almost feel like nothing changed at all?}

July is the old and the new.

It's yet another sleepless night alone, but you've had much worse. Born to Run is playing on the stereo, you've uncorked a new bottle, and now you're settling down with your iPad in hand to admire the accessories page on the Neiman Marcus site.

Your new pastime had started out reasonably enough in searching for a pair of sunglasses. All the ones you owned were back in your apartment, and you had decided it wasn't worth the emotional toll of going to retrieve them when it was simple enough to get a new pair. They arrived the next afternoon, a welcome distraction from the tightness in your chest and the phantom hand sliding up the inside of your thigh, and you remembered how much you enjoyed the thrill of a successful hunt. Your mother had loved shopping almost as much as she loved Stoli. At least once a week she would barrel her way past the front door of the apartment and announce that "I've had a shit day, Olivia, let's go," and off you went to Saks or Bloomingdale's or wherever else struck her fancy. By the time you were fifteen or so, you began to try out that line for yourself whenever you were stressed over trig or pining after some boy in your English class, and Mom was all too happy to oblige you. She may have been drowning in debt, but that landslide also carried you to the title of Best Dressed Senior.

Now it was time for you and your own credit cards to carry on your mother's legacy. And really, didn't you deserve it? You had spent close to two decades with barely any time to attend to the absolute necessities like eating and sleeping and staying out of the grasp of serial rapists hellbent on making sure you would spend the rest of your life remembering them every time you undressed. Now that you had all these empty hours to fill, you owed it to yourself to make up for lost opportunities. No doubt Mom was smiling down on you from the big Nordstrom shoe department in the sky.

You were considering the merits of a $500 Kate Spade bag when your phone whistled to indicate that you had a new text.

«Eli vs. stairs. Stairs won. Dad gets prize of taking losing contender to get stitches.»

You quickly typed out a sympathetic reply and got back a reminder that he had his phone on him if you needed anything and a promise to call back tomorrow night. Assuring him that you were fine, seriously, don't worry about me, you went back to deciding if you could pull off blue or should stick with black. What the hell, let's go with the blue.

Existential color crisis solved, you put aside the iPad and reached for your glass, taking a long sip. Oh, Elliot. What the fuck was this becoming, going from not speaking at all in May to 'sorry I can't call' texts in July? For someone you (thought) you knew so well, it could be awfully hard to figure out how you were supposed to act around him sometimes. And by sometimes, you meant most of the time. You had considered him your best friend for over a decade, never just your partner, but there was always that space between you. The coworker zone. You envisioned it as something akin to Elliot's stories of chaperones at Catholic school dances sticking bibles in between couples to 'save room for Jesus'. Whatever happened between you, you still had to be able to work together every day, and that played a huge part in dictating how you behaved with one another.

Now, however, the cranky teachers had packed up and left the gymnasium. You had the freedom to do whatever the hell you wanted, but you also didn't have the safety of the Old Testament wedged in between you. When he called at midnight or you met him at 'your' park bench, as had become your routine on the afternoons when you had doctor's appointments, there was no justifying it as work related. Even if it was only in your head, you had to admit you were there because you wanted to be.

What sort of relationship was this where you wish you could blame it all on circumstance? You already knew you were the two most emotionally stunted people on earth, but this was above and beyond. A dozen years together and you were only now learning how to be friends.

Not that it was always friendly. There was still a rift between you, and sometimes it felt like walking along the edge of the Grand Canyon, trying not to fall with every measured step while denying that the chasm below you even existed. You didn't want the ugliness between you to keep quietly festering, but this, whatever this was that you had, was already fragile under the weight of two years and zero goodbyes. The cracks were visible, sharp words and biting comments meant to shake the ground under his feet when you felt like he might be getting too comfortable, because he needed to remember that he was still on the brink. He could push back, of course, remarking that you could be awfully self righteous for someone who was pretty good at running away herself. But he never went as far as to take that fatal shove, the one that would send you over the cliff into a freefall that there was no returning from, and neither did you.

He knew the truth as well as you did- if one of you slipped, you were both going down together.

You had blurted it out once, on a day when it felt like the sky might buckle under the heavy weight of the humid air, when you looked at each other and saw someone who knew just enough to tear you apart but not enough to put you back together again. "Why are you here?"

"Because you think we can't be alone together."

"I don't mean this park. I mean- what is your angle here? You said you needed to see for yourself that I was alive. Well, you saw, you can check that off your to-do list. So now what is it?"

"You know, I could ask you the same thing. Why are you here? What's your angle?"

The only response you could come up with was 'you started it', which was a bit immature even if he had, in fact, started it. You turned away, calmly smoothing your hair back from your face. "I know I'm sounding like Munch, but someone knows a lot more about that plane than they're letting on. Somebody's got a vested interest in making sure it won't be found."

Foreign governments had nothing on the two of you when it came to avoiding the truth.

{we were caught up and lost in all of our vices}

July was (not) about sex.

Contrary to what you were sure was popular belief, you had never slept with Elliot.

Nor had the thought of consummating the relationship ever consumed your every waking moment. There had been some pretty heavy flirting at times, and one late night phone conversation that had moved far, far out of the realm of flirting, but by the next morning you felt like you had been french kissing a cousin and he evidently felt the same. You both went to elaborate lengths to avoid looking at each other, talking to one another, or breathing the same air as the other until he finally tossed a folded up scrap of paper in your direction two days later.

«want to pretend it never happened?»

«I don't know what you're talking about.»

You exchanged relieved smiles when he read your reply, and that was the end of it. (He had kept the note in one of his desk drawers for some reason; you came across it while scavenging through his stuff after he left). Even though you knew now that there was a definite mutual attraction, you kept the thought out of your head. Well. Most of the time. After all, you were only human. And perpetually single. And there's only so much you can do with a vibrator, and you know what he sounds like when he comes, and yes it was awkward afterward but maybe it would be different if you were actually in the same room together and...shit. Good thing you didn't think about it very often. Hardly ever, really.

Lately, though, that had changed. You still had nightmares most every time you slept, some more vivid than others, but now they had started sharing airtime with dreams of a very different kind. They varied in minor details, but the plot was always the same- Elliot pushing you down onto the mattress or up against the wall, pinning your arms above your head and sliding inside you without much in the way of preamble. It's rough, but it's not hurting you and you never think to be afraid. In fact, it feels strangely liberating, like he's fucking the demons out of you and this is what you've needed all along. You moan and writhe around like a pro and are about to lose your goddamn mind...and then you wake up, equal parts confused and so very fucking turned on. Every single time.

Then you keep thinking about it all day, of course, how he had you desperate and begging and completely overpowered and god you just want. You talk about it in therapy because somehow it's easier to talk about the sex you're having in dreams than the sex you're not having while you're awake. Dreams can be our brain's way of problem solving, Dr. Lindstrom says. It's a safe way of experimenting with ideas, of rehearsing possibilities, and you suppose that makes sense. It's certainly not happening in real life, where nothing you're actually okay with is doing it for you anymore and everything you want is still on the other side of a line you're not ready to cross.

But sometimes you'll look at him out of the corner of your eye while you're sitting on your bench and wonder what if, wonder how you would react.

The answer, frankly, terrifies you.

{Great clouds roll over the hills

bringing darkness from above}

July is contentious.

Everything seems to be a fight these days. If there's a way to disagree about it, whatever 'it' may be, you and Brian will find it and seize upon it.

Dr. Lindstrom talks to you about misplaced anger. Who are you really angry at, Brian asks one night as you pace back and forth across the living room, lecturing him on how many times do I have to tell you to not drop the keys on the counter like that, Jesus fucking christ, it's like you don't even think sometimes. You refuse to answer his question because it's not that simple, you can be angry with a whole universe all at once (like you are now), and every time he says something like that a little more of your rage is pointed squarely at him. Smug bastard doesn't seem to understand how patronizing that shit is, how you can hear the implication that he is somehow blameless and that is simply not true.

After all, he's learning how to throw down just as well as you can. He asks how the hell you think you're going to be able to survive back at work, because no one's ever going to be able to remember your whole ridiculous list of do's and don'ts. No one wants to tiptoe around trying not to find out what will set you off this time. You focus on making him spontaneously combust from the heat of your glare as his voice lowers and he says honestly, Liv, how are you not going to lose it the first time you're back in the room with someone who's getting a rape kit done, let's be real here.

You nod once, curtly, and turn to walk out the door with all the silent composure you can muster. You don't even slam it behind you, instead closing it so carefully that you can barely hear the click of the knob.

He doesn't get to hear you cry anymore.

{How am I gonna be an optimist about this?}

He's waiting for you at the door when you come back like he hasn't moved since you left. He says he's so sorry, and he kisses you like he means it. You know he does. You also know that there's nothing to apologize for- after all, he's only taking the ugly doubts that already live in your head and throwing them back at you. He has no way of knowing. You've never told him what you're afraid of and he's never asked.

Sometimes you wish he would, because you honestly can't predict what would come out of your mouth. Could be a delightful surprise for both of you.

The next morning you turn to look at him from over the giant pillow separating you and tell him this isn't working, that it's time for you to go back home. He starts to protest but you remind him that this was never meant to be permanent, that it happened because it was the only real option at the time and you both know you wouldn't have considered living together right then otherwise. The whole agreement was that you weren't rushing things this time around- it took almost four months of casual dates before you actually slept together, and although it had been an exclusive thing the whole time, it took six more months for you both to acknowledge that it was, in fact, a thing. Even then, the whole conversation literally consisted of him looking at you from across a table strewn with takeout containers and saying "So. You and me. This is a thing, right?" You nodded and said "Yeah, definitely," and that was the end of that. It wasn't your most eloquent moment, the question having caught you completely off guard, but it was all the answer either of you needed.

Under normal circumstances, it was a fine arrangement for two commitmentphobes trying not to fuck up a good thing for a second time. Key word being normal. Now those days seemed so long ago that you can't even remember who those people were and why they thought they had an infinite amount of time to figure shit out. Lucky bastards.

I don't want to lose this, you admit to him softly, and I know that's where we're headed. His eyes look like they're searching for the right words to jump out in front of him, but they're nowhere to be found. He knows that he'd be lying if he disagreed, so he just reaches toward the arm you have slung over the pillow, kissing the back of your hand.

Tomorrow you will be on your own.