Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters or ideas from The Killing. It's all just for fun.

Spoilers: Season 4, episode 3

When they meet up that morning outside the station, Linden's a mess. Not just a little bit of a mess, either. She isn't frantic or jumpy like she had been the first day after the shit with Skinner, but looking at her, he knows that this isn't a good day. He doesn't think she slept, again, and she just looks… completely drained. Exhausted. Defeated.

"Rough night?" he asks tentatively. He's not trying to be mean, but she has to know that she looks like hell. Besides, Linden's a straight shooter, and it's not as though he's never told her she looked like hell when she did in the past.

She stares out the windshield ahead of her, into the rain that's beating mercilessly against the car. She nods her head almost imperceptibly, not even turning to look at him. This isn't good, he thinks. He racks his brain, trying to think of what to say that will get through to her, which isn't easy considering that he doesn't actually know what is freaking her out so badly today. It could be a lot of different things.

"You alright?" he asks, continuing to watch her stare ahead vacantly. She's definitely not operating at full capacity at the moment. "Linden?"

After a slightly pause, her eyes flick towards him, but her head barely moves, then just as quickly, she looks back out at the rain. "I'm fine," she whispers.

"Oh, yeah, you look fine," Holder says sarcastically. He knows, however, that he's not going to get anywhere with her that way.

He sighs heavily, wishing that Linden didn't have to be so… Linden all the time. He decides he needs some coffee if this is how the day is going to go, and he's pretty sure that she will too. After all, he can't do a damn thing about most of the problems that are bouncing around making so much noise in her head, but there's one thing that he can do. And that one thing is to bring her some caffeine. Most of the time there's more of it than blood in her system, so he figures that she probably needs some right now.

She doesn't seem to have even heard his sarcastic remark, so he tries again. "Linden, I'm gonna go grab us some coffee down the block. You waitin' for me, or what?"

He doesn't even really expect her to answer, he's just going through the motions of a conversation at this point. So he's surprised when he hears her softly reply, "Yeah. I'll be here." It's a start, he thinks.

So he jumps out of the car into the pouring rain and sprints to the coffee shop at the end of the block to get them some breakfast. A few minutes later, he returns with coffee and a few different kinds of muffins, hoping he can get her to eat. If he were to guess, he'd say that there's a good chance that she hasn't eaten since the last time he saw her eat, sometime the previous afternoon. She takes the coffee from him without comment – not a surprise, considering Linden's relationship with caffeine. He pulls out a muffin and tells her to eat, even tries to make a joke out of it, saying they might need to chase down Kat at the Stansbury funeral and she'll need her strength. His attempt at humor is lost on her, however, because she doesn't appear to have heard a thing he said. Again, he can't help but worry about her.

Then suddenly she starts speaking, as though he hasn't just been talking to her for the past several minutes – unimportant though his chatter had been. "Holder…" she begins timidly. There's only one or two times he's ever heard her sound so fragile, and it's pretty unnerving. The time that springs to his mind the fastest is that day at the mental hospital, when she begged him not to leave her there.

He watches her carefully as she looks up at him. From her expression, it appears that she's about to break. "I can't find the second shell casing. I've looked everywhere," she tells him.

Worry washes over him as well. They can't afford to make mistakes, to leave loose ends. "You put 'em both on the table, right?" That's what she had told him, anyway.

"Yeah," she replies, her voice shaky.

He shakes his head slightly, looking down. "It's gotta be in the house. You looked, right?"

She nods slightly, looking back at him. "Everywhere."

"What about the gun?" he asks.

"I got rid of it, like you told me to. I'm not stupid."

"So it's there," he tells her calmly. "Don't worry about it. Come on, eat something." He's willing to accept that the casing is merely misplaced in her house. The simplest explanation is usually the right one, after all. It's not as though Linden's been having people over. The fact that she'd been with Skinner – that she'd been with anyone – still seemed out of character for Linden, much less the idea that anyone else would have been at her place with an opportunity to do anything with the shell casing. So it had to be there.

With that taken care of, he's back to his previous concern about her not eating. Linden, however, is not so easily deterred. "What about LoJack? Someone could find his car in that lake because we didn't check his LoJack." He can see that she's in full-on panic mode now.

But this time Holder's one step ahead of her. "I did. It didn't. He had it disabled. The last thing he wanted was for someone to be able to track him." He is really, really fucking glad he thought to check that.

Linden pauses, her concrete concerns are now satisfied for the moment, but that doesn't stop her mind from spinning a million miles a second. "How could I not have known who he was?" she asks pitifully. Holder knows that the question isn't directed at him, that she's thinking aloud and probably doesn't even realize that she's speaking. Then just like that, she's talking to him again. "I don't know if I can do this," she tells him. He can see that she's trying to steady herself, but she's holding on by a thread, like so many times before. He has seen her go through a lot in the time he's known her, and he has seen her both at her strongest and at her most fragile, sometimes at the same time. Even so, he's pretty sure that this is a new low for her. He just keeps watching her.

I can't do this, she thinks. How can I possibly tell him?

You can, she reminds herself. It's Holder. You wouldn't admit it to anyone else, but you can tell him.

So she decides to do it, because what the hell does she have to lose at this point? Pretty much nothing.

Her voice breaks as she whispers, "I'm drowning, Holder."

On one hand, his heart breaks for her. She fights so hard, and yet nothing ever seems to go her way. More specifically, everything somehow goes the opposite of her way for the most part. Her life has become so fucked up – she's so fucked up – in so many ways… he can certainly empathize with that. He wants to help her, the same way he has always wanted to help her. They're partners. They're friends. Best friends. He's done far more for her than he would ever have considered doing for anyone else, and he doesn't regret it. Well, most of it, anyway.

On the other hand, something inside him whispers that on some level, at least a little bit, she has done this to herself. Looking at it objectively, he supposes, she has. Not that every shitty thing that has happened to her in her life is her fault, because it most certainly isn't. Where she is right now, however, is a different story. She is the one who killed Skinner, after all. The reason she's so clearly losing her mind is because of what she did. In the same way that she technically killed Skinner, he's technically an accessory, though all he did, all he's ever done pretty much as long as he's known her, is to try to help her.

So while he feels terrible for her, in another way he's at the point where he has realized that he has to start thinking about himself before Sarah Linden, because she can't see how her shitty choices affect other people. Not because she's malicious or selfish, just because she can't see it. There's too much other noise in her head. But for him, there's too much at stake now, and he cannot – no, he will not – let her drag him down with her. He pauses before answering her, trying to collect his thoughts.

In a voice so calm he even surprises himself, he says simply, "You have to."

They look each other in the eyes for a long few seconds. His calm unnerves her. Calm always unnerves her. She is so rarely calm, and when she is, it's because she has literally exhausted all of her emotions. Seeing Holder so calm now… it's terrifying. All she can assume is that it means that he feels nothing, because that's what she feels when she's calm. Uttering that one sentence to him, those three words, may have been the hardest thing she'd ever done, and all he can do is give her an empty look and tell her that there's no choice but to do what they're already doing. Once again she feels betrayed, and she has the now all too familiar sensation of falling off a cliff.

I opened up to him, told him something I would not admit to any other person in the entire world… and he just stares at me. He feels nothing. She thinks she might be sick, or maybe it's just that her stomach is going to tear itself into shreds. It doesn't matter, anyway. She's going to drown in all of this, so none of it matters.

"We got no choice," he adds quietly. He knows she's not going to understand, that she's going to think he doesn't care. But there's nothing he can do about it.

But Linden doesn't want to be deterred. "Yeah, we do. I could, um, just tell them who he was. What he was."

"Are you fucking crazy?" he blurts out. "After everything we've gone through? Look, I'm not going to jail for that scumbag." He pauses, considers not telling her, but decides that he might as well. He's not quite sure how she's going to take it, being the way she is with emotions and all that shit, but they haven't lied to each other before, beyond maybe saying things were fine when they weren't, and he has no desire to start now, even just a lie of omission. Not now that they're in so deep together. He pauses and considers how to say it, but decides to just come right out with it. "Caroline's pregnant."

She stares at him, her face completely devoid of emotion. She had just managed to make her stomach stop lurching, and now she's falling again. She can't even understand why those two words affect her so much, make things so much worse, so she certainly can't figure out how to react. She was already drowning. It's possible that she's now being held her under the water she was drowning in.

So this was it. His allegiance would hereafter always be to his family. That thing that he has, and she does not. Never has, and never will. Thought he's right beside her, she suddenly feels like he's very, very far away from her, so far that the distance can't be overcome.

Holder continues, not completely sure that Linden is hearing him anymore, but hoping that she can. "Everything is different now. I'm gonna be a dad." He pauses and glances up at her. "Gonna have a wife and baby that need me."

God, he suddenly feels so guilty. Why should I feel guilty about this? he wonders. He looks out the front window at the rain, then back at her nervously. She still isn't reacting. He can almost see her retreating inside herself again, though she hasn't actually moved a muscle. It's just a sense that he has. When it comes to Linden, he has a sixth sense that's almost always right… not that it does him any good.

"So here's what we're gonna do, Linden. We're gonna move forward and leave this shit behind." Then suddenly his tone changes. Suddenly, he's almost the old Holder, the one she knew what feels like lifetimes ago. "So eat your fucking muffin. We got a funeral to get to."

She stares at him, her face stricken, almost without blinking. Her eyes are moist, but she isn't crying. She is literally beyond emotion, though it's waiting in the wings for its chance to return in full force as soon as she recovers even slightly. She wants to explain things to him, though she herself doesn't understand what they are. She hopes that if she looks hard enough at him, maybe she'll see it reflected in his eyes, or he'll see it in her eyes and then he'll explain it to her. It used to be that way. Somehow, they used to be able to communicate without speaking. Of course, that was before. Before she fucked it all up, so utterly and so completely.

He looks away first, down in front of him, because he can't tell which part of what he just told her is bothering her the most. He stares out at the rain on the passenger side, hating both himself for having this effect on her when all he wanted to do was help her, but also hating her a little bit for being the reason he's in the situation in the first place. Life isn't fair, but this is just beyond fucked up.

She can't speak. She can't cry. She can't think. She can barely even blink. As if on autopilot, she starts the car and puts it into gear, navigating the rain-soaked streets until they reach the cemetery, ignoring the look of concern that Holder gives her the entire way. There's nothing she can say or do that will change anything, so she just drives. After parking the car, she grabs the door handle and gets out of the car without a word or a backward glance, then stops about ten feet from the car, facing into the distance.

The last thing Holder notices before he gets out of the car to follow her is that she has finished her coffee, but that she never did eat the fucking muffin. Sighing, he opens the door to follow her.