Actually, Elliot knew he was deluding himself. He was trying to deceive himself, even now, into thinking that he had been stronger. To pretend that he had kept the faith for longer, that he hadn't allowed the treacherous thoughts born of fear and worry to intrude until they had some facts that confirmed for definite what had probably happened. He was lying to himself, still.
Everyone had done so though, during that day, until the dark night of reality set in. The old, bitter cliché of 'no news is good news' had circulated between all involved. Bitter because the words had rolled off their tongues far more often than they had believed in them. A white lie designed to keep them held together for as long as possible, while none of them were brave enough to say that they were breaking apart.
The truth was that his hope had begun to fade as soon as he had seen the blood and the overturned table; the moment he had made the fateful call that turned Olivia's home into a crime scene and her name into a missing person.
He hated himself for it for a long time afterwards, when he was forced to face how quickly his mind had jumped to the tragic, the heartbreaking, the devastating. How he had let Olivia down in allowing himself to doubt, even for a minute, her abilities, her courage and her strength. He should have held it together for far longer than he did.
Sitting in the doubtful, confusing peace of the familiar squad room, nausea rose to his throat, provoked by self hatred, and mimicking the bile that had burnt his mouth as he had stood outside her apartment building, with the bright yellow tape flickering and dancing in the corner of his eye.
"He spits the sour, stinging stomach acid onto the floor beside him and wipes his mouth on his sleeve. Gulping the air in an attempt to ground himself, he sees Cragen step out of the building and come towards him. With a shrug of his shoulders, the cop persona falls over him, settling his emotions and allowing himself to become temporarily detached.
"How you doing?" the Captain asks, and Elliot can see that he is struggling not to put an arm on his shoulder in comfort. He's glad that Cragen doesn't though, he needs to pretend for a minute that this is just another case, so he deflects the personal and turns to the professional.
"Where are we so far?" His voice isn't as solid as he would like, but it's a start.
"One of the neighbours, a Mrs Blake, heard a noise at about 9pm. She says it sounded like a chair falling over, but she heard nothing before or after, and didn't look out or investigate further."
Elliot nods.
" Liv left the precinct at around 8.30pm, so that would fit as a timeline for her to have got home then." Cragen makes a note on his pad, and Elliot feels odd, standing on the other side of a cop taking notes. He isn't a witness and he isn't a victim. Nor is she. But is that true any more?
"I need you to go back to the precinct and start calling the hospitals for any Jane Does admitted or treated from 8.30pm last night, up until now. And.....check with Warner as well."
Elliot feels himself pale slightly at the last words, a flash of fear before he composes his face again.
"Will do." Without asking further questions he walks towards the sanctuary of his car, desperate to get away from the building as if he could leave the events behind as well.
Just as he pulls up at the precinct, he catches sight of a scarf on the floor of the passenger side, and gulps. It's hers. He can't bring himself to touch it, and so it lies curled round itself like a sleeping animal. A cat maybe. Or...a dead animal. He knows that if he picks it up, it will smell of her.
Without giving it another look, he gets out and dashes in, refusing to make eye contact with anyone as he makes his way to the squad room.
Sitting at his desk, he pulls the phone towards him while carefully avoiding looking at Olivia's side. To look up and see the space is yet another acknowledgement.
Immersing himself in the calls to hospitals and clinics, he has two flashes of hope before further digging reveals them to not be her: a tattoo on an ankle and a pair of green eyes eliminating the two unknown brunettes from his enquiries. He saves Melinda till last, knowing that she would call if Olivia was laid out, cold and bare on a metal slab, and yet fearing the vision as truth.
"Medical examiner's office," breaks through his nightmare image and he asks for Dr. Warner, telling the voice on the other end that yes, it is urgent and no, it won't wait. He taps his pen against the desk for the few seconds of silence, and then she is on the other end.
"Hey, it's Elliot."
"What can I do for you? I haven't got a case of yours at the moment have I?"
"No."
He doesn't know how to phrase the question, how to blurt out that Olivia is gone and possibly dead somewhere, but he has too.
"Olivia's missing. Since this morning. And we had to check......" he allows his voice to trail into nothing, his tongue refusing to form the words 'body' or 'dead'. M
"My god. I hadn't heard," Elliot can feel the shock radiating through the phone, and is glad they aren't standing face to face. "She's not here Elliot. I....I'd have called you if she...."
"I know," he says, cutting her off, "but we had to ask. I guess CSU will be getting back with evidence from her place soon....maybe you could do the analysis....there was.........blood."
The word sits like a weight between them before she murmurs that of course she will, and then there doesn't seem to be anything else to say. She knows nothing yet and there is no time or energy for sympathy or worry to be passed between them.
"We'll let you know if we know something." He says, and she says she will do the same, and he can faintly hear her goodbye as he puts the phone down and sighs. That's all the places called where she could have ended up and it be an accident, and now there is an almost excruciating desire to get up and run, to hunt, to find. He wants to be a sniffer dog.
Looking up, he immediately sees the board in front of him, and stares stunned for a few seconds longer than he wants to spare. Someone has put her photo up there, 'Missing' written in block capitals above it and a time-line below. They've also printed a still from the security camera outside the precinct, a blurry outline of her back moving away from the building, with the date and time-stamp clearly visible. He can tell in a glance where she is in the picture, without the need for the circle highlighting her.
An incredible urge swells, coursing through his veins, and he takes a step forward to rip her photo off and tear it into pieces, wipe the writing away, smash everything in the room, because they're wrong. But before he can act, can lose it, there is the sound of high heels behind him and a demanding voice.
"Why didn't anyone call me?" He spins to see Alex striding towards him, anger radiating through every step. Before he can help it, he turns on her.
"Because we're too busy trying to find her!" and it's the first time he's raised his voice since all this began. She jerks back from him a little, as if his anger has physically pushed her away, or slapped her.
"I deserved to know via a better way than the grapevine." She's not awed by his irritation and refuses to back down from her position of hurt and indignation.
"Well, Olivia deserves to not be missing. And you know now, so it's done," he snaps. He knows he's being unreasonable, the beginnings of strain and worry showing themselves as he takes it out on her, but he continues, "so if you could stop complaining at me and make yourself useful, then we could use your help in going through the convictions to see who threatened her, and who has been paroled recently."
He is hoping that this will shut her up and get her off his back. He doesn't want to turn into this person, doesn't want to allow his worst side to show at this time but she's gone, he's trapped in the precinct because he knows Cragen won't trust him out there until he knows which way, or when, he is going to fall, and he is absolutely helpless.
She is silent, but before she can sit down, pull out files or ask where she should start, he is distracted by two figures over her shoulder, and turns sharply to leave the room, away from the foreboding men in black suits. IAB are coming and he knows he will be in their sights.
Liv and he have teetered a fine line on more than one occasion, and who better to question over a cop's disappearance than her partner. Especially when everyone believes they've been sleeping together, or have got too close, or that one will be the death of the other.
Of course, he knows he is innocent but right now he cannot bear the questions. He's already verbally attacked a friend, thrown up, nearly trashed the room and he can't imagine what he will do when they start tearing through her personal life, through their relationship, through their problems. He needs them to himself for a minute. Already today, her apartment has been ripped apart, and even that is too much.
Running, he escapes to the roof, bursting through the door with such violence that it bounces back and slams before he can take more than two strides through.
A loud bang startled him back to the present and he looked around sharply. A younger guy in a suit had come into the room and sent a trashcan flying. Now he was on his knees, picking the stuff back up hurriedly. He risked a sheepish glance upwards when he realised Elliot was looking at him, and then rose, seeming as if he was going to dare an approach.
With a clumsy, almost violent movement of his own, Elliot sent his chair crashing into the coffee machine as he stood up, grabbing Olivia's file and walking out of the room without a second glance at the man. As within his memories, he retreated to the roof, surprised to see it was a beautiful day. Weren't days of decision and culmination supposed to be full of power and fury, dangerous lightning, pouring rain or vicious winds? Instead, there was just a gentle breeze and a light sunshine drifting over the rooftops and skyscrapers. An ordinary day.
Walking over to the edge, he placed the closed file beside him and leant against the wall, staring down at the pavement and watching the people, small and insignificant beneath him. Subconsciously, he was standing in almost the exact place he had on 'd-day', the day the world had stopped. Struggling to calm and contain himself in preparation for the IAB's interrogation, he had been ambushed by memories of her.
Now, in the present, it was a relief to sink into the past without the nightmare coating of missing posters and empty spaces, the good memories of her before........well, before the monster built of fear and uncertainty reared its head.
"That first, dreadful day when he leans against the wall, he presses his knuckles so heavily into the coarse, solid bricks that he draws blood, but even that doesn't stop the initial, soft flashback drawing his mind into a safer, easier place. An escape.
It takes him to night time, to the same roof, looking over the same view, except they are both there this time. At first there are no words, just silent breathing as they sift through the facts of the day: a crying child, a grieving father, a woman murdered by her lover when she refused to leave her family. Neither can forget the sight of the four year old boy with blood on his hands and lips from the stab wound in her stomach. When asked, his quiet voice had explained,
"Mommy always kisses boo-boos better. So I did. But she won't wake up."
Now they were standing in the aftermath, transferring the pain from the surface where all could see and absorbing it into their bodies and their blood, filing the day into the appropriate folders of their mind labelled 'terrible, don't think, don't acknowledge."
Their arms are parallel as they lean, and when Elliot looks at her he can see the lights of the city flitting across her face, highlighting the slight blurriness of her eyes that hint at her softer side, the part that made her so good with the boy as they carried him away from the body. She blinks, and instead of tears dripping down her face, she becomes more settled, acceptance of the facts of their world calming her.
As he turns his back to the city he takes a deep breath at the same time as she does. Pushing off the wall, he takes a step and asks quietly,
"You okay?" She nods and looks back out.
"I just needed a few minutes. I'll come and finish up the paperwork soon."
He nods as well, walks further away from the wall, and when he gets to the door he looks back as he opens it. All he can see is her silhouette, but the sight of her as familiar to him as his own within a mirror. More so. He steps inside.
It's that memory he is hijacked by on the first day, and when he blinks out of it into the grim oppressiveness of her disappearance, he is overwhelmed by how solid she was in his mind. For a few seconds she is real, and then she begins to fade into the air before him.
Steeling himself for whatever was to come, he turns to the door, shutting out all thoughts but the desperate need to find Olivia, and stay calm with the IAB, as he walked through it.
Little could he imagine, at that beginning, with that initial flashback, how many times he would lose himself into the past, whether a choice, a necessity or an ambush.
Now, he was in that place yet again, watching all the memories of different times, different situations, drifting away from him. Standing, looking out at the standard, familiar view, it struck him that it was as if nothing had changed from that earliest scene. The apartment, the blood, the five years of tortured waiting and dissipating hope could almost have never happened.
However he knew, after this long, that while memories and dreams were shrouded with a mist of comfortable numbness, created by a buffer of time and repeated exposure, he couldn't live in them forever.
As if on cue, his cell phone buzzed in his pocket. Pulling it out, he saw Munch's number and answered,
"Hey."
"Hi. How you holding up?"
Elliot was surprised at how good it was to hear his voice again after so long, but almost smirked at the concern emanating from the phone. John Munch and worry hadn't often gone together in one sentence, especially aimed towards him.
"Yeah, I'm fine, it's just....."
"The wait? Yeah, I know. Glad I'm not there to be honest."
"Good thing too, old man. You might make coffee again." Elliot smiles at the snort of indignation at the other end.
"The coffee machine is probably longing for me back, it wants to turn out a decent sludge instead of the weakling stuff that you all made!"
Elliot carried on the banter for a couple more sentences before the enormity of the situation could no longer be covered with stupid jokes and wisecracks.
"Anyway, I should go. They'll be back soon and I'll be roped into some terrible task or other. But.....call me....when you know something."
Suddenly Elliot could hear the age in the other man's voice, and an image of the last time he saw him formed before his eyes. The pain, the sorrow, the defeat in his eyes.
After he hung up, he stared at the screen for another second before putting it back in his pocket. It was hard to think of John sometimes without allowing the vicious, excruciating vision of him on the evening of Olivia's disappearance override all the good times, the laughter, the cynical ranting.
Even now, it was so painful it almost brought him to tears.